Street Boys

by Lorenzo Carcaterra

  “I believe in Il Duce, si,” the man said, not backing down. “And I always will.”

  “Loyalty is always admirable, but in your case, it’s also foolish,” Von Klaus said. “As of today, the Italians want your beloved Mussolini dead, the Americans want him captured and we Germans really don’t know what to do with him. We have enough buffoons in our high command as it is. Which leaves you a loyal man with no place to turn.”

  “He will not abandon those who stay by his side,” the man said. “Il Duce will be back and Italy will again belong to him.”

  “Perhaps,” Von Klaus said in a sterner voice. “And if he does return, I hope he rewards your loyalty with a new home and new riches. Because as of this moment, all that you own is the suit you wear. The rest now belongs to Germany.”

  “This land has been in my family for three generations,” the man said. “No one can take it from us. Not even Il Duce himself.”

  “Your family may have owned the land, but they never worked it,” Von Klaus said. He gazed at the man, his eyes gleaming and hard. “That’s a duty people like yourself reserve for the poor.”

  “It’s not against any laws to employ farmhands,” the man said. “And we took good care of them. Treated them as if they were members of my own family.”

  Von Klaus walked in a small circle around the man. “And where is the poor side of your family now?” he asked.

  “Most of them fled,” the man said. “A few stayed behind and were killed. They were foolish enough to go against the power of Il Duce.”

  “Yet you not only stayed, you’ve managed to survive,” Von Klaus said. “With most of your wealth still at your disposal. Seems a poor way for a man to care for members of his family.”

  “They made their choice,” the man said. “And now they have to live or die with the results of that choice.”

  Von Klaus nodded, the son of a working-class Berlin mill worker about to pass judgment on the landed nobility that stood before him. “And I have made mine,” he said. “And you will have to live or die with the results of that choice.”

  “What are you going to do?” the man said, all the confidence and arrogance seeping from his body.

  “What I was sent here to do,” Von Klaus said, giving the man a last disdainful look. He turned and stepped toward the front of the house. “Empty the house of all its goods,” he shouted to his men. “Then blast it down. I don’t want even a stone left untouched. Use the flame throwers and torch the surrounding property. All of it, from one end to the other. Once I order the pull out, I want two tanks to stay back and mine the areas around the four sides of the house. I want nothing left standing. Nothing! And I want the smoke to be seen for miles. To be seen and smelled by everyone hiding around us.”

  “You bastard!” the old man shouted at Von Klaus. “You heartless bastard!”

  Von Klaus stared down at the man and smiled. “To a soldier doing his duty, that is considered the highest of compliments,” the colonel said.

  The old man stood his ground, breath coming out in hard gasps through his open mouth, his hands trembling. He shook when the first blast from a tank shattered the front door of his home and his eyes welled with tears when a second ripped through a third-floor bedroom. The third explosion stripped the man of all judgment. He rushed toward the colonel, standing now a dozen feet away, sanity giving way to suicide.

  “I will kill you for this, you Nazi bastard!” he shouted, running at Von Klaus with both arms extended. He had a small revolver gripped in one trembling hand. It had been jammed inside his tobacco pouch, hidden from the soldiers’ search.

  Colonel Von Klaus watched as he raced toward him, his manner relaxed and indifferent. He didn’t flinch as the two soldiers to his left fired three shots into the old man, dropping him face first onto the red dirt that lined the front of the house. Von Klaus walked over to the body, reached down, took the revolver from the man’s hand, and put it inside the front pocket of Kunnalt’s jacket. “A keepsake,” he said to him. “For the time we spent together.”

  “Do you wish him buried, sir?” Kunnalt asked.

  “Leave him for Il Duce,” Von Klaus said, walking away from the explosions and fires, back toward the quiet of his tank. “When he returns.”

