Beneath a Scarlet Sky: A Novel

by Mark Sullivan

  General Leyers finished his speech, shouting something about Hitler, and then threw his arm up and out in the Nazi salute. “Sieg heil!” he roared.

  “Sieg heil!” they thundered back at him.

  Pino stood there, confused by the fear he felt growing inside him. What had Leyers said to them? What was happening?

  The general disappeared with several officers into a tent. The eight hundred soldiers climbed into half the lorries and left the others empty. Their diesel engines rattled to life. The vehicles began to snake their way out of the meadow, one lorry full of men followed by an empty one. Some pairs went north on the rural road, and the rest headed south, lumbering into the distance like so many war elephants on parade.

  Leyers emerged from the tent. His face betrayed nothing as he climbed into the backseat of the Fiat and told Pino to drive south through the Po River valley, as fertile a place as there was on earth. Three kilometers into the drive, Pino saw a girl sitting in the driveway of a small farm with a grain tower. She was sobbing. Her mother sat on the front stoop, her face in her hands.

  Not far down the road, Pino saw the body of a man facedown in the ditch with his white T-shirt bruised purple from drying blood. Pino glanced in the rearview. If Leyers had seen any of it, he wasn’t showing a reaction. His head was down. He was reading.

  The road ran down through a creek bottom and came up onto a large flat with harvested fields on both sides. Less than a kilometer ahead, a small settlement of houses was clustered next to a large grain bin made of stone.

  German lorries were parked on the road and in the farmyards. Platoons of Waffen-SS soldiers marched people out into their front yards, maybe twenty-five of them, and forced them to their knees with fingers laced behind their heads.

  “Mon général?” Pino said.

  In the backseat, Leyers looked up, cursed, and told him to stop. The general climbed out and shouted at the SS men. The first Todt soldier appeared with large grain sacks on his shoulders. Others came behind, twenty, maybe more, laden with grain sacks.

  The SS reacted to something Leyers said, and the families were urged to their feet and then allowed to sit as a group while they watched their grain, their livelihood, their survival, stolen and thrown into the back of a Nazi transport.

  One of the farmers would not sit, and started shouting at Leyers. “You can at least leave us enough to eat. It’s the decent thing to do.”

  Before the general could reply, one of the SS soldiers hit the farmer in the head with the butt of his rifle and dropped him in his tracks.

  “What did he say to me?” Leyers asked Pino.

  Pino told him. The general listened, thought, and then called to one of his Todt officers, “Nehmen sie alles!”

  Then he headed toward the car. Pino followed, upset because he knew enough German to understand Leyers’s command. Nehmen sie alles. Take everything.

  Pino wanted to kill the general. But he couldn’t. He had to swallow his anger and marshal himself. But did Leyers have to take everything?

  As he slid into the Fiat, Pino silently repeated a vow he’d made to remember what he’d seen, from the slaving to the pillaging. When the war was over, he would tell the Allies everything.

  They drove on into the early afternoon, seeing more and more farms with Germans under Leyers’s command stealing grain bound for mills, vegetables bound for market, and livestock bound for slaughter. Cows were shot in the head, gutted, and thrown into the lorries whole, their carcasses throwing steam into the cool air.

  Every once in a while, the general would tell Pino to stop, and he’d climb out to have a conversation with a Todt officer or two. Then he’d order Pino to drive on and return to his reports. Pino kept glancing at the mirror, thinking how Leyers seemed to shift and change with every moment. How can he possibly be unmoved by what we’ve seen? How can he—?

  “You think I’m a wicked man, Vorarbeiter?” Leyers said from the backseat.

  Pino looked in the mirror, saw the general looking back at him.

  “Non, mon général,” Pino said, trying to put on his happy face.

  “Yes, you do,” Leyers said. “It would be surprising if you didn’t hate me for what I’ve had to do today. A part of me hates myself. But I have orders. Winter is coming. My country is under siege. Without this food, my people will starve. So here in Italy, and in your eyes, I’m a criminal. Back home, I’ll be an unsung hero. Good. Evil. It’s all a question of perspective, is it not?”

