Garden of Angels

David Hewson

Description

A THE TIMES BEST THRILLER OF THE YEAR 2022When a Jewish classmate is attacked by bullies, fifteen-year-old Nico just watches - earning him a week's suspension and a typed, yellowing manuscript from his frail Nonno Paolo. A history lesson, his grandfather says, and a secret he must keep from his father. Nico is transported back to the Venice of 1943, an occupied city seething under the Nazis, and to the defining moment of his grandfather's life: when Paolo's support for a murdered Jewish woman brings him into the sights of the city's underground resistance. Hooked and unsettled, Nico can't stop reading - but he soon wonders if he ever knew his beloved grandfather at all.

Sujets

• Historical fiction
• Venice
• Thriller

Informations

• Publié par: Canongate Books
• Date de parution: 18 août 2022
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781838857769
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 1 Mo

Extrait

David Hewson is a former journalist with The Times, the Sunday Times and the Independent. He is the author of more than twenty-five novels including his Rome-based Nic Costa series, which has been published in fifteen languages. He has also written three acclaimed adaptations of the Danish TV series The Killing .
@david_hewson | davidhewson.com
Also by David Hewson
The Nic Costa series
A Season for the Dead
The Villa of Mysteries
The Sacred Cut
The Lizard s Bite
The Seventh Sacrament
The Garden of Evil
Dante s Numbers
The Blue Demon
The Fallen Angel
The Savage Shore
Other novels
Carnival for the Dead
The Flood
Juliet and Romeo
Devil s Fjord
Shooter in the Shadows
 
