Once Night Falls

by Roland Merullo

  “Agreed.”

  “Not to be blunt, of course, but . . . how will you pay me?”

  “We just walked by your apartment building,” Giovanni told him.

  “True.”

  “I nodded to the man standing near the eucalyptus tree in front. There will be a package delivered to you now. You should delay for ten minutes, take a short walk, have a coffee. The payment is in gold. I think you’ll find it satisfactory.”

  “Second floor, left side,” Silvio said. “The landlady loves me, and I trust her completely, so your courier can leave the package in the tiny alcove next to my door with no worry.”

  Giovanni stopped, extended his hand, let the tiny smile play at the corners of his lips. There did seem something American about the man now, Silvio thought, something not quite cold but businesslike. “When you get back to the apartment, your payment will be in the top drawer of your bureau. Beneath the mirror you like to look in so much.”

  Silvio kept all reaction from his face. “Who, exactly, are you?” he asked very quietly.

  Giovanni had not let go of his hand. He seemed, now, less like a bella figura, less like a businessman, and more like the capi mafiosi Silvio knew so well: killers in silk suits, men who let underlings do the dangerous work for them but who, if called upon, could take a life as easily as others would dip a piece of bread into a dish of olive oil. “For the time being, I’m Giovanni,” the stranger said. “After we’ve done some work together, if we both survive, maybe I’ll tell you more.”

  Nineteen

  Mussolini was put into the back of a car with a young soldier beside him and the older man, the lieutenant colonel, in the front passenger seat. On their way out of the city, they passed German and Italian military vehicles, one or two ordinary cars, a stalled bus, and an ancient church, the front wall of which showed damage from a recent air raid. Mussolini knew that, once or twice a week, a few Allied bombers were getting through the air defenses, and as he stared at the church, another wave of doubt washed over him. If he couldn’t protect the capital . . .

  The driver was someone he thought he recognized, a tiny nut-brown man with a face as cracked and lined as the stone of a mountainside. He’d seen him somewhere, perhaps even during the March on Rome, the glorious night that had lifted him and his Fascist brethren to power. More than two decades ago, it was; the man would have been in the prime of middle age, small but brave, devoted, willing to sacrifice his life in order to create, out of the mess that was Italy then, a great empire worthy of their Roman ancestors. Mussolini stared at him in the mirror as the man piloted the car through the dark streets. A person, he thought, who could be trusted; a rare creature these days. Il Duce willed the man to look at him and, once they were out of the city, heading south and east, the driver glanced once, looked away, glanced again. Mussolini saw recognition there, penitence perhaps. Apology for the disrespect being shown to the great Duce. Mussolini made a small nod of forgiveness, the way a king—a real king—might forgive, and the driver moved his eyes back to the road and kept them there.

  No one spoke. They went slowly through the dark streets and then, with greater speed, along an even darker highway. Just last week, because of the air raids, he’d ordered most of the streetlamps to be kept off. Now he tried to read the road signs in the dim sweep of the car’s running lights, tried to guess where they were taking him. South, it appeared. For one bad moment, he thought he might be in the hands of the plotters of some kind of coup within a coup, and these renegades had captured him—no doubt without the king knowing—and were taking him to meet the Americans in Sicily. He’d be handed over to a smug, pale-skinned general in a tent or in a Palermo palace, interrogated, mocked. The Americans would put him on trial before the world, torment him with questions, try to make him implicate his associates, which, of course, would never happen. He’d starve himself to death first.

  For an hour and a half, the wizened old man carried them along the dark highway. Il Duce stared out the side window, catching a few of the signs. Pozzi, Anello, Nettuno. They were heading toward the sea.

  They slowed again, exited the highway, then pulled off the road and into a parking lot beside a small harbor. He saw a few fishing boats at anchor and a military ship, a cruiser, waiting there beside a lit section of dock, the name Persefone painted on its hull. That was it, then: they were sailing by night to Sicily to arrange a surrender. International disgrace. The only way they’d get through the fleet of American warships assembled there was by betraying their own Duce, their own homeland. The pain in his stomach was like fire. He wanted to cut himself open and rip out his entrails.

