Joseph Kanon - Alibi

“The daughter survived. She saw him do it.”

“Good. She would be willing to testify to this?”

“Yes,” I said, hesitant, wondering where she was going. “But-”

“So we have a link now. He helps the SS with the roundups. What else does he help them with? He’s not at Villa Raspelli to give aspirin, I think. It’s the logic.”

“But not the proof,” I said.

“No, not yet. But I’ll get it,” she said, scratching her arm again, excited.

“Proof of what?”

“After Paolo’s death, of course there were reprisals. This man was nothing to them, not really, but now he’s an excuse. Make an example for the partisans. Show them what happens when they-well, you can imagine. It’s the end, they’re desperate, and they were always butchers, so now they’re like crazy men. Torture. Terrible things. And it works. They begin to get the partisans, pick them off. Always it’s Communist uprisings they’re putting down, not the resistance. And once it’s very lucky-this time, a whole group. A house. And they burn it, with people inside. An atrocity. And the question is, who betrayed them?”

“But how could Gianni-?”

“No one betrayed them. Not that way. Someone led them to that house. It’s possible not even deliberately, not even knowing. I looked at everyone in that house, I made their files. Who would do it? No one.”

Her voice had gotten stronger, rising toward the end, so that one of the waiters looked over, thinking we were having an argument.

“You were in the house?” I said.

“Yes. Not everyone died. I was burned, but I lived. It’s strange, you know, because now I’m always cold. You would think-” She put both hands on the table, anchoring herself. “So I know who was there. But who did they follow? Who did they know to follow? Someone here,” she said, nodding at the folder. “And now you tell me something very interesting. You pray for them to make a slip. I think maybe he made the slip to you. But I need your help.”

“How?”

“The date. I need the date when he gave them the Jew, when the SS were there. In the autumn, yes, but when? Exactly. Do you know?”

“She would, I guess.”

“Good. When I get the hospital records, I can match the dates to the names.”

I looked at her, puzzled. “Why? What slip?”

She smiled slightly. “A man whose brother is Order of Rome, who visits SS, who reports Jews, this same man tells you he does this to save a partisan. How would he know? How would he know a man was a partisan?”

I said nothing. Not just the lie, the kind of lie.

“The man told him,” I said weakly, taking his side to see how it would fit.

“Who would tell him? Do you know how we lived? Other people’s names, identities-everything was secret. We trusted no one. And then you tell a man like that? With his sympathies?”

“But how would they know his sympathies?”

“Then you would not trust him. Unless you knew. Not with a life. You would not tell him.”

“But somebody must have.”

“Yes,” she said, lowering her head, “someone must. It’s possible, the SS. If they already knew. ‘Help us make the trap. Watch him. Tell us when to follow.’ Of course, it’s possible it was someone else. And he tells the SS, his new friends. But in the end they know. Who helps them?”

“If the partisan was there at all. Maybe he just made it up-something to tell me.”

“Such a story to make up,” she said. “A man who wasn’t there. It’s more usual, yes, to take the truth and bend it a little. Easier to answer questions, if you have to. Anyway, no matter. We’ll see if he was there. There were two people in that house from Venice.” She looked up. “And one of them had been wounded. I didn’t know he had been in the hospital, he wouldn’t have said. To protect whoever helped him. But I know when he came to us, so we match the dates. I know what name he used. What name did Maglione tell you?”

“He didn’t remember.”

“Ah,” she said, “a patient without a name. Then I find out, who did Maglione see at Villa Raspelli? I look at them, their files. And somewhere there’s a connection. If we’re lucky, someone alive. A witness. The Germans talk now-they like to tell us what their friends here did. You see? Not just us. It was the war. The Italians were no better.” She nodded. “We’re very close now.” She sat back, pouring more tea. “And for that I have you to thank. It never occurred to me to track the brother, and then one day Joe tells me he was reporting Jews. It’s like a chain, one thing to another, but you were the start.”

I looked out the rainy window, uncomfortable.

“You’ll give testimony, yes? And the daughter?”

“You intend to put him on trial?”

“Intend? Hope. It depends what we can prove.”

“You can prove he gave up Abramo Grassini.”

She shook her head. “Well, you know that was the law, to turn over the Jews. And the proof-whose word? I’m sorry. I don’t say it’s right, I say what is. But the one thing leads to the other, so it’s a help. With you, of course, it’s different. A credibility. For you to testify against him, what he told you-”

“But it’s hearsay. He’ll deny it.”

She leaned forward. “Let me tell you how they work, these trials. The victims are dead. So what do we have? Records, of course.” She held one up, a court exhibit. “Circumstances. Sometimes a witness. It’s difficult. We have to show the chain. The daughter knows something. You know something. A German knows something. Another. We make a chain of circumstance.” She put down the folder. “Sometimes a chain of lies. He lies to the daughter. He lies to you. Why? And then you see the chain and you pull it.” She moved her hands in a tugging gesture. “And you have him.”

“But technically-”

“These are special trials. The technicalities are different. It’s not the cinema, a murder trial.”

“It’s about murder.”

“No. Reputation. Maybe even social justice. There’s always that hope. But not murder.”

“Then they’ll get away with it.”

“They did get away with it,” she said quietly, so that the words hung over the table. “There’s no retribution after you’re dead. But people don’t know. And that they won’t get away with.” She sipped more tea, watching me over the cup. “You’re worried?”

“No,” I lied, suddenly seeing the tribunal table, my mother in the makeshift courtroom, Gianni glaring at me from the stand. “But I don’t like throwing mud in public either. If it’s just mud. I saw it in Germany. Nobody comes out looking good-you get just as dirty.”

She put down her cup. “Yes,” she said, a quick nod of agreement, “but I’ll still need you there.” She looked over at me. “It won’t be just mud.”

“And if you can’t prove it?”

“Well, I think I will. And it’s important, to have these trials. Otherwise-”

“Otherwise what?”

“The partisans find their own proof.”

Afterward I crossed back to the Dorsoduro side, uneasy, feeling things spinning out of control. All I’d wanted was to get my mother out of a mistake. Now it was something else. How could I testify against him? It would be terrible for everyone and justice for whom? Rosa was right about that, anyway. He had already gotten away with it.

A little past San Ivo a canal was being dredged, a dirty job saved for winter, when no visitors were here to see. Wooden planks dammed each end so big rubber hoses could pump out the water, leaving a floor of mud, just a few feet down, where workmen in boots were shoveling muck and debris into carts. The mud covered everything, spattering the workers’ blue coveralls, hanging in clots on the canal walls, just below the line of moss. Gianni’s great fear: mud would stick if someone dredged it up. I thought of him on the terrace at Lake Garda, having drinks with the men who’d ordered the trains. I’d met them in Germany, men still unsure why they were being accused. But those were the ones in cells, worn and frightened, out of their protective uniforms, awaiting judgment. The others, in the street, just went about their business, so ordinary there was no way to know, no haunted looks, no furtive tremor from unwanted memories. The crime hadn’t stuck to them. They had gotten away with it, free to walk around, even marry a rich woman. They smiled over the dinner table. Nobody knew. And that they won’t get away with, Rosa had said, asking for help.