Once Night Falls

by Roland Merullo

  But their legacy lived on. And he was in a league with them, a piece of history. No one could ever take that away. No matter what they did to him now, these conspirators, no matter what the Allies had in mind, the name Mussolini would survive.

  Lost in his musing, he didn’t realize that the captain had come up and was standing beside him at the rail, hovering at a respectful distance like a waiter anticipating a dinner order. “Are you hungry, Duce?”

  He glanced at the man, then away.

  “Please do not be angry with me. I am following orders.”

  “Given by whom?”

  “Badoglio . . . and the king.”

  Mussolini spat over the side of the boat. “Badoglio is a nobody, a former patriot, a bad general. I made him who he is.”

  “Head of government now.”

  “Don’t joke with me in such a way.”

  “Not joking, Duce. On his orders, we are taking you away . . . for your safety.”

  “Safety from whom?” Mussolini barked. “From what? My own people? My German friends? The Allies, who are a thousand kilometers away? Badoglio himself?”

  “I’m not a man of politics, Duce. But forgive me if I speak the truth . . . I think there are many people now who would want you captured or harmed.”

  “People have always wanted to harm me! I survived three assassination attempts! Three!”

  “I know, Duce, but this time—”

  “And so you are taking me where? A place where there are no people? Outer space? To live on the moon? On Saturn? Or are you taking me to be drowned, to be thrown off the boat at sea and never heard from again?”

  “I would never allow it.”

  “Then turn the boat around and bring me back to Rome. I want to speak to the king personally. I want to take a shovel and smash Badoglio’s head into pulp. I have been duped.”

  A stubborn silence. Mussolini turned and looked at the man again. Black hair that stood up straight from the top of his head, like a boy’s. Two or three days’ growth of dark stubble. A chin that went sideways below his mouth, as if he’d come out of his mother’s womb whispering a secret to someone beside him. The man seemed sincere, a good man. Still, he was slim and not muscular, and Mussolini had an all but insuppressible urge to pick him up by the knees and topple him over the rail.

  “We are taking you to La Maddalena, as I said,” the man told him earnestly, apologetically. “If we determine that it’s safe, we will have you stay in a private home for a time. The helpers there, a man and a woman, have been preparing for your arrival.”

  “And then?”

  “And then I don’t know, Duce. I have orders to leave you there if it seems safe and then return to the mainland.”

  Mussolini grunted and looked away, a dismissal. The captain waited at the rail for another minute, then mumbled an apology and went back to his bridge.

  Mussolini heard the growl of an airplane propeller, not far to their north, angry dog in another universe. A British bomber, he thought. Or Hitler looking for me. Another man whose reputation, whose greatness, would live on, no matter what the cowards and fools did to him. He looked up and saw that the plane, a bit closer now, was flying at low altitude and with a minimum of running lights.

  So perhaps it was an Allied spy plane and he was, as the captain suggested, being hunted. A helpless rabbit being moved from place to place as the hunters closed in with their rifles and dogs. A bird. A wild boar. If they did leave him on La Maddalena, a place that, despite its beauty, had always made him vaguely uneasy, he would ask for a pistol. If the Allies came to take him, they’d find a dead man.

  Twenty-Five

  From Hitler’s secret bunker in East Prussia, Captain Otto Skorzeny was flown back to Munich and then to Rome. There, he was given a room and an office in the German headquarters in Frascati, at the city’s southernmost edge. The building—four stories, stucco, gray as rain—included a windowless room in which prisoners were interrogated, but that room was on the far side of the building and one floor belowground, and the only time he heard the screams was on the first morning, when he went to introduce himself to General Kurt Student—who had an office nearby and who seemed, judging by the look on his face, to take pleasure from the sounds.

