A Thread of Grace

February 1945

ABOVE NORTHWESTERN ITALY

Tracers stream by. Black puffs of AA blossom. The Dakota bucks and rocks. Simon Henley cringes, and the dispatching sergeant from Chicago laughs. “Relax! Jus’ some token shit from Sant’Andrea,” the Chicagoan yells over the deafening drone. “Nuttin’a worry ’bout.”

The plane’s crew is American, its passengers British. Three Special Ops teams of two men each: an officer who speaks Italian and a signalman to establish communications between partisan bands and Allied Command. Two teams have already parachuted into Emilia-Romagna, and now it’s on to Piemonte, after cutting across the Gulf of Genoa.

As promised, the flak ends in less than the time it takes to overfly the thin crescent of Liguria, but Corporal Henley has several excellent reasons for remaining terrified. One: he is in an airplane. Two: the airplane is over enemy territory. Three: very soon, he will be required to jump out of the plane into the enemy territory.

Across the fuselage, Major Salvi grins beneath the sort of pencil mustache favored by dashing cinema stars. “Simon! How is your sphincter?” Simon registers shock, and once more provides a laugh. “Don’t be ashamed!” Salvi yells. “Even Lawrence of Arabia got the shits before a battle!”

An Ancona expat who taught Dante at Cambridge, Giordano Salvi signed on with the Special Operations Executive back in ’42. His English is a strange mix of academic and army, but his Italian is native. Salvi already holds the Military Cross for the work he did north of Naples before Anzio, two years ago. This will be his third drop behind German lines.

It’s Simon Henley’s first.

Nineteen, a baby-faced blond, Mrs. Henley’s little boy spent his first winter of service freezing on coast guard duty, twelve miles from home. There he fired a Lewis gun from time to time at German aircraft passing overhead, but failed to impress either the Luftwaffe or the local girls. The latter failure, and the observable influence of a paratrooper’s distinctive red beret on women, accounts for Simon’s present predicament. In a fit of unrequited lust, he volunteered for paratroop training last year.

With illogic that seemed typical of the army, Simon was posted to the Signal Corps in British Guiana instead. There four Negro NCOs, each a breathtakingly fast telegrapher who’d worked for the Georgetown post office, browbeat him relentlessly until he could reliably transmit thirty words per minute without error— a skill, he learned glumly, that had no measurable effect on his sex appeal. When his group started lessons in silent killing and unarmed combat, he began to wonder if he’d been assigned to Special Ops, but then it was back to England, when he was apparently reassigned to the paratroops after all. He spent two weeks stepping out of a wingless plane propped on scaffolding twelve feet above the ground while a sergeant screamed, “Tuck and roll, you bloody little cunt! Tuck and roll!”

At last, the moment of truth: three training drops from a plane with wings and an engine. Only then did the freshly promoted Corporal Henley discover that the only thing more sickening than flying was the fear of plummeting to the ground like a rock. And the only thing more terrifying than that was the thought of displaying how frightened he was by hanging on to the dispatcher’s knees and sobbing, “Please, sir, may I be excused?”

Tonight, like Major Salvi, Corporal Simon Henley carries a compass concealed inside a button of his tunic and a comb with a hidden saw in its shank. Less subtly, he wears a commando knife with an eight-inch blade sheathed on his left hip, a Colt.45 automatic holstered on his right, and a Marlin submachine gun slung across his back beneath the Irvine Stachute that will, he’s been assured, open automatically. He’s been told only that they’re to get themselves to Milan and link up with a band of autonomous partisans there. Major Salvi has the rest of their orders. Everything in the SOE is need-to-know.

The pilot spots a signal fire made of hay bales, their outline blurred by wind. “Commies, pro’ly!” the sergeant blares through the noise. “You limey bastids won’t sen’ ’em any weapons, so dey use decoy signals to fool us inna droppin’ shit onna wrong spot. Yer signal’s a square shape!”

“As opposed to a square color?” Salvi asks, ribbing him.

“Smart-ass!” the Chicagoan replies, shouting a laugh when Salvi says, “Major Smart-ass to you, Sergeant!”

They continue to chat at the top of their lungs while the pilot banks for a closer look. A second signal fire comes into view, and then a third, on a different mountainside. “Shit!” the Chicagoan yells when AA opens up on them from the direction of a flaming T. “Jerries! Get ready, youse guys.”

The red light comes on. The sergeant drags the door open. An icy blast of starlit air hits Simon Henley’s face. At thirty-second intervals, the sergeant flings out canisters of supplies, the wireless transmitter, and the hand generator, each on separate chutes. The plane jolts and sways alarmingly. The sergeant hits Salvi’s shoulder. The major disappears. Stepping up to the opening, Simon looks down, hoping to see Salvi’s parachute bloom above the folded, forested wilderness. The mountains are a study in black and white. Bloody hell, Simon thinks. It’s still winter here!

He’s never jumped into snow.

VALDOTTAVO

“The charges are too close together,” Renzo says. “Move that one about half a meter.”

“Why?” the kid wants to know.

“If the second detonation isn’t offset correctly, the wheels on the other side of the track will keep the train from derailing.”

“All right,” the boy says sullenly. He’s fourteen, maybe. Full of bravado and crap. “Why don’t you help?”

“Because,” Renzo explains patiently, “I’m a drunken old gimp. Either I fall over, or I can’t get up.” They can hear the locomotive’s engine now. “Move the charge.”

Renzo slogs back through the snowy mud toward Schramm and the others who wait on the slope above the tracks. “You shouldn’t talk like that about yourself,” Schramm says. “It’s bad for discipline.”

Lighting a cigarette, Renzo looks up, attention drawn by anti-aircraft fire in the distance. Low on the jagged horizon, an airplane smokes into sight. “Busy night.”

Schramm follows Renzo’s gaze. “British?”

“American. Starboard engine throwing oil. Feather that prop, friend.”

As if heeding Renzo’s advice, the pilot tries to bring the propeller vertical. The windmilling goes on, creating so much drag the plane nearly stalls. “Lighten the load,” Renzo murmurs. The damaged engine bursts into flame. “Cut the fuel…”

The train’s whistle blasts as the locomotive starts through its last tunnel. Renzo beckons to the boy. “Pietro— Paolo, whatever the hell your name is—”

“It’s Franco!” the boy shouts back.

“Are you going to stay there and argue with that train?”

Canisters, boxes, and a couple of paratroopers sail out of the crippled Dakota and disappear behind a nearby mountain. The crew remains on board, hurling flak jackets, a chart table and oxygen tanks into the night.

“Will they make it?” Schramm asks.

“If they bail out now.”

The plane begins to climb, but not fast enough.

“Scheisse,” Schramm sighs when it explodes against a cliff. “Survivors?”

“The crew? Not a chance.” Renzo pulls out his flask and raises it to the dead. “The jumpers? Possibly.”

Franco sloshes through muddy snow, looking back through dirt-gray branches in time to see the train crew leap into trackside weeds as the locomotive blares out of the tunnel. “You warned them!”

Renzo wipes his mouth on the back of his hand. “Of course!”

“But they’re Fascists! They’re—”

The air is compressed by two explosions in quick succession, then ripped by the screech of metal on metal. A shatteringly loud crash seems to go on forever. Across the ravine, Tullio Goletta gives the sign and thirty men in motley leave the trees to slide down a snow-covered slope. The trainmen call greetings to Renzo, and join the partisans in emptying the freight cars of their cargo.

Mouth open, Franco turns. Renzo’s eyes are mocking and mature, if slightly unfocused. “That’s why I’m the boss, and you’re the one who’s going to shut up and carry a box back to base.” Renzo waves to Tullio and pitches his voice to carry. “Anyone over there speak English?”

Tullio consults with the others. “Otello does, boss!”

“And I do, a little,” Schramm says.

“We’re going after that airdrop,” Renzo calls. “You’re with me, Tullio. Bring Otello and five or six others! You, too, Schramm. We may need a doctor.”

Roman candle. That’s the jump-school term for it. Occasionally chutes fail, and that’s what you look like, going down.

It seemed hours before Simon felt the welcome jerk of his own straps. He lost sight of Salvi’s all too rapid descent, rotating on the lines in time to see the Dakota itself crash into the mountainside. With tracers trying to find him, the long swaying float to earth seemed endless, even while the ground hurtled upward to meet him. He kept his elbows tucked and meant to roll, but thudded instead into snow, less than a minute after the Chicagoan gave Simon a shove into the frigid air.

Winded by the fall, he hears more explosions— two, three? Nearer this time. Expecting Germans at any moment, Simon tries to get out of his harness but can’t move. I’m paralyzed, he thinks. I didn’t roll, and I’ve broken my own silly neck!

In the next instant he realizes he can wiggle his toes. Crossing his eyes, he can focus on the snow just in front of him. He turns his head from side to side to clear a little airway in front of his nose. Kicks and presses and gouges with knees and elbows. Gains some space around himself, but makes no progress upward.

Not paralyzed then, but definitely immobilized.

Rest a bit, he decides.

The snow insulates him at first, but soon begins to drain his body heat away. Shivering, he tries again to dig out, swearing now, and scared. The activity makes him warmer briefly, but his muscles start to tense up. Fatigue sets in faster this time.

He rests, shuddering uncontrollably. His fingers and toes ache with cold. He tries again, digging like a demented terrier, but exhausts himself just to get his fingers up by his chest.

Astounded, he thinks, This is it then! Unless the Germans come and shoot me first, I’m going to freeze to death. Standing up. In a snowdrift. In Italy! I never even got to wear that bloody red beret.

He wishes he’d written to his mother. He wishes Major Salvi’s parachute had opened. He wishes it were spring, and that the snow would melt.

In a fit of determination, he grits his teeth and puts everything he’s got into last effort to free himself.

Don’t cry, he tells himself afterward. Just don’t cry.

“Where do you think you’re going?”

Angelo stands still, one arm into a jacket that’s already too small. “To the privy. Really,” he says. “The explosions woke me up. I had to pee.”

“Look me in the eye,” Mirella orders. “Tell me you weren’t going to look for bullets.”

“Honest, Mamma. I have to pee.”

“All right,” she says, eyes narrow. “I’ll just wait right here until you’re done.”

He jams his feet into wooden-soled boots. “You never believe me,” he mutters, indignant at being caught.

Mirella sags onto a kitchen chair as her son clumps out to the privy. Oh, Angelo, she thinks, fighting nausea. What am I going to do with you?

Is it because he’s a boy, or because he’s nine? Is it the war, or is it just Angelo, needing a man’s hand? She wishes she had Lidia to advise her. She wishes Iacopo were here to take charge. She wishes she could sleep through the night.

The door bangs shut. She looks up. “Angelo, come here,” she says. He does, but he won’t let her put her arm around him. “Angelo, please! Try to understand! I’m all alone here—”

“No, you’re not! There’s Mariano and Tomasso and—”

“That’s not what I mean, and you know it! It’s just you and me and the girls now. I have so much work to do, and I’m… I don’t feel well. I worry about Babbo, and if you make me worry, too, it’s just too much! I need you to be as grown up as you can be. You must look after the girls, and take care of me a little bit, too. Can you do that?”

Arms crossed against his chest, he shrugs, rolling his eyes but nodding. She tries to kiss him, but he squirms away and stomps up the stairs to the bedroom, ahead of his mother.

He and Stefania share a bed with Rosina to keep warm. Rosina’s asleep, but Stefania’s only pretending. She probably noticed when he got up to watch the airplane go by, and ratted him out to Mamma. Girls, he thinks, disgusted.

His mother stands in the bedroom doorway until Angelo undresses and gets back into bed. He waits, listening to the hallway floor creak under his mother’s footsteps, until her door closes. Then he pinches Stefania really hard, like Bruno Ceretto taught him. Stefania squawks, and he covers her mouth with his hand. “Nobody likes a rat, Stefania. You snitch on me again, I’ll cut your hair off.”

“You wouldn’t!”

“I’ll wait till you’re asleep and cut it off until you’re bald.”

“You’ll get spanked,” she warns.

“You’ll be bald a lot longer than my culo will hurt.” He pulls his pants back on, drags two sweaters over his head, opens the window, and tosses his boots out. Won’t be the first time he’s climbed down the vines. Throwing a leg over the sill, he fixes Stefania with a stare. “Rat on me again, and you’ll be sorry, baldie.”

The starlight’s all blue, but when your eyes are used to it, you can see real easy because the snow sort of shines. And anyway the parachutes are easy to spot. The camouflage is all wrong— black, green, and brown against the white. Course, they didn’t expect to get shot down. They probably figured they’d be past the mountains when they jumped.

Germans look for airdrops, but Angelo’s not scared of them. They don’t like coming into the mountains at night anymore, so they walk real slow, and won’t get here for a while. Dead bodies don’t scare him either. They did when he was little, but not anymore, not after that one Bruno Ceretto found. It must have been a partisan, because he wasn’t wearing a real uniform. He died near the orphanage, and Bruno found the body when the sisters sent everybody out to look for mushrooms and bird eggs and ruculo to eat. He told Angelo, and they snuck back out that night to see it. There were flies and worms, and no eyes, and it really stank.

“Get his bullets!” Bruno said, shoving Angelo.

“I’m not touching him! You can get a disease!”

“You baby. I bet you made it up about that lady’s head in a bucket!”

