Once Night Falls

by Roland Merullo

  Enjoy life. He always had. At sixteen, he’d moved away from the arid poverty of his home island and gone first to Naples, then to Rome, in pursuit of the reward that made the earth spin: money. As if he’d been born to the trade, he became a master at doing favors, at providing goods that were in need, at recommending and advising. If a Mafia friend required a contact in the Rome construction business, Silvio Merino made the introduction. For a fee, of course. If he heard about a shortage of artichokes on the mainland, he notified a Sicilian grower he knew; found trucks to carry the produce, a strongman to make sure not too much of it disappeared en route; hired a pretty young woman to sell them at market. And, naturally, took a percentage.

  He considered himself a patriot, a Christian, a moral man—though morality had always seemed to him a tricky business. Yes, of course, the American cigarettes he helped his Mafia friend sell in Rome had been pilfered. A shame for the company that made them. Then again, a bonus for his friend’s not very bright and otherwise unemployable nephew, who sold them, and for the store owners who bought them at a bargain price. Even the smokers benefited. Where was the sin in that? It was the way the world worked. Yes, two or three of the women he’d slept with had been promised to other men. But if the husband, fiancé, or boyfriend had been making them happy, why would they stray? He liked to think that by temporarily satisfying certain women, he’d kept intact many more relationships than he’d ruined.

  When the hard times came, Mussolini’s Thirties, rather than weeping and complaining as so many others did, Silvio found ways to turn events to his advantage. It proved easy enough to come by a certificate claiming he suffered from heart trouble and was therefore unfit for il Duce’s army. So, together with a printer friend, he formed a small enterprise and offered that same service, quietly, to a limited number of others. Soon he and his friend were providing various kinds of fake permits, ration cards, certificates of residence in Vatican City, and employment in homes and offices that did not actually exist. The tighter il Duce’s grip, the stricter the regulations, the more Silvio Merino flourished.

  Much as he hated the war and despised the Germans (how could you respect a people who valued efficiency over warmth?), their increased presence in the early 1940s created fresh opportunities. He gave assistance to members of the clergy and to the few resistance fighters who trusted him enough to reach out. He and his Mafia contacts had even played a small but important role in the recent Allied landing on Sicily. He made connections among people on this earth; that was his job.

  On that fine, hot afternoon, comforted by his musings, Silvio strolled along the Via Veneto, nodding to neighbors, smiling, tossing off a remark to brighten their dark days, slapping a shoulder, pinching a cheek, tucking in a loose bit of someone else’s shirttail. “This meeting involves intrigue,” his source had said. Perhaps real danger. He found the idea mildly titillating: he could make another contribution to the liberation effort, and without ever having to wear a uniform! Afterward, if the Allies triumphed, he might be seen as a minor hero; it would be good for business, good for his love life.

  Fashionably late, he arrived at the Café Dello Sport for his encounter, and, after studying the seated patrons for a moment, decided that the person he was supposed to meet must be the solitary, bespectacled gentleman in the back left corner. Silvio glided over, introduced himself, and shook the man’s hand as if they’d been friends since the first war. Giovanni was the name, no family name offered. “Facciamo una passeggiata?” Giovanni suggested quietly, in elegant Italian. Take a walk?

  “Sure, of course, naturally,” Silvio told the bespectacled stranger, but there was a whisper of concern in both ears now: Who knew which side this Giovanni worked for?

  As they stepped back out into the heat and set off at a leisurely pace, Silvio reminded himself to stay alert. Maybe his small gestures of assistance to the partisans had not gone unnoticed in Fascist circles, and he would now pay a price. These days, even on the streets, even in broad daylight, anything might happen.

  Nine

  Luca stood in the death stink of Piazzale Loreto for another hour, fixing the scene in his memory, watching the mothers and wives spill their grief into the hot afternoon as if it came from bottomless wells in the center of their bodies. The famous Duce has brought you this, Luca wanted to tell them. The famous Mussolini bears the guilt for the murder of your sons.

