Street Boys

by Lorenzo Carcaterra

  “We can talk to each other and the Nazis will never see it,” Vincenzo said. “We’ll be above them and below, invisible.”

  “Franco, how far can your pigeons go with a message and come back with an answer?” Connors asked.

  “A hundred miles,” Franco said.

  “Who do they fly to?”

  “They head for the closest coop in the area,” Franco said. “From there, it’s up to the messenger.”

  “How far do you need them to go?” Maldini asked.

  “Salerno,” Connors said.

  21

  OSPEDALE DEGLI INCURABILI

  Two long rows of beds were lined against both sides of the wall. Small wooden tables were positioned between each bed, a burning candle resting on each, bringing light and shadow into the large room on the top floor of the oldest hospital in Naples. The two dozen beds were filled with children, thin white sheets pressed up against their necks. A number of them had IV drips taped to their arms. Yellow signs with a black circle in the center were taped above the beds, a signal that the children had an illness that was beyond cure.

  The Nazi officer and three soldiers, each holding a full canister of gasoline, stood with their backs to the thick wood door that led into the room. They had taken the elevator up from the basement, switching on a back-up generator to put the machines in motion. The officer stiffened when he saw the signs and inhaled the acid aroma of disease. He signaled the men forward with a wave of his wrist, careful not to rest his hands on anything in the room. “Burn it down,” he said in a husky voice, “and end their misery.”

  The three soldiers hesitated, their eyes fixed on the sleeping children. “Make sure you coat the walls as well as the floors,” the officer ordered them, oblivious to their unease.

  “This is a ward for incurables, sir,” one said, careful to hide the disdain he felt at the order. “These children will die in a matter of days.”

  “They will die in a matter of minutes,” the officer snarled back. “This entire hospital will be scattered to the ground and left in ashes. It’s filled with people who carry contagious disease. Leaving it alone would be a danger to our men. Not even those sent to evacuate this hellish place had the nerve to walk in here. Which leaves it for us to handle. This is our job and you will obey my orders.”

  “Yes, sir,” the soldier said. He nodded his head at the other two men by his side and walked with them down the center aisle toward the rear of the room.

  They began to pour gas on the floors and walls. Each soldier carefully avoided looking at the sleeping children; each moved slowly and silently, filled with dread at the notion of waking anyone from his painless rest. The officer stood by the wall closest to the door and surveyed the scene. He put an unfiltered cigarette to his lips and clicked open the top half of a lighter. He put the blue white flame to the dark tobacco, watching his three men working their way toward the center of the room, a thin line of smoke reaching past his eye and up toward the ceiling.

  He inhaled, held the smoke and the breath when he felt the cold steel of a gun barrel push against the side of his neck. “I really hope you understand what I have to say,” the voice behind him said. “Because if you don’t, you’re going to die and never really get the chance to know why.”

  “What do you want?” the officer asked in clear tones of school-taught English.

  “It helps to be educated,” Connors said. He unclipped the officer’s side holster, pulled out his pistol and inched him back deeper against the wall. “Have your boys put down the canisters and slide their weapons and belts toward you. And just in case they don’t give a rat’s ass whether you live or die, let them know there are three rifles pointed at their backs ready to sever their spines if they don’t do what they’re told.”

  “There are dozens of soldiers spread all over the hospital,” the officer said, trying to glance over his shoulder at Connors. “Once they hear shooting, they’ll come running. You won’t last a minute.”

  “I don’t know how long I’ll last,” Connors said. “I guess it all depends on how good a safety vest you turn out to be. I figure between the uniform and your body, I can hold off at least ten, fifteen stray shots before I have to toss you aside.”

  The officer swallowed hard and moved his head slightly, trying to lessen the pressure on his neck caused by the gun barrel, and shouted out his command. The soldiers looked up, peering into the darkness around them, then lowered the canisters to the wood floor, their hands and the fronts of their uniforms wet with gasoline. They undid the clips around their ammo belts, letting them fall to the ground with a muffled thump, and stepped forward. They held out their rifles and crouched down.