  But then the colonel in the passenger seat turned and looked Mussolini in the face. “Duce,” he said somberly, “everyone is after you now. The Allies, the Germans, the partisans. We’re taking you someplace for your own protection. Kindly cooperate with us.”

  “Where?” Mussolini asked. The colonel stepped out of the car without answering. Il Duce followed. The soldiers formed a loose circle around him, as if, he thought, he might be able to outrun twenty-year-olds. Or as if some partisan in the hills was training a riflescope on the back of his head.

  “Where?” he asked again.

  The colonel pretended not to hear.

  “Where?” he said a third time, in a certain tone of voice that had served him all his life.

  “La Maddalena, if it’s safe,” the colonel said at last, and then, “Please go aboard.”

  Mussolini followed one of the soldiers up the gangplank. He could feel the others behind him. In the garish light from the captain’s bridge, he saw two faces staring at him in awe. Awe and pity. He threw back his shoulders, lifted his chin, strode onto the ship as if it belonged to him. Which, in a certain sense, it did.

  La Maddalena. An island a short distance off the north coast of Sardinia. It made sense only if they were going to hand him over to Hitler there. Yes, it made sense. Hitler had been notified—by spies or through official channels, it didn’t matter. Italy still controlled the waters of the Tyrrhenian Sea. The Führer would send a small flotilla to carry his friend back to Corsica or France and then to Germany. Perhaps Rachele and the children were being rescued now, as well. Perhaps Hitler would send someone for Claretta, too. He could sit with the Führer in Berlin and direct the war from there. They’d engineer a twin empire, preside over Europe, chase the Americans all the way back to New York . . .

  He thought he heard a small explosion behind them, up in the hills to the east. The sailors on deck turned their faces in that direction, then away, and spoke quietly to each other.

  “Duce, please,” the colonel said, “let me show you to your cabin.”

  Twenty

  From long before the day when Luca had convinced her to go into hiding, Sarah had been working to harden herself—against fear, against discomfort, against pain. So when she stepped out of the trees and saw the bloodstains on the front of Luca’s clothes and the blood on his arms and hands, she did what she could to mute her reaction. She didn’t scream or burst into tears or batter him with questions, as the prewar Sarah would have done. She reacted, of course—how could you not react to the sight of that much blood on a loved one’s body? She let out a half-stifled shout, ran across the last few meters, and tried to embrace him—he motioned her back—but she was conscious of holding inside her a flood of emotion, of keeping panic at bay, of showing him how strong she could be.

  Without asking a single question, she went into the cabin for his clothes, then led him up to the spring. While he bathed in the small clearing, backpack kept within reach, she wrapped his bloody shirt and trousers into a tight bundle, carried them into the trees, and buried them under a pile of dirt and leaves. They hadn’t said four words to each other. She went most of the way back but paused at the edge of the clearing and watched him without letting him see her. His black hair had grown long now and rested in curls on the back of his neck. His legs and right arm were packed tight with muscles that flexed
beautifully as he moved, but his left arm looked as if it had been transplanted from another person. A boy’s arm attached to a man’s body.

  Because she was standing to his left side—the side of his blind eye—she knew he couldn’t see her. She was able to watch him bathe, and there was a strange intimacy to that, his hands moving over his own naked body, his vulnerability when he bent forward and splashed water on his face and combed fingers through his wet hair. She was suddenly aware of the heat of the day. She pulled her dress up over her head, smelling her own sweat—sweet, he said it was—feeling the material brush lightly over her skin. She didn’t try to be quiet and, as she knew it would, the sound made him turn and look. His beautiful smile bloomed—quick, cut off before it had fully formed, almost a prewar smile—and then he stood and came over to her.