  He breathed in the smell without flinching, refused to look away. His eyes kept returning to one partisan in particular, a boy of fourteen with whom he’d done a small bit of work—two quick conversations—less than a month earlier. Alonso, the boy had called himself, another friend of the archbishop. Handsome in the first blush of his maturity, Alonso had been beaten so badly as to be almost unrecognizable. A woman who appeared to be his mother was there in the front row, on her knees, rosary beads wrapped around her clasped hands, pearls of sweat on her forehead, wailing and keening. What she wanted, all she wanted, was to be allowed to bury her mutilated child. But no. One of the soldiers rested his eyes on her for ten seconds, and Luca searched those eyes for the smallest trace of sympathy.

  Nothing. Ice. Metal.

  At last, Luca turned his back, tossed his cigarette butt onto the cobblestones, and walked away, trying to make himself as inconspicuous as possible, someone who did not know the archbishop, who wasn’t carrying an important message, who wasn’t seething; just another one-eyed mushroom gatherer and unemployed stonemason heading to work in the forest so there would be food for the sadistic armed forces of the Reich and their half-starved Italian servants.

  He walked past a row of shops that showed colorful awnings and half-empty windows beneath the balconies of stucco-walled apartments. He crossed the northwestern corner of the square, angled down a brick alley between two warehouse buildings, and, without a backward glance, moved toward the Maggiolina neighborhood and the train station there.

  He could sense—and sometimes hear—that someone was following him. If the Nazis had chosen to slaughter the young Alonso by chance, that would be bad enough—for every German soldier killed away from the battlefront, they took the lives of ten Italians. It was possible they’d just grabbed the first ten men they came across, tied their hands, clubbed them to death one by one as the others watched, then dumped the bodies in the square.

  But if, in one of the city’s secret interrogation rooms, someone had given up the boy’s name, and if others in the archbishop’s circle had been betrayed as well, then he and Don Claudio were in trouble. Which meant that his mother and Sarah and Rebecca were in danger, too. Which meant it had been tremendously foolish to let his curiosity draw him to Piazzale Loreto.

  He reached the Maggiolina train station and stood on the platform in a loose crowd of other wartime travelers, forcing himself to keep his eyes straight ahead. He smoked his last cigarette, doing everything he could to seem completely relaxed. It was possible that this man tailing him was just another person heading north. But it seemed more likely that he’d noticed Luca on the Piazzale—the only other man of military age there—and was one of il Duce’s Blackshirts with nothing better to do than spend his days tracking down so-called enemies of the State.

  To the south, the train whistle sounded its loud wail. Luca tossed the cigarette butt onto the tracks and stared down at his two bare forearms. The skinny left one—functional enough—might have belonged to a young boy who’d never known physical work. But the right arm, after almost twenty years of compensating for its weaker partner, was a thick cylinder of muscle, the hand calloused and powerful, a weapon.

  He hoped he was wrong. He hoped the man was simply on the same route by coincidence, because the gruesome scene at Piazzale Loreto, the vision of Alonso’s ruined face, had caused angry music to erupt in his inner ear, a violent symphony. He didn’t know where it might lead. As the train came to a stop a meter in front of him, he listened to the new sound and felt a fine coating of perspiration form on his neck and face. It had nothing to do with the
heat of the day.

  Ten

  By the time she finished bathing, Sarah could feel that the sun had climbed over the mountains beyond Lake Como’s eastern shore. She pulled on her clothes and started back down the narrow, broken path that led to the cabin, but the usual post-bath comfort had already abandoned her. From the time she’d been a small girl, she’d had a sharp intuition—almost a mystical sense—not so much for specific events (she couldn’t predict the future) but for what she’d told her mother felt like “bad air.” It was as if news, especially news of trouble or danger, reached her first via this cloudy sense of concern, and then was delivered in its specifics.

  She wondered now what it could be, because, making her way down the stony path, with leaves and branches brushing her shoulders and hips, she could feel a premonition as clearly as she could feel the warmth of the day rising in the air around her. Not Luca, she hoped. Not her mother or Maria. She tried to tell herself it was only an echo of the momentary terror she’d felt at the spring. Then she tried to convince herself, again, that they’d been animal noises, that, if it had been a person—a German soldier or Blackshirt—something more would have happened.