“Did not!” Scrunching up his face, Angelo waved at the flies, put his hand way out, and picked a bullet out of the dead guy’s cartridge belt with the tips of two fingers. He jumped back and Bruno laughed, but Angelo had the bullet, heavy and cold and important, in his palm.

Bruno snatched it. “Watch! You take the lead out like this, see?” He pried the pointy part out of the brass case with a penknife he took off a littler kid. “Then you pour the gunpowder into little piles on a flat rock. Like volcanoes, see?”

When you hit the volcanoes with another rock, they explode. The kids on the farm think Angelo made that up, but it’s true, so he’s going to get some bullets and show them.

Angelo ignores the boxes and stuff, trudging on until he finds the paratrooper whose chute never opened and is almost for sure dead. Still, he might be faking, and taking bullets is sort of stealing, so Angelo sits down behind some trees and holds his breath as long as he can, watching to see if anything moves. When the body passes this test of deadness, Angelo looks around for a big, long stick and creeps out of the trees toward the rocks the paratrooper fell on.

He pokes at the body a little at first, then harder. The real problem is, the gun’s underneath the guy. Angelo considers pushing the body over, but there’s a commando knife strapped to the top leg, and that would be as good as a bullet to show the kids at the farm. Holding his breath again, Angelo puts the stick down and reaches for the knife—

A hoarse shout startles him. He falls backward, scrambles to his feet, puts his hands up, like in a cowboy movie. For a terrible moment, he thinks the men are fascisti, but nobody’s wearing a uniform. “Ei! Over here!” he calls, waving his arms over his head, so they won’t think he didn’t know they were partisans. “I found the airdrop! Over here!”

He waits for them to arrive, dancing a little with excitement. There are nine men, clanking with guns and knives. The first ones are contadini for sure, short and thick: built like a brick outhouse, the factor always said. The last two must be city people, because they’re taller, and look tired. Nobody talks while the tallest, skinniest one stoops down to check the body.

Angelo raises his hand, like he’s in school. The second-tallest one has a scary scarred face, but he snorts a laugh and nods permission to speak. “That guy’s dead,” Angelo tells him. “I made sure! But there’s another one up there, and I saw more boxes and stuff over there! I can show you!”

The scarred-up man looks hard at him. “What’s your name, kid?”

After a moment’s hesitation, he says, “Angelo,” but not his last name, because you never know.

“Angelo Soncini?” the scarred-up man asks. “Schramm, this is Mirella’s boy! Angelo, it’s me, Renzo Leoni!” Angelo couldn’t swear to it, the man seems like maybe he could be the neighbor who came to Mother of Mercy wearing a priest dress one time. “Belandi,” the man swears, “what the hell are you doing out here? You could get killed! Look how big you are!”

“I’m ten!” Angelo says. “Almost.” He looks at the lightening eastern sky and realizes his mother is going to know he snuck out. “We should get going,” he says, adding, “I saw some Germans coming, too!” to make sure everyone will hurry up.

Angelo leaps from rock to rock, like an island-hopping giant in a white ocean, having a grand time. Considerably less amused, the men struggle along in his wake, trying not to fall into the pools of deep snow between the crags as they tramp down a ravine and across a frozen kettle pond and around the hip of a hill. They find a generator, a radio, and a canister of cigarettes at fifty-meter intervals, well packed and apparently unharmed, but the last of the Dakota’s cargo is higher on the mountainside in a drop zone nobody would have selected, and no footsteps lead away from the parachute.

Lifting silk away from snow, they expect another corpse. Instead a drowsy young man stares up at them and blinks slowly. “I trie’ a roll,” he says.

“Dig,” Schramm says, and everyone does, clearing the snow with their bare hands, tugging at the Tommy’s arms to pull him free. The Englishman begins to hum tunelessly, stopping now and then to make some remark and giggle. “Try not to jar him. Sometimes their hearts just stop,” Schramm warns. “We’ve got to get him warm as soon as possible.”

“I live right over there,” Angelo tells Renzo. “Mamma will take care of him.” The men pause and look at one another. “It’s safe,” Angelo says confidently. “The owner is a big shot with medals and stuff. He knows all the fascisti, and they don’t bother us.”

“Renzo,” Schramm says in a low voice, “if you want this man to live…”

Renzo closes his eyes, weighs priorities, issues orders. “Tullio, get back to base. Send your father back here with twenty men— wait, make it thirty— as fast as they can travel. You, you, you: take the radio equipment to Monteverdi for safekeeping. You two stay here to dig. Otello, go down to the farm with Angelo, so his mother doesn’t think he’s making this up.”

“And tell her to get a good fire going,” Schramm orders. “Heat some water!”

Still half-buried, the Englishman waves to the dispersing partisans. “Bye-bye!” he calls cheerily, then begins to sing, loudly and in a variety of keys. “Weeee’ll mee’ tagain, don’ know where, don’ know wheeeen…”

“Hurry,” Schramm says. “When they stop making sense, they don’t have much time.”

The paratrooper’s halfway to Tipperary when they’ve dragged him to the surface. Breathless from the effort, they listen to the jaunty march for a few minutes, then struggle to their feet.

“Schramm,” Renzo says as they make ready to carry the half-frozen paratrooper toward Villa Malcovato, “the ski instructors said if someone’s hypothermic, you warm him up slowly.”

Schramm concentrates on uncoupling the Englishman’s harness and lines. “We did some research,” he says vaguely. “Faster is better.”

Hearing comes first. People whispering. Boots on wooden floors. His own existence is next. He’s warm. Sitting in a chair. His legs feel heavy in an odd sort of way. He opens his eyes, blinks owlishly, takes in his surroundings a little at a time. A fireplace. A window.

“Caporale?” he hears a woman say.

She is, alarmingly, pretty as an angel, although Simon never expected heavenly beings to look so tired. Two sleeping cherubs snuggle on his lap, one under each arm, wrapped inside the same blankets tucked around him. That’s when he realizes he’s been stripped to his socks and army-issue Y-fronts, and that a bare-chested man is sitting right behind him.

The tired angel puts her hand against his chest, to keep him from leaping out of the chair. “Calma ti,” she says soothingly. “Tu sei fra amici.”

Amici means friends, but standing just beyond her is a group of fearsome-looking men, apparently outfitted at a jumble sale. Italian army jackets, city tweeds, hand-knit jumpers. Baggy peasant pants, trousers from woolen suits or German uniforms. Laced hunting boots, wooden clogs, street shoes, German combat boots. They’re heavily armed with an equally international collection of military-issue weapons, shotguns and hunting rifles, police pistols and meat cleavers.

Their disorderly appearance contrasts with the attention and obedience they give a slender, middle-aged man with a badly scarred face and a submachine gun slung casually over his left shoulder. Noticing Simon, Scarface breaks off their conversation and comes closer. “Parli italiano?”

Simon spots his uniform drying on a rack in front of the fire. “There’s a phrase book in my kit,” he tells them, pointing with one finger. Reaching around the little girls, he mimes opening a book with his palms. “Book? An Italian-English phrase book?”

The man behind him oozes out of the chair, speaking Italian. Simon instantly feels the chill of his absence against his own bare back, and realizes why this person was there in the first place. The angel speaks sharply to a boy— her son? — and the child hurries to get the phrase book, watching wide-eyed while Simon flips through it.

“There,” Simon says, and slowly sounds out transliteration. “Sahno key eye-tar-low: I am here to help you.” He hands the book over, pointing at the phrase.

The leader’s brows rise. Judging from the resulting laughter, he says something along the lines of, “Well, thank God for that! We’re safe now that this bedraggled little limey is on the scene.”

From the string of orders subsequently issued, Simon picks out just one word: Maria. The kitchen empties itself of partisans, leaving Scarface, the angel, and a thin man, all of whom continue discussing the situation. The bloke who sat behind him listens to them, nodding repeatedly while buttoning his shirt. “I am called Otello,” he tells Simon. “I visit England for one year. We are partigiani: partisans. Anti-Fascists. We are all friends for you. Your comrade is misfortunately dead. This is the doctor of us.” The thin man raises a hand in greeting. “He says you must rest.” Otello indicates Scarface next. “The boss says it’s dangerous for this lady if you stay here. So you will rest one night. Then we’ll go to our camp with you. Have you undestand everything?”

“Where’s the wireless? The Marconi?” Simon looks from face to face. “I have to report in. I was supposed to go to Milan, but I don’t know why. Major Salvi had all the orders, and if he’s dead, I don’t know what—”

Otello stops him, and translates. “The boss says, ‘The radio is safe. You will use it tomorrow.’ ” The doctor lifts the smaller of the two sleeping girls out of Simon’s lap. The tired angel takes the older one into her arms and sends the boy out of the room. “Now this lady takes you to rest,” Otello says.

The angel smiles encouragingly and shows Simon to a staircase.

Half an hour later, with Stefania, Angelo, and the English boy in bed, Mirella returns to the kitchen. Renzo and Schramm are alone at the table, deep in quiet discussion. “We have coffee,” she tells them. “Should I put some on now? No— maybe you should get some sleep.”

“Mirella,” Renzo says, “stop fussing and go back to bed!”

“I’m fine. I’m fine,” she says, bustling distractedly from task to task. “Are you sure about the coffee? I could put some in a sack for you. Il maggiore can get more. We have eggs. Should I make you some eggs? Werner, lie down upstairs awhile. I can take Rosina now.”

“Ah, but it’s such a pleasure to hold her.” A pale dawn brightens the curtains above the sink and finds its way to Rosina’s curls. Her chubby cheeks are the color of peaches, as her mother’s used to be. Schramm frowns at Mirella’s nervy, cheerless agitation. “You’re pale,” he tells her. “And thin. Are you eating enough? How far along are you?”

“Almost three months,” she says, as though dismissing some minor inconvenience. “I’m fine, Werner. Some morning sickness, that’s all.”

She glances quickly at Renzo. “Mirella—” he says, and stops for a deep breath and long moments of tapping the tabletop. “Where is Iacopo?” he asks finally. “Why are you alone here?”

“He’s in Sant’Andrea with the refugees—”

“God damn that man! Can’t he ever put his own family first?”

She doesn’t want Renzo’s anger. She has her own, and the gnawing fear that goes with it. “There was no one else,” she says. “Osvaldo Tomitz has been arrested.”

GESTAPO INTERROGATION CENTER

PORTO SANT’ANDREA

“I never used to smoke,” Artur Huppenkothen says. “My sister complains about the smell. Erna can’t understand why I have taken up such a filthy habit. My nerves, I tell her. It helps my nerves.”

He has smashed terrorist cells, one after another, but what good has it done? He is a blacksmith, bringing his hammer down on the anvil time after time, but there’s no iron to bend to his will. The enemy is like water, like the sea. You might as well pound a rising tide.

“The Soviets have taken the Balkans,” he tells the priest. “Yugoslavia, Bulgaria, Rumania. Religion is finished there. Do you want that to happen in Italy? Do you understand whom you are protecting, Father? Jews, who do not believe in Jesus. Communists, who do not believe in God at all! You are a good man, but you’ve been duped. You haven’t seen what I’ve seen. Communists took over München when I was a boy, and let me tell you something— they were all Jews!”

Beneath its bruises, the face remains impassive, the eyes downcast.

“Are you praying, Father? Then pray for wisdom!” Artur pleads. “In the Gospel of John, Jesus says, ‘Whoever belongs to God hears the words of God— if you do not listen, you do not belong to God.’ Who do the Jews belong to then? They killed Christ in Satan’s service! They poison and kill and steal from Christians. They hate us with a hate so vast, so— so violent, they want us all to die! The Jew is capable of any kind of evil. There is nothing they won’t stoop to, Tomitz! Why do you protect them?”

Artur opens a thick file, shuffles through the crackly onionskin papers. “In Spain, the Communists killed thousands of priests and monks and nuns! The pope himself said Jews form the principal force of Bolshevism! Jews subsist through contraband, fraud, and usury. They have tentacles everywhere, Tomitz— in contracts and monopolies, in postal services and telephone companies, in shipping and the railroads, in town treasuries and state finance— Here!” he says, finding a clipping from Civiltà Cattolica. “From the Vatican newspaper! ‘Jews are uniquely endowed with the qualities of parasites and destroyers. They pull the levers of capitalism and communism— a pincer assault to control the entire world! They grow fat off the arts and industry of the nations that give them refuge!’ ”

Silence.

Artur watches smoke give shape to light coming through the office window, trying to fathom this man. He looks so ordinary, so normal. Nothing in his physiognomy marks him as a race traitor, a Communist dupe, a Jew lover. Sadly, once the infection takes hold, no amount of reasoning can break its grip. Artur squares the sheaf of papers, closes the file, replaces it in his briefcase. “I gave you every chance,” he says. “You leave me with no choice.”

He was dozing in the backseat of the car, waiting for il maggiore to return from a meeting in the Palazzo Municipale. By the time he was taken into custody, he’d heard so many stories, he could anticipate every detail. The Gestapo men in leather coats. The pistol pointed at his chest.

There would be prison. Interrogation. You know you’ll be beaten, but you don’t really know. You can’t, until you feel that first blow, because it carries a completely unexpected message. It does not say, “Tell me what I want to know!” It says instead, “You are helpless.”

