The Detour (32 page)

“He died in a road accident. We found it in his pocket. It’s a large quantity, in
lire
and
Reichsmarks
. There is a German you should suspect, that’s true, but it isn’t me.”

Cosimo was still staring, shaking his head slowly. I felt for him. He had suffered the worst of this, he had helped me at every turn, but his judgment was not sound.

“Cosimo. You must give them the money.”

“I don’t have it,” he said, nearly choking on the words.

“You must. There is nowhere else it could be but here.”

“No one wanted it.”

“No one wanted it? It was a small fortune.”

“It was
sfortuna
.”
Bad
fortune.

The police captain said something to Cosimo, who translated: “Perhaps you men should go for a drive, looking for your colleague. The captain says he will interview us and get to the truth.” But neither German showed any interest in that, not with the scent so near and the whiff of money added to the intrigue. There was some disagreement in two languages, a patronizing tone that did not please the Italian police captain. I missed most of it, thinking of the unwanted money, of who would have wanted it most, who would have needed it, where it might have been put and never seen again.

“Follow me,” I said. I turned away from the statue. “I know where it is.”

The trigger-happy German raised his Luger again and ordered me to stop.

“If you shoot me, then you’ll have to do the work yourself. This is going to be a hard enough job without you waving that thing. Cosimo, where is the shovel?”

I hadn’t seen him look this unwell since the moment he had found his brother alongside the road. If anything, he had looked more tranquil then, as if that moment had been a confirmation of a long-lived fear, whereas this moment was a complete, terrible, and unnecessary surprise.

“Up on the hill,” Cosimo whispered.

“That’s where I’m going, then.” And I turned and strode without hesitation, followed by the sound of several pairs of heavy footsteps hurrying to catch up with me.

T
he mound was still fresh when we got there, less competently tamped down than I remembered it. I began to dig, watched by the two Germans, two Italians, and Cosimo. No one offered to assist. The rising sun burned away a scattered bank of clouds. A few bumblebees danced over the bright green grass, and we continued to hear them even when we couldn’t see them, the buzz of floral exuberance. After a few dozen shovelfuls, I stopped to roll up my sleeves, then changed my mind and unbuttoned my shirt, tossing it aside, unfolded.

In the Labor Service, we were never allowed to take off our uniforms, even on the hottest, longest days, and that had always been fine with me. But now, I didn’t care about
propriety; I hadn’t a self-conscious bone in my body; I didn’t care that this was one of the worst days of my life because the work wasn’t so bad really, and the sun on my shoulders felt good for now, and now was all that mattered anyway. I didn’t have to think, only dig.

I didn’t have to think, that is, until sometime later, when my shovel hit something soft. I poked around. I dug more carefully and felt around with the blade, aware only now that what I had thought was the insistent buzzing of an insect had become, in the last few minutes, the sound of Cosimo praying under his breath in rapid Italian. He was praying for the Lord’s mercy, for forgiveness. He was praying for the Germans’ patience. He was praying for our lives.

Let me stop and go back here, to this moment I have failed to remember properly, a stuck frame in my mental camera. Let me see Cosimo, who is not only praying frantically, but holding something. The Germans have moved Tartufa out of view, but just before following me up the hill, Cosimo picked her up again, cradling her like a baby in his arms—all damp, dark, speckled fur and black paws, the tail peeking out from underneath his left arm. He is a policeman who has investigated murders and transported the body of his twin brother. He has helped to hide a corpse. But there is one thing he does not understand: why a stranger had to shoot his dog, without even a warning.

So when the German with the Luger begins to hold it up again in response to the appearance of something strange coming to the surface—the back of a head, a few wisps of hair like the sweeping end of a broom mysteriously buried in the dirt—Cosimo stops praying. He tucks the limp dog more firmly under his arm, between hip and armpit, and with his free hand forms a fist.

The German takes a step closer to me, closer to the grave, fascinated and repelled. He lifts the gun higher, even as his gaze drops.

“Put that away!” Cosimo shouts, voice trembling. “You have no right!”

Rosina has left the house, in defiance of Gianni. She has climbed the hill. She is watching, too, from just behind the two visiting Italians and the other German. She is pressing her knuckles against her lips, trying to hold back any ill-advised sounds.

I have stopped digging. I have realized my strategic error. I, too, am trembling.

The German can’t believe what he is seeing. “Is that …?”

Cosimo makes his demand more clear: “Put it away!”

Rosina calls out to her brother—too late.

Cosimo’s fist comes up, catching the unsuspecting German on his left jaw. My shovel drops, the pistol with its deceptively narrow barrel swings—and then the popping sound that changes everything.

I stumble forward, hands sliding on the edge of the grave, trying to pull myself out. But Rosina gets to him first. Cosimo
has dropped to his knees, he is falling, his head is in her lap, he is trying to speak. The German is still holding his weapon as he pushes toward the grave, down on his knees at the edge, his legs level with my face, trying to see for himself.

“You did this?” he demands, and I am sure he is talking to me, but then I look, and he is facing Cosimo.

Cosimo says something none of us catch. The lips move, words the Germans don’t understand—“
Mio fratello
.”

“That’s right,” the German says. “Now you’ve got something to say about it.”

They think he is confessing, but he is doing nothing of the kind. He is only calling out, as one would hail a friend on the street. He isn’t implicating me, he isn’t sacrificing himself for anyone, he is simply trying to be heard before the figure turns the corner and is lost. “
Mio fratello
.” My brother.

I howl, “You’ve got the wrong man!”—but at that moment, there is a rush of sounds—a second carefully aimed shot and Rosina’s shriek, followed by a commotion as she attempts to interpose before there are two men shot instead of one: “I saw it all happen!”

