by James R Benn
Late in the afternoon we climbed a steep hill, the donkey clip-clopping up switchbacks slowly. Salvatore and Sciafani both got out of the cart to lighten the load. Lucky me, I got to stay buried under the almonds. We pulled off the road, and Salvatore unhitched the donkey to let him feed on the grass.
Sciafani lowered the rear of the cart. "We are almost to Agrigento.
Look."
I got out, thankfully for the last time. I brushed almonds from my clothes and tried to straighten up. As I did, I saw Agrigento, the setting sun hitting its walls, turning them to gold as shadows reached like greedy fingers across the rooftops. It was a beautiful city set high on the next hillside, a small valley of green split by a wide stream beneath it. I could hear church bells chiming the hour.
Salvatore closed up the cart as he and Sciafani exchanged words. I shook his hand, said Grazie, and smiled. He gave me a little salute and then went to tend to his donkey.
"We should wait until dark before we enter the city," Sciafani said.
"Salvatore must go to his relatives now. It is too dangerous for him to take us further."
"Where should we--" Sciafani stared at something over my shoulder, and I turned to see what he was looking at. A cloud of dust kicked up from the road down in the valley, and the sound of an engine downshifting painfully and straining up the hill toward us echoed from below. He grabbed my arm and pulled me behind a line of thick shrubs. We flattened ourselves and waited. Salvatore held on to the donkey as he stood in the open, his shotgun hung carelessly from his shoulder, his lethal speed hidden by a posture of peasant lethargy.
An ancient truck heaved itself up over the crest of the hill. It had no military markings but was crammed full of khaki-clad soldiers standing in the back and on the running boards, hanging onto the truck, grasping short Italian carbines.
"Fascist militia, MVSN," Sciafani said in whisper, even though at this distance, with all the noise the truck was making, he could have yelled it.
The truck stopped as soon as the road leveled out, and the soldiers burst into activity, handing down cases of ammo from the back of the truck, and lifting out a heavy machine gun and tripod. An officer, his dress uniform complete with the official Fascist black shirt, stepped from the passenger seat and scanned the horizon with binoculars. He looked east, to the left of the city, which I judged to be due south of us. "We must be making a move," I said, my voice a whisper now that the truck was silent. I imagined GIs advancing up that hill into machine-gun fire.
Then I thought about Sciafani. Fascists or no, these were his countrymen. There was still no "we" between us, no matter how friendly he'd been. I wondered if he would want to stay with them, to tend their wounded, if it came to that. I wondered if he was tempted to turn me in. I glanced at him but his expression gave nothing away. For the first time, I felt a shiver of mistrust. Sciafani had been a willing traveling partner at first, but after the encounter with Vito Genovese and Legs, something had changed. Was it seeing the German shoot Signor Ciccolo? Perhaps. But there was something mysterious about the story of Sciafani being adopted, especially after all the talk about trusting only blood relatives. I realized he was here for his own reasons. They coincided with mine for now, but I needed to pay attention and be alert to any change.
The Blackshirt pointed at Salvatore and yelled. Two soldiers marched over, waving their hands for him to leave. He argued with them, gesturing from his cart to Agrigento, probably complaining about not getting to the market. They shook their heads, and he resignedly hitched up the donkey, complaining the whole time. He did a good job of maintaining their focus on him as he moved away, keeping up a stream of Italian that sounded like insults mixed with bewilderment. As he passed our hiding place he winked.
We watched the militiamen set up the machine-gun emplacement. There were about twenty of them. They dug foxholes on either side of the road and a firing pit protected by sandbags for the machine gun. Off in the distance, to the east, a dark plume of smoke appeared. The officer turned his binoculars on to it, then got into the truck and took off, back down the hill. For reinforcements maybe.
"Are these Fascists good fighters?" I asked Sciafani. I was hoping they were nothing more than local militia who might skedaddle for home as soon as the first shots sounded.
"I have seen a battalion of Blackshirts attack British tanks with hand grenades," he said. "I have seen others cower in their holes. Some Fascist units are very well trained, others less so. Most of the Blackshirts here are not from Sicily."