Even on the battlefield, the Red Cross or the medics find their way to the wounded. The compensation for being hurt is the expectation of help, and when that expectation is destroyed, a part of you dies. You realize with numb surprise that those who hold you prisoner can do anything they like. They don’t simply punch you in the face. They reach through the air and shatter the boundaries that make you an individual. They impose themselves on you as they please. It is a kind of rape.

The next surprise is heartening. Like a little boy in his first schoolyard scuffle, you discover you can take a punch. The fright and pain of the first blow fade remarkably quickly. A kind of giddiness takes hold. The pain is not, after all, unbearable. It’s not as bad as a toothache, for example. Hit me all you want, you think then. It’ll get you nowhere.

And so: the shuffle down an endless corridor illuminated by bare bulbs hanging from cords furred with dust. A turn, a stairwell. Another corridor three flights down. Doors on each side at two-meter intervals; men behind them weeping, moaning. “Coraggio,” someone shouts to the shackled newcomer. “Courage, comrade!” A man behind a different door laughs shrilly.

A large brick room. A high vaulted ceiling. His clothes are taken from him. While his hands are manacled behind his back, his eyes follow a thick-linked chain rolling over a pulley anchored in the ceiling, spooling onto an oaken uptake spindle with an iron crank.

The strappado. Machiavelli endured it, survived it. He wrote The Prince afterward. Or, rather, he dictated it. Nevertheless. It is possible to live through this. There can be a life after the strappado.

Huppenkothen is waiting. He is a small man, neat, with the kind of round soft features that look good-natured. “I hate this,” he says, pacing. “The screaming. The shitting, the pissing. I hate it.” He pauses to light another cigarette, his hands unsteady, and jerks his head toward a civilian with a flamboyant mustache and a long blue jaw that works like a pump handle as he chews the last of a sausage panino. “Signor Innocente does not share my distaste, Father. You’ll talk sooner or later. I suggest sooner.”

Innocente. It is the surname given to foundlings raised in Catholic orphanages. A euphemism for bastard.

Innocente licks his fingers, steps forward, pulls the chain down, snugs its hook into the shackles. The chain rattles. The spool creaks, taking up the slack.

“Names,” Huppenkothen says. “Addresses. Meeting places.”

The hook draws Osvaldo’s hands upward, backward, away from his body. Sweat pops on his forehead, his upper lip. His feet leave the ground. Suspended a meter above the floor, he is able to think of Christ crucified for an instant.

And then: he is transfigured, transmogrified, all body, no soul. All that was Osvaldo Tomitz gathers into his shoulder joints. His muscles quiver, first slightly, then more violently. He stops breathing, unwilling to spend strength on anything other than holding himself at half-oblique.

“Everyone tries that,” PierCarlo Innocente tells him. “It never works.”

From the spindle’s vantage, PierCarlo measures the naked body with a tailor’s eye, deciding how much chain will be needed to keep the feet above the floor. He hoists the priest another half meter up and chocks the spindle. Drawing closer, he inspects the priest’s shivering penis with detached curiosity. “Naughty worm,” he whispers with an odd lilting intimacy. “Naughty little worm…”

He straightens and hits the priest high in the belly, under the rib cage, emptying the lungs so that no scream can mask the crackle of shattering cartilage and snapping ligaments. Torn out, lifted from behind, the balls of the shoulders spring from their sockets. The body falls abruptly, then hangs from its own muscles and skin and nerves and blood vessels. The dislocated arms are twisted high above the head.

“Torture,” PierCarlo says to himself. “From the Latin torquere, to twist.”

He watches, patient, emotionless. Soon the body’s need for breath wins its battle against gravity, and the screaming can begin. When the shrieks subside to a high, thin whine like a piglet’s squeal, PierCarlo begins to chant in the singsong voice of an adult wheedling cooperation from a reluctant child. “No one can hear you but me. Nobody knows where you are,” he croons softly. “Give me what I want, naughty worm, or I’ll never let you go.”

March 1945

PENSIONE USODIMARE

PORTO SANT’ANDREA

The office is makeshift: a cheap desk pushed into an entry that was once a modest receiving room for a prosperous family. After the war, Antonia Usodimare intends to fix the place up again, but for now it’s good enough. Her boarders are lonely men, too weary and dejected to care about threadbare upholstery and derelict draperies. She moves heavily on puffy, leaden legs, cooking plain meals for them, doing their washing. Between bouts of housework, she knits with red and swollen fingers, knobby knees splayed beneath the skirt of a faded black dress, bunioned feet stuffed into a pair of her dead husband’s slippers.

This morning, she aches worse than usual. After all the boarders left, she added a long climb to the garret to her ordinary work, then punished her joints further by kneeling in the corner, prying up the boards, retrieving a bundle of clothing. One flight down, she wrapped the bundle in a thin towel, collected a few shirts, stuffed them into a sack with stinking underwear and socks. Layering them, like a nasty lasagna. Slowly, pausing on each stair tread, she made her way back down to the office, tucked the sack under the desk, and settled down to wait.

She’s been promised that a staffetta called la vedova will give her an entire package of British cigarettes in exchange for the bundle. A princely payment, but justified by the risks Antonia takes for the resistance. The Gestapo will arrest anyone, even old women. If they search the Pensione Usodimare and find what hides under her desk, Antonia Usodimare will pay with her life.

At midmorning, a young peasant knocks politely on the open door but stays just outside, one hand balancing the large basket she carries on her kerchiefed head. “Prego, signora,” she says with a slurry mountain accent, “have you any laundry for me today?”

Antonia frowns suspiciously. She was expecting someone her own age, not this pregnant green-eyed girl. “I usually do my own.”

“Prego, signora, I’ll do a good job, and I don’t charge much. I need the money. I am all alone. A widow.”

As she realizes that la vedova is not just a nickname, the landlady’s lumpy old face changes. “Poveretta,” she murmurs, bending to retrieve the sack. The girl lowers her basket, secreting the bundle amid the sheets and shirts she’s already carrying. “Grazie tanto,” she says. “You are very kind.”

She passes the cigarettes to Antonia when the old woman embraces her. “There are too many widows,” Antonia whispers. “Too many mothers alone.”

“There will be more.”

It is a promise, not a threat. Antonia draws back, chilled. La vedova pauses at the open door. “I’ll have the laundry back by Tuesday,” she says in a voice meant to be heard. “Mille grazie, signora.”

At roadblocks and checkpoints, she can play her pregnancy either way. Italians, either sentimental or in collusion with the resistance, allow the weary young Madonna to pass without a thorough search. Germans are more dangerous. Their eyes linger on her swollen breasts. They pretend to be suspicious. Italy is filled with girls who survive by doing soldiers a favor for a few lire, a couple of cigarettes, a little food. To them, Claudia is a slut stupid enough to let herself get knocked up, as bitter and embattled as they themselves. “What have you got in that basket?” such men always ask. Sometimes she flirts with them. “A bomb,” she jokes. “Want to search me?”

Sant’Andrea’s early spring has softened into real warmth; her blouse is half open beneath a rust-red cardigan. The waistband of a flowered skirt is shifted above her belly, and raises the hem over her knees. She shuffles forward in the queue, watching the older of two soldiers.

Stepping up to the barricade, she glances at a gang of undersized urchins loitering just beyond. Ragged, barefoot, fearless. “Zigaretten,” such boys beg at every German checkpoint. For sport sometimes, soldiers flick a butt to the cobbles and make bets as children fight for possession. Claudia leans over to set her basket down. The older German watches a trickle of sweat slip between her breasts. She hands over her identity card.

He may toss a cigarette toward the boys, beckon to her, demand a “toll” for her passage. He may see the signs of alteration on her papers and arrest her, or simply shoot her in the head because he’s hung over and knows the war is lost. She will not know why she died, except that she is following her orders: collect the uniform, deliver it to Schramm.

“What’s in there?” He means the basket, but he’s looking now at her belly.

“A little bastard,” she says in Schramm’s Italian-accented German. “Want to search me to be sure?”

Pawing through the laundry, he gives the opportunity some thought. She’s pretty, even six months along— “Scheisse!” he hisses, leaping back as though his hand had been bitten by a snake.

She apologizes, feigning surprise and dismay. Explains that such cleaning is part of her job. He swears again, face twisting with disgust, and tells her to move on. God knows how many people this man’s killed, but rags soaked with menstrual blood have the power to horrify him.

She clears the barricade and follows a boy named Riccardo down a narrow alley, through a low plank door. The other kids filter in, delivering stolen purses, wallets, and guns. Riccardo decides what he can fence in town and what he’ll sell to la vedova. The bargaining is swift. Two packets of British cigarettes for identity papers. He wants two more for the guns, but she shakes her head. “One pack,” she says. “We’ve got plenty of guns.”

“Bene.” Riccardo lights up.

“Next Tuesday,” she tells him. “The Genoa gate.”

The child’s cheeks hollow as he takes a drag. He coughs and nods, then raises a grubby hand in farewell. “Next Tuesday,” he agrees. “Ciao, bella.”

NEAR BORGO SAN MAURO

VALDOTTAVO

Tonio lugs lead batteries. Maurizio totes the cumbersome generator. The twelve-pound wireless transmitter bumps against Simon Henley’s own chronically bruised back. Twenty-some men form a guard around the precious radio equipment. When the sun comes up, the tracks of this mixed multitude will be plain as day through melting snow and the mud beneath it. “Won’t the Germans follow us?” Simon Henley asks his guide.

“Of course not,” Maria Avoni says.

“Why not?” he asks in sincere ignorance.

“Because they might find us.” She stands still, listening. Gets her bearings, and points. “There is a spring. We will drink some water and rest.”

Mirella Soncini seemed an angel of mercy who made his first day in Italy warm and safe. Maria Avoni is an altogether different example of Italian womanhood. Last month, at Renzo Leoni’s order, Maria appeared at Villa Malcovato toting a machine gun, with ammunition belts criss-crossed over her lovely bosom: Boadicea as dressed by Pancho Villa. “How was your flight?” she asked Simon, as though he were a tourist on holiday, not a paratrooper behind enemy lines. “I will show you to your first camping place,” she said. “We will have an enjoyable walk.”

She commands a band of two dozen partisans instructed to facilitate the British signalman’s work. Her English is competent, but Simon was bemused by her phrasing until she mentioned that her father was a mountain guide before the war.

She picks out a flattish rock to use as a picnic bench, and extracts panini from a backpack. The other partisans nudge each other, smirking, when Simon sits next to her. He wishes their vulgar assumptions were correct. He’s spent hours pretending to care about Maria’s nature talks, watching her hips as she climbs in the moonlight.

She is smart, and knowledgeable, and has volunteered for the thankless task of teaching him a bit of her language. Tonight’s topic has been the bewildering variety of Italian politics. As near as he can make out, the Garibaldi Brigades divide their time between ambushing Fascists and preparing for a Communist revolution after the war. Matteotti Socialists are left-wing laborites, but not Communists; they support trade unions and peasant agricultural cooperatives. Christian Democrats want to restore normality, a rather cloudy concept these days. Catholic Actionists differ from Christian Democrats in some way that even Maria is hazy about. “I think they’re more religious” was all she could come up with.

The Committee for National Liberation’s brief is to coordinate the actions of such groups for the common good— broadly defined as making the Germans leave Italy. The British SOE’s mission, in turn, is to encourage CNL cooperation with the Allies by dropping medical supplies, weapons, ammunition, money, and cigarettes, all in exchange for intelligence on enemy troop movements. Simon’s own orders are to transmit said intelligence, an activity the German SS and Italian Black Brigades wish devoutly to discontinue. By day, squads of them comb the district on foot or motorbike, searching in general for partisans and in particular for an Englishman with a wireless. Maria guides him to a new transmission location every seventy-two hours.

“And what are your political views?” he asks Maria, trying to sound worldly while chewing a cheese sandwich.

She licks olive oil from her fingers. “See those two farms? There, and there.” Hints of a rosy dawn flush the eastern sky. He can just make out the blackened ruins high on either side of the main valley. “The Fascists say Attilio Goletta helps the resistance. The Communists say Battista Goletta is a Fascist informer. Broken clocks are correct two times a day. The Black Brigades and the Garibaldini— they are both correct this time.” She shrugs, and with an act of will, he does not watch her breasts move beneath her battle jacket. “Most of the time, they are wrong. Fascisti think all peasants help the partisans, so they burn houses. Communisti think if a farmer’s house isn’t burned, he must be a collaborator. So they burn houses.”

“And your group?”

“We just want all these bastards to leave us alone. Germans, Fascists, Communists.”

Relieved the British are not yet on her list of bastardi, Simon clears his throat self-consciously. “Maria, I heard that there will be a dance. A lot of the partisans are inviting staffette… I was wondering if you would—”

Her face goes still. She moves her head from side to side, listening to a faint thumping on the other side of the low mountains to the south. Mortars, a valley or two away. “I’ll dance when the war is over.”

She stands, giving orders. Maurizio does as he’s told, hefting the generator, but Tonio mutters “Rompacoglioni” in a tone intended to provoke. Maria replies, a whiplash in her voice.

Simon straps the wireless onto his back but looks to Maria for an explanation of what just happened. She pumps the air near her crotch with both hands and jerks her head toward Tonio. “Ambidestro,” she says with a sneer.

He stifles a laugh when he works it out: two-handed wanker.

