A Thread of Grace

March 1944

FRAZIONE DECIMO

VALDOTTAVO

“Where is the other lady?” Schramm asks when the young woman appears two days in a row.

She sets a basin filled with warm water onto the floor, pushes the hayloft shutters fully open, stands outlined by the sunshine. For the first time since they arrived here, the breeze carries no knife. “Signora Savoca took advantage of the weather. She’s down in San Mauro for a few days.”

“The signora is your mother?”

“Stefano’s. The man who brought you here?” she prompts. “Stefano Savoca?”

“He said his name was Renzo.”

She calls herself Marisa. Lovely, even if it’s not her real name. He knows almost nothing about her except that she is gentle, and he is half in love. A weakened man. A pretty nurse who is not contemptuous of that weakness. The situation is banal, and she counters it by making herself sisterly: casual and matter-of-fact in caring for him. Staying windward, she pulls his blankets off and airs them over a laundry line strung between the house and barn. Returning to his bedside, she makes a move for the sheet. Well enough to be startled, he snatches it back.

Dipping a rag into the water, she wrings it out. “Herr Schramm, you are in Italy,” she reminds him, washing his face, neck, chest. “No country on earth is more densely populated by male nudes. Nuns in Florence know more about reproductive anatomy than whores in Marseilles!”

He stares.

“Sometimes I forget you’re German. That was a joke,” she says, resoaping the rag. “Should I have applied for a permit before I told it?” He smiles, and she hands the washcloth to him. “You’re well enough to do the parts that make nuns blush.” She leaves the hayloft with his chamber pot. “How old is your baby?” he asks when she returns.

“Rosina?” Marisa pauses to count. “Six months! Imagine that!” She busies herself, using a clean handkerchief over her hands to collect the dirty ones she’ll boil. “No blood for three weeks!” she notes. “Signora Savoca is right. You’re going to live.”

“Life is full of missed opportunities.” It’s her turn to stare. “A joke,” he says.

“Next time, get a permit!” Marisa stoops to give the washrag one last swish, twists it nearly dry. “I’ll bring soup later,” she says, flinging washwater out the window. The clothesline pulley squeaks as she reels the line in.

“I should begin to walk a little. Tomorrow perhaps.”

She pauses, a blanket over her arm. “Why not today?”

That afternoon, she brings him a paisley robe that must have been Renzo’s and helps him to the edge of the bed. Spent, he sits, rests, then manages a few steps on shaking legs. After his soup he tries again, and with Marisa’s encouragement, he crosses the hayloft to a chair and back before they hear the baby’s waking wail.

“Mamma’s coming, cara mia!” Marisa calls. “If the weather holds,” she tells Schramm, “I’ll open up the house tomorrow. You can come down for a visit.”

The clouds pile up overnight, but the temperature stays warm enough for rain, and a change of scenery is a powerful incentive. With frequent stops, Marisa guides him across the sloping covered passage that connects the barn to the house, through an open door, and across a swept plank floor. Feeble as a good intention, he watches his own feet until she settles him at a table. Propped on his elbows, he wills his heart to slow, concentrating on each breath until he can spare the energy to look around.

“Terra nova!” she says. “Do you feel like Columbus?”

A pedal-powered sewing machine sits on a sturdy worktable under the window, where the pale winter light is best. An oil lamp hangs from a metal chain in the center of the ceiling. Suspended from a tripod in the open hearth: an iron pot. The fire’s been built up, to counteract a chilly breeze through the open door. A cupboard holds a jug of olive oil, a bottle of wine, and three slumping burlap sacks— cornmeal, dried chickpeas, and chestnut flour. Rafters, posts, door, and windowframes— all retain the shape and color of the branch or trunk from which they were hewn. The house is simple, but beautiful in its way. Long ago, someone plastered its thick stone walls, and these have been adorned with trompe l’oeil windows that reveal summer landscapes or the sea—

“Mirella,” his hostess says firmly.

“Scusi?”

“My real name is Mirella. The other lady is Lidia.”

“Grazie,” he says, touched by her trust. He lifts a hand toward the walls. “Are you the artist?”

“More artisan than artist. My father was a stuccatore—a specialist in fresco restoration. He started me on forced perspective when I was very young. My son’s age, now that I think of it. Angelo’s almost eight.”

“I have a boy that age! And another, of six years. They are Klaus and Erwin. Where is your son?”

“In a boarding school. He was safer there, away from the bombing. My husband couldn’t leave his work. He’s still in Sant’Andrea.”

“And this is Rosina,” Schramm says. Her cradle is on the floor, near the fire and as far from the sick man as it can be in this tiny house. Arms flailing, legs pumping at a restraining blanket, she is practicing B’s: “Bub, bub bub.”

“You must miss your family, Herr Schramm.”

“Yes. As you do, no doubt.”

They glance at each other, and Mirella clears her throat. An unspoken agreement is reached: they will not speak of absent family. The emotions are too raw, tears too close.

“Trompe l’oeil is very common in Liguria,” Schramm observes.

“Painters are cheaper than masons and sculptors.”

“It’s also cheaper to employ relatives than strangers, I think.”

She smiles. “My father had me bagging pigments when I was four! I loved the blues: lapis lazuli, cobalt, ultramarine. All I have here are pastels, but the colors please Rosina.”

“Signora Savoca has not returned?”

“No, and I expected her back by now.”

“She hates me, I think.”

“Bub, bub, bub. Bub!” the baby shouts, thrilled by her own volume.

“Signora Savoca lost children to influenza in 1918.” Mirella picks Rosina up and bubs back at her for a time. “She thinks Bayer aspirin was poisoned. Her theory is that Germans were exacting revenge for their defeat in the Great War.”

“That’s absurd!”

She smiles at the baby. “Two of her older girls took the aspirin. They died. The youngest children didn’t. They lived.”

“Coincidence.”

“Probably.” Mirella plants noisy kisses on chubby cheeks, her eyes on Schramm. “Distressing to be hated because of lies, isn’t it.”

He shifts uncomfortably in his chair. “Especially when there are so many legitimate reasons to be hated.”

“You people do keep starting wars,” she says tartly. “Every family in Italy has lost men because of Germany, and this occupation isn’t helping your reputation.”

“I imagine it would make a nice change if we tried tourism.”

She laughs, genuinely amused. “The Allies aren’t especially popular here either. They leveled Monte Cassino a few weeks ago.”

“For God’s sake, why?” Sitting on a hill between Naples and Rome, the fourteen-hundred-year-old Benedictine monastery was the jewel of medieval Italy.

“The Americans said the Wehrmacht was calling in artillery strikes from the abbey. The Germans deny it. Either way, it’s gone.” She jounces Rosina on her knee. “The Allies are still south of Rome. On the other hand,” she reports cheerfully, “the Russians have pushed your panzers all the way back to Poland! And there’ve been huge bombing raids on Berlin and Cologne— Dio mio, I’m so sorry! Do you have family there?”

“They are in Freiburg.”

“Then they’re all right,” she says, awkwardly.

“Probably.” Schramm turns his attention to a hand-carved crutch hanging from a hook by the front door.

“The last tenant was a hunchback,” Mirella tells him. “Tuberculosis of the spine, I think you’d call it. People around here are still frightened of the house. It’s been empty for years.”

“I am probably not contagious anymore, but are you not concerned?”

“My uncle died of tuberculosis when I was fifteen. He lived with us when I was a child.” She sets the baby back into the cradle. Astonished, Rosina produces a scowl of imperial displeasure, large brown eyes following her mother’s move toward the iron pot hanging in the open hearth. “X-rays show spots on my lungs, but they’re encapsulated.” Mirella tucks her apron between her legs, to keep the fabric away from the fire, and ladles thin soup into a thick pottery bowl. “Renzo explained about keeping the windows open and so on. And Rosina is upwind.” She brings the bowl and a wooden spoon to him. “The soup’s very bland, I’m afraid. Salt is like gold these days. Your Italian is quite good. Did you study Latin?”

“Yes, in school.”

“And your accent is Florentine.”

“I spent a year in Florence when I was young. Words come back to me. I worked hard last fall to remember the grammar.” She steps to the window. Light from the setting sun makes a nimbus of her hair. “It must be close to the equinox,” he remarks, waiting for the broth to cool.

“Yes— it’s March already! Friday, the seventeenth, I think. Easy to lose track up here.”

An experimental howl issues from the cradle. Mirella takes an oil lamp from the top of the cupboard and puts it next to the one already on the table. She doesn’t light either, though it’s getting dark. Rosina begins to wail. Mirella stoops to lift her.

“Don’t pick her up!” Schramm says sharply.

“Why on earth not? She’s probably hungry.”

“She should wait. It’s good for her.”

“I can’t imagine how. She’s not a prioress fasting her way into heaven.”

“You should put her on a feeding schedule,” he insists, eyes averted as Mirella tosses a cloth over her shoulder and unbuttons her blouse behind it. “If you pick her up, she’ll cry for what she wants.”

“German babies submit their requests in writing, I suppose.”

Rosina snorts and gulps and snuffles before settling in to nurse steadily. Schramm, too, concentrates on feeding himself. By the time he pushes the empty bowl aside, the spoon feels as heavy as a shovel. Leaning on the tabletop, he gazes at Mirella. “You look so familiar…”

Wryly, she strikes a pose with Rosina. “Have you been to the Staatliche Museum in Berlin?”

“That’s it! The Botticelli—”

“Madonna and Child with Angels, 1477. Also the first angel on the left in Primavera, at the Uffizi. According to family legend, my many-times-great-grandmother was one of Botticelli’s models.”

Looking at her, Schramm realizes the full genius of the painter, who captured the ordinary tiredness of a pretty mother who’s breast-fed for six months, and whose Son still wakes up most nights. “The resemblance is strong,” he says.

“It’s a lovely story, but…” She shakes her head.

“Inheritance halves each generation,” Schramm agrees. “There would be little continuity over four centuries.” He had forgotten the pleasures of conversation. “So! You don’t like Germans. You don’t approve of the Allies. What are your politics?”

In a singsong voice, she tells Rosina, “Mamma thinks politicians are frauds at best, and tyrants, given half a chance, cara mia, but kings can be decorative and useful!” She smiles at Schramm. “Renzo calls me an anarcho-monarchist.”

“Are you the one who wouldn’t marry him?”

“He told you that?” She seems surprised. “It was a long time ago.” The sated, sleepy baby quiets, and Mirella lays her in the cradle, humming softly. Standing at the window, her back to Schramm, she buttons her blouse. “Sun’s almost down!” she says, shivering.

“I should get back to the barn so you can close these windows.”

“Prego. Stay awhile more.” She brings a loaf of chestnut bread from the cupboard to the table, and then a bottle of local wine and two small glasses. “The bread’s overdone. I haven’t quite grasped the nuances of baking on a hearth.” Snapping a straw from a broom by the fireplace, she presses the end on a coal, then uses it as a match to light the two oil lamps. A tendril of smoke rises when she blows the straw’s flame out. Without a word of explanation, she closes her eyes and holds her hands before them. “Baruch ata Adonai, Eloheynu melech ha-olam…”

Friday. Sunset. The unfamiliar language. “You’re Jewish!”

Her eyes open. “Sì, certo! Didn’t you know?”

“I thought you must be Catholic. Renzo said you didn’t marry because of religious differences.”

Mirella shakes her head as though to clear it. “I married a rabbi. That could be construed as a religious difference,” she says, pouring the wine. “Ordinarily, the husband says the next blessing, but these are not ordinary times.” Another chanted prayer and she hands Schramm a glass. “Loosely translated,” she informs him, “that one means, Thank God grapes ferment.”

“I’ll drink to that,” he says.

“A moment longer.” She places her hand on the bread and sings a third prayer before breaking the loaf into pieces and giving Schramm a share. “L’chaim!” she says, raising her glass. “To life!”

Schramm reaches gingerly across the table to clink glasses. “If you’re Jewish, then why didn’t you marry him?”

She chews and swallows before answering. “Have you ever read Svevo? Like Balli, Renzo loves women very much, but all of them equally, and only when he’s in the mood.” She sips the wine. “I wanted a more settled life than he was likely to provide. Now look at me! On a mountaintop, in a hunchback’s cabin, with a German officer. Not the bourgeois domesticity I envisioned.” She breaks off a smaller piece of bread thoughtfully. “And when Renzo came back from Abyssinia, he was… different. Herr Schramm, do you understand why he drinks so much?”

Schramm puts his glass down. Looks away. “Yes,” he says. “I believe I do.”

The storm that night is silent but relentless. By morning the entire valley is enveloped in the peculiar hush of deep spring snow. With Rosina and Schramm still asleep, Mirella is happy to lose herself in small tasks. She swings the pot of soup back over the coals, and nudges a kettle of water closer to the heat. She did as many chores as possible before sundown last night, but she has to tend the fire or they’ll freeze. The Polish Hasidim would be scandalized, but Mirella suspects that in ancient times women never had a genuine day of rest.

Thanks to Renzo’s contacts, she has real coffee beans and a grinder. She pours boiling water over the grounds and steeps them like a Turk. While they settle, she hurries out to the privy, shuffling through the snow to clear a path. When she returns, the full fragrance greets her, and she pours carefully, savoring the quiet. Thank God for simple gifts, she thinks. I am alive and well rested, with a cup of coffee to warm my hands and raise my spirits.

For nearly a week after Renzo brought the four of them to Decimo, Mirella was all but unconscious. She slept, woke to nurse Rosina, and slept again. A husband, three pregnancies, small children: there was a time when Mirella Soncini could count on one hand the nights of sound sleep she’d had since 1935. When the war began, things got worse.

Screamed awake by sirens, she and Iacopo would leap from bed, grab the children, and run to a shelter. When the all-clear sounded, her relief at seeing her own home intact was always blighted by others’ losses. Iacopo would hurry off to comfort the bereaved, leaving Mirella to face the tedium of clearing away the dust and grit and ash blown in from the harbor, again and again and again.

Even if there was no attack, she had to be up early to do the marketing before everything was gone. Her youth has been squandered in queues, shuffling forward step by step to claim a kilo of greenish potatoes at one store, the children’s milk ration at another, the family’s bread ration at a third. The only thing she could predict was the shortage of something basic: oil, sugar, eggs, salt, pasta, rice. Three meals a day to get on the table, and every one a struggle.

Slowly devotion to family and community condensed to stubborn determination. She would stay at Iacopo’s side, even if that meant huddling in bomb shelters. She would give Angelo the courage to enjoy the excitement of a raid, even if her own heart pounded with fear. She would teach herself to appreciate moments of fleeting peace. The feel of her son’s cheek against her own. The taste of a fresh tomato. The weight of her sleeping husband’s hand on her breast.

Since leaving home, Mirella’s longing for Iacopo and Angelo has been keen and constant, but there are compensations here. Without the demands of congregational life, she’s been free to spend hours with Rosina, gazing at her daughter’s perfect little body, playing with her, singing to her, watching her grow. In this small, safe place, Mirella can keep order and count on a routine. For her, the solitude and silence of the mountain are daily pleasures.

Lidia, by contrast, has been as restless as a dog on a chain, and craves politics more than fresh fruit. Once or twice a month, Renzo hauls supplies up the mountain, including a stack of newspapers: La Stampa, L’Italia Libera, Gazzetta del Popolo, Avanti! As welcome as he is, Mirella dreads his visits. She herself prefers any sort of book to current events and hates the political wrangles Renzo and his mother get into.

She shivers, notices the fire, adds a bit more wood. Pulls the blanket over Rosina’s cradle and opens the shutters to reel in a few diapers, dried crinkly-stiff on the line. Back in Sant’Andrea, Mirella never thought about the peasant laundresses who came into towns and carried off huge baskets of linen. A knock on the door, a shy smile, a few lire pressed gratefully into a rough, chapped palm. A week later, jumbled sheets and shirts and underthings, soiled and smelly, were transformed into neatly folded, beautifully pressed stacks of cleanliness.

Since coming here, her cracked, red hands and aching back have taught Mirella to respect the work behind so many things city people take for granted. “Now you understand!” Don Leto said happily. “You know the people, and you know their labor! When I was young, I kept accounts for our landlord and found out how little his tenants got. The contadini raise rabbits and pigs for his table. They live on polenta. Polenta with beans, polenta with potatoes, polenta with cheese or milk, but always polenta.”

Renzo made her look at things with a shrewder eye. “Peasants aren’t stupid, Mirella. They’ve got rabbits and chickens in pens hidden in the woods. Almost everyone keeps a piglet aside— where do you think they get their sausage? Most of these houses have false walls for wine and olive oil left off the inventory.”

“The padrone steals big, the contadini steal small,” Don Leto said when she asked him about that. “When larceny and lying are a way of life, the sin is the landlord’s. You can see for yourself the effects of poverty. Children grow up stunted in mind and body. When everyone in a family must work so hard, no one can stop to think of a better way.”

Lidia is convinced that the Communists have a better way. From each according to his abilities, to each according to his need. No landlords living off the misery of sharecroppers. Workers sharing equitably in the fruits of their labor. Lidia is thrilled by the courage of factory workers in Milan and Turin. Daring the fascisti to break their strikes, they mean to starve the Nazi war machine. This much Renzo was willing to commend, but when his mother praised the Soviets’ stupendous military production, he snorted. “Do you know how Stalin taught Russian peasants to show up at factory jobs on time? He had the ones who were late shot. So much for the people’s paradise, Mamma.”

What are your politics? Schramm asked last night.

Mirella answered with a joke, but the truth is that she doesn’t trust her own opinions. As a child, she reveled in the pageantry surrounding Benito Mussolini. He was as handsome as a storybook prince, and he rode a beautiful white horse. Her father believed in il Duce’s greatness and in the Fascist drive to make unified Italy a world power. She loved her father, so she believed what he believed, flattered when he talked to her like a grown-up. When someone questioned why Italian sons and taxes should be squandered on an African adventure, her father supported the Abyssinian war. “Italy’s destiny is to rule lesser nations! And let no one question our loyalty! Jews have always been and will always be a part of the national glory.”

For all her father’s political passion, when Mirella turned seventeen, it was not empire that enthralled her but Iacopo Soncini. And it was not war that frightened her but Renzo Leoni. “Mirella, there’s a sky above the sky! Let me show it to you,” he pleaded. There were currents in the ocean of air above the world, he told her. Rivers of wind carving valleys into a countryside of cloud, a geography of blue and gold and white. “One quick flight, Mirella. No barrel rolls, I swear! And I’ll land her like a kiss.”

Why did she refuse?

Above her, the roof slates have warmed. A chunk of snow slides off noisily, hitting the ground with a slushy thud. Rosina wakes up with a wail. Mirella sets her thoughts and coffee cup aside. The day begins in earnest, with all its necessary tasks, Shabbat or not. She has no more time to think while the sun is up.

Hours later, her day ends as usual. She checks on Werner, banks the fire, kisses Rosina’s forehead one last time, and crawls onto her own lumpy mattress, pulling three woolen blankets up to cover her shoulders. Ordinarily she falls asleep with grateful ease, but tonight, she watches firelight on the shallow vaulted ceiling and thinks again of the men she chose between.

Soft-bodied, soft-spoken, the scholar she married now lives like a spy in his native land. Braving checkpoints with false papers, open to denunciation at any moment, Iacopo risks his life to bring comfort and wisdom to frightened foreigners who expect from moment to moment to be found out, sold out, bombed out, burned out of their hiding places. The once-dashing pilot came home from Africa with a hero’s medal, and a thirst for grappa that seems unquenchable. Why had she heard Iacopo’s hesitant proposal of marriage more clearly than Renzo’s call to courage? Was it a failure of nerve or a triumph of common sense? If she had married Renzo, would his life be better, or her own life worse?

God knows, she thinks turning over, but God be blessed: at seventeen, I made the right decision.

BORGO SAN MAURO

“Will you look at that! And her, named for the Virgin!” Adele Toselli whispers, scandalized in gray morning light. “How could her parents let her out of the house in that skirt!”

“She probably rolls the waistband after she leaves.” Lidia moves the curtain slightly. “Watch the soldiers.”

Adele sighs. “Can you remember the last time a man looked at you like that?”

“December 13, 1898.” Lidia lets the curtain fall. “Nobody ever watches old women, and that’s what we can use against them.” When Adele hesitates, Lidia asks, “Do you know what the Germans call us? Alte schwarze Krähen—old black crows.”

Widowed before God gave her children, Adele Toselli has worn mourning and served the priests of San Mauro for over fifty years. There was gossip in the beginning, but the first Father was very old. The second was very holy and cared nothing for women. And Don Leto? “I knew Leto Girotti when he had two legs!” Adele informs anyone who asks, and most of those who don’t.

“You’re sure you know what to do?” she asks Lidia.

“Cara mia, I heard more about engines at my dinner table than I care to remember. That’s all my husband and son talked about!”

Adele drums arthritic fingers on a table she has scrubbed for half a century. “Why not? Why not!”

Lidia turns her back, wraps something in a handkerchief, then slips the little packet into her handbag. Bending at the waist, she smiles hollowly at Adele, who giggles like a schoolgirl and deposits her own dentures on a cupboard shelf. They leave the rectory in lumpy layers of black wool, taking the long way to San Mauro’s central market. Turning down a deserted side street, they age step by step. By the time they reach the crowded piazza, they’re tottering in pitiable anonymity, pinched and wrinkled faces aimed at the cobbles.

Adele tenses, rehearsing what she’ll say if someone recognizes her, but Lidia was right. It’s cold. German soldiers in greatcoats loiter with casual menace in front of what used to be the municipal hall. Wrapped to the eyes in scarves, townspeople want to finish their shopping unmolested and get back inside.

Lidia increases pressure on Adele’s arm, glancing at the latteria. Their unwitting accomplice emerges from the shop with her can of rationed milk. Dimpled knees flashing under the roll-topped skirt, legs pinked by wind and chill, coat unbuttoned despite the cold. The younger Germans grin and nudge one another. The boldest calls out a crude remark, but a blond and haughty corporal stares hard with hooded blue eyes. Favoring him with a sidelong glance, the luscious Maria Avoni slowly raises a hand to brush back heavy mahogany-colored hair, its glory undiminished by anything so sensible as a hat. The movement is intended to press her nipples more firmly against a too tight sweater, and it achieves its purpose. Head high, she feigns indifference to cheers and whistles.

With all that to enjoy, what soldier would waste a glance at two alte schwarze Krähen with their cheeks falling in, clutching each other’s arms with blue-veined and spotted hands? The old crows pass between a pair of BMW motorcycles that lean on kickstands outside the garrison office. One huddles solicitously over her toothless companion, who crouches next to the engines just long enough to… oh, tighten the laces of a high-topped shoe, perhaps? Two quick moves, and the ladies hobble on.

March is as shameless a tease as Maria Avoni, with hints of spring and reminders of winter by turns. Overnight the wind shifts, the air warms. Tuesday’s sun heats up the gravel track that leads to Decimo. Lidia Leoni is tired, her feet chilled and sore, but she does not go inside, not yet. She picks her way across the yard to the edge of a high cliff near the hunchback’s house.

“You’re back!” Mirella calls, standing in the doorway. “I was starting to worry. Is everything all right?”

“Yes, of course! Splendid sunset,” Lidia comments, without turning. Casually, she reaches into her handbag, withdraws a pair of ignition wires, and flicks them into the void with a slight movement of her wrist. She faces Mirella and smiles brightly. “Adele sends her regards.”

TABACCHERIA MARRAPODI

VALDOTTAVO

“Where’s the cash coming from?” It’s cold again today, but Tino Marrapodi’s face is pasty with sweat. “Eight years, I run this store, and I never saw so much cash!”

There’s enough of the new postman’s arm below the elbow to serve as a sort of hook, and Pierino Lovera uses it to keep the leather mail pouch open while he paws through its contents with his left hand. “Nnn-n-niente, sssignore,” Pierino announces regretfully.

“Look again. Maybe a postcard, down at the bottom?” The storekeeper’s older boy was sent to North Africa in 1941. Three months ago, his younger was drafted into a Republican army unit that’s been sent to Germany for training. Neither’s been heard from since. “Nobody paid cash before,” Marrapodi says worriedly. “A man would come in for kerosene, tobacco. Some corduroy. He’d pay with lard, cheese. Maybe a basket of eggs. We eat the eggs. Couple days later, I get a stack of wood for the lard. I wholesale the cheese in San Mauro. One time, I ended up with a wagonful of broom straw! What good is a wagonful of broom straw? my wife wanted to know. More good than a ledgerful of scribbling, that’s what I told her!”

The large black sign behind the counter bears the king’s crest and the Fascist sheaf of wheat. “Bertino Marrapodi is the official licensee of a state store,” the sign proclaims, “authorized to sell the monopoly goods of the Italian government: tobacco, salt, matches, stamps, and quinine.” Sale of any other goods is forbidden. To prosper in the midst of poverty, the storekeeper must make two and two equal five in accounts receivable, but only three in accounts payable. Like Jesus, he turns water into wine, making ten liters of nebbiolo into eleven, fiddling the arithmetic accordingly. Tino’s days are spent negotiating complicated deals, his nights rehearsing his defense if someone rats on him. “I have the only store on this side of the valley, Your Grace. The contadini would have to walk all day to get to San Mauro, so I make a few other items for sale. Pots, pans. Safety pins. Pasta, cloth.”

Tino is confident such infractions of his license will be overlooked, but it’s strictly forbidden to sell liquor to the old men who meet here every day to play cards. The law forbids playing cards on the premises, so Tino makes them sit outside in the cold, and they’re resentful. It’s only a matter of time before somebody puts the bite on him: “Pay me off, or I’ll make trouble for you!”

Pierino finishes his rummage through the mailbag. “Nnn-n-niente,” he says again.

Marrapodi presses his fingers into his belly. “Heartburn,” he says. “Keeps me awake all night! How can I sleep with so many worries?” His boys are missing. His strongbox is filled with German-printed occupation lire. There are shortages in the Roccabarbena warehouse. Without a kickback to the wholesaler, his store’s tobacco supply would dry up completely. There’ve been ugly scenes— people shouting, accusing him of profiteering— but he only raised his prices to cover the bribes. “The cash worries me,” he says again, pressing harder into his stomach. “What if someone denounces me?”

Pierino offers his left hand to Marrapodi. “Www-wa-watch mmmy b-b-bi—?”

“Your bicycle? Sì, certo.”

They step outside together. It’s chilly, but the sun is shining through a break in the clouds. The hamlet centered on Tino’s store is just a few small stone houses next to even fewer big stone barns. Tino lifts his chin toward a footpath that leads upward toward ever tinier and poorer places, where the most isolated sharecroppers scratch at thin soil and raise small, skinny children. “The last postman used to leave mail here for them,” Tino says. “You don’t have to take it all the way.”

Pierino shrugs and mugs: I know, but I can’t help myself. I’m a conscientious man.

Taking Pierino’s good arm, Marrapodi draws close. “Be careful,” he warns the postman quietly. “They’re Communists up there.”

In the beginning, war seemed like a good idea. The army was a big new market for produce and grain. Piemonte sent four divisions of draftees to Russia, and the boys got nice uniforms with leather boots. With so many young men drafted, there were plenty of jobs in the towns and cities.

Soon, though, old taxes got higher, new ones more imaginative. The dog tax was infuriating. First a small tax on watchdogs, then a larger one on truffle dogs, and finally an impossible levy on hunting dogs. What’s next? people asked. A chicken tax? A tax on piss, like Vespasian’s?

The war is bleeding everyone dry. The contadini already split their harvest with landlords and their crooked factors. When the Blackshirts started showing up, you couldn’t slaughter a hog without a gang of enforcers demanding a quarter. Resist, and they’d open your scalp. Now it’s Germans sweeping through the valley, dragging anyone in trousers from the fields, taking anything they want. In a good year, the contadini make a bare living, and now they’re squeezed from all directions. The Germans are offering huge bounties for Jews and partisans, and they’re burning out anyone who hides them. Would you blame the contadini for informing?

“Ei! Pierino!” Attilio Goletta yells from his hayloft when the postman comes into sight. “Did you hear? Ocelli’s truffle dog has learned to sniff out fascisti! You know how you can tell when he finds one?”

Pierino grins up at him, waiting for the punch line.

“He shits!” Attilio laughs hugely and tosses his pitchfork aside. Brown, bald, and barrel-chested, the farmer clumps down the exterior staircase in wooden clogs. “How can you tell if a new bridge is good?” he asks, wiping both hands on his pants and offering his left. “Drive over it with a truckload of Germans. If it falls down, it’s a good bridge!”

A tiny six-year-old runs over from the garden to tug on Pierino’s empty sleeve. “Ei! Pierino!” he pipes. “What’s the difference between a dog and a Nazi?”

Smiling expectantly, Pierino shakes his head: I don’t know.

“The Nazi lifts his arm!”

Pierino smiles, and Attilio roars, but gives the kid a shove toward the garden. “Get those rows ready! I don’t want to see any weeds!”

The ground the Golettas work is so bad they need every child, every daylight hour, six and a half days a week, year in and year out, to feed themselves without going further into debt. Attilio’s oldest boy, Tullio, is with the partisans, which makes everything harder. The Golettas aren’t just supporting themselves and their younger kids, either. There’s Florina’s mother, plus Attilio’s widowed sister and her two daughters, and three ebrei besides.

Pierino holds out an envelope, and Attilio grins. “Holy cards from Don Leto?”

Dollars from Hebrews in America become francs in Switzerland. A priest at the border smuggles them to a bishop in Genoa, who turns them into lire. The milkman brings that money to Don Leto, who distributes it to those who come to Mass. Pierino delivers the rest to isolated families like the Golettas and Canobbios and the Ocelli, who’ve taken in foreign Jews the way his own family has.

With his youngest son out of earshot, Attilio leans toward Pierino and whispers, “You hear about Pinocchio? He goes to Gepetto and says, Every time I make love, my girl complains she gets splinters! Gepetto gives him some sandpaper, ne? Couple of weeks later, he runs into Pinocchio again and says, Ei, Pinocchio, you getting along with the girls now? Pinocchio says, Who needs girls?”

Laughing, Pierino hefts his bag. He knows where Attilio’s getting cash, but God knows where he gets his jokes. “Mmm-marrap-podi’s ssssusp-picious. B-b-battista, too.”

“Marrapodi’s a moron. And my cousin’s a sack of shit, just like his father. Battista’s always saying, ‘I’m a Knight of Labor! I worked for everything I got!’ Merda! Battista bought that farm with money that should have been my father’s, and I hope the bastard gets a cancer. Florina!” Attilio yells, fuming. “The postman’s here!”

Florina hustles out of the house with three loaves of bread and a sweater knit from lumpy yarn. People say she was once the prettiest girl in Valdottavo, but ten pregnancies on, Florina is bowlegged and bent, with more fingers than teeth. She wraps the bread in the sweater and slips the bundle into Pierino’s mailbag. “Bring thith to my thon,” she lisps. “Tell Tullio: I pray for him and the otherth.”

Pierino resumes his climb toward the Cave of San Mauro, but he stops when he sees the red thread tied around a certain branch. Removing it, he veers onto a goat track, climbs alone and unobserved for half an hour. He arrives at the appointed place, lets the mailbag thump to the ground, and sits beside it. Still awkward with his left hand, but getting better, he unbuckles the leather flap and pulls out the chunk of cheese and apple Signora Toselli packed for him this morning.

Across the valley, half-buried in snow, the hamlet of Santa Chiara looks like part of the mountainside, its sloping slate roofs as dull as the sky. He hasn’t been home in nearly a month, but Don Leto’s housekeeper looks after him. The rectory has lots of books, and Don Leto likes to talk about them. “I, too, am the first of my family to be literate,” the priest said. “We who love to study are like pigs with wings, ne?”

Or warriors with one arm, Pierino thought.

He has steeped himself in the classics, reading late into each night, until he dreams of battles fought in stately, sonorous words. Like Scipio Africanus, Pierino has set himself to learn from the enemies of Rome.

He is only twenty-one— his education aborted by war, his arm truncated by war, his tongue tied up like a dog by war. Pierino Lovera’s name will never be in a book, but he understands war, and he knows how to win this one. He’s studied the tactics used against Giulius Caesar by Cassivellaunus; understands the trap laid by the German chieftain Arminius, who destroyed the Legions of Publius Quintilius Varus in the Teutoburger Wald. Supplied from the countryside, aided by relatives and neighbors, highly mobile indigenous irregulars have always been able to tie up conventional troops, disrupting and delaying their movement, confusing and defeating much stronger regular forces. History will show that Adolf Hitler is not Caesar but Pyrrhus, who won battle after battle but lost so much each time that he lost his war in the end.

Now, at last, Pierino has found a man who can make others hear what Pierino can only think. The man who has watched him all this time. “Ready?” Jakub Landau asks, stepping into view.

Pierino hoists his mailbag, and leads the way.

CAVE OF SAN MAURO

Duno Brössler hunches on a lump of rock, a dirty blanket around his shoulders, an oily rag draped over his knees. His fingers are blue and he shivers convulsively, but he’s learned to ignore the cold.

Methodically, he takes a 7.65mm RIAF Beretta ’35 to pieces. Removes the magazine, turns the safety on. Locks the slide, pushes the barrel back, lifts it from the rear. He is not worried about being disarmed on duty. He can field-strip and reassemble the pistol in sixty seconds, and he can do it one-handed. Like Pierino.

Duno takes the afternoon watch, because that’s when Pierino’s likely to arrive. Most of the boys loathe sentry duty. It’s lonely, boring, and cold, but Duno doesn’t mind. Pierino was colder in Russia.

Duno detests the Republic of Salò because Pierino detests it. He despises the repubblicani because Pierino despises them. He loathes the Germans on his own account, and Pierino hates them, too, but that puzzled Duno in the beginning. “Why do you hate the Germans so much, and the Russians so little?” Duno asked. “Russians took your arm!”

Duno remembers Pierino’s answer as if the maimed man had spoken with the fluency of an orator. “The Russians were defending their homeland,” he said. “We, too, will defend our homes against the Germans, and against the Allies if they try to rule us. We’ll fight the landlords and the repubblicani. We will defeat anyone who comes to take land we’ve watered with our sweat.”

Pierino was patient with Duno’s struggle to learn Italian; Duno appreciated the time Pierino required to finish a sentence. After Don Leto introduced them, it took the whole of their climb up here for Pierino to explain where they were going. The Cave of San Mauro, high in the mountainside, has hidden fugitives for centuries. When Napoleon invaded Italy, the valley’s women were hidden from the French here. In this war, it’s the young men who are at risk during rastellamenti.

Una rastella is a hay rake, Pierino explained. The Germans descend on groups of potential laborers and rake them up for work gangs: “Un r-r-rastellammmmento.” By the time Pierino got the word out, Duno had memorized it.

Apart from Duno himself, the San Mauro Brigade consists of local kids born in the unlucky years of 1924 and 1925. Draftees could either serve in the Republican army under German command or risk being raked up. Many of the eighteen-year-olds who reported for duty have deserted, bringing home their guns, and stories of German insult and abuse.

Four notes: whistled. Duno stands and returns the notes, higher. Nessun dorma! Nessun dorma! The signal was Duno’s idea. He has loved the aria since he was small, when his father booked an opera company touring Turandot. Duno knows now what the lyrics mean. Nessun dorma! No one sleeps! Appropriate, he thought, for those who keep watch.

When Pierino rounds the last switchback, Duno hurries to meet him, Beretta in hand. “Pierino, watch me strip this—!” He skids on the gravelly slope.

Pierino’s not alone. Tall, blond, and powerfully built, the man with him looks like a recruiting poster for the SS. Swallowing his surprise, Duno says, “I know you! I was at Sainte-Gisèle. You’re Jakub Landau!”

Everyone in Sainte-Gisèle knew Jakub Landau’s story. He was a Polish Jew, but one who spoke perfect German and looked so Aryan that a gauleiter actually believed Landau’s claim to be a Volksdeutscher named Hans Obermüller, whose papers had been lost in the bombing of Warsaw.

Landau looks hard at Duno. “Yes. I remember. You’re bigger.” He gestures at the Beretta. “Show us.”

Duno kneels and closes his eyes. His whole body shakes with cold, but he does the job with cool competence, and his chest swells when Landau is impressed. “I can do the Breda, too,” Duno brags, “ma due minuti—two minutes for the machine gun.”

Pierino points to Duno’s right hand: if you lost your left, could you manage with your right?

“Not as fast yet,” Duno admits, “but I will be. I’m learning to shoot, too. We need bullets, Pierino. Some of us need more practice.”

Duno doesn’t mention what the other boys say about him: that he couldn’t hit dirt if he fell out of a wagon. He suspects they’re just teasing him— nobody could see the kind of targets they pick out for him. This leaf, that stone…

Pierino unslings the mailbag and pulls out a sweater wrapped around several loaves of bread. He gestures for Duno to put the sweater on. Shuddering with cold, Duno considers it, then refuses. “There are others who have less,” he says stoutly.

“Il postino told me you would be a good comrade,” Landau says, his Italian heavily accented. “Wear it on sentry duty,” he suggests. “Then share.”

“That’s fair,” Duno agrees.

He’s started to put the sweater on when a cautious voice calls from somewhere to his left. “Duno! Who’s that with you? He looks German.”

“That’s my relief,” Duno tells Landau. “Va bene, Nello! Pierino brought him.”

Circling a bald boulder, Nello Toselli reveals himself: short and baby-faced, the sort who’d be a fat kid, given a decent meal even once a day. “I was just making sure,” he says. The rifle he clutches is unloaded, but a stranger wouldn’t know that.

“Good discipline,” the blond man notes, “for boys.”

Nello shoots him a look and is about to say something rude when he notices what Duno is wearing. “Ei! Duno! Nice sweater! Did your girlfriend bring it up here?” It’s only a joke, but Duno flushes. Giggling, Toselli smacks him on the shoulder. “So that’s why you volunteer for sentry duty! You’ve got una bella fica coming up in the afternoons, ne?” He gestures obscenely. “Fare la chiavata?”

“Bastardo lurido!” Duno sneers. “Go to hell with your dirty mind! Pierino brought the sweater, and bread, too.” He waves a loaf in Toselli’s face. “I was going to give you some,” he taunts, snatching it back when Toselli makes a grab for it, “but after that remark—”

“Ei! Duno! I was only giving you a hard time,” Nello whines, making another try for the bread Duno holds just out of reach.

