Wolf's Edge (The Nick Lupo Series Book 4)

by W. D. Gagliani

  Then they could get lost in the thickest part of the woods. The Germans would leave them alone—once on foot in the forest, the uniforms would become likely easy targets for partisan knives in the back and garrotes around the neck.

  They ran as fast as their legs could take them, their faces and arms slashed by low-hanging branches that seemed to have become razor-sharp since they had last been there.

  Suddenly they broke through the vegetation and found themselves on the paved road.

  Unfortunately, the command car had already careened around the curve, and the soldiers on it picked out the boys as live targets. One of the Germans fired a long burst from his submachine gun as the boys dove into the woods, the slugs barely missing them.

  “Il bosco!” Pietro shouted. “We’ll lose them in the woods!”

  They slashed through the low-level brush, brambles scraping their skin painfully as they ran.

  The loud, ripping burp of a machine gun drove them to hug the ground, and they felt slugs tear up trees and bushes all around them, raining down shrapnel made of bark.

  Dio mio, Franco thought. I’m going to die for this stupid stunt.

  The command car was stuck on the road, so the boys dragged themselves almost upright and slipped further into the wooded grove. Franco hoped the Germans would give up the chase. For what were they but a couple of children? Why were the Bosch so determined to run them to ground and kill them? Their airplane tire had blown a couple mines, so what?

  The tree trunks closed in around them. They heard a couple more bursts from the machine gunner, but now barely a tenth of the bullets were penetrating the dense thicket, and as they continued to fight their way through the slashing brambles, the sound of gunfire retreated.

  Panting, their muscles trembling with the exertion of their run, the boys slowed and looked at each other. They stood stock still, listening.

  Franco thought they might have traversed a full kilometer through the woods, but it was hard to tell. The sound of the car’s engine was so muffled by the trees that it was reduced to a faint humming.

  It sounds like an angry bee, he thought. He shook his head at the nonsense thought. Then the reality of their plight sank in.

  “We could have been killed,” he said to Pietro.

  For his part, Pietro was shivering like a leaf in a windstorm. All he could do was nod.

  “Why did they come after us like that?” Franco scratched his chin, and his fingers came away bloody. Suddenly he could feel that his exposed skin was criss-crossed by thin cuts and slashes. He was going to catch hell at home.

  Then he snorted. If he survived.

  As they caught their breath and let their tightened leg muscles relax, they listened for sounds of pursuit.

  “They can’t drive that car into the woods,” Franco said, sounding more hopeful than convinced.

  “Cretini!” Pietro spat out. “I wish we would have killed some.”

  Franco thought Pietro’s tough words came easily, after they’d both run like rabbits. On the other hand, who would have expected such a response?

  “Whatever they’re guarding in that compound must be pretty important.”

  “Why?” Pietro said.

  “Because they can’t be that mad at us for a couple mines. It doesn’t make sense.” Kids were always playing pranks on soldiers. Most often the soldiers took the abuse good-naturedly.

  “We could have killed a few of them,” Pietro pointed out. “We wanted to kill a few of them.”

  “Maybe they’re just bored.”

  Franco cocked his head to one side. “I think…”

  “What, what’s wrong?” Pietro said, anxiety crossing his features.

  “I think—” Franco began again. His voice faded as he listened carefully. “Dogs!”

  From where they had come, the direction of the road, they could both suddenly hear the snapping of branches and a strange baying.

  No, it was…

  Not quite barking.

  Howling.

  The boys looked at each other, their eyes widening.

  “That doesn’t sound like dogs,” Franco said.

  Pietro was shaking his head. “I spent last winter visiting my uncle up in the mountains,” he whispered. “This sounds like wolves. I heard enough of them.”

  “Lupi?” Franco shivered.

  “Yeah, like your name, idiot!”

  Franco Lupo would have smacked Pietro at any other time, but suddenly the fear was upon him. They’d just been shot at by angry soldiers, but this somehow seemed worse. Were the soldiers hunting them with domesticated wolves?

  “They have to be guard dogs,” he whispered. “German shepherds.”

  The howling continued.

  Coming closer.

  From several directions.

  Pietro shook his head rapidly.

  “Wolves. I’m telling you! Not fucking dogs!”

  “How—?”

  “Doesn’t matter,” Pietro spat. “We have to keep running!”

  Wordlessly, Franco agreed. He started running again, his body crying out in rebellion and his leg muscles tightening again almost immediately. Pietro was right next to him. They ducked under the low-hanging branches and dug deeper into the forest, running blindly to put more distance between themselves and the howling beasts presumably on their trail.

  Whatever they were.

  Wolves.

  Franco instinctively knew his friend was right.

  Howling.

  Coming closer.

  Giovanni Lupo

  When the Germans had first come, there had been smiles all around. Italy was allied to Germany, and it was ever so clear that the Italian kingdom, though led by a dictator, could ride German coattails to greatness.

  Watching columns of German soldiers and their mechanized horses—tanks, half-tracks, armored personnel carriers, squared-off command cars, and miles of covered two-ton transports—people who lined the streets of the large cities nodded with nervous assent. It was an impressive sight. Perhaps it was time for Italy’s rise, aided by their Germanic neighbor.