“He calls me ballbuster,” she tells Simon casually. “I say to him, ‘Lucky I hate the Germans more than I hate pricks like you.’ ” She studies Simon, knowing— the way women always seem to know— that his intentions are every bit as dishonorable as those of any other man. His tactics, at least, are more gentlemanly. “When war came, there were fewer tourists, and my father’s business went down. After the Germans? No tourists at all. From then on—” She meets Simon’s eyes with a level gaze. “I supported my whole family. Parents. Nonna. Three brothers, a sister.” She watches his reactions. Admiration. Puzzlement. The shock of understanding. He searches for something to say, but she says it for him. “I was a whore, but I am also their superior officer. So they obey.”

They have begun to climb again when a small girl appears out of nowhere. She chatters and points toward a farm building about a mile down the mountainside. Simon sees a German soldier exit a barn.

Unconcerned, Maria sends the child off and leans again into the slope. Simon stumbles, looking over his shoulder. There are several Germans now, heads bowed over a map. One raises binoculars. “Maria,” Simon says with all the urgency he can muster, “if they spot us, they’re not likely to mistake this for a shepherds’ convention.”

“You worry too much,” she says, her pace unaltered. “They will stay there and have a breakfast.”

He has never been in combat. Maria has led ambushes, survived firefights, won skirmishes. She knows the country and the people. He trusts her judgment. With the war nearly over, many ordinary German and Italian soldiers merely go through the motions of pursuing partisans, but the SS have lost none of their zeal for hunting down unarmed Jews. In the past few weeks, Simon’s seen massive operations sweep through valleys like this. Barking mad, really, given how much those troops are needed elsewhere.

Suddenly, and for no reason he can identify, he feels… exposed, and very frightened. He sidesteps, not knowing why, moving to Maria’s left just as the machine guns open up.

Startled by the noise, he dives for cover, rolling behind a log in time to see Maria’s blouse stitched in red by a neat row of bullets. Four more partisans are hit before she topples to the muddy ground.

Three rounds zip over the log, their draft riffling Simon’s hair. They’re shooting at me, he thinks stupidly. Those people are trying to kill me. In the next instant, all the tedious months of SOE training and discipline take over. He looses a burst from his Marlin in the general direction of the gunfire and motions for Maurizio to move uphill.

Wide-eyed, Maurizio tightens the generator’s straps, scrambles through the muddy melting snow, then fires a burst of his own while Simon runs crouched and at top speed. Soon all the partisans are moving upward in pairs, alternately keeping the Germans’ heads down with covering fire and scrambling like hell for cover on higher ground.

They’ve made fifty meters when the noise and the immediate danger begin to recede. Mouths open, they pause to reassess their line of retreat. The ground suddenly leaps to life beneath Tonio’s feet. A machine gunner on their left flank quickly corrects. Tonio screams— legs, thighs, hips spattered with slugs. Another partisan grabs his arm, trying to pull the wounded man along. The gunner finishes them both.

Sprinting now like startled goats, the surviving partisans dash toward the trees on their right, struggling through the treacly surface. A third machine gun opens fire directly in front of them. Three men go down, shot or maybe only slipping in the mud. Simon scrambles into a shallow gully with Maurizio. Maurizio yells to the others. A few shout back. Simon tries to count the voices. Seven left? Eight? Scattered over a fifty-yard field of overlapping fire. In the numberless western serials Simon watched as a child, this was when the 7th Cavalry would gallop over a ridge, bugles blaring, sabers flashing.

The shooting becomes sporadic. Partisans periodically pop up to keep the Germans at bay. The Jerries return fire halfheartedly, knowing they need only remind their quarry they’re still pinned down. Eventually, the Italians will run out of ammunition.

It’s going to be a beautiful spring day, Simon thinks as the sun rises. He can see a small copse of chestnut trees in a rubble of boulders, about two hundred yards uphill.

He nudges Maurizio and jerks his head toward the trees, hoping that eyes and expression can convey his thoughts: Stay here, and we’re fish in a barrel. Run, and we’ll be cut to pieces. Understanding, Maurizio shrugs, pulling the corners of his mouth downward as if to say, Six of one, half a dozen of the other. “Andiamo,” he says.

They take another count of the survivors and relay the plan to make a run for it. Tensing, Simon has gathered himself for the dash when the noise suddenly triples, and military clichés explode around him. Withering fire. A hail of bullets. All hell breaking loose. A vaguely familiar voice shouts in English from somewhere uphill. “Ei! Simon! Get ready! We give you cover!”

Laughing crazily, Maurizio directs Simon’s wild-eyed gaze toward a man waving behind a tree stump. It’s the one who visited England. What was his name? Something Shakespearean…

Before Simon can remember more, Renzo Leoni strolls out from behind a boulder. (Cool as a cucumber. Butter wouldn’t melt in his mouth.) With the Germans preoccupied by this astounding display of joie de morte, Simon jumps up to spray the woods with his Marlin, thinking, Run like a rabbit. Run for your life.

Vaulting a fallen tree behind a low rock outcrop, he flops onto his belly and watches for muzzle flashes. This time he aims and picks off a man feeding ammo into one of the machine guns. Rewarded with a scream, he feels for the first time the sheer unholy joy of survival at another’s cost, and looks for someone else to kill.

A partisan scuttles over and hides behind the rocks with him. “Ei! Simon! Remember me?” he asks cheerily. “I am Otello. I visit England for one year!”

Living proof that God protects drunks and lunatics, Renzo Leoni joins them, groaning like an old man when he kneels. He speaks in a low, quick voice, his appraising eyes on Simon. “The boss is happy you still have the radio,” Otello translates. “He says: you did well. He says: a corporal in the paratroops is worth a colonel in any army!”

Surprised and gratified, Simon can think of no way to reply, and in any case, Renzo seems to forget him in the next moment. “He will count to three,” Otello says, watching the silent orders the boss is conveying with an Italian’s manual eloquence. “The others will cover us, and you will run with me, over the hill— that way. Run very fast, understand?”

On “Tre!” they take off amid a thunderstorm of gunfire. Knees pumping, crouched like a crone under the weight of the wireless, Simon expects a bullet in the arse, but minutes (hours, centuries) later, he and Otello clear the crest safely and slide down behind it.

Maurizio is next, flinging himself and the generator over the hilltop and into the declivity beyond. Three more partisans follow, leaping like Olympic long jumpers. One of them has retrieved the batteries from Tonio’s body. Another grins and offers a bottle of red wine. Simon stares, astounded by the idea of carrying wine into battle, but he takes a slug and passes it on.

Otello and the others confer quickly. Two partisans nod and leave. Silently, the others wait, watching their Englishman’s chest heave. “Are you better now?” Otello asks solicitously. “Can you walk?”

Insulted, Simon puts his primitive Italian to use, maligning the mating habits of Otello’s entire family. Laughing, they get on their way, teaching him several additional terms for such behavior as they follow the scouts.

The gunfire grows fainter as they cross hills, cut through fields, and skirt hedgerows, moving at a steady pace that seems to indicate a long journey ahead of them. The day turns warm. Birds sing. Suddenly, the scouts come running back, calling out in hoarse whispers, motioning: Down! Down! Down!

Everyone dives for cover, and Otello pulls Simon into the freezing waist-high water of a high-banked stream. A German half-track trundles over the horizon. Shivering, sweating, they wait in absolute silence while the vehicle rumbles past, close enough for them to smell its exhaust.

When it finally disappears around a hill, they scramble out of the stream. Simon shrugs out of the radio rig, determines that it hasn’t gotten wet, and tries to empty his boots without taking them off. Otello holds a whispered conference with the scouts, who take positions about fifty yards ahead. “We go where the Germans came,” Otello says. “Do you understand? The Germans make a radio signal to headquarters that says, ‘All clear. No partisans here.’ So, no more Germans will come that way.”

For the balance of the day, they meander through the countryside, their only objective to avoid contact with the enemy. Three times they see German patrols in the distance, and once they duck behind a hedgerow. A platoon of Decima Mas Republicans passes: ex—motor torpedo boatmen from the defunct Italian navy, limping morosely in bad boots.

By dusk Simon is thoroughly lost, and therefore utterly unprepared when they arrive at the very spot where the ambush began. He stares at Maria’s body, forgotten until this moment. Sitting beside her, the same small girl who warned them this morning, a lifetime ago.

The child is sent away with a few quick orders. The partisans draw straws. Maurizio loses. While the others draw off to a safe distance, Maurizio checks their comrades’ corpses for booby traps. When nothing blows up, Otello says, “This is safe for us tonight. The Germans think no one will come back.”

Alerted by the little girl, two short, thick women arrive bearing shovels on their shoulders, baskets of food on their heads. Shaped like potatoes, with faces of genial toughness, they cluck their tongues over the fallen while handing chestnut bread and skins of harsh red wine to the living. Famished, the partisans eat, talking quietly, then take turns digging in rocky mud. The women shake their heads. “Poveretti,” they say. “Poveretti.”

Simon slumps empty-headed beside Maria’s body, listening to the shovels’ crunch and slop. For the first and only time, he reaches out to touch her face; startled by her cold flesh, he draws back. When the time comes, he helps lay her and the other corpses into their shallow graves. Otello cuts branches from some sort of conifer, placing fragrant sprays of green over the slack and empty faces. Maurizio starts to fill in Maria’s grave but stops when Simon asks him to. Removing the little compass hidden in one of his buttons, Simon shows it to the others. They nod with approval when he closes Maria’s fingers around it.

The peasants depart with their baskets and tools. Otello posts a sentry. The others pass wine bags from hand to hand, but no one sings tonight. When the skins are empty, each man makes a pile of pine boughs to lie on, above the freezing mud. A childhood prayer runs through Simon’s mind. Now I lay me down to sleep. If I should die…

Tomorrow, he’ll be escorted to one of the many tall stone watchtowers built into the slant of Piemonte’s hilltops. Seven feet on a side, the upper level ten feet above a cellar downslope, they always afford a panoramic view of Valdottavo.

Otello and Maurizio will stay with him, to help with the batteries and generator. Over the next few hours, they’ll watch activity in the valley. Identify high, quiet places within a few miles of the hideout. Hike to the best spot for the first transmission. There Simon will open the radio case, fit a stone into a loop at the end of a fifty-foot copper wire, and fling it over a nearby tree branch. He’ll tune to Algiers, and be amazed once again by how easily such a primitive arrangement brings in QSA5 signals.

With a onetime code pad, index finger tapping thirty errorless words per minute, he’ll deliver the intelligence he’s gathered in the past two weeks. “Partisan strength est 23,000 / disciplined under fire well-led / main German withdrawal hwy estimated 150 lorries destroyed / 200 KW 50 POW / partisan losses light / civilian reprisals heavy.”

He’ll ask to be released from the mission he and Major Salvi were supposed to have carried out in Milan. He’s already with a group of autonomous partisans who deserve all the help they can get. He’ll request airdrops of plastic explosives, of Stens, Brens, and automatic rifles, of ammo and spare parts for all the weapons. He’ll ask for more signal flares, for salt and cigarettes, for penicillin, sulfa drugs, plasma, sterile bandages, and morphine.

Then he’ll break to receive, taking down his own orders in Morse, to be decoded when he gets back to the stone tower. He’ll have under an hour from start to finish— the time it would take for two German direction-finding vehicles to get a fix on him.

Today he learned he can rely on his training, rely on himself to do his duty, and do it well, under fire. In the morning, no doubt, Simon Henley will feel like a blooded veteran, ready for whatever the war can throw at him. But tonight? Lying on a bed of pine boughs near the grave of a young woman he barely knew, he thinks of the short, hard life of Maria Avoni, and he cries. Like a baby.

VILLA MALCOVATO

NEAR ROCCABARBENA

They are the bravest of the brave, these girls. The chances they take, the risks they run. The more Mirella learns of them, the more awe and sadness she feels.

When the occupation began, the Resistance printed pamphlets for wives and mothers. “Your greatest contribution to the nation is to open your door and let your men go— to fight!” But who risked arrest and rape and death to distribute those pamphlets? Girls. Women.

Staffette carried letters, documents, intelligence. Then medical supplies, then dynamite, ammunition, and grenades. They knew their fate if caught, so they learned to load and fire pistols for their own protection. Soon they joined brigades and assault groups, and now they fight beside the men. Constantly on the move, traveling on foot in the awful cold, sleeping in cellars, on concrete floors, in barns or open country. Hungry, wet, lice ridden.

No wonder, then, when a widow of sixteen becomes the mother of an infant boy born many weeks too soon.

Mirella hears a quiet knock at the door, and opens it to Werner Schramm. “The doctor is here,” she tells Claudia.

Mirella moves to the fireplace, listening to Schramm’s soothing murmur as he examines mother and child. In a voice as small as her baby, Claudia asks, “Will he live?”

Schramm’s eyes briefly meet Mirella’s. “Your son is very small, very weak,” he tells Claudia gently, “but babies can surprise us.”

“Why won’t he suckle?”

“He is tired from being born, signora. He needs rest and warmth. As you do.”

A few years ago, Werner Schramm would have whisked this doomed infant away. Out of sight, he’d have done nature’s work, granting the child a quick and merciful death. He is a different man now, but it is very difficult to watch the little chest heave spasmodically, working hard for air.