  15

  PORTO DI SANTA LUCIA, NAPLES

  SEPTEMBER 26, 1943

  An orange sun was resting on still water in the distance. A line of boys stood along the stone edges of the shore. In the middle of the bay, the four wooden boats lurched to starboard, pulled down by the weight of full nets. Around them, boys and girls bobbed above the waterline like buoys, each holding on to a square of netting or a chord of rope. Vincenzo stood in the center of the rear boat, staring down at the water and at the fishing nets he had helped pull to the surface, each holding thick piles of rifles and handguns. All around him there was a stunned and happy silence, as the boys, on shore and in the water, stared with amazement at their catch of weapons.

  “Is this all of it?” Vincenzo asked Maldini. He reached an arm into an open lip of the net, pulled out a lupare and held it firmly in his grip.

  “It is all you will need,” Maldini said. He was stretched out across three wooden planks, face up to the darkening sky.

  “Thank you,” Vincenzo said.

  Maldini raised his head and looked over at the boys swimming in the water. “Look at them,” he said. “They are so happy. They see the guns and believe that now they can fight the Germans. And most of them will die, each with one of those guns in his hands. You should curse me for that, Vincenzo. Not thank me.”

  Maldini stared at Vincenzo for several moments, seeing in the boy’s brooding eyes the same burden of loss that he himself carried. He turned and looked around him at the joyful faces floating in the water and wished they could all be tossed back into another time and place, one that was miles removed from the death they had seen and the destruction that followed. But he knew it to be nothing more than a foolish whim. In time of war, Maldini had learned, life was broken down into a series of moments, each branded into memory. Most of those moments were etched in a horror that would forever be sealed inside the dark reaches of the mind. A few, a very precious few, brought a smile and along with them a sense of once again being alive and filled with hope. Maldini knew as he stared down at the boys and the arsenal of weapons they gleefully embraced that this was such a moment.

  “Death will come when it chooses,” he said to Vincenzo. “But for today, we are alive, and for that we should celebrate.”

  Franco looked out at the coastline, at a boat rowing slowly toward them, four small boys struggling with the weight of the oars. “Fresh fish roasted over an open fire would be a perfect way to start,” Franco said. “That is, if our little friends managed to catch something other than a chill.”

  “Have the boys put the guns in the boats and row them to shore,” Vincenzo said to Maldini. “I’ll swim out and help bring in the fishermen before it turns dark.”

  “No,” Maldini said. “I’ll go and help the little ones. You stay. You be the one to tell them to load the guns on board.”

  “What difference does it make who tells them?” Vincenzo asked.

  “The difference is not for now, but for later,” Maldini said with a smile. “They need not only to trust you, but listen to what you tell them to do. No matter what happens. The sooner that starts, the better.”

  Maldini stood, patted Vincenzo on the shoulder and jumped into the cold water. He was halfway out to the lone rowboat when Vincenzo’s orders echoed across the waves. He stopped, turned and smiled when he heard the loud cheers from the boys that followed in its wake. He floated in the waves and relished the sight of happy faces and sounds of joyful laughter as the guns were tossed from net to boat.

  That would be victory enough for this day.

  16

  45TH THUNDERBIRD INFANTRY DIVISION HEADQUARTERS SALERNO. SEPTEMBER 26, 1943

  The three officers leaned over the edges of the map
and studied the various pieces that were spread across it. Captain Ed Anders reached across the map and moved a tiny wooden tank farther south. “This is where we should be by now,” he said, frustration and anger edged in his voice. “We haven’t moved in over a week. And I still don’t have a goddamn idea why.”

  “Montgomery,” Captain Jack Sanders said. He was thirty-five, five years older than Anders, standing off to his left, taller and with thinning blond hair and a thick white mustache. He was a career army man, joining up the day after he finished high school, leaving behind three sisters, a widowed mother and a small grocery store in Gainesville, Florida. “The man won’t make a move unless the odds guarantee a victory. He just can’t afford to lose a battle.”

  “The general is doing a slow burn of his own,” Captain Frank Carey, the third officer in the tent, said. Carey was in his mid-twenties, stationed with the Thunderbirds’ sister division, the Texas, and was viewed by the other officers in both groups as a five-star in the making. His words carried a hint of his Macon County, Georgia, upbringing. “But there isn’t all that much he can do about it. Ike said to sit tight until Monty gives the word.”