  Mussolini sucks Hitler’s dick, some of the more cynical said quietly to their like-minded friends, but most saw the strength of the German forces and imagined their country as a reborn player on the world stage. If it took Mussolini’s sycophancy to achieve the old grandeur, then why not? Italians and Germans together, the middle ground people said—who would have thought it possible?

  But then the realities of war set in, and early Italian military success was followed sharply by military disasters and losses as campaign after campaign turned bloody and churned up Italian lives like sacrifices to inscrutable gods. Slowly the alliance between Germany and Italy strained, certainly at street level, and German High Command centers began to feel a backlash that was at first political and social, but later began to include acts of domestic terrorism perpetrated by disaffected citizens and soldiers who had deserted and who now flocked to the camps of the partisans in the mountains and hills.

  Relatively quickly, it became less and less safe for German soldiers stationed in Italian cities to partake of the nightlife and restaurants, to frequent the whorehouses and the sex parlors, or even just to shop and relax. In far more remote villages and towns, it was even worse. Soon German soldiers began to be found naked, mutilated, throats slit ear to ear, as local frustrations with the war and its impact—and predicted outcome—grew and the populace turned against the minority who still clamored to ride German coattails. For now it seemed such a ride would lead the Italian homeland straight to a hell of its own making.

  Giovanni Lupo lived with his family on the outskirts of Genova, the huge port city whose importance to the German war machine had kept it tightly occupied by mechanized German forces. Its factories had turned now to near slave labor to churn out goods for the war effort, but it was Germany’s war effort—no longer Italy’s. In September 1943, the Italian monarchy and its political backers had signed a secret armistice with the Allie
s. As soon as it became known that Italy had surrendered, the German forces in Italy overnight turned into an occupation force that would draw Allied bombers who had little choice but to target the ports, the factories, and the bases now reinforced in order to slow the Allied advance from the south with as much resistance as possible. Everyone knew the war was lost except the mad German leadership.

  Now, heading home on foot from his meager employment in a local foundry that had miraculously avoided nationalization by the Germans, Giovanni Lupo kept a cautious watch for German patrols. They would sometimes sweep up able-bodied Italian men to fill gaps in factory assembly lines. One could be in the wrong place at the wrong time. Giovanni watched for covered trucks, listening for their loud gearboxes in the distance.

  A typical tactic was for such a covered truck to drive to a public square or market, pull up, and disperse its human cargo, a platoon of Wehrmacht infantrymen who would then round up bystanders and passersby and hold them at gunpoint until a cattle van could remove the hapless victims.

  Giovanni was convinced his ears were very sensitive. The moment he heard the unforgettable sound of one of those vehicles, he would melt into one of the narrow lanes that lined the street he walked. He had mapped numerous routes home to avoid this very danger. He walked briskly now, avoiding the glances of strangers, hoping he could make it home without trouble. His fellow pedestrians surely thought the same and went their way, avoiding him.

  Every day it was a similar prayer, every day the same risk. It drove his wife mad. Young Maria Lupo had suffered through the early days of the war, separated from her own family who lived in the hills near Venice. Only Giovanni’s good job and his determination to continue to make a life for his wife and son in the shadow of the big city kept her from fleeing the dead-eyed Italians and the German soldiers—some of whom were courteous and friendly, and some of whom were quite the opposite—and heading for her own family’s farm.

  Giovanni knew her patience was running thin. Things had steadily worsened since the armistice had become common knowledge and the German army, the legendary Wehrmacht, had clamped down on the populace. Food was expensive, some staples scarce or altogether impossible to find at any price, the streets dangerous, the Allied advance and the partisans’ renewed vigor leading to more and more cruelty at the hands of the German occupiers…

  Giovanni walked fast, his hands in his pockets, one wrapped around the tubular lead weight he carried in case he needed a little more weight behind his considerable right hook. Wouldn’t help against an armed patrol, but a single adversary would pay the price if his jaw got between Giovanni and his escape route. It might be all the advantage he needed to avoid the life of a slave. He walked fast, hoping to beat the rapidly approaching darkness almost as much as the random patrols.

  For, as dusk arrived, so would the Allied bombers.

  He looked straight ahead, ears attuned to the infrequent roar of a motor vehicle. Bicycles he tuned out, along with handcarts and wheelbarrows.

  Maria, I’m coming home. Don’t worry too much.

  He hoped his son had found his way home from school by now. School was a random affair, sometimes held all day as was required, sometimes dismissed early for completely unpredictable reasons. A month ago, a teacher had disappeared—presumably in a street sweep. The children had been dismissed until a substitute could be coaxed from another school farther away. Hardly anyone wanted to work so close to a German high command, for it was an Allied high-priority target.

  The fact of which was on Giovanni’s mind more right now than usual.

  He had worked a full day for the first time in months, eagerly accepting the opportunity to earn a few extra lire. Maybe there would be eggs and some lard in the kitchen tomorrow because of it. He hated watching his son grow up hungry, though Franco was a good boy who didn’t complain often.