The blond man grabs the loaf and tears off a small piece for Nello. “Sometimes we must impose a tax, ei, comrade?”

“The rest goes into la nonna’s basket,” Duno says, peeling the sweater off. “Whoever’s freezing his coglioni off on sentry duty gets to wear this, understand? Share and share alike!”

The San Mauro Brigade of the First Alpine Division of the Armed Anti-Fascist Resistance, that’s what the boys here call themselves. Their “brigade” is seventy-one short of a hundred-man company and they’re armed with a haphazard collection of shotguns and hunting rifles that belonged to someone’s nonno, but bombast comes naturally when you’ve heard Fascist propaganda all your life. Gangly adolescents slouch against the cave walls or huddle around three campfires, filling the air with talk and body heat. Several wear uniforms, insignia removed. Most wear the clothes they ran away in last fall, when the weather was still warm.

“Comrades!” Jakub Landau calls out, his voice cutting through their murmur. “I ask hospitality of the brigade!”

They leap to their feet at the sight of this blond stranger. A Republican deserter holds a Carcano ’91 at the ready. Landau recognizes Attilio Goletta’s son Tullio from descriptions: he is hairy as a boar, and just as attractive. A tall old woman, slender and severe in black, comes forward to place a hand on Tullio’s gun barrel. “Pierino and I have met with il polacco before, boys. We can vouch for him,” Lidia says, as Landau bows over her hand.

“I am called il polacco because I am from Warsaw in Polonia,” Landau tells the boys.

“Pierino brought this from your mamma, Tullio!” Duno holds the bread high, then adds it to the basket of food la nonna arrived with this morning. Most nights the brigade’s suppers consist of Signora Goletta’s cornbread, and boiled chickpeas washed down with rough red wine. For this occasion, la nonna has supplied a feast: two big tins of tuna and half a wheel of parmigiano-reggiano that her son brought up the mountain last month.

Even here, in a cave, they mind their manners in front of Lidia, making small talk, exchanging pleasantries and news with the stranger until he is ready to explain his presence among them. Wiping his mouth, Landau begins his standard recruiting speech, picking bits of cornbread from his palms, so as not to waste a crumb. He represents a fighting force called the Volunteer Corps of Liberation— led by Italian army officers, manned by demobilized Alpini and regular army, as well as by patriots like themselves. The corps is aided by good men working inside the Republican government, who pass information to the partisans about Fascist military plans. Landau himself is an organizer for a growing coalition of Resistance groups brought together by the Committee for National Liberation. He is trusted precisely because he is a foreigner without local loyalties, untainted by vendettas or jealousies.

His voice is ordinary, factual; his Italian ungrammatical, but adequate. “I have no family,” he says quietly. “The Germans, they kill all my family. My wife, my children, my parents, my brother, my sisters. Why?” He looks up. The boys are listening, wide-eyed. Softly, caressingly, he says, “Because they are ebrei.”

Standing, he speaks now with the tone of a man who expects no reply. “Four years, I was alone. Four years, I was afraid. Four years, I ran. No more.” He points toward the Soviet Union. “Like the sun, an army of patriots rise in the east. In Russia, in Polonia, in Yugoslavia, in Greece— the people rise against fascisti everywhere. I have joined my fate to theirs.”

If the San Mauro joins this corps of liberation, he promises, they’ll become part of a genuine brigade: three companies, each divided into platoon-sized units officered by a lieutenant in command of three squads: thirteen men each with a sergeant and corporal. Company commanders, subcommanders, logistics and intelligence officers will support the fighters.

Tullio Goletta scratches with a furry hand at the lice in his hair. “I had enough of officers when I was in the army.”

“I have heard of Attilio Goletta’s son,” Landau says, looking at Tullio. “People say you and your babbo are two loaves from same dough. Both fearless, both strong. But Babbo’s jokes are better.” The boys all laugh. “In the Corps of Liberation,” Landau resumes, “officers do not order any personal slavery. Italy don’t shine Germany’s boots, and men of the corps don’t shine officer shoes. We tell them, You officers: you clean your own dishes! Wash your own stinky shirts!” When the laughter dies down again, Landau adds soberly, “And you fighters: respect the peasants! They are mother and father, grandparents and sisters of the armed anti-Fascist partisan movement. You do not steal from them! You leave the women pure!”

There are cheers this time, but Tullio points to their flea-market armory. “What we need are weapons, ammunition. Warm clothes, and shoes! What are you offering— besides officers?”

“Lugers. Mausers. Schmeissers. Uniforms. Greatcoats. Boots— good ones. All,” Landau says, “from bodies of enemy.” Tullio snorts, but the Pole knows his audience. These kids are young enough, and bored enough, to believe that they can do anything. Quickly, he outlines a plan.

The effect is galvanic. Arms wave, eyes glow, voices rise in volume, echoing against the glistening stone walls. “I think it could work,” la nonna says judiciously. “I’m willing to do my part, and so is Nello’s zia Adele.”

Nello looks doubtful. “I’m not so sure. Borgo San Mauro could end up like Boves. The Germans burned a priest and an important businessman to death. Twenty-five people were shot. The whole town was leveled.”

“We’ve got to do something,” Duno says. “We can’t just sit up here forever!”

That, Landau suspects, is exactly what Nello would like to do. Attesimo, Italians call the policy. Wait and see. “Comrades,” he says, “this is war, with casualties, with reprisals. Our enemy knows only force. He listens only if we use his language.”

“Pierino, what do you think?” Duno asks.

All eyes turn to the only combat veteran among them: a one-armed reminder of the risks that soldiers run. The postman stands. He makes a humming sound, shrugs, grimaces: apologetic, annoyed, resigned. “M-m-m— Mmmm-mo—” His Adam’s apple spasms, his lips convulse. He jerks his head to break the jam. “Mmmoses!” finally bursts through. Then, as sometimes happens when he is alone, or unself-conscious, the next word slips out with a breath. “Aaaaron,” he says, pointing at Jakub Landau.

At first the boys don’t understand. “He speaks for you?” Duno asks. When Pierino nods, Duno turns to his comrades and says, “That’s enough for me.”

Forgotten in all the talk, the fires have burned down. Duno Brössler reaches for a chunk of chestnut wood. “We fight? The Germans kill.” He holds the wood above one of the hearths. “We don’t fight? The Germans kill.” The firewood drops. Sparks explode into the damp air. “I say: we fight!”

One by one, boys stand. One by one, they toss fuel onto the embers, until the fires blaze. Somewhere in the cave, a sweet-voiced tenor begins to sing, “Nessun dorma.” One by one, the boys of San Mauro join in. “My secret lies locked up within me. No one shall ever know my name…”

Closing his eyes, Landau listens silently. He is moved by the melody and the lyrics. Moved by the gallantry of old women and skinny kids who propose to take on the Republican army, the Wehrmacht, the Waffen-SS. Moved almost to tears by the final stirring declaration of a victory that must come from beyond the grave.

The Germans have Tiger tanks, he thinks, but these boys have Turandot, and courage, and history on their side.

A week later, the equinox is past, and the days noticeably longer. Even so, when Lidia returns to the hunchback’s house this time, it’s an hour after sundown. She is surrounded by violet mountains floating like islands in a sea of clouds illuminated by a gibbous moon, but she is blind to their beauty.

Lidia Leoni knows now why men love war. To plan together, to be audacious. To fear, and risk, and win! To triumph over contemptuous conquerors! What could be more thrilling?

The wind shifts. Mirella has a fire burning, and the fragrance brings Lidia to her senses. Shod in awful peasant clogs, her feet are freezing, and she hobbles inside at last. The baby must be sleeping. Mirella sits alone in the firelight.

“Cara mia, wait until you hear what we just did!” Lidia says, unwinding her muffler. “Four ambushes, no casualties! Hardly any of the Germans were hurt either— Nello didn’t want to give them an excuse for reprisals. We got twenty-four uniforms, all good wool, enough for all the boys. Pistols, rifles, even a machine gun! Ammunition.” Stamping her feet, Lidia makes sure she’s knocked the caked March mud off her clogs. “I swear, I feel like a girl again! What’s wrong?”

Mirella, mute and frightened, looks past her to a figure sitting in shadow by the door.

“Signora Savoca. Home at last!” a suave male voice says. “Or perhaps I should call you Gramma? All good partisans should have nome di battaglia, signora, in addition to those on their false papers. I understand your battle name is la nonna.”

Reluctantly, Lidia Leoni turns to face him.

“I’m afraid it really doesn’t do to walk into a house and blurt out your troop strength, signora. People ordinarily have to be tortured to give up the kind of information you just tossed into my lap.”

Standing as straight as she can, Lidia unbuttons her coat and hangs it on a peg next to the hunchback’s crutch. “Renzo, I—”

“Prego, Mamma! Call me Stefano, one last time.” He reaches into his breast pocket for a set of identity papers and tosses them into the fire casually. Mirella flinches. Lidia stares. The pasteboard curls and blackens. “They’re compromised,” he says. “As far as I can tell, everyone in this valley knows Stefano Savoca’s mother is supplying partisans with the food he brings up the mountain.”

“I–I’m sorry,” Lidia stammers. “I didn’t…”

“You didn’t what, Mamma? You didn’t think? You didn’t look? You didn’t listen? You didn’t investigate fresh wheel ruts leading directly to your barn? You didn’t notice the trampled ground around your own doorway?”

Lidia feels behind her for the chair and sits, a little harder than she intended.

“Renzo, please!” Mirella whispers, stepping between them. “She’s your mother! Don’t do this—”

“Don’t do what?” Renzo asks with chilling mildness. “Don’t speak harshly to her?”

A knot in the wood pops. The fire flares. Mirella backs away.

“If you are going to play this game, Mamma,” he continues softly, “it’s important to learn the rules. The rules are: partisans are shot. People who aid partisans are shot. People whose houses are used by partisans are shot. People who live near those houses, and didn’t turn the partisans in, are shot. The relatives of those who have been executed are immediately under suspicion. They are arrested, and ungently questioned. If they don’t know anything, they make something up, so the beatings will stop. Anyone they mention under torture will be arrested—”

“And shot! Thank you, caro. You have made your point.” Tears well and spill, but Lidia’s eyes remain level. “Tell me,” she asks with flinty curiosity, “what exactly are the rules for those whose sons ask them to shelter Nazi deserters?”

The door slams behind him. Mirella opens it in time to see him stride unevenly across the yard. Hurrying, she follows him into the ramshackle barn that serves as Schramm’s private sanatorium.

“Go back inside,” Renzo orders, voice low.

She tugs a cardigan more tightly around her but stands her ground.

“Mirella, I am not a quartermaster for the San Mauro Brigade!” Gripping the rear of a wooden mule cart, he lowers himself onto his knees and drags a case of tinned army rations from within a false bottom. “The food I steal is for you!”

He lurches to his feet, but something happens. He cries out in pain, loses his grip on the flimsy crate. Cans and curses roll in every direction. The mule snorts and shies, but Mirella is not intimidated by male anger anymore. Boys, she thinks. Renzo, Angelo, Iacopo. They’re all just boys. “They’re hungry, Renzo, so we share what we have. Everyone around here is taking them food—”

“All the more reason why you should eat what I bring you!” White-faced and furious, Renzo hops toward a bale of stale hay and lowers himself onto it with an involuntary whine.

Schramm’s uncertain voice comes from above. “Renzo, do you need a doctor?”

Renzo shouts, “Verdammte Scheisse, nein! Go back to sleep!” Lowering his voice again, he tells Mirella, “Pick up the cans!”

It’s a plea, not an order. She turns her back and makes a cradle of her apron to gather the tins. Wincing, she listens to the agonized grunt he makes as he does whatever he must to his kneecap. When the cans are stacked, she tries again. “Renzo, your mother just wants to make things better,” she whispers, coming close. “If everyone brings one brick, we can build a new world!”

“Or a new prison.” He glances upward. “Has Schramm ever told you why he became a Nazi?”

She brushes hay from her apron and shakes her head.

“Ask him sometime. The answer’s instructive. God save us from idealists!” Renzo cries softly. “They dream of a world without injustice, and what crime won’t they commit to get it?” Rubbing at his knee with both hands, he mutters, “I swear to God, Mirella, I’d settle for a world with good manners.”

She feels the familiar prickle: her foolish breasts let down milk whenever anything arouses pity or protectiveness. She reaches toward him, but Renzo rises suddenly and takes three lopsided steps toward the mule’s stall. Clucking and murmuring, he coaxes the dissenting animal back into its traces. “It’s dark,” Mirella says. “Stay the night.” He yanks a leather strap, snugs up a coupling. “When did you learn to harness a mule?” she asks, to fill the silence.

“When the milk van was stolen at gunpoint. Or should I say, when it was requisitioned to serve the people? Evidently, children who need milk do not qualify as the people.” He rounds the cart and stands in front of her, moonlight on his face. Her hand moves toward the large bruise yellowing on the side of his forehead. He jerks his head away. “If the partisans don’t like being called Communist bandits, I suggest they stop pistol-whipping people they rob.”

There’s liquor on his breath. “Renzo, why do you drink so much?”

“My legs hurt. Cold weather and high altitude make them worse. Grappa,” he says precisely, “is easier to obtain than aspirin.”

Mirella crosses her arms over her dampened blouse and settles onto a hay bale. “It’s warm in Sant’Andrea.”

He stares, then laughs, then slumps beside her: forearms on his thighs, hands loose between his treacherous knees. “Not a single morning passes without my thanking God that you married Iacopo.”

“Liar.”

He smiles a little. “You were the only one I could never fool.” She puts her arms around him, resting her chin against his back. “Rosina’s beautiful,” he says.

“She’s already trying to walk! She talks, too! No words yet— it’s still nonsense, but she knows what questions and answers sound like.”

“You must be relieved.”

“Yes, except… This time the surprises don’t seem so miraculous.”

He draws a little pouch of tobacco from a pocket, rolls a cigarette in a square of newsprint. “December thirtieth, 1935,” he says, as though answering a question. “And they gave me the Silver Medal for it.”

“I’m sorry?”

The match trembles slightly in Renzo’s fingers. “You asked why I drink. I’m telling you.” He shakes the flame out and releases a jet of smoke. “The Dolo raid. That was my squadron.”

“Dolo? But… my father said that was British propaganda. He said the British wanted the League of Nations to put sanctions on Italy so they could take our colonies.” She looks into the middle distance, trying to take it in. “The British weren’t lying?”

“No, and neither were we. That’s the hell of it,” Renzo says, his face in shadow. “The Abyssinians were a pack of brutal, thieving warlords who used the Ethiopians as beasts of burden. Haile Selassie’s signature on the Geneva Convention was an obscenity, Mirella. He had prisoners of war crucified! I knew those two pilots— Minniti and Zannoni were friends of mine. They were castrated alive and crucified. So we hit Dolo.”

“But why? Didn’t you see the Red Cross?”

“Mirella,” he says wearily, “the Red Cross was painted on the roof of every brothel and bar in Addis. At Quoram, our planes were hit by AA from gun emplacements marked by the Red Cross. At Harar, the ammunition dumps were in warehouses with hospital signs.”

Hands over her mouth, she looses a shuddering breath. “But Dolo— that really was a hospital? Forty patients,” she whispers. “That doctor.”

“Forty-two patients.” The tip of the cigarette brightens, and he lifts his head to exhale. “The doctor’s name was Lundstrom.”

“The Swedes said a nurse tried to wave you away. Is that true? You dropped the bombs anyway?” There’s no denial. She searches for something to say. “Renzo, it was war. If you hadn’t dropped those bombs, somebody else would have.”

“Yeah, sure. But maybe— just maybe— they wouldn’t have done such a damn fine job of it.”

For a time, he sits silently, remembering: hilltops and hollows veiled in mist, like a woman in bed: asleep, peaceful, erotic. The targeting trance, the long tense descent. The release, the red and orange chaos blossoming below.

“You tell yourself it doesn’t matter, until nothing else does.” Without looking Mirella in the face, he pinches off the end of the cigarette, works his way onto his feet, flexes experimentally at the knees. “As good as they get, up here.” He reaches up to grasp the boards of the mule cart’s frame. Hesitates, then hauls himself up in one quick motion. When the pain’s grip loosens, he says, “Osvaldo Tomitz has a friend in the Vatican. He got a list of the Yom Kippur deportees.”

The change of subject takes her by surprise. “But— no! Your sister?”

“Ester. Her husband. The kids. Nobody will tell Tomitz where they were sent. He’s not… optimistic. I can’t find either of my other sisters. Susa’s family was with Catholic friends, but the house is gone. There’s been a lot of bombing in Turin.”

“But Debora lives in Florence! Surely they won’t bomb there!”

“Monte Cassino is a ruin. Who knows where Allied command will draw the line?”

“Renzo, did you find my father and sister?”

“Belan— I’m sorry.” He passes a hand over his eyes. “I meant to tell you right away, but then Mamma— Your father sends his love. Etta says he’s driving everyone crazy, and the neighbors hiding them should be canonized when this is over. But, yes— they’re fine.”

“Susanna probably is, too. And Debora. They’re smart, Renzo. They have Catholic family and friends.”

He clears his throat, then digs into his pocket, and hands Mirella a paper packet, heavy for its size. “Like salt,” he remarks when he can speak again, “my female relatives once seemed an inexhaustible commodity. Trade some of this for eggs and produce.”

She doesn’t ask him how he got the salt. She doesn’t want to know the risks he takes. Suddenly, the constant ache of longing for her family is as gut-twisting as hunger. “Renzo, I need to see Angelo! His teacher wrote— he thinks we sent him to the orphanage because we didn’t love him after Rosina was born. Suora Corniglia explained, and I’ve written, but— I have to see him! And I have to see Iacopo, even if it’s just for a day— an hour!”

She expects an argument: It’s too dangerous, too difficult, too impractical. The checkpoints, the bombing, the arrests. She must be patient, sensible, mature. She knows all that, but she’s desperate for Angelo to be solid flesh in her arms. She yearns to hear Iacopo make an aria of her name. Renzo, she is prepared to plead, Renzo, if you ever loved me—

“I’ll work something out.” He leans over to unwind the reins, then shoves the cart brake loose. “Take care of my mother,” he asks in return. “Tell her about Ester when the time is right.”

He looks over his shoulder to judge the turn he’ll need to maneuver out of the barn. “Mule!” he says sharply, slapping the reins. Ears twisting, the animal complains but squares in the harness and pulls.

Above, forgotten in his hayloft, the late Dr. Lundstrom’s unlikely heir listens to the rumble and squeak of iron-clad wheels and squeaking wooden joints. Listens to Mirella’s footsteps as she returns to the hunchback’s house. Listens until there is nothing to hear but the skittering of barn mice, and wind in the pines nearby.

I knew you understood, Schramm thinks in the darkness. The most appalling things can become… just part of the job, and afterward… Christ, there are days when you’re ashamed to be sane. Ah, Renzo, God help us both. Scheisse, we’re a pair.

DIVISIONAL HEADQUARTERS,

12TH WAFFEN-SS WALTHER REINHARDT

PALAZZO USODIMARE, PORTO SANT’ANDREA

Minutes before midnight, Helmut Reinecke lays the last report on Erhardt von Thadden’s desk. “Essentially the same as the first three, Gruppenführer.”

In the past nine hours, four company commanders in widely spaced towns were approached by groups of old women declaring themselves loyal to il Duce, and offering to lead the Germans to partisan hideouts. The Reds were stealing food, the women said. They were interfering with girls. Enough is enough! It’s time for i Tedeschi to impose some order!

The commanders dispatched patrols with these elderly guides into the forested hills flanking Valdottavo’s mountains. Each group was led through a particularly narrow ravine, where they had to string out single file. With gestures and pissing noises, the old crows indicated the need to relieve themselves, then disappeared into the woods. Armed partisans stood up along the ridges. The soldiers were ordered to lay down their arms and strip off their boots and uniforms. Officers resisted in three of four cases. One was killed. Two were injured. The humiliated survivors eventually found their way back to base in their underwear.

Reinecke says, “I wouldn’t have believed it, sir.”

Von Thadden tosses the report aside. “At least Franck’s patrol had the sense to wait until dark to slink back. New orders: every company commander clears his decisions with us.” He rises to study the wall map of Valdottavo, where each partisan action has been marked with a red pin. Harassment, mainly. Petty thievery, mostly from the farmers in the region. Without turning, von Thadden asks his adjutant, “What’s their gambit, Helmut?”

With a single exception, the red dots are just east or west of the San Mauro River. Reinecke leans past von Thadden and taps a finger on the north end of the Valdottavo funnel, where the valley ends in a broad band of low mountains. “That’s their stronghold. They’re trying not to draw attention to it.”

“Where would you move to respond?”

Reinecke’s finger falls on the railhead. “Borgo San Mauro.”

“No. Choose six villages, three on each side of the river. Hang five men in each. Burn the buildings, confiscate crops and animals.” The Schoolmaster turns on his heel and smiles brightly, though his eyes are red-rimmed with fatigue. “Explain my strategy.”

Reinecke thinks for a moment. “Let the peasants see what happens when they tolerate Communist bandits in their midst. They’ll do our job for us.”

“The partisans may be driven into Valle Stura or Valle San Leandro, and thus…?”

“They’ll become someone else’s problem.”

“Or they’ll concentrate near Borgo San Mauro in the northern end of the valley, where they’ll believe themselves safe. Much easier to deal with when we’re ready.”

Reinecke collects the stack of reports for filing, but he pauses before leaving. “Sir? Anneliese asked me to thank you for the flowers and all the baby gifts. Very thoughtful of you and Frau von Thadden.”

“Go home, Reinecke! And give that baby a kiss from her papa’s boss.”

April 1944

CASA DI GOLETTA

VALDOTTAVO

The work begins with stripping out: an old wall taken down, its stones reserved for later use. Santino Cicala holds each stone in his hand, memorizing its weight and form. Thoughtful, deliberate, he twists left for large ones, right for smaller ones, laying them in a crescent that forms behind him.

Most wallers strip out like bulls pawing the ground, but when Santino apprenticed, his master taught him patience. “Building a wall is like making love to a woman,” he said. “Take your time. Find her rhythm. Hurry, and you’ll botch the job. Dawdle, and you’ll lose it.”

The toolshed was rebuilt before Christmas. Bad weather delayed work on the barn for two months, but the repairs were finished last week. All that’s left is this sheep pen, and Santino will have it done by Easter. Two faces of stone, hearting between, a one-to-twelve taper. Halfway up, a layer of throughs— large stones that bridge the faces and tie the wall together.

Battista Goletta pauses in his own labors to watch Santino study the wall, then bend to select a stone. Hefting it, the Calabrian twists the rock, considering it from all sides, and turns it over again. Bracing the stone against a leather-aproned thigh, he brings the hammer down sharply.

Wiping her gnarled red hands on a faded flowered apron, Rosa crosses the yard to her husband. On Santino’s third rap, the stone fractures along some hidden fault. Remade, it clicks into place between its neighbors on the wall, neat as you please.

“Magic,” Rosa says.

“Hard work,” Battista counters.

When the snow melted and the path to Goletta’s place was clear, Don Leto hiked up the mountainside to see Santino’s work. “You are an artist!” he cried as Santino swept up stone chips and packed them firmly into the hearting of the wall. “Is that to neaten the job site,” the priest asked, “or do you do it for a reason?”

“Both,” Santino said. “Strength comes from the inside— from the inside, not from what you see.”

“And the same is true of people, as I told your ebrea. It’s what’s inside that counts. Of course, it doesn’t hurt for the outside to be beautiful, ne?”

“You found her?” Santino had almost given up hope. The winter, the Germans…

Don Leto pointed across the valley at a hamlet just below the treeline, visible only because the chestnut branches were still bare. “She’s in Santa Chiara. The contadini call her Claudia Fiori. Come to the rectory after Mass on Palm Sunday. I’ll arrange a meeting, but we must be careful.”

“Because of the rastrellamenti?”

“No, the roundups aren’t so bad as they were last autumn, but we have Waffen-SS in the municipal building. Don’t worry. We can manage them.”

Today, sweating in spring sunshine, Santino lays his hammer down and mops his face with a rag. At this pace, he’ll lift four tons of rock by sunset, for two and a half meters of chest-high mortarless wall, topped with a ridge-cap of triangular copestones.

All around him, mountains cleave the air like mauls. Hazelnuts are dropping. Bees hum. Across the valley in Santa Chiara, chestnut trees are in bud.

Battista says you can still get snowstorms this late in the season, but mare’s tail clouds promise good weather for a day or more to come. Santino brushes stone dust from his hands, sucks sweat and blood and powdery lime from a fresh gash in his palm. Three more days, he thinks. And then I’ll see her again.

RECTORY

CHURCH OF SAN MAURO

Adele Toselli has hoarded ingredients for a month. Two turnips, an onion, a potato, a quarter of cabbage. “Three carrots as wrinkled as I am,” she mutters, but it doesn’t matter. Simmer the vegetables with a handful of chickpeas: minestrone. Don Leto has contributed four fresh eggs from three parishioners, and given his own weekly ration of bread. There’s a tin of anchovies in the pantry. Two days ago, the Sant’Andrese priest Osvaldo Tomitz brought early peas from the coast along with money for the Jews. And there’s still a chunk of Parmesan from Stefano Savoca’s last bad-tempered visit.

With the zuppa simmering, she shells the peas, tears most of the bread into small chunks, beats the eggs, mixes it all in a clay pot. With Parmesan grated over the top, and the oven hot, she shoves the casserole in to bake. Sliced onions, spring dandelion leaves, add a little vinegar to the oil from the anchovies. Ecco! Insalata con acciughe.

She stands back from the worktable to consider the young couple outside, gauging appetites. A big strong boy, a slender girl. There’s enough, Adele decides, and enough is as good as a feast.

Don Leto stumps into the kitchen. “The table is beautiful, Signora Toselli!” He lifts the pot’s lid and breathes in the soup’s aroma. “Do you want some help in here? Hand me a knife— I’ll chop that onion.”

“Get off your foot,” Adele orders, reducing the onion to paper-thin disks. “Men don’t cook.”

“In France, the cooks are all men. Chefs, they’re called.”

“France. Put perfume on Germans. That’s your French.”

Don Leto pulls the window’s curtain aside. Santino’s carbine leans against the cemetery wall. Nearby, the two young people walk decorously. Santino’s hands are clasped chastely behind his back. Claudia’s are filled with flowers. “She looks like an angel, Signora Toselli. And Santino? Well, Santino is—”

“A good boy,” Adele says firmly. “Aren’t you glad I talked Tercilla Lovera into this?” she asks, making sure to get credit. “Baths, clean clothes, a civilized table! A nice young couple should have something special when they’re courting.”

She wipes her hands on her apron and joins Don Leto. For the boy, Adele borrowed a nephew’s suit. The coat won’t close across Santino’s chest and the trousers puddle over his shoes, but the corduroy’s so finely waled it feels like velvet, even though it wears like iron. The Cavaglion company has sold kilometers of that cloth to peasants in the districts around Cuneo. The family is Jewish, underground now, but after the war, they’ve promised there’ll be wedding dresses for the girls of any family that hides a refugee.

Someday Lidia and I will make a wedding dress for Claudia, Adele thinks. But for today, there’s a frock the color of sunflowers, from a bag of donated clothing. When Claudia stoops at the edge of the grave, the skirt fans over freshly turned earth, gold over gray.

“Thin as a broom straw, poor child, but still lovely,” Don Leto says. “If only her papa could see her.”

The inscription carved on the wooden cross reads simply ALBERTO FIORI 1894–1944. “But look,” Claudia says, pressing the dirt away. Low on the base, where the gravelly soil covered it, Santino sees a tiny six-pointed star. “Don Leto put it there, after the funeral.” She pushes the dirt back, to conceal the telltale sign.

Typhus, the padre told Santino. A bite from a flea or louse. City people were more vulnerable. Signor Blum had a weak heart, and the fever carried him off within two days. Santino rubs a palm against his trousers and offers it, to help Claudia stand. The shock of contact makes his breath catch, but she quickly pulls away.

“I’m sorry,” she says, embarrassed. She brushes the dirt from her callused hands and the hem of her dress. “The farmwork…”

Emboldened, he reaches for her hand and turns up the palm. “You should be proud,” he tells her earnestly, holding it next to his own. “Hands like these mean you’re honest, you work hard. No gangster or landlord has hands like mine. No prost— Good women have hands like yours.”

She touches his borrowed tie and jacket lightly, smiling at his scrubbed face and carefully combed hair. He has not changed, but she has. Claudette Blum was a silly, sulky girl who could still believe that hard times were a temporary annoyance. In her place stands a solemn young woman named Claudia Fiori, her prettiness chiseled by loss and illness to marble beauty.

“Would you like to sit down?” he asks.

There’s a stone bench surrounded by small-leafed lilacs and roses pregnant with buds, and embraced by a stone Virgin’s outstretched arms. Santino whisks dust and pollen from the cool, pitted surface and takes off the too tight jacket, laying it on the seat so Claudia won’t get her dress dirty.

He sits beside her. “Don Leto says you like the people you’re staying with.”

She looks toward the mountain across the river. “After Papa died, Zia Tercilla wanted to adopt me. Don Leto knows a lawyer who would do the papers for free. But I still have a mother. I’m not really an orphan.”

“Don Leto found me a job in Sant’Andrea.”

“Is that far from here?”

“It’s on the coast, near Genoa. There’s a train. So I could—” he swallows. “I could visit. You. Sometimes.”

“I’d like that,” she says, but she is looking at her father’s resting place. “When you visit a grave, you’re supposed to put a little stone on it. In a Jewish cemetery, if there are lots of little stones on a grave, it means this was a good person whose memory brings many visitors. I can’t do that while the Germans are around.” Tears well, but do not fall. “So I bring flowers, instead.”

Ready to cry himself, Santino wishes he could make it better somehow. But dead is dead. What can anyone do?

Just like that, the solution comes to him. He selects two pebbles from the garden walk and returns to the grave, squatting beside it. With a short, thick finger, he gouges a hole in the crumbly dirt and holds out one of the pebbles. “Yours first.”

Green eyes swimming, Claudia looks at him as though he is a miracle, a genius. She wipes her eyes, comes to his side, drops her pebble into the hole. He sends his own after it and covers them both, patting the dirt flat.

“That’s good,” he says, holding her as she weeps at last. “He was a good man. He deserves tears, and stones on his grave.”

Reaching into an unfamiliar pocket, he pulls out the clean handkerchief that Signora Toselli provided in anticipation of this very moment. Claudia wipes her eyes with it and blows her nose. “After the war,” he tells her, “there’ll be work for masons in cities, because of all the bombing. Everyone says a man with my skills could make a good living here. I might stay. Up here. In the north. If you would— We— I mean, I’d still like to visit my family back in Calabria, but—” He scowls at the grave, sorry for his presumption. “I meant to ask your father.”

She’s fifteen. She should be studying geometry and grammar and French literature. Memories of Belgium, paved streets, electric lights, and school have faded as dream fragments do, forgotten when the day begins. From her first week in Santa Chiara, she has worked side by side with the other women, harvesting grapes in September, chestnuts in October, olives in November. She knows how to choose unflawed ears of corn and tie them into bunches to hang in the soffitta. Her hands feel empty without a spindle to work while she sits. She has begun to think in dialect.

On the hillsides across the river, mountain orchards are dressed like brides, pink and white with blossom. Water slaps at the mill wheel’s plank blades, softening the eerie moan and creak of wooden gears. In a garden just beyond the cemetery wall, an old man sings as he works.

“Papa taught me a song when I was small,” she says. “Wo man singt, da setze ruhig nieder: Where one sings, take your place without fear.” Claudia lays her callused hand on Santino’s cheek, turning his face toward her. “We’ll live here,” she says simply, “but after the war, we’ll visit your family.”

“Really?” he says, amazed. “Really?” he asks again.

She nods, and his glorious gap-toothed grin appears, utterly transforming the homely face. To make a man so happy! she thinks. To make this man so beautiful… “Yes,” she says. “Really.”

Hand in hand, they sit like an old married couple with everything in their lives already decided, and all life’s sorrows but one behind them. Her hand tightens around his fingers. “Promise me something?”

“Anything,” he says, stunned and stupid with love.

“After the war, we’ll find my mother. We’ll bring her and my brothers here, and you’ll build a house for them.”

He squeezes her hand, then lets it go and approaches her father’s grave as though it is a judge’s table. Kneeling, he puts a hand over the secret place where the pebbles are buried. “I will find your wife and sons, signore,” he swears. “I’ll build them a house with stone floors, and thick walls, and a slate roof. The rafters will be chestnut, and the windows will have real glass. Four rooms. Two up, two down. I’ll teach your sons my trade, and when they marry, we’ll build houses for their wives to be proud of.” He looks across the river, seeing these structures in his mind: measuring out the foundations, estimating the loads. “Your sons and I will build houses so strong no bomb or war can touch the ones inside. Every stone we lay will be in your memory, signore. But the house I build for your daughter will be stronger and larger and more beautiful than any of them.”

Santino Cicala stands and faces the woman who will be his wife. When he speaks, his voice is firm with an authority he has never felt before. “We will name our first son Alberto.”

She smiles, and holds out both her hands.

“Young love!” the German says with supercilious scorn, eyes on the tearful couple in the garden. “Lieber Gott! Isn’t life awful enough?”

Head cocked back on her scrawny neck, Adele Toselli is ready to shut the door in his face. “What do you want?” she asks ungraciously.

He whirls and grasps her spotted hand, kissing its prominent blue veins fervently. “Vat do I vant?” he cries, his accent comical. “I vant your undying devotion, Italian goddess!”

Horrified, Adele snatches her hand away.

“Run avay vit me to ze Black Forest! Ve’ll eat cherries, und ski!” he wheedles. The accent disappears. “Not at the same time, of course.”

“You!” she cries, pointing. “You’re—”

“Ugo Messner, at your service, Frau Toselli.” He clicks his heels and inclines his head sharply. “I am here to pay a call on your employer.”

Grabbing his arm, Adele pulls him inside, amazed by the transformation. Freshly barbered, closely shaved, the former Stefano Savoca is almost unrecognizable. The milkman’s ill-fitting coveralls have been replaced by a well-cut tweed suit. A frayed shirt collar has been expertly turned, and no longer betrays its age where it folds over his beautifully knotted tie. Adele is getting used to men whose names change from month to month, and she has always known that Lidia’s son was only pretending to be a Sicilian, but he even seems… taller, somehow.

“You’re sober!” she says.

“And bearing up bravely,” he says breezily as she leads him down the hall toward Don Leto’s office.

The new heels on his gleaming shoes ring smartly, if arrhythmically, on the stone-tiled floor. “What’s wrong with your legs?” Adele asks over her shoulder. Lidia would never tell her.

“When small airplanes make unscheduled landings, knees and ankles rarely meet aviation standards for shock absorption. My legs, however, have many other fine qualities,” the astounding Herr Messner declares as Adele knocks on the padre’s door. “They are reasonably functional during the summer, and at sea level. They are also complete from hip to toe, which is more than some can say. Ah! Don Leto! The famous Red Priest, about whom one hears so much! We are, of course, alone— I’ve been watching the rectory since dawn. I must inform you that our Sicilian friend Stefano Savoca has died again— this time permanently. I am the late Ugo Messner of Bolzano, freshly resurrected, and ready to assist in the building of a new world! Perhaps you will permit me a few words before I convey your package to Sant’Andrea?”

The office door closes, muffling the cannonade of words. Adele lingers in the hallway. Her ears aren’t what they used to be, but the voices quickly rise. “And I told you before,” she hears Lidia’s son shout. “Keep the women out of it!”

Lips compressed, Adele frowns at his tone, but before she can work up a good bout of indignation, the door opens so suddenly she almost falls into the visitor’s arms.

“If it isn’t Giulietta’s nurse!” he says caustically. “Go tell Romeo it’s time to say good-bye, signora. His train leaves in half an hour.”

Renzo Leoni watches, face hard, until the old lady harrumphs and leaves. “That is exactly what I’m talking about,” he says, slamming the door. “You are all amateurs!”

Leto Girotti neatens his desktop, papers here, pens there. Folds his hands. Looks up. “Amateur,” he says. “From the Latin amator—lover. Thus: one who engages in an enterprise for love, not money. In the case at hand, for love of Italy. For love of liberty. For love of those who flee tyranny, and who resist it.”

“Explain what love had to do with this.”

Leoni snaps open a leather document case and drops the March 24 issue of La Stampa on Leto’s desk. The front page is dense with tiny print. Centered at the top in a fine ascetic font is the headline: THIRTY-TWO GERMAN SOLDIERS, VICTIMS OF BOMB ATTACK IN ROME. In smaller letters beneath, it says, “The Reaction: 1 °Communist-Badogliani Shot for Each German Injured.”

Leto whispers, “Three hundred and twenty…”

“Three hundred and thirty-five. The Germans evidently miscounted. Civilians, machine-gunned in groups of five. It took hours.”

Ashen, Leto Girotti pushes away from his desk and stumps to the open window. Out in the garden, Signora Toselli is telling Claudia it’s time for Santino to leave. “The Resistance didn’t kill those poor wretches,” Leto says. “The Nazis did.”

“A comfort to the corpses, no doubt. My sources say Hitler wants reprisals set at fifty to one from now on. Are you keeping track of the numbers in Valdottavo? The SS is.”

Claudia looks as slender as a willow wand, Santino as solid as one of his own stone walls. Leto Girotti closes his eyes, but it does no good. He can see in his mind the Calabrian’s muscles burst by bullets, Claudia torn to pieces behind the false shelter of that sturdy body. “The Republic of Salò is a puppet government,” he says without facing Renzo. “If we can’t strike at the Nazis, we’ll cut the strings of their marionettes.”

Behind him, there is a bark of stunned laughter. “That’s your solution? Civil war? Italians shooting Italians, for the love of Italy! What kind of priest are you?”

Leto turns. “The kind who’s visited Fascist prisons. The kind who has given the last rites to prisoners with no eyes, no ears, no fingernails! What kind of man are you?”

“We’ve been over this, and over it! I’m doing what I can!”

“It’s not enough! Old women are risking their lives to get weapons for the Resistance!” Leto points out the window toward the Cave of San Mauro. “There are boys up there— kids who should be in school. The only veteran among them stutters so badly, a battle would be over before he could get an order out! They are hungry for a leader. Renzo, the Communists have already made contact.”