  Immediately after reporting to the general, Skorzeny began assembling his team: Radl, his right-hand man; Goss, his secretary; the half dozen available commandos who’d worked on the invasions of France and Belgium. After lunch, he sat down with SS Obersturmführer Selenzen, interim assistant head of intelligence for the Italian front. Selenzen was a short, fat, crafty man with jowls and large ears, steel-rimmed spectacles pinched into place by round cheeks, a Bavarian accent, and a passion for chess, sweet Mosel wines, and young boys. The last interest made Skorzeny squeamish, but Selenzen was said to be a master at raking his fingers through the moldy undergrowth of Italian society and coming up with nuggets of information. Radl told him Selenzen would hold these nuggets in his fist until just the right moment—a key meeting, usually one attended by General Student or Field Marshal Kesselring—and then open his hand and display them with a toothy smile. The information he gathered was more than enough to encourage his superiors to leave him to his tawdry pleasures.

  The smile, however, was not in evidence on that rainy Roman morning. Selenzen sat in a leather chair with his fat thighs spread and his lips pursed. “I’ve just come from the Lake Como area,” he said slowly, flicking a piece of fried egg from his uniform and onto the floor, “and I’ve reached the conclusion that the Italians are not warriors. You know this, Captain, I’m sure. Not brave, not warriors, not worthy of us. However, they are masters at deception, at secret-keeping, at making feints and false moves.”

  “In other words, you have no idea where Mussolini is.”

  “In other words, yes, for the time being. It’s been only a few days, Captain, and I’ve been focusing on other matters. I have my pawns out in the streets. One makes the assault on the king gradually. First the pawns, then the knights are moved into place. The bishops. A period of attrition, and then perhaps the queen and the castles come into play. When do you want him by?”

  “Now. Today. This instant,” Skorzeny said.

  Selenzen let out a low chuckle, a few notes of sarcastic mirth. He squeezed the bottom of his nose between thumb and forefinger. “We know he had a meeting with the king, but we’re not exactly on good terms with the king, as you must be aware.”

  “You have no one inside the king’s circle?”

  Selenzen shook his head, making the big cheeks wobble like the hindquarters of a beast.

  “No one in the police? The military?”

  “We have people there, yes, but from the looks of things, there are, outside the king’s inner circle, possibly five men who know where Mussolini has been taken. We’re squeezing every source, though. Every source.”

  “Squeeze harder,” Skorzeny told him.

  Twenty-Six

  Don Claudio found four decent plums at the market near the Bar Lake Como, paid for them with small coins, and started back home. The route to the Church of Sant’Abbondio took him along a painfully steep hill, one kilometer in length. He considered the walk penitential. Difficult as it was for a man of his age and corpulence, the priest accepted the penance willingly, as he accepted all life’s difficulties. At the base of this acceptance was the belief that the world had been made with a divine logic and fairness at its heart, even though that logic and certainly that fairness was, from time to time at various points in history, invisible to the human eye. Why did pain exist? Why did evil exist? Why had God allowed men like Hitler and Mussolini to come to power? These questions were, to his mind, simply beyond the realm of human understanding. Answers, he believed, would come only after death. The Merciful One would judge all souls then, would separate the good from the evil. He’d given his adult life to the Church, to his parishioners. He’d sinned a few times, yes. But he’d been a devoted priest. That devotion, he hoped, would save him. />
  Still, the walk back to his church caused him a fair amount of physical distress. Since the start of the war in Europe, and especially since the first day they’d seen the soldiers of the Reich on Italian soil, and most especially when he made this walk, Don Claudio had had occasion to wonder how he’d behave under torture. The recent conversation with the short German officer had done nothing to soften such thoughts. How would he behave? Not well, he supposed. He was not a stoic, not known for his courage nor brave with pain; even the small Lenten sacrifices he made—giving up wine for six weeks, rising early for prayer—seemed to him to exact a price out of all proportion to his willpower, as if the cells of his lungs were being consumed by tiny fires, as if, now, the enormous suffering of hell was reflected in miniature in the beads of sweat on his arms and face as he climbed. It wasn’t his fault, not really. Even on the war diet—consuming a third of what he used to consume—he’d shed only ten kilos, less than half of what he needed to lose. Not his fault.