“And you?”

They are asking me now. I am staring at Cosimo’s closed eyes and softened jaw and parted lips, still moving slightly, still filtering air, but only barely.

Rosina shouts, “It was self-defense! Can’t you just leave? We hate you!”

The Italian police captain closes in on the German with the gun. He steps between the German and Rosina, a brave man for doing it, a brave man waving his arms and using every
gesture and facial expression God gave him to try to calm everyone down. In anger, I make a grab for the German’s ankle and, in return, hear another
pop
. I feel a hot spike of pain run through my hand, and hear yet another
pop
that makes my shoulder throb. If any coherent thought runs through my brain at all, it is only:
this is how things end
. But it will bring balance. It will be a punishing symmetry, to meet my end after the end I have inflicted upon these others: Enzo, Cosimo, and even Keller, regardless of his faults. And more than that: a punishing symmetry considering how I came here, and what I refused to acknowledge.

“Gerhard,” I whisper, only to myself, yielding to the shock as the left side of my body begins to go numb.

A flurry of questions over my head: “Who is this Gerhard? Another thief? Is he here on the farm?”

No, he is—was—in a place called Dachau. When he entered, he was an old man—the opposite of a survivor, unwilling to censor his own thoughts, unwilling to please his superiors in the way that might have saved him, and physically unwell besides. They’d let him take nothing with him, his servant girl had said: not clothing, not his medicine. Almost certainly, at that moment, he was already gone, no more alive than Enzo, his spirit even more lost than Enzo’s because he had never been mourned.

And still, these ten years later, I am forcing myself to replay the scene I’ve never allowed myself to envision in full since the day it occurred, while stopping short at full disclosure. But why stop short? Why not just say it? Why not admit that at the moment I was sobbing for Gerhard, I believed that his
survival had been unlikely. But not impossible. A small distinction, but the only things that matter are small: the differences between a man and his brother, the distinction between a mere copy and a masterpiece.

I know more about the shame of Dachau now—a place that was bad enough from its founding, in 1933; a place which would become horrific on an entirely different scale with the start of war. But I also knew, even in 1938, that there had been a brief window of time—maybe only days, maybe only hours, those hours in a life that end up mattering most—when I and Mueller and my coworkers at
Sonderprojekt
could have done something. That
I
could have done something much more than stand once outside Gerhard’s door, accepting the gift of the di Luca guide, accepting the gift of an Italian detour, signing the pact of silent paralysis that is to blame for everything, not just in Germany, but everywhere—the darkest moments of the last two thousand years.

I had betrayed my mentor in one way: by making no protest at his disappearance, by voicing not a single question out loud among the many of us who had worked alongside him. I had obeyed him in another: by taking the trip he believed would change me.

“Gerhard,” I continued to whisper on that final morning, waiting for the last shot that did not come, mute to the questions being shouted all around me in the chaos of that graveside moment, and hearing the echo of Rosina’s desperate shout, “Can’t you just leave? We hate you—all of you!”

T
hey carried me out to a waiting car, still conscious but only half alert. They did not let me communicate with anyone in the Digirolamo family. Herr Keller was brought out of the twice-used grave and loaded into the truck with the dirt still clinging to the folds in his neck and the waves in his hair. Also loaded into the truck was the
Discus Thrower
and all the treasures found within Enzo’s coffin—the money, and even the lighter, which I saw the Luger-toting German using later at the consulate where I was questioned, flicking the thing open and shut.

In Turin, I was given medical attention and phone calls were made, and I was brought into the consulate there, where the questioning began and then was halted, to be continued
on our own soil. Two more vehicles joined our caravan, and by Milan, we were back on faster roads, up through northern Italy and to the border.

In Munich, following my recovery, I was roundly abused for defaming Herr Keller, though my claims and Cosimo’s apparent confession cast enough confusion over everything to make any simple conclusion or dissemination of justice impossible. I was stripped of my position and told I wasn’t good enough for regular prison, wasn’t good enough for a simple execution, but they’d find a hard, miserable job for me somewhere—which they did, in Neuengamme, a new camp in Hamburg, on the grounds of a defunct brickworks.

There we built the facilities that would hold hundreds of prisoners, and later thousands. Day after day, I dug through heavy, peaty soil. I excavated foundation pits where barracks would soon stand. Alongside many others, I dug a canal that would be used to transport the bricks made by camp inmates. I dug and dug—and every bit of soil I moved was creating one thing only: the next grave. The next million graves, ordered by Hitler.

Even at
Sonderprojekt
, I had rarely voiced
Der Kunstsammler
’s actual name; even now, I try not to say it. But I will say it once, and remember one last time how Gerhard referred to him: not as the failed artist, but as the failed father figure. He had said, when I told him once about the animosity I felt toward my own
Vater
, to be wary of replacements. “It is in wanting to replace, to reach out for false hope or false comfort, that our nation has stumbled so dangerously. Sometimes, we must simply accept an absence in our lives.”

But of course, it isn’t easy. If I hadn’t been so eager to replace the father figure in my own life, I would not have been drawn to the men who all resembled my father in some way—including Gerhard himself.

Furthermore, if I had not been a replacement for some German lover that reminded her of happier days, I find it hard to imagine Rosina would have allowed me into her heart and her bed. In the end, this was the unhappy uncertainty that followed me for years, not knowing whether Rosina had enjoyed me only as a pale echo of someone else. If so, it would have been a fitting punishment for the man who had failed to save her brothers. It would have been a fitting punishment, too, for a man who had been obsessed with a lifeless marble icon—to be remembered as merely a stand-in for someone or something else, rather than loved as something real, inconvenient, flawed.