CHAPTER FIVE
I caught the traghetto that crossed the Grand Canal to the Gritti and then headed toward San Moise. A few days, Joe had said-maybe he had already gone. But the Bauer still had a Sullivan registered, and while I was using the house phone to call him, I spotted him at breakfast in the dining room facing the rio.
“Late start?” I said, going up to the table.
“Late night. You just caught me. Sit, but don’t expect too much.” He rubbed his temples, wishing away the hangover.
“Thanks.” I took a cornetti from the bread basket in front of him. “Eat something. It helps.”
“Did I call you or did you call me?”
“I called you. I need a favor.”
“Too late. I go back to Verona at fourteen hundred.”
“That’s where I need the favor.”
He raised his eyebrows over the coffee cup.
“Could you run a check on somebody? See what you’ve got hiding in the files?”
“Italian?”
I took out the photograph.
“Isn’t this the guy from the other day? You always run a check on your friends?”
“He’s not a friend.”
“Bad boy?”
“I think so.”
“What’d he do?”
“Cooperated with the SS rounding up Jews.”
“He wouldn’t be the first. They insisted, you know.”
“I don’t think it was like that. I think he helped.”
“Adam, for chrissake, if I had a nickel for everybody who-”
“I know. Frau Schmidt telling on the neighbors. This is something else. He’s a doctor. Old family. He had a choice.”
“Army?”
“No. Probably too old. Maybe too smart.”
“So?”
“So, what else? This stuff-it usually doesn’t happen just once. You know. It’s part of who you are.”
“Fascist?”
“Maybe, but not only that. I mean, what the hell, the mailman probably had a party card. Did he work with the Germans? What did he do? Sort of thing you might turn up in your files.”
“Might.” He looked again at the picture. “You have a name?”
I took out a pen and started writing. “He may have used another. That’s why the picture-in case somebody might spot him.”
“Somebody like who?”
“Come on, Joe, we worked the same street. You must have somebody just looking at pictures to see what he can see. An old partisan, maybe. Somebody looking to get even.”
Joe took a sip of coffee. “Is that what you’re looking to do?”
I met his gaze over the cup. “He wants to marry my mother.”
“Jesus, Adam, we’re not a fucking reference bureau. If you don’t like him-”
“He’s a bad guy. I just want to know how bad.”
“Look, let me explain something to you. This isn’t Frankfurt. The setup’s different here. We’re not trying to punish anybody. The Italians are supposed to be the victims, the good guys. We don’t keep those kinds of files on them. And the Italians, they don’t want to know. They settle things privately. It’s what they’re good at. Since fucking Rome. Some Fascist prick set up a partisan ambush? They don’t bother with a trial. They just stick him with a shiv some night and go about their business. You see Mussolini in the dock? Just strung him up at a gas station. They don’t want us running trials here. They take care of their own.”
“So what are you doing here then?”
“German trials. The Germans want trials. Or maybe we want them to have them. Anyway, they do. And when the evidence is here, we have to come get it. Kesselring did a lot here before they transferred him back. Just wiped people out. So things get lost in Germany, we find something else here. It doesn’t matter where he did it as long as he did it. It’s the Germans we’re after, not your mother’s boyfriend.” He put the picture back on the table.
“So let’s see, that means you’ve got the German army files-what they didn’t take. They take much?”
“Some.”
“And you’ve probably got that cross-referenced with the Salo government files-liaison reports anyway. SS? Nobody kept files like they did, we know that. So what do we have? The army worked with Italians, so there’d be sheets on them there. Secret police reports, for sure. SS would have their own little black book of informers. Somebody like Gianni, they’d probably give him a file all his own, wouldn’t they?”
Joe raised his eyes again. “Yes.”
“In other words, the German files have got practically everything we want to know about the Italians, wouldn’t you say? Except what they said to each other. And all I want to know is what he said to the Germans. What they had to say about him.”
“An Italian civilian? We’re not here for that. They’re our friends.”
“Yeah, well, so are the Germans now.”
“We’re not supposed to use the files this way.”
“What are you talking about? That’s all we did.”
“You’re not in the army anymore. And he’s Italian. We’re not supposed to-”
“Jesus Christ, Joe, the old man is lying there in a hospital bed and this guy fingers him. In a hospital bed. How much protection is he supposed to have?”
Joe said nothing for a minute, then pocketed the paper and photograph.
“All right. All I’m saying is, this isn’t Frankfurt. We may not have anything.”
“If you don’t, you don’t. I’ll bet you’ve got a Herr Kroger.” Our assistant, for whom the files were a series of live wires running from connection to connection, the whole a wonderful bright web in his brain.
“Soriano,” Joe said, nodding. “Signora. Pretty good, too.”
“Put her on it. She’ll know right away if it’s worth a little sniffing. I don’t want to tie you up with this.”
Joe grinned. “No, just use my best snoop. You don’t change.” He patted the pocket with the photograph. “You really love this guy, huh? What if I come up dry?”
“There has to be something. A man who’d do that-it’s never just once.”
“And you’re sure he did?”
“There was an eyewitness.”
“And you’re sure-”
“She was the old man’s daughter.”
“Oh, she was,” Joe said, looking at me. “Then she’d know.”
“Yes, she would,” I said, staring back.
Joe sighed and put his napkin on the table. “Well, this was fun. Just like old times. You have a phone here?”
“On the paper. I’ll come to Verona if-”
“No, you don’t want to come anywhere near me. It’s not Frankfurt, remember? Anyway, I’m not as much fun as I used to be. Can I ask you something? This guy, does he know that you know?”
I looked at him, surprised that this hadn’t occurred to me, then nodded. Of course he knew. Claudia would have told me.
“Some fucking wedding,” Joe said.
I walked back, taking the wide swing over the Accademia bridge, then sat for a while in the Campo San Ivo. There was a shaft of sun in the square, and some bundled-up old people sat on benches with their faces turned to
