Alibi

Alibi

by Joseph Kanon
Alibi

Alibi

by Joseph Kanon

Paperback(Reprint)

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Overview

From the bestselling author of Los Alamos and The Good German comes Joseph Kanon's riveting tale of love, revenge and murder set in postwar Venice.

Winner of the Hammett Prize

It is 1946, and Adam Miller has come to Venice to visit his widowed mother and try to forget the horrors he has witnessed as a U.S. Army war crimes investigator in Germany. But when he falls in love with Claudia, a Jewish woman scarred by her devastating experiences during World War II, he is forced to confront another Venice, a city still at war with itself, haunted by atrocities it would rather forget. Everyone, including his mother's suave new Venetian suitor, has been compromised by the occupation, and Adam finds himself at the center of a web of deception, intrigue, and unexpected moral dilemmas.

When is murder acceptable? What are the limits of guilt? How much is someone willing to pay for a perfect alibi?


Product Details

ISBN-13: 9780312425906
Publisher: Picador
Publication date: 05/16/2006
Edition description: Reprint
Pages: 416
Sales rank: 263,466
Product dimensions: 5.40(w) x 8.20(h) x 0.80(d)

About the Author

About The Author
Joseph Kanon is the author of three previous novels, The Good German, Los Alamos, and The Prodigal Spy. Before becoming a full-time writer, he was a book publishing executive. He lives in New York City.

Read an Excerpt

Alibi


By Joseph Kanon

Henry Holt and Company

Copyright © 2005 Joseph Kanon
All right reserved.

ISBN: 0-8050-7886-X


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 cafes, 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 tanned, sitting on beach chairs in front of striped changing huts, clowning with friends, everyone in caftans or bulky one-piece woolen bathing suits. Cole Porter had been there, writing patter songs, and since my mother was close to Linda, there were a lot of evenings drinking around the piano, that summer when they'd just married. When her train from Paris finally crossed over the lagoon, the sun was so bright on the water that for a few dazzling minutes it actually seemed to be that first summer. Bertie, another figure in the Lido pictures, met her at the station in a motorboat, and as they swung down the Grand Canal, the sun so bright, the palazzos as glorious as ever, the whole improbable city just the same after all these years, she thought she might be happy again.

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 planning parties. Coffee and sugar were hard to get, but wine was cheap and the daily catch still glistened and flopped on the market tables of the pescaria. La Fenice was open. Mimi Mortimer had arrived from New York and was promising to give a ball. Above all, the city was still beautiful, every turn of a corner a painting, the water a soft pastel in the early evening, before the lamps came on. Then the music started at Florian's and the boats rocked gently at the edge of the piazzetta, and it all seemed timeless, lovely, as if the war had never happened.

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 few trunk lines into Germany were reserved to 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 USFET while I waited for my separation papers. I had been in Germany since the beginning of the year, first with G2, then attached to one of the de-Nazification teams separating the wicked from the merely acquiescent. Frankfurt was still a mess, the streets barely passable, filled with DPs and hollow-eyed children with edema bruises. The phone call, with its scratches and delays, seemed to come from another world, so far from the rubble and desperation just outside my window that its news seemed irrelevant. The marchesa was quiet; you hardly knew she was there ("darling, not even a flush"). My room had a wonderful view. Her pictures hadn't arrived from New York yet, but Bertie, a treasure and fluent, was looking into it. It was a call that began in what my father used to call her medias res - a plunge into the middle of whatever she was thinking, followed by exasperation when you didn't know what she was talking about. Finally I understood that she had moved to Venice intending to stay, which meant that my home would be there too. The point of the call, in fact, was to say she was expecting me for Christmas.

"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.

"Well, then," she said. "Won't it be wonderful? To have Christmas together? It's been years."

"In a Fascist country," I said, half teasing.

"It's not the same thing at all. They weren't Nazis. Anyway, all that's over. It's lovely here, just like before. I can't wait for you to see the house. Maybe it'll snow. They say it's enchanting in the snow."

Characteristically, she hung up without giving me her address, so it was to Bertie that I later wrote to say that I'd be spending Christmas in the hospital. After surviving actual combat and the tough early days of the occupation, what got me, embarrassingly, was a rusty nail, a careless step in the debris of a Frankfurt street that caused a puncture wound and required tetanus treatment and a holiday spent with amputees and boys with nervous tics. By the time I finally got to Venice it was February, I was out of the army, and the city was huddled against a damp, misty cold.

The piano nobile, as grand and formal as described, was freezing, kept dark but not draftless by long, heavy drapes. The sitting room, warmed by space heaters from Bertie, was comfortable, but the high Tiepolo dining room made meals so chilly and unpleasant that my mother had taken to eating in the kitchen or off a tray sitting next to the bars of her electric fire. Above us, the marchesa had become so silent that a maid was sent up to check, as if she might be one of those birds who grow still on a winter branch, then suddenly fall over. What would have changed everything was sun, cutting across the Adriatic to seep into all the tile roofs and parquet floors as it often did even in February, but the sky that winter was German, cloudy and gray. In the evenings, near our house, there was no light at all. A fog would come in from the sea, filling the Giudecca channel, streetlights were spaced far apart to save power, and the calles became dark medieval paths again, designed for people with torches.