Across the room Mirella refills a cooling scaldino with hot coals and slides it under the bedding near the girl’s feet, tucking the blankets around her. Together she and Schramm step away from the bedside.

“You can try feeding him with an eyedropper,” he suggests quietly. “The skin is very fragile. Perhaps some olive oil, to protect it. Keep him warm. That is most important.”

Duno Brössler is in the kitchen, pacing as nervously as a young father. When Claudette went into labor, Duno sent for Schramm immediately, but the baby was born so soon… “Your young friend will live,” Schramm says, “but her son won’t last the night.” Duno sags. “You did well to save one of them,” Schramm tells him. “You should go to medical school when this is over.”

Duno runs his fingers through lank and dirty hair. “Is she awake? May I go in?”

“Yes. She will like to see a familiar face, I think. Send Signora Soncini to bed. She needs rest, or she may lose her own pregnancy.”

Duno steps quietly into the little room, speaks to the rabbi’s wife, who kisses the infant’s forehead on her way out. Duno draws a chair near, sitting close enough to stroke the dying baby’s fine, dark curls. He looks more like an organ-grinder’s monkey than a human child, but Duno says, “He’s beautiful, Claudette.”

“Thank you,” she says, believing him.

“Have you chosen a name?”

“Alberto, for my father. That’s what Santino wanted.”

“That’s a good name,” Duno says. “Rest now. I’ll stay with you, Claudette.”

Once they knew that Osvaldo Tomitz was in a Gestapo prison on Via San Marco in Porto Sant’Andrea, the hours of discussion yielded only one good plan. “I’ll say I was sent to check on his condition,” Schramm argued. “My friends, you must allow me to save lives. That is a doctor’s duty, is it not?” Eventually even Renzo was persuaded: Schramm could do by stealth what would otherwise require a full-scale attack on a fortified position in an occupied city.

He unwraps the bundle of dirty cotton sheets delivered at such cost by la vedova. Shakes the wrinkles from the uniform, holds the jacket to his shoulders with a sense of unreality. Who wore this? Werner Schramm shares a name with that man, and a biography to a point. To wear the uniform now is to put on a mask in a Greek tragedy, but Schramm is ready to assume his role.

He leaves a note of thanks and farewell for Renzo. Urges Mirella to take care of herself. She cries, and kisses him on both cheeks. A partisan escort waits outside.

They hike across pastures and through woodlands, snake along bends in the winding river, take cover in a vineyard. A church bell strikes nine. Across the road, at the top of a slight rise, Tullio Goletta waves, taps his ear, and puts his finger to his lips. Wind rattles the branches of nearby trees. Tullio raises one finger, makes a T of his hands. Tedeschi: Germans.

The noise grows. A camouflaged Wehrmacht command car lumbers into view, slowly dodging craters left by British bombs. Half-amused by how predictable German schedules are, Schramm brushes dirt and leaves from his uniform, squares his shoulders, and walks out onto the road. The lines come back to him. The posturing, the presumption. Herr Doktor Oberstabsarzt Werner Schramm of the Waffen-SS commandeers the car, demands to be driven to Sant’Andrea. He is obeyed by a very young, very inferior officer.

Schramm blusters and bullies his way through roadblocks and checkpoints, and arrives at his destination in early afternoon, sweating in the early warmth of the coast. Surrounded by barbed wire, sandbags, and giant iron stars, the building’s windows are bricked almost to the top, leaving just a few centimeters open for ventilation.

Boot heels ringing, Schramm enters, shouts, intimidates. The jailer is a well-fed Italian toady eager to mollify bad-tempered Nazis. Grabbing his keys, he is happy to lead the way down a twisting set of stairs cut into living rock. The air is moist, damp, cooler by the step.

“A relief from the heat outdoors, ne?” the chatty jailor remarks. “Until your joints start to ache. Of course, these bastards have more than their joints to think about! Down this way, signore. These used to be storerooms, I don’t know what for. Must have been valuable, though. Look at those doors!”

Wide, heavy planks, reinforced with iron bands. Two long rows on either side of a stone corridor. Behind one door, a man weeps and begs. Someone yells at him, voice harsh, words garbled. A third man cries, “Coraggio, camerati!”

“Courage, comrades!” the jailer mocks. “That one must be new.” He glances over his shoulder. When the German fails to share his amusement, a scowl automatically replaces the grin. “Shut up in there!” the toady shouts, banging on doors with his truncheon. Halfway down, he sorts through keys, opens the door, steps aside. “In there,” he says unnecessarily.

Illuminated by the borrowed light of the hallway, the room is narrow. Like a tomb. Like a sepulcher. The walls are tiled with porcelain-faced bricks, as a bathroom’s might be, but there are no facilities beyond a galvanized bucket in one corner.

Curled on the bare basalt floor, the man inside does not rouse. Eyes swollen shut, lashes buried in purpled pulpy flesh. Broken teeth visible through torn lips. Both shoulders dislocated; vast bruises speak of ripped blood vessels. The abdomen, too— hideously bruised. Testicles blackened. Blood in a drying pool of voided urine: ruptured kidneys, a torn bladder.

A thousand years of artwork have prepared Schramm for this body. Grünewald’s Isenheim Altarpiece. The damned of Bosch’s hell. The crucifix in every church. Look without flinching at atrocity, they instruct the faithful. Imagine what the saints endured, and envy them. Behold what the Savior suffered for your sake. But not everyone learns the intended lessons; some dream of hammering the nails.

Blinking, gagging, Schramm takes a handkerchief from his pocket and holds it over his nose; not even the greatest artwork can convey the smell of ammonia and shit. “This is Tomitz? You are certain?”

“Oh, yes, sir! Absolutely!”

Voice low and controlled, Schramm asks, “Who is responsible for his condition?”

The jailer shrugs. “PierCarlo Innocente, I suppose. The Gestapo made the arrest, but Innocente specializes in priests. He says priests and Communists are the hardest to break. They believe in a better world to come. This one didn’t look like much when they brought him in, but he still hasn’t talked—”

“Christ! Look at his mouth! If he wanted to talk, how the hell would we make out what he’s saying? Get Innocente, now!”

“I–I don’t know where— He’s off today.”

“Find him, or I’ll hold you responsible.”

The jailer hesitates. “I should lock up.”

Schramm points to what’s left of Osvaldo Tomitz. “Do you suppose that is going to escape?”

The jailer hurries off. Just as quickly, Schramm kneels at the priest’s side, bending to bring his lips close to the torn ear. “Father,” he says, “I’ve come to help.”

Spongy eyelids flutter. Bleeding fingers twitch. One must be ordained to give extreme unction or to hear confession, but one of the partisan priests has provided Schramm with what he needs, and given him instructions. He opens a medical bag and withdraws a small, round case that looks like a gold pocket watch.

“Receive my confession, Lord,” he whispers for Tomitz. “Savior of the world, O good Jesus, who gave Yourself to death on the cross to save sinners, look upon me, most wretched of all sinners. Give me the light to know my sins, true sorrow for them, and a firm purpose of never committing them again.”

He’s probably getting the prayers wrong, but he doubts that God will mind. “Pray with me, Father,” he urges. “O my God, I am heartily sorry for having offended Thee, and I detest all my sins because of Thy just punishment, but most of all—”

The priest’s split and crusted lips begin to move, and together they finish the Act of Contrition. Opening the gold case, Schramm brings the consecrated Host close enough to touch the swollen lips. Throat clogged, he whispers, “Corpus Christi.” The priest’s tongue reaches forward to bring the dry and nearly weightless wafer within his battered mouth.

The ritual is complete, but not the task. “Osvaldo Tomitz,” Schramm asks, “do you believe in Jesus Christ, who died so that others might live?”

Tomitz nods once, twice. Slowly: again, again, again.

“This day, you shall be with Him in heaven. Father, pray for me!”

Exchanging the gold case for a syringe, Schramm finds the intercostal space, depresses the plunger. A moment later, the suffering ends. A thousand Jews, the people who harbor them, and God knows how many Resistance cells are safe.

Schramm should leave now. Just walk home, to his sons and to his wife. War changes men, but it changes women, too. He’s spent the better part of two years in the company of Italian women running households in the midst of war. If, by the grace of God, he lives long enough to reach home, and if Elsa is alive when he gets there, Werner Schramm is determined to make a better job of it than his own parents did after the Great War.

But somehow, he cannot bring himself to move. Slumped against the wall, next to the body of the soul he has just released, Schramm thinks, You understand now, don’t you? You are with God now, Father, but after what you went through, surely you no longer believe it’s a sin to prevent suffering. We were right in the beginning, but— the borders kept moving. Perversion, vagrancy, gambling, theft became diseases. Dissidents, Communists, Gypsies were carriers of disease. To be a Jew was to be disease itself. At the trains, I tried to choose the best, the strongest, the most likely to survive awhile. It was like a juried art show— inferior work was rejected. Yes, I know. Judge not, but…

We were afraid. We were all afraid. There wasn’t enough of anything, and if there isn’t enough, you’re afraid someone will take the little you have. They’ll hurt you, steal from you, and laugh at your weakness and stupidity afterward. That’s what everyone believed. We were all locked away in our separate fears, and then… the Führer came out of his prison with a key. He would turn our selfish, despicable fear into a kind of glorious selflessness if we obeyed him, if we dedicated our lives to the Reich. If our blood was pure.

There’s no point in lying, Father. With Irmgard in my family, it was judge or be judged. If I joined the Party, if I did as I was told, there was no question of sterilization. Exceptions were made. Goebbels has a clubfoot, you know. And my children— they’re such fine boys. Strong and handsome. I miss them so much….

Schramm’s eyes fill. He tries to get a grip on his emotions, but when he sees the small cross scratched in the mortar between the stones, there’s no holding back the tears. Tears for what he meant to do, tears for what he did. Tears for his broken family, his broken life, his broken nation. Sobbing, he crawls to the little cross, and places his fingers on the symbol of salvation, of love that is more than enough, love that is the antidote to all fear. Remorse claws at his lungs, his guts, his heart.

Father, I was afraid, and weak. And wrong. And I am so terribly sorry! I’ll do penance, Schramm swears, choking on a laugh when he thinks, Not just rosaries, either, Father! For the rest of whatever life I am granted, I will try to make amends.

The old words come back, prayers he learned as a child. Misere mei Deus: Have mercy on me, O God, according to the multitude of thy tender mercies. Blot out my iniquities, and cleanse me of my sin. Lord, I am not worthy that You should come unto me, but only say the word, and my soul shall be healed—

Footsteps. Voices. At the other end of the long corridor, the jailer jabbers apologies, explanations, excuses. Another man growls ill-tempered rejoinders. Schramm clambers to his feet, drags a handkerchief from a pocket, wipes his eyes, blows his nose. He feels as though he has drained a swamp of sin, but there is no time for contemplation.

A tall man with a lantern jaw and a luxuriant mustache flings the half-closed door wide open. Schramm points to Tomitz. “You are responsible for this?”

The bastard’s head tilts back. Arrogant, unashamed. It would be so easy, Schramm thinks. One in the body, one in the head. Send this hound to hell, and step over his corpse without a backward glance.

Go, said Jesus to the harlot, and sin no more. There is hope, Suora Marta said, even for a pig like you.

“Innocente, you are an incompetent swine!” Schramm snaps. “Clean up the mess,” he tells the jailer. “I’ll find my own way out.”

Blinking in the sunlight, he gets his bearings and looks for the quickest route out of town. He’s hardly walked a block when the quiet is broken by explosions, gunfire, screams. Civilians around him cry out, clutch children, race for cover. Schramm grabs a skinny woman’s arm. “I am a doctor! Tell me: where is the hospital?”

She points, shouting half-coherent directions, and breaks away.

Schramm asks twice more before he finds the place. A harried nursing sister in the midst of a crowd sees his uniform and snarls. “No, you don’t! Not here! Not in this hospital!”

An ambulance team pounds by, carrying a stretcher with a wide-eyed old man who holds a shaking hand over a ragged gash in his forehead. Schramm unbuttons his jacket, tossing it into a corner. “I am a doctor, Suora! I want to help!”

Maybe it’s because he’s speaking Italian. Maybe there is something in his face that convinces her he is not there to kill. She shows him where to scrub. Their first patient is lifted onto the table. An eight-year-old boy, breathing in short, grunting coughs. “One gunshot,” another nun reports. “Hit from behind in the left shoulder. The exit’s just below the right nipple.”

Schramm taps the chest with the tips of his fingers. Below the left clavicle, the chest resonates like a drum. Lower down: a dull sound, like tapping a stone. The second sister hands him a scalpel and murmurs to the little boy: this will hurt, he must be brave. Quickly Schramm slices through the resistance of the exquisitely sensitive pleura, ignoring the child’s shriek as he widens the knife track. The wound bubbles. Schramm holds out his hand. A drain appears in it. He pushes seven centimeters into the cavity. Blood gushes through the chest tube into a bowl held by a nun.

The child gasps and coughs in the cold sweat of agony. The basin overflows. An orderly mops it up. The nun connects the drain to a bottle on the floor. Half-filled with water, that will act as a simple one-way valve. With each wailing exhalation, air and blood burble from the submerged end of the tube. The boy’s lung begins to expand. Already the next casualty is being carried in.

