The Partisan Heart Page 16

  He hauled down his bag from the top of the wardrobe and searched in the side pocket. It was empty. He stood up, scratching his head and took a step back from the bed on which the case lay, looking around on the floor, expecting it had fallen out as he lifted it down. But it was not there.

  He was certain he had put it in there. He thought back to that morning, only a few days ago, taking himself through everything he did before leaving his house. He saw himself bending to the floor, picking up the envelope and putting the bag down to unzip the pocket and put it in. He saw himself closing the zip, picking the bag up, opening the front door and leaving. It had been there. There was absolutely no doubt.

  Had he taken it out and forgotten he had done so? He searched the room, under the bed, behind the dressing table. Still, it was not to be found.

  Had someone taken it? Had someone come into his room? It was inconceivable. He took a large swig of the bottle of beer, wiped his mouth with the back of his hand and sat down on the bed.

  Why? What could anyone possibly want with Rosa’s photographs of ruined, abandoned churches and farms?

  Shortly before seven o’clock, the time the courier was due to pick up the envelope containing the photographs of Palazzo Ronconi, Michael collected himself once more, realising that the photographs needed to be annotated in some way so that the office in London would know what it was looking at. He opened the package containing them and started to number them, cross-referencing those numbers with a number on a piece of paper and providing a few lines describing each.

  Some of the shots were good and a number were very definitely usable. Not bad, he thought, considering he was not a photographer, although, naturally, he had learned some tricks of the trade from Rosa over the years.

  He came to the four or five shots he had taken of Teresa Ronconi’s bedroom. It was a large room, which adjoined the butterfly sanctuary that took up the rear of the house. In contrast to the fairly grand manner in which the rest of the house was decorated, it was quite simple. The walls were painted in a quiet, pastel shade, instead of groaning under the weight of several decades of hefty wallpaper. What was most striking was the fact that every surface was covered with photographs in frames, large and small. What he presumed were her family were frozen in time, playing on ski slopes, cavorting for the camera on yachts. The lives of the rich and famous, indeed.

  He had taken a photograph of one table, the surface of which was hidden by the sheer number of photo frames and he now peered at it in close-up to enable him to describe it properly. The photos in the foreground of the shot were of a younger version of her father and a blonde woman, most probably her mother seated at a restaurant table, smiling at the camera during that brief moment of happiness they had enjoyed together. Beside it were pictures of people he did not recognise, but at the edge of this group was a framed photograph of a younger and thinner Antonio Ronconi, a posed photograph that was a little like a publicity still of an actor. He sat, leaning forward on a stool, with his legs crossed and his chin resting on his hand. He was smiling and could easily have been the hero of an American soap opera. At the bottom of the photograph were some hand-written words. Michael could not make them out and wished he had a magnifying glass to find out what this brother had said to his sister.

  It was then that he remembered Rosa’s glass, her linen tester. He had thrown it into his bag just before leaving their room in Renzo’s house and had not taken it out of the bag when he had been at home. So, it must still be there.

  He fumbled around in the corner of his bag and there it was. Unfolding its stand, he placed it over the photograph. It took a moment for his eye to adjust to the glass’s magnification, forcing him to lift his head from the glass, blinking a few times, before returning to it.

  The handwriting was flowery, with dramatic up and down strokes. A dream for a handwriting expert, he thought, trying to focus on the letters.

  ‘Con i migliori saluti, la mia farfalla – tuo fratello, Antonio.’

  His eyes widened over the two words – mia farfalla. It was what Ignazio had heard one of the kidnappers say to Teresa as they manhandled her from the bar! Mia farfalla – Antonio’s name for his sister. It was too much of a coincidence that a stranger would use the same term of endearment, no matter how ironically.

  Just at that moment, there was a knock at the door.

  ‘Damn!’ said Michael, realising it was probably the courier, here to collect the photos and bike them down to Milan. He looked at his watch and saw that he was fifteen minutes early. Bloody Italians and their relaxed approach to time. They’re either too early or too late. Never bang on time, he thought.

  He stood up and walked to the door.

  When he opened it, he briefly saw two men standing there. One of them quickly stepped towards him and grabbed him round the middle, pinning his arms to his side. He struggled as a cloth of some kind was pushed into his face by the other man. There was a pungent, chemical smell that caught at the back of his throat. Michael kicked out, catching one of the men hard on the shin, but the fight started to go out of him as whatever chemical was on the cloth started to take effect. His vision became blurred and then there was just an echoing silence.

  11

  April 1944

  Upper northern slopes

  The Valtellina

  North Italy

  It had been sixteen days since Luigi, Il Falcone, had disappeared. He had left the camp to go and meet with another group and had neither met them nor returned.

  Sandro had learned of his non-arrival at his rendezvous with a profound sense of dread. In the days immediately following his disappearance, it was thought that he must have been taken by the Germans en route, and even as they spoke, was probably being tortured for information. As the days had passed, however, it had become increasingly obvious that something else had befallen their leader. The Germans would certainly have made propaganda out of their capture of such an important figure. He would have been paraded before the local people and would probably have been publicly executed. The Germans knew Il Falcone, of course. All of North Italy knew him. His exploits were recited by children in the villages of the Valtellina.

