Alibi: A Novel (36 page)

“We’ll find them someone else.”

“Someone else,” she repeated.

“Who could have done it. Another possibility. Just so long as it’s not him. We need to make a story. Something so close to what really happened that they can believe it. Just make a little change. The way Gianni did, remember?” Walking along the fondamenta, making the truce.

“Ah. Now like Gianni,” she said, her voice tight.

I looked at her, then let it go. “But we have to know what really happened.”

She turned from the water. “We already know what really happened.”

“I mean at the safe house. It’s in Cavallini’s head now. It’s too late to use anything else. He thinks Moretti has a motive. But who else would?”

“And the nurse is going to tell you?”

“A piece, anyway. If I can talk to her.”

At the hospital, Claudia didn’t even bother to translate. On my own I might have managed some kind of conversation, helped by gestures, but Claudia and the duty nurse spoke in a rush that swept me aside, unable to pick up even the occasional word. It was easier just to lean against the glass front of the nurses’ station and watch them speak. I thought of Moretti, lying upstairs with his puncture wound. The nurse would have had to know. Now this one was writing something down, motioning with one hand, giving directions.

“The one we want just retired,” Claudia said in the high gothic hall. “A
great
friend of Maglione’s. He was that kind of man? With the nurses?”

“I don’t know. I never thought so.” But then, so much else had been wrong.

“And who sleeps with retired nurses? Young nurses, yes. So maybe it’s just this one’s idea.” She nodded back toward the nurses’ station. “She thinks they were lovers because he helped her find a place to live—what else could it be? After all those years together, devoted to him, what does she get? Two rooms in Castello. Put away somewhere so he can marry his American. Typical, the man does as he likes, while the woman—” She stopped, shaking her head. “And maybe, she thinks, the nurse didn’t like it. Who would have a better reason?”

“To kill him?”

“She reads magazines.”

We had left the hospital and were walking across the campo past the equestrian statue.

“And who dumped him in the lagoon?”

“She’s not that far. Still with the romance. They worked together for years, and not a hint. Only now, when she’s old and he helps her. And this one believes that.”

“Were there rumors—other nurses?”

“Of course not. He was a saint,” Claudia said, her mouth turned down. “A saint.”

“A savior of men.”

“Yes,” she said, still grim. “Except my father.”

We followed the directions through several back calles of hanging wash to a house whose plaster front had peeled off in patches, leaving irregular pockets of dark brick, like Dalmation spots. Anna della Croce was on the second floor, up a staircase that smelled of cat and listed to one side. When we rang the bell, we could hear a series of locks being turned, as if the room had been barricaded against the rest of the sagging house. Then the creak of the door, a pair of eyes peering into the stairwell. It was only after Claudia mentioned Gianni’s name that the door swung open. For a second no one said
anything, adjusting to the light. Then Claudia’s eyes widened, and her whole body went rigid with surprise.

“
Voi
,” she said softly.

The woman looked at her, wary again. “
Che cosa volete
?”

“What is it?” I said to Claudia.

“It’s the same nurse, the one with my father. Look, she has no idea. No memory at all. I’m someone new to her. She watched them take me away, but she never saw me before. It meant nothing.”

“You’re scaring her. Speak Italian.”

The woman had drawn closer to the door, stepping slightly behind it, as if it were a shield.

“Imagine. Nothing to her,” Claudia said, her voice almost dreamy.

“Claudia,” I said, touching her shoulder. “Ask her about Gianni.”

She looked at me, coming back, then smiled wryly. “Yes, that’s right. Something she’d remember.
Scusi
,” she said, turning to the woman, reassuring her with a spurt of Italian that I couldn’t follow but that got us through the door.

We went into a tidy small room filled with porcelain figurines, Claudia still talking. We had gotten the address from the hospital, she was so nice to see us, it had been a tragedy about Gianni, and then I lost the thread again. I was given a straight-backed chair with upraised arms and a velvet-covered seat, formal, the kind that’s kept for visiting priests.