“I should think the Red Priest would be delighted.”

“Don’t be a fool,” Leto snaps. “There are sins of omission, my son. If you refuse to oppose those who do harm, you are complicit! You were a military officer, a professional. And I believe you are a patriot. Fewer will die if those boys are well armed and well led.”

A long minute passes. Leoni stands motionless, his expression somewhere between pity and loathing. “Your day is coming,” he warns softly. “God help you when you learn what I know.” He stares until Leto’s eyes drop, and when he speaks again, his voice is tight. “I can get them weapons— but that’s as far as I’ll go. And I have two conditions. One: the brigade goes to ground until I get back from Sant’Andrea next month. No action at all, understand? If I’m setting something up, I don’t need a crackdown before it happens.”

“And the second condition?”

“The women stay out of this.”

“Not even the love of God can keep the ones we love safe. Nevertheless,” Don Leto agrees, “I will do what I can to keep your mother and the rabbi’s wife out of harm’s way.”

More tears, more embraces. With nothing else to seal their promises, Santino hands Claudette his carbine. “Keep this for me,” he says. “I can’t carry it in the city.”

The man who calls himself Ugo Messner grips Santino’s small suitcase in one hand and Santino’s large arm in the other. “I’m sorry, Giulietta. Time, tides, and Mussolini’s trains wait for no man, not even your Romeo.”

Pulled downhill toward the station, Santino looks over his shoulder for a last glimpse of Claudia, and stumbles. “Watch where you’re going, Cicala!” Messner’s German accent has disappeared, a no-nonsense Ligurian one taking its place. “We don’t have much time, so listen carefully. The Germans are worried about an amphibious assault near Genoa. God knows why, considering what a mess the Allies have made of their campaign so far.” Messner waits until they clear a corner and he can speak again without fear of being overheard. “The Wehrmacht is building a seawall with bunkers for heavy machine guns and seventy-five-millimeter cannon, from Savona to Varazze. You’ll be working for a German engineering firm, Lorentz and Company—”

Santino stops a few steps uphill. “I won’t collaborate!”

Messner turns. “Don Leto told you about this job, vero? Would he ask you to collaborate?” Messner waits for Santino to consider this. “A man who knows how to make a good wall also knows how to build a bad one, true?”

Santino squints. “Are they using concrete?”

“Of course.”

Santino catches up. “Enough sand in the mix? It’ll crumble by November.”

“Precisely. Turn here.” The station in sight, Messner speaks quickly. “I’m taking you to meet a man named Fichtner. He thinks I’m a Volksdeutscher—an ethnic German from Bolzano who’s perfectly delighted that the Vaterland has retaken Südtirol. Fichtner’s desperate for skilled workers.” He glances at Santino and adds sourly, “I’ll see if I can get you a better salary. You’ll need the money if you’re going to get married.”

“You’re not so nasty as you pretend,” Santino tells him. “Don Leto said you were a war hero—”

“Don Leto is completely full of shit.”

The locomotive looses a piercing blast. Porters wheel pushcarts stacked with luggage past crates of produce, cages of chickens, sacks of dried corn. Passengers mill nervously, waiting to display their documents to men in long leather coats.

Messner leans against a low granite wall engraved with the names of men from San Mauro who died in the last war. Rubbing his knee with one hand, he reaches into his suit coat with the other. “Here’s your ticket. That’s the queue for third class. Get off at Sant’Andrea.”

“Aren’t you coming with me?”

Messner’s voice drops. “Ugo Messner, I’ll have you know, is a member of the fucking master race. The fucking master race travels first-class!” He stands and assesses the crowd casually. “Sometimes it’s safest to hide in plain sight,” he says even more quietly. “If anything happens to me, get off in Sant’Andrea and go to Fichtner anyway, but in that case, don’t mention my name. Tell him you heard he was looking for masons.”

Messner starts to leave, but Santino grabs his arm. “Signore, I–I never traveled alone. There was always an officer.”

The hard eyes soften. “Your papers are authentic. You’re doing nothing wrong. Show the man your ticket. Find a seat. And buon viaggio—enjoy the trip.”

EN ROUTE TO PORTO SANT’ANDREA

The train stops repeatedly, taking on passengers until they fill every seat, every corridor, even the linkage platforms between cars. Small children nap on overhead luggage racks, pillowed on bundles. Everyone stinks: unwashed bodies, unwashed clothing. “Soap is cheap,” Santino’s nonna used to say. “There’s no excuse for dirt.” But nothing’s cheap in wartime.

There’s a long stop in Roccabarbena. A lot of people get off, but Santino isn’t sure he’s allowed, so he sits by the window watching the people at the station. A young woman gets on just before the train pulls out again, and sits next to him with a quick smile. The train rolls out, crosses an iron trestle, rounds a wide bend that skirts the last of the mountains.

Abruptly, Piemonte’s high country flattens into a vast plain. Contadini stagger behind oxen. Black ribbons of fertile soil curl away from gleaming plow blades. Santino wishes he’d paid more attention when they’d studied Piemonte’s characteristics in school, but he’d never thought he’d see it himself.

“Tanta bella! The land is so beautiful!” he remarks to the young woman at his side. “In Calabria, it’s all rocks. What do they grow in those fields?”

“Mostly corn, but—” The train slows, and she sighs with exasperation. “This trip used to take four hours! We’ll be lucky to do it in twenty…”

She’s friendly, and her skirt is so short it rides up above her knees. She’s wearing short socks, too; the skin of her legs is bare. They chat awhile, and Santino tries to make up his mind about her. At home he’d be certain she was a prostitute, but the north is different, and he decides to give this young woman the benefit of the doubt.

Moving toward an arc of mountains, the train picks up speed, then slows to a crawl, then stops inside a tunnel. The girl waves a hand at the dense darkness around them. “What’s worse? Getting bombed outside or buried alive in here?”

“Arches are very strong,” he says. “The tunnel won’t collapse, and the bombs can’t reach us in here. So tunnels are safer. Stuffy, but safer.”

She rears back, to get a better look at him in the gloom. “It was a rhetorical question, but I like your answer.”

Prostitutes wouldn’t know a word like that “torical” one. “Are you a student?” he asks.

“I was, until they closed the universities.”

“La mia fidanzata?” He stops to savor the moment: he’s never called Claudia his fiancée before. “She was a good student. Reads any book she can get. Me, I only had the mandatory. Soon as I finished my four years, I was glad to get outside and do something useful.”

“Then your children will be smart like their mamma and practical like you, ne? A good combination.”

The train quivers and begins to roll. Santino closes his eyes. Smart, and practical, he thinks. And maybe good-looking, like their mamma.

Content to let the prophecy linger in his mind, he dozes off, head against the glass. When he awakens, it’s night. The train is stopped, but this time out in the middle of nowhere. He stretches as compactly as he can and rubs at crusty eyelids. Several seats away, a badly dressed boy of about twelve clutches a knapsack, his frightened eyes on the girl at Santino’s side.

The young woman taps her fingers on the armrest, and grips it when two German soldiers board. “Madonna,” she says quietly. No one else speaks.

Beams of light sweep through the car from the soldiers’ flashlight. “Dokumente!” one of them shouts. Many of the passengers moan and reach for their papers, but the girl next to Santino hardly breathes as the Germans work their way down the aisle. Suddenly, she stands and addresses the other passengers. “Dio santo! Why don’t we just paint a target on the roof?”

Startled, the soldiers pause in their task.

“Can’t you people hurry?” she demands, motioning with her hand like a wheel turning faster and faster.

“Yes!” someone else yells. “We’re sitting ducks for Allied bombers!”

In the next instant, half the passengers crowd into the aisle, thrusting papers at the Germans, complaining loudly about the delay. The soldiers shout back, and bash somebody with a club. A woman screams. Men shout. Santino untwists in his seat in time to see the pale boy drop from view. Moments later, there’s a tap on Santino’s boot. He crosses his legs, and does not look down when the fugitive wriggles past him on the floor, moving toward the section of the car the soldiers have already checked.

Eventually the Germans leave. The passengers settle down. The train pulls forward again. “Brava!” Santino whispers when the young woman sits beside him. “Who is that boy?”

“I have no idea.” She takes a shuddery breath to settle her nerves. “Since last September, half of Italy is hiding the other half. If someone looks scared, you do what you can.”

It’s past dawn when the train slows yet again. Outside, forests, hills, villages, and fields have been replaced by bombed factories and wrecked apartment buildings, some still smoldering.

The young woman slides forward on her seat. “This is my stop,” she says, yanking her skirt down. “Sant’Andrea is next.” Santino helps her pick up her bundles. “You shouldn’t talk to strangers,” she warns. She meets his eyes, and adds, “Neither should I.”

PENSIONE USODIMARE

PORTO SANT’ANDREA

“She was probably a staffetta,” Messner says quietly when Santino tells him what happened. “A messenger for the Resistance. Turn here. That’s the house. Naturally, I stay elsewhere. Members of the master race do not share accommodations with treacherous Italian scum,” he whispers as they enter the lobby. “Ah! Signora Usodimare, I have another boarder for you.”

Suspicious, the old woman looks Santino up and down. “Sicilian?”

Santino hands her his papers. “Calabrian, Signora.”

“No better!” she snaps.

“He’s a nice boy,” Messner assures her, “with a job, and a housing voucher from Fichtner at Lorentz.”

Trying to look harmless, Santino waits politely while Messner takes the lady aside for a murmured conversation. Something Messner says makes Signora Usodimare laugh girlishly as she trades a key for a pack of cigarettes.

Messner jerks his head, and Santino follows him down a hall that changes elevations three times for no apparent reason, and then up three flights of stairs. At the end of a corridor Messner unlocks a tiny room, taller than it is wide and stiflingly hot. He pushes the window shutters open to let in some air and sends his hat twirling onto a peg by the door. “Give me ten minutes. I need to thaw out,” he says, sitting in the room’s only chair and massaging his knees after the climb. “Belandi, how I hate the mountains!”

Santino sits on the edge of the bed. “You were going to tell me about staffette.”

Messner pulls a silver cigarette case from the inside pocket of his suit coat and offers it. “You don’t smoke?” he asks when Santino refuses. “Good! Filthy habit.” Messner shakes the flame from a match and coughs on the first puff. “Staffette… Where to begin?” he asks. Rhetorically. “Apart from ordinary gangsters, there are about a hundred bands of anti-Fascist partisans in northwestern Italy. Gruppi di Azione Patriottica in the cities, Squadri di Azione Patriottica in the countryside. Liberals, Christian Democrats, Socialists, Communists. Garibaldi Brigades, Catholic Action Brigades. Bread and Justice Brigades. Liberty and Justice Brigades. Most of them couldn’t organize a bun fight in a bakery.” Messner shifts in the chair and gazes absently out the window. “They all use girls like the one you met on the train as messengers because women travel more freely.”

Thinking of Claudia, Santino says, “Dangerous.”

“You have no idea. When staffete are caught…” Messner lifts his chin, sending a plume of smoke upward. “The Great War killed courage with machine guns, Cicala. This one’s murdering chivalry.”

Santino joins Messner at the window. The boardinghouse sits on high ground, and Sant’Andrea is laid out like a map. At least a third of the buildings are damaged, the streets holed with craters bridged by planks for foot traffic, or boarded over with salvaged doors. Piles of rubble block the ground-floor windows of the buildings still standing. Broken glass glitters in the sunlight. A barber cuts hair in the midst of the wreckage. A skinny housewife has strung a clothesline between two chimneys; clothes flutter above what was her kitchen floor a few days ago. Smoke and dust drift in the soft spring air. The white shirts will be dingy before they are dry.

“Are you from Sant’Andrea?” Santino asks.

“Ugo Messner is from Bolzano.”

“Even for a stranger, it’s a pity to see it like this,” Santino says, playing along.

“The city was never picturesque,” Messner admits quietly. “It’s been an industrial port for five hundred years. Tanneries and weaving in the beginning. Shipbuilding before the forests ran out. Chemicals, iron, steel mills later on— Porca miseria! Look at that!”

“What was it?”

“The Ospedale Incurabili.”

The smoking ruins of the hospital are nearly lost in the haze over the Mediterranean. “Maybe the pilots thought it was a factory.”

Silent, Messner takes a drag, filling his lungs with as much smoke as they can hold before flicking the butt out the window. Taking his hat off the peg, he stands still, as though weighing some decision. “There’s a company of bersaglieri guarding the construction site for the seawall,” he says. “The bersaglieri are—”

“Repubblicani.” Santino nods knowingly. “Old fascisti, with a new name. And corrupt, like mafiosi.”

“Is that what Don Leto says?” Messner asks, his voice light with sudden anger. “Allow me to explain something about city life, my son. We’ve got two armies confiscating trainloads of food from us. Civilian rations are down to one hundred grams of bread a day, two hundred grams of cheese a month! People are starving, and unlike the Red Priest, bersaglieri have families to feed. I know one of them is selling supplies from the seawall project. Cigarettes, food, medicines. And he’s got access to explosives, small arms, and ammunition. So he may be corrupt, but Don Leto’s friends can use what I can buy from him. Do I make myself clear?”

Santino’s eyes remain level.

“You don’t have to approach the man, Cicala. Just find out who he is.”

The wind shifts south, bringing with it the musical tinkling of bricks being tossed into piles.

“You don’t trust me,” Messner replies to Santino’s silence. “I consort with Germans. I could be an informer. Maybe I’m using you to find the black marketeer, so I can denounce him for money. Fair enough. Would you like a hostage?” Messner spreads his hands and presents himself. “Like the inestimable Claudia, I am a Jew. I can drop my pants to prove it, but if you insist.”

Santino crosses his arms. “What’s in the little boxes? The black ones that look like little houses?”

A slow smile of appreciation spreads across Messner’s face. Closing his eyes, he speaks as though reading from a book in his mind. “You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, with all your soul, and with all your might. Teach these words to your children. Speak them when you sit in your home, when you walk, when you lie down and rise up…” One eye opens. “Belandi. What comes next? Bind them for a sign upon your hand… and for frontlets between your eyes, whatever the hell frontlets are.” The other eye opens. “Et cetera. Close enough?”

“I’ll watch for the man who’s selling things.”

“Bravo.” Messner takes a last look out the window. “The Allies are bombing us, the Axis is starving us, and the Communists will grab whatever’s left at the end. Mondo boia! Executioners rule!” he swears softly, shaking his head at the destruction. “I need a bottle, and a whore whose politics can be trusted. Care to join me?”

Santino shifts uneasily. “There are bad diseases. I don’t want to bring anything home. When I’m married.”

Caught between amusement and envy, Messner smiles. “I’ll check back at the end of the week. If you need help before then, go to the basilica. Find a priest named Osvaldo Tomitz. Tell him you heard from a shithead that Don Osvaldo was a decent man. He’ll know what that means.”

“Don Osvaldo,” Santino repeats. “A decent man.”

“Don’t forget the part about the shithead!” Messner calls, disappearing into the hallway.

Santino sits on the bed and bounces a bit. The mattress is better than any he’s slept on. He’s never had a room to himself before. Suddenly lonely, he returns to the window. I’ll save every lira, he thinks. No drinking, no cards. I’ll get work on the side. The moment there’s enough money, we can get married.

Something white catches his eye: snapshots fluttering through the piazza in front of the boardinghouse. A lady wearing mismatched shoes scurries to collect them. German soldiers stand on the corner. Civilians hurry past, impatient, nervous. One photograph keeps tumbling just beyond the lady’s reach. The soldiers laugh. Santino tenses to run outside and help, but before he can put motion to the thought, a gust of wind blows the photograph decisively away.

WAREHOUSE DISTRICT

PORTO SANT’ANDREA

Glissando, a harbor siren hits high A before its brief solo is lost in a chorus of inland Valkyries. German anti-aircraft fire provides percussion. Ears straining to pick out the sound of the approaching aircraft, Iacopo Soncini watches the warehouse rats. They are smart, and their hearing is more acute than his own.

“What do you think?” he asks them. “Yanks or Tommies?”

All winter, B-17s have flown over northwestern Italy, winging toward the Reich. Like wharf rats, many Sant’Andrese have learned to distinguish the engine note of the American bombers from that of the British planes. In mild weather, neighbors come outside to watch squadrons in the starlight. People chat in low voices, sitting together in dark courtyards or leaning out of windows. Then they go back to bed, hoping for a few hours of rest before sirens announce the Americans’ return to Corsica.

When the rats dash for cover, Iacopo does, too. “RAF,” their skittering tells him. “Our turn tonight.”

One of the rats creeps back into sight. A pregnant female, teats prominent, she balances on sturdy little haunches and begins to groom her soft brown fur. “False alarm?” Iacopo asks. He blinks, and she’s vanished.

A thudding explosion a few hundred meters away. Dust sifts from the rafters. Iacopo’s eyes shift from floor to walls to roof, searching for signs of collapse. Ground-floor corners are the safest, left standing when the rest of a building goes down. The next detonation is so close, he feels the concussion in his chest.

There is a mathematical pattern to a raid. No matter how tight the pilots’ formation, bombardiers vary slightly in the release of their cargo. The earliest of the explosions can be heard separately. Soon individual sounds merge into a toneless crescendo.

He could give a lecture on the natural history of terror. Survive your first air raid, and you thank God, laughing and giddy. Survive your tenth, and the element of luck cannot be ignored. If we’d been there, not here; if the breeze had carried that fire a few meters closer… Funerals become a commonplace annoyance as you make your way through the city. The notion of luck begins to turn on you. What worked before may not save you this time. Dash through the street, and you could be crushed by falling masonry. Race to a shelter, and you could suffocate as the fires’ carbon monoxide sinks into the cellar.

Survive your thirty-first raid, and you’ll sit tight for number thirty-two. You’ll waste no energy. You’re too tired, too familiar with the outhouse stench of your own fear to run from it. An abandoned, rat-infested warehouse next to a shipyard is as good a place as any, if your luck runs out.

Hunched on the floor, the cool stone cobbles hard against his hips, Iacopo feels his shoulders rise and his head duck in a pointless involuntary effort to protect himself. He tries to think about his family. The exercise is fruitless. Mirella is no longer pregnant, but he cannot picture her any other way. Angelo exists as the memory of a little boy marching off, stiff-backed, hand in hand with a short, round nun. Rosina will be crawling by now, perhaps saying a few words as well. Changed beyond recognition.

The only face he can picture clearly is a stranger’s. A girl, perhaps sixteen: fast asleep, eyes open, wandering along Via Massini. Sleepwalkers are common in cities under bombardment— no one understands why. Dreaming perhaps of a journey to some safe place, dressed only in a nightgown too short for her, the sleeping girl drifted through shreds of morning fog. She was so young that he could see in her face the infant she once was, the toddler, the schoolgirl. He ached to take her in his arms and kiss her with all the tenderness he still had in him. A delayed detonation shook the ground. In an instant she was transformed from lovely girl to terrified animal. She circled frantically, unable to decide which way to run. When he came toward her, she screamed and screamed, as though he were the embodiment of all that had blighted her childhood.

The air raid’s thunder beats against him like a club. Puddles shiver and gleam in the pale light that pours through holes in the warehouse roof. Pesach’s full moon illuminates tonight’s coastal targets, and his own shaking hands. Coal dust draws black crescents beneath his nails, and makes intaglios of his knuckles. His forearms are muscled like a sailor’s. The back that bent over books now curves around the willow basket he uses to lug his stock-in-trade. The RAF is his business partner, he supposes, and the thought is vaguely funny. If he’s alive and reasonably whole in the morning, he’ll leave this leaky den, assess the pattern of bomb damage, choose a direction. The first hours of the day will be given not to prayer and study but to scavenging charcoal in wrecked buildings. When he’s filled the basket with chunks of fuel, he’ll deliver it to housewives who still have stoves to cook on, and who are sharing the little they have with fugitive Jews.

At last, the explosions slow, become sporadic. Above him, tons lighter, British bombers wheel and begin their flight back to base unburdened by ordnance. One by one, the rats reappear.

He listens to the shouts and secondary explosions outside. The rats make themselves tidy, combing dusty whiskers with delicate, pale paws. The sirens wail the all clear. Once again the angel of death has passed over him. He tries to thank God, but can’t help feeling like a thug’s wife who believes she is loved if a punch goes wide.

Twenty minutes, he thinks. The trembling will stop in twenty minutes.

Running feet pound along the alley beyond the warehouse walls. Iacopo remains where he is. He’s picked up too many clumps of flesh and bone, found too many families cooked in the water from burst boilers, heard too many screams, smelled too much charred meat, seen too many corpses lying doubled up in pools of their own melted fat. Tonight he will sleep. In the morning, he will make his rounds, delivering courage with the charcoal.

“Lo amut, ki echyeh, v’asaper ma’asei Yah,” he whispers with threadbare resolution. “I shall not die but live, and I will declare the works of God.”

IMMACOLATA CONVENT

PORTO SANT’ANDREA

Suora Marta pulls out the handkerchief she keeps tucked into her tight black inner sleeve and hands it to Frieda Brössler. The woman must have been handsome once, but her pale skin has been spoiled by weather, and worry, and grief.

“I told Steffi— don’t talk to anyone! Wait here, and we’ll come back for you. Then—”

A white-veiled novice enters, eyes downcast, carrying a tray. Noiselessly, she sets out two glasses of water, two bowls of diluted milk flavored with roasted cicoria, some rolls that aren’t too moldy. “We can’t offer anything better,” Suora Marta apologizes as the novice backs away. “Dip the bread into the milk,” she suggests. “You won’t notice the mold.”

Frau Brössler shakes her head: I can’t. Sighing, Suora Marta nods permission to the daughter Liesl, who stares at the bread but reaches only for the milk. “Frau Brössler,” Marta says, “if we are to find your other daughter, you must try to tell me as clearly as you can what happened.”

“There was an ultimatum,” Frieda says, gripping the handkerchief. “Anyone caught after the deadline would be shot, and so would the owner of the property they were caught on. How could we put that farmer in danger, after he had been so kind? Duno— my son— he said we shouldn’t do it, but Herrmann was so sure! I don’t know where Duno is. He wanted to join the partisans. He left us the day before we went to San Mauro—”

“One thing at a time,” Suora Marta says. “Please— take a little water. What happened when you reached Borgo San Mauro?”

“At first, Italian soldiers put us in an armory. They were good to us— there was food, and they even let us go into town to shop. Then the SS came. They started beating people. Old people, women, children. They were shouting and pushing people onto freight cars. They had guns and dogs— savage dogs. A little boy started to cry, and a soldier hit him! That child couldn’t have been four! Steffi started screaming. I was afraid the soldiers would hit her, too. I took her to a side street. I told her, ‘Stay right there until we come back.’ My husband thought he might be able to trade his wristwatch for better seats on the train. He went to the Germans to inquire, and— and—”

“The tall one shot him,” Liesl says, dry-eyed.

Frau Brössler seems dazed. “One moment Herrmann was asking a perfectly sensible question, and the next, he was— He was on the ground. He was gone. Just like that. Gone! I couldn’t move. I just stood there. His blood… poured— just poured out over the cobblestones.”

Suora Marta is the only nun whose German is good enough to speak to many of the Hebrews. The weight of these stories, the endless repetition… How does the rabbi stand it? She glances at the wall clock. Half past two, and he is long overdue.

“A lady saw Papa on the ground,” Liesl says. “She pulled us inside.”

“Signora Giovanetti, her name was.” Frieda accepts the glass of water the nun presses on her. “She hid us.” The wonderment almost dries her tears. “She was so kind, so kind! I asked, Perché? Why? She said, ‘Anch’io vedova.’ Something like that. What does that mean, Sister?”

“Dear lady,” Suora Marta says gently, “it means: ‘I, too, am a widow.’ ”

“Mutti looked for Steffi later, with Signora Giovanetti,” Liesl says while her mother sobs. “They couldn’t find the doorway.”

“We were afraid to ask too many questions,” Frau Brössler continues, tears streaming. “The lady hid us for a month in San Mauro. Then she took us to her cousin’s house farther away. He kept us all winter, but in March there were German sweeps. It was too dangerous, so a priest brought us here.”

“Bitte, Frau Brössler,” Suora Marta presses, “what did the doorway look like? Do you remember anything at all about the place you left your daughter?”

The woman’s reddened eyes lose focus. “The door was very short. Even Liesl would have to duck to go through it.”

“Nothing else?”

The daughter speaks. “There was a statue of a little man. He was wearing that kind of hat with the two points.”

“A miter.” San Mauro, most likely, the town’s patron saint. “A short door, near a statue of San Mauro.” It’s not much to go on, but it’s a start. Suora Marta once again pushes the plate of bread toward the Brösslers. “Please— you must eat!”

“We can’t eat that,” the girl says firmly.

“Don’t be fussy, child! I know there’s some mold, but have—”

“It’s almost Easter. So it must be Passover now. We don’t eat bread during Passover.”

“Of course!” Marta says. “The Feast of Unleavened Bread!”

“We’re supposed to eat matzoh,” the girl says.

“They won’t have matzoh, Liesl.” Her mother glances toward the door, then at the bread. “Someone said a rabbi visits? He could tell us what to do.”

Suora Marta looks again at the clock. “He must have been delayed, but I’ve heard him help others when they must make a decision. He always says, ‘Choose life.’ In my village there was a saying, Frau Brössler: ‘Bread is life.’ ”

When the two have eaten, Suora Marta leads them to the novitiate dormitory. There are no rugs on the floors or pictures on the walls, but the room is large and airy, divided into cells by posts and clotheslines, from which hang a series of canvas sheets. The novices themselves have mostly moved to Roccabarbena, their places taken by Jews. Mother and daughter will sleep side by side, in the last bed left. Safe from the Nazis if not from Allied bombs.

Marta climbs the back stairs to the professed sisters’ quarters and opens the first door on the right. Sitting at a small desk, she takes out a piece of white stationery, now half its original size, makes a sharp crease along the top, and carefully strips away another bit of paper. Uncapping a fountain pen, she writes a few words, blows gently to dry the ink, and folds the note twice. Reaching through a slit in the side of her outer gown, she buries the note deep in the black cotton pouch that serves as a pocket.

Suora Marta stops by the linens room for a handkerchief to replace the one she gave Frau Brössler. The refectory next. The kitchen is deserted: dinner long over, supper not begun. A packet of food waits on the scrubbed wooden table, and it joins the note in her pocket. Hands under her scapular, Marta proceeds to the mother superior’s office. The door is open, and Suora Marta sticks her head inside. “Reverend Mother, may I take Suora Ilaria for a walk to the basilica?”

Mother Agata smiles coolly. “Give my best to our friend in the cleaning closet, Suora.”

Suora Ilaria has no idea why she serves as Marta’s companion on such errands, but she asks no questions as they cross the piazza. When Marta tugs the side door open, the elderly nun peeks into the basilica. “I’m going to die soon!” she confides with a girlish grin.

“How wonderful!” Suora Marta replies, propping the door open with her foot. “Watch your step, Suora.”

Ilaria points her head toward the ground and takes a big step over the threshold, as though it were a sleeping dog that might jump up and knock her down. “Soon I’ll be with our Lord, and his Blessed Mother!” she says cheerily. She grips Suora Marta’s arm. “I don’t mean to brag.”

Marta pats the spotted hand. “Pray for me when you see them, Suora.”

In middle age, Suora Ilaria was the convent’s Living Rule— the very embodiment of the order’s customs and laws in all their myriad minutiae. Her meticulous observance was a silent reproach to her less scrupulous sisters in Christ, and earned her the nickname Suora Malaria. For years, the principal result of Suora Marta’s weekly examination of conscience was a tabulation of uncharitable thoughts about the woman at her side. Thirty-four years later, Marta’s a little sad at the thought of losing the old girl.

Not that I’d begrudge her a moment with You, Lord, she thinks with a pious glance toward the crucifix.

The basilica is dressed in Lenten purple, nearly deserted this time of day. Two poorly dressed, thin-faced laywomen kneel in the vaulted silence, lips moving as each prays a solitary rosary. A skinny laborer rests his bony rump against the pew behind him and stares vacantly: too tired to pray but comforted to be in church. Sitting in the back of the basilica, apparently lost in thought, a heavily mustachioed gentleman in an expensive suit strokes a long jaw, blue with the kind of beard that needs shaving twice a day.

Marta supports Suora Ilaria’s creaky genuflection and leads her to the left. When the old nun settles in to pray near the Virgin’s altar, Suora Marta slips away.

Until a few weeks ago, Rina Dolcino brought meals to Giacomo Tura. Sometimes Suora Marta was in the basilica when this happened, and it did not escape her notice that Rina seemed more vivid, somehow, when she emerged from the scribe’s small room. If either of the pair had been under seventy, Suora Marta would have put a stop to the visits at once. Perhaps she should’ve been more suspicious. Giacomo Tura has mourned like a widower since Rina was killed.

Naturally, the old gentleman is lonely. Suora Marta passes some time with him, discussing war news. South of Rome, the front is quiet. The Red Army has taken Odessa. The Allies control the air over western Europe and Germany. By the time Marta returns to the nave, Suora Ilaria has fallen asleep kneeling, forehead on gnarled hands still folded in prayer.

Palming the note concealed in her habit, Marta removes the handkerchief from her sleeve and steps forward as if to dust the base of the Madonna’s statue. She gives the plaster feet a bit of a rub to remove some smudge and slips the piece of paper under a vase of flowers. Turning, she sees the gentleman with the mustache note her attention to the altar’s cleanliness. Suora Marta nods slightly, acknowledging his approval.

Tasks accomplished, she returns to the pew and slides in next to Suora Ilaria, who is snoring peacefully. There, until the basilica bell tolls the hour, Suora Marta prays for the soul of her friend and co-conspirator Rina Dolcino, who may not have been in a state of unblemished grace when she was pulled out of a market crowd last month and shot by Artur Huppenkothen’s Gestapo.

PALAZZO USODIMARE

PORTO SANT’ANDREA

“Reprisals are an effective tactic for encouraging good citizenship,” Erhardt von Thadden admits, knifing into a huge slab of Florentine beefsteak on his plate, “but they can be overused, Artur.”

While the Gruppenführer chews, his toady Helmut Reinecke takes up the theme. “In the Soviet Union, many Russians and Ukrainians were eager to join the Waffen-SS in opposing communism. The same will be true here, Herr Huppenkothen, but reprisals against civilians easily undermine willingness to work with us.”

“The Geneva Convention is clear,” Artur insists. “When civilians take up arms under the banner of a government that has capitulated, they lose their protected status.”

Von Thadden tips the last of the wine down his throat. Crystal flashes as he raises his glass toward the maid. “Artur, you haven’t touched your meal!”

“I neither eat meat nor drink alcohol.”

Reinecke’s mouth twitches, but von Thadden looks stricken. “Like our Führer! Of course! How could I have forgotten? Shall I have the chef prepare something else for you?”

“I didn’t come here to eat, Gruppenführer. I came to discuss a coordinated campaign against terrorists and their supporters. When Italian deserters bring guns home and use them to assassinate German officials, they’ve made their homes subject to attack. When an old man gives vegetables to partisans, he and his garden become military targets. The rosy-cheeked woman who sews dresses for her daughters and mends clothing for bandits puts her own children at risk.”

“Certainly, Herr Huppenkothen,” Reinecke agrees, “but the Führer also instructs us to make our rule more tolerable by dulling the senses of the local population. They must fear us, but they must also believe that they will not be harmed so long as they do as they’re told. One can make use of Alakhine’s defense as well as Steinetz’s offense.”

“The lure, not the cudgel,” von Thadden explains. “Do you play chess, Artur?”

“Games are for children.”

“Chess teaches strategy and tactics for any conflict.” Von Thadden turns his benign gaze on Reinecke. “So: Alakhine’s defense, Helmut… What do you propose?”

“Put German construction crews to work rebuilding damaged churches, sir, as von Treschow did in the Soviet Union. He encouraged Russian Christians to come out of hiding and worship in public again. This tactic gained such goodwill among the clergy that many priests joined anti-Communist fighting units. They make excellent spies—”

“And excellent collaborators!” Artur points out. “They’re conspiring to hide Jews all over this country.”

“Then we must open their eyes,” Reinecke insists. “Jews put their parishioners at risk. Jews are bandits and thieves. Jews are to blame when reprisals fall on Italian Aryans.”

“Italian Aryans.” Artur snorts. “Have you ever looked at Italy’s coastline? These people have been seafarers for millennia. What do you think sailors do when they get into port?”

“Good point, Artur,” von Thadden concedes. “The appeal to race rarely stirs Italians, Helmut. They define blood by direct kinship only.”

“Then remind them that their own gallant sons died fighting Jewish Bolshevism in the Soviet Union. Remind them that if the Communists take over here, they will seize private property, just as they did in Russia.”

“While promising the peasants that we’ll break up large holdings and redistribute the land after the Bolsheviks are defeated,” von Thadden says comfortably. “The Italian is not logical. He won’t even notice the contradiction!”

The room is decorated with exquisite frescoes, beautiful furniture, heavy silver serving pieces. Everything surrounding von Thadden speaks of loot and unearned status. Artur rises to inspect a chess set on a side table. “Sixteenth century,” von Thadden tells him. “Rose quartz, onyx, and white marble. The pieces are sterling, of course. I have a board in every room. I like to keep games going with various opponents.”

Artur’s hand hovers over the board, as though he is considering a move. Putting a finger under one corner, he tips it over, sending stone and silver crashing to the floor. Reinecke is on his feet, but von Thadden raises his hand and shakes his head.

“You, sir, are a venal, self-satisfied thief,” Artur Huppenkothen says with quiet conviction. “You are unworthy of the Reich, and unworthy of our Führer. I will do whatever is necessary to restore order in this city, with or without your cooperation, Gruppenführer.”

The bedroom door is open. Martina von Thadden turns from her dressing table, all pearl-colored satin and pale pink skin. “A new negligee!” Erhardt notes on his way in.

“Do you like it?” she asks, twirling. “It was very expensive, but Ugo told the shop owner, ‘This lady is the Gruppenführer’s wife, you fool!’ You should have seen that man’s face, Lieber. He said he’d send it right over as his gift to the Gruppenführer’s lovely lady. And look at these shoes, and this handbag! Have you ever seen such fine leather?”

Erhardt pretends to admire the latest acquisitions, letting her happy musical voice bubble around him while he undresses. Childless, surrounded by servants, Martina has nothing to do but shop for clothes and prepare for the moment when her man returns.

He holds out his arms. “Come to me, little chatterbox,” he says, and she does, giggling like a girl. His hands float down a satin river, then grip the heavy hips. Martina has put on weight since coming to Italy, and Erhardt is glad of it. He likes the heft of her, the depth of the shapes, the luxurious distance of bone from his touch. She seemed made for babies when they married, but their first died shortly after birth, and she has miscarried ever since. A blood incompatibility the doctors said.

She breaks away and moves backward, pulling him by the hand toward their bed. “You’ll never guess who I saw today!” she says the moment he’s through.

He tries not to sigh. This is her only flaw. She likes to talk, after. “Who?” he asks, eyes closed.

“Erna Huppenkothen! She’s still not married. With a name like that, I’d have run off with the first man named Müller I could find. She told me she has a gentleman friend— guess who!”

“I can’t imagine.”

“Ugo Messner! She says he’s ever so nice to her. She made sure I knew that he’s never touched her even once, except to kiss her hand. She thinks that means he’s respectful, not repulsed. Dry and skinny as a stick, Erna is.”

“Messner’s just polite because of her brother. The rest is her imagination.”

Martina goes still. “Lieber, you don’t think Ugo is…?”

“Paragraph 175?” Erhardt says, using the customary legalism. “No, my sweet, but have you noticed that his gait is somewhat impaired? There’s a rumor of a terrible war wound.” He clears his throat, and adds, “Not unlike Göring’s.”

Her lips form an astonished O. “How awful!” she cries. “I knew there was something about him. I feel so safe with him.”

Erhardt knows what she means. There is something about Messner: a sort of brave melancholy that makes his attention to bored and lonely women seem more a service to their men than a reason for jealousy. “I suppose it’s possible he really is courting her. Of course, Gestapo connections never hurt.”

“Erna told me that she embroiders AH on all of Artur’s personal linen. Poor little man! He tries so hard to be like the Führer—and he fails so gloriously!”

When her husband chuckles, Martina rises on an elbow to kiss him, and makes her eyes warm as she straddles him. “I love to make you laugh,” she murmurs. She leans over, letting her heavy breasts brush the hair of his chest and belly lightly, lightly. He stretches like a cat, almost purring as her lips go to work.

For the good of the race, the doctors told the couple, the Gruppenführer should take another woman, but Martina is damned if she’ll give all this up to some cow who’ll drop one calf a year.

Morale is on the rise, she thinks when he finally stiffens, and hides her relief in renewed determination while his eyes wander the ceiling. There, painted satyrs chase nymphs, who smile over milky shoulders. Diaphanous scarves fall gracefully from legs parted half in flight, half in invitation. Arbors encircle a garden full of pink roses, and plump grapes hang from twisted vines. Foliage does not quite conceal a variety of couplings. Standing, bending, above, behind…

Erhardt raises a languid hand and points. “Let’s do that one now.”

Like many maritime estates, the Palazzo Usodimare is absurdly large. Four great wings surround a central piazza larger than San Giobatta’s. There are stables, storerooms, kitchens, baths, residential quarters, two ballrooms, a dining room for fifty guests, and a seaward gallery of offices, where the prince’s staff once scanned the harbor for incoming ships. The whole is ringed by massive stonework. Four hundred years on, and the Usodimare family is nearly extinct, their palace appropriated by the latest of Italy’s invaders, but the purpose of the palace walls hasn’t changed: to demonstrate raw power while shielding the splendors within from the eyes of the vulgar.

Dry-mouthed, Osvaldo Tomitz hands his papers to a sentry. “I have an appointment with the Gruppenführer.”

The guard studies the priest’s photo minutely and logs a notation while a second sentry frisks him, grinning when he gets to Osvaldo’s crotch.

“You’re expected,” the first man says, handing the identity papers back. “Follow that walkway.”