  They went a little way farther into the trees and made love on a patch of mossy ground, Luca on his back. “You’ll have to wash again,” she said, but he seemed unable to speak.

  From the moment he brushed his palms across her breasts and nipples, Sarah felt a kind of electric current surge through her. Physical, yes, but something beyond physical, too, as if he were carrying her into another world, a place of light and warmth and the complete absence of fear. In its place, another feeling—love did not do the feeling justice—that she’d tried so often to describe in her poems. A shimmering comfort was the closest she’d been able to come, un conforto scintillante, as if the cells of her body were humming joyous background music to something beyond the bodily world, a bird singing out in darkness.

  It had been this way from their first kiss—fourteen months ago on the bus as they approached the lakeside park in Tremezzo. Luca’s left hand had half the strength of his right, but this wasn’t about strength. He ran his fingertips up and down her sides, breasts to hip bones, touching her so lightly, it was as if a handful of feathers were being brushed across her body, and when he held her against him, bare skin to bare skin, everything else simply disappeared. There was no war, no German soldiers looking for her, no Judaism or Catholicism, nothing but her thumping heart and the electricity.

  She weighed so little on top of him. She could feel his fingers on the ribs of her back now, tracing, stroking. She moved gently, in almost complete silence, her hair swinging back and forth against the sides of her face as she rocked over him, the electricity evolving into heat, as if her insides had turned molten. She was making noises now, rhythmic but quiet, then falling on top of him, chest to chest again, both of them breathing hard, the war, the world, slowly coming back into focus around them.

  She lay against him, letting her breath slowly settle. There was a dimension to the lovemaking that had been missing in the glorious days before the Germans arrived, when they’d used a friend’s apartment on the lakeside road—the statale—and made love to a chorus of motorini and bus engines, their flesh firm, their bellies full. In those times, she’d had lucrative work translating English articles for scientific journals, and once a month, she was required to travel to Genoa. Luca would take leave of his stonemason job and his mountain excursions and meet her there, and they’d sink into the luxurious hotel bed with sheets that were soft and cool and so finely woven they seemed like a human embrace. He’d caress her gently, and they’d tease each other for as long as they could bear it, Luca running the backs of his fingers up the insides of her thighs, painting her neck and ears with small kisses. Afterward, she’d fall into the deepest sleep and dream so often of having children that she wondered if she might, in fact, be pregnant.

  In the morning, there would be an elaborate hotel breakfast—eggs, cheese, pastries, cold cuts, coffee, fruit—and they’d talk freely about their work, their plans for the day, their future.

  This new dimension was more love than lust, a tender compensation for the harshness of wartime. She was anxious to ask about the blood and afraid to at the same time. Anxious to tell him her news but wanting to wait a bit, to savor the feeling of his flesh against hers, the smell of the forest on his skin, to try, again, even for a few minutes, to forget the outside world. When they’d been quiet for a while, lying against each other, lightly coated in sweat, a gentle rain started to tap on the leaves above them. Luca was flat on his back, she on her side against him, and she said, “Do you want to tell me?” and felt him flinch, as if she’d jerked him back into a harsher orbit.

  It took him almost a full minute to speak, and then it came pouring out—the scene at Piazzale Loreto, the train, the man, the knife, the lepiota. By the time he was finished, tears were streaming down her face. On the heels of a story like this, she couldn’t bear to speak the words, to present him with her great secret gift.

  “I feel,” he said, then fell silent. “I feel like an angry beast has come to live inside me. When I was standing over him, I wanted to just keep stabbing and stabbing, to cut him into pieces. When I was at Loreto and seeing all that, I wanted to get a gun and shoot all of them. I wanted to go to Rome and go into Mussolini’s office and shoot him in the face and—”

  She put her fingers over his mouth and then on his chest. “You’re twenty” was all she could think to say. “We’re only twenty.”

  “I feel like I’m a hundred and twenty.”