The nurse sat primly on the edge of the daybed, a severe-looking woman in her sixties who still seemed to be wearing a starched uniform, her eyes sharp and suspicious, even now on the lookout for sloppily made bed corners. I could see that she would never have spoken to me, but Claudia, another woman, had somehow put her at ease. Tea was made, an excuse for small talk to find out why we had come, whether we could be trusted. This time Claudia did translate, first paraphrasing their conversation, then finally with nearly simultaneous answers so that it felt as if we were all really talking.

“She’s worried about her pension. But I told her it’s to solve the murder, so that’s different.”

“Because he was a saint.”

She nodded. “The best man she ever knew. Would this hurt his reputation? And I said no, now everyone would admire him for this.”

“So it was a bullet wound?”

“Yes. She helped him remove it, just the two of them. He said he would take the responsibility—he didn’t want her to get in any trouble. Always thinking of others, you see. But of course she wanted to help him. So they took out the bullet and cleaned the wound and then she dressed it so no one else would know, not even the other nurses. Then they made out the report.”

“Had he done anything like this before?”

“No. But he knew the man. A family friend. And Dr. Maglione told her, ‘I can’t refuse him. I have to help. But no one has to know.’ ”

“He came into the hospital with a bullet wound and no one else knew?”

This involved a longer answer, filled with what sounded like medical details.

“You couldn’t tell. The wound was shallow. Not much blood. But of course the bullet had to be taken out. Maglione saw him right away—and after, all people knew was a bandage. Except for Anna,” she said, nodding to the nurse.

“Why would Moretti take the risk?” I said to myself. “If it wasn’t serious. Going to a hospital.”

“The bullet still has to come out. You need a doctor. And this one he knows. She says they were friends—Maglione liked to talk to him.”

“About what?”

A shrug. “She assumes old times. They hadn’t seen each other in years.”

“No, they wouldn’t have.”

“But the risk.” The nurse was shaking her head at the memory of it. “She was worried the whole time. But with him it was always the patient. When he found out Moretti had left, he said it was too soon. It needed more time.”

“But he discharged him.”

“No, he left. In the night. Like a thief in the night.” Hunching her shoulders, stealthy. “Because he was so grateful. The Germans came
one day and he saw that it was a risk for Maglione. How long before someone found out? So he left in the night. He didn’t wait.”

“But the medical report—”

“They had to say discharged. What else? Escape? Then everything would come out. So he was ‘discharged,’ and she signed it, and that was the end. Until now.”

I went over to the window, a view across the calle to another window, shuttered. “So Gianni couldn’t have had him followed,” I said. Wrong about this too. Moretti had gone without Gianni’s even knowing. Then the report had been faked to protect him, all witnessed by a sharp-eyed nurse.

“There’s no doubt about this, any of it?”

“You don’t want me to ask her that. She’d be offended.”

“The Germans who were there—soldiers or SS?”

“SS. They were looking for Jews.”

“And did they find any?”

Claudia looked at me, but translated. The nurse nodded, lowering her head.

“There was nothing they could do. The Germans knew. Grini, maybe, the informer. That was his specialty, hospitals and mental homes.”

“But he wasn’t there that day.”

“No, but they knew. Dr. Maglione was helpless. He used to say, ‘The Germans are like wild animals. You have to be careful with them. If you frighten them, they’ll bite. You can’t get too close.’ ”

For a minute no one said anything, the only sound in the room a teacup clinking on its saucer.

“Anything else?” Claudia said.

I shook my head. “I thought there’d be something. Something she’d seen.”

“Oh, and she’d tell you? She sees what she wants to see.”

She started again in Italian, calm, almost in a monotone, so the nurse’s reaction seemed all the more abrupt, a shocked expression, head jerked back.

“What?” I said.

“I told her someone said Gianni helped the SS. That he pointed out Jews.”

“Claudia.”

“She was there, wasn’t she? See what she says.”

A flood of words, angry. I waited, watching Claudia.

“Whoever said that, it must be his imagination. The doctor would never do that.”

“She might not have seen it,” I said quickly.

“She saw everything else.”

“It’s not the same,” I said. “He wouldn’t want her to see that.”

“I saw it.”