The garden behind the wall is stunning in its prewar beauty. Almond and lemon trees in enormous terra-cotta pots line paths perfumed by roses and mimosa, clematis and jasmine. Roman and Egyptian statues preside over a view of the water far below, softened by a living frame of cypresses, holm oaks, umbrella pines and palms. Luxuriant foliage breaks the noise of the city into small, distant fragments. All other sound is quiet and close. The rasp of brooms grooming paths. The scraping of rakes. The clank of a wrench as a plumber works on the dry fountain’s pump. The casual chat of SS troopers with submachine guns, overseeing the work.

In a far corner of the garden, filthy and tattered, Iacopo Soncini stacks half-burnt scrap wood and bits of broken furniture around a pile of uprooted plants. Appalled, Osvaldo stops abruptly.

“Wunderbar, ja?” a cultured voice behind him remarks. “In such a garden, one may forget the ugliness of war.”

Osvaldo turns. An officer smiles in greeting, fair skin crinkling around clear blue eyes. “Erhardt von Thadden, at your service,” he says. “Thank you so much for coming! I appreciate your making time for me, Hochwürden.” The traditional form of address for a German priest is “Highly Honored,” but in von Thadden’s mouth the title is mockery, and his smile broadens when Tomitz bristles. “My apologies. I was merely extending a courtesy,” he says smoothly. “What does it say in the Gospels? ‘Call no man Father.’ Sant’Andrea is most assuredly not Rome, but I shall do as the Romans do, if you prefer, Padre.”

“Tomitz will do.”

“Excellent! And you may call me von Thadden, of course. My office is in this wing,” he says, leading the way. “I ordinarily prefer to meet with people in their native habitat, so to speak, but lately it has seemed the better part of valor to invite visitors here. I don’t mind dying for the Vaterland, but there’s no glory in being assassinated by a bandit on a bicycle.”

Von Thadden leads the way past glass cases displaying detailed models of ships, vellum charts of the Mediterranean, brass navigational equipment. Somewhere, typewriters clatter like small-arms fire. Von Thadden stands aside, allowing Osvaldo to precede him into the office. Its walls are dominated by frescoes immortalizing the naval battle of Lepanto, and by a map of the Gruppenführer’s fiefdom.

Von Thadden invites Osvaldo to sit in a chair upholstered in coral damask, but he himself lingers by a small gilt table that supports a simple wooden chess set. “My grandfather carved the pieces,” he says. “He taught me to play when I was eight— Ah! There’s a mate in two.” Chuckling with satisfaction, von Thadden plays the white rook from C1 to C8. “Leisure is so important. You leave the game, and come back to it refreshed. May I offer you something to drink? Coffee perhaps? Tea? It’s a bit early, but I do have some very good French Cognac.”

Osvaldo remains standing. “Nothing, thank you, Gruppenführer.”

“Are you sure?” Von Thadden takes a seat behind a neoclassical table. “Please, Tomitz! Relax!” he urges pleasantly, and waits until Osvaldo perches on a chair. Well-tended hands come to rest upon a thick, unopened file. In red letters, the word Geheim is stamped: Secret. “This isn’t an interrogation,” von Thadden assures him. “I simply like to get to know important people in my district.”

“Then you should make an appointment to visit the archbishop, Gruppenführer. I am merely his secretary.”

Von Thadden chuckles. “Admirable modesty, Tomitz, but I am an academic by training, and any professor will admit that his office and all his affairs are run by his secretary!” Von Thadden opens the file, lifts the top sheet, scans it briefly. The blue eyes rise, and von Thadden smiles happily. “You see? I am correct! His Excellency does indeed speak very highly of you.” He sets the précis of that interview aside, then picks up another report, and another. And another. “Tell me about yourself, Tomitz. Where did you grow up?”

“Trieste.”

“Yes, of course! When it was still part of the Habsburg empire, explaining your flawless German!” von Thadden says brightly. “Interesting city, Trieste. Mittel-europa at its mongrel worst! Austrians, Italians, Slovenes, Greeks! And Jews, of course,” von Thadden says genially. “Your parents were…?”

“My father was in shipping. My mother is a widow.”

“I meant, what is your parents’ race?”

“Italian.”

The expectant smile fades. “Father of Austrian ancestry. Mother, Venetian. A German head, an Italian heart, ja? Mann’s Tonio Kröger, come to life.” Von Thadden smiles encouragingly this time. “Brothers? Sisters?”

“Two of each.”

“My family was the same. Three boys, two girls.” Von Thadden consults the file. “I am the fourth of five, but you were the middle child, I see. Sisters older, brothers younger. One in the army. Karl?”

“Carlino. Yes.”

“Ach! It says here that Karl has been missing for some time. How terrible for your poor mother!” Von Thadden looks up, eyes rich with sympathy. “Would you like me to see if I can ascertain his whereabouts?”

Osvaldo hesitates. “I’m sure my mother would appreciate that.”

“Naturally! She worries about her Karl! It would be my privilege to alleviate such suffering. Unfortunately, my wife and I have no children, but my Martina would be frantic in your mother’s place. Karl’s unit was…?”

“Ninth Army, Third Corps, Venezia Division. He was stationed in Greece.” Osvaldo glances at the file. “Surely you know that already.”

Von Thadden looks hurt. “Your dear mother’s anxiety would only be prolonged were I to waste time making inquiries on the wrong front.” He returns to the file. “You went to the Tortona seminary.”

“Yes.”

“And taught there later… Tell me about your education. I’m not a Catholic. I’ve always been curious about the training of priests.”

“Latin liturgy, theology, philosophy. Are you a Lutheran, Gruppenführer?”

“I’m afraid I am a bit too knowledgable to cling to my natal religion, Hochwürden. My academic field was Near Eastern philology. I know a creation myth when I hear one, even if it’s the myth I grew up with. What do you think of Genesis?” von Thadden asks curiously. “Do you honestly believe your god made mud-pie people, and then became so angry with them for eating a piece of fruit—”

Osvaldo rises. “If you’d like to discuss the Church’s position on natural selection, there’s a Jesuit at the Gregorian who—”

“Sit down.”

Slowly Osvaldo drops back onto the chair.

“Genesis is merely a Jew variation on the Babylonian creation story Enuma elish,” Von Thadden says, scholarly once more. “ ‘Blood I will mass, and cause bones to be! I will establish a savage: man shall be his name.’ Thus spoke Marduk— the first divine sculptor of people. Flood stories were commonplace in Babylon, Sumeria, the Hittite kingdoms. Genesis is simply a degenerate version of earlier myths.” Utterly at ease, he leans back in his chair, crossing one knee over the other. “Christianity, of course, has no validity at all severed from its Jew roots— a persistent logical problem. Having declared Jesus divine, you must mistranslate and misrepresent Hebrew prophecy. The Jew messiah is to be an earthly leader who’ll bring political peace to Jerusalem and, by extension, to the world. The past nineteen hundred years have been very bloody.” Von Thadden smiles cheerfully. “No peace, no messiah.”

“Jesus will come again—”

“Ah, but as a Jew peddler might say: Cash, not credit, mein Herr! Jesus had his chance.” Von Thadden rises to pour coffee from a silver service on a side table. Adding a generous measure of sugar, he stirs thoughtfully with a sterling spoon. “Christians backed the wrong horse, messianically speaking. So you changed the rules to make Jesus the winner of the race. And if a Jew messiah ever does materialize, you’ve taken the precaution of declaring him the Antichrist, and enemy of Christendom! Goebbels could hardly have done better!” He lifts the exquisite porcelain cup toward his nose, breathing in with evident pleasure. “You’re sure you wouldn’t like a coffee?”

The aroma is intoxicating. “No,” Osvaldo says. “Thank you.”

“Let me guess! You’ve given it up for Lent?” Insouciant on damask, von Thadden lets his gaze travel around the office. “Christian mythology, I’m afraid, is also lacking in originality. Zeus visits virgins who give birth to demigods. Mithras was born of a virgin— on December 25, no less! His cult had a communal meal and prayer that went, ‘He who shall not eat of my body and drink of my blood shall not be saved.’ Let me see… A kingdom to come? Zoroaster. Blood sacrifice followed three days later by a resurrection? Attis, who returned from the dead on the spring equinox.”

Osvaldo checks his watch. “I do have other obligations this morning, Gruppenführer.”

“Of course! You are a very busy man.” It seems, almost, a compliment. “My men call me the Schoolmaster— I do tend to fall into old habits! One last thing, with your indulgence.” Von Thadden unfolds a small strip of paper and reads six words. “ ‘The convent is short on charcoal.’ ” He doesn’t bother mentioning where the note was found, or how he knows Osvaldo is connected to it. “You’re certain you wouldn’t like a brandy?” he asks.

Mouth cottony, Osvaldo says, “No. Thank you.”

“Is it normal practice,” von Thadden asks with catlike curiosity, “for an archbishop’s secretary to be concerned with a convent’s charcoal supply?”

“These are not normal times, Gruppenführer. Italy has no coal. German authorities prevent us from importing fuel. So we use charcoal. Church institutions work together on such matters as heating and provisioning.”

“Well, heating shouldn’t be a problem anymore. Lovely weather!”

“Charcoal is also needed for cooking and washing, Gruppenführer.”

“Obviously! Why didn’t I think of that?” Von Thadden all but smacks himself in the forehead. “Charcoal makers figure prominently in Italian history, I understand. The Carbonari of 1849 were rebels who gathered in forests pretending to be charcoal makers while planning attacks on foreign rulers. Karl Marx admired them. He believed guerrilla warfare was the best way for a weak force to confront a stronger and better-organized army.” Seraphic eyes glowing, von Thadden inquires, “Do you admire the Carbonari, Tomitz?”

“I am notoriously obtuse about politics, Gruppenführer.”

“A humble servant of the Prince of Peace!” He taps Osvaldo’s folder with a blunt finger. “And a very… busy… man.”

Von Thadden stands, stepping out onto the small balcony overlooking the garden. “I’m told the botanical collection had five thousand exotic species,” von Thadden says, his voice raised for Tomitz’s benefit. “Plants from Asia, Africa, and the Americas. They have no place in Europe. Rip them out, and burn them! That was my order.” He faces Osvaldo. “The laborers are conscripts living in a guarded barracks. I’m inclined to let them go when the work is complete, but if something unfortunate were to happen? I’m afraid I’d have to wash my hands of them.”

Dropping all pretenses, he returns to his desk. “Communist criminals have had their way in Rome, Milan, Turin, Genoa. Not here. Tell your Bolshevik friends, Tomitz: if Germans in this district are harmed, reprisals will be set at twenty to one.”

“Tell Renzo: explain to Angelo,” the rabbi whispers urgently as the priest passes.

Giving no outward sign that he has heard, Osvaldo strides away from the Palazzo Usodimare. Bogus mythology, he thinks, nauseated by anger. What about those magical Nordic runes on his collar? Nazi hymns to Wotan? Numerology, telepathy. Divining rods, phrenology, magnetic cures. Neo-pagan looniness, all of it! The German people have forsaken Jesus for a maniac who believes in cosmic ice and Atlantis, and a Grail filled with Aryan blood.

Arrest is inevitable. Osvaldo knows that now. He feels momentarily safer merging into a market crowd on his way back to San Giobatta, but a broken-nosed stranger falls into step with him. When his arm is seized, Osvaldo is surprised only by how soon his time has come. He opens his mouth to shout.

“I won’t hurt you, Padre,” the thug whispers, “but you have to come with me.”

Oblivious pedestrians stream past, like water around a rock. Everyone has a great deal to do, very little to do it with, and always: the checkpoints, the document inspections, the petty tyrannies to circumvent.

Warily Osvaldo follows the man through unfamiliar alleys. At the entry to a small, ruined apartment building, the thug whistles a few notes of Puccini and is answered by a bit of Donizetti. Stepping over wreckage, he leads Osvaldo to the remains of a corner flat that still has most of its walls and some of its ceiling.

On a smoke-damaged easy chair, an elephantine figure rubs the inside of a fleshy thigh where a shrapnel wound has ached for a quarter of a century. “Signor Brizzolari!” Osvaldo cries, “Grazie a Dio! I should have come directly to you—”

Serafino Brizzolari holds up a clean pink hand in warning. From the inside pocket of his tentlike suit he withdraws a small medicine bottle. “This should help your sister’s little boy, Beppino. Give her my best wishes.”

The thug slips the bottle into a pocket. “Grazie, signore. Padre, I’m sorry I scared you. A blessing, please?”

“Go in peace, figlio mio.” Osvaldo waits until he is alone with the fat man. “Signor Brizzolari, von Thadden has—”

“That’s why you’re here. And no— never come directly to me about anything.” Brizzolari lifts a manicured finger to indicate a pile of not very clean clothing. “Put those on.”

“But why?”

“Huppenkothen has an arrest warrant out for you. The Gestapo knows you and Suora Marta are doing something suspicious, and that others are involved.”

Osvaldo curls his lip at a pair of filthy trousers. “Then why didn’t von Thadden—?” He freezes, one foot in the air. “He told me to warn the partisans that he’d kill his hostages if they took any action in Sant’Andrea.”

“He also had you followed out of the palazzo.” Brizzolari shifts his bulk in the chair. “Beppo’s brother-in-law will have taken care of your tail. And von Thadden won’t move against the partisans yet.”

Osvaldo pulls on a patched shirt that stinks of another man’s sweat. “How can you possibly know that?”

“Renzo Leoni’s made friends with von Thadden’s wife and Huppenkothen’s sister. Lonely women talk.” Brizzolari glares over his belly at a massive gold pocket watch. “Damn the man! He was supposed to be here fifteen minutes ago. His drinking is—”

“The principal arrow in my quiver!” Renzo stumbles through a gaping hole in the apartment wall and looks back at the rubble behind him, to see what he tripped over. After a puzzled shrug, he makes a sweeping bow. “A man among men,” he declares himself, “and graceful as well!”

“Is this the end of a long night,” Osvaldo asks, “or the beginning of a bad day?”

“Does it matter?” Renzo collapses onto a broken-backed sofa and scrubs at his face. “My apologies, gentlemen. Something came up last night, or this morning… or whenever it was.” The trembling hands fall into his lap. “Don Serafino, what would you take in trade for a cigarette? Would my firstborn son do, or will I have to promise you a daughter?”

Brizzolari growls but tosses him a pack of Macedonias. “You are out of control.”

“Those who are without sin are also without information. I’ve endured an unimaginably tedious evening with Erna Huppenkothen, and God knows, that required a great deal of drinking.”

Aghast, Osvaldo sits on a wobbly, water-stained chair, a dirty sock in one hand. “You didn’t—”

“O Dio! If you could see your face!” Renzo laughs loosely. “No, fornicating for Italy exceeds my patriotic limit, Padre. Even the perpetually virginal Erna might recognize a clipped dick if she saw one. Nevertheless! At the cost of hours of excruciating boredom, I have learned that her brother, Artur, is frustrated as hell. Italian Jews have Catholic friends, Catholic in-laws, Catholic business partners. Nobody’s ratting them out. Local police are tipping neighbors off before every sweep. So poor, dear Artur has decided to concentrate on foreign Jews. There will be a Gestapo raid on Immacolata after midnight tonight.”

“The convent!” Osvaldo says. “But the Concordat! They wouldn’t dare—”

“International borders didn’t stop them,” Brizzolari rumbles. “Did you think a cloister would?”

Shoving his feet into battered work boots, Osvaldo stands. “I should warn the sisters.”

Renzo says, “It’s been taken care of. When Huppenkothen shows up, Immacolata will appear judenfrei, but the convent will be watched from now on.” He shakes a cigarette from the pack and offers it to the priest. “You’re compromised as well, Padre.”

Osvaldo nods, accepting the cigarette as well as the logic. “With me out of the network and the rabbi in custody, who’ll take care of the refugees?”

Renzo’s bloodshot eyes focus sharply. “Wait— Iacopo?”

Brizzolari sighs. “I knew there was a warrant out for him, but I didn’t—”

“That’s what I was trying to tell you!” Osvaldo says. “Von Thadden has him pulling weeds in the garden at Palazzo Usodimare. I don’t think they know who he is. He got raked up for a labor gang, but von Thadden threatened to kill the entire group if the partisans make trouble.”

Swearing steadily, Renzo walks in tight circles. Slows, then stops and looks up. “Don Serafino, can you get custody of von Thadden’s hostages?”

“It depends,” Brizzolari says cautiously.

“Doctors are still allowed to go from house to house, right? Anytime, day or night— same as priests?”

“Priests, midwives, and doctors, yes. Curfews don’t apply.”

“With a doctor’s bag and the right papers… What do you think, Tomitz? We could cut your hair differently, get you some glasses perhaps. You could wear my suit—”

“And pick up Iacopo’s rounds… Yes! Nobody ever remembers me anyway.”

Brizzolari considers Osvaldo’s forgettable face above the ordinary clothing. “It could work, assuming you don’t have to set any bones. You could keep the refugees’ money in a false bottom. Roll bills up and put them into medicine bottles.”

Squinting through smoke, Renzo holds the discarded cassock up to his shoulders. “A little tight across the chest… How does this work? Do you wear it like a dress?”

“It goes over a shirt and trousers. You can use mine.”

“Don Osvaldo, if he’s caught wearing that, every priest in Italy will be suspect!” Brizzolari looks from one man to the other. “Leoni, you can’t be serious!”

“Not often,” Renzo admits, “but I’m sobering up, and the idea still makes sense to me. Don Serafino, if you get the hostages transferred into the municipal jail, I think I can solve a number of problems simultaneously.” He tosses the cassock onto the sofa and slumps beside it. “It’s up to you, Tomitz, but there are places I can’t go as Ugo Messner.”

Osvaldo shrugs assent. “Giacomo Tura can alter my papers for you.”

Brizzolari wipes his sweating crown with a pristine handkerchief. “Tura takes too long. There’s a man in my office who can be trusted.” He motions irritably for his briefcase. “Who’ll take care of these while you two play dress-up?” Opening the case to reveal hundreds of ration cards, Brizzolari recites, “Bless me, Fathers, for I have sinned: I have lied and I have stolen.”

“I was selling them to raise cash for Iacopo to distribute,” Renzo explains.

“I can fence them,” Osvaldo says. Renzo and Brizzolari stare. “Priests, and doctors,” he informs them delicately, “are acquainted with all manner of persons.”

Squaring a straw Borsalino on his large, round head, Brizzolari heaves himself onto his surprisingly dainty feet. “I’ll send Beppino back with the paperwork in a few hours. And I’ll do what I can for Rabbino Soncini and the others. Padre, Dottore,” he says, tipping his hat. “Good day to you both. And God save Italy, if He can.”

Side by side, the younger men watch him pick his way through the wreckage. Slumping onto the sofa again, Renzo says, “When this is over, remember what that fat Fascist bastard has done. He’ll need you to vouch for him, Padre. We’re in for a civil war, the moment the Germans leave.”

“And if the Germans don’t leave?” Osvaldo asks. “Kesselring’s making the Allies look like fools!”

“He’s as good a tactician as Germany’s got,” Renzo agrees. “And the military record of the Allies in Italy remains unsullied by a single well-run battle, but they’ve got time and brute force on their side. Germany’s running out of both.” He levers onto his shoulders and heels to pull a hip flask out of his back pocket. Osvaldo’s eyes narrow. Renzo rolls his. “Don’t tell me you’ve never seen a drunken priest.”

Osvaldo snatches the flask away and pours its contents onto a waterlogged Turkish carpet that was once some housewife’s pride. “I’ve seen you,” he says. “In the streets. During air raids.” Standing in the darkness. Waiting for a bomb with open arms, a bottle in his hand. Osvaldo waits until Renzo’s eyes shift to change the subject. “There’s a rumor that the Allies are withdrawing troops from Italy.”

Renzo flicks ash off his cigarette. “They’re being redeployed. The Germans’re expecting an attack on Calais. Von Thadden thinks the Allies’ll settle for holding southern Italy, because of the airfields and ports. The rest of the peninsula’s of no strategic value to them.”

“And what will become of us, here, in the north?”

Hands dangling between his knees, Renzo stares at an upstairs toilet leaning crazily on a pile of rubble. Laths and broken joists stick out of its bowl, like dead flowers in a cracked vase. Gathering himself for one last bout of coherent thought, he takes a long drag, and flicks the butt away. “The Reds will hold eastern Europe. The Americans and British could take the west. The Wehrmacht’s best bet is to shoot Hitler and negotiate terms: Germany keeps Mittel-europa from the Baltic to the Arno. The war’s over. Everybody celebrates, and I’ll get hanged instead of Brizzolari. Although, with my luck,” Renzo mutters, stretching out on the sofa, “the damned rope will break.”

The sun has found the gaping hole in the roof. Renzo throws an arm over his eyes. Within moments, he’s asleep, and Osvaldo sits quietly, studying the man. Raids, fires, smoke: the air is often sickly yellow, but it’s not just sour light discoloring Renzo’s skin. Suicidal bravery, or cirrhosis of the liver— he’s killing himself. And he knows it. Osvaldo has been tempted to ask about Renzo’s past, but what might seem normal curiosity in other times could raise suspicion now. His only real clue lies in what Renzo himself said of Schramm, the day they met in San Giobatta. “I’m inclined to respect a soldier who has to get that drunk before confession. He must have an admirable conscience to be so ashamed.”

Twice, Osvaldo has tried to speak to Renzo of the prodigal son, of God’s loving welcome for the penitent. Both times, the words stuck in his throat. Hypocrite, he snarled at himself. Offering absolution to one sinner but not the other. You want to pick and choose who is worthy. And yet— Nothing Renzo did in Abyssinia could possibly rival Werner Schramm’s tally. Not a tenth of 91,867 were killed in the whole of the Abyssinian war!

Lord, how often shall my brother sin, and I forgive him? And Jesus said, I do not say to thee seven times, but seventy times seven… That’s 490, Osvaldo thinks. Is it a matter of scale, then? Is the murder of one human being less heinous than the murder of 91,867?

Yes, he thinks stubbornly. Yes! It is 91,866 times less heinous!

Osvaldo Tomitz has tried and tried, but he cannot make words like guilt and forgiveness, atonement and absolution fit around what Schramm confessed, or around what others like him are doing today, at this very instant. Yes, of course! Forgive as you are forgiven! But Jesus spoke directly: forgive those who sin against you yourself. Surely that can’t mean forgive those who murder by the trainload. Forgive those who willfully commit atrocities. Forgive everything, anything!

Osvaldo knows himself quick to anger. Outrage comes over him like an eagle sinking talons into his chest, tearing at his heart. Is it satanic pride, tempting him to believe that God feels that same outrage? To believe that some sins are so vast, not even Jesus could be willing to forgive them?

Nearby, shockingly loud, the air-raid sirens begin to howl. Osvaldo jumps to his feet. Renzo groans and rolls onto his side, his back to the priest. “Sit down, Tomitz,” he mumbles. “Nothing we can do yet.”

Except pray, Osvaldo thinks.

But pray for what? He used to pray that Sant’Andrea be spared a raid. That seems tantamount now to wishing death on other cities. For survival? Of whom? Who dies, and when and how, is long divorced from any moral dimension Osvaldo can detect. Even so, he prays: for the souls of those who’ll be vaporized by the blast of a direct hit; for those whose bodies will be crushed by falling masonry; for those who’ll suffer; for those who’ll grieve.

Squadrons release their whistling cargo. Each bomb has a task. Two-kilo incendiaries ignite rooftop fires. Fifteen-kilo bombs penetrate deep into structures, setting them ablaze from the inside out. Blockbusters— as massive as small trucks— destroy entire buildings, cratering streets, filling them with rubble to hinder firefighting equipment.

The detonations come closer. Osvaldo begins to wish he hadn’t dumped Renzo’s liquor on the floor. He wonders if it is easy to push a button or pull a lever and cause a hundred deaths you do not see. He asks himself if he could do it.

When he gets his answer, he prays for the pilots and their navigators, for the gunners and the bombardiers. Forgive them, Father, for they cannot see the burns, the crushed heads, the splintered limbs, the shattered lives. And bless them, for they are fighting those who’ve made a charnel house of Europe.

When at last the all clear sounds, Renzo sits up and scrubs at his hangdog face. “On your feet, Padre,” he calls, trudging toward the street. “Work to do.”

Osvaldo hesitates only long enough to pull his rosary from his pocket, to look at the crucifix and bring it to his lips. “The sick require a physician’s help, not the healthy”— that’s what Jesus taught. But gazing at the emaciated figure on the cross, what Osvaldo sees are the cool, clean hands of a doctor touching the warm flesh of a starving Jew. The hands of a physician who touches not to heal or comfort but to push a syringe full of poison into his 91,867th victim’s heart.

If that can be forgiven, Osvaldo thinks, hell is empty.

May 1944

MOTHER OF MERCY ORPHANAGE

ROCCABARBENA

Everybody thinks Isma is a half-wit, but Angelo Soncini is pretty sure she’s Jewish.

At first, Angelo thought he was the only Jew in the orphanage. Then one time he was doing chores, and scrubbing circles on the floor made him hum. Riccardo came over and whispered, “Quit that!” Angelo thought he wasn’t supposed to scrub anymore, but when he started to get up, Riccardo said, “No, stupid! Just shut up! You were humming ‘Hatikva’!”

After he knew about Riccardo, Angelo looked for other kids pretending to be Catholic. He watched at meals to see who kept kosher, but that didn’t work. There’s never any meat, so there’s nothing you can’t mix with milk, so everything’s pareve. Mostly there’s zucchini, or potatoes, or polenta, or rice in watery soup, and a little bread after school. You might get an egg if you’re real sick, but you have to have spots or something. The sisters can tell when you’re faking it. Sometimes there’s soup with real old pasta, and little worms floating in it. Worms are definitely not kosher, but everybody picks them out, except the biggest boys, who eat them to make the girls scream and get in trouble.

You have to be quiet all the time, except at recess and on Sunday after Mass. You have to act real serious like the sisters. You have to walk in lines, two by two, and you wear dark blue uniforms with white shirts if you’re a boy, and white blouses if you’re a girl. You have to be obedient, and you can’t have anything that belongs to you alone, so you have to be careful with everything. Because it’s not yours, it’s just “for your use.” When you outgrow your pants or something, you turn them in and get bigger ones. For your use. If you talk or get out of line, you’ll get a smack from Suora Paola. Suora Paura, everyone calls her: Sister Scary.

Sister Scary always yells, and she calls you by your last name, and sometimes Angelo forgets that his name is supposed to be Santoro, and he gets in trouble because he doesn’t answer right away. After he figured out about Isma, Angelo snuck up and told her, “Watch out for Suora Paura— she’ll smack you one if you do something wrong!” Isma just stared at her feet and said, “Isma glai,” or something like that. That’s all she ever says, so that’s what everybody calls her: Isma.

“Suora Paola has to be strict,” Suora Corniglia told Angelo. “If soldiers are coming, you have to do exactly as we say without asking why, or somebody might get hurt.” Suora Corniglia always explains stuff, and she never ever yells. Not even soft. Suora Corniglia calls everybody by their first names, like a mother, and she’s pretty, and nice, and she has dimples. Angelo is going to marry her when he grows up, because she’s always kind. She’ll wear pretty dresses then.

But she can still go to Mass.

Sometimes Suora Corniglia hides half an apple in her big sleeves, and she secretly gives a quarter to Angelo and a quarter to Isma. Suora Corniglia is real careful that nobody else sees. That’s another reason Angelo thinks Isma’s Jewish.

Plus, another reason is, Sister Scary let Isma keep that stupid doll. It’s just a china head and a rubber body with the arms gone. The hair is all scrabbly. It’s ugly, and nobody’s allowed to have private stuff, but when Sister Scary tried to take it away, Isma screamed so much you could hear it all over the school, and everybody thought their ears were going to fall off. “It’s all the poor little thing has,” Suora Corniglia told Sister Scary. And then they looked at each other real serious. That’s how Angelo figured out for almost sure that Isma is Jewish. If she was a Catholic kid, she could’ve screamed until she turned blue. Sister Scary still wouldn’t have let her keep that doll.

A lot of girls cheat, though. They make little, tiny dolls out of a stick and a scrap of cloth or a leaf or something. They hide the dolls in their uniform pockets. At recess the girls take the dolls out and make them talk to each other in real high squeaky voices. It makes Angelo sick.

Most of the time the boys and girls are apart, so Angelo doesn’t see Isma much, except at recess. And Mass. Everybody goes to Mass together at 6:30 every morning, which surprised Angelo a lot the first time. In synagogue, ladies and girls had to sit up in the gallery, but in church, they sit right in with men and boys! Angelo understands that now. In the synagogue, the women always came late, and then they talked too much, and the men would always be looking up and glaring at them, and when the women got noisy, Signor Tura would hiss like a snake. But Catholic girls know how to shut up. The sisters teach them that in school.

Angelo likes Mass, except for the crucifix, which is scarier than Suora Paura. One time, when Angelo went to visit Don Osvaldo at San Giobatta, Babbo told him, “In the old days, the Romans did that to anyone who made trouble. There was a slave called Spartacus who fought for freedom, and the Romans crucified six thousand of his followers, all along the Via Appia.” When Angelo asked Suora Corniglia what kind of trouble Jesus made, she said, “He died for our sins.” Which still doesn’t seem fair, even though Suora has tried real hard to explain it.

Mass is mostly very nice. The candles are like when Mamma lit the candles for Shabbat. Near the end, the priest chants, “Sanctus! Sanctus! Sanctus!” just like when Babbo chants, “Kadosh! Kadosh! Kadosh!” And the priest wears fancy stuff that looks like what Aaron wore in the Tent of Meeting in the desert— Angelo had a picture book about that when he was little. Plus, the singing is good.

Angelo likes school, too. There aren’t many books, so they memorize a lot. Multiplication tables, case endings, trees, stars, how to use punctuation. Angelo has a good memory, but sometimes he pretends he doesn’t know an answer because there’s this big kid named Bruno Ceretto. Bruno’s older, because he got held back. He’ll twist your arm real hard if you show off. Bruno hates show-offs, but he’s more show-offy than anybody.

The whole school has recess after lunch. Angelo doesn’t play with Isma, but he watches out so nobody picks on her. Once Bruno took Isma’s stupid doll away from her, and Angelo slugged him in the stomach so hard Bruno couldn’t even talk, and then recess was over. Bruno leaves Isma alone now, but then he started kicking Angelo whenever he got the chance, so Angelo would punch him. Sister Scary caught them fighting, and made them both kneel for an hour on pieces of real hard, dry corn, which hurt worse than getting kicked, and made marks in his knees that are still there! So now Angelo just says, “Girls kick. Are you a girl, Bruno?” Bruno gets mad, but he can’t do anything because Sister Scary is watching them all the time with real fierce eyes.

Someday his parents will visit, and Angelo is definitely going to tell them how mean Sister Scary is. Angelo got a secret message that he was going to see Babbo at Passover, but he didn’t come. When Angelo cried, Suora Corniglia said it was too dangerous at Passover because the Germans might suspect. But still.

His parents will visit pretty soon. Angelo is almost practically sure of that. He’s going to tell them they should adopt Isma. They can change her name to Altira because Isma’s not a real name. It’s a pretend name, like Angelo Santoro. Or Sister Scary.

“You can come and live with my family after the war,” he promises Isma at recess every day.

Isma just hugs her stupid doll and looks at her feet. “Isma glai.” That’s all she ever says.

Long white fingers grip a wooden-handled brass bell at 5:15 A.M., and Suora Ursula calls, “May Mary’s immaculate heart…” From every cell, the responsum comes: “… be forever praised.”

Suora Corniglia pulls off a plain cotton nightgown and dresses as she has each morning since she became a postulant: in a fog of half-remembered dreams. Hands clumsy, she ties the laces of stout black shoes, then pulls a blue-violet gown over white cotton undergarments. She tightens the belt around her waist, adjusting the soft pleats of the gown. There are more pleats now than ever. She’s never been a large person, but since the occupation began weight has fallen off her and the other nuns like leaves from a tree. They are bone-tired and always hungry, but this is no more than anyone else suffers, and much less than many endure. Together, she and her sisters in Christ remember Jesus in the desert, and join their hunger to His.

A plain woolen scapular goes over her head, falling almost to the floor in front and behind. Beginning to wake up, she kisses the silver crucifix and slips its long chain around her neck. In the corner of the cell, propped overnight on a mop pole: the white coif and cape with its new black veil. She settles it onto a forehead grooved by the stiffly starched headband that sits just above her brows, and fastens its laces at the back of her neck. Muffling sound, the fabric embraces her face, and she adjusts the drape of the cloth that covers her shoulders.

Her clothing, like the cell she sleeps in, is merely “for her use.” The practice of poverty is meant to free the mind and heart from concern for worldly goods, but before she came to the convent, she never thought so much about material things as she does now. She conserves the tiniest slivers of soap. She is aware of each millimeter of candlewick burned. In spare moments she repairs hems, patches holes, mends stockings for the children. The fabric is old. Careful stitches come apart. Sometimes it’s all she can do to keep from weeping.

Turning back loose outer sleeves the prescribed twelve centimeters, she stands and waits. The bell rings a second time, and she joins her sisters in procession to chapel. She used to pray for the end of the war, but she suspects God doesn’t need a nun to nag Him about that. These days she prays for patience with the children and the mending, with her superiors and herself.

Ite, Missa est: Go, the Mass is ended. Older orphans shepherd littler ones to a refectory where peasant women dish out polenta. The nuns return to the convent to share a breakfast hardly more substantial than the communion wafers they have just received. When the bell rings again, Suora Corniglia stands for the two-by-two procession with the other teachers to the school.

The classroom for her use is large and high-ceilinged, floored with gleaming chestnut. Whitewashed walls reflect the light pouring through enormous windows that look out over an old Roman bridge. On the eve of its third millennium, Ponte Ligure seems determined to carry people and goods across the river forever, but British bombardieri cannot let this insult to their manhood stand. They return for round after round in a lunatic boxing match: twentieth-century explosives versus first-century stonework. At least once a week she has a nightmare about the classroom windows. In her dreams, they’re shattered by concussions, and the children are cut to pieces.

At 8:00 the students file in, two by two, their lives as regulated by brass bells as her own. They take their places next to scarred wooden desks bolted to sleighlike iron runners, shortest to tallest, so the ones in the back can see over those in front. When Bruno Ceretto arrives at the last desk in the far corner, they chorus, “Buon giorno, Suora Corniglia.”

They are unsmiling except for Angelo, who sneaks a grin at her like a secret lover. Embarrassed by the thought, Suora Corniglia frowns when she replies, “Buon giorno, children. Bruno, will you lead us in the Credo?”

Prayers are recited in singsong Latin. Permission is granted to be seated. Floor bolts creak as small bottoms hit wood. The boys know the schedule as well as she does, but they wait for her cues.

Religion. History. Grammar. The morning passes. Desktops bang open, slam closed. The boys wait. She nods approval and faces the blackboard in a swirl of dark blue wool. Raising her arm, she places a centimeter-long stub of chalk against the blackboard. “When subtracting a—”

Two planes flash by, level with the hillside school. For an instant, she sees a pilot clearly. Machine-gun fire spits in both directions. Bombs bounce off stonework into the river. Water erupts into the air. Boys surge toward the windows.

“Get away from the glass!” she shrills, seizing Angelo and Bruno by their shirts. She can hear the planes’ engines as they climb and bank to reapproach German gun emplacements. Fabric gives way as she flings the boys toward the door. “Into the corridor! All of you! Now! Now! Now!”

“Did you see him?” Angelo asks Bruno excitedly. “The pilot looked right at us! Did you see him?”

Trembling uncontrollably, she wants to slap the child for not being terrified, but by the time she has the whole class crouched along the edges of the hallway floor the attack is over, and someone is tugging on her sleeve, announcing, “Suora! Mario peed hisself!”

Mario stares at his lap, fat tears slipping down thin cheeks. “O poveretto!” she sighs with exasperated sympathy. “Don’t make fun!” she orders sharply, glaring until nervous laughter lapses into suppressed giggles. “Bruno! You and Angelo take Mario to the dormitory. Ask Suora Idigna to help him clean up and change. Get clean shirts for your use and bring the ripped ones to me for mending. Be back here in ten minutes! The rest of you: into your seats!”

The three boys march off: Mario bowlegged around the shamefully stained trousers, Angelo and Bruno tattered and torn from her own assault. Next time, she tells herself, grab arms, not collars.

The balance of the day is uneventful, until the school portress knocks. With a stern look toward the boys, Suora Corniglia lays down her chalk and goes to the classroom door.

“Sorry for the interruption, Suora,” the portress whispers. “There’s a Padre Righetti here to see you. He’s waiting at the convent.”

She glances at the wall clock. “Grazie, suora. Ask him to forgive me, but I can’t leave until recess.”

There are, in the event, two additional minor crises to manage. Sweeping into the convent receiving room, she says, “I’m sorry to have kept you waiting, Padre. One of the boys—”

The priest turns from the window. Suora Corniglia’s mouth drops open. So does the visitor’s.

“You’re Angelo’s teacher?” He snaps his fingers twice, trying to recall where they met. “You— you were scrubbing the floor at San Giobatta!” he says. “September eighth, right?”

“Yes!” she says with quiet excitement, placing him now. “You helped with the broken glass! You’re the—” She stops herself.

“The Jew who went off with the German. I see you got a promotion.” His eyes flick toward her black veil. “You’re an officer now! How have you been, Sister Dimples?”

“It’s Suora Corniglia,” she says primly, hands under her scapular. “And if that’s a costume for Carnevale, you’re a little late in the season. What are you doing in a cassock?”

“Trying earnestly not to get arrested.” He holds up the biretta’s square crown, with its three shark fins and pompon, and puts it on his head, vamping like a Parisian model before sitting at the table. “I borrowed the ensemble from Osvaldo Tomitz, who was carrying a doctor’s bag last time I saw him.”

“Not getting arrested seems to be Italy’s national sport,” she remarks, feeling a great deal less tired now. “I need to get back to the students in fifteen minutes. What was it you wanted, Padre?”

She expects him to laugh at the title, but he sobers instead. “I’d like to meet with Angelo, if that can be arranged.”

There’s something about his tone. “But— no! His parents?”

“His mother and baby sister are safe. His father’s been jailed as a hostage.” He holds up a hand when the nun gasps. “For the moment, everything is fine, but I’d like to speak to Angelo. I led him to believe I could arrange a visit, and I want to explain. Is there any way I can talk to him without arousing suspicion?”