  “Tell the tall guy in the center to slide them over to your right, next to the door,” Connors said. “Rifles first, then the ammo.”

  The officer stiffened, the muscles around his back and arms tightening, his eyes fixed on his men. “And if I refuse?” he asked, the cigarette in his mouth burning down to the quick. “You don’t have it in you to shoot me, not like this. Unarmed and with my back to you. It goes against everything you Americans believe in.”

  Connors cocked the gun and pushed the barrel harder against the officer’s neck. “If those rifles and packs aren’t next to my feet the next time I look down, you’re going to be able to smoke through your throat.” His words were low and hard. “Right now, that’s about all I believe in.”

  The officer let the remnant of his cigarette slip out of his mouth and ordered the silent soldiers to do as requested. Connors watched as the rifles and ammo packs landed against the wall next to his boots. He then stepped away from the officer and shoved him toward the three soldiers. “Fold your hands and rest them on the back of your heads,” Connors ordered. “And don’t forget what I told you. There’s a rifle scope on your every move.”

  Vincenzo and Angela came out from behind one of the beds, their clothes reeking of gasoline. “You find a place?” Connors asked.

  Vincenzo nodded as he pulled off his shirt and threw it over his shoulder. “The Museo Pignatelli,” he said. “On the second floor there’s an empty room about this size. The children can be put there and we can leave two of the boys behind to watch over them. Allow them to die in peace.”

  “Any of them contagious?” Connors asked.

  “No,” Angela said. “We put up those signs during the evacuation, so the Nazis would leave them alone.”

  “Let’s move it then,” Connors said, staring down at the row of beds filled with children wasted away by disease. “We got about ten minutes to get these kids out of here. Do it fast and do it quiet. If anyone spots us, just keep going and leave it to me. You two stay with the kids and keep them covered.”

  Vincenzo ran toward the closest bed, rested the IV drip on its side next to the sick child, stood behind the iron bar and rolled it over toward Connors and Angela. “The elevator is down the hall and to the left,” he said. “It can hold two beds at a time. That makes six trips in all.”

  “Get moving,” Connors said, looking at Angela as she walked closer to the four Nazis in the center of the room. “I’ll catch up to you.”

  Angela walked with deliberate steps, her dark oval eyes focused on the officer in the center, the bottoms of her shoes drenched in gasoline. She held a pistol in her right hand.

  “Grab one of those beds and follow Vincenzo,” Connors told her. “He’s waiting for us.”

  “What are you going to do about them?” she asked, without turning, her eyes never wavering from the officer.

  “What do you want me to do?” Connors asked.

  “They were going to burn a room filled with dying children,” Angela said, her words rushing out, her anger beyond anyone’s grasp. “I think the same punishment should be given to them.”

  Connors shook his head and rested a hand on Angela’s back. “You don’t really think that.”

  Angela turned her face and stared up at Connors. “They’re Nazis,” she said.

&nb
sp; “But you’re not,” Connors told her.

  Angela turned back to the Germans. She stepped up closer to the officer, their eyes locked, each viewing the other with sheer contempt. Angela jammed the pistol in his stomach. “I want so much to kill you,” she whispered.

  “But you can’t,” the officer said, his expression fearless and smug. “The American spoke the truth. You’re not a Nazi and, in the end, that will be your downfall.”

  “Angela, get the kids out of here,” Connors ordered. He was standing over her, his rifle curled in his hands. “We can’t leave Vincenzo waiting too long. He’s exposed out there.”

  Angela lowered her head and pulled the gun away. She turned, walked toward one of the beds and began to roll it to the elevator. The officer watched her leave and then turned to Connors, his eyes brimming with scorn. “You can’t win a war if you’re not prepared to rid yourself of the enemy,” he said. “It’s a harsh lesson the Italians are much too weak to learn.”