  The reason for Sandro’s dread was the increasingly erratic behaviour that Luigi had understandably demonstrated in the last few weeks since his wife and son had disappeared from their village. Sandro had spent the first few nights with him after word had come back that, indeed, they had been transported by train out of the valley, presumably north to Germany. Luigi had drunk himself senseless and had fallen into a coma-like state. He had then repeated the process for three days and nights, distraught when awake and raving when asleep, the demons of guilt haunting the passageways of his mind like drunks staggering through empty midnight streets. Then on the fourth day, he became lucid, frighteningly lucid.

  ‘Someone informed on me.’

  Sandro awoke to a pair of hands tugging at his lapels and shaking him.

  ‘Someone informed on me.’ A louder hiss. A wild look in his eyes, the look of a man who was on a journey through hell and had only bought a one-way ticket.

  ‘Falcone … Luigi … What …? I can’t breathe …’

  He let Sandro’s head fall to the ground and covered his face with his hands. A deep, almost inhuman sob emerged from behind his interlocked fingers. He took his hands away from his face and wiped his nose with the back of a sleeve, gathering himself.

  ‘Don’t you see? Someone, someone from this camp must have told the Germans that I am Il Falcone, that Angela is my wife. As far as they are concerned – if they were concerned at all – I was killed fighting in the Italian army eighteen months ago. Someone must have told them.’

  ‘But Luigi, it could have been anyone. It could have been a neighbour, someone in the village who knew.’

  ‘No. They do not know. As far as they know, my wife is a widow and my boy is fatherless. Dio, I haven’t set foot in the village for eighteen months. It has to be someone in the camp. It isn’t
the first time either. Look at San Giorgio. No one outside of this camp knew about that, no one.’

  Several weeks previously, a band of partisans had been ambushed as they went to the hillside village of San Giorgio to carry out an attack on a German barracks. As the partisans were making their way through the forest above the village, they had found the Germans waiting for them in force and seven partisans had lost their lives in a vicious fire-fight. Luigi had escaped along with half a dozen others and, although suspicions were mooted, they were too unpalatable and it was decided, finally, that the Germans had simply struck lucky by stumbling into the operation.

  ‘That was pure luck, Luigi. We discussed it.’

  As he said this, Sandro recalled his and a number of his colleagues’ doubts at the time. There had been too many Germans and they had been too well prepared. Quite simply, they had been waiting for the partisans, and on the exact route they were taking. It had been no coincidence.

  Everything was risky now, as the war went on. In the south, the Allies were making slow, but relentless progress, pushing the occupying German army further north and it was only a matter of time, unless the Germans threw every man they had into the battle, before the Allies took all of Italy. Still, German divisions poured through the passes in the mountains to bolster the exhausted troops retreating from Rome. People were becoming mercenary as they anticipated the end-game. Anything was possible. Even the unthinkable – one of the partisan group, seeing the end of the war, deciding to play for high stakes; a reward from the Germans to give him a good start when peace finally broke out. Yes, it was entirely possible.

  ‘Ach!’ Luigi hawked up a lump of phlegm and spat it out as if he were ridding himself of the evil thoughts he had been having. ‘It had to be someone who wasn’t on that raid.’

  ‘But, Luigi, this is impossible. These men wouldn’t do it. Madonna, I wasn’t on the San Giorgio raid, remember? You’re saying that it could have been me!’

  ‘The swine could have been any one of you!’

  He stared into Sandro’s eyes for a second and then stood up suddenly and lumbered away into the trees that lined the clearing in which the group had made camp.

  Sandro once again felt doubt swell up, the doubt he pushed to the back of his mind each time it arose. The face of George Bright came back to him, seated on a rock, squinting at the sky as he polished his spectacles, and the photograph of the Englishman’s daughter, smiling expectantly at the camera. With Luigi so unstable and capable of anything – as, indeed, Sandro feared he had been with the Englishman – there was danger hovering around him. He wore it like an overcoat. It defined him and it drove him.

  Adding to the confusion were Sandro’s feelings for Angela – lost now, it seemed to him, lost in the vastness of this war, as were so many things and so many people, scattered like autumn leaves in the wind, across Europe. He slumped back, his head resting uncomfortably on the earth beneath it. She was lost forever and he still had not acknowledged the fact. In fact, he refused to acknowledge it. As far as he was concerned, she was still waiting for him in their clearing surrounded by trees, leaning on the rock with Antonio gurgling in her arms.

  After a while, it had seemed to Angela like she was walking beside herself. This realisation had been a gradual process. At first she had come back to her body after only a minute or two, after suddenly noticing how odd it was that she was no longer part of that original body and that she could even look at herself, walking along to the left of her. That was the strangest part of it. She had felt that she was not alone. Of course, she was not alone because there were hundreds, perhaps even thousands treading the same circles that she walked. Their walk had definite boundaries. Those boundaries were delineated by the wire fences that marked the edge and the end of the world and, in fact, everything may well have ceased to exist beyond those wires, for all any of them knew, prisoners or guards. For Angela, who all her young life had dreamed of worlds beyond her own in the Valtellina there was a certain irony in this. Her world seemed to be becoming smaller as her life progressed and her dreams, once large and all-encompassing, were now also shrinking, shrinking until they occupied only the few hundred feet on which her circle of exercise took her. One day they would be so small that they would disappear altogether and life would no longer be worth living.

