When they’re inside, Esmond rushes straight to the bedroom and the W/T.
‘Penna, come in Penna.’ It is several minutes before a reply.
‘Esmond, I’m so sorry, Esmond.’
‘You know?’
‘We know.’
‘What’s going to happen to them?’
‘Levy will be on the train with the rest of the Jews for Germany tomorrow. We’ll do our best to fish him out.’
‘But Ada?’
There is the crackle of static. Then, in a graveyard voice, ‘They’ve handed her over to Carità.’ Esmond staggers into his chair. ‘It’s not as bad as it might be,’ Pretini says. ‘If they knew she was Jewish, they’d have taken her to the camp by the station with Levy. It means her identity is holding up. Carità will interrogate her, knock her about a bit, no more.’
‘Where is she?’
‘At the Villa Triste. You sit tight and I imagine she’ll be out this time tomorrow. She’s a tough one, your Ada.’
He cannot sleep. He paces up and down the floor of the drawing room. Signora Rossi sits upright on a divan, watching him. He imagines going down to the Villa Triste with his gun and shooting his way in. He wonders if Alessandro would come with him. But the other members of the Resistance are planning their raid on the German train the following afternoon. If he does it, he’ll have to do it alone. Several times he shouts out, kicks at the furniture, sobs. He feels madness stammering at the edge of his mind, and all his mind can hold is the memory of Ada’s green eyes, stretched impossibly wide. Finally he slumps down in an armchair.
Signora Rossi makes him a cup of tea, pulls up a footstool beside him and sits. She takes his hand in hers and strokes it, not speaking. He can’t choke down the image of Carità’s pudgy face, his wide nostrils, his schoolboy’s shorts with their fat, hairless knees. Tatters comes into the room and curls up in his lap, begins to snore. They are sitting like that, Signora Rossi holding his hand, Tatters grumbling quietly, Esmond hunched and hopeless, when the sun comes up.
He waits by the radio all day. He knows he mustn’t call Pretini or the partisans at Monte Morello. All efforts will be centred on the rescue attempt. There’s nothing he can do for Ada. Signora Rossi sits reading Chekhov in the drawing room. She makes a lunch of pasta and beans, but he can’t eat. As darkness falls, he’s standing in front of the triptych. He has tuned the wireless to Radio Moscow. The news in English at 7 p.m. speaks of the Anglo-American bombing raids on Berlin, thousands of tonnes dropped on the already blazing city, lines of refugees spidering out into the countryside. The Allies now hold most of Southern Italy. They have broken through the first of Kesselring’s defensive positions above Naples and are at Monte Cassino, approaching the Gustav Line, beyond which, Rome. They will not arrive, he reasons, in time for Ada.
It is very late when he finally hears Pretini’s voice over the W/T. He’d been dozing on the bed wrapped in George Keppel’s tweed jacket, not wanting to sleep but eventually sinking into a series of rapid nightmares. ‘This is Penna, come in Esmond.’
‘Esmond here.’ He waits, as if the world has stopped. Then he hears Pretini sigh and his heart sinks.
‘It was a catastrophe. A fucking catastrophe from start to finish. They’d been warned of our plans. The train was preceded by a Krupp K5. It blasted the truck from the tracks then started shelling the hills. There were snipers, several heavy machine guns, at least a hundred soldiers with the carriages. We had no chance. We lost two Serbians. Elio took a bullet in the shoulder.’
‘And the train, it’s gone?’
‘Gone. I’ve had Rabbi Cassuto here all afternoon. Two hundred young men taken today. He fears another round-up later in the month.’
‘And Ada?’
‘No word, I’m afraid.’
19
On Tuesday morning Bruno arrives at the villa. He’s riding a red Moto Guzzi, goggles down around his neck when he comes to the door. He holds onto Esmond’s hand for a long time when he sees him. ‘We’ll go in and get her,’ he says. ‘I promise you, if she isn’t out by Friday, we’ll blast our way in there.’ Esmond nods. ‘She’ll be all right,’ Bruno says.
Signora Rossi hugs Esmond on the steps of the villa and then climbs up behind Bruno with her shopping bag on her lap. She puts her arms around him and he pulls up his goggles. Bruno waves as he drives through the gates and out into the road. Esmond stands on the gravel in front of the villa listening until he can no longer pick out the engine from the other sounds in the air. The house is silent and cold.
He can’t face waiting alone by the radio for another day and so goes out for a run. He and Tatters pound along the cypress-lined hillsides, past the Arcetri Observatory and the Torre del Gallo, along towards San Miniato. He feels if he can keep running, can keep up hammering his feet and heart and breath, then he might never have to face losing Ada. He realises, as he stands, exhausted, on a hilltop beside an abandoned shepherd’s hut and looks down into a valley where the first mist is gathering beneath the trees, that he was tested on the bridge and that he came up short. He should have saved Ada, should have held a gun to the SS officer’s head until he let her go. He reaches down and flings a handful of shingle into the valley.
When he gets back to the villa it is almost three. He is drenched in sweat, already cooling on his brow. Tatters is panting at his feet and goes immediately to his bowl of water which he laps in rapid strokes. Esmond hears Pretini’s voice on the radio. He takes the stairs two at a time.
‘Hello.’
‘We have Ada.’
He looks up, up to the bright sky. ‘Where is she?’
‘At the Careggi Hospital, by the university. She’s officially still under arrest, but we have people near her. We’ll get her out.’
‘How is she?’
‘She’ll live. She’s conscious.’
‘When can I see her?’
‘That wouldn’t be wise, for you to be down there. My friend, the doctor, wants to keep her overnight. In the morning they’ll tell the guards that they’re taking her for surgery and bring her up to L’Ombrellino in an ambulance.’
‘Tomorrow, then.’
‘Yes, tomorrow.’
He clumps back downstairs, searches the shelves in the drawing room until he comes upon a book of Hopkins’s poems and sits reading all afternoon and well into the night. He hears nothing more on the radio but finds some consolation in the poems. ‘Not, I’ll not, carrion comfort, / Despair, not feast on thee,’ he repeats the lines to himself, remembering how Leavis’s voice would rise into the mad eaves as he read. He takes the book with him to bed and by the time he turns out he has all of the ‘Terrible Sonnets’, each hopeful-hopeless line, by heart (a phrase which gains sudden new truth). He drifts off to the echo of: ‘I can; / Can something, hope, wish day come, not choose not to be.’
20
The ambulance arrives just after eight next morning. Esmond has been up since before dawn. He realises he has been allowing plates to pile up in the sink, dirty clothes to fall across the room. He sweeps the floor of the drawing room, scrubs the sideboard in the kitchen, changes the sheets on their bed. He even dusts the triptych. By the time the doctor comes up the steps and rings the bell, the inside of the villa is gleaming.