"So they'll probably fight?"
"It is a good position. I would say yes, they will fight."
"We should get out of here." I stated the obvious while looking to our rear.
"That will be difficult," Sciafani said. He was right. While we had cover between us and the militia, there was nothing but bare rocky ground behind us. Once we left the shrubs, we'd be in the open long enough for them to spot us, either going down the hill or back the way we had come.
"We have to stay put until it gets dark," I said.
"Yes, and pray one of them does not walk over here to see a man and his horse," Sciafani said. He had the basic idea, so I didn't correct him.
We waited. The truck came back and more men got out. The truck was towing a 20mm antiaircraft gun, and the crew hustled to unhook it and set it up. As if to taunt them, a single aircraft zoomed out of the western sky, the sun at its back. I couldn't raise my head high enough to identify it, but the machine gun gave it a few ineffective bursts before it climbed out of sight. They moved the 20mm gun to the side of the road opposite the machine gun so their positions formed a semicircle, facing east. We'd have to move around to the right and hope there wasn't another unit doing the same thing on the other side of the hill. We waited some more, listening to the sound of digging and idle chatter that could have come from enlisted men in any army. Nervous laughter, jokes, complaints about the hard ground, bad food, and indifferent officers. I'd been in the army a little more than a year and already the rhythm of daily life in camp or at the front had become part of me. It was easy to recognize the sounds soldiers made, their ability to show contempt for the service while at the same time quietly demonstrating their bond to each other. The tone and tempo of the words didn't sound any different in Italian, and it almost made me homesick for life in a GI camp.
Memories of North Africa flowed unbidden through my mind.
Uncle Ike had his headquarters in a fancy villa. I was in a nice tent with a wood floor up off the sand. It wasn't as nice as the Hotel St. George, where Kaz had managed to get us a room when we first arrived in Algiers, but we weren't living in foxholes either. There were dinners and receptions at the villa, and once in a while Kaz and I would be invited, especially if the guest was a visiting congressman from a Polish or Irish ward. Uncle Ike didn't like having to entertain politicians, but when he did, he did it right. Harry Butcher would show them around, make sure they met some GIs from their district, take their pictures, bring them to a villa on the beach for a swim, then for a fancy dinner with the general, plenty of booze and cigars all around. There might even be one going on right now, I thought. Cocktails, maybe. Perhaps Diana was there, wearing her brown FANY uniform as if it were a gown, the wide leather belt polished to a gleam, the brass buttons sparkling like diamonds. She loved that uniform. It had been tailor-made for her, sent from England after she decided to accept the posting SOE had offered her in their North African operation. The first time she tried it on after her last mission, it hung off her thin frame, a wide gap between collar and neck. We both pretended not to notice.
FANY, the First Aid Nursing Yeomanry, was an outfit that provided the Brit army with women trained to operate switchboards, drive trucks, that sort of thing. It also was a source of agents for the Special Operations Executive. Diana had volunteered after she had served as a switchboard operator with the British Expeditionary Force in 1940, and made it out of France at Dunkirk. The destroyer she was on was sunk by Stukas, and by
the time she had been picked up, she'd watched the wounded who had been on stretchers slide off the deck and disappear beneath the waves. Diana had told me about that the first day we met. She'd clung to me, crying her story out, reliving the helplessness she had felt watching everyone around her die.
She'd been courting death ever since and almost caught up with it in Algeria. She was OK now, but I didn't know how we were. We'd fallen hard for each other, back in England. But after I pulled her out of that Vichy prison camp, drugged and half dead, I focused more on getting my revenge on the bastard responsible than on being with her. Not that she didn't want him dead too, but once that was taken care of, I should have stepped up and let her know I still loved her. But I'd been scared, unsure of myself, and she knew it and thought the worst: that I didn't want to be with her after all she had endured.
I'll admit, I didn't like thinking about it. So I tried, tried my best, and as the weeks passed, and she grew stronger, so did we. But I was never sure I had her full trust, and had no idea how to get it back.