  Pino gazed at the general in the mirror, thinking that Leyers seemed infinite and ruthless, the kind of man who could justify almost any action in pursuit of a goal.

  “Oui, mon général,” Pino said, and couldn’t restrain himself. “But now, my people will starve.”

  “Some might,” Leyers said. “But I answer to a greater authority. Any lack of enthusiasm for this mission on my part could be grounds for . . . Well, that’s not going to happen if I can help it. Take me back to Milan, the central train station.”

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Lorries stacked high with Nazi booty from Italian farms, orchards, and vineyards jammed into the streets around the train depot. Pino followed General Leyers into the station and out to the loading platforms where German soldiers were loading grain sacks, wine kegs, and full bushel baskets of fruits and vegetables into boxcar after boxcar.

  Leyers seemed to understand the whole system, firing questions at subordinates and calling out notes to Pino as he marched up and down the platforms.

  “Nine trains travel north through the Brenner tonight,” the general said at one point. “Arrival Innsbruck oh seven hundred hours. Arrive Munich thirteen hundred hours. Arrive Berlin seventeen hundred hours. In total three hundred and sixty cars of food will . . .”

  Leyers stopped dictating. Pino looked up.

  Seven Waffen-SS soldiers blocked their way. Beyond them, a string of seven rickety old cattle cars sat on the track by the far platform. At some point, the cars must have been a barn-red color, but the paint had blistered and peeled, and the wood was splintered and cracked, making them look barely fit for travel.

  Leyers said something threatening to the SS soldiers, and they stood aside. The general walked toward the train of old boxcars. Pino followed. Looking up, he saw the sign marked “Binario 21.”

  He was puzzled, knowing he’d heard of it before, but not placing it. With all the din inside the station from the loading of loot, it wasn’t until Pino was beside the last car that he heard children crying inside.

  The sound seemed to freeze the general. Leyers stood there, staring at the cracked and splintering walls of the cattle car and the many desperate eyes staring back through the cracks at him and at Pino, who now remembered Mrs. Napolitano saying that Platform 21 was where Jews disappeared on trains heading north.

  “Please,” a woman inside the cattle car sobbed in Italian. “Where are you taking us? After the prison, you can’t leave us in here like this! There’s no room. There’s . . .”

  Leyers looked at Pino with a stricken expression. “What is she saying?”

  Pino told him.

  Sweat broke out on the general’s forehead. “Tell her she’s going to an Organization Todt work camp in Poland. It’s—”

  The locomotive engine sighed. The train rolled back a foot. That set off wailing inside the boxcars, hundreds of men, women, and children screaming to be let out, demanding to know their destination and begging for any small mercy.

  “You’re going to a work camp in Poland,” Pino told the crying woman.

  “Pray for us,” she said before the wheels squealed on the tracks and the train began to pull away from Binario 21.

  Three little fingers stuck out of a crack on the rear wall of the last cattle car. The fingers seemed to wave at Pino as the train gathered speed. He stared after the train, seeing the fingers in his mind long after he couldn’t see them anymore. His urge was to go after the train and set those people free, get them to safety. Instead, he stood ther
e, defeated, helpless, and fighting the urge to cry at the image of those fingers, which would not fade.

  “General Leyers!”

  Pino turned. So did the general, who was pale. Had he seen those fingers, too?

  Beyond them, down the platform, Gestapo Colonel Walter Rauff was chugging toward them, his face flushed with anger.

  “Colonel Rauff,” Leyers said.

  Pino took a step away from the general and studied the platform beneath his feet. He didn’t want Rauff to recognize him for fear that he might become suspicious of the Italian boy from Casa Alpina somehow becoming the driver to General Leyers.

  The Gestapo colonel started yelling at Leyers, who began yelling right back at him. Pino understood little of it, but he did hear Rauff invoke Joseph Goebbels’s name. Leyers responded by invoking Adolf Hitler. And in their body language, Pino got the meaning. Rauff answered to Goebbels, a Reich Minister. But Leyers answered to the führer himself.