  Again Giovanni thought of his son’s walk home from school. It was a long walk, some of it through rural lanes and secondary streets, but he should be safe if he walked straight home without any distractions.

  Unfortunately, Franco was the kind of boy for whom everything was a distraction. Curious and intelligent beyond his years, the boy made a learning game out of everything. He studied his surroundings with perhaps a bit more enthusiasm than was good in such a setting.

  If not for this damnable, senseless war—and its resulting occupation by the goddamned Germans—his son would have been at the top of his class in studies. But the school slowdown had stunted the book learning, and Giovanni was beginning to fear his boy was getting too much of a street education. He spent half his days, sometimes his entire days, running the streets with a few of his fellow students. Some of them were fatherless boys whose moral compass was questionable at best. Some were borderline delinquents.

  Giovanni knew enough parents and a couple teachers, and he knew some of what the boys were learning on the streets. But what could he do, tie the boy down every day? Surely his wife would have wanted him to, but most days Giovanni was off to work before the break of dawn, so he couldn’t know whether there would be school or not. Sometimes they learned Franco’d been on the streets all day only when he came home to eat the meager supper Maria had spent her day preparing from their thin supplies. This was also why he had jumped at the chance to work for a few more hours. One of the best ways to show his family the depth of his love was to help fill their stomachs.

  Some of these additional lire he had earned today would also find their way into the pockets of German soldiers willing to part with certain foodstuffs—barter and outright black market dealing were in effect for both sides, an irony of war. German mess halls had plenty of oil and potatoes and salt. What they didn’t have was beef and other meats, coffee, tea, and other spices. Urban Italian families lacked eggs, oil, butter, flour. Accommodations could be made. Chocolate, cigarettes and tobacco, lard, and—from nearby farms, freshly-killed chickens, rabbits, ducks and geese, an occasional lamb—became commodities at the center of complex bartering deals that often benefited both sides. German officers, accustomed to the high life preordained by their lofty rank, tended to look the other way when their subordinates engaged in such dealings, for their own messes benefited as well from the illicit trade. Some of the officer corps even ran their own black market schemes. Wartime created many dark avenues of capitalism, not all of them food oriented.

  But it was the thought of extra food, especially eggs and meat and oil, all of which he could almost taste—though he suspected that soon the Germans would begin to run out of oil as well, if the rumors of losses in the South were true—that distracted Giovanni from his single-minded route home.

  And distracted him from two very important things.

  One was the approaching command car, which was crawling along scouting the streets ahead of a “collection” squad.

  The other was the exact moment at which dusk would become evening.

  Giovanni turned the corner and found himself facing the command car, which swerved toward him with a squeal of tires. Two burly Germans were leaping from the rear in seconds, before the vehicle had even come to a full stop.

  Taken by surprise, Giovanni shrank back against the wall behind him, having forgotten it was there. He lost precious time trying to decide whether he should pull his lead-heavy hand from his pocket and fight, or flee the way he’d come. Unfortunately, the momentary indecision tied up both options, for his weighted hand caught in his clothes and at the same time he couldn’t reorient his legs and feet in order to allow for a sprint away from the uniformed thugs who were upon him.

  Merda!

  Shit!

  His fist was trapped.

  His feet tripped over themselves, and he went down sideways even as the two Germans caught him in double steel grips and yanked him off the sidewalk as if he were a child, their guttural orders and commands just a jagged jumble of sounds in his ears.

  Oh no, Maria! This wasn’t what I wanted!

  He struggled in their grasp, his r
ock-hard muscles straining inside his constricting coat, but the two were larger than average, two bruisers who knew the ropes. They suspected his hand held a weapon and made sure it couldn’t clear his damned pocket, and by keeping his feet off the ground they kept him off-balance as well, and he found it impossible to gather enough leverage for a kick.

  He had no platform from which to launch an attack.

  “Nooooo!” he shouted in frustration. Tears wet the corners of his eyes.

  He’d asked for this.

  The two uniformed goons manhandled him between them, their faces grim with determination and single-minded purpose. Perhaps their own well-being in the barracks depended on how they performed their thuggish duty.

  Whatever their motivation, they were as immovable as boulders, and Giovanni wept with anger and futility as he saw his days of freedom and the love of his family wrenched from him as surely as his heart would be.

  But still he struggled in their iron grip even as they dragged him, sweating and screaming, past the waiting command car to where a small, covered truck was just pulling up.

  This was why he hadn’t heard it. Smaller than the usual vehicle, it had also been driving toward him from around the corner of the adjacent unpaved lane.

  A perfect trap.

  And he’d stumbled right into it.

  His thoughts turned for a split second to the new strategy—if only he’d witnessed it in action before, he might have avoided falling prey to it.

  His legs swinging empty kicks at the shins of his attackers, which they mostly avoided, his mouth keeping up a steady stream of curses that would have made his wife blush, he found himself being tossed face-first like a sack of spongy, rotten potatoes over the rear gate and into the back of the truck.

  His face stopped its painful slide on the rough planks by smashing into the muddy boots of another German soldier, who thrust the muzzle of his submachine gun brutally into Giovanni’s skull.

  He almost passed out.