‘What We Buried’ shows us that killers still do lurk among us today
Perhaps I should introduce you to Toronto author Robert Rotenberg.
He is a criminal lawyer and a principal in his own legal firm. But he has also found time to become a popular author of “legal thrillers,” a screen writer, and a teacher of creative writing. In all, he has published six detective or police-procedure novels set in Toronto; they begin with “Old City Hall” (2009) and run through “Downfall” (2021). His seventh is “What We Buried” (Simon and Schuster, 2024). It brings forward a startling revelation about the persistence of Nazi thinking and headstrong antisemitism in present-day Ontario; it also forges a reminder of the link between wartime Italy and Canada, and, in particular, the Italian town of Gubbio and cottage country north of Toronto.
“What We Buried” is the story of Daniel Kennicott and the belated police pursuit of the criminal forces behind the suspicious deaths of his parents and his brother, Michael, in separate Ontario incidents.
These cold cases have long haunted Kennicott and certain of his superiors. As usual in Rotenberg’s novels, a major figure is head detective Ari Greene. As Kennicott’s “boss and mentor,” Greene is intrigued by a new lead that has recently surfaced concerning the motor-vehicle deaths of Daniel’s parents a decade ago.
Nora Bering, Toronto’s first female chief of police and a former partner of both Greene and Kennicott, is in charge of the investigation. Over coffee at a popular Portuguese bakery in downtown Toronto, Bering informs Kennicott that she is sending him to Gubbio the very next day. The assignment opens up the parallel lines of action in the novel.
What Kennicott discovers on his trip to Italy is paralleled by what Greene and others are able to unearth about the cold case.
Gubbio is a medieval hill town in eastern Italy. While visiting there many years earlier, Kennicott’s mother had discovered “I Quaranta” the monument to the 40 innocent Italian martyrs who were murdered in the town by the fleeing Nazis.
Rotenberg provides some useful background: “In 1944, the Allies’ Italian campaign was brutal. They fought their way up from the south, and the Nazis, hell-bent on stopping their advance, punished Italians who had collaborated with them. Hitler decreed that if a German soldier was killed by partisans, then twenty civilians picked at random would be executed. The price for a German officer was forty innocent people.” In Gubbio, Nazi retribution was swift and brutal. That act of vengeance led to the town’s memorial.
The massacre itself was random and utterly contemptuous of the townsfolk. The victims were taken from their homes and forced to dig their own graves before they were executed. Bullet holes are still evident in the wall where they were shot. Kennicott finds a pamphlet describing the awful event; it allows him to connect and empathize with his mother’s discovery of the “I Quaranta” monument and the grim truth behind it.
Rotenberg faced a major challenge in setting his story in motion. With such an important story to tell and sort out, could he make Kennicott a credible and solidly interesting character? This is, I think, a particular problem for a writer working in a series. In “What We Buried,” Kennicott seems at first only modestly interested in his lost family members and appears to be only a modestly interesting character himself. His Toronto routines in “Little Italy” and his relationship with his partner Angela are all we have to go on — that, and his career change from lawyer to police officer and his stature within the force.
Those three lost members were, after all, his only immediate family. It turns out that he has kept his mother’s diary from her trip to Gubbio; however, he hasn’t paid much attention to it, despite the fact it was found in his brother’s briefcase when he was murdered.
Nevertheless, he tells Angela that he will make it his “guidebook” should he ever go there. Then, not coincidently, Ari Greene and Nora Bering, spurred by the 10-year anniversary of Michael Kennicott’s death and their ongoing concern for Daniel’s safety in Toronto, decide to send him to Gubbio.
Once there, and following his guidebook, he learns about the scars left on the Italian community by the Nazi occupation 80 years ago. Families there have long memories and recall especially whether they were either partisan or not. The Gubbio family Daniel connects with see him as a descendent of their Canadian liberators and invite him to their annual archery dinner. But after visiting the “I Quaranta” Memorial, he realizes that it is seen by very few tourists to the area and remains little known.
Moreover, after the war, conditions in Europe were horrible: “Cities were destroyed, infrastructure destroyed, farms destroyed.” While many of the Waffen-SS Nazis were hunted down, some “members made extreme efforts to hide their identities,” changing their names, removing their identification tattoos and seeking to relocate. A number came to Canada, initially to prison camps, but then on occasion, with government help, they became citizens.
The story turns on the surprising fact that Kennicott’s maternal grandparents had successfully disguised their German heritage; formerly known as Hans Schmidt, his grandfather renamed his family Smith. They were part of a small and close group of Nazi Germans who resettled in Canada after the war; some rose to high places but remained quietly loyal to the Nazi cause. Others, like Smith, tried to bury his former connections. Kennicott remembered that grandfather Smith’s home contained no family pictures.
Hans Schmidt had been a member of the Waffen-SS and was active in Gubbio. Quite on her own, his daughter had researched her father’s dark past and was on to revelations when she was killed in the Ontario traffic accident. Turns out, however, that she had left her research material with some partisans in Gubbio and they remained ready to provide a guiding hand when Daniel Kennicott made his visit to the town. Little wonder that he was well received when he arrived.
The story has a Jewish connection as well. Ari Greene’s daughter Alison begins a family study of the life of Ari’s father, Yitzhak (she calls him Grandpa Y), and slowly digs into his life in Europe before and after the war. Surviving concentration camps, family killings and Nazi persecution in Poland, Grandpa Y became a tracker of escaping Nazis in Europe after the war.
“The Allies didn’t care about the soldiers who had been in Italy. The sadists who did the killing.” “There were two million German prisoners in Europe and the Allies were overwhelmed.” Yitzhak describes on film how “Jewish agents” managed to identify and then kill numerous Nazis who were seeking refuge in new countries.
The other major part of the narrative focuses on Ari Greene and his team’s successful search for new evidence about the three Kennicott deaths in Ontario. I found these chapters the least satisfying part of the story. The detective work was carefully detailed but seemed relatively paint-by-number and selfcongratulatory when compared to the Gubbio material. Perhaps this follows from the understanding that the responsibility for the Kennicott deaths lay with two families that had managed to disguise their Nazi sympathies by means of successful professional careers and impervious social identities in Ontario. Ari Greene notes wryly that, though his team had been denied a wiretap on these families, the police would conduct it anyway. This likely implies a future direction for the Ari Greene series.
All in all, “What We Buried” is a gripping and complex, though uneven, mystery. The secrets closely harboured by our grandparents can contain horrible truths. Killers do lurk among us still.