  “Any news from your recon team?” Sanders asked Anders.

  “Not yet,” Anders answered, shaking his head. “But it’s still early. The trip down doesn’t look like a long one on a map. But the way the Nazis have those roads mined, it’s gonna take them a couple of days to get into the city.”

  “You expecting them to find anything?” Sanders asked.

  “Not really,” Anders said, standing away from the map. “My guess is the two operatives we had working with the Italians got out before the evacuation. But they can give us a better idea of what’s left down there. The Nazis know we’re going in there someday. My guess is they’ll be looking to rip apart everything they can.”

  “They’ve been doing that since we got here in July,” Carey said, staring at the clear sky outside the tent flap. “You know, my wife always wanted to see Italy. We used to talk about it before the war. Now, it’s going to be a lot of years before I can bring her here and give her something to see.”

  “How much help can we expect from this new guy in power, what’s his name again?” Sanders asked.

  “Marshal Pietro Badoglio,” Anders said. “He’s a paper soldier, and if the reports we get are reliable, pretty much an idiot.”

  “You figure the resistance leaders will listen to him or will they just fire on anybody that drives into the city?” Sanders asked.

  “I wouldn’t count on much of anything from him or them,” Carey said. “The government Badoglio set up collapsed before we even got here. The people out there are on their own again. If you ask me, they’ve been that way since this war started, and frankly, they’re a lot better off.”

  “We’re here to help them,” Anders said. “But by the time we’re through, we’re going to end up doing just as much damage as the Germans.”

  “I’d end this damn war tomorrow if I could,” Frank Carey said. “And get everybody back to wherever the hell it is they belong.”

  The three officers stepped out of the tent and walked down a narrow road toward their waiting jeeps. They walked in silence, each feeling at loose ends, uncomfortable with the lag in the regular battle patterns they had grown accustomed to as they led their troops through the center of the Italian heartland. They were in a rush to end their days of war and return life to a semblance of what it had once been. It was a dream everyone in and out of uniform hoped to turn into reality.

  While they walked the grassy slopes of an Italian town newly conquered, they knew that back home in America, flour, fish, beef and cheese could only be bought with red ration stamps and the sale of sliced bread was banned. In Washington, D.C., the Jefferson Memorial was dedicated in a presidential ceremony and the Pentagon was completed and newly occupied. Movie theaters gave citizens looking for visions of better days Hollywood versions of war with the successful films Guadalcanal Diary, Watch on the Rhine, Five Graves to Cairo and Gary Cooper and Ingrid Bergman in For Whom the Bell Tolls. Count Fleet won the Kentucky Derby and Duke Ellington had yet another hit with “Do Nothin’ Till You Hear from Me.” Selman Abraham Waksman, a forty-three-year-old Rutgers University professor of microbiology, introduced the world to antibiotics, while penicillin powder was applied for the first time in the treatment of chronic disease. Race riots scarred Harlem in New York while soft-coal workers threatened to walk off the job, urged on by the president of the United Mine Workers union, John L. Lewis. And the New York Yankees won another World Series.

  “I wonder what the winters are like around here,” Sanders said, looking to his left as he led the way down the road.

  “At the rate Monty and the Brits are moving, we may find out,” Carey said.

  “He’s going to have to move sooner than that,” Anders said. “Even his own men are starting to make fun of him. And he has to know that the longer he takes to move into Naples, the more time he gives Patton to move through Italy. To those two, it’s never been about wars and men. It’s about headlines.”

  “There is some logic to what Monty’s doing,” Carey said. “Let the Germans go into Naples and let them go in strong. Once they’re in, they’ve got their backs to the sea. There’s no place else for them to go. We come in, close ranks on the roads out of town, and we got them.”