  But the bad air followed her until the cabin’s damaged roof came into view. Instead of going inside to eat her simple breakfast and then take up her notebook of poems, she sat in the trees, well hidden there, and waited. Luca had promised to come to her today, but he hadn’t said exactly when, or how far away he’d gone, or on what kind of mission.

  It was beginning to seem to her that she’d have to move again, that her days in the cabin were numbered. Maybe this bad air, this feeling, this premonition, was only that: time to leave.

  Eleven

  After midnight, when the laughter from the Rossos’ house had been replaced for a short while by worse noises, audible even at this distance, Maria went to one of the front windows and peered out. From this vantage point, she had a view of a slice of the lake, ink black in the darkness, and of the lacy jewelry of stars above the mountains on the eastern shore. As was almost always the case, the road in front of her house was empty of people. She wondered if her husband was still alive and where he might be sleeping on this night. She and Sabatino had moved here for the view and the quiet of the hills, the sense of peace. That word, that memory, carried such a bitter taste now. They had wanted to raise a brood of children, but she’d been able to bear only one: the crippled star around which she and her husband had orbited these past twenty years.

  Barefoot, she went back along the hallway, took the broom, and tapped the end of the handle twice, gently, on the hatch above. She could barely hear it open. Rebecca’s face—a face she’d known for forty years—appeared there, little more than two large eyes, angles, and shadow. Mumbling an apology as she always did, Rebecca moved the slop bucket over the opening and carefully lowered it. Maria took it in both hands and carried it to the toilet, dumped it quietly there, washed her hands in the sink, then handed up two boiled eggs, a small tomato, and a clean washcloth. Rebecca reached down and clutched them in her fingers. There was no more speech between them on that night. The need for thank-yous and warnings had left them weeks before. Maria could hear lips sucking greedily at the tomato. Rebecca dragged the hatch closed, and Maria went out into the back yard to wash the bucket clean at the outdoor faucet and to look at the stars and pray. Just as she’d started an Ave Maria, she heard a voice behind her in the darkness. A voice with a German accent. “Che fai, donna?”

  What are you doing, woman?

  Drunk to the point of imbalance, the man must have wandered, shirtless, from the Rosso house across the weedy, now unused field, through her small grove of olive trees, and as far as the gate in the fence that bordered her property. The moonlight shone from his completely bald head. She couldn’t speak.

  “What are you doing?”

  “I-I-I,” she began, and he let out a drunken chortle. “Toilet broken.”

  “Ah, Italian shit. And so late.”

  “My stomach. Illness. I-I . . . Diarrhea.” She was sure he didn’t know the word, but even in the half darkness, she could see a terrible smile pasted on his face, and she wondered now if she’d be marched back into the house and made to show him where Rebecca was hiding, or if her exhausted guest would make a noise inside, drop the small door down into the hallway, sneeze, burp, call out.

  “I won’t keep you from your shit work. We want you to cook for us. Our other cook disappeared . . . a mystery, where she went. You have these chickens. We want you to make us a dish with them.”

  “I’ll lose the eggs.”

  “Keep all but one, then. Make the sacrifice of one chicken for the Reich! Ha! Every night now, we want a nice Italian dinner. We have the food. There are five officers and sometimes . . . guests. Every night starting this next one.”

  He stared down at her, and Maria realized she was trembling. Fear, bitterness, loathing, an enormous wave of stifled emotion. If she’d had a gun in the pocket of her dress, she would have pointed it at his bare chest and fired.

  “I’m very weak. I’m old.”

  “Nonsense,” the man said. “You’re a woman in the prime of life!” With that strange comment, he turned away and stumbled back across the empty lot toward the Rossos’ house. Over his shoulder he said, “Dinner for us tomorrow, and make certain to wash your hands before you come work!”