The nurse, still angry, was looking from one of us to the other, listening to the volley in a foreign language.

“She’d never admit it now anyway. Ask her when this was, when the Germans came.”

Claudia said something in Italian.

“October fourth.”

When Claudia and her father were taken, when Moretti was being protected, just as everyone had said. Exact, an excellent witness. The story everyone agreed on, except for the nod. I looked at Claudia, the other witness.

I moved in the chair, stuck. Why would the nurse lie? The fake report had become a badge of honor, her war story, helping Gianni do the right thing. So we had to assume he had.

She said something in Italian, her eyes on me.

“She wants to know how you knew about the bullet wound.”

“Tell her Gianni told me.”

“Ah,” the nurse said.

“I told her you’re the American woman’s son,” Claudia said, explaining. The nurse was taking me in now, somebody in Gianni’s world, not just a foreign voice. “She wants to know if she can talk about this now. It’s no longer a secret?”

“Not anymore. Better tell her the police might ask. No surprises.”

They both got up as they spoke, the meeting over.

“She wants to know who did it.”

I shrugged. “The police think young Moretti.”

The nurse turned to me, speaking Italian, forgetting for a second to go through Claudia.

“She says, why would they think that? Dr. Maglione saved his father’s life.”

“Tell her we don’t think he did it either. That’s why we came,” I said, one more blurred half-lie.

I looked around at the shelves of knickknacks. The rooms he had helped her find. Not enough to buy anyone’s silence, even assuming there was silence to buy. And why would there be? She still thought he was a hero, and she’d been there.

“Are you finished?” Claudia said.

I nodded, feeling deflated. Finished with no next place to go, and still no way to connect Gianni to the house.

We said good-bye, a thousand thanks, most of it by rote, my mind elsewhere. Then Claudia spoke in Italian, and the nurse stopped, taken aback.

“I said to her, ‘Do you know you look familiar to me?’ ” Claudia said.

“What are you doing? Leave it.”

Claudia’s eyes flashed. “I want her to remember. I remember—why shouldn’t she?”

The nurse studied her for another minute, then shook her head. “She says maybe from the hospital. So many people come and go, it’s hard to keep track.” She looked down, her lips in a forced half smile. “So many people come and go. And I’d know her face anywhere.”

We started for the door, the nurse still talking.

“She says it’s like that in the hospital,” Claudia said, airy now, the nurse prattling. “So many people. After a while you don’t notice.” She looked at me. “So that’s all it meant for her.”

“Maybe she wasn’t there,” I said. “Right then, I mean.”

“No, she was in the ward. Or do you think it’s my imagination too?”

Could it have been? A question so faint it was almost unnoticeable, like a hairline crack in porcelain.

“Do you? Yes, it must be. The doctor would never do that,” she said, playing the nurse again.

She turned to her and said something in Italian, without translating, but it must have been asking whether she was sure, baiting her, because the nurse squinted at Claudia’s face again, then shook her head.

“Claudia. We didn’t come here for that.”

“No, to make sure he did something else. It’s not enough, what he did. But maybe he didn’t even do that.
She
didn’t see it. So how do you know?” Asking something else, her voice angry, all of it still alive to her, not yet just a white splotch of skin. Real, more accurate than memory.

“Because you said so,” I said calmly.

She turned away, embarrassed, so that my eyes went to the nurse at the door, watching us closely, maybe the way she’d watched things in the ward, not really understanding what they meant. People coming and going.

“By the way,” I said, “ask her if she was there when the son came for the medicine.”

“What medicine?” the nurse said.

“That he sent to Moretti.”

“Why would he send medicine to Moretti? There was no infection.”

I looked at Claudia, my head suddenly light.

“For pain maybe?”

She brushed this away with her hand. “Then? In the war? Who had such medicine? There wasn’t even enough for the ones who were suffering. Moretti hadn’t had any in the hospital—only at first, to take out the bullet. After that, no, he didn’t need any.”

“But Dr. Maglione sent him some,” Claudia said to her. “The boy said so.”

“No, it’s impossible. He didn’t need medicine.”

“He didn’t need medicine?” I said, wanting to be sure.