“If he were older, you could pretend to hear his confession, but his class hasn’t had First Communion yet.” She thinks for a moment. “On Sunday afternoons, the children are allowed to hike up toward the monastery. Within reason, we let them do as they please for a few hours. They can play or read. Most of them hunt for mushrooms or berries— there’s so little food. If you were to wait by the monastery gate, I could steer him toward you.”

“Do you think I could stay with the brothers until then?”

“Ask for Fra Edoardo. You won’t have to explain anything to him.” She hesitates. “When Angelo comes to you, he’ll bring a little girl along. She’s only three, or maybe four. We think she might be one of the refugees who came over the Alps last year.”

“What’s her name?”

“We don’t know. She’s almost mute, poor thing. The children call her Isma. The only thing she ever says is, ‘Isma glai.’ ”

“Isma glai…? Ist mir gleich? Is that what she says?”

“I suppose… Yes! That could be it— nursery German for ‘I don’t care’?”

“Don’t say anything to her yet. Let me talk to her first.” Fussing with unfamiliar fabric tangled around his legs, Renzo stands. “Until Sunday, then, Suora Fossette.”

“Until Sunday. And don’t you dare call me Sister Dimples in front of the children!”

A slow grin forms above the Roman collar. “The thought,” he lies, “never entered my mind.”

Wrung out by five minutes’ effort fueled by a diet of poor-quality starch, spring chard, and not much else, Suora Corniglia leans against a terrace wall to muster strength and catch her breath. Beside her, tiny brown lizards dart into crevices between stones. Fig trees bake in the basil-scented warmth above meticulously tended vineyards that crisscross the hillside. The Mediterranean is a stripe of silver between gray-green foothills, and when the wind shifts, the astringency of pine from nearby mountains is replaced by the barest hint of salt and seaweed.

The breeze carries Angelo’s heartbroken angry wail as well, and Corniglia aches for him. In her first year of teaching she’s learned that the emotions of eight-year-olds are as outsized as their new front teeth, big as barn doors in their little faces. Frowning curiosity, stunned surprise, and joyous vindication appeared in rapid succession on Angelo’s face when she said quietly, “Take Isma to the monastery gate. A man is waiting to see you there.” Before she could tell him the visitor was not his father, Angelo took off up the hillside, Isma running after him, china-faced doll flopping in her hand. “I knew it!” Angelo yelled. “I told you, Isma! I told you Babbo would come!”

Leaning forward to take better advantage of rubbery muscles, Corniglia climbs again until she reaches two small children and the ersatz priest, sitting on a bench shaded by the brothers’ grape arbor. Gravely, Renzo Leoni shifts Isma from one black-gowned knee to the other. “Suora Corniglia! Permit me to introduce Signorina Stefania. Stefania is this many,” he says, holding up four fingers, “and lived in Austria when she was little. Angelo was just telling me about a squadron of British pilots who strafed the school yard on Friday. Blow,” he says, holding a large white handkerchief over the little boy’s nose.

Face blotched by the purple stigmata of childish rage and anguish, Angelo swallows. “What I meant was, they didn’t really strafe us.”

“Well, they might have,” Renzo allows, his sincerity less specious. Switching to German, he asks Stefania quiet questions. She starts to cry, and he pulls her close. “Of course, you were scared! Planes are scary!” He winks at Angelo. “Just like Suora Paura! Angelo, Suora Corniglia has a nickname, too! It’s—”

“— very likely to get Angelo in a lot of trouble if he uses it,” Sister Dimples warns.

Stefania holds up her doll and whispers. Renzo brings his ear closer to her mouth. Stefania repeats something almost inaudibly. “I am requested to tell Suora that Antoinette is also from Austria.”

Word by word, with frequent asides to Angelo and the nun, Renzo draws the little girl out. As the conversation progresses, infant allegiance to her mother tongue begins to loosen and it becomes clear that she understands more Italian than she’s been willing to admit. Gradually, Renzo brings the questioning around to the painful topic of parents. All he can get from Stefania is “They went away.”

Angelo, by contrast, is voluble on the topic, hurt and angry that his parents haven’t visited either. “Angelo,” Renzo reminds him, “I told you— your babbo can’t come yet. He’s locked up, but he’s in a safe place—”

“Well, you should just go and get him out!”

Above the starched white collar, Renzo’s eyes rise to meet Suora Corniglia’s. “It’s not that simple, Angelo.”

Abruptly, Renzo lifts Stefania off his lap, plunks her onto the bench, and limps toward a bicycle leaning against the monastery wall. Between grief and grievance, Angelo stares open-mouthed at his neighbor’s back. Just as stunned, Suora Corniglia’s lips part. You can’t just leave! she thinks, appalled. You can’t just walk away.

As if in answer, Renzo stops and takes a deep breath, willing the fun back into his face. “But wait! I almost forgot!”

Drawing something from a rucksack draped over the handlebars, he returns, hands concealed behind his back. “Which?” he asks. Angelo points to his right. Crestfallen, Renzo moans his dismay. “Too bad! I thought you’d like to have this.”

He reveals a left-handed miracle: an orange. Horror-stricken at having guessed wrong, Angelo’s face falls. Renzo lets him suffer for an instant before tossing it. The fruit, heavy with juice, drops into Angelo’s palm with a thwack, and he tears the peel like a ravening wolf. “Share it with Stefania!” Renzo orders.

Angelo rips the fruit in half and hands Stefania her portion. With the bliss of a soul ascending directly to heaven, the little boy bites into a segment and staggers with pleasure as the juice slides over his chin. Stefania may never have seen an orange before, but the item is demonstrably edible, and she too stuffs orange segments into her mouth, one after the other.

“Suora Corniglia,” Renzo says sternly, “you’ve neglected the subject of table manners.”

Suddenly dizzy, the nun closes her eyes, but summons enough presence of mind to say, “In my defense, there is very little for us to practice on.”

“Sit,” he says quietly. “Put your head down.” She leans over, and hears his footsteps as he walks to the bicycle and back. “Drink this,” he says, handing her a silver flask. She shakes her head. “Don’t argue,” he says, “unless you fancy me carrying you back to the convent.”

Hesitantly, she takes a swallow, coughs, eyes tearing, and hands the flask back. He takes a healthy swallow himself and sits next to her. “There is a special place in hell for the man who invented bicycles,” he says, massaging his knees. Tucking the flask away, he rummages in his pack, produces a second orange, and digs his nails into the peel. The world contracts to the size of the fruit in his hand. She stares, motionless, struggling to keep her head clear. “Eat this,” he says. “Now.”

She does as she’s told. The juice is acid and sweet. When it hits her stomach, she retches. He hands her a canteen of water from his rucksack. This time, she drinks deep. Then she finishes the orange.

He makes the children drink as well, and when they’re done, he folds his handkerchief to a fairly clean spot, wetting white linen with the last of the water. Feinting left, he anticipates Angelo’s dodge to the right. Doing the same for Stefania, Renzo says, “Let’s see if the sisters have done a better job with your religious lessons than with your table manners. Angelo, who were the first man and the first woman?”

Angelo rolls his eyes at how easy this is. “Adamo and Eva!”

“And when were Adamo and Eva created?” Renzo asks, busily cleaning juice from Stefania’s fingers.

Angelo cries, “On the sixth day!”

“Right. And what happened next?” Renzo asks cagily.

Staggered by this evident contempt for his biblical acumen, Angelo yells, “God rested!” with a great show of exasperation.

“Wrong!” Renzo yells back triumphantly. Suora Corniglia blinks, and Angelo scowls. “God rested on the seventh day,” Renzo admits, handing Corniglia the damp handkerchief, “but what happened before that?” Silence reigns. “Before the evening of the sixth day,” he informs them patiently, “there was the sixth afternoon! And what happened on the sixth afternoon?”

Wiping her fingers and refolding his handkerchief neatly, Suora Corniglia bats her eyelashes in a parody of flirtation. “Do tell, Padre! We are breathless with anticipation!”

“I should think you would be,” he says huffily. “On the sixth afternoon, Adamo and Eva and the animals were all sitting around in Eden enjoying the lovely weather when something strange happened.” He pauses dramatically. “The big round yellow light up in the blue place—”

“The sun!” Angelo hollers. “In the sky!”

“Well, you know that, but Adamo and Eva had just been created, remember, and hardly anything had a name, and they didn’t know how anything worked! So when the big yellow thing started slipping down the blue place toward all that green stuff, Adamo wondered, ‘Why is the big yellow thing doing that?’ Eva said, ‘You’re asking me? I just got here myself.’ So Adamo asked the animals, ‘Why isn’t the big round yellow thing sticking up there in the blue place?’ And the animals said, ‘We were hoping you’d tell us!’ ”

“Except,” Suora Corniglia breaks in, “there was one little mouse who just looked at her feet and said, ‘Isma glai!’ ”

Stefania giggles, a tiny silvery sound, and lies back against the black worsted cassock, relaxing into the story. “The big round yellow thing disappeared,” Renzo continues, pulling Angelo onto the bench. “Eden got dark and chilly. Adamo and Eva and the animals were all cuddled up to keep warm, just like this. Santo cielo!” he cries wickedly. “No one is cuddling with Suora Corniglia!”

“Grazie, Padre,” she says smoothly. “I am quite warm enough!”

“Are you sure?” he asks. “Because I’d be happy to—” Stefania tugs the crucifix hanging around his neck and whispers something. “You’re right. I’ll finish the story. So there they were, all cuddled up. Adamo said, ‘I wish God had let us keep that big round yellow thing.’ But Eva said, ‘Well, those new little twinkly things are pretty, too.’ ”

“Stelle,” Stefania whispers.

“Stars! Exactly! But nobody knew that then. One by one, the animals went to sleep. Adamo whispered, ‘What a lot of trouble for God, making that big yellow thing for such a short time.’ But Eva said, ‘He’s the Boss.’ ” Renzo’s tone changes. “What do you think happened next?”

“The sun came back!” Angelo yells.

“The sun came up! The animals stretched and started walking around, mooing, and roaring, and so on. Adamo said, ‘Look, Eva! God made another big round yellow thing, but this time He put it over on the other side of the garden!’ ” Renzo lifts Stefania from his knee, his fingertips meeting across her little back. “What do you think, Stefania? Does God make a new sun every morning?”

She looks at her feet. “I don’t know,” she says. Not, Suora Corniglia notes, “I don’t care.”

“It just goes around to the other side!” Angelo tells her. “You can’t see it, but it’s still there!”

“Yes,” Renzo says softly. “The sun is still there, even when you can’t see it. And your parents love you, even when you can’t see them.” Out of the corner of his mouth, he mutters to Suora Corniglia, “Even when you can’t stand them.”

Corniglia smiles. Renzo stands, groaning when he gets up. “I can’t promise to bring your parents to you,” he says, “but I can promise I will try. Before I go… Angelo, take Stefania over to the bicycle and look in the other bag.”

The children race off. “That was beautiful,” Corniglia says.

“It’s midrash: a story behind a story in the Torah. My oldest sister told me that one when she left home to get married. She was killed last October, trying to get to Switzerland.”

“I’m sorry.”

“Chocolate!” Angelo shouts, dancing with a candy bar. “Chocolate, Suora!”

Renzo looks over his shoulder. “Angelo, you little savage! Offer Suora some!”

“Just share it with Stefania!” she calls.

“Thank you,” Renzo says quietly, “for taking care of them.”

They are not my children, she thinks, but they are a son and daughter for my use. Renzo looks at her so searchingly that she turns away, her veil shielding her eyes. “You’re not a bad fellow,” she hears him say, “for a nun.”

She glances at him. “And you’re not a bad fellow, either. For a fake priest.”

Once again, a slow grin transforms the mournful Renaissance face. Pleased, but aware that she is skirting sin, Suora Corniglia regains custody of her eyes, and keeps them on the path as she strolls with him toward the bicycle.

“Angelo,” Renzo asks, “do you have a message for your mammina?”

Angelo scrunches up his face. Teeth brown with chocolate, he looks at the monastery wall, at the ground, at the arbor. At Stefania. He squints up at his neighbor. “It’s a secret.”

Renzo leans over. Angelo rises on tiptoe, putting grubby little hands around the man’s ear. “That’s a good message,” Renzo says, when the whispering ends. “I’ll tell her that.”

Below them, at the school-yard gate, Suora Ursula rings the brass bell. Well trained, the children race down the hill, knowing the day’s outing is over. Suora Corniglia returns to the bench and retrieves Stefania’s doll, forgotten in the excitement. “You, too,” she tells Renzo, coming nearer. “Get going!”

Not caring if anyone can see them, the black-gowned Jew takes her hand and kisses it, watching her reaction. Challenged, she refuses to pull away and meets his eyes, unflustered. Vanquished, he clutches at his heart and staggers backward, as though struck by an arrow.

“Pagliaccio! Clown!” she says with affectionate reproof, as though he were one of her eight-year-olds. Hiking up the cassock, he throws a leg over the bicycle seat. While he’s busy fitting a clip around his pants leg, she impulsively removes her rosary. “To complete your disguise,” she says.

He holds out his hand, and she drops the plain black beads with their simple silver links into his palm. After a long moment, he says, “Take care, Suora Fossette.”

“I’ll pray for you, Padre Pagliaccio.” She watches him push off, her rosary in his pocket, bicycle tires grating on gravel. “Don’t get arrested!” she calls. He raises a hand without looking back, and disappears over the crest.

THE HUNCHBACK’S HOUSE

FRAZIONE DECIMO

Drying laundry snaps in the breeze. Ravens squabble in the treetops. The garden is green with seedlings. Content in his high-backed chair, Werner Schramm turns his face toward the late-spring sun. The women wear faded cotton frocks, and though he himself is wrapped in woolens to guard against a chill, he feels remarkably well. As long as he doesn’t raise his arms, there’s no chest pain at all.

He’s begun to take short walks, an ambition little Rosina now shares. Plump hands in her mother’s firm grasp, she lumbers with baby industry between Mirella’s legs. “You shouldn’t make her walk too early,” Schramm advises. “Her legs won’t grow properly.”

“Nonsense! She loves it!” Mirella bends to kiss her daughter’s silky curls, and returns undaunted to her topic. “Anyway, you don’t have to be Freud to work it out. All those stiff, raised arms. All that talk about how hard he is. He’s covering something up!”

“You’ll have to excuse Signora Soncini, Herr Schramm.” Lidia pops peas into a bowl and drops the pod into the apron stretched across her lap. “Like everyone who takes Doktor Freud seriously, she seems to have only one thing on her mind. Thank God, her husband will be visiting soon.”

“Babbo’s coming, cara mia!” Skirt ballooning, Mirella swings Rosina up and around. “He’ll see how you go flying!” she cries, delighted when the beaming baby repeats, “F’ying!”

Halfway down the mountain, a church bell tolls. Sunday Mass is over, but the parish choir is rehearsing for some saint’s festa. A polyphonic hymn floats up through air so clear and light so true, Schramm dreams again of painting. Lidia’s dark eyes in their spiderweb of parchment-colored skin. The crescent curls of Rosina’s red-gold hair. Mirella’s cheeks, like ripe peaches beneath freckles she earned planting their kitchen garden. Focus on the near, forget about the distant. War becomes a memory, a rumor, a myth…

“Admit it, Werner,” Mirella says. “Doesn’t the Führer seem sort of— I don’t know… prissy?”

Werner blinks and straightens. “He isn’t married, but there is a woman. She is never spoken of in public—”

“So every girl in Germany can dream that the Führer would choose her,” Lidia says cannily. “My grandmother was in love with Bonaparte.” She reaches into the willow basket for more peas. “She saw him once when she was twelve. He was young then, and dashing. He smiled down at her from his white charger, and she very nearly swooned. Later, he gained weight and lost charm, but for several years, she was enthralled, and kept a scrapbook of his battles.”

Schramm knows these two women better than his own mother or his wife. After months in this isolated house, no topic is off-limits. Female combativeness no longer shocks him, but he still hasn’t decided if it is an Italian trait, or Jewish, or simply Lidia and Mirella. His own wife, Elsa, is a bland, blond memory, but he wonders now if he ever really listened to her.

Looking up, the baby buzzes her lips like an airplane. “Airp’ane, Mamma!”

“Say prego!” both women correct reflexively, and when she does, Mirella rewards her with another swoop through the air.

Rosina is tiny but seems startlingly precocious. She can already tell birds from planes. “My boys didn’t speak so well until they were two,” Schramm says.

“Girls talk early.” Lidia hands the baby a pea pod to gum, to give Mirella a rest. “Renzo had almost nothing to say until he was almost two and a half. He’s made up for it since.”

Refusing to be sidetracked, Mirella asks, “Has Hitler’s secret woman had any secret children? Are there any little Überkinder fathered by the Führer?”

“No,” Schramm admits, “there are no children.”

“Heavens!” she says archly. “He denies his own superior germ plasm to the nation, when it’s every good Aryan’s duty to breed?”

“I think what you suggest of him is not quite correct,” Werner says delicately. “But all his energy is—” He makes a gesture suggesting a funnel. “He puts everything into his speeches. To hear him is almost— scusi, ladies, but it is almost pornographic. He begins very gently. He takes the crowd into his confidence. He speaks, and you think, He speaks to me alone. The others disappear. I have felt this,” Schramm confesses. “Thirty thousand around me, but I felt alone with him. He is like a strong friend who knows your secret thoughts, who is more experienced, more wise. Everyone moves toward him. Your heart is faster, your eyes see only him. His voice rises. He—”

He swells, Schramm thinks. He grows tumescent— larger, more powerful— before your eyes. Your heart and soul open to him, like a girl’s legs. He fills you. Nothing in the world exists but this man, his words, his voice, his power to make you believe, to adore him, to let him do as he pleases with you.

Schramm comes to himself, and clears his throat. “When the speech ends,” he says quietly, “it is a climax. For him. For us. A seduction, and a climax.”

For some reason, Mirella will not meet his eyes, but Lidia is judicial. “ ‘The serpent deceived me,’ ” she quotes aridly, “ ‘and I did eat.’ ”

“I met him once,” Schramm says. “I was invited to the Berghof— his villa in the mountains. He is less impressive in private, except for his eyes. They are not beautiful, precisely, but extraordinary. Hypnotic! But he can be so boring! The same stories, over and over. ‘When I was a soldier… When I was in prison…’ He talks and talks. All night, every night, when others want only to sleep. He knows a great deal about medicine and biology, but much of what he said was not correct.”

Or was simply absurd. A Turkish porter can lift a piano by himself. Humanity depends on the whale for nourishment. Fifty thousand Irishmen went to America in 1641. No one in the Middle Ages had high blood pressure. When their blood rose, they’d fight with knives; now, thanks to the modern safety razor, the world’s blood pressure is too high. Anyone who paints a sky green and pastures blue should be sterilized. Roosevelt’s a Jew. Jesus wasn’t. The Czechs are really Mongolians. Look at the way their mustaches droop. Roman legionnaires were vegetarians and had magnificent teeth.

Rosina starts toward the garden on little hands and knees. “And no one argues with him?” Mirella asks, retrieving her daughter before she can crawl over the zucchini.

“Not twice.” Schramm shudders at the memory. “He said to me— it was very late, about three in the morning— he said, ‘Uncooked potatoes will cure beriberi in a week.’ I said beriberi is unknown among those who eat sufficient meat. He was—” Dumbfounded, Schramm thinks, but he doesn’t know the word in Italian, so he mimes Hitler’s astonishment. “I thought, Wunderbar! He is impressed with my knowledge! So I said also that potatoes do contain some thiamine, but that vitamin is unaffected by heat. Ergo: potatoes need not be raw.”

Brows up, Schramm invites comment. The women shrug: So?

“He began to scream at me!” Schramm says. “There were ten of us that night. No one could move! I was—” He mimes his shock, eyes bulging with astonishment and fear. “For two hours, three hours, he screamed and screamed about the evil of meat, and the absolute necessity of not cooking the potatoes to cure beriberi! I thought he would have me shot!”

“It wasn’t the potato. It was the contradiction,” Lidia says. “Men like that want everyone to marvel at their power and superiority, but they’re terrified of competition. When such a man proposes a footrace, he intends to begin by battering his opponent unconscious with a rock.” Lidia sets the bowl of peas aside. “Tell me, Herr Schramm, what did you do to merit an invitation to the Führer’s exalted presence?”

“I wrote a public health pamphlet on the importance of mother’s nutrition during pregnancy for the fitness of the infant. That was my medical speciality before the war. I made a study of the causes of incorrect infants. He heard of my work.”

Gripping Mirella’s skirt, pulling herself upright, Rosina thumps her mother’s legs. “Mamma! Up!”

Mirella ignores her. “What do you mean by incorrect infants, Herr Schramm?”

“Osteogenesis imperfecta, pes equinus. Meningocele, spina bifida. Pardon— I know these terms only in Latin. Hydrocephaly, microcephaly, anencephaly: heads very large from water on the brain, or very small heads, or without a brain. Also— very small people. Blind, deaf. Such conditions might be an error of heredity, but if good seed falls on poor soil, the results are disappointing. Hitler was interested in this idea.”

“Tell me, Herr Doktor,” says Lidia. “Is idiocy among the defects caused by poor nutrition?”

Mirella flinches, but Lidia’s brows are raised in calm curiosity. “Some forms, yes,” Schramm tells them. “Cretinism and goiter are often together. Both result from deficiency of iodine.”

“P’ego! Up!” Rosina demands.

Mirella pulls her skirt from Rosina’s fingers. “Wait,” she says, first walking, then running toward the hunchback’s house.

Bewildered, Rosina watches her go. “P’ego up! P’ego up, Mamma!”

Schramm asks, “Did I say something wrong?”

Lidia takes her apronful of pea pods to the compost heap and tosses them on top. She says nothing, waiting for the younger woman to return.

When Mirella reappears with a photo that trembles slightly in her hand, Schramm needs only a glance. The anatomical atavisms are unmistakable: almond eyes with medial epicanthic folds. Midface insufficiency with pronounced saddling of the nose. Fat pads like an orangutan’s around the face and neck. If he could examine the child, its palms would surely present the diagnostic undivided crease. “A younger sister, perhaps?”

“My second child.”

“Ach. Unusual for such a young mother. The condition occurs once in, perhaps, fifteen hundred births among women under thirty.”

“Is there something I could have done? Something I should have eaten, or not eaten?”

What can he say? When Langdon Down described the syndrome, the Englishman believed it represented reversion to prehuman stock. Others say such children are evidence of Mongol ancestors, who raped their way across Europe. Modern authorities blame mothers too feeble or exhausted to bear healthy offspring. Wishing to be kind, Schramm says, “The condition is not associated with malnutrition. I know of nothing you could have done to prevent this tragedy. Where is the child?”

Ignored, Rosina begins to cry in earnest.

“There was an accident,” Lidia tells Schramm when it’s obvious Mirella can’t. “Altira died when she was three.”

He draws himself up in the chair, familiar with the sensation of being across the desk from a devastated parent. “Mirella, you must not grieve: I assure you that a mongoloid idiot is better off dead—”

The slap is so sudden, so unexpected, Schramm can only stare.

Mirella snatches back the photograph. She tries and fails to say something. Scooping Rosina up, she stalks away, slamming the hunchback’s door behind her.

Lidia sighs. “Go in there and apologize, Herr Schramm.”

Schramm stands, astonished. “Apologize! For what?”

Lidia leans over to retrieve the wrap that’s fallen from his lap. Shakes its dust out. Folds it loosely in her lap. “You insulted her child.”

“I spoke as a physician, signora! There were many worse things I could have said!” Swept by an ancient anger, he jabs a finger in Mirella’s direction. “Mothers like her— they think only of themselves! They are the ones— they don’t see! They refuse to see!”

“To see what, Herr Schramm?”

The wrecked families. The broken dreams. The teeming institutions, like satanic zoos filled with every sort of biological failure.

Approach the children’s yard: mongoloids and cretins would rush the fence, faces contorted in caricatures of human emotion. Grunting, tongues protruding, their mouths issuing wordless shrieks or meaningless, mindless babble. When they saw you had nothing for them, they’d wander away, sit cross-legged on the ground, clustered together. Drooling, laughing horribly at nothing. Picking up pebbles, eating bits of debris, tugging at the few remaining tufts of grass in the barren courtyard.

There was an entire ward for the hydrocephalics. White plaster walls, white iron cribs, white cotton sheets, and on each white pillow an enormous head. Immense egg-shaped domes tapering to tiny wizened faces connected by birdlike necks to emaciated bodies. His sister Irmgard’s withered little hand would reach through the guardrail to touch his fingers. “I hope it’s sunny tomorrow,” she’d whisper, her voice like a breeze passing through dead leaves. “We go for a walk when it’s sunny.” A walk? Schramm wanted to cry. Hospital attendants pushing high-wheeled baby carriages like peddlers’ carts, laden with grotesque vegetables.

And the nurseries— Christ! The nurseries were filled with the worst that could happen to human zygotes. Babies with gaping holes where their mouths and noses should be. Fragile little skeletons wrapped in a thin layer of blue-white skin the color of watered milk. Spastic, or rigidly immobile. Children so crippled they’d never leave their cribs. So impaired they’d never learn anything. Their only communication was the ceaseless, tearless, wordless moan of those trapped for years in a life of unspeakable, inescapable pain. Free me. Free me. Free me—

“Herr Schramm? Herr Schramm!” Lidia says sharply. “Are you all right?”

“Those children are like a bomb!” he says raggedly. “A bomb that kills the whole family, that breaks everything in a home! All the mother’s time and attention go to the weakest. She deprives her other children of her care. She neglects also her husband. It is natural that he should leave! And for what? A child who will never contribute anything to society!”

When Lidia speaks, her voice is emotionless, factual. “Yes. I knew a mongoloid when I was young. A neighbor’s child. His nose ran constantly. He never used a handkerchief. Disgusting. His tongue was always out. He couldn’t learn to control his bowels.”

“They never do!” Schramm declares. “A proven fact!”

Lidia raises her hands, adjusts a hairpin, tightening the iron-gray chignon. “When Altira was born, everyone told Mirella the condition was hopeless. Some of us also believed—” She hesitates. “I believed the child would reflect badly on the Jewish community. It would give comfort to those who believed us an inferior race.”

Schramm looks away from the level eyes, dry beneath lined and looping eyelids.

“Mirella stood up to us,” Lidia recalls. “You’ve seen how she can be. I told her she was being unreasonable. She said, ‘The world is filled with unreasonable hate. What’s wrong with unreasonable love?’ Sentimental nonsense, I thought, but she kept Altira. Mirella treated that hopeless child like any other beloved baby. The results were…” Lidia pauses to choose her word. “Stunning.”

The wind carries the scent of rock and warming soil. A few meters from where they sit, a hawk rides heat from sunlit crags. Feathers rippling in the wind, the bird lifts one wing and wheels.

“I was surprised by Altira’s sweetness,” Lidia continues, voice light, controlled. “She was often rather boring. All small children are boring, frankly. They love to do the same thing over and over. Altira had a capacity for repetition far beyond the limits of my patience. Even so, there was a light in her eyes.”

The breeze shifts. The hawk rocks slightly, working to maintain his position, yellow eyes sweeping the tangle of spring-green vegetation at the edge of the hunchback’s terraces.

“When I was thirty-four, I had a child— not like Altira, but not … right. When she was born, I swore she’d never be ridiculed as that neighbor boy was. We told everyone the baby died. My husband took her to the Cottolengo Institute near Genoa. She lived there for seven years.” Her chair creaks as she eases sparely fleshed bones on the unforgiving surface. “I never went to see her.”

The hawk stalls for a breathless moment, folds his wings, plummets. In the silence, they hear the brief, small cry of his hapless prey.

“Regret changes nothing.” Lidia waits until Schramm’s eyes meet hers. “Go to Mirella,” she says. “Beg pardon, Herr Doktor.”

Inside, dripping rag in hand, Mirella scrubs furiously at the trompe l’oeil drawings on the wall. When Schramm appears in the doorway, she plunges the rag into the bucket of washwater and wrings it like a chicken’s neck.

“Doctors! Doctors like you— She won’t live, that’s what they told me. But she did. She’ll never talk, but she did, Schramm. Not clearly, I admit that, but lots of three-year-olds are hard to understand! And she understood what we said to her. She was not an idiot!”

A chalk ocean disappears. Rosina sobs. Schramm sinks onto the stone platform near the fireplace.

“They said she’d never walk, but she did. Yes, she was clumsy. So what? Not everyone is a ballerina. She was sick a lot, but everybody gets colds. And yes! I probably did neglect Angelo, but he didn’t need me as much as she did.”

“Mirella, please—”

The washrag, filthy with land and sea, smacks against his shoes. “It’s Signora Soncini to you!”

“Signora, no parent would wish for the kind of children I have— I have seen. If such conditions could be prevented—”

“The race would be improved?” Mirella wipes her nose on the back of her hand. “Homer was blind. Beethoven went deaf—”

“Signora, you don’t seriously believe that a mong— that your daughter could have been a composer?”

“We don’t know what she could have been! She died before we found out!”

Frightened by her mother’s anger, Rosina crawls to Schramm. He bends stiffly and takes the baby onto his lap. Mirella snatches Rosina away.

“Doctors,” she says contemptuously, oblivious to the child wailing on her hip. “You look at people for ten minutes, and you think you know everything about them!”

Less, Schramm thinks. Ten seconds, perhaps? Five?

“Airp’ane!” Rosina sobs, pointing.

“She wasn’t a tragedy, Werner! She was a little girl. She was my daughter. And she loved to dance.”

Rosina squirms out of her mother’s heedless embrace. “Airp’ane!” she cries, patting at the door.

The noise outside grows. A shift in tone: acceleration. “Mein Gott,” Schramm whispers.

“You’re not even listening!” Mirella cries, aghast. “You doctors never—”

They have, perhaps, half a minute. He grabs Rosina, thrusts her at Mirella, flings the door open. “Get out!” he shouts. “Get away from the buildings! Run!” he yells to Lidia, pushing Mirella out the door. “Run for the trees!”

The first Stuka shrieks by. Mirella makes for the woods, the baby clutched to her chest. Head between his shoulders, Schramm runs toward Lidia, grips her arm. A second gull-wing shadow sweeps over the ground. They both stumble when the engine backblast hits them.

Mirella crouches, shielding Rosina with her body. Rosina’s terrified screams join the high-pitched wail of the Stukas, and the rattle of their machine guns. The first concussion nearly knocks Lidia off her feet. Schramm staggers but keeps his grip. The second bomb explodes farther up the mountain.

Fifty meters into the forest, they scrabble sideways, skirting the mountain’s incline, scrambling over vines and rocks. Keep track, he tells himself. Center-mount 500s, away. Four SD70 fragmentation bombs on the wing racks. How many left?

Schramm spots an ancient chestnut. Thin mountain soil has eroded away from a snaking tangle of tree roots, creating a little cave. Pointing, he gasps, “In there!” He takes Rosina. The women crawl through an opening like a Gothic arch made of roots as thick as Rosina’s body. One of the planes lets its rack of 70s go. Stones and dirt shower down through treetops. He hands the shrieking baby in to Mirella.

“Get in!” Mirella shouts. Schramm shakes his head. She and Lidia move to the edges of the little space. “Get in!” Mirella yells again. “There’s room!”

A second rack of bombs falls. The detonations merge into a single titanic blast. He squirms under the tree and wedges himself between the women. “Luftwaffe! They want the partisans, not us!” They nod, trembling. He puts his arms around them.

Another pass: explosions are replaced by the rattle of machine guns and answering small-arms fire. Engine noises doppler away. Six, perhaps eight minutes after the raid began, it’s over.

For a time, only the baby’s hiccuping sobs break the forest’s stunned silence. The adults stare straight ahead, gathering their wits.

When cramped muscles demand movement, Schramm delivers himself like a breech birth, feet first. Mirella hands Rosina through, crawls out on her own, takes the baby back. “Wasn’t that exciting, Rosina?” she cries, voice high with forced cheer. “Santo cielo! What a racket!”

Lidia accepts Schramm’s help, and doesn’t release his hand as they pick their way back through the forest. “They know about San Mauro,” she whispers.

“It was a message,” Schramm says. “We know where you are.”

Mirella, a few steps ahead, holds Rosina close. “Yes, cara mia, those were bad airplanes, but they’re all gone!” she soothes. “You’re such a brave girl! Everything is fine now.”

The hunchback’s house is still standing, and the ramshackle barn no worse. Schramm collapses onto his chair. Lidia sits next to him, equally drained. They watch, slack-jawed, as Mirella swoops the baby through the air.

“What noisy airplanes!” Mirella cries. “Wasn’t that fun?” she asks a doubtful Rosina, whirling until the baby’s short, sharp terror begins to yield to her mother’s insistent merriment and her own sunny nature.

“Extraordinary,” Schramm says, shaking his head when Rosina repeats her mother’s “Flying!” with increasing conviction.

Lidia extracts a handkerchief from her apron pocket, presses it against a flushed and dirty face. Eyes sidelong, she considers the winded German beside her while dabbing at the trickle of sweat slipping down her crepey throat.

Schramm looks down the gravel path that leads toward San Mauro. “Someone’s coming,” he says.

“It’s Don Leto!” Mirella shouts joyously, swinging Rosina around and around. “That means Babbino’s in San Mauro, cara mia! We’re going to see your babbo again, and your big brother!”

A black-clad figure is hobbling hurriedly up the gravel path, and there’s something familiar about the man, but— “That’s not Don Leto,” Schramm says. “The limp is wrong.”

Lidia shades her eyes with both hands. “Old as I am,” she notes drily, “there are occasions when I am forcibly reminded that I have not yet seen everything. That’s my son. In a cassock.”

Renzo waves to them briefly before Mirella reaches him. Hands on her shoulders, he speaks quietly and at some length. Mirella puts the baby down, and sits heavily on a tree stump. Rosina babbles. Mirella sketches a smile, her face crumpling as Rosina crawls off to play.

“Her husband,” Schramm supposes.

“Poveretta,” Lidia whispers.

Leaving Mirella, Renzo approaches, limping heavily. “Schramm! You’re looking less cadaverous! And Mamma.” He kisses the thin-skinned downy cheek Lidia offers. “Pale, but otherwise undamaged?”

She reaches out to grip his hand. The long, uneven breath he exhales is the only sign of the dread that drove him to sprint the last half kilometer up this mountain. “Iacopo?” she asks.

“Arrested. Just bad luck: he was raked up with forty other hostages.” Still trying to get his breath back, Renzo unbuttons the cassock and tosses the sweaty woolen garment over the laundry line. “Mamma, exactly how bored are you—?”

“Don’t move,” she says.

Schramm and Renzo follow her stare. Half-buried in the soft soil of the garden, the bomb’s stablizing propeller rotates slowly in the breeze. Straddling it, arms wide, Rosina makes buzzing noises with her lips. “Airp’ane!” she announces happily.

Lidia fastens a clawlike hand on Renzo’s arm. “She doesn’t know you. I’ll go. Keep Mirella away.”

Mirella hears her name, sees Rosina, rushes toward her. Renzo blocks her path. “No!” she screams, struggling as Renzo lifts her off her feet. “Rosina, no!”

Lidia moves steadily through the garden. When she is close enough to hear ticking, she glances over her shoulder. Schramm and Renzo have manhandled Mirella behind the hunchback’s house. Bending at the knees amid feathery carrot seedlings, Lidia points toward the sky. “Rosina!” she says. “See the airplane?”

The baby looks up. Lidia seizes the child under the arms, steps over the bomb, and starts for the stone barn. The ticking pauses. The baby is heavy but Lidia hurries, thin old legs stumping along decisively.

They’re just inside the door when the blast lifts her off her feet for a weird, short sail through the air. There is no sensation of impact, only the need to keep Rosina in her arms. Her shoulder goes numb when she hits a bale of hay, but she hangs on, curling around the baby while they’re pelted by stones and dirt.

Straw is still falling when the others reach her. Schramm stoops to feel along Rosina’s limbs. The baby is crying, but there’s no blood, and she’s safe now in her sobbing mother’s arms. Ears ringing, Lidia reads Schramm’s bleached, anxious face, his moving lips: She’s fine. She’s fine! Are you all right? “Yes, I think so,” Lidia says, faintly amazed by the whole experience. She will be badly bruised, no doubt, but she’s too keyed up to feel pain.

Renzo helps her stand, holds her briefly. Schramm looks more shaken than she feels, and says something. Lidia taps her ears and shakes her head. “I can’t hear you!”

They make her sit on a hay bale. She paws bits of straw from her hair while Schramm examines her. Renzo spots her spectacles, straightens the frames, and puts them on her face. Still laughing, she catches sight of the view beyond the barn, and her face loses its shape.

The garden is a crater. The chairs she and Schramm sat in a minute ago: vaporized. The laundry posts have remained upright, the rope bizarrely in place. Renzo’s cassock lies twenty meters away, unscorched, in the weeds. Diapers smolder nearby. Smoking-hot chunks of metal are everywhere: jammed between the stones of the house and barn, embedded in trees, littering the ground. “A miracle!” she says, stupefied. “A miracle.”

Werner Schramm has witnessed the phenomenon in others many times: the buckling knees, the helpless weeping. Under fire, your training takes over. When the danger’s past, the shaking and crying begin. Renzo stands behind Lidia, his hands on her shoulders, both of them taking in the devastation. Mirella’s forearm makes a seat for Rosina’s bottom. Her other hand cups the back of her baby’s head, fingers lost in red-gold curls. So ordinary. So normal. But they might have died half a minute ago…

Schramm wipes his eyes, ashamed of going to pieces. “Cataplexy,” Schramm tells the others, tears spilling. “It’s nothing. Reaction. Truly. Just reaction.” But the recoil intensifies as he looks from face to face. Lidia. Renzo. Mirella. Concerned. Understanding. Sympathetic. The faces blur. He knows who they are, but he cannot see them. They become, with terrifying ease: items, categories. Jew, too old to work. Jew, able-bodied. Jew, with child. Left. Right. Left.

Sinking in a heap on the packed dirt of the barn floor, he gives himself up to the weeping, until he hasn’t strength for more. Finally, exhausted and empty, he pulls himself together and sees two adolescent boys. Out of breath from their long run, they stare at what’s left of Mirella’s garden. Lidia goes to them. A hurried conversation, and she points to Schramm. They come toward him, their anxious faces pinched by shock. They take his arms, lift him to his feet, pull him toward a path that leads to the Cave of San Mauro.

