The Secret Messenger. Mandy Robotham
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several times to descend from her office in the smaller bedroom. In what seems like every spare moment, Luisa is engrossed in that box attempting to unravel the mysteries amid the dust within. Daisy sits alongside, humming with an impatient flickering of the screen, waiting for Luisa to continue the article she should be working on. Jamie sees that the collection of old paper and photographs has more than captured her imagination – it’s become a purpose, perhaps morphing into an obsession of late. She’s become withdrawn but not in a morbid sense, and that can only be a good thing, he thinks, given she’s just lost her mum. Except he seems to have lost Luisa too. Hopefully, it’s temporary. He has to be patient and wait for her to re-emerge, take her nose out of those dusty scraps and be the Luisa he knows and loves. Right now, it appears that might take some time.
Luisa runs a hand over the keys of the monochrome typewriter she brought from her mum’s house, which takes pride of place in her office now. On that day of discovery in the attic, she bashed out her frustrations – though was careful to be kind to the keys, in deference to its age – and it felt good: the rhythmic tackety-tack of the mechanism winding up speed as her fingers became accustomed to the keyboard. It produced a rambling array of thoughts, now stuck in a notebook entitled ‘Head space’. She’s certain the machine is the origin of some of the typed pages – the dropped letter e bears that out – but the mystery is that some look like fact and others a kind of story, with a fictional, descriptive air. What are they doing amid the pictures of suave Italians with guns and camouflaged faces?
The office wall is now papered with a mosaic of scraps and photographs, topped off with coloured Post-it notes in Luisa’s scribble, as she tries to understand the timeline and characters in this war tableau. As she reads and deciphers over her Italian dictionary, she is becoming convinced that her grandmother was more than simply a bystander to war; that she had some part to play in its direction and the eventual liberation of her city. But what part? The mystery gnaws at her, night after night as Jamie snores lightly beside her. Who was her grandmother? Certainly, someone with more to her past than Luisa could have ever imagined. And why didn’t her own mother ever talk about this potentially colourful life? With her storyteller’s head, it’s not that much of a stretch for Luisa to imagine her grandmother as some sort of underground spy; she’s sure that if it were her own mother, she would have wanted to shout it from the rooftops, been prodigiously proud.
She scrolls back in her memory of her grandmother; Luisa’s own mother always seemed short with her, impatient, as if there was a long-standing feud between them. Something in her past had seemed to colour her mother’s personality, making her bitter and bad-tempered towards almost everyone. Certainly, Luisa’s father had retreated inside himself before his death. Yet no one ever spoke of it.
This new search, however, is a welcome distraction to those memories of home life as often cold and humourless. Luisa has researched enough articles about the grief process to know that it is undoubtedly helping with her own; to imagine something of her family within the paper bundles means she feels closer to her long-dead grandmother, whereas she struggled to find a connection with her own mother in life. Luisa has always known that her grandma Stella was a writer of novels – three or four family dramas written under the name Stella Hawthorn, but long since out of print. Just one had been on her mother’s bookshelves, and Luisa had read it with pride in her early teens. It was good, a definite page-turner, filled with sumptuous descriptions of both places and emotions and a hint of her Italian past as her nineteenth-century characters travelled to and from her native country. Luisa could almost taste the gelato of Milan, imagine the gossamer pink drench of a Naples sunset, the lilt of an Italian lover against the hard vowels of an English accent. Strangely, though, there was nothing of Venice in that volume, and she’s been hard at work since her mother’s death in trying to trace the other three texts, trawling websites specialising in old books or second-hand texts. The publisher, sadly, has long since closed up shop and, aside from visiting every antique shop she can find, Luisa has been reduced to sending feelers out into cyberspace and eagerly checking her email every day. So far, nothing.
With the codes, warped messages and strange initials, threads begin to weave in Luisa’s mind. Had her soft, demure grandmother been part of the Venetian Resistance, donned the rough uniform of a partisan soldier, or even sported a gun? Or acted as some glamorous spy working in plain sight of the Nazis, a Mata Hari character? She laughs then; her imagination is running riot. Still, it’s possible in the shape-shifting of a world war. But where did her Grandpa Gio fit into all this, if at all? It makes for a puzzle of layers, and one that both frustrates and fuels her curiosity.
‘Lu? Luisa! It’s getting cold,’ Jamie shouts, clearly irritated now, and Luisa is forced to leave her past behind and move into the present. But not for long.
Venice, mid-February 1944
The early months of the year crawl by, with Venice holed up in its own weather enclave, wet and miserable. Due to the transport, the flow of Resistance reports from outside Venice slows to a trickle and it’s harder to fill the newspaper with positive news. Arlo and I flesh out the gaps with Tommaso’s illustrations, housewife recipes designed to eke out the week’s rations, and tips on the best places to shop. As I type, it hardly feels like fighting talk, and I have to remind myself that the paper is as much about helping ordinary people as waging a military campaign. Occupation is a fight against the enemy every day, and even the foe you might tentatively smile at across the market stall could make the difference between liberty or capture. While we all live alongside our Nazi occupiers and under the shadow of their politics, people still have to eat – small trade crafts come and go across the water, gondoliers who once conveyed tourists now scrape a living as supply carriers, avoiding the wash of ominous German gunboats, their weapons cocked and ready. Venetian life, though, functions in spite of our unwelcome visitors and the drone of aircraft passing like small swarms of bees overhead. Like people throughout Italy and Europe, we carry on.
There’s a welcome gap in the clouds in mid-February. At Nazi command, I take the cover off my works typewriter early one morning and see a tiny folded square of paper under one footing. I scout around the office – only Marta is humming to herself as she lays out some of the day’s work. I’d never had her down as a Staffetta, but equally I’m not supposed to be one either, so her innocent enough looks could be her best ally. Looking around me, I slide out the note and pocket it quickly. Cristian strides into the office, looking strangely upbeat and sporting something like a smile.
‘Good morning, all,’ he says, in Italian this time, since it’s only Marta and myself, and then, ‘Good morning Signorina. Are you well?’
I stammer something positive and quickly make my excuses to go to the toilet. The note has all the hallmarks of Resistance, using language and a code known only to my local battalion. It says to meet a contact in the corner of Campo San Polo and await further instructions. I deposit the piece of paper in my heel and head back to the office, barely suppressing my happiness. The tone of the note doesn’t sound like a routine message drop; perhaps there’s something I’m needed for, a task that will make me feel of even more value to the cause.
Cristian looks up as I return to the office, with a smile to accompany.
‘Ah Signorina Jilani, you’re back—’
‘Sorry. I’m needing to visit the—’
‘Yes, yes, no mind at all,’ he says, moving towards my desk, a large book in his hand. ‘I simply wanted to give you this.’ And he lays the volume down. It’s a thick, dictionary-like tome of technical translations. ‘I thought it might make life easier,’ he says. ‘For all those tricky words you – we – ponder over.’ Despite tiny flecks of grey in his beard, he looks like a boy who’s just given his teacher the shiniest, plumpest apple. There’s a proud half-smile under the bristles of his neatly clipped beard.
For a few seconds, I’m stumped for a reaction – part of me