That's the way things had been when I left for this island voyage. We were still in love, I guess. Something was missing though, and I was man enough to understand it was something I didn't have, but not man enough to know what it was.
Sciafani shifted his weight as he lifted his hands to put them under his arms. A rock rolled loose and started a noisy fall, dislodging gravel that flowed downhill after it, the stones hitting each other at the bottom with a sharp click-clack sound.We flattened ourselves even lower, not daring to look up to see if the soldiers heard.
"Che cio e?" The sound of boots on gravel came scuffling across the ground, drawing closer, murmurs of cautious curiosity evident in the tone of the militiamen as they approached.
A sound like a long sheet being ripped rose in a crescendo from the sky, too fast and fierce to allow for any response. The ground shook as one shell hit, thundered, and cracked on the hill. More shrieking sounds descended, explosions that spewed earth and fire around the Italian positions. Naval gunfire, I thought. That aircraft, a spotter, had caught a glimpse of the antiaircraft gun being unloaded. Right now, sailors miles offshore were reading coordinates and loading huge shells into the cannons of a cruiser's gun turret, while a few dozen Blackshirts were being blown to kingdom come. I pulled at Sciafani, motioning down the hill. We had to get out of here now, while we could, before a shell found us.
"No," he said, shaking off my hand. Screams pierced through all the other sounds, and he started to stand, but I pulled him down again.
The awful shrieks and explosions continued, punctuated by the agonized calls of the wounded, until they were drowned out, perhaps ended, by the next round of shells. A series of smaller explosions marked a hit on the 20mm ammo, a column of flame coloring the darkening sky as the truck's gasoline tank went up. One soldier unhurt, but with wide, panicked eyes, ran right through the shrubs, tripping on my legs as he barreled by. He rolled partway down the hill, then looked at me and screamed, running crazily away, weaving and nearly falling as he held his hands over his ears.
The shelling ended abruptly. Sciafani and I looked at each other, unsure what to make of the sudden silence. It took a few seconds for other sounds to be heard, the aftermath of a violent bombardment. The crackling of flames, moans of the wounded, the pop, pop, pop of rifle ammunition going off in the fire. We raised our heads and looked. It was nearly dark but the burning truck lit the scene with a flickering orange light. Craters filled the area where the positions had been, smoke curling up from the bottom of the ten-foot-wide holes. We stood. The machine-gun emplacement was simply gone, the men, heavy weapons, and sandbags erased from the landscape, replaced by overlapping circles of smoking dirt. The antiaircraft gun, a blackened heap of twisted metal, had been thrown ten yards from where it had been set up. I stepped over a severed leg.
"Here," Sciafani said. "Help me."He had a man by his arms, buried up to his chest in debris thrown up by the explosions. He didn't seem to have a mark on him. I grabbed one arm and Sciafani took the other. We pulled and fell back, holding the top half of a man, cut through by shrapnel. The sailors who had loaded shells minutes before were probably drinking coffee by now.
We finally found someone alive, huddled in a crater where he had taken shelter after the first round of shells. He had shrapnel fragments in his back, which Sciafani picked out by the light of the fire with a knife he'd taken from the body of an officer, a sharp dagger that he sterilized in the flames before he worked the shrapnel out. The guy never blinked. He stared out into the night, his mouth open as if to speak, but he made no sound.
I searched for other wounded while Sciafani worked. I found a soldier, younger than me, younger than my kid brother, by the side of the road. He was crying as he lay in a pool of blood. I called for Sciafani as I knelt beside him. He looked at me with a question in his eyes that I didn't want to answer as he held his hands clamped tight to his abdomen. I knew what shrapnel did. It was seldom clean. Blood seeped through his fingers. I didn't know enough Italian to say anything and it didn't seem right to speak to him in English.
"Je suis desole," I said as I smoothed the hair away from his forehead. I am sorry. "Je suis desole.
"
"Mi dispiace," Sciafani said as he knelt next to me and put his hand on my shoulder. He took the boy's hands to pull them away from his wound, but stopped as a raspy, jagged breath came out. With it, all movement ceased. The hands relaxed, and Sciafani placed them crossed on the boy's chest.