  It was, indeed, far from the promenading of her youth in the square in her village, she thought, as she slowly and with great effort, placed one foot in front of the other; the teenaged girls, arms linked conspiratorially, hands to their faces, pushing the giggles back between their lips, hips swaying in an exaggerated fashion, knowing and yet, at the same time, ignorant of, the great themes of their young lives. The boys, huddled on corners, smoking and affecting nonchalance, their deep, quiet, Valtellina souls troubled with love and longing, their eyes following the shadows of that longing as they circled the square.

  She feared to look to her left where her other self, that other version of her walked. She sensed it there. Sensed the shaved head, cut and scabbed from the rough slashes of the razor that had separated her from her thick black hair. She had cried as she watched it fall from her head to the floor to mingle with all the other clumps of shorn hair. Sensed the red-rimmed eyes, underlined with black shadows that looked as if they had been painted there by an expert makeup artist at La Scala. Sensed the face that would, inevitably, like the faces of all the other women who surrounded her, be shrunken like that of a woman thirty years her elder; like theirs, her face would gradually be taking the shape of the skull that formed its framework, as if a building were to take on the shape of the scaffolding that held it up. It was as if her body were being turned inside out, as if she were beginning to wear her bones like clothes.

  Someone was singing as they left the clearing high in the mountains that held their camp. It was an old song of the valley, one that Sandro recognised. He remembered his mother singing it as she hung out wet clothes to dry when he was a lot younger, she unaware that he was listening, innocently stopping for a rest, putting her hands on her hips and staring up at the peaks, the words of the song spilling into the silence around her. Now it hung in the damp, heavy air of the late spring afternoon, as if it were caught up in the fine drops of the steady drizzle that was falling onto their hats and down their faces.

  There were seven of them and they were on their way to a rendezvous with another group who were relaying ammunition to them. This was one of the more mundane tasks in which the groups of partisans had to engage. Every month or so this meeting would take place and would involve a lot of walking and a good deal of carrying. It was never, therefore, the most popular of duties. Sandro was especially unenthusiastic on this occasion. A flu epidemic had rampaged through the camp and he had spent the past three nights soaked in sweat. This morning, however, he had awakened feeling better, if still a little weak.

  He trudged along at the rear of the small column, almost pleased to be going somewhere other than the perimeter of the clearing that was about as far as he had gone while ill.

  ‘I wonder where old Luigi is right now?’ It was Carlo, dropping back to have a word with him. He blew cigarette smoke into the drizzle and it hung over them as they walked as if it had been trapped in a bag which was being held at the end of a string.

  ‘I just hope he’s alive,’ Sandro replied. ‘Two weeks without any sign of him – it’s not good.’

  ‘You may be right. But, the tedeschi normally make a big show out of capturing someone like Luigi. Even if they were still questioning him – and may God help him if they are – they would let it be known that they had him in custody. To frighten us all off.’

  ‘As if they would succeed in that,’ said Sandro, looking up, hoping to see a break in the grey sky that would signal the end of this spring rain. ‘You’ve heard how they’re on the run in the south. It’s only a matter of time.’

  ‘Let’s hope so,’ grimaced Carlo, pulling up the collar of his heavy jacket and throwing away his sodden cigarette.
‘Let’s hope so. Or, at least if it isn’t, let’s hope the damned rain stops.’

  They trudged on, heading in a westerly direction towards the slopes above the town of Chiavenna. The paths they were following were becoming more and more difficult to walk on. The rain had now been falling for two days and was rolling down the sides of the mountains. In places it flowed like small streams and the dismal thought of returning to the camp carrying heavy ammunition lent a dejected air to the walk.

  Finally, they stopped, as the light was beginning to fade. The sun had sunk invisibly below the high horizon of the mountain peaks at least half an hour previously and it was becoming chilly. Mercifully, the rain had finally stopped, but their clothes were soaked through and they were very cold as they slumped down against the trees that hugged the side of this part of the mountains, the place where they always stopped for the night before walking the next morning for a few more hours to arrive at the rendezvous.

  A fire was quickly lit and they huddled close to it, eating the cold meat they had brought with them and passing a couple of bottles of grappa from mouth to mouth in an effort to restore some warmth to their shivering bodies. As the heat of the fire reached into their damp coats, steam rose into the darkness as if they were being cooked.

  Later, Sandro lay wrapped in his blanket, shaking, his flu having returned with a vengeance, exacerbated by the dampness of his clothes and the effort of the day. He realised he should have stayed back at the camp to recover more fully. He opened his eyes and stared up at the sky. At last it seemed as if the flat greyness of the past few days had broken and stars winked between the clouds. The moon, too, was visible once more, racing like a ship across the sea of the heavens.