  “Would it have bothered you at all to set fire to these kids?” Connors asked. “Letting them die that way?”

  “No,” the officer answered with a slight smile. “It would only have bothered me not to do it.”

  Connors glared at him and nodded. “That’s good for me to know,” he said in a low voice. He took several steps back and waited as three street boys emerged from the shadows, rifles in hand. “Gennaro, you stay and keep an eye on our friends,” he ordered the oldest boy. “Claudio, you start moving the beds toward the elevator.”

  “What about me?” Gaspare asked. His eyes were still red and swollen from his scuffle in the piazza.

  “Grab the guns and the ammo belts over by the back door and get them out of here,” Connors said. “Don’t be afraid to use them if you have to.”

  The boys moved into position, the wheels of the beds gliding softly along the gas-drenched wooden floor. Connors ran down the hall and toward the elevator door, held open by an impatient Vincenzo. “Start heading down,” Connors said, waving him on his way. “I’ll take the stairs. If they try to hit you at the door, I can come at them from the side. If that happens, you and Angela fire at them from your end and move the elevator back up.”

  Vincenzo slid the black iron gates shut and stepped back, careful not to dislodge the IV needle in the arm of the dying boy by his side. He looked across at Angela, squeezed in against the far wall, her eyes staring down at a silent, raven-haired girl in the bed mustering all her strength to give a weak smile. The girl brushed aside her hair and Angela leaned down and kissed her damp forehead. “Where are you taking us?” the child asked, her dry voice pained by every word.

  “Away from the Nazis,” Angela said.

  The elevator landed on the main floor. Vincenzo unlatched the hook and swung open the black gate. He grabbed his rifle and turned to Angela. “Wait,” he whispered. “When I wave, move the beds out, one at a time.”

  Vincenzo stepped into the main hallway at the rear of the hospital, three candles in the middle of a small wooden table the only light available, and looked for moving shadows at both ends. The door to the stairwell next to the open elevator swung open and Connors stepped out. “Get the kids out and then send it right back up,” he told Vincenzo. “Claudio and Gennaro will swing in the next two and we just keep the rotation going until we get all twelve down here.”

  “We’ll be moving toward the ramp in the back,” Vincenzo said, pointing just past Connors’s right shoulder. “Once we get outside, we’ll be fine. We can use the alleys and side streets to get to where we need to go.”

  “There’s only five of us,” Connors said. “And there’s twelve beds that need to be moved through the streets. How you going to make that work?”

  “Let me worry about that,” Vincenzo said, turning away. “You just worry about the soldiers. There’s got to be at least fifty of them in the hospital. And then there’s the four tanks covering the front.”

  “They’re here to kill people who can’t move,” Connors said, his voice dripping with anger and bitterness. “They’re not expecting any bullets coming their way.”

  Vincenzo watched Angela wheel the first of the beds out of the elevator and reached in to pull out the second. “Do you want me to stay with you?” he asked Connors. “In case they come at you from more than one side?”

  “You stay with the kids,” Connors said, stepping into the elevator, staring down at the sick child. “There’s something I need to take care of before I leave.”

  The tank commander signaled an all-clear and fired the first shell into the center of the hospital. The blast buckled the fourteenth-century structure, sending large stone cinders and thick chunks of glass hurtling to the base of the square below. Smoke and flames shot up the stairwells and engulfed the halls. Connors braced himself against the cold marble of a far wall, his eyes on the four Nazis standing across from him in the now-empty ward. It had taken six silent trips to strip the room of the sick children, bringing them down to the alleys and away from the scope of the Panzer tanks.

  “It’s still not too late for you to save yourself,” the officer said to Connors, his voice now a distant echo. “They fully intend to bring this hospital crashing to the ground. And there’s nothing left for you to do to prevent it.”