  After several minutes of intense threats and ice-cold conversation, a furious Rauff stepped back and saluted. “Heil Hitler!”

  Leyers returned the salute with less enthusiasm. Rauff was about to leave, when he fixed on Pino for several seconds. Pino could feel his attention dancing all over him.

  “Vorarbeiter,” General Leyers called. “We are leaving. Bring the car around.”

  “Jawohl, General,” Pino said in his best German, and then hurried past the two Nazi officers, never once looking at Rauff, but feeling his flat dark eyes fixed on him.

  With every step, Pino expected to be called back. But Rauff never said a word, and Pino left Platform 21, praying he’d never have to return.

  General Leyers climbed into the staff car with his normal unreadable expression back in place.

  “Dolly’s,” he said.

  Pino glanced in the rearview and saw Leyers’s eyes screwed toward the horizon. He knew he should keep his mouth shut, but he couldn’t. “Mon général?”

  “What is it, Vorarbeiter?” he asked, still looking out the window.

  “Are the people in the boxcars really going to an OT work camp in Poland?”

  “Yes,” the general said. “It’s called Auschwitz.”

  “Why Poland?”

  At that, Leyers’s eyes came unscrewed and he almost shouted in irritation, “Why all the questions, Vorarbeiter? Don’t you know your place? Don’t you know who I am?”

  Pino felt like he’d been slapped at the back of the head. “Oui, mon général.”

  “Then you will keep your mouth shut. You will not ask questions of me or anyone else, and you will do as you are told. Do you understand?”

  “Oui, mon général,” Pino said, shaken. “I am sorry, mon général.”

  When they reached Dolly’s apartment building, Leyers said he’d take the valise up himself and ordered Pino to return the Fiat to the motor pool.

  Pino wanted to follow the general upstairs or go around the back and get Anna to let him in, but it was still daylight and he feared he’d get caught. After a long look at the windows of Dolly’s apartment, he drove away, thinking how much he wanted to tell Anna about all that he’d seen that day. The violence. The violation. The despair.

  That night and for many nights afterward, Pino’s dreams were haunted by the red train and Platform 21. He kept hearing the woman beg him to pray for her. He kept seeing those poor little fingers wiggling at him and dreamed that they belonged to a child of a thousand faces, a child who could not be saved.

  Over the ensuing weeks and days, Pino drove General Leyers all over northern Italy. They rarely slept. At the wheel, Pino often wondered about the faceless child and the woman he’d spoken to on Platform 21. Had they gone to Poland to be worked to death? Or had the Nazis just taken them somewhere and machine-gunned them the way they had in Meina and a dozen other desecrated places throughout Italy?

  When he wasn’t driving, Pino felt powerless and exhausted watching Leyers loot factories for machine tools and seize a staggering quantity of building supplies, vehicles, and food. Entire towns were stripped of basic commodities, which were either shipped to Germany by train or distributed to soldiers on the Gothic Line. Through it all, Leyers remained stoic, pitiless, and committed to his task.

  “I keep telling you the Allies need to be bombing the train tracks over the Brenner Pass,” Pino told his uncle one night in late October 1944. “They need to cut it off, or there will be no food left for any of us, and winter’s coming.”

  “I’ve had Baka send that message twice,” Uncle Albert said in frustration. “But the world’s focused on France, and forgotten Italy.”

  On Friday, October 27, 1944, Pino again drove General Leyers to Benito Mussolini’s villa at Gargnano. It was a warm fall day. The leaves of hardwood trees had turned fiery far up into the Alps. The sky was a crystalline blue, and the surface of Lake Garda mirrored both, causing Pino to wonder whether there was a more beautiful place in the world than northern Italy.

  He followed Leyers up onto the villa’s colonnade and to the terrace, which was empty and strewn with leaves. The French doors to Mussolini’s office were thrown open, however, and they found Il Duce inside, standing at his desk, the suspenders of his riding pants hanging by his sides and his tunic well undone. The dictator had a phone pressed to his ear, and his face was twisted into something spiteful.