  Just then, Sarah heard something like what she’d heard that morning. A rustling in the trees on the far side of the clearing. A pause. What sounded like footsteps. Luca heard it, too, and reached quietly for his backpack and drew out his knife. He turned his head all the way around so he could see the spring. Another few seconds and out of the trees stepped a wild boar, only the second one she’d ever seen. It was a hideous creature, brown-black and covered in coarse hair, all snout and ears and humped back and short, ugly legs. She felt Luca relax beside her. “The blood,” he whispered.

  The boar went straight to the pool, sniffed, lowered his snout to the red-tinted water, then began to lap at it greedily, grunting with pleasure, twitching its small rough tail.

  Twenty-One

  Since the start of the war, one of the things Don Claudio had always found most difficult was the long, empty stretch of daylight after the conclusion of Mass. His counseling duties had shrunk almost to zero. His invitations to meals at the homes of parishioners had abruptly ceased. The rectory staff—a cook, a maid, a junior priest—had fled Sant’Abbondio for parts unknown, so, unless he made the difficult walk back and forth into town, there was no one to sit with and discuss life, no one with whom to play cards or talk theology or even to watch as she prepared a meal. What did that leave him? The secret duties were few at this point, new and coated in terror: the monthly trip to Milan, the passing on of an occasional message. The rest of his days were empty. There was only so much time an ordinary man could devote to prayer. There was little now with which to fashion a lunch, just odds and ends of food brought to him by parishioners. One old tomato. A heel of bread. Thanks to Maria’s trees, he had oil, but no salt. Thanks to Luca, a bottle of wine that, he suspected guiltily, might have been stolen.

  He sat in the rectory kitchen and cut a slice from the tomato, soaked it in a dish of oil, broke the bread and dipped it into the oil, took a small bite, sliced off another piece no larger than a communion wafer, had a sip of the wine. Wartime wine. He grimaced at the taste of it. He took as much time over the meal as he could, then sat beneath the stone outcropping of the roof and said a leisurely rosary while looking down over the lake. That done, he went up to his room and lay in bed, hoping to sleep for an hour. But despite the bad night, he couldn’t seem to sink into the world of dreams. His mind brought him back to his sins—he supposed that was, in fact, the earthly part of his punishment. He recalled his hours with Rebecca Zinsi, the one lover of his life, their great, illicit passion. A sin, clearly, a breaking of his sacred vows, a surrender to passion, to the flesh.

  Still, he had never quite been able to make himself feel completely guilty about it. What was it? A handful of weeks twenty years ago. Perhaps this lack of regret came from the fact that a
child had been the product of their secret union, a beautiful young woman now. Rebecca had been stoic in her disgrace, carrying her large belly through the town and, he suspected, never, not to any soul, admitting the true paternity. No, she’d told no one—he was sure of it. But how many times she must have been asked! Mocked. Tormented. And not once had she spoken the words that would have ruined him. For a time, he’d wanted to leave the priesthood and marry her. They’d had a number of whispered conversations about it; he’d offered, sincerely, on multiple occasions, but she wouldn’t hear of it. The guilt was too heavy on her even without that, she said.

  He’d revealed his secret only to the man who was now the archbishop of Milan, and only in the confidence of the confessional. A secret that would never be shared.

  The daily Mass was finished, his rosary, his lunch, his musings on the past . . . and there remained hours and hours of daylight to get through.

  He washed himself and made the long, steep downhill walk into the center of Mezzegra in a light summer rain. At the Bar Lake Como, he found his coterie of old friends, men he’d known since grammar school. Among them in these times, no one had much money, but Orlando the owner let them run an endless tab. “When the troubles finish,” he liked to say, “you will pay me triple price!” They joked and bantered in the local dialect, Comasco, as different from Italian as English from Russian, and they knew their priest well enough, and had known him long enough, that when Don Claudio appeared and took a seat with them, the jokes became, if anything, more ribald not less. And yet not one of them seemed to suspect the province of his secret sin.