In the hallway, a temporary receiving station is set up to assess serious cases and assign an order of treatment. Occasionally the triage nurse has a case stretchered directly into surgery, hoping immediate intervention might save a life. Hour after hour, Schramm digs out shrapnel, opens abdomens, sews up perforated bowels, removes crushed limbs. Time stops. There is only the flesh beneath his fingers.

When the last patient has been carried off, Schramm is lightheaded from dehydration. Exhausted, but exhilarated. He pulls off his gory shirt and trudges to a sink to wash away the blood, lifting handful after handful of water to his face, head, shoulders, chest. Drying off, he asks the nurse, “Is there someplace I could stay, Suora?”

She doesn’t answer. He lowers the towel from his face. The nun is as white as her coif. A Wehrmacht officer stands in the scrub-room doorway, imperious in full if filthy uniform. “There is a German doctor here.” He frowns at Schramm. “You?”

Startled, Schramm stammers, “Sì— jawohl. Yes, sir. I was cut off from my unit—”

“You’re needed. We’ve got casualties.”

There seems to be no choice. Schramm tosses the towel aside and shrugs into his uniform, a soldier again. “Are we going to the front, sir?” he asks as they climb into an open staff car and head north.

Gray in the face, the other officer looks blank. “Going to the front? Scheisse, man! Where do you think you are? We’re pulling all the field hospitals back. The Allies have broken through.”

April 1945

VILLA MALCOVATO

NEAR ROCCABARBENA

Werner was the first to come under her protection. Then Simon Henley, nearly frozen. Young Claudia was next, and Mirella hoped the girl would stay, but two days after tiny Alberto was buried, the staffetta left to rejoin her brigade.

A destitute old woman with five small grandchildren arrived at the villa that afternoon. Mirella took them in. On that signora’s rundown heels: a Moroccan soldier, completely lost. Nobody understood a word he said. Mirella gave him a meal, and after looking at a map, he went off happily to whatever fate awaited him.

The following week brought a bewildered Sicilian draftee, terrified and begging to stay. The owner of an antiques shop in Genoa, who offered to pay for a meal with a Renaissance figurine carved from ivory. A farmer’s son, desperately ill with pneumonia. A man who’d worked for an English businessman before the war: denounced by one neighbor, warned by another, on the run. Mirella kept the farmer’s son in the villa’s small clinic; the others moved on.

Lavinia Costa-Valsecchi was next. A ninety-year-old contessa, dotty in furs and diamonds, she was dumped at the villa by her chauffeur, who drove off to join the partisans with her auto and its petrol as his dowry. Then a little girl with an even littler baby boy on her hip knocked at the kitchen door. Their mother was dead. The girl heard that Villa Malcovato still had a milk cow. Could they stay here?

District by district, the Germans steal anything of value as they pull back. They burn whatever they can’t carry away, shoot anyone who protests and many of those who don’t. Allied air raids are destroying what’s left. The Germans are hated and Allied bombardiers cursed, but true loathing is reserved for the Italian SS volunteers, and for informants who buy favor with neighbors’ lives.

Civilians are of no consequence to anyone but themselves, and tell stories of pointless destruction and casual cruelty to anyone who pretends to listen. Kindly, naive people arrested for giving a meal to a stranger. A little boy hit by a staff car, deliberately run over by the tanks that followed. Bombs falling on four children herding some geese in a field. A fifty-year-old man tortured for three days before the fascisti realized their prisoner was Giuseppi Pesce, not the Giovanni Pesce they sought.

Villa Malcovato’s population doubled, and doubled again, filling the house, the stables, the barn. A dozen peasant families burned out of their homes. Twenty-three children, overflow from Mother of Mercy, itself inundated by orphans. Exhausted evacuees from Genoa, Sant’Andrea, and Savona, many in a sort of walking coma, speechless and trembling.

Mirella shares her bedroom now with four other mothers, thirteen children among them, and shares the bed itself with Angelo, Stefania, and Rosina. Before falling into stuporous sleep, she takes brief comfort in the way they snuggle around her, warm and sweet-faced, smelling of compost. Each morning she awakens to find another little group of famished people waiting for her attention in the courtyard.

With two hundred or more to feed and shelter, she tells the factor and his men to dig up the last stocks of cheese and flour, oil and salt, buried for safekeeping last fall. She puts older girls in charge of younger children, or sends them to help in the garden. The boys work in the barns or care for livestock hidden in secret clearings. The women cook, spin wool, knit baby jerseys. They make diapers from old sheets, sew children’s clothes from scraps of worn-out fabric, cobble shoes from wooden soles and strips of carpet.

The villa has reverted to its earliest form: a medieval city under seige. The world shrinks to what can be touched, seen, heard. Mental horizons contract to those of the most isolated peasant, and with that narrowness comes peasant skepticism toward all plans for the future. Nothing you were, or are, or will be, is in your own hands. Society is held together by the simplest of human ties. A person in need stands in front of you; if you can help, you must help.

A war of leaflets begins. Paper flutters from low-flying planes. “Anyone who harbors rebels will be shot. Any house in which rebels have stayed will be blown up after all stores of food are confiscated and the inhabitants shot. The German army will proceed with justice, but with inflexible hardness, unless informed immediately of the rebels’ whereabouts.” Leaflets scattered by the Allies give precisely the opposite instructions. “Italian patriots! Continue your resistance with acts of sabotage against the German army. Cut communications, destroy bridges, roads, and electrical plants. The moment for decisive action is near!” Mirella has children collect the leaflets for toilet paper.

After sunset one evening, three Austrian soldiers knock timidly on the door. They’re very young, deserters from the Wehrmacht, trying to get home. Their prospects are poor, but better than at the front, where some great battle is being fought. Mirella gives them some withered apples, shows them the map, sends them on. In the morning, four mortar rounds fall on the villa’s chapel, empty at the time. Somewhere, gunners adjust their aim and the explosions shift away from the farm. Mirella sends the oldest boys to the edge of the woods to dig long trenches, line them with brush, and cover them with tarps. The women stuff sacks with straw for makeshift mattresses, ready to run with the children to the trenches on a moment’s notice. The immediate menace advances and retreats, but this much is certain: the front is no longer in Africa or Russia or France, not in Messina or Rome or Florence. It is here.

“Che sarà di noi?” everyone asks Mirella. “What will become of us?”

No radio, no post, no newspapers, but rumors in abundance. Two villages west, Fascist troops appeared suddenly, blocked off the main street, and arrested everyone. A partisan band took a town south of here, expecting to link up with the Allied advance; the Germans arrived instead, and wiped the partisans out. London has been completely destroyed by a new German weapon. At Villa Senni, three hundred people hidden in the cellar had to flee through artillery fire into the mountains; a hundred were killed— no, two hundred! Thousands of people are dying of Spanish influenza in Bologna. The Allies have landed in strength at Genoa. A German spy has assassinated Roosevelt. The Americans have pulled out of the war.

Inured to the sound of airplane engines, the children don’t even look up when bombers drop their cargo on Roccabarbena, or when small, swift groups of fighters swoop down, guns flashing, on something doomed two valleys away. A new sort of refugee turns up: fugitives from the Italian Black Brigades, begging for civilian clothes and hoping to join the partisans. “You should be more careful,” one tells Mirella. “For fifty kilometers around, people told us, Go to Villa Malcovato.”

A few days later, an Italian civilian appears and takes Mirella aside to tell her about an English paratrooper who needs food and money. There is something about this man… “No,” Mirella says. “We have nothing to do with foreigners here.”

“Signora,” he says, moving closer, “this Englishman is a Hebrew. He needs your help.”

She covers her momentary hesitation by looking for one of the children. “Rosina!” she shouts. “Stay out of that mud!” She turns back toward the man, making sure he can see how tired she is. “Scusi,” she says, distractedly. “What were you asking?”

“Are there any farms nearby where ebrei can get help?”

“None,” she says heartlessly. “We have our own to care for.”

Then one bright blue morning, the contessa announces it is her saint’s day. “Signora, there’s no Saint Lavinia,” the housegirl Giovanna tells Mirella. The contessa insists there should be a party in her honor. “Completamente pazza,” Giovanna murmurs, but the weather has improved, and the notion of a festa is so bizarre, the idea takes hold. One of the older girls ties braided yarn around the children’s legs and teaches them to run three-legged races. The contessa, wrapped in a fox stole, urges the children to sing Christmas songs, and caps the day by awarding a pearl necklace to the child with the sweetest voice, and a Mont Blanc fountain pen to the winner of a sack race. That night, the old lady favors Mirella with a Mona Lisa smile and says, “I think that did everyone good, don’t you?”

The low booming of artillery grows nearer. Angelo runs up the rutted drive, more excited than afraid. “They’re coming, Mamma! Eight hundred Germans!” An hour later, the rumor begins to change. Eight hundred become three hundred. Fascisti, not Germans. By evening, the three hundred are eighty, marching south toward Sant’Andrea.

At midnight, Giovanna shakes Mirella awake. “Signora, there’s a partisan with a bullet in his shoulder at the door,” she whispers. “What should I do?”

Mirella pulls a cardigan over her nightgown, goes to the kitchen, dresses the wound. “You can sleep in the stable,” she tells the boy, “but you must leave before light.”

All that night, they hear cannon fire and planes. In the morning, the ground is littered with leaflets in four languages, offering safe conduct, medical aid, food, and removal from the combat zone to any German who surrenders.

A heavily armed man appears out of the woods, begging for a meal. Around mouthfuls, he warns of two German spies. “They’re wandering around east of Cuneo. They pretend to be deserters and ask for help. They were handed on from farm to farm, until they uncovered the whole network of contadini helping the Resistance.” The man washes his polenta down with a glass of watered milk, and stands to leave. “Last Monday, Fascist troops surrounded three small villages and the outlying farms and shot everyone the spies pointed out, including four women and an old priest. So be careful of anyone asking for help.”

Mirella watches him tramp away, trying to remember the Austrian boys she gave apples to. How many were there? Two of them, or three? Three, she thinks. They seemed like nice boys, but who knows? Who knows…

A squadron of Allied planes flashes overhead, droning toward Roccabarbena. She watches the tracer bullets from German AA emplacements in the city. Two planes are hit just as the bombs are released. The whole valley seems to explode, just beyond the hills.

At ten the next morning, a German staff car roars up the drive through a steady spring rain. Two officers get out. Without knocking, the commander shoves the front door open and shouts for whoever is in charge. Mirella lifts Rosina to her hip, willing herself to appear innocent and ignorant. Would it be better or worse if her pregnancy were more obvious at five months? Better or worse if her eyes were not sunken in half-moons of purple skin? Better or worse if she looked twenty-eight, not a haggard fifteen years older?

Without such worries, the contessa takes charge, supporting herself on two ebony canes. “How dare you come in here with muddy boots! Who are you?” the old lady demands in imperious German. “What are you doing here?”

“We require billets for a field hospital,” he begins.

“What?” she asks with loud annoyance. “Speak up! I haven’t all day!”

The officer tries again. “We require this property as a hospital—”

“Don’t be absurd. This is a children’s home, you ridiculous man! Kinderheim, do you understand? Children!” The contessa flicks the blue-veined back of her hand at him. “Now go away. And don’t come back!”

The officer mutters something that Mirella takes to be “Loony old bat.” She follows him anxiously from room to room as he inspects the property. “Kinderheim,” she says, taking a cue from the contessa. “This is a children’s home! Do you understand?”

He leaves the house and confers with the other officer, who has evidently inspected the outbuildings. The children have been herded outside into the downpour. Many are crying. Angelo has Stefania by the hand; he glares at the Germans, who don’t notice, thank God.

“Alles,” the commander says, gesturing. “We require the whole farm.”

“But the children? Die Kinder?” she asks helplessly.

The officers climb into the backseat of the car. “We will return tomorrow,” the commander tells her.

Mirella turns her back to the muddy gravel spun up by the staff car’s wheels. Those who’ve hidden until now gather in the courtyard, waiting in the rain for her to tell them what to do.

Il maggiore is trapped in Milan— Allied planes swoop down and strafe any vehicle they spot. There hasn’t been so much as a note from Iacopo since January, and the last time she saw any of Renzo’s men was when Claudia was here. Was his band the one wiped out at Montebianco? Is it time to move everyone into the woods? How much longer will the fighting last? How many babies and old people would die of exposure? Are the woods any safer than the villa?

Mirella hardly notices the strength leaving her legs, but she lets someone take Rosina out of her arms. I’m used up, she thinks, sitting in a puddle. There’s nothing left.

Behind her, the contessa stands in the doorway, watching the German car disappear down the drive. “A Prussian of the worst sort,” she declares before addressing the crowd. “The Germans want this place for a hospital. They want us out by tomorrow.” She waits for the cries of dismay to die down. “My late husband,” she says clearly, “was an admiral when he died. I asked him once why he had chosen the navy and not the army as his career. He said, ‘If you’re going to be killed in battle, it’s better to sleep in a dry bed the night before.’ ” She folds her hands over a small potbelly swathed in silk. “You may do as you please, but I intend to stay right here.”

Shrugging fatalistically, the others disperse, to make whatever decisions are left to them. Mirella leans back, propping herself on her hands, unspeakably weary. “Signora, why didn’t you help before?”

The contessa looks down, brows arched. “You seemed quite capable.”

