Alibi: A Novel (37 page)

“No, I told you. Anyway, how could Dr. Maglione do this? The man left in the night. Dr. Maglione didn’t know where he was.”

“No,” I said, following the thought right to the house, “but his son did.”

C
arlo Moretti may have been legally adult, but he looked years younger, smooth and wide-eyed, barely adolescent, features that must have given him a useful innocence in his courier days. Now they made him seem childlike, a frightened boy waiting to be taken home.

Rosa was finally allowed to see him that evening, and Cavallini, improbably, allowed me to go with her, maybe as a kind of unofficial watchdog for the Questura. She had brought the new lawyer, and most of the time was spent going over what the police had said to him and what he’d replied. The lawyer took notes. The boy glanced at me from time to time, but his attitude was more bewildered than suspicious—I was no more surprising than anything else that had happened. No, the police had not used any force, just questions. Had they promised him anything? No, but they said a confession meant a more lenient sentence, if it came early, before physical evidence was collected, prints, bloodstains. They wanted to know about his boat. Given Gianni’s probable route on foot, Moretti must already have had it waiting. Where? “They’re looking for witnesses,” Rosa said, “to put you on that boat.” “But surely there was someone who could verify that you hadn’t taken one out,” the lawyer said. “You couldn’t just take a boat.” No, it was easy enough. They weren’t guarded at night. If you did it carefully, you could get out to the lagoon and no one would know. I looked away.

“Did they ask you whether he was dead when you put him in?” I said.

Rosa and the lawyer turned to me.

“Cause of death,” I said. “The official cause was drowning.”

“How do you know this?” the lawyer said, beginning to write on his notepad.

“Cavallini told me when I identified the body. Check the coroner’s report.”

“Yes,” the lawyer said, “it’s an interesting technicality. Maybe useful, the actual cause.”

“What difference does it make?” Moretti said, his voice sullen.

“Listen to me,” Rosa said. “Everything makes a difference. It’s going to be all right.”

“No, it’s not,” he said, looking down.

“We’ve found a witness,” she said. “For that night.”

“You should have told me,” the lawyer said, surprised.

“The man with the umbrella,” Rosa said, still looking directly at Carlo. “You remember, he offered you an umbrella. When you were walking. In front of the Londra Palace. By the statue of Vittorio Emanuele.”

“The man with the umbrella,” Carlo said numbly, not understanding.

“Yes, he remembers the time exactly. How wet you were. If you think, you’ll remember him,” she said, tapping her finger on the table.

He glanced at her in recognition, then shook his head. “It won’t make any difference. It’s what you used to say—don’t get caught. Once they have you—”

“That was different. That was the war,” Rosa said.

Moretti shrugged, all the answer he could manage.

“Talk to him,” Rosa said, pointing to the lawyer. “Every detail. So he can help.”

“To find another technicality?” Moretti said. “What does it matter to them? They’ve already decided. They want to put me in prison.”

“No,” Rosa said, suddenly stern, a kind of slap. “They want to kill you. That’s the punishment.”

He stared at her, his face pale, all the defiance seeping away, then rushing back in a flash of panic as she pushed back her chair and stood. “So talk to him.”

“Where are you going?” he said.

“Talk to him now. He’ll tell you what to say. I’ll be back tomorrow.” She reached over and put her hand on his. “Listen to me. You didn’t kill your father. They did. Do you think I would let them do this to you?”

He lowered his head. “And if it was my fault?”

“I was in that house too. Do I blame you? I blame
them
. No more. Just talk to him.” She placed her hand now on the lawyer’s shoulder, then motioned for me to get up. “Come,” she said, shooing me away with her. “Too many ears.”

The abruptness of it surprised me, so my question seemed blurted out. “Did he give you the medicine himself, or did someone else?”

Moretti looked at me for a second as if he were readjusting a dial, going back to an earlier program. “He did.”

“So you knew him?”

“No, I’d never met him. But I knew my father had been in the hospital, so I wasn’t surprised.”

“He called you himself?”

