Alibi: A Novel (33 page)

Gianni’s papers took no time at all. His businesses were all in the hands of managers, and Giulia, his heir, had already been to their offices, looking through the accounts.

“I thought it could be someone afraid of being caught. Everybody took a little during the war, to survive. But not enough to kill.”

How much was that? I wondered, but let it drop, not really interested in the businesses anyway. But the personal papers were disappointing too—a neat drawerful of bank statements and house accounts; another of official documents, birth, death, and accreditation,
crowded with elaborate seals; some hospital paperwork; a few letters, none revealing; a small pile of receipts; a program from La Fenice; clipped articles from professional journals put aside for a rainy day. A blameless life, anybody’s.

We sat at the big mahogany desk in the library, a dark room that backed onto a side calle, away from the canal. Giulia had turned on the desk lamp, making the polished wood gleam. The house was as perfectly waxed and still as it had been after the funeral, maybe the way it would always be now, a convent quiet.

“But did he keep everything here?” I said, rummaging through the deep bottom drawer.

“Yes, I think so. And the albums over there on the shelf. Where I found the pictures for your mother. Maybe you should see the rest. What are you looking for?”

“I don’t know. Him. People he knew.”

“There’s an address book,” she said, bringing it over.

For a few minutes we looked at it together, flipping pages. “That’s a patient, that one,” she said, and so, I assumed, were the others. And friends and dinner partners and tradesmen, all Italian. But what had I expected? Extension numbers at the Villa Raspelli? Checkmarks and combination letters, a coded secret life? I closed the book.

“Any diaries, anything like that?”

She shook her head. “No, only the Maglione books, from the old days.” She pointed to a shelf behind her, scrapbooks and odd-shaped journals, some bound in leather, others in gathered-together, yellowing folios. A few boxes, meant to look like books, for stacks of letters bound with ribbon. “They kept everything. For their history.”

“It must have stopped with him.” I closed the drawer.

“Well, my uncle did the notes. I remember him writing. My father was too busy for that.”

“But letters? There must be
some
letters. Your mother?”

“No. They never wrote. Or they’re gone.” She looked over at me. “Before—I never thought about it. They didn’t love each other. Maybe that’s why.”

We looked at the photo albums—stiffly posed grandparents, then
the Maglione childhood, Gianni and Paolo in sailor suits, the usual. Then the book from which she must have got my mother’s pictures—sunny days on the Lido in wet wool bathing suits, groups lolling in front of changing cabanas.

“Which is your mother?”

“They didn’t meet till later. Look, Luca, before he became a priest.” A plump boy with a grin, years from piety. “I don’t know this one.” Standing next to Gianni.

“That’s my father,” I said.

“Oh.” She looked up at me. “Yes, I see it now. It’s strange, our parents together. Like the same family, but not the same.”

My father was squinting into the sun, but both of them were smiling. A day at the beach, a casual snapshot, no hint at all of anything to come, their lives twisted together.

“But where’s Paolo?”

“He was always taking the picture, I think,” she said, smiling. “No, here, the tennis one. My father didn’t like tennis, so maybe it was his turn with the camera.”

I took the picture out of the album and brought it nearer, looking at it closely. No hint here either—no Order of Rome, no politics, none of Bertie’s murk. He was standing against the net in tennis flannels and a white sweater with a chevron neck, his arm draped over the shoulder of another player, both of them holding their rackets at their hips.

“It’s sad to look at them,” Giulia said, moving away. “Everyone so happy. Does that make sense?”

I nodded. “What was he like?”

“Paolo?
Uno vitaiolo
. You know, always for the pleasure. Tennis. Those cars. Of course, when I was a child I thought this was wonderful. Another child, you know?”

“And then?”

“And then I wasn’t a child anymore.” She turned, facing me. “He was a Fascist. You’re surprised I say that? I know. Today, no Fascists. We were all in the resistance. I think we even believe it.”

“How do you mean, Fascist?”

“Fascist. He liked Mussolini. He liked the parades, dressing up, all of that. He was on committees—you know, they liked him because of his name. Of course no one listened to him, but it made him feel important to go to meetings. And after, the tennis. So not so serious—how could Paolo be serious? And then it’s the war, and everything’s serious. He’s too foolish to see what is happening to us, that it’s a catastrophe. He thinks the king will save us, make peace with the English king. Because he’s a king too. Imagine the foolishness of it. Well.”