  “Unless that’s what they want us to do,” Sanders said. “You guys know as well as I do, the Nazis mined every damn road from Rome to Naples and in between. They mined the bottom of the bay, which can cause our ships a lot of trouble. They mined the walkways and the hillsides. Hell, the bastards even mined their own dead soldiers. The way they have it set up, they can knock off a quarter of our troops without having to fire a single round.”

  “You think that’s what’s holding Monty back?” Anders asked. They had reached the base of the road, their backs turned away from the bay. “He’s worried about getting through the mine traps?”

  “I sure hope that’s not the case,” Sanders said. “If it is, then we will be here all winter, and we’ll need Patton to liberate us.”

  “You look around and see the faces of these Italian people,” Frank Carey said. “They never wanted any part of this war, no matter whose side they were on. They want to farm, not fight. But when we leave here, they’re going to be left with nothing more than holes in the ground and dead bodies to put inside them.”

  “What makes them so different from us?” Anders asked. “We’ll all have bodies to put away once we get home.”

  “But we’ll still have a home,” Carey said. “Nobody bombed it or ransacked it. Nobody took our clothes and burned our property. It’ll all still be there, the way we left it. Might need some touching up, but it’ll be standing and our families will still all be there. The people who lived here lost that and I don’t know how you ever get something like that back.”

  “It’s not our worry, Frank,” Sanders said. “We’re soldiers and nobody gives a good damn what we think or how we feel. We’re just here to take the land, call it a win and then call it quits. We didn’t ask to be here either, anymore than the Italians want us here. Believe me, I’d much rather die with my feet tucked under the sheets of my own bed than in a vineyard on a hill in Italy, no matter how beautiful it is. But I don’t worry about that, either. I’m here to fight, not fret.”

  Carey looked at Sanders and winked at Anders. “I couldn’t help but notice that you Florida boys get a little testy when you’re standing under the sun too long,” he said to Sanders. “You’d think you’d be used to it by now.”

  “It’s the swamp gators I miss,” Sanders told him with a smile. “Having those suckers floating along the sides of your boat usually has a soothing effect on a man’s tolerance for bullshit.”

  “I’m going back to my troops,” Anders said. “See you guys at tomorrow’s briefing. Unless we get an order to move out. In which case, I’ll see you on the road to Naples.”

  “La
st division to reach the city gets clean-up duty,” Sanders said. “What do you say? You two up to it?”

  “I’ll be on my third shower by the time you two come rolling in,” Carey said. “Count me in on that bet.”

  “I’ve never seen the day when my Thunderbirds get bested by the Texas,” Anders said to Sanders. “Make sure your boys have plenty of cleaning supplies in their gear.”

  “Brag all you will, boys,” Sanders said, starting to walk from the group. “But we’re the ones assigned to follow Monty. Which means we’ll be the first Americans in the city.”

  “You’re forgetting something, Jack,” Anders said. “A minor detail, but a detail nonetheless.”

  “What would that be?”

  “While we’ve been up here shooting the shit, one of my recon teams has been heading for Naples,” he said. “That’s a Thunderbirds recon team. By this time tomorrow we’ll be the first ones in.”

  “Looks like you got yourself hit with a sucker punch,” Carey said to Sanders. “Don’t matter all that much, though. Since you’re the unit following Monty, you may never get to see Naples at all.”

  “That’s right,” Anders shouted out to them from the base of a ravine. “You know that saying, ‘See Naples and Die.’ It should really be ‘See Naples when Monty dies.’”

  The loud laughter of the three captains echoed off the silent hills of the Italian coastline.

  17

  VIA TOLEDO, NAPLES

  SEPTEMBER 26, 1943

  Connors eased the jeep to a stop, gazing through his windshield at the two boys blocking his path, one of them resting a foot on top of a firm, round ball. They both looked to be about eight years old, wearing threadbare outfits grafted from the torn clothing left behind by adults. The smaller of the two smiled at Connors, his bare foot rolling the ball with the edges of his toes. He had golden brown hair and sea-colored eyes with a dark leather tan covering his mostly bare body.