  Twelve

  Captain Otto Skorzeny, thirty-five, battle-scarred from fighting on the Russian front, his body as trained and taut as an Olympic athlete’s, had been called back from the outskirts of Moscow some months earlier for, of all things, colic. A child’s illness! It embarrassed him to speak of it, and it made him slightly uncomfortable to have been pulled away from the fighting. Still, looked at a certain way, the illness was consistent with the perfect good luck that seemed always to follow him: it wasn’t the worst time to leave Russia and Stalin’s T-34 tanks. German forces had passed two winters on the steppes; things were no longer going so well there.

  Besides, the return to Germany had brought him a promotion and a new opportunity: always fond of strategy, he’d been moved from antitank artillery to a commando unit and trained in the subtler arts of war—espionage, sabotage, trickery, interrogation. Thanks to that work, he’d made the acquaintance of some of the Reich’s best field officers and most important higher-ups. In the process, he’d been awarded the Iron Cross, second class, and had made something of a name for himself, just as his father had long ago predicted.

  When his phone rang on this July morning, he was back in Berlin on a short leave, relaxing in a hotel bed with a woman he’d met the night before. With the tip of one finger, the woman was tracing the looping scar on Skorzeny’s left cheek, reminder of a piece of Soviet shrapnel. He rolled over, lifted the receiver, and heard the voice of Second Lieutenant Goss, one of his assistants. There was a nervous excitement in his words. “You’ve been summoned,” Goss said. “They’ll pick you up in twenty minutes and take you to the airport.”

  Nothing more was said, nor should there have been. Skorzeny washed and shaved, dressed in his uniform, nodded once to the woman—still naked, last name forgotten, bedroom tricks and phone number filed away for future visits—and, just before stepping out the door, was surprised by a possibility he hadn’t considered. He turned back to look at her, a dark-haired vision in the sheets. He studied her face. “You’re not by any chance Jewish, are you?” he asked.

  Her laughter followed him out into the hallway.

  Skorzeny stepped from the building just in time to see a black staff car with swastika flags on its fenders turning onto his street. The car pulled to the curb. A uniformed lieutenant jumped out, saluted, opened the door. Skorzeny took a seat in back and lit a cigarette. No information was offered and none asked for. He ran two fingers over his combat decorations—a superstitious gesture—and wondered what this next assignment would be. Who could say? Something wild and adventurous, he hoped. Unorthodox. A job rife with thrill and dan
ger.

  At Tempelhofer, a Heinkel was waiting, propellers turning. German cross on the fuselage, swastika on the tail, an elegant machine. He climbed aboard—strangely enough, the only passenger—and they made a rough flight to Munich and landed at Neubiberg without incident. From there, he was put on a smaller plane, a Storch, and flown—toward East Prussia, he guessed from the landmarks below—by another peculiarly silent pilot who landed them on a tarmac airstrip with admirable skill.

  Another staff car, two colonels in front this time, red and silver braids on their epaulets, more silence. By now—colonels as chaperones, no less!—Skorzeny was beginning to suspect that what awaited him was more than a meeting with an ordinary field commander. He felt a twist of excitement in his belly. The car raced out of the city—he saw a sign, RASTENBURG—and then sped along an empty highway, heading northeast. After half an hour, they turned off the main road and soon encountered a checkpoint. Rifles, salutes, the usual treatment. But there was only a five-second delay—who were these colonels?—and they raced on, into deeper country now.

  Another quarter of an hour, another checkpoint. More thorough this time. The men looked under the car, in the trunk, studied the colonels’ papers for a full minute, asked Skorzeny for his name three times, checked his paybook. Then more salutes. More Heil Hitler!

  As twilight settled, he stared out the side window. This particular summons—the mysterious flight, the colonels and checkpoints, the silence—had a sense of destiny to it, a kind of grandeur. It suited him perfectly.

  Soon they passed through a gate in a guarded barbed-wire fence, then beneath overhead camouflage—branches across netting—and pulled up in front of a drab concrete building so perfectly set into the forest that it was barely visible even from two car lengths away. When Skorzeny stood up, he saw that there were trees placed on the roof so nothing could be seen from above. He was escorted into a large room with a long wooden table half-covered with maps. Four other officers stood at attention there. He joined them in line. The colonels had disappeared. Now he could feel his heart thumping: in this kind of a place, with this kind of security, they could be waiting for only one man.