“And after that?”

“After that, the Germans. And Paolo? He supports the Salò government, against the CLN, the partisans. It interests you, Italian politics?”

“It confuses me.”

“Yes,” she said. “But at the end it’s not difficult. If you’re with Salò, you’re with the Germans. So Paolo was too. Sometimes I think it was good that he died, before it was a disgrace to the family. Even for my father it was too much. Paolo was his brother, so that’s something sacred to him, but it wasn’t the same between them. The Germans, that’s something my father would never forgive.”

I looked over at her, expecting irony, but she seemed utterly sincere, guileless.

“They had a fight?”

“A distance. Maybe a fight, I don’t know. I was at school. And of course
I
wouldn’t speak to Paolo then. You know, the students, the way we felt—I was too angry with him. Maybe ashamed, too. My own family. So I didn’t speak.” She came back to the desk and looked down at the picture. “And then after he died, I remembered him like this. When he was so nice. My father too, I think. So quiet, days like that. You know, whatever he did, still a brother.”

“What about your father, his politics?”

She smiled. “Was he this, was he that? Nothing—he wanted to survive them. That’s what he used to tell me. Stay out of it. Keep
your head down. So of course we would quarrel. You know, at that age. He was afraid, I think, that I would get involved in the resistance. So many of the students—”

“Did you?”

“No. I wanted to, of course, everybody did, but in the end—I don’t know, a coward maybe. Too much a lady, my friend used to say, my mother’s daughter. So maybe she was right.”

“But not your father’s?”

“Oh, a little bit. I think secretly he admired the resistance too. But he was afraid of it. For him it was simple—the family, Venice. The Church—well, maybe that was for my mother. He believed in those things. And what was the resistance? Maybe a threat. Something else to survive. So he kept his head down. No sides.” She turned at a soft rap on the door, an even quieter opening. “Ah, Maria,” she said, “thank you.” Not surprised.

The maid, in a starched linen collar and apron, carried a coffee tray to the table in front of the reading chairs. The cups and pot lay on a white doily, also starched, as if it had been meant to match her uniform. Shy smiles and murmurs in Italian, part of the ceremony of getting the tray on the table.

“I’ll pour, shall I?” Giulia said, at once dismissing Maria and taking up the pot in her hand, poised, her mother’s daughter.

I sat on the other side of the low table. It was the funeral all over again, nothing extra, everything as it should be, sure of its own taste. Even her dress, I noticed, was suitable, black without any purple frills, a discreet mourning—mourning because I had held his head under. Now we were drinking coffee, polite.

“But it must have been hard in the war, not taking sides,” I said.

She took a sip, then held the cup in her hand, thinking. “Of course in the end you do. It’s your country. I didn’t have the courage, maybe, but I had money. So I helped with that. We were alike that way. Keep your head down, but do it anyway. No sides, but he helped the partisans.”

“He told you that?” Maybe as plausibly as he’d told it on the fondamenta, but why?

She shook her head, then smiled. “Well, I didn’t tell him about the money either. But I know. He made it a question of medical ethics—what’s the right thing to do? You know, they do this in the law school too. So it’s good training for me. But this is his way of telling me. A man is brought in with a gunshot wound, a man you know. The law says you must report all such wounds. But you know that the only way he could have been shot is in the fighting, a partisan. If you report it, the government will kill him. If you don’t, maybe it goes badly for you, for helping a traitor. The man begs you—‘Help me, don’t give me up.’ What do you do?”

“And what did he do?” I said quietly.

“We agreed that the first obligation must be to save the man.”

“Even if he’s a traitor.”

“But if the government itself is illegal—”

“And who decides that?”

“Yes, who? You see how it goes on? He liked these questions. Well, I liked them, so he would ask.”

“And how did it end, this one? What did he do?”

“Oh, he said you can make it complicated if you like, but the simple fact is, if you know a man, you can’t give him up. So I know he didn’t.”

I put down my cup. “What if you gave up someone else instead?”