“You have to come!” they are saying. “We need a doctor!”

The sun has dropped behind the mountains on the other side of the valley when Renzo emerges from the hut with the household’s sole remaining chair. He settles it onto a patch of level ground, making a courtier’s sweeping gesture, and Lidia accepts the seat. They are alone. Rosina is napping, Mirella beside her. Schramm, depleted by the events of the day, has sent word from the cave that he’ll stay tonight with the San Mauro Brigade, which has sustained its first casualty.

Renzo shakes a cigarette from a package of Nazionales and offers it to Lidia. “What happened to that silver cigarette case?” she asks.

“Sold it.” He leans over with a match. “I sold Zia Elena’s credenza, too.”

She dismisses the news with a queenly wave. “All that carving! Made me think of skin diseases.”

Cigarette dangling in the corner of his mouth, he lowers himself to the weedy ground, using his hands to ease his knees as he stretches out. She holds her own breath until he leans back on his elbows and his face relaxes. Smoking in companionable silence, they watch a flock of swallows dive murderously through clouds of insects.

“I saw Angelo a few days ago,” Renzo says, tapping ash. “He has a little girlfriend. Austrian, probably Jewish. About four. I asked Angelo if he had a message for his mammina. He wants his parents to adopt Stefania. He said he was ‘practicing up on being a big brother.’ ”

“Eight-year-olds can be rather sweet little people. Does he miss his parents?”

“Yes, and—” Renzo shakes his head at his own foolishness. “I may have a way to get his father out of jail, if you—”

“Very.” Lidia sends smoke upward.

“I’m sorry?”

“Just before Rosina and I took our first flight,” she reminds him drily, “you asked how bored I am. Very,” she repeats. “I am very bored, and I want to go home!” They are both surprised that her voice is shaking. “Well, look around!” she cries, waving at the bomb crater. “How much more dangerous could a city be? I can help you, Renzo. Old women are practically invisible, and that gives us a kind of power.”

Who else is there? He is a member of no group, working alone, making things up as he goes. He pulls out a flask. “To the death of chivalry!” he says before offering it to his mother.

She sips delicately, returns the flask. Steadier, she asks, “So what do you have in mind?”

He watches the sky turn from gold to pink, and waits for the liquor to do its work. When benign indifference has claimed him, Renzo gestures carelessly at the twilight. “What color would you call that? Would you say that’s ultramarine or—”

“Renzo, darling,” Lidia says wearily, “don’t be an ass.”

“Mamma,” he says grandly, “we have two tasks before us, and you may have your choice of them. One of us will go to jail, while the other blows up a building.”

Lidia Segre Leoni was the first woman in Sant’Andrea to ride a bicycle in public. She started smoking in 1916 and kept it secret for a decade, even from her son. She has faced down German officers and led their soldiers into ambush. She reaches for Renzo’s flask and tips the last of its contents into her own mouth. Eyes watering, she hands it back. “Going to jail, as I recall, is your speciality.”

5 June 1944

PORTO SANT’ANDREA

10:15 A.M.

Relaxed, tanned, and looking a good deal the better for his month at some mountain spa, Ugo Messner waves a languid hand toward the Mediterranean a thousand meters below. “Bombing has improved this place!” he decides. “The vista is enlarged. There is a breeze.”

A rabbit-toothed waiter delivers Artur Huppenkothen’s breakfast: Cognac and coffee. To his sister Erna’s dismay, Artur routinely ignores the heavy meal she prepares each morning and comes instead to the Café Vittorio, where white-coated waiters serve patrons in dove-gray uniforms or smartly cut suits. Artur never used to drink, and he himself blames Messner for encouraging the vice, but Ugo can do no wrong in Erna’s eyes. Her reproaches are for her brother alone.

“What could be better, Artur?” Messner asks, brushing bread crumbs from his fingers. “French brandy, Ethiopian coffee, Italian sun, and German power!”

“What’s left of it,” Artur mutters sourly.

Messner’s voice drops. “Is it true then? Rome has fallen? Kesselring’s retreating toward Florence?”

All last month, the war in Europe went quiet. Italy was especially calm, until a witch’s cauldron of nations suddenly attacked the Gustav Line. Americans, British, Canadians. Australians, New Zealanders, South Africans. Bolsheviks from France, Poland, Russia, Yugoslavia. Indians, Senegalese, Moroccans— Negroes, given guns by Aryans! Now Rome is lost, and the Führer has allowed a retreat from the USSR as well. Rubbing a hand over his forehead, Artur says, “Greater Germany is shrinking by the hour.”

“More reason to take advantage of present circumstances,” Messner advises quietly, brandy in hand. He pauses to appreciate a young woman strolling by in a tight tan skirt. Fabric cups her buttocks, and she is wearing high heels. Her flesh rises and rests, rises and rests as she walks. “No place to hide a bomb in that ensemble,” he remarks, “but I imagine sentries enjoy making sure.”

The slut brushes past a pair of patrolling soldiers. Both heads turn. A brief conversation, and they change direction. She stops when they call, smiling at the taller soldier, casually reaching into her blouse to adjust the strap of her brassiere. A canvas-draped army truck rumbles through the piazza. Artur loses sight of the three just as a bicyclist approaches from the opposite direction, bearing down on the café.

In an instant, Artur is on his feet, his pistol at arm’s length.

The bicyclist brakes frantically, going down in a tangle of limbs and spokes. “Don’t shoot!” he begs, both hands in the air. “Per favore! Bitte! Please, don’t shoot!”

The child’s eyes are huge with terror. He is nine, perhaps. Or ten.

From a distance, Artur hears Messner say, “Relax! It’s just a boy!” Artur fires anyway, to kill his own emotions. The gunshot makes everyone jump, but the bullet goes wide and the weeping boy runs away, abandoning his bicycle in the street.

“That’ll teach the little bastard to look suspicious!” Gently, Messner extracts the gun from Artur’s fingers, placing it next to a china plate flecked with the shards of a crusty roll. “Lugers— the latest thing in wartime flatware!” he announces, smiling amiably at the military men around them.

One by one, the patrons of the café return their attention to their own tables. Messner catches the eye of the rabbity white-faced waiter, points to his empty Cognac glass, raises two fingers. “Too much espresso, Artur!” he chides. “It can make a man jittery.”

“So can living in a city filled with assassins! I could clear this region of Reds in a week if von Thadden would get out of my way. He’s stalled for half a year, when anybody could see they’ve been operating out of the north end of Valdottavo. I arranged for a Luftwaffe raid myself when he wouldn’t take action. He went whining to Kesselring.” Artur lifts his upper lip in distaste. “No clear lines of responsibility! No coordination,” he says, mimicking von Thadden’s cultured tones. “Now everyone reports to Kesselring. Gestapo, army intelligence, Waffen-SS, the security police, Kripo. We’re the generalfeldmarschall’s Anti-Partisan Warfare Staff, and precisely nothing gets done!”

“Surely a handful of partisans can’t make enough mischief to be a military threat!”

“They’re better armed every day. Every gun they carry is taken from the hand of a dead German soldier.”

“My dear Artur, the weapons are stolen. Italians are thieves, not warriors! They sing Puccini and eat pasta. They make love, Artur. They don’t fight.”

“They disrupt supply lines and communications. They’re holding down troops that could have been on the Gustav Line.” When the waiter sets their brandies on the table, Artur downs his own in a single gulp. “They’ve attacked German and Italian military headquarters,” he whispers, “and blown up Gestapo offices.”

“They’re a rabble,” Messner insists. “Incompetents. Degenerates! The explosions must have been Allied bombs on a time delay—”

“Quiet!” Artur orders sharply. His eyes are unfocused, but it’s not the liquor. “Quiet!” he shouts.

Waiters freeze, trays tucked under their arms, coffee cups poised. Patrons scowl, but they follow the Gestapo chief’s eyes upward.

They hear what sounds at first like a column of trucks, but there is no grinding shift of gears. Just a low, steady groan, high and far away. Wehrmacht officers and SS men come slowly to their feet, linen serviettes falling unnoticed from their laps to the cobblestone pavement. Waiters stare, amazed, as the cloudless Ligurian sky begins to fill with tiny silver sparks, winking like stars in blue daylight. Ten, twenty, fifty, a hundred: squadron after squadron of American aircraft. Two hundred, three hundred. Bicyclists slow, put down their feet, gaze upward. Five hundred. Six! Heavy bombers, fighter escorts. Pedestrians stagger slightly and lean against stone walls, heads thrown back, mouths gaping. “Madonna,” a waiter says, voice loud in the dense silence that envelops the piazza. Seven hundred! Eight hundred, nine hundred… All on their way to Germany.

“I make it just under a thousand planes— for a single raid,” Messner breathes, awestruck. “More than the entire Italian air force had at the beginning of the war. God help whoever’s under that…”

Around the corner, just out of sight, an Italian baritone begins an ironic rendition of “Deutschland über Alles.” There is an angry Teutonic shout, a defiant retort in Italian. A gunshot. A high-pitched scream, cut short by a second bullet. A Sturmbannführer nearby raps his knuckles on a café tabletop by way of applause. “Well done!” he growls as a new-made widow’s wailing joins the drone of Allied engines. “That ought to shut those opera singers up.”

Always the first to recover from such shocks, Messner snaps his fingers at the rabbity waiter, who still hasn’t moved a muscle. “You there! A round of brandy for everyone!”

Cognacs are quickly distributed. Messner stands, glass raised. “Our faith in the Führer remains unchanged!” he declares with stout volksdeutscher sincerity. Officers and officials greet the toast with a murmured, “Sieg heil.” Glasses are drained.

Loyalty demonstrated, Messner moves his chair to sit at Artur’s side. “Have you come to a decision regarding the arrangement I spoke of last month?” he asks quietly. “The corduroy is first-rate, Artur. Fine wale, with a hand like velvet. Bolts of it locked in a warehouse. Getting that Jew fabric to Germany would be a service to the Vaterland, Artur. Another winter is coming.”

Messner’s voice is low and smooth in Artur’s ear. “Think of Erna!” he urges. “She never complains when others prosper, but I know she loves beautiful things. She is a good woman— I’d ask for her hand, but she deserves better! Where’s the harm?” Messner presses softly. “Corduroy to keep German children snug this winter. A postwar nest egg for Erna, and for the man who might have been my brother-in-law, were I more worthy.”

Artur watches the planes disappearing into the distance. Why are the pilots willing to bomb fellow Aryans? he wonders, at a loss. They should be standing with us against Bolshevism! Stalin and his Jews’ll turn on them— wait and see. They’ll regret what they’ve done to us when Ivan kicks in their doors!

“The war will end eventually, Artur. You must think of your future, and Erna’s.”

Beneath the shimmering white tablecloth, Messner’s thigh is warm. The touch is casual, probably inadvertent. Artur shivers slightly. “Trucks are hard to come by,” he says, his lips hardly moving. “The best I can do is a ’38 Opel Blitz.”

With the barest motion of his hand, Messner taps Huppenkothen’s glass with his own. “Fifty-fifty?”

Artur’s glance flicks toward the other patrons. “Sixty-forty.” He presses a heavy linen serviette against skin misted with sweat, then stands. “Drop by my home at noon. Erna will have an envelope for you.”

SANT’ANDREA MUNICIPAL JAIL

11:45 A.M.

When Jakub Landau stopped at a routine roadblock on the way into Sant’Andrea, he still had an out-of-date work permit identifying him as Hans Obermüller. He’d nearly bluffed his way into the city when the Republican soldiers discovered anti-fascist pamphlets sewn into the lining of his jacket, and turned him over to the carabinieri. Tomorrow il polacco will be shot.

Iacopo Soncini is the only one who knows that the condemned man is a Jew. Landau himself considers the fact of no interest. “I am a Communist,” he replied when the imprisoned rabbi identified himself as a clergyman. “Religion is a drug.” Drawn by Landau’s eerie equanimity, Iacopo asked the source of his calm. “The individual does not matter,” he was told.

In the shadow of death, Landau has talked— to pass the time and, perhaps, to be remembered. His mother was German, his father a Pole working in Germany when they met. “When Mama died, Papa took me and my brother back to Kossow, but we spent our summers in Offenbach, visiting my mother’s parents.” Landau served two years in the Polish army and obtained an engineering degree from Warsaw Polytechnic, but his childhood German did not fade. Like his father before him, he found work in Berlin.

The Depression hit; foreigners were the first to lose their jobs. Landau went home, married a Warsaw girl, had a daughter. “Her birthday was the first of September,” Landau told Iacopo. “She turned three the day Germany invaded in ’39. The news spoiled her party.” Guests huddled around Landau’s shortwave as Radio Berlin announced that the Wehrmacht had crossed the border “in retaliation for an attack on Germany by Poland.” They laughed— actually laughed— at the absurdity!

Absurdity or not, Polish corpses soon rotted on the streets, and hospitals overflowed with wounded. Air attacks went on around the clock, and when the Wehrmacht was close enough to shell the city, the Soviet army invaded along Poland’s eastern border. Occupation was certain; by whom was unclear. Bodies bloated in the late-summer heat, and exploded hideously. There was no food, no electricity, no water, no sewer service. The bombardment ended, and the tanks rolled in.

“The Nazis made a big show of handing out bread. There were journalists, cameras,” Landau recalled. “I heard one reporter say that the German people were compelled to feed the hungry population of Poland due to the criminal neglect of the Polish government!” The cameras didn’t show that the bread was a centimeter deep in mold. Nor did the reporters mention that the food depots near synagogues were called rat traps. “Poles were given moldy bread, but Jews were given beatings.”

Everything of value was confiscated— a fancy word for stolen. Everyone had to register, so the population could be sorted into racial categories. “Poles of German ancestry were given Jewish farms and factories,” Landau said. “They could ride in trains, they ate well. Overnight, the Volksdeutsche were kings! Most couldn’t speak a word of German, but I could.” White-blond, with glacier-blue eyes, he told the authorities he was a civil engineer, a Pole of German ancestry whose identity papers had been destroyed in the shelling. A week later, he was working for the Reich, answering to the name Hans Obermüller. Nerves stretched tighter every day, he supervised the repair of bridges in Warsaw, in German-occupied Estonia and Finland, and finally in Berlin. At the end of 1942, he made a dash for southern France. When the Italian Fourth Army retreated across the Alps last September, Landau was with them, and arrived in Italy the day its own occupation began.

“And what of your family?” Iacopo asks now.

“I sent my wife and daughter to live with my father in Kossow. I could visit them because trains ran nearby. I thought they would be safe.”

The heat in the jail is oppressive, but Iacopo shivers at the echo of his own decisions. “Tell me their names,” he whispers. “If I live, I will look for your family and tell them of your fate.”

“They’re dead,” Landau says without emotion. “The Germans sent everyone in Kossow to a place called Treblinka.”

All the rabbi can summon is the most exalted of banalities. “Surely, they are with God.”

Around the room, conversations and card games stop. Two hundred prisoners packed into the jail stare while Landau laughs, loud and long. Amused and indulgent, the Pole shakes his head, wipes his eyes, and waves their interest off. Smiling tenderly, he pats Iacopo on the arm, like a father soothing a child. “Rebbe,” he says, “what I have seen would make an atheist of Abraham.”

TAVERNA IL DUCE

12:40 P.M.

The Fascist tavern near the seawall is crowded and noisy, filled with men who pay cash for what they want. At a corner table, Santino Cicala waits with a bersagliere in civilian clothing. His name is Giuseppe Farini. Santino pretends he doesn’t know that. It makes Farini feel better. The black marketeer is so nervous, he’s smoking his own stock. Every pack of Milites can buy a thick stack of occupation lire, but this will be the biggest risk he’s taken so far. He glares at the door. “Where the hell is that drunk?”

“He’ll be here. He’s got a lot of things to arrange—”

Everyone smiles when the couple comes into view. A handsome Italian whose suit coat is tossed over his shoulders and sways with every jaunty step. A homely Fräulein, weak with laughter, made vivacious by his interest. Gallantly, the man who calls himself Ugo Messner pulls out a chair for Erna Huppenkothen, greets a couple of fascisti, mimes friendly recognition to other patrons. When his companion is settled, he leans over to whisper in her ear. Something he says provokes a scandalized shriek, and he weaves through the tight-packed tables, disappearing into the gabinetto at the back of the bar.

Santino follows, but waits outside. The Jew always locks the door while he takes a piss. When the latch slides back, Santino slips inside. “Va bene?”

The whispered response is ebullient. “Benissimo! Ottimo! Perfetto!” Messner hands Santino a packet of transport papers. “There’s an Opel Blitz waiting at the Gestapo motor pool. They’re expecting you. When you’ve finished loading the cargo, bring it to the alley just this side of the Cuneo bridge. We’ll meet you there— What’s wrong?”

Santino stares at the key in his palm. “I can’t drive.”

“What?”

“I didn’t know you wanted me to drive the truck! I thought you just wanted me to load it!”

Messner’s liquorish urbanity explodes into half-vocalized profanity so appalling, Santino bumps into the wall, trying to move away in the tight space.

“I’m sorry, signore! I didn’t—”

The eyes close, and a hand goes up. “Forget it,” Messner says tightly. “It’s my fault. I should have— It doesn’t matter.” He cracks the door open. “Where’s Farini?”

“In the far corner, near the kitchen. Out of uniform, and shitting-his-pants scared.”

“Good. Heroism requires fear, Cicala, which is why I am incapable of it. Stay here for a few minutes, so we don’t look like we’re together. I’ll work on Farini.”

When Santino emerges from the W.C., Messner is back in the middle of the fascisti, the Fräulein hanging on his arm, enchanted. “But do you know why so many people hate the Jews?” Messner asks the others. “Because Jews think they matter! What they say, what they do, what they believe. Even when they don’t believe in God, Jews think their disbelief is significant. It’s positively comic, and intensely annoying to the rest of us.”

At the table by the kitchen, Giuseppe Farini is standing like a figure on a pedestal: shoulders back, head high. Glancing at Santino, he throws a few bills down on the table and lifts his chin toward the door. “Let’s go.”

“Where?” Santino asks.

“To the Gestapo motor pool, and then to the mountains,” Farini says in a low firm voice, gazing at Messner with a look just like the Fräulein’s. “I’m through eating German shit,” he swears. “And if the Allies come? By God, I’ll fight them, too.”

Santino catches Messner’s eye. Grinning, Messner lifts a glass toward Farini. “Who will join me in a toast to heroes?” he shouts. “Bartender! A round for everyone!”

Songs and jokes and funny stories follow. He entertains the clientele, well aware of the impression he and Erna make. An aging girl with good connections. A shameless gigolo. Loose, happy, careless. No one seems to notice his sweating palms.

Ugo Messner may drink as much as any sot can swallow, while Padre Righetti wears a mask of fearless honesty and must never stagger or slur his words. Suspended between them, Renzo measures the capacity of each. Half sober, he can just keep up with the swift cunning and momentary ingenuities his restless mind provides. Half drunk, his nerves are steady, and all the chances seem worth taking.

He doesn’t always get the balance right. He awakens, now and then, fully dressed in a hooker’s bed, with no memory of what he said or did the night before. Head splitting, mouth foul, he fingers his clothing, deciding who and what he should be. Smooth serge? Don Gino Righetti will be ashamed, the troia tolerant and amused. If the rougher fabric of Ugo Messner’s linen suit comes to hand, she’ll be polite. Either way, she’ll be happy, paid handsomely, for a quiet night’s sleep. Thus far, neither of his alter egos has exposed the mohel’s work to the professional scrutiny of an unknown whore. Unmanned by liquor, he is also unbetrayed.

Back in Abyssinia, after the Dolo hospital raid, he could drink for hours, and still have a woman or two. On leave in Addis, he favored the girls pimped by a displaced Russian prince who kept women in a row of doorless mud-brick cabins. He drank before. He drank after. He hardly ever ate. He couldn’t stomach sooty Ethiopian flatbread rolled around raw beef and red pepper, but he learned to love the tedj. Cheered on by other pilots, he drank that stuff without swallowing, his throat open as a drainpipe. Tanked to the top, he’d take on another of the Russian’s harem. Then, sufficiently disgusted, he’d locate a bar frequented by the lower ranks and pick a fight with an infantryman of promising bulk and evident ferocity, hoping to end the evening dead.

Pilots fly now by the hundreds, kill by the thousands. It would be easy to lose his grip on guilt, but he clings to this one truth: greater crimes do not excuse his own. When the murder of forty-three people no longer matters, civilization is extinct. His shame is the last vestige of honor in a vicious, barbaric world. He drank in Addis to kill his conscience. He drinks now sacrificially: to keep remorse alive.

And because his legs hurt. And because getting drunk is the only pleasure left to him. And because his hands shake less.

He’ll quit soon.

But not today. Today he’ll once more seek that golden land where reckless genius lives! Timing’s critical. The schedule’s tight. He’s made one mistake already, and can’t allow another. He checks his watch, makes his farewells. May I walk you home, Fräulein Huppenkothen? Of course— the dressmaker. Compliment her for me. You always look wonderful. Take care, my dear. I’ll be away on business a few days. Ja, klar, mein Schätzchen! As soon as I get back.

A splash of cold water in the gabinetto. An espresso on the way out. A surreptitious change of clothes in Giacomo Tura’s cleaning closet. And Padre Righetti emerges from the basilica ready for responsibility. One blackbird in the city’s flock, he walks across San Giobatta’s piazza. Lifts his shark-finned hat to a pair of nuns who incline their heads as one. Raises his hand in bogus blessing over a pair of Jewish children selling holy cards to trusted Catholics on the steps of the convent. Hiding in plain sight, as Padre Righetti suggested.

He passes unremarked through checkpoints and roadblocks, progress unimpeded until he approaches the municipal jail. There the carabinieri take pains to examine papers with ceremonial attention. The queue files forward a few steps each minute, stalling completely when an old woman insists on explaining her business to them.

“My son outgrew these!” she says with a vague, worried look, clutching a bundle of rags. “I have to find a mother with an older boy and a younger one,” she confides. “She can have my son’s clothes for her little boy— I’ll trade them for her older son’s things.”

“Signora,” the policeman protests kindly, “your son must be a man by now. It’s been a long time since he outgrew anything!”

Bent and bony, the old lady hugs the bundle to her sunken chest. “My son outgrew these!” she says, quavering voice more insistent. “I have to find a mother with an older boy and a younger one! She can have my son’s clothes for her little boy, and my son can wear her older boy’s clothes!”

People begin to mutter. Smiling benignly, Gino Righetti steps out of the queue and comes to the carabiniere’s side. “Let her pass,” he says, sotto voce. “She’s just a crazy old lady, figlio mio. Completamente pazza.”

“I heard that!” the old woman snaps. The carabiniere nods them through, and Renzo takes her by the arm. “A priest should know better! You’re very badly brought up!” she scolds. “Let go of me! I have to find a lady with an older boy and a younger one!”

“Don’t upset yourself, signora.” He steers her toward a crude wooden bench placed beneath a high, barred window of the jail, where he tips his biretta to wives and mothers and sisters waiting their turn to stand on the bench and speak to their menfolk inside. “I’m sure these ladies will let you sit here and rest, signora,” he suggests soothingly. “When I’ve finished my work among these poor prisoners, I’ll come back for you, all right?”

Suddenly cooperative, she allows him to take her bundle. He jams it between the heavy wooden bench support and the wall before addressing the other women. “If this lady wanders away, go with her, my daughters.”

They glance at one another, at the bundle, at the old lady, whose eyes are clear now, and focused.

The earliest part of the jail was solidly built of sturdy sandstone blocks. This new wing was slapped up in a hurry to deal with a glut of wartime prisoners. The women are separated from their men by a poorly mortared wall, post-and-beam construction filled with brick and stone rubble, lightly frosted with stucco.

“Sì, Padre!” the women murmur. “Sì, certo! Whatever you say.”

SANT’ANDREA MUNICIPAL JAIL

4:05 P.M.

Once a week, a priest comes to hear confessions and say Mass. Iacopo Soncini pays little attention when a new one enters the large, open room and moves through the crowd from prisoner to prisoner, speaking quietly. Whenever a priest approaches, the tattered charcoal man is humble. “Nothing to confess,” he always says. “No chance to sin in here, Padre.”

“Now, there’s a shocking failure of imagination!” this one replies. “I found any number of illicit activities to pursue in jail! Bribery, lying, theft, gambling…”

“Renzo!”

“Shut up and listen carefully: the outer wall is going down in about five minutes. There’s a truck waiting at the Cuneo bridge. Mirella and the children are at Mother of Mercy. If we get separated, go there and ask for Suora Corniglia—”

“We have to take him with us,” Iacopo says, pointing. “He’ll be executed tomorrow morning. He’s a Polish Jew, but he speaks German.”

“That’s a Hebe?” Renzo stares. “Belandi! I never would have guessed! All right, he can come, too. Get behind that partition.” He jerks his head at the sandstone, once the exterior of the old prison. “Stay there, and don’t look back!”

Quietly directing prisoners toward safety, Renzo works through the crowd. When he reaches the Pole, the man barely glances at him before saying, “Non sono cattolico. Sono ebreo.”

“How nice! So am I,” Renzo answers in quiet German. “Even with the rabbi over there, we’re seven short of a minyan, but as God told Moses, Don’t just stand there praying, cross the sea! The wall you’re leaning against has three minutes to live.”

A slow, hard smile forms on the Pole’s lips. “I knew the CNL would send someone.”

“There’s an Opel Blitz waiting at the Cuneo bridge— Wait! The Committee for National Liberation? Verdammte Scheisse! Porca Madonna—” There’s no time to think, let alone sort out which language to swear in. “I’m freelance, understand? Not CNL! I just came for the rabbi. We’ll get you out of Sant’Andrea, but then you’re on your own.”

Beginning to wish Padre Righetti had bought some sacramental wine, Renzo leads the last few men behind the wall. There he pulls out the small black book Don Osvaldo provided, lifts the missal in his left hand, crosses himself with his right.

Inside, a hush falls. Outside, a furor rises.

“I have to find a lady with an older boy and a younger one!” a familiar voice insists. “Don’t push her, you cafone!” a younger woman shouts. “She’s an old lady!” another yells. “How dare you treat women like this?” a third demands.

Renzo begins the chant. “Introibo ad altare Dei.”

“Ad Deum qui laetificat juventutem meum,” comes the responsum.

“You should be ashamed!” a woman yells. “Would you treat your mother like that?” someone asks. “She can have my son’s clothes for her little boy!”

“Do me justice, O God, and fight my fight against a faithless people. From the deceitful and impious men, rescue me!”

Serafino Brizzolari’s rumbling bass voice joins the soprano chorus, as planned. “Ladies! Ladies, please! I’m sure we can resolve this difficulty—”

“Signor Brizzolari! Tell these men they can’t treat us so rudely!”

“Ladies, please! I must insist that you all follow me—”

“…lucem tuam et veritatem tuam: Your light and Your fidelity shall lead me on and bring me to your holy mountain.” How apt, Renzo has time to think.

The high, barred window is replaced by brilliance. The bottom of the wall erupts. The sensation of motion ends almost before he can register it. Slammed backward, blinded by the flash, he lies immobile, his lungs stunned and airless.

Someone lifts him to his feet. Blinking stone powder and stucco, he puts out a hand to feel his way forward, trips over something soft, stops to wipe blood and dust from his face, and winces at a metallic stinging sensation, like needles thrust into his skin. His left eye clears long enough to see a thin man on the floor, screaming from within a skull, its face flayed by the blast. All the sounds seem far away, as though heard underwater. His right eardrum is probably broken.

“— ome on!” It’s Iacopo, hair singed and pale with dust. Lost again in a red haze, Renzo lets the rabbi guide him toward the breach. His lips and nostrils and eyes burn. Lime in the mortar, he supposes. His left eye clears long enough to see women converging on the mob of men who tumble out of the jail. Everyone is shouting and running, creating as much confusion as possible.

“Belandi!” Renzo shouts, hilarious with relief that he’s not blind and probably won’t be completely deaf. “We did it!” And everyone seems to have lived through it— apart from that poor faceless bastard who looked back at the wrong moment. There but for the grace of God, and an extra five meters’ distance from the blast—

A brick hits his shoulder. The upper portion of the wall is beginning to collapse.

Iacopo yells something and grips Renzo’s arm. The ground levels beneath them. The stink of explosives and burned hair recedes.

Renzo pulls the cassock skirt up and dabs tentatively at the mess above the Roman collar. He isn’t frightened by the amount of blood soaking into the black serge. No worse than the Libyan crash, he supposes. Head cuts bleed like hosepipes.

Another swipe at his eyes, and he catches a glimpse of his mother standing at the edge of the crowd, waving. He raises a hand to let her know he’s seen her. “My mother’s over there!” he yells, but the rabbi doesn’t seem—

Two more explosions penetrate his muffled ears. Gunfire crackles. Women scream and scatter. Someone clubs his leg out from under him. Dumbfounded, he tries to get up. Hands seize him, the fingers like iron grapples in his armpits, dragging him over the cobbles. Booted feet pound past. He lifts his head, sees his mother coming: a force of nature, determined to reach him.

“Mamma! No!” he screams. “Get down!” Above and behind him, he hears Santino shout something at Iacopo. Iacopo grabs his legs. “Wait!” Renzo screams, bucking and kicking. “Mamma, get down!”

All around them, bullets sing and smack into masonry. Santino scuttles backward, stumbling when the body in his hands goes suddenly slack. The face above the dog collar is white. “Madonna! Did he just die?”

“I don’t think so,” the rabbi gasps, trying to keep a grip on a leg slick with blood. Landau catches up with them. “What happened?” Iacopo yells. “Why did—?”

“We had attacks planned all over the city. They must have thought the jailbreak was a signal.” A young man in laborer’s clothing tosses a pistol to Landau, who begins firing to give them cover. “Go, Rebbe!” he shouts. “Get to the truck!”

Around the corner, Giuseppe Farini waits with the Opel ready and running. He jumps out to release the tailgate when he spots Santino with a bleeding priest. “Gesù! What the fuck happened?”

Santino pushes the body up into the truck, heedless of the cargo its blood will spoil, and gives the rabbi a boost as well. “Drive!” he yells.

Farini starts for the cab.

“Wait!” Iacopo shouts, pointing.

Jakub Landau sprints down the alley and dives headfirst into the truck. Slamming the tailgate into position, Santino dashes for the cab.

The Opel lurches forward, and they’re on their way: a fake priest, a genuine rabbi, and the regional political officer of the Italian Committee for National Liberation, along with cargo officially bound for Germany, all transportation papers stamped “Highest Priority” and signed by Artur Huppenkothen.

Improbably jabbed and prodded by the bolts of cloth beneath him, Jakub Landau feels through the layers and pulls out a 9mm Beretta. Unfurling a roll of fabric, he finds seven more pistols. Concealed in the center: two carbines nestled like lovers, stock to barrel. Counting quickly, he makes an estimate. Fifty bolts of cloth. Four hundred Berettas, a hundred rifles. He snakes an arm downward. Crates of ammunition, beneath it all. A bonanza.

The rebbe is on his knees putting pressure on the gunshot wound in the bogus priest’s thigh. “We have a good medic in the mountains,” Landau yells.

Up in the cab, the driver downshifts to handle a steeper grade as they drive out of town. The engine noise adds to the ringing in his ears, but Landau can read the wounded man’s lips.

Italians, he thinks, smiling to himself. It’s always Mamma with them.

Summer 1944

SAN MAURO BRIGADE FIELD HOSPITAL

VALDOTTAVO, PIEMONTE

The dream usually begins the same way. Duno is alert, but never scared. The planes will make a wide turn, he expects, then double back for a second run at the Roman bridge in Roccabarbena.

He hears the rattle and ping of gunfire hitting stone, sees Nello Toselli, still tubby despite a winter of hunger, racing bullets to the cave. Two planes flash overhead, German crosses, black on white, under the wings. Nello’s screams are lost in a series of deafening explosions.

Duno kneels at Nello’s side. The air reeks like a barnyard. The ground is brown and rust and red. Nello is facedown, his pants sticky with blood. Holes in his back and buttocks gape through the torn fabric like lipsticked mouths. Duno rolls him over. Loops of glistening bowel tumble out. The colors are astonishing. Maroon. Crimson. A bright spring green. Yellow, like chicken schmaltz.

This is where the dream can change. Most nights, the others gather to stare at the crater in Nello’s belly and groin. Someone vomits. “Go get la nonna’s doctor!” Duno yells.

Nello whimpers, “Mamma, it hurts.” Something in his gut breaks. Bright red arcs out of the body in pulses. Duno flinches when his face is splashed with hot blood, and wakes up.

Sometimes, though, the dream is different. He shouts for boiled salt water, washes dirt from the intestines, stuffs them back inside. Nello sighs. His face loses its clenched look and relaxes into a blank repose. On those nights, Duno sleeps better.

No one could have saved Nello. Duno knows that now. A swill of blood and bile and shit obscuring the field means ruptured viscera and ripped vessels. “Reassurance is your last gift,” the German doctor told him. “Speak calmly and quietly to the wounded man, and go on to someone else.”

Nearsighted, without spectacles, Duno Brössler is no good with a gun, but he isn’t squeamish, and he’s not afraid of blood. He can look at great ragged cavities left in pulpy flesh and simply… go to work. He has, quite likely, saved six lives under terrible conditions, and made it possible for them to return to battle. To do that, Jakub Landau told him, is as though Duno himself were six soldiers.

Since Nello’s death, Duno has spent countless hours studying the anatomical drawings Doktor Schramm improvised on the plaster walls of la nonna’s house. The chalk sketches were almost beautiful. “In combat, you won’t see this,” Schramm warned. “Bullets make a mess.” Welling blood is venous; pulsing blood, arterial. “Get the bleeding under control first,” Schramm told him. “Find what leaks.” Put direct pressure on the wound— pad your hand with clean cloth if you have it. “Don’t cut a tubular structure,” Schramm said. “Never close the jaws of your scissors if you can’t see their tips.” A rapid pulse and pale blue gums? Shock: raise the feet, keep the trunk warm. Use iodine for disinfectant, liquor for anesthetic. When neck wounds bubble and chest wounds suck, stitching the blue-rimmed hole won’t help. Convulsions signal cardiac arrest. Fixed, dilated pupils confirm death.

I ragazzi: the boys. That’s what the Valdottavese still call the San Mauro Brigade, but there are no boys left, not since Nello Toselli died. They’re men now, even those too young to shave. Since the air raid on the cave, they’ve moved every few nights, on the run, but not afraid. They coalesce for planning, split up to carry out raids. There were awful casualties at first, but they’ve developed a strategy that’s been consistently successful. They choose a road, blow up the next small bridge over a stream, and take the high ground nearby. Then they simply wait for a German column sent to investigate. It’s always preceded by two soldiers on motorcycles. Just as they realize the bridge is out, you shoot them to pieces, collect their weapons, and take the bikes. A couple of hours later, two German trucks carrying twenty men and small cannons will appear. Hold the high ground, shoot them to pieces, collect their weapons, their ammunition, and the trucks. Four hours later, two Tiger tanks arrive. By that time, you’re long gone: better armed, and scattered into a dozen ravines. The Übermenschen never change their tactics, and it’s costing them the war.

“We’ve got the Nazis on the run,” Duno tells the man he’s working on. “Rome is free, and yesterday the Allies invaded France. Radio London said it’s the largest invasion in history.”

The wounded man is conscious, but hasn’t said a word. The right side of his face is swollen to twice its normal size. Duno rinses the cloth in hot water, presses it against the half-formed scabs. When they’re softened and looser, he can pry them off and get at the bits of stone embedded in the skin.

Blood starts to flow again. The rabbi looks ready to pass out. “Head lacerations bleed a lot,” Duno tells him. “Don’t worry. These are superficial.”

“He’ll be all right?” the rabbi asks.

“Sì, certo!” Duno says, audibly confident for the patient’s sake.

In fact, the leg looks angry. Streaky, reddened. Sepsis could be setting in. “You can’t be sure,” Schramm told him. “Sometimes the body defeats an infection.”

Today Duno has the luxury of shelter for the operation, even if it’s only a barn. There’s a fire, boiling water to sterilize the knife, brandy for anesthesia, the rabbi to assist. Duno motions, and the rabbi hands him the grappa. “Drink up,” Duno says, putting the bottle into the wounded man’s hand. “I’m going after that bullet.”

The fingers refuse to grip. The man works to speak clearly through fattened lips. “Do wha’ y’have to.”

Duno looks at the rabbi. “Help me roll him onto his side, then hold him steady.” They cut the blood-crusted trouser leg neatly, so it’ll be easier for la nonna or Nello’s aunt to repair. The entry wound is small, above and behind the knee. There’s no exit, just a huge bruised lump halfway up the thigh, in front. “The bullet is lodged here,” Duno says, palpating the front of the thigh. “I’m going to cut across the skin and take it out from the front,” he warns the patient. “I’ll be quick.”

Concentrating, Duno hardly hears the shout of pain when he slices through the bruise. Two more passes through granulated blood, and the blade strikes lead. “Hold as still as you can,” Duno says, using the knifepoint to midwife a slug through his incision. The man gasps, shudders convulsively, goes limp.

“Just as well,” Duno remarks, popping the bullet out. “Easier to sew when they’re unconscious.” He cleans the entry and exit wounds again, painting them with iodine, suturing. “This isn’t so bad, really. I’ve seen bullets pulverize the bone, rip the arteries, blow big chunks out of the meat.” Duno glances up. “Sorry, Rabbino. Put your head between your knees.”

With the leg bandaged, Duno starts digging grit out of the face, hoping to be done before the man comes to. It’s tedious work. “Somebody told me this is la nonna’s son,” he says to pass the time and distract the rabbi.

“He is,” the rabbi says. “Was. She’s dead.”

Duno’s hands freeze. He looks down, and realizes that the wounded man is awake beneath his fingers. “How?”

“Cross fire,” Renzo Leoni says. “Finish wha’ you’re doing.”

They move him twice, maybe three times. Always at night. The moon is quartered once, gibbous the next time. For a while, he’s hidden in a wine cellar, where cool, moist air does battle with a fever that threatens to burn him to the ground. Iacopo seems never to leave his side.