"He is gone."
I didn't know what to say or feel. I didn't want these guys firing into the GIs who might be swarming up this hill tomorrow, but I also didn't want this kid to have to suffer and die. I put my head in my hands, and repeated Sciafani's words as best I could.
"Mi dispiace," I said.
"Look," Sciafani said. "Look at me. His blood is on my hands."
He held his hands out, palms up, coated in dark red blood. "These are the hands that did this. I did nothing to stop the Fascists, and now they are sending boys out to be killed for Mussolini. Do you know what Il Duce says about blood?"
"No."
"Blood alone moves the wheels of history," Sciafani quoted. "He said that in 1914. We had quite enough warning, don't you think?
Blood alone."
CHAPTER * EIGHTEEN
"DON'T SHOOT!" I HELD my hands up and stepped in front of the three bandaged Italians on the floor. I knew what a glimpse of an enemy uniform might mean to the GI who had stuck the snout of his Thompson submachine through the door, not to mention what it could mean for me. "I'm an American."
"Non sparare, non sparare," sobbed one of the wounded Italians. I guessed it was basically the same request.
"Come out where I can see you," the owner of the Thompson barked. He still wasn't showing more than the muzzle of his gun. Smart guy.
"Coming out," I said, holding my hands palm up, slightly forward, so the first thing he'd see was that they were empty.
"Who the hell are you, Mac?" The guy eyeing me was a buck sergeant, and while he didn't keep his Thompson leveled at my gut, he didn't exactly practice firearms safety with it either.
"Lieutenant Billy Boyle. I got separated from my unit. There's three wounded Italians in there," I said, pointing to the abandoned house where Sciafani and I had taken the survivors from the night before.
Over his shoulder, I saw GIs darting from cover and making quick dashes, staying low in the long early-morning shadows. The only sound was the rapid tread of boots and the slight clinking and clanking of gear as a platoon of heavily armed men moved swiftly around us, wraiths descending from the hills.
"What unit, and where's your weapon?" He eyed me with suspicion.
"Seventh Army HQ," I said, turning so he could see the patch on my shoulder. "We ran into some Germans and barely got away. All I have is this Beretta." I patted the pistol stuck into my belt.
"Hey, nice. Can I see it?"
"That's 'Hey, nice, Lieutena
nt.' Or has the army given up on that in the last couple of days?"
"I got no idea if you're a lieutenant, a deserter, or a Kraut. What I don't believe is that any headquarters punk got here ahead of Rangers." His eyes narrowed beneath the steel rim of his helmet as they studied me.
"Purely by accident, Sarge. We were trying to make our way back last night and got trapped up there when the Italians started setting up emplacements." I pointed to the top of the hill, the dark craters draped in shadows cast by the morning sun.
"Yeah, the navy blasted that for us yesterday." He turned and signaled to someone. His shoulder patch said First Battalion Rangers.
"You're Darby's Rangers, right?"
"That's right, Mac. You sure you don't want to trade for that Beretta?"
I knew he believed my story when he started hustling me for a souvenir. If he thought I was a deserter he would've taken it outright. If he really thought I was a Kraut, I'd be dead.
"No, Sarge, I might need it. You'll probably find a few more up ahead."
"OK, our medic will look at your wounded prisoners." A Ranger with a red cross on his helmet and armband ran up to us.
"Got some wounded Eyeties in here. Hang on, Doc, lemme check 'em for weapons."
He disappeared into the house, but it didn't take long. It was one long room, and the most badly wounded man was on the single bed, the others on the floor. We 'd washed their wounds as best we could and ripped up clothes and the single sheet for bandages. It wasn't much, but Sciafani said they'd live. I'd scrounged canteens and rations from the debris at the top of the hill, and even found some brandy in the house, but that had gone to the wounded.
"They're all yours, Doc. One looks pretty bad. There's a civilian who had this, said he was a doctor." The sergeant held the dagger Sciafani had picked up the previous night. The sheath had MVSN engraved on it and the Fascist symbol.