Too tired for courtesy, Mirella says, “I thought you were crazy.”

“Possibly,” the contessa allows, going back into the house, “but I am not the one who’s sitting in the mud.”

Sometime that night, Angelo jostles his mother’s shoulder. “Mamma? Mamma!” he whispers. “Stefania wet the bed!”

Mirella hauls herself upright, cleans herself and the children, turns the mattress over. Dry bed, she thinks, and falls asleep before she can laugh or cry.

Troops arrive at dawn. Not hospital personnel but trucks, tanks, infantry, along with two donkeys laden with stolen goods, and one goat without much time to live. Germans surround the house and farm. Some fall asleep where they drop. Others tear the place apart, looking for hidden food and valuables, snarling at anyone in their way.

Mirella gets the children up and dressed in layers. “Stay here with the girls,” she tells Angelo, “but be ready to go.”

A young officer sits in the kitchen. Dirty, utterly worn out, he raises his head. “Guten Tag,” he says, and mumbles something she doesn’t understand.

He seems civil and sounds reassuring. “Kinderheim,” she tells him. “Many Kinder. What should we do?”

He looks beyond her. Mirella turns. Angelo is standing on the stairs behind her. The girls clutch his hands, wide-eyed. The officer pushes himself to his feet, approaches Rosina, cups her chin in a filthy palm. He says something Mirella can’t make out, but she catches the word Keller. She points toward the stairs.

Knees buckling from fatigue, the soldier descends partway into the cellar and looks around. “Das ist gut.” He beckons. “Kinder, ja?”

Something whizzes past the kitchen window with an eerie moan, and explodes an instant later in the garden. Shouting orders, the officer pounds back up the stairway and runs outside. A second shell explodes. “Angelo!” Mirella screams. “Take the girls downstairs, and stay there!”

“Mamma, where are you going?”

“To get the other children— they’ll be safer in the cellar!”

“Mamma, don’t leave us!” Stefania begs. “Please, Mamma! Don’t leave me again!”

Mirella’s heart jolts. She lifts Rosina, starts down the staircase. “Angelo, take Stefania’s hand!”

There’s machine-gun fire, shockingly loud, just beyond the kitchen. Another Allied shell hits, nearer. They say you never hear the one that gets you, but how could anyone alive kno

May 1945

SANT’ANDREA BLUFFS

Renzo is chain-smoking Gold Flakes, but his eyes are clear and he is not so lame now that they’re close to the coast. He grins at Claudia’s unspoken assessment. “Peak of condition, relatively speaking.” A good thing, too, given that the brigade is under attack, and badly outnumbered.

They’d have been in real trouble, if not for her. Camped in yet another stone ruin crumpled atop yet another scrubby mountain, the brigade posted sentries, and everyone else went to sleep. Claudia woke up, queasy with cramps, and went to the makeshift latrine. There, she squatted, watching starlight sparkle on Porto Sant’Andrea’s bay. Something nearer caught her eye. Noiselessly, she pulled up her trousers, grabbed her submachine gun, and found a vantage behind the low stone wall.

Several platoons of Republican soldiers had slipped past the guards and crept, heavily armed, toward the hilltop. She opened up on the nearest, all of whom had their hands full with climbing. A minute later, two hundred partisans were running to join her attack on what has turned out to be some thirteen hundred fascisti, supported by heavy and light machine guns, mortars, artillery, three armored cars, and two tanks at the bottom of the hill.

With surprise gone, the Republican assault troops have been pinned down for two dark hours by random fire. Now that dawn has exposed their positions on the hillside, they can do little more than cower and pray as they’re picked off.

Behind the brigade’s line, young women and younger boys break open airdrop packing, make aprons of their shirts, scuttle forward with their deliveries. In the shelter of a stone wall, partisans salute their Englishman with raised chins, grins, small waves of appreciation. Since Simon Henley jumped into the thin air over Piemonte in February, arms and ammo and crisp pound notes have dropped like confetti on this unit.

Renzo draws deeply on the butt of one cigarette and lights the next with its glowing end. “Grenades,” he coughs, “on my command.” Claudia runs crouched in the shadow of a stone terrace, relaying orders. At Renzo’s shout, a veritable orchard of pineapple grenades fly downhill. One-sided slaughter continues until a no-man’s-land is established.

Again Claudia moves along the line. “Shoot now only when you see a good target,” Otello tells Simon, although the lovely green-eyed girl has said considerably more than that. Before she finishes her route, Renzo yells something even Simon understands.

“Conserve ammo?” Simon asks. “But why? We have crates of the stuff—”

“Don’t worry, Simon! The boss knows what he’s doing.”

Renzo closes his eyes, concentrating on the topographic maps he sees in his head. Claudia summons three men to his side, and he sends their squads into the wooded ravines that rib the mountain. By Simon’s count, this move leaves 120 or so to hold the high ground. Splitting your forces is rarely wise, and the odds against them are of Agincourt proportions, but none of the others seems concerned.

Now taking only light resistance, enemy troops move past the survivors of the first assault group, advancing to within sixty paces of the crumpled castle’s defenses. Encouraged by the lull, a Republican officer shouts into a megaphone.

“He says we must surrender!” Otello reports gleefully. “We are surrounded. Our position is hopeless.” An accurate description, as far as Simon can see, but everyone else seems amused, and the merriment is more raucous when Renzo shouts something in reply.

Roaring, the fascisti rise to charge. The boss’s voice cracks like a rifle shot. Bullets, grenades, and body parts fly, until the Republicans can neither advance nor retreat.

Renzo calls, “Cease fire!” There are cheers along the line. Otello giggles happily. “Their artillery is no good now! The gunners would kill their own men!”

Far below, on the road skirting the base of the bluffs, a new and larger detachment starts upward. This time the Republicans are burdened with machine guns they hope will give cover while their casualties are extricated. Their climb will take hours.

Staffette hand out wine and cheese and British battle rations. Sitting with Claudia and the brigade medic, the boss waves off food, but accepts the grog. Duno glowers disapproval. Claudia shrugs. Renzo ignores them both.

From a distance, Simon considers the three of them. Jews, he thinks. Clannish as Scots, and just as canny. The only man who enters their charmed circle is that one-armed postman who delivers directives from the Committee for National Liberation to autonomous bands like this one. Renzo is as deferential to the messenger as he is dismissive of the messages.

The British are notorious for emotional constipation, but Simon has never seen a man drink with less emotion. The boss doesn’t get sentimental, or sloppy, or mean, or happy. He is businesslike and practical about drinking, as though getting blotto were a job he means to do, and do well. Renzo plays at war the way another man might play tennis: with careless grace, with thoughtless skill. Claudia works at war the way another woman might do housework: without protest, without complaint. If her own chilly quiet weren’t enough to discourage suitors, Duno has made it clear to Simon that Claudia is under the boss’s protection, though she is not his lover, nor is she Duno’s girl.

Crows and seagulls converge to bicker over bodies. Renzo passes the time plinking at birds that come too close to the Fascist wounded, but his hands shake and he’s a poor shot. The sun moves overhead. Fed and relaxed, oblivious to the moans and cries of the enemy wounded, some of the men settle down to nap. Others talk quietly. Simon’s own eyes begin to drop…

“Simon!” Otello whispers, shaking him.

Waking in an instant, Simon shades his eyes against the afternoon light. The Republican reinforcements are just out of range, setting up machine guns. They’re determined to get to their fallen comrades, but this will be the proverbial uphill battle, and they’ve learned to respect the commander of this brigade.

On some signal Simon does not detect, a partisan squad that’s moved to the enemy rear rises to let loose volley after volley. The Republicans turn to face the threat, only to be raked from their left. Those who survive the first fusillade wheel. That platoon drops out of the line of fire from a third platoon on the enemy right.

With a perfect view of the battlefield, Simon begins to feel like a guest sitting in the Royal Box at a Wimbeldon match. Holding the whip hand, he discovers, produces warm, happy feelings of invulnerability and power. This, he realizes, is what it must have been like for the Jerries when they started all this.

Gray-and-black uniforms turn red. Helmets cartwheel downhill. Rock and weed take on the color of oxblood. Junior officers bellow conflicting commands as men crumple and fall around them. Nobody knows who’s in charge, and the Republicans can expect no help. Surely, their officers won’t risk more pointless casualties.

Renzo calls for another cease-fire. Before long, the wounded are begging for water, for help, for mercy in late afternoon heat.

“Look,” someone yells. “They’re leaving!”

On the road below, the artillery units begin to withdraw. The guns are left behind, and the remaining troops begin to melt away. Some of them throwing off their uniform jackets.

Alone, a Republican officer begins to climb in the diminishing light. His face is in shadow when he arrives at the edge of the battlefield, where his batallion lies dead or dying. With a strip of white bandage in his hand, he steps into range and calls to his partisan counterpart.

Passionate argument breaks out among the brigade officers. Paying no attention, Renzo walks into the open to meet the Republican.

Mesmerized, Simon hardly breathes while both men pick their way awkwardly through the carnage. Either side could break this truce at any moment, but their officers speak at length, shake hands, and part.

Down in Sant’Andrea, bells begin to ring, and the sound spreads from church to church across the city. No one says a thing until Renzo has made his slow and painful climb back to the brigade.

Claudia is waiting for him with a bottle. His hard, scarred face unmoving and wet, Renzo shakes his head and starts to fall. Duno provides an arm to slow the collapse. Claudia bends to listen to the barely audible voice, then straightens to address the brigade. “The Germans have surrendered,” she says without emotion. “The war is over.”

Simon is sure he’s understood, but no one moves while she continues with something he can’t follow. “The Republican commander asks us to help with the dead and wounded,” Otello translates. “The boss says: they’re our countrymen. Honor them.”

Duno is the first to venture toward those still living. One by one, partisans put down their guns and follow.

PORTO SANT’ANDREA

Delirium. There’s no other word for it. Half-wild and half-starved, dressed in rags with flour bags tied around their feet, partisans march into the city, singing anthems of resistance. Their pace slackens to a saunter to accommodate cheering crowds, ten deep on either side of the street. Women and girls rush forward to embrace them and plant kisses on their cheeks. Old men push bottles of wine into their hands. Accordions and guitars appear. Everyone is singing at the top of their lungs.

Palms blistered and backs aching from a long grim night as grave diggers, the boss’s tattered men are very late to the party, but no one resists the joy for long.

Green, white, and red flags, stitched together from curtains and tablecloths, fly from every window. To Simon’s delight, a few makeshift Union Jacks wave in recognition of Britain’s real, if belated, aid to the Resistance. In every church, giddy young men clamber drunkenly into belfries, banging on the bells with mallets until their arms are rubbery and someone else appears, ready to do the same.

Soon Simon himself is crocked enough to take a turn. “Viva l’Italia,” he shouts over and over, until he’s too hoarse to go on. When his replacement arrives, Simon fills his chest with Italy’s soft coastal air and looks out over the Mediterreanean, listening to the rapturous noise around him. By God, I’ve justified my little life, he thinks. I did my bit to bring this day to Italy and these wonderful people.

Suddenly it seems like a hilariously good idea to slide down the church roof, and the wild applause Simon receives for the stunt makes up for the thump his tailbone takes. “You forgot to roll!” Otello wails, and the two of them howl with laughter until they’re too weak to stand. “Have you seen the boss?” Otello gasps, wiping his eyes.

“Not since this morning,” Simon tells him. He looks around, hoping to find Claudia, but the thought is lost when two fine young ladies present themselves for his approval. “I’ll dance when the war is over,” Maria Avoni said just before Simon saw her killed. In her honor, and with a paratrooper’s red beret on his head at long last, he drinks and dances with every girl he can grab.

All too soon, a British officer picks him out of the crowd, and waves him to the sideline of the carnival. “Powell, S.O.E.,” this captain says, shouting to be heard. “We landed by Lysander at Vesime. You were ordered to keep these men out of Sant’Andrea!”

Concentrating mightily, Simon struggles to recall such an order. Yes— there was a transmission from Field Marshal Alexander in Tunis, sometime in the past few days. “Under no circumstances are the irregulars to attack the northern cities until Allied forces arrive to lead them. They are to hold their positions and limit their actions to harrying missions.”

For a year and a half, the partisans of northern Italy fought the Fascists with minimal outside help. Carpenters and lawyers, farm boys and shopkeepers, carabinieri and theology students, butchers and musicians and railway workers put aside every social and political difference among them. Together, they swarmed over roads, bridges, train tracks, airports, wiping out German columns sent to demolish Italian infrastructure, attacking every remaining Fascist garrison. They endured hunger, brutal weather, thousands of casualties, untold grief and suffering, and on the brink of victory, Alexander wanted them to stand down. Simon knew the boss well enough to anticipate his response to that. Rather than deliver the decoded message to Renzo, Simon had simply tossed the crumpled paper into a campfire.

Now, with a smart salute, he gathers all the bleary dignity he can muster and lies. “Like King Canute, sir, I tried to stem the tide. Regrettably, it did no good, sir.”

“Yes, I see the difficulty,” Powell says, himself distracted by a lovely brunette offering a bottle and an open-armed welcome. “Mille grazie, signorina. Too kind,” he says formally, adding, “Carry on, Corporal,” before plunging into the crowd for a dance.