  “Claretta, Rachele’s gone crazy,” Il Duce was saying. “She’s coming for you. Don’t talk to her. She says she’s going to kill you, so close the gate, and . . . Okay, okay, call me back.”

  Mussolini hung up the phone, shaking his head before noticing General Leyers and Pino standing there. He said, “Ask the general if his wife is insane over Dolly.”

  Pino did. Leyers looked surprised that Il Duce knew about his mistress, but said, “My wife is insane over most things, but she knows nothing of Dolly. How can I be of service, Duce?”

  “Why does Field Marshal Kesselring always send you to see me, General Leyers?”

  “He trusts me. You trust me.”

  “Do I?”

  “Have I ever done anything to make you question my honor?”

  Mussolini poured himself some wine and then shook his head. “General, why doesn’t Kesselring trust my army enough to use it? I have so many loyal, well-trained men, true Fascists willing to fight for Salò, and yet they sit in their barracks.”

  “It doesn’t make sense to me, either, Duce, but the field marshal has a far greater military mind than mine. I am but an engineer.”

  The phone rang. Mussolini grabbed it, listened, and said, “Rachele?”

  The dictator pulled his head off the receiver, wincing while his wife’s voice came screaming out into the room with remarkable clarity. “The partisans! They’re sending me poems, Benito! One line says over and over again, ‘We will take you all to Piazzale Loreto!’ They blame me, they blame you, and they blame your bitch of a mistress! For that she’s going to die!”

  The dictator smashed the phone down in its cradle, looking shaken, and then stared at Pino for an indication of how much he’d heard. Pino swallowed and became fascinated by the stitchwork in the rug.

  Leyers said, “Duce, I have a busy schedule.”

  “Preparing your retreat?” Mussolini sneered. “Your run toward the Brenner Pass?”

  “The Gothic Line still holds.”

  “I hear it has holes in it,” Il Duce said, and drained his wine. “Tell me, General, is it true that Hitler is building a last redoubt? Somewhere underground in the German Alps, where he will retreat with his most loyal followers?”

  “One hears many such stories. But I have no direct knowledge of that one.”

  “If there is, will there be a place in that underground fortress for me?”

  “I can’t speak for the führer, Duce.”

  “That’s not what I hear,” Mussolini said. “But at the very least, maybe you can speak for Albert Speer. Surely Hitler’s architect would know if there was such a place.”

  “I
’ll ask the Reich Minister the next time we speak, Duce.”

  “I’ll need a room for two,” the dictator said, and poured himself more wine.

  “Duly noted,” the general said. “And now I must leave. I have a meeting in Turin.”

  Mussolini looked ready to argue, but the phone rang. He winced, picked it up. Leyers turned to go. As Pino started to follow, he heard Mussolini say, “Claretta? Did you shut the gate?” There was a pause before Il Duce roared, “Rachele’s there? Get your guard to get her off the gate before she hurts herself!”

  They heard more shouting as they walked off the terrace and down the stairs.

  Back in the Fiat, General Leyers shook his head and said, “Why do I always feel like I have been to a madhouse when I leave this place?”

  “Il Duce says many strange things,” Pino said.

  “How he led a country is beyond me,” Leyers said. “But they say the train system ran like German clockwork when he was in full power.”

  “Is there an underground fortress in the Alps?” Pino asked.

  “Only a lunatic would believe in something like that.”

  Pino wanted to remind the general that Adolf Hitler wasn’t exactly stable, but he thought better of it and they drove on.

  Shortly after sunset on Tuesday, October 31, 1944, General Leyers told Pino to drive him to the train station in the city of Monza, about fifteen kilometers northeast of Milan. Pino was exhausted. They’d been on the road almost constantly, and he wanted to sleep and to see Anna. They’d barely had ten minutes together since the night of the strafing.

  But Pino followed orders and turned the Fiat north. The second full moon of the month—the true blue moon—rose, casting a pale light that made the countryside look like dark turquoise. When they reached the Monza station, and the general climbed out, Organization Todt sentries locked at attention. They were Italians, young men like Pino, trying to survive the war.

  “Tell them I’m here to oversee a transfer in the yard,” General Leyers said.