 
The paperback edition published in Great Britain, the USA and Canada in 2022
by Canongate Books Ltd, 14 High Street, Edinburgh EH1 1TE
Distributed in the USA by Publishers Group West
and in Canada by Publishers Group Canada
First published in 2021 by Severn House Publishers Ltd,
Eardley House, 4 Uxbridge Street, London W8 7SY
canongate.co.uk
This digital edition first published in 2022 by Canongate Books
Copyright David Hewson, 2021
The right of David Hewson to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are either the product of the author s imagination or are used fictitiously. Except where actual historical events and characters are being described for the storyline of this novel, all situations in this publication are fictitious and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events or locales is purely coincidental.
British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available on request from the British Library
ISBN 978 1 83885 770 7
eISBN 978 1 83885 776 9
Wenn die Generation die den Krieg berlebt hat nicht mehr da ist, wird sich zeigen ob wir aus der Geschichte gelernt haben.
When the generation that survived the war is no longer with us, then we ll find out whether we ve learned from history.
Angela Merkel, July 20, 2018
CONTENTS
Part One
The Woman in the Lagoon
Part Two
The Visitors
Part Three
Tangles in the Loom
Part Four
Traitors
Part Five
Blood on the Streets
Part Six
Ordinary Monsters
Author s Note
PART ONE
I must have been four or five. Nonno Paolo was reading a night-time story, the two of us alone in my little room on the third floor at the front. It was a history book. Something real, true, in which a man, an ancient king or an emperor, was at the end of his reign, assessing his achievements and his failures too, wondering what came next as he lay on his death bed.
Was that a special kind of bed? the child me asked. One they kept for the occasion? Could you avoid dying altogether if you never slipped beneath its sheets?
He used to read to me out of guilt I think. Usually Dad was on the road, in America or Japan, Russia, France, there to sell the famous velvet of the House of Uccello. That was what we, among the last of the traditional weavers of Venice, did. Mum had packed her bags and gone back to live with her parents in England. Venice, it seemed, was not to her taste. Any more than us. Before long she had a new husband and a new family, too.
No, Grandpa said. A death bed wasn t something special. Just the place you found yourself when the time came. Any bed would do.
Even now, so much later, I can summon up the brief world of childhood. The sounds beyond the windows of my neat little bedroom in the Palazzo Colombina. Vaporetti and motorboats, the gentle lapping of idle waves against crumbling brick and the rotting woodwork of our private jetty. Gulls squawked, pigeons swooped and flapped their airy wings. Sometimes I d hear a gondolier sing a snatch of opera for the tourists. There was the familiar smell of the canal: diesel and chemical, the faintest whiff of decay behind. That last was always there.
Did someone die in my bed?
It s brand new, Nico!
Will I die in it?
He laughed, reached out and stroked my hair. Nonno Paolo s face was narrow and grey, marked by angular cheekbones that made me think he looked like a genial statue come to life. He had a kindly smile, though he often seemed exhausted from working seven days a week, tending to the affairs of our company and busy weaving outlets.
Of course not. This is a child s bed. Soon you ll grow and we ll buy you another. There are lots of beds ahead of you in this life. Lots of excitement. Growing up in this busy world of ours will be such an adventure. You want an adventure don t you?
I suppose.
All boys want adventures.
But I will die? One day?
He waved his hands in exasperation.
That moment s so far off you needn t worry about it. Just think of now. This week. Saturday when Chiara will take you to the Lido. You can play on the sand. Go paddle. There ll be ice cream. Other kids to play with.
Chiara Vecchi was a large and bustling woman who d once worked for us as a weaver, then later, after my mother left, became an essential helpmate, fetching, cooking, ferrying me to school when no one else was around.
I don t want you to die. Ever.
Grandpa closed the book.
You re too tired for this.
No I want a story. Another one.
He bent down, kissed my forehead and ran his fingers through my hair.
All in good time, little boy. His genial face clouded over with an expression even a child like me could read. Doubt and perhaps regret. Though whether you ll thank me for the one I have in mind
Before I could say another word he bent down and kissed me again. Then he went to the end of the bed, turned on the TV and flicked through the channels until he found a cartoon.
JUNE 1999. I WAS now a nervous, gangly fifteen-year-old, walking into a private room in the hospital of Giovanni e Paolo. It was my turn to sit by the bed. I so wanted to be elsewhere. On the beach at the Lido, listening to music, trying to keep up with my peers. Chasing girls if I could only work out how. My father was so good at that. He didn t seem to have passed on the talent.
More likely I d be out with my cameras somewhere, taking pictures of the wild marshes by Torcello or the dunes of San Nicol . Photography was my one hobby, an obsession almost. Grandpa had set me up with an account at the camera shop near San Giacomo dell Orio. They loved me since I spent a fortune there on SLR bodies, lenses, film and developing. Not a cent of it down to me of course.
All the walls were white. The corridors rang to echoing footsteps and quiet voices. The place reeked of an antiseptic medical smell that caught the back of my throat. Or perhaps that was just fear. On one side of the room two long windows looked out over Fondamente Nove and the lagoon. The placid water shone, swimming in the kind of heat you never normally got till late July. Heavy, humid, tiring, filled with buzzing, biting insects.
The moment I entered, head down, visibly unenthusiastic I imagine, Nonno Paolo gestured at the chair beside the bed. I d never seen him so frail. That alone - I was a child still even if I didn t know it - made me want to run from this brightly lit cell with its chemical stink and the insistent, rhythmic whirr of the fan in the ceiling.
It was hard to imagine a world without him and, being the child I was, anything hard was to be avoided. To tell the truth I couldn t begin to understand how the Uccello could possibly live without him overseeing the daily running of our palazzo and the small, male household it contained. He was our rock, a fixture I assumed would always be there. Except soon, they all said - my father, the nurses, the doctors and Paolo Uccello - the patriarch of one of Venice s most famous fabric houses would be gone.
I gather, he said, his voice frail but not without authority, there s been trouble at school.
The truth was I d barely been a part of it. My sin was one of omission. I d been suspended for a week, along with Maurizio Scamozzi, the ringleader, and two other boys. It wasn t the first time Scamozzi had got us in trouble and frankly it was mostly a mix of curiosity and fear that made me go along with some of his stunts. Getting kicked out of school, even temporarily, was new though.
Sorry, was all I could manage.
What happened?
A boy had been bullied. I d been there, watching. Not taking part. Not intervening either.
I know I should be punished, I said. One week s suspension-
No matter. He swept the air with his right hand. It was such a feeble gesture for a man I d always regarded as strong and healthy. I wanted you to come and see me anyway. There s something you need to read.
Nonno Paolo seemed the tallest man in the world when I was tiny. Age and illness had bent and greyed him. Now he lay beneath a single white sheet on the hospital bed, propped up by a couple of pillows, a book and a jug of water on the chest of drawers between him and the open window. Outside was the quiet stretch of Fondamente Nove that led eventually to the gigantic, mostly closed and abandoned boatyard of the Arsenale. Since it was Sunday the stretch of lagoon that ran over towards Murano was busy, rowers sculling across the mirrored surface, vaporetti working their way to and fro, back to the city, across to the Lido.
See that? he asked, pointing at the window.
The small cemetery island of San Michele sat between us and Murano, its walls decorated with castellated gothic ornaments. There was a church by the jetty to receive visitors, the living and the dead. The place looked like a cross between a castle and a giant s tomb.
You ve been ill before, I told him. You ll get better. We ll have you home in a week or so. Dad told me. He-
Your father told you no such thing. Soon they ll be ferrying me in a casket across that water.
I didn t know what to say.
This boy you were picking on. Who was he?