PENSIONE USODIMARE

PORTO SANT’ANDREA

Above the city proper, Antonia Usodimare turns toward the footsteps behind her. Looking better for a bath, twenty hours’ sleep, and a change of clothes, the man she knew as Ugo Messner joins her in the doorway and listens to the bells. “They’re still having their fun,” she says. “All night, they’ve been drinking.”

“A gigantic national hangover in the making,” he remarks.

“But I’ll be the one with a headache.” Everyone knows what happened when the Reds took over Russia. Before long, boys with guns will pronounce sentences on Republican officials, landlords, bankers, anyone faintly aristocratic, anyone with money, anyone whose death will profit a personal enemy. Antonia survived this war by taking German and Fascist boarders, and she knows she’s in for trouble. “I’m an old woman,” she says. “A widow with no sons. All I have is this pensione. How long before a mob comes to burn me out?”

“Duno and Claudia will be awake soon, signora. They’ll vouch for you. I left British cash and a letter that should help as well. In the meantime?” He takes her hand, raises it to his lips. Kisses it respectfully, and winks. “Make a flag, signora. And practice looking happy.”

Hands in his pockets, hat tipped back, Renzo Leoni strolls away, enjoying a peacefulness he’s never felt before. “Why is it so easy now?” Claudia asked him once, when she returned to the brigade, no longer pregnant. “I can’t seem to be afraid anymore.”

“You have no one to live for,” he told her. “It’s a kind of freedom.”

Ambling downhill, he finds a local barber heating water in a German helmet over a small fire, and sinks blissfully into all-but-forgotten sensations. A chair beneath him. A warm towel draped around his face. A close shave, and a decent haircut.

He tips the barber handsomely. Finds a newsstand and buys all the one-page papers available. Following the scent of finely ground coffee hoarded in anticipation of this day, he locates an outdoor café. Sits at a table in its little island of swept pavement. Lights a cigarette, orders an espresso, lays the papers out, and pieces the story together.

Sometime last month, von Vietinghoff requested permission for Army Group C to retreat back to Germany. From his bunker in Berlin, Hitler ordered Italy destroyed instead. Despairing of their Führer’s sanity, Wehrmacht and SS generals burned their records, and contacted Church officials. In return for safe conduct back to Germany, their troops would not carry out the scorched-earth command from Berlin; civil authority would be handed over to the Committee for National Liberation. Bishops and archbishops relayed their messages to partisan commanders.

The CNL happily responded that Eisenhower’s orders were clear: no negotiations with the enemy. The Germans were invited to surrender unconditionally. Von Vietinghoff wavered, then refused. Partisan attacks redoubled. The Reich’s defeated divisions indulged in a final spasm of barbarous attacks on civilians, but by the end of the week, all German armies in Italy surrendered. The ceremony lasted seventeen minutes.

The local news is startlingly unheroic. The CNL plans to present a united front in negotiations with the Allies for control of the Sant’Andrea city government. Political parties are dividing up spheres of influence: food distribution, telephone and electric utilities, police and fire departments. He recognizes a name or two. Jakub Landau will be the head of a civil engineering group; il polacco will begin sewer repairs immediately.

Sewers, Renzo thinks with a snort. I’d rather be dead.

The bells have stopped ringing. A weeping girl, still plump from German food, rushes past. Her head is shaved and doused with red paint. Reprisals have begun. There’s gunfire somewhere near the warehouse district. Pockets of resistance being cleaned up, most likely. Republican soldiers who held out until the end.

The wrong kind of patriots, he thinks.

He stubs out the cigarette, drops a pound note on the table. Leaving the papers for the next patron, he walks downhill, toward the center of town. The whole city seems to have had huge holes bashed in it by a colossal hammer. Walls still standing are plastered with grainy news posters: il Duce and his mistress hung upside down from a Milanese lamppost. Scrawled graffiti everywhere. Down with Mussolini! Death to Fascism! There’s no intact glass anywhere; shards glitter under broken masonry and rusted iron. Most of a child lies near a pile of debris.

San Giobatta’s bell tower has collapsed. The gap allows a view of the docks, where Italians long past delusions of dignity hold out tin pails for food flung into the crowd by British sailors who were shelling them a week ago.

Crouched on a curb, a tiny barefoot boy holds out muddy cigarette butts salvaged from gutters, begging people to buy them. Like an ancient Roman tossing bread at the circus, Renzo flips the kid a pack of Gold Flakes. Stunned by this unimaginable luck, the child runs away, yelling, “Mamma! Mamma! Mamma!”

A few blocks way, the curving marble staircase of the municipal palace is exposed to smoky daylight. Scorched papers blow through the collapsed facade and flutter down the street. In the piazza itself, bodies hang from a makeshift gallows. The north wall of the palazzo still stands, decorated with dripping starbursts of red, chest-high. The executions are presided over by a sixteen-year-old boy with a Sten. The head of the tribunal is a year or two older. Renzo congratulates himself on his own exquisite timing.

Then he sees the mountainous corpse. Executed by firing squad, too heavy to risk on a noose.

With Osvaldo Tomitz dead, there was no one left to testify on Serafino Brizzolari’s behalf. Despairing, Renzo tries to remember when he heard the shots. Was I drinking coffee? Belandi. If I’d skipped that goddamned haircut…

The rest of his plan is flawless— aided, even, by this final failure. The piazza is filled with people eager to finger others, and now simply asking about Brizzolari is enough to arouse hostility. “That’s Ugo Messner!” cries the rabbity little waiter who served cappuccino to Nazis for eighteen months. “I heard him say, ‘My faith in the Führer and the Vaterland is unshaken! I am a good Nazi,’ he said, ‘and I hate the partisans!’ ”

Not precisely true, but hardly worth arguing about. And in any case, the owner of a Fascist bar hurries to corroborate the waiter’s accusations. Yes, that’s Ugo Messner. He was very friendly with Erna Huppenkothen! Her brother ran the Gestapo!

That should have been sufficient for conviction, but in Sant’Andrea there is, amusingly, a lawyer for the accused. The avvocato has two minutes to plead for each client’s life, and does so with Ciceronian eloquence, despite the fact that acquittal is unlikely when there’s already a rope around the defendant’s neck. “I myself suffered under the fascisti,” he reminds the mob, “but I still believe in the integrity of the law. If you won’t give me time to call witnesses on his behalf, at least allow this man to speak in his own defense!”

The adolescent magistrate calls for silence. “Ugo Messner, have you anything to say?”

The crowd quiets, and the temptation of one last performance is too much. “ ‘I am the one who has no tale to tell,’ ” Renzo declaims grandly. “ ‘I made myself a gibbet of my own lintel—’ ”

He stops, mid-verso, amid catcalls and curses. Two nuns skirt the edge of the crowd with a line of orphans trailing them: skinny little goslings behind dark blue geese. Suora Marta hurries the children along, intent on getting them past the makeshift gallows as quickly as possible. Her wimple shields her eyes, and for a moment he believes himself safe, but— “No! Wait!” she cries when she sees him. “You mustn’t— He’s not a collaborator!”

Leaving the children, she pushes through the crowd, jerked backward when a man snares her arm. His face is yellow and green with fading bruises. “Look!” he snarls, pointing at jagged teeth with nailless hands. “Look at what they did to me!”

“Not him! That’s Renzo Leoni!” She wrenches her arm loose, shouts to the others. “Find the rabbi! Or ask the archbishop!”

“Go back to your convent!” the nailless man yells.

“This man is not a criminal! He was using the Germans—”

The rush-bottomed chair beneath Renzo’s feet wobbles. Its legs, or perhaps the cobbles they stand on, are uneven. Below him, arguments and accusations fade away. In his mind, it’s nearly sunset, and his eyes rise to a lavender sky where a thousand swifts soar and wheel. Their dark wings flash as they disappear, plunging, and reappear, sweeping upward in tight formation. He waits until the swifts dive and, in a moment of remembered ecstasy, hurls himself after them, and dangles breathlessly.

It’s like flying, except you never come down.

Autumn 1947

MOTHER OF MERCY ORPHANAGE

ROCCABARBENA

Tongue in the corner of her mouth, a little girl glowers in mighty concentration. Determined to master this skill, she sighs heavily and stops to rub at a mistake. The paper crinkles. She looks up, close to tears.

“Va bene, Filomena,” Suora Corniglia says. “You’ve practiced enough for today. Go out and play.”

Filomena adds her worksheet to the wrinkled and deformed stack on Suora’s desk. Nearly every piece in the pile is crumpled or creased or blotted. The children do their best, but the paper undermines them. Parades of nicely ovalled O’s and properly angled P’s stumble over bits of wood embedded in cheap grayish pulp. The older children have fountain pens, and any hesitation in the flow of writing results in a little pool of ink soaking into the paper. The younger ones use pencils, but their worksheets are holed by erasures. “Gently,” she reminds them over and over. “Don’t rub so hard!” But there is something about eight-year-olds and mistakes. Errors must be obliterated. The paper suffers.

At least we have paper, she tells herself. Things are getting better…

Rising from her desk, she cleans the board— an eraser in each hand, arms wheeling. Stepping to the nearest open window, she claps the felt blocks at arm’s length, closing her eyes and turning her head from the chalk dust. She sneezes anyway. The breeze shifts, clearing the air and carrying the shouts of workmen repairing the roof of the railroad station.

The classroom windows don’t frighten her anymore. In the dormitories, orphans don’t wet their beds or wake up screaming quite so often. They are better fed, growing again. No one can love them as their dead or missing parents would have, but they know that the sisters care for them.

Autumn light makes the varnished chestnut bookcases beneath the windows glow. From the time she was small, she has always loved the beginning of a new school year. Everything seems possible—

A knock at the door makes her jump. The portress pokes her head into the room. “Sorry to startle you, Suora. There’s someone to see you.”

“Grazie, Suora, I know this gentleman. Rabbino, how wonderful to see you again.”

Left alone, the two of them struggle with emotions they are desperately tired of feeling. Widowed, childless, the rabbi is changed: bone and muscle, shadows and lines. They both know he did everything possible to save Suora Corniglia’s father, but il maggiore was so closely identified with Mussolini… Anyone who’d had anything to do with the Germans or the Republic of Salò was likely to get strung up. Even that poor one-armed postman was hanged. He couldn’t stutter fast enough to convince anyone he’d been a partisan all along.

“Prego,” she begins, “have a seat, Rabbino—”

The only adult-sized chair in the room is her own. They laugh, and Iacopo leans against a desktop near the window, but not for long. Filling the silence, he moves from place to place in the classroom, chatting a little too brightly about elections and political scandals, the reparations Italy must pay, the fate of territories taken by France and Yugoslavia. Rome has lost Abyssinia and Eritrea as well, but that may be a blessing. All over the world, the old powers struggle to regain control of rebellious colonies and protectorates. Nearly six years of war. Forty million dead, one way or another. Enough killing, one would have thought, to sicken everyone of the sport, but new conflicts have broken out in Palestine and India, in China and Indonesia, in Nicaragua and French Indochina.

For her part, Corniglia speaks of the school and the children. Aid money from America. The new priest assigned to Don Leto’s old parish in San Mauro. Villa Malcovato.

Somehow, in the chaos after the war, the villa still passed legally to il maggiore’s only surviving child. Suora Corniglia arranged for the land to be broken into individual farms, and much to the bishop’s dismay, gave title to the contadini who’d worked the land before the war. “Has his excellency forgiven you yet?” the rabbi asks, smiling when her dimples appear.

“He’ll get over it,” she says, unperturbed. “Do you remember the German doctor who joined the partisans? There was a letter from him, sent to Villa Malcovato, asking about your family. I wrote back to tell him what happened.”

Another silence. The rabbi stands. His hat brim moves through his fingers, around and around. “I’ve completed my work here,” he says finally. For two years, he has collected names, updated lists, sorting the missing from those gone forever. “We’ve established that nearly all the Italian deportees were sent to a camp in Poland called Auschwitz. A few have turned up, but we have just under six thousand confirmed dead.”

She’s seen photos in the newspapers. People say the newsreels are too terrible to bear. The rabbi steps to the windows, his back to her.

“There’s a saying in Hebrew,” he tells her. “ ‘No matter how dark the tapestry God weaves for us, there’s always a thread of grace.’ After the Yom Kippur roundup in ’43, people all over Italy helped us. Almost fifty thousand Jews were hidden. Italians, foreigners. And so many of them survived the occupation. I keep asking myself, Why was it so different here? Why did Italians help when so many others turned away?” He shrugs and turns. “I’ve decided to immigrate to Palestine, Suora. To a kibbutz on the coast, near Tel Aviv.”

From one war to another, she thinks. “You will be a great loss to us, Rabbino.”

“It’s kind of you to say so, but I feel—” He looks away. “I feel that life here has been amputated.” He faces her a moment later, and smiles briefly. “Anyway, I wanted to thank you. And to say good-bye. And to return this. Renzo Leoni had it in his pocket when he— The mortician was an old friend of his. This was wrapped in a piece of paper with your name on it. Well, actually, it said Sister Dimples. The undertaker had no idea, but he kept it, and last week it occurred to him to ask me about it.”

She holds out her hand. The rabbi drops a rosary into her palm. Plain black beads with simple silver links. Father Clown, she thinks. Father Clown…

“Thank you, Rabbino,” she says when she can speak. “I will pray for him.”