  A dozen times on the way up the hill, he had to stop and catch his breath. During each of those pauses, he said a quiet Ave Maria—even once nodding to a passing German staff car as he recited the prayer. An officer in the back seat stared at him and seemed to be making mental notes: check on the fat priest; who knows what goes on in his church?

  At last, Don Claudio reached the soccer field just below Sant’Abbondio: fifty or sixty more steps and he could rest. The grass on the field was baking in the afternoon sun, but the church itself, all dark marble, dark wood, and walls thick enough to keep out the winter chill, would be cool and still, a refuge of body and spirit.

  Once he’d wiped the sweat from his neck and forehead and set down on the pew nearest the door the paper bag that contained the four plums, he made his way to the vestry and the metal offering box. He found the key on his key ring, turned it in the lock, lifted the oblong door, and saw there what he had hoped and dreaded to see: a slip of paper next to a lira note and a few coins. Hoped, because the note meant Luca was still alive. Dreaded, because the message—delivered while he was at Bar Lake Como with his friends, no doubt, the young man slipping into and out of the church like a breath of wind—would contain his instructions. Those instructions might lead him anywhere, including the German torture cells. Even in the cool of the nave, he felt sweat form instantly on his palms. He was, he thought, no hero.

  He pinched the bill and brushed the coins into one hand with the fingertips of the other. Before taking out the note, he surveyed the interior of his church. It was not beyond the realm of possibility that a spy might be hiding in the shadows, a German soldier come to torment him or even, perhaps, to make a confession. There were, Luca had told him, safe houses up in the hills, but no place, not even a church, was completely safe in these times.

  Sure that he was alone, Don Claudio grasped the slip of paper between the top knuckles of his second and third fingers, drew it out, and unfolded it. Printed there in pencil was a capital letter M, what might have been either an upside-down U or an arch, and a small arrow with the numeral two. After studying the marks for a moment, he understood. He closed and locked the offering box, carried the note over to the bank of votive candles, held it there until it burned almost to his skin, then dropped the ash on the marble floor at his feet and the last bit of paper into the red glass that held the nearest candle. He scuffed the ashes and went to his room to make a late lunch of two fresh plums and half a glass of wine. The other plums would go to Maria and Rebecca.

  M was for Milan, the arch for the archbishop, and the arrow and two meant two more days. He had his assignment, then: travel to Milan on Friday to pay a visit to Archbishop Maniscalco, surely the bravest and best of men. He sighed, raised up a prayer for courage, ate his meager lunch, then repaired to his bedroom—visions of pliers and bloody teeth running through his mind’s eye—for a late-afternoon rest.

  This was the power of evil, he thought before drifting into a light sleep. Nothing need be actually done to you, just the idea of it, the rumor of it, the sense of the possibility of it. That was enough.

  Twenty-Seven

  From the cabin, Luca hiked down slowly toward the town, a walk of nearly two hours, keeping in the trees. He stood behind the church for a long time, watching to make sure no one would notice him. He saw Don Claudio leave the rectory and make his way toward the town and his weekly rendezvous with friends. The back door was unlocked, as he knew it would be. He slipped inside, made his quick delivery, then ducked into the woods again and began to climb a steep, serpentine path, northwest toward the Swiss border.