“Where’s Mirella?” Renzo asks.

“Suora Corniglia found a place for her and the children. She sends her love. Drink this. Then rest.”

“Go home. Go… wherever they are. Leave me alone.”

An outdoor bivouac, next. Shards of sunlight shattered by twisting leaves, falling like glass into eyes emerging from bruised lids. The Austrian boy comes and goes. Once Jakub Landau visits with a delegation from the CNL, hoping to recruit la nonna’s son; it is a mistake il polacco will not repeat.

Days become weeks. She sends her love. Mirella? Or Sister Dimples…

He hears conversations. Actions taken, casualties sustained and inflicted. Now and then, an adolescent comes near, pats his shoulder, and says, “I got one for her, comrade.”

By August, he can walk with a crutch. They move to Castello Ritanna, a long-abandoned hilltop fortress. “Some of the smaller rooms are intact,” the Austrian kid tells him. “We’re using them as a more permanent hospital.”

One day Schramm appears in a stone doorway, comes close, kneels at Renzo’s side. The German is professional at first. “Straighten the leg. Good. Flex it, so… Yes. Excellent.” Fingers probe the wounds. Renzo’s face is turned from side to side, its pitted, livid surface inspected. “The boy did a good job.” Schramm rocks onto bony haunches. “I am sorry about your mother, my friend. She was a remarkable woman.”

What is there to say?

September 1944

FRAZIONE SANTA CHIARA

VALDOTTAVO

16 SEPTEMBER

The first time she saw the blood, she thought that she was dying. Her father was still alive then, and Claudia ran to him, weeping, but he turned away from her distress. Tercilla Lovera rushed from the henhouse to see what the trouble was. Albert Blum elbowed his daughter. “Tell her,” he mumbled, and hurried off, embarrassed.

Tercilla listened, wiped her rough hands on a worn apron, and put horny palms on either side of Claudia’s wet cheeks. “Cara mia,” she said, “nobody ever dies of a nuisance.” That was the good news. The bad news was, it would happen every month, over and over. For years. “If it stops,” Tercilla warned, “you’re going to have a baby.”

Wonderful, Claudia thought while Tercilla taught her how to fold the rags. War isn’t enough? I have this to worry about, too?

A day or two later, Pierino brought home a set of safety pins he bought at Tino Marrapodi’s store. The pins made things easier, but Claudia couldn’t look Pierino in the eye for a week.

From then on, when she and Bettina walked down to barter cheese for pasta at Marrapodi’s, old men looked up from their cards or touched their caps when Claudia passed. Sometimes if she looked over her shoulder, she saw them measuring her hips with their eyes. “You’re a woman now,” Zia Tercilla told her. “Like Caesar’s wife, you must be above reproach, or men take advantage.”

The month her father died, Claudia herself was so sick with typhus that the bleeding didn’t come. Bereft, feeble, wretched, she sobbed, “I don’t… want to have… a baby. Papa’s gone! And I’m… too young!” So Zia Tercilla explained the rest. “Is that all?” Claudia demanded with soggy resentment. “Are there any other little surprises?”

“Wipe your nose,” Tercilla said. “The surprise is, it can be nice, if you have a good man like my Domenico.”

By late spring, things were back to normal, and while Claudia wasn’t exactly glad, she welcomed evidence that she had her health back. Kneeling now on a broad, flat rock at creekside, she weights her rags with stones and lets the water start her work. Washing them is a distasteful chore, but she’s gotten used to it. Like squatting on a pair of planks to relieve herself above a public cesspool, the nuisance and mess are simply part of life in Valdottavo.

It’s a life she’s made peace with, a life she feels ready for. She’s worked beside Tercilla and Bettina for nearly a year, kneading bread dough, sorting dried beans, beating flax, spinning wool. Since Claudia’s engagement, Tercilla’s constant instruction has become more emphatic. A housewife must know how and when to plant each kind of vegetable in the kitchen garden, what pests to watch out for. How to fertilize with chicken droppings without burning the crops. And how to preserve and store produce, and make cheese, and—

There’s time, Claudia tells herself firmly. I’ll learn what I need to know.

She and Santino will always be different— a Jew, a Calabrian. They will be without blood ties in the valley, but they won’t have a legacy of grudges and suspicion to overcome either. After the war, Santino will be a sought-after mason. Claudia is already a member of the community: Tercilla’s honorary niece, cousin to Bettina and Pierino. People on Pierino’s postal route say, “Ei! postino! Send your cugina Claudia to write for us!” Pierino can read, haltingly, the rare letters he delivers— you don’t need a right hand for that— but Claudia does the writing.

The letters are nearly all the same. “Dear Son, we have no word of you since 1942. It’s summer, so we don’t worry now that you have no blanket. We pray to the Madonna you’ll come home from Russia before winter.”

Parents nod gravely when Claudia reads their words back to them and watch solemnly as she folds the letter into its flimsy envelope, inscribing it with the last known address of their missing boy. In return for the paper, the ink, and her trouble, they give Claudia an egg or a bit of cheese, and offer prayers for her fidanzato Santino. Claudia, too, has a man at risk.

She worries about Santino, naturally, but in a way that feels pleasingly adult and serious, and anyway, the war will be over by Christmas; that’s what everyone says. Sitting back on her heels, she lays a sliver of soap next to twists of cloth, stacked like cordwood on a dry rock. “Ecco!” she says to no one. “That’s done for another month.”

The skin beneath her breasts is greasy with sweat. She looks around, listening, but hears only the raucous rattle of cicadas. Satisfied that she’s alone, she quickly strips off her blouse and leans out over the creek, still slightly amazed by her own body. She scoops cool water over her breasts, onto her face, down her neck, into her armpits. Hiking up her skirt, she squats to soap between her legs. This is why Mama went to the mikveh every month! she realizes. To feel clean. To start time ticking again.

In no hurry to get back to the village, she sits on a boulder and watches leaves flutter and twirl on their stems as her fingers work at the buttons of her blouse. Once anonymous, the plants around her are familiar now; she knows Don Leto’s book from front to back. Laburnum alpinum, typical of subalpine mountains, she thinks. Rosa pendulina. Geranium sylvaticum. Saxifraga rotundifolia. The Latin binomials are like poetry. All the creekside plants are native, but nearly everything in the gardens is from America: tomatoes, potatoes, corn, squash, peppers. What on earth did Italians eat before Columbus?

Closing her eyes, she listens to the creek. Its hushed noise reminds her of applause for a symphony heard on the shortwave. The mountain is her orchestra now. She knows its music well—

Her eyes snap open. The first cry sounds almost like a birdcall, but so many songbirds have been trapped for food… She stands, straightens her skirt, moves away from the water’s babble, listens harder. A squeal this time. Or a bleat, like a lost goat might make.

Curious, cautious, she steps from rock to rock, crossing the creek to the other side of the ravine. She hears rough laughter, and she knows— already, she knows— but she makes her way to the top. Heart pounding, she raises her head just high enough to see, just long enough to be sure. Then she runs for home.

“The Germans were kicked like dogs south of Rome, but they pulled back in good order to the Trasimeno Line,” Santino says, drawing a finger across his shin. “They held the Allies there two weeks, but pulled back again to Arezzo.”

“We hhheard they’re d-d-dug in along the Aaarno,” Pierino says.

“The Gothic Line, they’re calling that one. A lot of men from Liguria and Piemonte were sent there to build walls, gun emplacements, watchtowers. That’s probably where your husband is, signora. I hope he’s all right.”

Tercilla nods, flattered by the attention. She’s heard that southerners are almost Arabs and keep their wives locked up, but Santino is respectful, full of news yet calm and steady. He always brings something from the city for Tercilla and Bettina. Little cubes of sugar this time, each wrapped in tiny pieces of paper with German words on them.

As much as she loves her son, Tercilla can see why Claudia prefers the stocky stonemason. Pierino is better looking and has a good job, but you have to balance that against the stutter and the missing arm. And the nightmares. With four girls to marry off, Tercilla never expected to have trouble settling her son. “Be patient, woman,” Domenico used to say. “When the widows and orphans know who they are, any man with a dick and a job will be a prince.” Now Tercilla is the one who waits to know if she’s a widow, and she’s lucky to have Pierino’s salary, even if it’s paid by the Fascist government. “That’s money the repubblicani won’t have for bullets,” Don Leto told her.

She cuts wedges of tomatoes, thick slabs of chestnut bread and thin slices of cheese, and sets them on the table between the men. “Would you like some wine?” she asks them. Stretching, she takes down a bottle, and her new wineglasses.

Tercilla wouldn’t like to think of herself as a war profiteer, but a lot of city people snuck into the hills this summer, hoping to swap small treasures for food. She took a silver spoon for a half liter of olive oil. That’s been a disappointment, darkening day by day until the only nice thing about it is the fancy design on the handle. But the crystal glasses she got for a small wheel of goat cheese! Those sparkle like new snow when the morning light hits them.

“The Germans pulled four divisions out of Italy to fight in France,” Santino is saying. “That should make things go faster here. But the British generals are…” He shrugs and shakes his head. “The Canadians broke through the Gothic Line in August. They lost four thousand men, but the British Eighth didn’t back them up, and when the weather got bad, the Canadians had to withdraw. The fascisti I work with thought it was a gift from God!”

“Th-the G-germans’re d-drrrilling hhhh—” Pierino holds up his hand, to ask for time. “Hhhholes! Under th-the P-p-ponte Antica.”

“The Roman bridge at Roccabarbena,” Tercilla clarifies, pouring the wine.

Santino takes a sip and nods his compliments. “Whenever they pull back, they blow up bridges behind them, to slow the Allies down.” He brightens. “That means they don’t think they can hold the Gothic: they’re getting ready to retreat north.” He addresses Pierino, one soldier to another. “Germans are dangerous, even after they’re gone. They leave booby traps everywhere. Mines hidden under cans of food, or pieces of chocolate, or soap. Even under dead bodies! Pick something up, there’s an explosion. You should watch them up here, so you know where the traps are.”

“Wwwwhy exp-p-plosssives?” Pierino makes an arc through the air, and then points underneath it.

“Under the bridge?” Santino recites from memory. “ ‘An arch is two weaknesses that, leaning together, become a strength.’ That’s what Leonardo said. Bridges are built for a load from the roadbed, so they’re hard to damage from above, like when planes drop bombs. But if you weaken the span from below—” He stops, his homely face almost breaking in half around his gappy grin. “That’s her!” he says happily. “I just heard Claudia outside!”

She bursts into the house, rushing past them for the rifle Santino gave her to seal their engagement. “Pierino! There are soldiers—”

Both men are on their feet when she turns, the carbine heavy in her hands. “Santino!” she says, astonished. “Thank God! There are soldiers doing something terrible to a girl!”

Santino reaches for the ’91 to check the chamber. “Where? How many are there?”

“Six of them. I’ll show you where.”

Pierino grabs a second strip clip of ammo from a shelf. Bettina appears in the doorway, eyes like eggs. Tercilla grips her daughter’s shoulders roughly and spins her back outside. “Go tell Cesare Brondello,” she says. “Then hide, Bettina! And stay hidden!”

They are working in pairs. One kneels on the girl’s shoulders while the second pumps away. Two are done. A blond corporal smokes. A private buttons his pants. Both call encouragement while the next, slack-mouthed and rapt, waits his turn. The youngest hangs back, and the blond corporal punches him in the shoulder. “What’s the matter?” the blond asks. “You some kind of queer?”

Twenty meters above, Claudia urges in a tiny, frantic voice, “Shoot them, Santino! Make them stop!”

Tercilla shakes her head. “He’ll hit the girl.”

“The b-b-blond first,” Pierino whispers.

“Second,” Santino says. The carbine’s well oiled: the bolt slides back noiselessly. Motionless as the rocks that hide him, Santino braces against a tree trunk. Listens to the blubbery little noises the girl makes each time the boy rams into her. Watches, unblinking, until the soldier sags.

Santino breathes out, finger tightening on the trigger. The other Germans give a ragged cheer when their comrade grins for the last time, rolling away from the girl. The side of his head sheers off.

Before anyone can react, the blond’s jaw disappears. Bone and blood fly from his neck. He tumbles backward, hair like ripe hay in a patch of sunlight.

The girl on the ground convulses, scrabbling away on her elbows and heels like a crab. The third bullet goes high. The fourth smashes into a knee and travels straight up the leg. The wounded soldier shrieks. Panicking, the others return fire, but can’t work out where the rifleman is.

One grabs the girl, jerks her onto her knees, crouches behind her. Two others race for cover. Tracking ahead of the slowest, Santino brings him down with a lucky shot. The youngest disappears into the woods, and keeps on going.

Pierino lifts a rock the size of a loaf of bread and scuttles along the ridge. Santino loads the second clip, and nods. Pierino pops up, flinging the rock like a discus. It smashes down through leaves and brush. The German with his arm around the girl’s neck wheels to face the noise.

It’s a poor angle. Santino goes for a body shot. The round goes sideways through the boy’s back. His grip on the girl flies open. His screams join hers, and those of the castrato.

“How many more?” Santino asks. “Where are the others?”

“Two dead, three wounded,” Tercilla says grimly.

“One ran,” Claudia tells him as Pierino returns.

“Fffinish them,” Pierino advises.

The girl is rigid with fear, her half-nude body gaudy with brilliant red and sickly yellow. It can’t get worse for her. Santino takes a deep breath. Lets it out slowly. Sights. Squeezes. Once. Twice. Three times.

Claudia and Pierino bolt down the slope. Pierino kicks bodies and collects sidearms while Claudia leads the girl up the slope. It’s Maria Avoni, Tercilla realizes, disgusted. Blouse ripped, legs bare, Maria’s face is all open mouth and dirt and tears. Everybody knew something like this would happen, and the little tramp has put the whole of Santa Chiara at risk, coming up here to do her dirty business.

Neighbors arrive in groups of two and three. Some carry knives. Old Cesare Brondello has a shotgun. When he sees the bodies, Cesare sends his granddaughter back for picks and shovels, and goes to Claudia’s fidanzato, digging a rag out of his own back pocket.

“Wipe your mouth,” he says, when the Calabrian’s done emptying his stomach. “You never killed before?”

Pasty-faced, Santino shakes his head. “Only animals.”

“Then nothing has changed,” the old man says. “We’ll bury the bastards, but you’d better say good-bye to Claudia. You can’t stay here.”

Five minutes, Claudia thinks. We had five minutes, and now he’s gone off somewhere with Pierino, and who knows when we’ll see each other?

She and the girl are ankle-deep in the creek. The other women stand at the edge of the water, talking behind their hands while Claudia sluices soapy water over a young body frighteningly like her own. “Sit down,” she says. “I’ll wash your hair.”

“I’m dirty,” the girl says angrily, nails scraping at her thighs. “There’s still dirt.”

“Those are bruises.” Claudia dips the rag into the water over and over, searching for blood and brains in crevices, behind ears.

“I want to confess!”

“You didn’t do anything wrong,” Claudia tells her, glaring at the village women, whose eyes shift away. “My name is Claudia. What’s your name? Tell me your name.”

“Maria,” the girl says, breaking down again. “Like Our Lady. Like the Virgin!”

Tercilla waits with a dry cloth. “Get dressed. You’re clean.”

“No! I’m still dirty. I want Don Leto! I have to confess!”

“Maria, listen to me!” Claudia cries. “You didn’t do anything wrong! It was the soldiers—”

“But I agreed!” Maria wails. “He promised— We were hungry, and I agreed!” She looks at the others, her eyes pleading. “But just to one— not to six! Not to six!”

Old and young, the women of Santa Chiara look at one another, and then at Claudia, who is still pure. You see? their faces ask. You see what happens? Guard your virtue, or you’ll end up like that little slut Maria Avoni! Maria can see it in their eyes. “You think I don’t know what you’re thinking?” She wipes her nose on the back of her hand, defiant now. “Puttana tedesca! Go on, say it! German whore!”

Suddenly furious, Tercilla Lovera splashes into the creek and hits Maria hard, twice, across the face. “God help you!” she snarls. “God help us all, when the Germans find out what you have caused!”

HEADQUARTERS, SS-PANZERGRENADIER

2ND REGIMENT

12TH WAFFEN-SS WALTHER REINHARDT DIVISION

ROCCABARBENA

The sun sets. Europe’s airwaves fill with coded transmissions. Snow on flowers; grass on high hills; bright birds sing. The images of poetry, drafted for war service. Opera, too, has been dragooned. On Radio Berlin, Siegfried sings of reforging his father’s broken sword: a German counteroffensive is cleared to begin twelve hours later. Tonio declares his love for the Daughter of the Regiment on Radio London: some partisan band can expect a British airdrop, this time tomorrow night. The telephone exchange between Erhardt von Thadden and Helmut Reinecke seems an ordinary conversation about Reinecke’s baby daughter, by contrast.

“Ach! I almost forgot,” von Thadden says. “My Martina sends greetings to your dear wife, and apologizes for a missing line in that recipe she sent on Wednesday. It should begin, ‘Boil the macaroni.’ ”

“Thank you, Gruppenführer,” says the recently promoted Standartenführer Reinecke. “Will you be joining us for dinner on Sunday?”

“Nothing would please me more.”

Kinder und Kuchen conscripted for war work now.

Allied commanders have finally learned Blitzkrieg. Fluid lines, fluid operations. Commanders encouraged to be bold, to let armored columns break through wherever possible without worrying about flank protection or supply. Vast numbers of Wehrmacht troops have been encircled. The Red Army is on the Prussian border, the American fifty kilometers from Köln and the Ruhr. Soviet factories churn out three thousand planes a month, and nearly as many tanks. American armament plants run around the clock. “They can add rooks and knights and bishops to the board on every play,” von Thadden said, “and Germany has no pawns left.”

The two men have been close from the day Reinecke became von Thadden’s adjutant. Not quite father and son but kindred spirits, they’ve disagreed on one issue alone: conduct of the antipartisan war. Reinecke argued for the lure, hoping to win anti-Communists to their side. Von Thadden gave it a fair trial, but every kilometer lost to the Allies has given comfort to the insurgents. Bolder by the day, they’ve accounted for thirty thousand German casualties since May, nearly matching the numbers lost to the British Eighth and American Fifth Armies. “It’s time for the cudgel,” Reinecke conceded. “Allow me to wield it, Gruppenführer.”

For the first time since he left Russia for Italy, Helmut Reinecke is back in the field, no mere lieutenant but a Standartenführer at the head of a panzergrenadier regiment. With five thousand of von Thadden’s men under his command, Reinecke has used the early weeks of his new rank well: deploying troops, positioning artillery. “We are to hold northern Italy, at all costs,” he told his company commanders, and he read to them Kesselring’s latest orders, with particular emphasis on their final lines. “The situation in the Italian theater has deteriorated to such an extent that it constitutes a serious danger to fighting troops and their supply lines, as well as to the war industry and economic potential. The partisans are a motley collection of Allied, Italian, and Balkan soldiers, and even German deserters who lead native civilians of both sexes, of different callings and ages. The fight against them must be carried out with the utmost severity. I will protect any commander who exceeds our usual restraint in the methods he adopts against the partisans. A. Kesselring, Field Marshal.”

Gruppenführer von Thadden will arrive on Sunday evening. The action is scheduled for the following Wednesday. Everything is settled, but the plan receives added impetus when Reinecke’s own adjutant— a laconic man named Scheel— appears at the office door with a dispatch. On a routine patrol this afternoon, German soldiers from the San Mauro garrison were ambushed by local farmers. A savage firefight ended with five Germans dead. A sixth escaped to report the squad’s massacre.

The Geneva Convention could ask no more. Quickly Reinecke dictates the wording of the notice to Scheel. “Print five hundred,” he orders. “I want them posted by dawn.”

CHURCH OF SAN MAURO

17 SEPTEMBER

Leto Girotti lifts his eyes, extending, raising, and joining his hands together. Bowing his head, he turns to face the congregation once more and makes the sign of the cross over them. “Benedicat vos omnipotens Deus: Pater, et Filius, et Spiritus Sanctus.” Some six hundred of the faithful sing their “Amen” with the choir.

“Et verbum caro factum est,” Leto chants. The congregation genuflects as a body, except for one man at the back of the church. Sixtyish, nearly bald, shoulders heavy with ax-muscle, his face the color of roasted chestnuts, the leathery skin gullied by sun. Battista Goletta is not here to worship.

Leto finishes the service by rote and returns to the sacristy to devest. He is in no hurry to deal with Battista, but when the time comes, Leto musters warmth and welcome. “Battista! How wonderful to see you at Mass. I have prayed for this day, figlio mio.”

“Don’t give me that crap, Girotti.” Battista thrusts a printed notice into Leto’s face. “This is your doing, priest!”

By the time he’s finished reading, Leto’s voice is steady. “These are lies. Those soldiers were violating a girl. A good man caught them in the act— I won’t say who, but it’s someone you know yourself, Battista.”

“Whoever he was, it’s him or the whole valley.” A short, thick finger jabs hard into Leto’s chest. “Give the Germans what they want,” Battista says softly, “or I’ll tell what I know about you and that Commie cousin of mine.”

“I don’t believe you,” Leto says as firmly as he can. “Attilio Goletta is your own flesh. His son Tullio is your godchild! You wouldn’t betray them!”

Battista’s eyes bore into Leto’s. “When il Duce made me a Knight of Labor, I took an oath to support him. I don’t go back on my word just because the Allies are winning.” He glances up the mountainside. “And tell those Communist bastards this: I’ve already made a statement to someone reliable. If anything happens to me, he’ll make sure they pay.”

Six months ago, Leto knew every partisan by name. No longer. Volunteers have poured into Valdottavo. Some are from other valleys, or Milan, or Turin. Some are deserters from Mussolini’s Black Brigades. Others wear squares of red cloth tied around their necks. Few know the priest by sight, and a cassock guarantees nothing. Ragged and underfed, each eats time with suspicion, but Leto dares not hurry them. Fail to convince a sentry of your honesty, and from where he sits, he can detonate an explosive around the next bend.

The cutoff to the crumbling little castle is hidden by trees and vines, netting and brush. By the time Leto reaches it, his leg and a half ache enough to distract him from both worry and prayer. Another sentry challenges him, and with patience born of exhaustion Leto explains his business once more, and then again, to a boy guarding the heavily camouflaged gate. This time, at least, it’s a local kid— one of the younger Brondellos. “Sì, certo, Padre,” he says. “See that doorway? He works in the hospital.”

Inside half-ruined walls, Castello Ritanna bustles with more activity than it’s seen since the fifteenth century. Leto stumps across the courtyard, determined to beg forgiveness humbly and accept whatever help or advice the other man is willing to give.

He enters a cool and shadowy stone chamber where men rest on pallets, recovering or dying. A frightened boy begins to cry, believing a priest’s been called to administer the last rites. From the back of the room comes a low, familiar voice. “Relax, kid, he’s not here for you.”

Sitting on a milking stool, Renzo is feeding soup to a man whose hands are bandaged. Spoon poised, he waits for the priest’s eyes to adjust. “Don Leto,” he says with soft mockery, “you’ve been avoiding me.”

Swallowing, Leto asks, “May I speak to you in private?”

Renzo hands the spoon to one of the walking wounded and slowly pulls himself to standing. Together, they limp across the courtyard, Renzo asking clipped questions, Leto providing brief answers. The Soncinis? The rabbi and his family are reasonably safe; Leto won’t say where. Tomitz? Leto hasn’t heard from him recently, but Osvaldo surfaces only when he has to. The refugees? More German pressure— three sweeps last month, but no one caught. Italian bus drivers have refused to transport Jews from a concentration camp north of Florence; with attacks on the Gothic Line, the Germans have let that situation go for now. Money? Still coming across the Swiss border.

The tension between them does not ease until they each use the same maneuvers to sit on a crude log bench without putting pressure on a bad leg. Renzo shakes his head and waves a hand at the tumble-down castle. “An appropriate setting for a couple of wrecks like us.”

Leto tugs a sheet of tightly folded paper from beneath his cincture. Printed in German and Italian, the ultimatum is blunt. “Five German soldiers were murdered by assassins near the village of Santa Chiara, district of Borgo San Mauro, on 16 September 1944. The killers must be handed over to German authorities, along with the bodies of the fallen German soldiers, by noon 19 September 1944. Failing that, the harshest of reprisals will fall upon Valdottavo. Order issued and signed, Standartenführer Helmut Reinecke.”

“Reinecke! He used to be von Thadden’s adjutant. Porca bagascia! I don’t suppose I have to say it.”

“You warned me this would happen. No one is more aware of that than I! Renzo, it was Santino Cicala. Claudia discovered six Germans raping a local girl. Santino killed five. One man got away.”

“Belandi.” Renzo sighs. “I’d have done the same, but I’d have missed more than one. Cicala must be a hell of a shot.”

“What should I do now?”

“Where’s Santino?”

“I don’t know. These notices are posted everywhere— he’s bound to see one.”

“You’re assuming he can read well enough to understand them.” Renzo uses both hands to shift his leg. “Go back to the rectory. Telephone Antonia Usodimare. Santino may have gone back to her boardinghouse in Sant’Andrea. The partisans will get the word out, too.”

Leto’s heart sinks. “Then you believe he must turn himself in.”

“Belandi, no! That’s exactly what I don’t want.” Renzo gets to his feet. “I know Reinecke, and his C.O. Let me see if I can work something out.” Renzo whistles sharply and waves to a young man loitering nearby. “Find Tullio Goletta for me!” He turns to Leto. “If Santino shows up, send him to the hunchback’s house, understand? He’s to stay there until I tell him different.”

“If Renzo says he can work something out, he probably can,” Osvaldo Tomitz told Leto last year. “Give that man a handful of snarled fishing line, he’ll knit you a trawler, and there’ll be fish for supper.”

Leto has begun to agree. Who but Leoni would have imagined getting a truckload of arms and escaped prisoners out of Sant’Andrea? And with the Gestapo’s help, no less! The death of his mother was a terrible thing, of course, but it seems to have sobered him, and Leto feels sure Lidia would have chosen such a death over a useless one, or slow decline.

A slow decline is just what Leto would like— geologically, if not physically. Downhill is harder on a wooden leg. He makes poor time on gravel tracks, falling when his peg gets wedged between rocks. The sun has set when he finally steps onto the paved road that winds past Tino Marrapodi’s store and downward toward San Mauro.

There’s only one way back to the rectory from here, and he needs an excuse for being out after dark. He could tell the Germans he was summoned to give Extreme Unction to a dying parishioner, but they might ask the name, check his story. Someone else will be put at risk.

He’s half-decided to ask Tino for a night’s shelter when an unseen man whispers harshly, “Stop! Don’t move!”

Leto holds his breath, raises his hands, turns slowly in the direction of the voice. Two figures rush toward him in the lavender dusk: one slender as a willow wand, the other as broad and strong as his own stone walls.

Lowering his hands, Leto Girotti holds out his arms. The three of them embrace. No one needs to say it: they’ve seen the notices. They all know what’s at stake.

“Hear my confession,” Santino says.

Claudia is trembling, but her back is straight. “Then marry us,” she says.

WAFFEN-SS REGIMENTAL HEADQUARTERS

ROCCABARBENA

18 SEPTEMBER

“Sir?” Skinny, fidgety, and hardly out of diapers, the motor-pool driver paces next to a dun-colored staff car. “How much longer, do you think?”

Lounging on a pile of sandbags, Ernst Kunkel rolls his eyes. “Who knows? The Schoolmaster can talk the ears off a rabbit. He and Reinecke are probably playing chess, or some damned thing like that.”

“He’d better hurry. It’s a seven-hour drive. We’ll lose the light!”

“What’s your name, kid?”

“Meisinger, sir. Hans-Dieter.”

“What are you, seventeen?”

“Almost, sir.”

Christ, Kunkel thinks. Sixteen. He’s still got spots. “You open to some advice, Hans-Dieter Meisinger?” Kunkel shakes a cigarette out of a pack and offers one. “You don’t call sergeants sir, and you don’t tell a Gruppenführer to hurry.”

The boy lights up awkwardly, coughing on the first drag. He wants to look like he’s smoked before, but mostly he just holds the fag in his hand, trying not to burn his fingers. “My mother didn’t want me to enlist,” he says, as if he’s been waiting to tell somebody since he joined up. “I lied about my age. The Reich needs men, I told her, but really I–I wanted to learn to drive, you know?” The kid’s hands twitch. “I didn’t think it would be like this.”

“Rough?”

The boy takes a trembly pull on the cigarette, coughs, and looks away.

Ernst Kunkel has spent the war cleaning Erhardt von Thadden’s uniforms, pouring coffee, kissing up to the old man’s wife. Sure, you can get killed— air raids, pipe bombs, hit-and-run attacks, but what the hell? Sant’Andrea is soft duty in a nice climate. In Kunkel’s opinion, that’s worth a certain amount of diligent boot-licking, especially compared to fighting partisans.

It’s like chasing ghosts in a graveyard: they know the territory, and you see them only when they decide to show themselves. Over a hundred successful raids, and nearly a thousand Germans killed around here since April. Seven hundred wounded. Almost five hundred Fascist casualties. At least young Meisinger has the brains to worry. Von Thadden’s read the reports, but he seems to think this little jaunt will be an amusing mountain holiday.

Finally, they hear voices just inside Reinecke’s office. Von Thadden’s new adjutant, Karl Schmidt, leans over to open the door for the Gruppenführer, careful not to step in front of von Thadden as he does so. A cipher, Schmidt is. Dull as his name. Jawohl, Gruppenführer. As you wish, Gruppenführer. Right away, Gruppenführer. You’re a fucking genius, Gruppenführer. Reinecke recommended Schmidt as his own replacement for the job. “He has what it takes, Gruppenführer.” An agile tongue and a taste for shit, Kunkel thought.

When von Thadden appears, everyone in the vicinity braces to salute. At attention, Kunkel takes a sidelong look at him. Uniform perfectly pressed, already wrinkled. Boots polished, and scuffed. A small coffee stain just beneath his ribbons. Von Thadden thinks being sloppy is endearing. “— a pleasure to see your planning come to fruition, Helmut,” he’s saying. All jovial and generous, like Father Christmas with a riding crop. “The master always likes to see his apprentice do well!”

Reinecke snaps his fingers at the driver. Young Meisinger salutes and rushes to open a door for von Thadden, then scurries around to the other side of the car. When both officers have settled into the backseat, Kunkel climbs in next to Meisinger, who starts the engine.

Reinecke comes to von Thadden’s side. “You won’t reconsider, Gruppenführer? Let me assign an escort.”

“Your concern is noted, Standartenführer, but I will rely on the isolated queen’s pawn.”

The officers exchange Heil Hitlers. Reinecke raps the fender with his knuckles. Meisinger looks to Kunkel before pulling away. “No escort?”

Kunkel shrugs and whispers, “That’s the way he likes it, kid. Drive.”

Roccabarbena is the closest thing to a city up here, but only barely big enough to qualify. Petrol for civilian use is long gone. There’s hardly any traffic. In less than fifteen minutes, they’re out of town and into the neck of the Valdottavo funnel. Mountains rise almost vertically on either side of the river, paralleled by train tracks and the road they’re on.

Kunkel jerks his head toward riverbed stones barely covered with water, and pitches his voice so only Meisinger can hear. “Trout must be bumping their balls on the bottom.”

The kid manages a twitch, but the smile never really develops. His knuckles are bloodless on the steering wheel, his eyes darting left, center, right, and back again. “It’s crazy not to have an escort,” he mutters.

Kunkel agrees, but he also knows when to keep his mouth shut: all the time. Von Thadden’s probably convinced it’s more valorous to go alone, or some old-time crap like that.

The valley widens. Whenever there’s a good stretch of road, the kid speeds up, working the clutch and gearshift, the wheel and the brakes. Tanks and trucks have beaten the shit out of the pavement. Potholes. Ruts. Lick your lips, and the next jounce could take off half your tongue.

Kunkel watches the passing countryside, but there’s nothing much to see. Tree stumps and burnt farm buildings for two hundred meters on either side of the riverbed. It’s good bottomland, crops growing further out. Corn, tasseled off. Women bent over, harvesting something. Beans, maybe. Raggedy skirts riding up, scrawny legs showing. Nobody worth getting excited about, although the kid keeps gawping. Maybe he likes ’em skinny—

Meisinger makes a small whining noise and hauls hard on the wheel. The car careens left and jumps the road, nearly tipping over. For thirty meters, they smash along the shoulder, flattening low weeds and whippy saplings before lurching back onto the pavement.

Swearing nonstop, Kunkel climbs back into his seat. “Scheisskerl!” Schmidt shouts, helping von Thadden off the floor in the back. “What is the meaning of this?”

The kid doesn’t even slow down. “Land mine in the road. Sorry, sirs! Did you see that lady stand up and block her ears? She was expecting a bang. If you look back, you can see where the ground was disturbed, and then smoothed over.”

Still fuming, Schmidt twists in his seat to look behind them. “Yes,” he admits. “Yes, I see it, Gruppenführer. Good work, ah—?”

“Meisinger, sir,” Kunkel supplies, glancing at the kid with new respect.

“Meisinger!” von Thadden repeats heartily. “Very alert. There’ll be a commendation for your file!”

Made bold by praise, Meisinger raises his voice over the noise of a tortured suspension and the diesel engine. “Pardon me, sirs, but we really should turn back and get an escort. Motorcycles. A couple of armored cars. Partisans have attacked two convoys in the past twenty-four hours, and—”

“Do you play chess, Meisinger?”

“No, Gruppenführer, I never learned.”

“If you had,” Schmidt chimes in, “you’d see the potential of the isolated queen’s pawn, which prevails by not attracting attention to an attack.”

“Make a note, Schmidt,” von Thadden says. “Have those women questioned.”

An hour passes, and then another, with no additional excitement. The officers in the back spend the time going over some big report, but every time the car approaches a curve where you can’t see the road ahead, Meisinger tenses up.

It’s hard not to do the same, but hell, Kunkel thinks, you can’t stay scared forever. With the top down, the afternoon sunshine pours onto them like balm, and Kunkel starts to relax… His head jerks up when Meisinger pulls onto a gravel track.

“I need to refill the petrol tank, sirs. And sirs? Up this high, with night coming on, it’ll get cold soon. I can put the top up while you— if you’d like to—”

Von Thadden saves him. “Yes, thank you, Meisinger. Very thoughtful.”

Bladders emptied, trousers buttoned, officers and men climb back into the car. The gravel road rises, skirting a hilltop. Kunkel shifts in his seat and looks back the way they’ve come, catching glimpses of the valley through rare gaps in the everlasting goddamned chestnut trees. The view isn’t bad. East-facing slopes in shadow. Sun setting behind them, throwing pretty light on the other side. The river breaking into creeks, like a girl’s braid coming undone.

Kunkel would feel better if he could see some gun emplacements. Valdottavo’s a lot bigger than he expected. Which means Reinecke’s regiment is stretched thinner than von Thadden thought it would be, sitting behind that fancy desk in Sant’Andrea, talking about fucking chess. Jesus.

Meisinger downshifts, guns the engine. The emptied jerrican rattles in the back as the car jolts over ruts and rocks, grinding over a crest in an alpine meadow. It’s a giant fruit bowl of a place, tipped west, orchards catching the last bit of daylight. Pear trees, apples. Goats grazing on windfalls. Von Thadden looks up from the reports. “Excellent cheese up here. Not as tasty as German cheese, of course, but good for the type.” He lifts a chin toward the goats. “Fruit for fodder. Sweetens the milk.”

Knows everything, von Thadden does. “How much longer?” Kunkel asks Meisinger softly.

“An hour. Maybe more,” Meisinger whispers. “We should’ve left earlier.”

“— and the local prosciutto crudo is good as well,” von Thadden is telling Schmidt. “Rather like a Schinken, although a different breed of swine.”

A few hundred meters ahead, a peasant has finished pruning suckers off his apple trees; his big hooked knife leans against a pile of brush. When he spots the car, he pulls a cloth cap off his stubbly head and dodders arthritically into the center of the road, waving his hat at the camouflaged staff car and yelling.

“Gott,” Meisinger murmurs. “Partisans.”

“This could be trouble, sir,” Kunkel warns.

“Not necessarily,” von Thadden replies. “Schmidt, take care of the report. Just as a precaution.”

A few meters ahead, the peasant mimes with conspicuously empty hands: You can’t go any further. Meisinger hits the gas.

“Don’t hit him,” von Thadden calls from the backseat. “He’ll damage the radiator. Slow down, Meisinger, that’s an order.”

Kunkel glances over his shoulder. “Shall I shoot him, Gruppenführer?”

“In a moment, perhaps.”

Meisinger gears down to a crawl, swings off road slightly, coming to rest at the side of the road. His eyes are closed, and his lips are moving. Kunkel checks the backseat again. Crumpling the papers von Thadden has been reading, Schmidt stuffs them back into the attaché case. In his patient schoolmaster voice, von Thadden says, “Get out and speak to the man, Kunkel. Give Schmidt some time.”

Kunkel opens his door. When nothing happens, he stalls, twisting from side to side to stretch his back, and then strolls out to meet the peasant. Bald, bandy-legged, and barrel-chested, the farmer clumps closer, wearing wooden clogs, a filthy faded shirt, and stained corduroy trousers. The old man hesitates, pulls out an ancient handkerchief, sneezes into it. “Ponte nicht gut!” he says in pidgin German, wiping his nose. “You gotta turn back, signore! Bridge no good!”

“Scheisse! That’s a pain in the balls,” Kunkel says. “Between bandits and bombing, it’s getting to be more trouble than it’s worth, going on a picnic these days.”

The man sneezes into his rag again. “Non capisco, signor Herr.”

“Signor Herr! Aren’t you the cute one?” Kunkel looks over his shoulder at the Gruppenführer. “He says the bridge is out, sir.” Indistinct in the backseat, von Thadden shakes his head.

The peasant scratches his crotch and grins uncertainly. “Bridge no good,” he repeats, looking confused but earnest.

“Ja, klar, I heard you the first time,” Kunkel says affably. Where the hell would a peasant learn even that much German? Again he turns toward von Thadden. “I have reason to believe this gentleman is not being entirely candid with us, sir.”

Schmidt rolls down his window slightly. Smoke escapes. The peasant’s grin turns wolfish. “Zigaretten? Got cigarettes?” he asks hungrily, inching sideways toward the car. “Für Apfel? Gut, ja? Cigarettes for apples?”