“Yes. ‘Come to the hospital. Tell your father I have his medicine’—you know, as if he thought he was at home, in bed. So I went. And he gave me the pills. ‘Does he have any fever?’ he said. No. ‘Tell him one more week with these.’ As if I knew all about it. So I said all right, and I took them and that was that.”

“And you took them to the safe house?” Next to me I felt Rosa stir, annoyed that I was going back over this.

“No, I didn’t know exactly where he was. I thought Verona. But then when he wasn’t there, I tried the house.”

“Was he surprised? To get the medicine?”

“Yes. He said it was nice of the doctor to worry, but he felt fine. Maybe somebody else could use it. It was hard then to get anything, even aspirin. But there was no label on it, so we didn’t know what it was for. How could we use it?”

“No label?”

“No. That’s when I thought, you know, He knows what my father is. He doesn’t want it found—to be connected.”

“Did your father take any?”

“Yes, one, to see what it was. He said he felt the same. It wasn’t the medicine that killed him. Not that way.”

“Not any way,” Rosa said, putting her hand on his arm again. “Are you finished?” she said to me.

“And then you stayed the night?” I said, still trying to make a picture.

“No, never there. Back to Verona.”

“Not Venice?”

“Not with the curfew. I had to leave the house after dark, so there was only enough time to get to Verona.”

“To a safe house there.”

“Yes.”

“And you’d done this before?”

“Many times,” Rosa said. “He was the best.”

“Yes,” Carlo said, “except this time.”

Rosa was still angry when we left the Questura.

“What are you trying to do, make him crazy? You can see he blames himself. And how do we know they followed him? Do they come while he’s there? No. The next morning? No, another day. So who knows? Maybe a tip. Maybe they already knew.”

“Then why did Gianni send his father medicine he didn’t need?”

She looked away, stymied. “A fine thing we did. You know, a boy who blames himself for one thing, sometimes he takes the blame for another. I’ve seen this. A confusion in the mind.” She was quiet for a minute, folding her arms across her chest as if she had caught a chill. “You know that if it’s true, it strengthens Cavallini’s hand. It gives him a case.”

“He already has a case. That’s why it’s important to know what really happened there.”

“If it’s connected. It’s too many ifs now—there’s no time for that.”

“Just inventing witnesses.”

“Why not? The police are inventing a case.”

I said nothing. For a few minutes we pretended to look at buildings as we crossed over the bridge to Santa Maria in Formosa.

“It’s the only way it makes sense, you know,” I said finally. “If he was followed.”

“Yes,” she said, half aloud, as if it had been pulled out of her.

“What happened to the house in Verona?”

“It was betrayed. Not then,” she said quickly. “Later. Everything was betrayed eventually.” She thought for a second. “Why did they wait another day?”

“To see if he went anywhere else. When he came back to Venice, they knew he’d delivered the medicine. So it had to be that house or Verona.”

“And it had to be the house, or he wouldn’t have gone there—just stayed in Verona. So they came.” She stopped, looking away from me, toward the far end of the campo. “You know what they did? First they poured the gasoline. And then they were all around the house, with machine guns. So if you came out, they shot you. Then the matches. So you had a choice. Run out to the guns or stay inside. And of course people stayed—at least you had a chance. Nobody was burning yet. But then the smoke got you, and after that you burned.”

I looked down at her arm. “But you got out?”

She gave a weak smile. “I’m afraid of fire. I ran into the guns.”

“And they missed?”

“No, they shot me. Twice. They left me for dead. So that’s how it happened.” She turned to me. “He knows this. Carlo. He knows how his father died. And if it were you who led them there? How would you feel?”

“I don’t even know what I’m supposed to be looking for,” Claudia said.

We were in Gianni’s office at the hospital, going through a stack of blue folders.

“Anything that happened that week.”

“How do you know anything did?”

“It must have. Otherwise, it’s a contradiction. He takes in a partisan,
swears his nurse to secrecy, fakes a medical report. He saves him. Why set up his son?”

“Because Moretti escaped. He didn’t know where he was.”

I shook my head. “Then why not send up a red flag right away? No, I think he meant to help him. He never changed the report. He brags to his daughter, tries to make himself look good for helping the resistance. Days go by. Over a week. And then all of a sudden he sends the boy out with some phony medicine, so he’ll be followed. That part’s right—it has to be. So what happened in between? Something happened.”