  He wouldn’t cross the border, of course—it would take three hours or more to hike that far, and the chances of encountering a German guard were too high. Instead, he followed the path for an hour, sweating but not really breathing hard, until it disappeared into a delta of small stones. At that point, any curious hiker or soldier on patrol who didn’t know the terrain would surely give up. Beyond the delta of stones lay an even steeper terrain of dense underbrush and five-meter cliff faces, vipers in the shadows, wild boar in the trees. Impassable, it seemed. But his father had taken him here, too, as a boy, so he knew it was possible to go on. This section of hills was too high and too dry and not shaded enough for mushroom hunting, but his father had loved the high terrain, and they would sometimes come up here on a summer night, provisioned with food his mother had packed. They’d climb rock faces using hands and feet (a challenge for Luca with his one weak arm—his father encouraged but never helped him), crawl beneath brambles, search for berries and walnuts. Often as not, they’d go as far as the border—fences and signs even then, but no guards—and have a meal there. When darkness fell, they’d wrap themselves in blankets, study the stars for a while, and then sleep. His father’s passion had led him to the Alpine Corps and so, most likely, to his death—they’d heard nothing from him in many months. But perhaps it had also led his son to the work he was doing now. Maybe, Luca thought, all the world turned according to some great design like that, with good and evil locked eternally in a fierce war, the battleground moving across the globe and through time, individual soldiers guided by mysterious forces they could never discern. Maybe, instead of some man-in-the-sky God, there was a system of firing brain cells, elaborate beyond imagining. Maybe even his killing of the felt-hatted man was part of that grand design. He did not pretend to know.

  From the stony delta, he turned parallel to the slope, worked his way painstakingly through hundreds of meters of brush, using his knife and wire cutters in places but trying not to leave too obvious a trail of broken and cut branches. He came out on a narrow path he remembered well. His father had told him once that the path might have been used by the people who’d inhabited this area thousands of years before it was called Italy. Every twenty or thirty steps, the footpath was broken by brambles or small rockslides, but Luca was certain no one else knew about it and even more certain the Germans would be too lazy to find it or, if they happened to find it, too lazy to follow it. He went along for two hours, stopping once to drink from the water bottle and once when he came upon the pleasant surprise of a bush of ripe elderberries—bitter but nourishing.

  In late afternoon, he crossed a small grassy ridge, then a stream where he filled his stoppered bottle and splashed his face, and then, finally, a rock overhang similar to the one where he’d rested the day before—one wall and a stony, slanted ceiling. He sat there and chewed on bread and his last piece of cheese, thought about Sarah and their child and the things she had said, and waited for darkness.

  Whenever the wind puffed a light gust in his direction, he could hear engines downshifting. German cars and troop transports they would be, making their descent along the hairpin turns at the pace a man could run. They came into Italy through the pass from Austria, moved between the western side of the lake and the Swiss border and then along the crooked roads that led to the statale and, eventually, to Milan and points south. The Nazis were filling the country with armament now—tanks a
nd artillery and troop transports and motorcycles—pouring their hatred and violence into Italy. And the Blackshirts were welcoming them.

  Great care had to be used in fighting them. Great care, skill, courage, and a large measure of luck.

  Sabotage was his main work, his piece on the chessboard of the grand strategy of resistance. The archbishop had connected him to a local farmer named Gennaro Masso and, through Masso, to three men who worked the hills north of Gravedona. Though it frustrated him not to be asked to do something larger, and though he didn’t like the men, he had so far obeyed them without question. Small acts of . . . disturbance, that was what they expected from him—the placing of the occasional pebble in the jackboot of the German giant. He liked to think a better man for the job could not have been chosen because the sabotage had to be made to look like merely the quirks of nature—a thick tree branch falling across a road with no saw marks on it, as if blown there in a storm; bits of glass or a few nails sprinkled on the asphalt as if spilled by accident from the back of a passing truck; a slick of oil, all but invisible in darkness, left—so it seemed—by a faulty engine just at a turn in the road and just wide enough to send a troop transport careering into the ditch; one telephone line, torn from its mooring as if by strong winds or cut by a falling branch. His instructions were to space out these events no closer in time than one a week and no closer to each other than ten kilometers. Much as he enjoyed the work, it made him impatient. People were being killed, tortured, raped, starved to death, forced to hide in attics and mountain cabins, and he was delaying a single convoy for a few hours, ruining one or two engines, disrupting a handful of phone calls. If he’d been older, or a man with two working eyes and two strong arms, they would have treated him differently. He reminded himself to speak to Masso about it.