Unexpectedly, Von Thadden gets out of the car and comes around it quickly, blocking the peasant’s view of Schmidt and the burning papers. Gratifyingly impressed by a general officer’s uniform, the peasant gapes.

In the next instant, he drops from sight, rolls under the car, shouts something.

Firing into the air, a pack of screaming partisans rise from the orchard brush piles, charge the car, disarm Kunkel and von Thadden, thrust gun barrels into the faces of the two men inside. It’s over in ten seconds.

Rolling from beneath the chassis, the peasant motions with a pistol for Meisinger and Schmidt to come out of the car. Meisinger gets out immediately, hands up, shaking and mumbling. When Schmidt fails to do the same, the peasant gives an order to a skinny young bandit with close-set eyes and huge nose overhanging a rudimentary mustache. “Put that fire out!” the boy shouts in Viennese German. “Do as you’re told or I’ll shoot, Schlappschwanz!”

“I don’t take orders from Jews,” Schmidt says.

Bad move, Kunkel thinks, and he’s right. The little kike fires into the backseat and takes a startled step backward. Glowering under a chimpanzee’s brow, a hairy thug pushes the Jew aside, reaches inside the car, and hauls Schmidt’s body onto the road.

Foamy red blood pulses from the neck. Legs scrabble at the gravelly road. Trousers darken. Feet twitch spasmodically, flop sideways. Wooden matches spill from a cardboard box in the curled and lifeless fingers. Meisinger moans.

With apelike agility, the hairy one hops into the car, cursing as he beats the flames out with his own hands. The contents of Schmidt’s bottle dribble onto the roadbed. The strong, sweet scent of petrol joins the stench of burnt gunpowder and urine.

The Ape climbs out of the staff car with a sheaf of charred and smoking papers that go to pieces in the evening breeze. Schmidt died doing his duty, Kunkel thinks. Whatever was in that report, it’s unreadable now.

The old man presses a pistol barrel into von Thadden’s temple, bringing the smell of cordite close while the general’s arms are bound behind his back. Von Thadden asks, “Do you intend to kill the rest of us as well?”

Meisinger starts to cry. The bandits snigger. The old man issues a string of orders to his ragged young subordinates. Rat Face listens, nods, and turns to the Germans. “You are our prisoners, Gruppenführer Schlappschwanz. Make trouble, and they’ll shoot your tiny dick off.”

Tullio Goletta waits until the Germans have disappeared beyond the orchard. “Bonehead!” he yells, cuffing Duno. “You were told: no killing!”

“He was trying to burn those things! So they had to be important, right? Anyway, he moved!” Duno squawks. “It was supposed to be a warning shot!”

“Gesù!” Tullio fumes. “The first time you ever manage to hit something! We needed hostages, not more bodies!”

“Va bene, Tullio,” his father says. “Gruppenführer Schlappschwanz will count extra.” Attilio Goletta laughs. “General Limp-Dick! That’s a good one!” he says. “Wait’ll I tell that one to Pierino!”

THE HUNCHBACK’S HOUSE

FRAZIONE DECIMO

When moonlight finds Santino Cicala, he is lying on the sacking mattress filled with dry and crackly leaves, gazing at his wife of thirty hours. The night chill has raised gooseflesh, and he curls around her, belly to back, to warm her, not to wake her.

Their first time, it was the stripping out: walls of awkwardness and modesty taken down. Thoughtful, deliberate, he stood behind her, kissing her neck, smelling her clean hair, reaching around her for the buttons. He pulled the blouse from her shoulders. Felt her bare back against his chest. Cupped her breasts, memorizing their weight and form. Most men go at it like bulls pawing the ground, but stones have taught Santino patience.

When the time came, he did what he had to, as gently as he could: he hurt her. And when he was done, he kissed and kissed her. “The first time’s bad for girls,” he said, and promised, “It’ll be better from now on.”

They talked, after, about the life they’d lead. The houses Santino would build. The garden Claudia would grow. The children they would have. They know life will be hard: one bad year can sink a mountain family for a decade. But there will be chestnuts to roast or boil whole, and to grind for sweet brown flour. Wood for tools and furniture, and to burn for warmth. Cornmeal for polenta. Eggs, and the occasional chicken to stew. “Stonemasons get paid in cash sometimes,” Santino said. “I’ll buy you some goats with money, or I can take them in trade. You can make cheese for us, too.”

She giggled then and told Tercilla’s story about making cheese when she was a bride. There were a dozen ways for cheese to fail, and Tercilla found them all. When at last she proudly unmolded her first successful wheel of fontina, Domenico found a long black hair sticking up right in the middle. Solemnly he pulled it out and held it up for her consideration. Tercilla said, “I guess that’s why Mamma told me to wear a kerchief,” and for some reason it struck them both as madly funny. “Domenico and I— we laughed and laughed and laughed,” Tercilla said, “and from that time on, we were truly one.”

Smiling, Santino rose on an elbow and kissed his wife again. He took his time. He found her rhythm. He kept his promise: this time it was better.

Sleep overcame them, and they woke next to full light. They ate, and played house, pretending the hunchback’s place was their own. Santino walked around the ruined barn and told her how it could be repaired. There must have been a garden here last spring, Claudia decided. A few tomato vines survived bombing and neglect, their fruit sweeter than apples. A lone corn stalk stood in one corner. “Why aren’t there any ears?” Santino asked, lifting its leaves and finding nothing. Claudia told him, “They have to be in a big group of plants, or the ears don’t get fertilized—”

She stopped, blushed, but did not turn away. Instead she held out her hand, and led him back into the house.

Once, when he was fifteen and apprenticed, Santino worked in the garden of a rich man. There was an old statue of a naked girl, lean and strong, and unafraid. “Diana, the huntress,” the master told him. The marble girl watched over them as Santino swept stone chips, and packed the hearting, and learned how strength could fracture but be rebuilt.

Now that girl is his. Living skin like cool marble. Lean and strong. No longer afraid. “Moglia mia,” he whispers, his fingers grazing her breast, her hip, her thigh. “My wife. My wife.”

Claudia awakens, turns over. She meets his need with a woman’s certainty, her hands on his arms, his shoulders, his broad back. Measuring the shape and feel and weight of him. Learning him by heart. “My Santino,” she whispers when he shudders. “Always my Santino. No matter what.”

She does not cry when her husband leaves. Save your tears, she thinks. You may need them later.

BORGO SAN MAURO

19 SEPTEMBER

Sunlight glints off a river that looks chrome-plated. A sudden, sharp heat headache begins, just behind Eduard Knyphausen’s eyes. He sweats in full battle dress under the Italian sun’s assault. Summer’s last stand, he thinks. Not even noon, but hot already.

San Mauro’s been sealed off for three days, surrounded by a reinforced company of an armored grenadier division, part of three Waffen-SS battalions in position all over Valdottavo. “Sturmbannführer, there are no combatants in San Mauro,” the peg-leg priest claimed. “Only women and children. Old people, sick people!”

“And where are the men who have left all these poor people behind?” Knyphausen asked icily. “In the mountains, among the partisans and bandits, that’s where! Listen carefully: I want the bodies of my men back. I want the guilty to surrender. If they choose not to turn themselves in, they will be responsible for what happens here, not I.”

Finally the church bell strikes ten. Knyphausen nods. Noise erupts. Officers shout through bullhorns. Troops standing ready at the edges of the town yell, “Raus! Raus! Raus!” smashing open every door, pounding through every building. Houses vomit skinny-legged old men, women ugly with fear, screaming children.

With whips and dogs, squads of soldiers herd them toward the center of town. It seems like chaos, but every move is choreographed. Several hundred townspeople join scores of peasants relieved earlier of their market produce and corralled since dawn in the central piazza. There are machine gunners at the corners, riflemen on rooftops. Men with dogs patrol the perimeter. Knyphausen glances at his watch. Seventeen minutes, he notes with pleasure. All set in motion by his nod. “Get a head count,” he orders.

A sergeant approaches and salutes. “Sturmbannführer, there is a man trying to get into the town. He has no papers— he says he’s a Volksdeutscher from Bozen. He claims the bandits have taken Gruppenführer von Thadden prisoner, along with eight other Germans. They want to negotiate.”

Von Thadden failed to arrive last night; that much is true. Knyphausen flicks at his boot top with a ceremonial riding crop. “What proof does he offer?”

“Oberleutnant Schmidt’s papers, sir. He says Schmidt was killed, but the bandits want to arrange an exchange for the others. The man’s unarmed. Shall we let him through?”

Temples throbbing, Knyphausen says, “I’m getting out of this sun. Send him to my office.”

His headache worsens when he hears what the Volksdeutscher has to say. His name is Ugo Messner, and he has been held prisoner since June, when bandits confiscated a truck and the load of fabric he was delivering to the Vaterland. Perched on a wooden chair, Messner looks nervous and ill-fed. His well-made suit is dirty and ragged. He claims to know both Reinecke and von Thadden personally. Schmidt’s papers are genuine and bear rust-colored evidence of a wound, although there’s no telling how serious or whose.

“I’m not sure how many Germans they’ve taken hostage,” Messner says. “At least nine. If the bandits see your troops withdrawing, all prisoners will be released. If not, they’ll execute the captives. They say those five German soldiers who were killed— they were caught raping a local girl. The partisans are peasant boys, Sturmbannführer, sentimental about their sisters’ purity. The whole incident is unfortunate, but with a little finesse, no more German blood need be shed over this.”

Neither of Knyphausen’s choices are attractive. Negotiate with terrorists or be held responsible for a general’s death. Less than two hours to deadline…

Messner says, “Bitte—if I could just speak to Standartenführer Reinecke myself?”

It’s an out: pass the problem up the line. Raising his voice slightly, Knyphausen calls, “Buntenhof: get Reinecke for me.”

Waiting, Knyphausen goes to his office window to check on the situation in the piazza. The crowd is nervous but cowed. Messner asks for a cigarette, coffee, and food, relieved to be among Germans, and full of questions. The bandits told him that the Führer had been wounded in an assassination attempt, that the Wehrmacht has lost ground in France, the Low Countries, in the East, in southern Italy. Reluctantly, Knyphausen confirms it all. In the past two weeks, the Soviet army has reached Yugoslavia, linking up with Tito’s partisans. The Americans and British have taken Brussels, Antwerp, and Liège. Messner looks stricken, but Knyphausen is happy to provide the facts he pins his own hopes on. “We’ve blown up the dikes and flooded the lowlands. That will slow them down. And the Führer has a stupendous new weapon, even better than the Vengeance 1 missile. What we need are more tanks and a little time. We can turn this—”

Buntenhof appears in the doorway. “Sir, I have Standartenführer Reinecke for you.”

On the telephone, Knyphausen briefs Reinecke on the kidnapping. Messner watches worriedly. Wincing at Reinecke’s response, Knyphausen holds the handset a few centimeters from his ear. Messner motions for it. When Knyphausen refuses, Messner shouts, “Helmut, my friend! You must help! Think of Martina!”

“Buntenhof!” Knyphausen calls. “Get this man out of here!”

Messner is pulled from the office, still pleading at the top of his voice. It’s difficult to follow what Reinecke is shouting. Clark’s Fifth Army has launched a huge attack. A ferocious battle is under way. Kesselring wants the partisan threat behind his lines liquidated.

“But Gruppenführer von Thadden—?” Knyphausen asks.

“Damn you, Knyphausen— we have our orders!”

Reinecke cuts the connection. Knyphausen stands, straightening his jacket with a tug. Outside, a sergeant is waiting for him. “A total of 318, Sturmbannführer: 231 from the town, plus 87 peddlers here for the market, sir.”

Six hundred short of the figure in their own municipal records. Lies. Deception. They had their chance. “Messner!” Knyphausen shouts. When the anxious Volksdeutscher presents himself, Knyphausen points to the mountains looming above this wretched little nest of vipers. “Tell those bandits they are to release the hostages unharmed by noon, or pay the price. There will be no negotiation.”

Messner looks stunned. “Sturmbannführer, an hour and a half! Even on a motorcycle, I couldn’t— Please! Allow me to ask Reinecke for a little more time!”

Knyphausen turns on his heel. He needs to get out of the damned sun, back into the relative cool of his office—

“Prego, Sturmbannführer! A moment! I beg you!”

It’s that damned one-legged priest again, at the edge of the piazza crowd with a stocky little goblin of a man at his side. “Sturmbannführer, I have the man—”

“I’m the one,” the ugly brute is saying. “Just me! No one else—”

Messner shouts something. The sergeant shoves him on his way.

“They were abusing a girl,” the priest says. “Santino only wanted to—”

Knyphausen stomps down the steps, into the glare, his head pounding. “Are you telling me that this— this one man, this one man, this single piece of stinking shit killed five German soldiers?” Knyphausen draws his Luger, points it at the priest’s head. “He is some kind of spaghetti-sucking Übermensch? Is that what you expect me to believe?”

The crowd surges forward, their shouts and cries drowning Knyphausen’s rage. Sentries push back with rifles at present arms. Dogs lunge. Officers’ arms rise and fall, whips striking at anyone in range. A soldier smashes his rifle butt into the priest’s shoulders. Cawing and clawing her way to the priest’s side, an old black crow screams abuse at the soldier, and then simply screams when she, too, is knocked to the ground between the goblin and the priest.

Three flat, loud reports echo against the buildings. Bodies jerk, flop, go still. In the sudden silence, Knyphausen does not need to shout. “Get the rest of these people into that church.”

Hazy sunlight yields to featureless cloud cover. By late afternoon, the valley seems to steam. Claudia Cicala sits on a high rock ledge, her husband’s Carcano ’91 cradled in her arms. A man she does not recognize works his way up the mountain toward the hunchback’s house. Trudging doggedly, he disappears around a switchback or behind the trees, reappearing whenever a terraced field interrupts the forest. His limp is obvious, but long before she can see his face, she knows this is not Don Leto. He has two arms— not Pierino then. He is too tall, too slim to be Santino.

Two hours later, close enough to speak, he shows himself unarmed, and removes his hat. “Giulietta, I have bad news.”

She looks more carefully. He is changed, but she remembers the day he called her that. He is not a German, Don Leto told her. He is a Jew. An Italian Jew who was once a soldier.

“Sono desolato,” he says. “Your Romeo was an honorable man.”

With painful effort, he lowers himself, sitting at her side. For a long time, they watch the darkness gather. A widow of sixteen. A cripple of thirty-one. In the distance, thousands of birds coalesce in the smoky dusk, wheeling, diving, soaring in unison on scythe-shaped wings.

The man lifts a hand toward them. “Apus apus, of the family Micropodidae,” he says. “I was killing time in a library once, and looked them up. ‘The common swift is the most aerial of birds,’ ” he recites, “ ‘so perfectly adapted to flight, the species’ feet are nearly vestigial.’ ”

“Micropodidae,” she whispers. “Tiny feet…”

“They never land on the ground or perch on branches. Swifts ride air currents all night, sleeping. They eat, and preen— even mate in the air. I wouldn’t have believed it, but I saw them when I was a pilot. They collect nesting material on the wing. Straw, dry grass, flower petals. Anything light enough to be carried by the wind. Swifts nest just long enough to raise their young, and then… They return to their element.”

“We thought if he turned himself in, no one else would be hurt,” she says.

The wind rises. To the south, there are flashes of white light within and below the clouds. Lightning, and artillery. She knows the difference now, instructed by Pierino. Each evening all summer, Mussolini’s San Marco brigades have blindly lobbed 155mm shells into Valdottavo; the partisans replied with captured 81mm mortars, aiming just as blindly at the sound of the San Marco guns. Any effect on the opposition was purely accidental. Today was different. Across the valley, there were battles and skirmishes. Fires, everywhere. Borgo San Mauro and a dozen other towns smolder. Santa Chiara is gone. Zia Tercilla, she thinks. Bettina. Cesare Brondello. All the people who took Claudia and her father in, and treated them like family.

The temperature begins to drop. Outrunning the coming thunderstorm, birds swarm in a blurred, shadowy shape that swirls into the next valley. Tonight’s rain will be a blessing and a curse: dousing fires, chilling the dispossessed.

The man gets to his feet, graceless as a grounded swift. “We have a roof,” he says. “We should get inside.” The first fat drops hit her face. She lets him help her up. “Prego,” he says, trying to take the heavy rifle from her hands. “Let me carry this for you.”

She lifts the rifle, holds it closer. She studies this strange, scarred man she barely knows. “Will you use it?” she asks. He looks away, then meets her eyes. She waits until he nods, and then she hands it over.

Standing at his window, Helmut Reinecke stares at the teeming rain while his adjutant reads the draft report. “ ‘In response to recent partisan ambushes and attacks, three battalions of the 2nd SS-Panzerkorps Regiment, 12th Division Waffen-SS Walther Reinhardt, were ordered to engage the enemy in Valdottavo, where partisan bands have roamed freely. A show of force near their strongholds was sufficient to cause the male population to flee into the mountains, carrying firearms and grenades. The bases of these bandits were destroyed. A number of houses were burned to the ground when partisan munitions hidden within them exploded. Several Communist sympathizers were executed.’ ” Scheel looks up. “Should I have mentioned the civilians in that church, Standartenführer?”

Reinecke’s conscience is clear. Huppenkothen said it: when soldiers take off their uniforms and conceal their weapons, they are no longer protected by the Geneva Convention. And neither are those who support them. “Items of military importance only, Scheel.” Perimeter floodlights create pyramids of gilt raindrops so close together they seem solid. “What is it the French say? Après moi, le deluge! Something like that…”

“I don’t speak French, sir.” Scheel waits a beat. “It never seemed to be of military importance.” Reinecke grunts a laugh. Scheel continues reading: “ ‘Following these engagements, the regiment was attacked by men in civilian clothing. We estimate their numbers to be close to twenty thousand. Despite heavy fighting and a number of casualties, we broke their resistance. We are presently regrouping. Gruppenführer Erhardt von Thadden and eight others are missing in action, presumed killed.’ ”

Hands behind his back, Reinecke turns from the rain to stare at a silver-framed photograph recording his daughter’s first Christmas. Anneliese holds little Margot, dazzled by the gorgeously decorated Tannenbaum. Erhardt and Martina von Thadden look on, like proud grandparents. “Type the report up for my signature,” Reinecke says. “Make arrangements for me to go to Sant’Andrea. Don’t inform Frau von Thadden yet. I’ll bring the news to her myself. And contact Artur Huppenkothen at Gestapo headquarters. Set up a meeting.”

Two, perhaps three months before they must retreat behind the Alps. We’ll make them pay, he’ll tell Martina. Before we leave this place, we’ll make the bastards pay.

CASTELLO RITANNA

21 SEPTEMBER

Nine men, unshaven and half-dressed, sit morosely in close quarters. Stripped of their uniforms, given dirty peasant trousers to wear, they were brought here blindfolded, shoved into this little cell. Each has a story of ambush or attack. They’ve had no food for twenty-four hours. The water jug is nearly empty, the slop bucket nearly full. No one expected to live through the night, so they count themselves lucky when they awaken to hunger and the stench of their own waste.

Beyond their prison cell, an argument rages. “They are prisoners of war! The Geneva Convention—”

“— is a crock of shit! They are murdering civilians. They’re war criminals.”

“Which is what you’ll be if you shoot them!”

The shouting gets louder. A new voice ends the dispute. The language is Italian, the accent Teutonic. Kunkel boosts young Meisinger up, to peer out a small high window. “I see a German,” Meisinger reports excitedly. “Standartenführer Reinecke must have sent a negotiator after all!”

Regaining some dignity and bearing, the Gruppenführer stands, and urges the others to do the same. They wait, clawing straw from hair and rubbing at teeth with their fingers.

The wooden bar scrapes back and the heavy timber door is dragged open. The clouds are low and gray, but the captives blink in the dull light pouring into the dim cell.

“Herauskommen!” a blond man orders.

Von Thadden addresses the Aryan, whose tone indicates that he does not realize to whom he is speaking. “Guten Tag, mein Herr. I am Gruppenführer Erhardt von Thadden—”

“Shut up. We know who you are.”

Shoved toward the center of a small castle’s piazza, their protests rewarded with blows and curses, the prisoners have no choice but to obey. A mob of men and boys with reddened eyes glare, shout and spit at the captives, but make way with deference and respect for the blond. He sits at a table crudely lashed together from fallen branches, folds his hands with an expression between contempt and satisfaction. Before him are nine small piles of documents weighted with pebbles against the breeze. Identity papers, personal items, snapshots. “My name,” the blond begins, “is Jakub Landau—”

“I knew it!” a captain named Grittschneider says, thirst-swollen lips curling with distaste. “Jew dog!”

The rat-faced little Jew who shot Schmidt in cold blood snarls, “Shut your filthy mouth, Nazischwein!”

There are shouts, threats. Someone drives a rifle butt into Grittschneider’s belly. Landau raises a hand. Order is instantly restored in silence broken only by the sound of Grittschneider coughing.

“I shall read the indictment in German for the prisoners,” Landau announces. An interpreter repeats this in Italian. “During the past few weeks, three battalions of the Second SS-Panzergrenadier Regiment, Twelfth Waffen-SS have engaged anti-Fascist forces in the Valdottavo district,” Landau begins. “The Third, Fifth, and Sixth Brigades of the Committee for National Liberation repulsed attacks on their positions, inflicting enemy losses of eighty-seven killed or wounded at a cost of fourteen casualties to our own forces.”

Without turning, Landau pauses. The interpreter’s voice is flat, unemotional and familiar, though Erhardt von Thadden has never before heard this man speak Italian. He who was always immaculately turned out when visiting the Palazzo Usodimare is shabby now, and hollow-eyed, half his face pitted by scars. “Mein Gott,” von Thadden says. “Ugo Messner.”

“Sometimes,” Messner replies. “Not recently.”

“You— you sat at my table. You danced with my wife!”

“You occupied my country.”

Landau’s voice cuts through, continuing the indictment. “Unable to defeat combatants, German forces surrounded and yesterday destroyed the following.” There are groans, roars, cries of grief as Landau reads a long list of towns and villages razed. “A thousand families have been burned out. We have received reports of over five hundred civilian casualties. Nearly three hundred were burned alive in the church of San Mauro.”

“This is absurd!” von Thadden says. “We were in your custody while that was happening!”

Jeers drown Messner’s emotionless translation. Again Landau gestures for silence. “In that case,” he says, “explain these.” He draws photographs from one of the nine stacks of documents, and spreads them out on the table so the prisoners can see them. Grittschneider looks away.

“Scheisskerl!” Kunkel snarls at Grittschneider. “You’ve killed us! Why would you carry pictures like that?”

The partisans pass the snapshots from hand to hand. On the back of each someone has methodically recorded dates and locations from 1941 to 1944, from Russia to Italy. The backgrounds vary— forest, grassy wasteland, a stone bridge, a blank wall— but the same heavy-set man is in each. His uniforms document a rise from second lieutenant to captain. Behind him, dangling from taut ropes: as few as three, as many as twenty, people hang. Mostly men.

“They were criminals! My duty was to establish order in those towns,” Grittschneider declares. “Those executed were thieves, drunkards. Murderers!”

A young woman approaches, holding out a photo. “Name two.” Guileless green eyes fix Grittschneider with an unwavering gaze. “If they were guilty of crimes, there must have been a trial. Name two of the convicted.”

“Claudette!” Duno cries. She does not turn. “That’s Claudette Blum!” he tells Landau.

“It was a long time ago,” Grittschneider says, dismissing her. “They were criminals! Justice was done.”

Landau stands to face the partisans. “Justice! The very thing we seek!” he says, theatrically amazed by the coincidence. He turns to the Germans. “I will be merciful. You may all live… for as long as this man can recite the names of those he hanged.”

“It was a long time ago!” Grittschneider repeats. “I don’t remember—”

“I only wanted to drive a car!” Meisinger weeps. “I didn’t do anything!”

Landau pounces, mimicking the boy. “I didn’t know! I didn’t do anything!” he whines. “That’s what they say, comrades! But there are ten thousand places where the fascisti kill like this. Everywhere the Nazis go, they murder. They build factories for nothing but killing! Bigger than Fiat, bigger than Olivetti— huge factories, comrades. Thousands of people go every day into these factories— not to work, to die! Children, women, old people. Jews, Gypsies, Slavs— anyone the Nazis call Untermenschen. The bodies are burned. You can see smoke from twenty kilometers away! They give the ashes to German farmers— for fertilizer! I have seen these things with my eyes, and now you, too, see what they do!”

Landau points at Valdottavo blanketed by a brown haze. “Comrades! The fascisti have burned our houses, our villages. They have killed my family, your family! Will these men live?”

From three hundred throats, a single word.

Nine men are beaten to their knees, shoved facedown into the damp stone cobbles of the castle’s courtyard.

Blood spatters, fountains, pools. A slaughterhouse stink joins the cordite. The shooting goes on and on, until the guns are emptied, the rage is sated, the silence broken only by crow calls and wind.

“That was wrong,” Renzo says raggedly. “What was done here was wrong.”

“Yes,” Landau agrees. “It was a waste of bullets. Next time, we use rope.” Focusing for the first time on the green-eyed girl, Landau frowns. “Who are you?”

“You know her,” Duno Brössler reminds him. “She was in Sainte-Gisèle. She’s—”

“Capable of speaking for herself,” Landau says. He comes closer and asks again, “Who are you?”

She meets his eyes, then looks past him to the others. “I am the widow of Santino Cicala, and I have come to join you.”

Hours later, one man sits alone on a crude wooden bench, his back against a stone wall, an empty bottle in his hand, talking to the blood, diluted now by steady rain.

“I’ve sworn off ethics,” Renzo explains to the faint and fading pink puddles. “What’s the point?” he asks.

“Too much for me,” he admits, face to the rain. “You sort it out.”

November 1944

VILLA MALCOVATO

NEAR ROCCABARBENA

Paradise, Mirella thought when she first saw this place. A large farm, fifteen kilometers from the nearest train station, five from the nearest village. The main house on a hillside, with a wide prospect of the broad valley, a small wooded mountain beyond. Patches of sloping cultivated land: wheat, corn, alfalfa, olives, vines.

“In the summer, it’s dry as dust,” Suora Corniglia warned her, “and hot! You can barely breathe! The riverbed becomes a desert— nothing but stones, with a little muddy trickle down the middle. But when it rains, the whole countryside comes to life. Everything has color again. That’s when the work is hardest, but it’s so beautiful…” The nun came to herself and cleared her throat. “There is a small school for the farm children. Your husband will replace a teacher who… is needed elsewhere. You’ll run the kitchen and the ambulatorio—a sort of clinic for the peasants. And everyone helps with harvests. You can trust the padrone without reservation. His name is Massimo Malcovato.”

This personage arrived at the convent in a huge car. Painted in the Vatican’s yellow and white, it was driven by a liveried chauffeur who looked vaguely familiar, and turned out to be Don Osvaldo Tomitz. The children were thrilled by the grandeur of riding in an automobile, but their parents were more dazzled by the ease with which the vehicle sailed through roadblocks and checkpoints. Osvaldo slowed and stopped just long enough for Malcovato to declare, “Ich bin ein Diplomat des Vatikans!” Carabinieri asked no further questions. Even Germans waved the car on.

Wounded three times in the Great War, Malcovato retired a major, and he is still il maggiore to everyone he deals with. Wearing five Silver and three Bronze Medals for valor, he became an important food distributor under Mussolini, and to this day, he strides through Fascist Italy, greeted with respect everywhere he goes. “Officially,” he rumbled, “I am disabled by my war wounds. This status entitles me to first-class train compartments, and an attendant to accompany me whenever I must travel.”

“Il maggiore has businesses in Milan, Turin, Genoa, and Sant’Andrea, all with large Jewish communities,” Osvaldo said, throwing a grin over his shoulder at Iacopo. “And he has almost unlimited access to ration cards.”

“To be turned into cash,” Iacopo surmised, “for payoffs and bribes.”

“Gifts,” il maggiore corrected serenely. “Expressions of gratitude— as is my desire to help you, Rabbino. During the Battle of Caporetto, a soldier named Tranquillo Loeb carried me half a kilometer to a field hospital. Perhaps you knew him. He became a lawyer, and I followed his career— to its end. Shameful. Shameful! I never had any affection for the Germans, but how a civilized nation could permit such things is beyond me. I’ve done what I could since Loeb was killed. My daughter made me aware of your personal difficulties.”

“Your daughter?” Mirella asked.

“Suora Corniglia is il maggiore’s youngest,” Osvaldo said. “Renzo met her at San Giobatta. He kept in touch.”

“It was Leoni who suggested that Don Osvaldo become my attendant.”

“The fascisti were getting suspicious about the ‘doctor’ visiting so many houses in Sant’Andrea. So I’ve become a chauffeur. We’ve rebuilt the distribution network.”

“The arrangement has been quite satisfactory. Ah— we are nearly at the end of our journey. I have a house in Milan,” il maggiore told them, “but this is home. Don Osvaldo and I generally visit once a month for a few days of rest. Occasionally we may bring additional guests, but I’m sure Signora Soncini will be able to accommodate them at the table.”

Villa Malcovato proved to be a self-contained kingdom straddling the border between the mountains and the plains of Piemonte. Some six hundred contadini on fifty-seven tenant farms are scattered across seven thousand hectares, all administered from the villa fattoria, with its threshing floor, an ox-powered mill, a granary, oil presses, a dairy, carpentry and ironwork shops, a laundry and stables, poultry coops, pigpens, barns. Operating on the mezzadria system, the estate produces wine, oil, flour, pasta, bread, cheeses, meat and eggs, fruits, vegetables, and beans.

The villa itself is unpretentious: a square sixteenth-century stone and redbrick house, its loggia overlooking a garden of cypresses and ilex. “Rosina, see how pretty?” Mirella said. “Angelo, look! There are dogs!”

“Kitties, too?” Stefania asked softly.

“Every barn has kitties!” Mirella assured her. They had to take Stefania, of course. Angelo would not be parted from her, and it felt right to add a daughter that age to the family.

When the car pulled up to the back door, the older children raced off to see the animals. Iacopo went with il maggiore and Don Osvaldo to meet the factor and begin learning the farm’s operations. Left behind, with Rosina squirming in her arms, Mirella nearly swooned when she saw the enclosed privy. And the kitchen! Limestone floors, a marble sink under a window fitted with glass, not just oiled lambskin. An indoor pump for water. Glasses, plates, tin-lined copper pans. Beautifully crafted storage baskets hanging from the rafters. A long wooden table for her family, plentiful food to place before them! Paradise, she thought again, with a Shehecheyanu of thanksgiving.

Three months of relentless labor have sweated the romance out of country life. Since her first rapturous day in the kitchen, Mirella and two housegirls have rolled out highways of pasta, scrubbed mountain ranges of potatoes and carrots, ground swamps of basil, garlic, and oil for pesto. Dio santo, the bread alone is a full-time job! Thirty loaves a week to fill those pretty baskets— bread made by hand from standing grain to flour to kneaded loaves. Fifteen kilos of dough at a time, baked in a wood-burning oven fueled by cuttings from grape vines and fruit trees.

Rosina alone is exempt from work. Like all the estate’s children, Angelo and Stefania pick tomatoes, shell beans, and glean a second harvest from the wheat fields after the men have gone through with mechanical threshers. Tanned and barefoot, the two of them have shot up like the weeds they hoe out of the kitchen garden, making up growth lost to hunger.

“You came at the worst time, signora,” one of the housegirls tells her as they wash dishes together. “Winter is easier. It’s all handwork then. Knitting, sewing.”

Before that promised respite, there will be the grape and olive and chestnut harvests, but Mirella smiles briefly, grateful for Giovanna’s encouragement. Her feet are swollen, her back aches. The window above the sink reflects a woman who’s begun to understand why peasants age so quickly. At least I’m not pregnant, Mirella thinks. At the end of the day, Iacopo trudges in from the barns, more worn out than Mirella. They go to their bed limp with fatigue, wanting no more than to sleep side by side, too tired to muster so much as a kiss.

You can wear out or you can toughen up, Mirella tells herself sternly, and under the circumstances—

Twin beams of light slash through the darkness. Drying her hands, she feels the rush of anxiety provoked by anything unexpected, but relaxes when she recognizes the yellow-and-white auto. The major’s visit is two weeks early, but that’s hardly a cause for panic. “Iacopo!” she shouts like the contadina she’s becoming. “Il maggiore is here!”

Mirella sends Giovanna upstairs to put the children to bed. She herself prepares a platter of thin-sliced sausage, tomatoes, cheese, and bread. Carries the tray to the library, where the men always meet. Nudges the door open with her hip, and stops, frozen.

“I–I thought they were Africans!” Don Osvaldo’s voice cracks. “I thought, There can’t be Africans in San Mauro. Rabbino, they were burned black! Fused together by the heat— hundreds of them. Hundreds!”

At Osvaldo’s side, Iacopo looks up and sees his wife. “There has been a battle in Valdottavo, Mirella. Don Leto is among the dead.”

Mirella cries, “Oh, Valdo. How terrible!”

“There’s more bad news,” il maggiore says, pacing in front of the fireplace. “The Germans arrested most of the Milan network last week, and in Turin—”

Iacopo takes the tray from Mirella’s hands. “Go to bed,” he says in his velvety baritone. “I’ll join you later, cara mia.”

The men talk far into the night, but when Iacopo comes to bed, Mirella is still awake. He slides under the covers, and she puts an arm over his chest, giving comfort, seeking it. Silent, he lies on his back, his hands behind his neck, staring at the ceiling. She holds the sheet to her breasts and sits up in the darkness. Waiting.

“The Waffen-SS and Gestapo have begun a coordinated campaign to root out Jews, partisans, and anyone who helps them. Mirella, they’re arresting priests— someone must have talked.”

Hardly breathing, Mirella closes her eyes.

“There’s no choice, cara. We have to consider—”

“No, Iacopo!”

“Osvaldo is doing the work of six men.”

“I won’t listen to this. You risked your life for months. You were arrested twice. For God’s sake, Iacopo— you have a family! You have children!”

“How can I hide here when other men—”

She shakes her head stubbornly, eyes brimming, chin trembling. “I have never said no to you before. Never! But I do now. No, no, no! Promise me you will not do this!”

“Mirella, I can’t—”

“Promise me!”

He turns on his side, his back to her. She bites her lip, determined not to cry, and after a long time, lies down next to him.

Merely a handsbreadth of lumpy mattress between them, but they are each alone.

Christmas, Mirella tells herself, like everyone else in Europe. It will be over by Christmas. If we can just get through a few more weeks…

Cadenza d’Inverno Winter 1944–45

Rome changed hands two days before the Normandy invasion, and just like that, the Italian campaign dropped off the world’s front page. A sideshow, newspaper editors decided. Barely worth a mention. Four hundred thousand men, forgotten.

They’d get letters from the folks at home. “Is the fighting finished there? We never hear anything about Italy.” Soldiers would try to tell them what it was like on the Gothic Line, but the words would fail, or disappear beneath a censor’s thick black lines. So they wrote back about the mud.

Once the autumn rain began, it never stopped for long. Bridges washed out. Rivers flooded their banks, and fields disappeared under water. Torrents roared down mountainsides, and mud sloped by the ton onto civilian highways already hammered by heavy military equipment. Engineering battalions worked day and night, digging drainage ditches, plowing the syrupy mess to the sides of roads. They blasted rock from Apennine crags, crushed it, shoveled gravel into gouges and potholes, getting sloshed with sheets of mud for their trouble as trucks roared by carrying food and ammunition, casualties or replacements.

Wet for weeks, feet would swell something awful. Men would limp into a town hoping for shelter from the endless goddamned rain, and there’d be nothing left. Not a building untouched. Whole houses blown to hell: splinters and gravel, that’s all. Nothing alive except maybe one poor damned cow, udder full to bursting, bellowing as she roamed through the muddy wreckage.

And then they’d get to the front. Christ— even the air was muddy there, but nobody at home would read about that. The censors wouldn’t let them tell how mines and shells sent geysers of the stuff into the sky, how mud-covered birds fell to earth with bits of man meat and twisted metal. Boots and socks, bearings grease, blood, crankcase oil, vomit, shattered corpses— everything churned, liquefied, sucked into the mud.

A few days of that, and everybody began to break down. Madman-hero or chickenshit draftee, they couldn’t think straight, couldn’t follow what the officers were saying. Men were court-martialed for disobeying orders they couldn’t remember having heard.

In General Headquarters, topography and armies were represented on maps by tightly packed contour lines and geometric shapes, but armies didn’t fight in that campaign. It was companies at best. Platoons. Squads. Clusters of individual men struggling up narrow fingers of steep and stony mountains toward dug-in troops who could see them coming, and defended every goddamned inch.

In that murderous, soul-killing, relentless way, the American Fifth took one mountain after another, while the British Eighth fought its way through the vast watery maze of Romagna’s swamps. By October, Highway 65 to Bologna was wide open and the Brenner Pass was blocked by debris from bombs. The German retreat was cut off, and behind their lines, the Italian Resistance was at work, disrupting communications, transportation, supply lines; blowing up bridges, ambushing troops, assassinating officials. Action by action, partisans took possession of the countryside, the forests, the high ground, and the night. No city, no building, no household in Italy was safe for Fascists.

They could see the end. That was the hell of it. Whether they looked for victory or defeat, they could see the end. A breakthrough was days away, and then—

Supplies and reinforcements were diverted from Italy to other theaters. The Allies reassigned their best generals to the western front and Greece. A few nights later, Kesselring’s staff car collided with a piece of towed artillery, and he was out of action, damned near killed. The sideshow was handed over to second-tier generals: the Allies’ colorless Leese, the Reich’s lackluster von Vietinghoff.

Neither could win. Neither would yield. And then it began to snow.

Across Europe, dense fog and deep cold encased every branch and twig in icy armor. Generals used the bone-chilling, heart-freezing winter of ’45 to consolidate broken units and hurl them against the enemy again, and again, and again. The infantry’s dream of “home by Christmas” became the Great War’s nightmare of stagnant lines and pointless slaughter.

And every night more fine young ghosts whispered in a knife-blade wind: Welcome to hell, brother. Damn the generals. Damn the politicians. Damn them all. Damn everyone who is warm, and dry, and alive tonight.