  Connors, a rifle in one hand and a cigarette in his mouth, stared down at his feet, the floors and the walls still wet and moist from the heavy splashes of gasoline. “I don’t want to prevent it,” Connors said, looking back up at the Nazi. Then he pulled the cigarette from his mouth, tossed it on the floor and saw the instant rush of flames lift and spread down the center of the room, chewing up the floorboards and crawling up the walls. “See you in hell,” he said.

  He walked out of the ward and shut the door behind him.

  The beds were held together by belts and rope, moving three to a line, pulled down the barren streets of Naples by Vincenzo, Claudio, Gennaro, Gaspare and Angela. The group walked with heads bowed, all their strength needed to roll the shaky beds along the hard and rocky cobblestones. At their backs, thick plumes of black smoke rose toward the sky, telling them that the destruction of the hospital was under way.

  They turned a corner, the wheels on the beds squeaking and vibrating with each hard spin, the loud and fiery explosions heating their backs, the heavy footsteps of Nazis echoing all around them. “We won’t be able to get to the museum without running into soldiers,” Gennaro said. He looked across his shoulder and down the deserted streets as he lugged the heavy beds toward safety, the skin around his small hands frayed and bleeding. “It will be hard to defend ourselves and keep the children safe.”

  “If the Nazis come at us,” Vincenzo said, “we separate from the beds. Have them aim their fire at us, not at the children.”

  “We leave the beds out in the open?” Angela asked.

  “We have no other choice,” Vincenzo said. “You stay with them, duck down between the openings. If they start shooting at them, you fire back. But you keep down until that happens.”

  Claudio stopped, bucking the force of the rolling beds with his back. Five Nazi soldiers were running up the empty street toward them, rifles perched and ready. From behind them, they heard the pounding footsteps of three more, running at full gallop, each poised to kill. Vincenzo bolted away from the side of the beds, tossed himself to the ground, his elbows scraping the cobblestones, and began to fire his rifle. Gaspare, Gennaro and Claudio split and ran toward the shuttered doorways of an empty produce store for cover, firing their guns in both directions. Angela eased down between the sides of the beds, whispering words of comfort to the frightened children. The slant of the street kept them rolling at a slow pace toward the oncoming Nazis. The three Nazis running toward them from the far end of the street focused their attention on Vincenzo, firing a steady stream at the boy who was spared any cover. Vincenzo turned on his back and emptied his rifle toward the soldiers. He hit one at chest level, bringing him to his knees. Claudio and Gaspare fired machine gun shell
s at the five Nazis coming at them from above and Gennaro emptied his pistol, each looking to draw the fire away from Angela and the children in the beds. All of their shots missed their marks and they were forced to cower for cover as machine-gun bullets riddled the doorways of the buildings where they crouched.

  The two soldiers were thirty feet away from Vincenzo, the boy down to his last two bullets, when Connors stepped out of a bombed-out bakery and aimed a machine gun their way, the volley of bullets taking down both Nazis. “Grab their guns and ammo belts,” he shouted to Vincenzo. “Then go and back up Angela. I’ll check on the other three.”

  Connors ran to the corner, gazed across at Angela huddled between the three long rows of beds, the faces of the kids under the sheets warmed by the sun, their eyes too weak even to glance at the firestorm around them. He stared at them for several seconds and then eased a grenade out of his clip and ran toward the three cornered boys. He stopped beside a stone wall, tossed the grenade to Claudio and pulled a second machine gun from behind his shoulder and began firing both at the five Nazis running at him down the empty street. “It’s not a gift,” he shouted out to Claudio who was staring at the grenade in his hand. “Pull the pin and throw it at them.”

  Claudio undid the pin and hurled the grenade toward the sky, forcing the Germans to scatter. The bomb landed several feet across from a fountain, the blast hurtling rocks and debris and killing one of the five. Connors fired the last of his rounds into the thick gray smoke, clipping off two more Nazis. He stood next to Claudio, Gennaro and Gaspare, pushing the boys back deeper into the doorway, keeping his eye out for the last of the soldiers.