“Someone else?”

“To save the first. Your friend. If you gave up someone in his place.”

She looked at me for a second, then down at her cup. “What makes you ask this?”

“It’s a question he once asked me.”

“And you think,” she said, stirring her cup, still not looking up, “this was his way of telling you something.”

For a minute we were quiet, still enough to hear the clock.

“Do you think he did that?” she said finally, sitting up straight, braced.

I hesitated, then sat back, moving away from it. “I think it was just a question.”

“It’s a terrible thing.”

“Yes.”

“Why would he ask that?”

“As a moral dilemma, maybe. An impossible choice.”

“But you can’t choose someone’s death.” She was looking at me now, her face longer, more severe, like her mother’s again. “That’s murder.” Sure, admitting no exceptions.

I said nothing, kept quiet by her stare. Then her face began to change, no longer as properly arranged as the tray, and I saw that she was distressed, waiting for me to say something.

“He wouldn’t do that,” she said. “You knew him. Do you think he would do that?”

“I think it was just a question.”

“Then why—”

“Something may have put it in his mind. Something that actually happened. The story about the partisan—when did he tell you that?”

“When? Last year,” she said, composed again, interested.

“After the war?” I said, confused.

“No. I mean the year before. Forty-four. When he came to see me. I remember he told me at lunch.”

“When was this, exactly?”

“Autumn. October, maybe.”

“Why did it come up? I mean, why do you think he told you?”

She smiled a little, shaking her head. “Maybe to make me like him. Always we were arguing then. So maybe this was his way of saying, You see, Papa’s not so bad. I’m on the right side too.”

“But he never actually said he’d done this.”

“No, but that wasn’t his way. He never talked about himself. Maybe he thought it wasn’t dignified. He was private, a Maglione. My mother was like that too.”

“Secretive?”

“No. Private,” she said, making a distinction to herself. “I never knew what he was thinking. But what does a child know? All those years, here we are in this house, a family, and I never knew—” She leaned forward, placing the cup on the tray. “Maybe a little secretive.
A doctor has to be, you learn that. You don’t talk about your patients. I used to ask him things and he’d say, ‘That’s not my secret to tell.’ Always somebody else’s secret. ‘I won’t tell,’ I’d say, and he’d wag his finger, like this,” she said, demonstrating, so that I looked up, seeing Gianni. “You know the old saying.” She lowered her voice, becoming him. “Two people can keep a secret, if one of them is dead.” She paused. “So I didn’t ask. And then it turned out he must have had one of his own.”

“What do you mean?”

“He was murdered. Do you know why? No. So it’s still his secret.”

I sat back, looking around the room to avoid her gaze. “Well, it’s safe here. There’s nothing else? Files?”

“At the hospital. His real life was there, I think,” she said, her voice wistful. “Not here.”

There was an awkward pause.

“I should go,” I said, getting up. “Maybe there’ll be something in the patient files. That’s next. He seems to have erased himself everywhere else.”

“Yes, he was good at that. He didn’t like to keep things.”

I smiled, glancing around the old library, virtually an archive.

“Oh, this was Paolo. Poor Paolo, Papa erased him too. Threw out his books. You know, he was always writing in those books—
appunti
for the family history, and Papa said they were rubbish. Well, what did he expect? Mazzini from Paolo? But, you know, now it just stops. Unless I write it, I suppose,” she said, her voice diffident, as if she were talking to herself, suddenly alone.

“Wait. Paolo kept notebooks and your father threw them out?”

“Not all. Just the ones with his activities. ‘What will people think later?’ he said. It was an embarrassment for him.”

“But where are they?”

She gestured toward the shelves.

“Paolo kept them here?”

She looked at me, puzzled. “It was his house.”

“Yes, I forgot. But you all lived here?”

“Of course. The family.”

“All during the time they—?”

“Yes. There was an agreement—no political talk at dinner.”

I imagined them sitting at the starched table, private, talking politely, each one whirling in his own mystery.

“Can I see them?”

“Yes, of course,” she said, walking over to the shelf. “I’m sorry. I thought, my father’s papers. It didn’t occur to me. These are Paolo’s.” She ran her hand along a line of leatherbound spines.