I noticed none of this - or rather, it was all so like the gray I was used to that I accepted it as natural, the way things were. The gloomy afternoons were no different from the weather in my head, full of listless shadows, an urge to draw in. Does anyone really come back from the war? The lucky ones just keep going, on to the next fight, unaware that they're breathing different air. The rest of us have to be brought up in stages, like deep-sea divers, to prevent the bends. The boys in the hospital had come back too fast - their faces twitched, their eyes darted at every sound; prey. I slept. The fog that came in at night from the lagoon, would fill my head too, a lulling numbness, asking to be wrapped in blankets, left alone. Sometimes there were dreams - really ways of going back, reminders of the nightmare time that was supposed to be over - but mostly the sleep was just fog, opaque and shapeless.

"Just like Swann, couche de bonne heure," my mother would say, but idly, not really worried, for by this time Dr. Maglione had come back into her life, so she was spending evenings out, unaware that when she left me with a book I was already halfway up the stairs in my mind, curling up with the fog.

The result was that I was waking early, before first light. It wasn't insomnia - I slept deeply, snug under a warm duvet - but some automatic awareness that the light was about to change, the way plants are said to lift their heads toward the dawn. My bedroom window faced across the channel to the Redentore, and I would look out into the darkness waiting for its lines to start forming, as if Palladio himself were sketching them in again, until finally everything had definition, still murky but real. Then I would put on my heavy wool army coat and leave the house without making a sound, quieter even than the shy marchesa, and begin my walk.

Venice is often said to be a dream, but at that hour, when there is no one out, no sounds but your own steps, it is really so, no longer metaphor - whatever separates the actual paving stones from the alleys in your mind dissolves. The morning mist and the gothic shapes from childhood stories have something to do with this, the rocking slap of boats on the water, tugging at their mooring poles, but mostly it's the emptiness. The campos and largos are deserted, the buoy marker lights in the lagoon undisturbed by wakes, the noisy day, when the visitors fan out into the calles from the Piazzale Roma, still just a single echo. Things appear at that hour the way they do in sleep, gliding unconnected from one to the next, bolted garden door to shadowy church steps to shuttered shop window, no more substantial than fragments of mist.

(Continues...)



Excerpted from Alibi by Joseph Kanon Copyright © 2005 by Joseph Kanon. Excerpted by permission.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.

Reading Group Guide

Discussion Questions
1. Alibi offers its characters a series of moral dilemmas that can also be pondered by the reader. Gianni's "choice" is particularly thorny. He may either give up a dying man to the Nazis or turn over a young, active member of the partisan resistance. Although in the end this proves to be a false choice, how would you rationalize such a decision?
2. Venice has served as a backdrop to many novels. Its history of secrecy and wealth, the romance of the masked ball, and the enigmatic canal system make it a potent setting espe-cially for the mystery novel. Why do you think Joseph Kanon has chosen Venice for his novel?
3. How do the gradually changing seasons (from deep winter to spring) color the events in the novel?
4. The financial reversal is one of the most shocking twists in this constantly twisting novel. When Adam realizes that it is his mother, not Gianni, who is the gold-digger, how does it muddy the morality of Adam's actions?
5. Put yourself in Adam's situation. After the murder, would you stay in Venice to continue investigating Gianni's past, or flee with Claudia?
6. What are Adam's motives for investigating Gianni's past—to protect his mother, to avenge Claudia, to avenge his own father? And how do these motives change after the murder? Which of these motives do you think is most valid?
7. Many families have stories about WWII and the Holocaust. Where were yours when these events were unfolding?
8. Have you ever discovered anything surprising about a family member after his or her death?
9. Compare Alibi to histories you may have read about this period in Europe. What did this book teach you about WWII and its aftermath, particularly in Italy?
10. Occupied Italy's role in the war raises many moral questions pondered by the characters in this novel. For example, how does a society sort out the criminals from the victims of a foreign occupation? When nearly everyone seems to be complicit in the atrocities in some way, how does a nation begin to forgive itself?
11. In Alibi, Venice is a tourists' paradise haunted by a traumatic recent past. Kanon reminds us that even the most picturesque places may have shameful histories. Can you think of other tourist spots with similarly turbulent (and possibly hidden) pasts?
12. Cavallini is determined to protect the honor of the Maglione name. Why do societies protect their established and wealthy families?
13. Alibi is not a typical whodunit. Perhaps Bertie expresses this most succinctly when he tells Adam: "It's the ultimate mystery, isn't it? People. Not who done it. Who they are." The search in this novel is for Gianni's true identity. Adam is not looking for the culprit; he's looking for the victim. How does that change your expectations of the outcome?
14. Alibi is critical of Venice's secretive society and of the crimes it tried to conceal after the war. Can we apply these same criticisms to our own society?
15. How would the experience of reading this novel be different for a person from Venice?
16. Does the "bullet" stop with the conclusion of the novel? Adam and Claudia have been torn apart, and both must live with the guilt that comes with their perfect alibi. What do you imagine will happen in the twenty years after Kanon's story ends?

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