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Alibi

Kanon Joseph (EN)

ALSO BY JOSEPH KANON

Los Alamos

The Prodigal Spy

The Good German

Alibi

Alibi

A Novel

JOSEPH

KANON

Henry Holt and Company, LLC

Publishers since 1866

115 West 18th Street

New York, New York 10011

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Henry Holt and Company, LLC.

Distributed in Canada by H. B. Fe

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Kanon, Joseph.

Alibi : a novel/ Joseph Kanon.—1st ed.

p. cm.

ISBN-13: 978-0-8050-7886-2

ISBN: 100-8050-7886-X

1. Americans—Italy—Fiction. 2. Mothers and sons—Fiction.

3. Venice (Italy)—Fiction. 4. Jewish women—Fiction. 5. War crimes—Fiction.

6. Revenge—Fiction. I. Title.

PS3561.A476A79 2005

813'.54—dc22 2004063594

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Director, Special Markets.

First Edition 2005

Designed by Paula Russell Szafranski

Cartography by Jeffrey L. Ward

Printed in the United States of America

1 3 5 7 9 10 8 6 4 2

For

David and Lizbeth Straus

Alibi

CHAPTER ONE

After the war, my mother took a house in Venice. She’d gone first to Paris, hoping to pick up the threads of her old life, but Paris had become grim, grumbling about shortages, even her friends worn and evasive. The city was still at war, this time with itself, and everything she’d come back for—the big flat on the Rue du Bac, the cafés, the market on the Raspail, memories all burnished after five years to a rich glow—now seemed pinched and sour, dingy under a permanent cover of gray cloud.

After two weeks she fled south. Venice at least would look the same, and it reminded her of my father, the early years when they idled away afternoons on the Lido and danced at night. In the photographs they were always ta

A week later, with Bertie negotiating in Italian, she leased three floors of a house on the far side of Dorsoduro that once belonged to the Ventimiglia family and was still called Ca’ Venti. The current owner, whom she would later refer to, with no evidence, as the marchesa, took clothes, some silver-framed family photographs, and my mother’s check and moved to the former servants’ quarters on the top floor. The rest of the house was sparsely furnished, as if the marchesa had been selling it off piece by piece, but the piano nobile, all damask and chandeliers, had survived intact, and Bertie made a lend-lease of some modern furniture from his palazzo on the Grand Canal to fill a sitting room at the back. The great feature was the light, pouring in from windows that looked out past the Zattere to the Giudecca. There were maids, who came with the house without seeming to live there, a boat moored on the canal, and a dining room with a painted ceiling that Bertie said was scuola di Tiepolo but not Tiepolo himself. The expatriate community had begun to come back, opening shuttered houses and pla

I learned all this many weeks later in a telephone call she had somehow managed to put through by “going to the top.” At this time the trunk lines into Germany were reserved for the military, so I imagined that a general, some friend of a friend, had been charmed or browbeaten into lifting a few restrictions. The call, in any case, caused a lot of raised eyebrows in the old I. G. Farben building outside Frankfurt where I pushed files into one tray or another for US-FET while I waited for my separation papers. I had been in Germany since the begi

“I’m still in the army.”

“Well, they give passes, don’t they? I mean, it’s not as if the war’s still on. And I’m sure you could use the break. I’ve seen the newsreels—it looks just awful there.”

“Yes.” Camps full of corpses, wheeled out in farm carts to mass graves. Feral kids eating out of PX garbage cans. Women passing bricks hand over hand, digging out. Not what anyone had expected, pushing over the Rhine. GIs rich with a pack of Luckies. What happens after.