“And you’re going to find that here?” she said, touching the files.

“I want to know everyone he saw that week. Anything that might explain it.”

There was a tap on the door frame. The night duty nurse stood just outside with a coffee tray, an excuse to see what we were doing.

“
Dottore
,” she said. “Some coffee. You’re working so late.”

She placed the cups on the desk, glancing at Claudia. Had she been listening? But the desk outside was empty, the nurses’ station farther down the hall. Was there anything else we wanted? Staring openly now at the folders as she left.

“So now you’re the
dottore
,” Claudia said.

“They call everybody that.”

“No, only the stepson,” she said, smiling to herself. “They all know. She thinks you
look
like him.”

“She thought the old nurse killed him, too.” I sipped some of the coffee. “We need to be him for a week,” I said, rubbing the arms of the chair, as if just touching his things could put me in his place. “Everything he did. Something happened that week.”

“With the patients?” she said, picking up a folder.

“I don’t know. Here’s his calendar. Meetings at the hospital, mostly. Then the appointments—I’m cross-checking those with the medical files. Did they really show up? What happened?” I looked over at her, an appeal. “You know how to look at these. You’re a doctor’s daughter.”

She took the appointment schedule and began shuffling through the stack to pull out files. “It’s crazy what you’re doing,” she said.

An hour later the nurse came in with more coffee. Claudia was
smoking, her feet propped up on the edge of the desk and folders in her lap, and for a second I thought the nurse, almost scowling with disapproval, would protest, but she merely raised her eyebrows at me, the new
dottore
, and sniffed. Claudia, unaware, just kept turning pages, absorbed in Gianni’s medical day. When she reached over for her coffee, she kept her eyes on the page.

“And?” I said, lighting a cigarette, signaling a break.

“So many ulcers. Gastrointestinal, a good specialty in the war. The bad food, the fear—think how busy.”

“So he was good?”

She nodded. “Yes, you would think—”

“What?” I said, leaning forward to get her attention.

“No Germans.”

“They had their own.”

“Well, in the army. But a specialist, that’s different.”

“Maybe he wouldn’t see them.”

“You didn’t refuse the Germans, if they asked. But they didn’t.”

“Would they see a local doctor?”

“The soldiers, no. But the officers? You have to remember what it was like. It’s not a camp, it’s Venice. They sit in San Marco, take a gondola—what everyone does in Venice. Parties. With Venetians, too. How do you think my father survived? Getting rid of their babies. At least it was safer for the girls, a real doctor. They were—here. Restaurants, everywhere. It’s their city. So if you get a stomachache, why not go to the doctor? But they don’t.”

“Why not?”

“I don’t know. You asked me what do I see, and I see he’s the only man in Venice who never sees Germans. Clean hands. At least in public.”

“And in private he saves a partisan,” I said, another dead end.

“A partisan,” she said dismissively. “No. He saved a friend.”

I stared at her, the words clicking into place like cylinders in a lock.

“Paolo’s friend,” I said, another click. Tennis sweaters, arms slung over shoulders. “Because he was Paolo’s friend. Wait a minute,” I said, reaching for the phone.

“What?”

“But then he sends young Carlo to where Moretti had to be.”

I asked the hospital operator to put me through to the Bauer. Rosa had just come in and, given the slightly groggy tone in her voice, must have had some wine at dinner.

“Do you never stop?” she said.

“Just one more thing. The group who killed Paolo—there was someone else, besides whoever was in the house.”

“He’s dead.”

“Dead how? I mean, in the fighting?”

“No, the Germans captured him. They killed him.”

“Which means they probably tortured him.”

She was quiet for a second. “It’s possible. But it doesn’t matter. He didn’t know about the house—where it was, anything. He was never told. It was a protection for us. And him. It couldn’t have been him.”

“But he knew who killed Paolo.”

“Signor Miller, he’s dead.”

“When he was captured—any interrogation files?”

“No. Of course we looked for that.”

“How long was he kept?”

“We think two days. They hung his body in Verona. In Piazza Bra.”