Once Night Falls

by Roland Merullo

  The radio—Don Claudio no longer had a working one in the rectory—cursed Roosevelt and Churchill but made no mention, none, of il Duce. If Don Claudio needed proof that Mussolini was actually gone, that was enough.

  At one point in the conversation, though no one had knocked, Don Claudio heard the door open again and felt an icy chill scurry up the bones of his spine: The Austrian? A German soldier? An assassin? He made himself look up and saw a mustachioed priest there, vaguely familiar. The priest placed a small statue on the sidebar, nodded to the archbishop, ignored Don Claudio completely, and closed the door quietly behind him as he withdrew.

  When the church formalities were finished, when they’d exhausted all possible small talk, the archbishop leaned his body—still trim and lithe—across the low table between them and motioned for Don Claudio to do the same. He took a fountain pen from its holder, dipped it in ink, and wrote on a piece of paper. He turned the paper so Don Claudio could see it:

  In the saint on the table, 1,000 lire in gold for Luca to pass on to Mentone

  Three rifles and a pistol in your cloakroom when you return

  Loaded!

  Federico watched Don Claudio’s eyes. Made sure he’d understood, then ripped the paper into small pieces and, as Don Claudio watched, put them into his mouth, wet them, worked his jaws and tongue, and swallowed. They stood, hugged each other warmly—“Coraggio!” Federico whispered in his ear—and Don Claudio nodded and turned toward the door.

  He wanted a new mathematical formula then to describe what percentage of the sanity remained in each of his friends. He estimated his own number would be about 65 percent. The archbishop, swallowing paper now, perhaps somewhat lower.

  But he had his marching orders. The sidebar—polished wood, waist height—was on his left as he made his way out of the office. On it, he now saw, stood a small porcelain statuette of Saint Jude. Patron saint of impossible cases. He picked it up—unusually heavy. A thin piece of green felt had been glued securely to the base of the statuette. He suspected that a cylindrical tunnel had been bored from the bottom of the porcelain up through the saint’s torso. Stacked inside, he would find the gold coins. Into the pocket of his black trousers it went. If he were stopped and searched, it would be just another priestly relic for the Germans to mock. If by some chance they noticed the weight and peeled away the felt, they would see the circle where the tunnel had been bored. If they put a finger inside, they would find the money. If they didn’t believe him when he told them it was his own personal stash, for food and emergency church repairs, then he would be arrested and tortured and killed.

  He nodded at Bruno the guard as he went out into the day, stopped and smiled up at the sunshine as if his sanity index had fallen to 40 percent. And then he walked on in search of that impossible thing: an inexpensive lunch in the city of Milano. Food, the Italian sacrament.

  Thirty-Four

  Two days passed in the Rome office, days in which Skorzeny busied himself with preparations for he knew not exactly what. Parachutes, scuba gear, mountaineering equipment—it depended on where Mussolini turned out to have been taken, if, in fact, they ever figured that out. It bothered him to rely so heavily on Selenzen, so he made inquiries of his own, invited German-speaking Italian officers for expensive lunches and dinners, made friendly, probing conversation, circuitous inquiries. The whole game seemed rather foolish: they must know how badly Hitler was hoping to find Mussolini, but he was supposed to be discreet about it, hint, speak in circles, pretend the desperate search was secondary to other considerations. It was the same with the Jews: when dealing with the Italians, he and his comrades were supposed to suggest that the Jews were suitable citizens, that they might one day even have a place in the Reich, that the Italians’ relative sympathy for them was sensible, kind, even useful, when in fact Skorzeny himself wanted nothing less than to eliminate them from the face of the earth, every one of them, to the last man, woman, and child.

  He kept trying, kept pressing gently to find out where Mussolini had been taken, but his efforts yielded nothing in the way of hard information.

  Still, there was work to do, if only in anticipation. He arranged for more of his best men to be called to Rome from duties in other parts of the Reich. He found a pilot he trusted, made a trip to the Pratica di Mare airfield to scout out conditions there, spent a little time in the headquarters’ underground bomb shelter because the enemy was making the occasional air raid on Rome now, killing civilians mostly but damaging a few key roads and supply lines, as well.

  After long hours of planning, thinking, and worrying, just when Skorzeny was beginning to feel an erosion of his customary optimism, Obersturmführer Selenzen knocked on his door. A Heil Hitler! An offer of a glass of white wine—accepted, of course—and Selenzen took his customary place in his customary posture, splayed out on the chair like a man about to fall asleep after having gorged himself on an elaborate lunch.

  “News?”

  Selenzen worked his fat lips, delaying for everything he was worth. It was all Skorzeny could do not to scream at him. The man was unfit, physically and psychologically, to be an officer of the Reich.

  “Something, perhaps,” Selenzen said in a coy manner.

  Skorzeny waited, watched, thought: I’m about to strangle you!

  “We have information that a ‘special prisoner’ was held in a local carabinieri barracks for a time and then driven away in darkness.”

  “Driven away where?”

  “South.”

  “South?”

  Selenzen nodded.

  “That’s it?”

  “A beginning. For a time, we’d heard he was somewhere on the western shore of Lake Como, far to the north. But that information has proven to be inaccurate.”

  Skorzeny could no longer hold in his rage. “Obersturmführer,” he said, “you seem to be treating this as a game of chess when it is, in fact, direct orders from your führer. Get off your fat ass and bring me real information or you’ll be reassigned to Kiev. You have one day. Go!”

  Selenzen stood, glanced at his wineglass, and departed. Skorzeny was left to stand at the window and look out toward the crater of a long-inactive volcano where the pope’s summer residence stood. Homes there, stone homes and a few plane trees, a scene too pleasant for wartime. He had Italian friends now, yes. And there were some excellent soldiers among them. But there were times—this was one of them—when the nation of Italy sickened him, when it seemed that the infamous Latin laziness and love of la dolce vita was contagious. At moments like this, he worried that the German army, the finest military force the world had ever known, would be mired in this hot swamp of wine and indolence until it met a terrible end.

  Thirty-Five

  When Maria went to the Rossos’ house in late afternoon to begin preparations for dinner, she found that something—it must have been rumors of an Italian armistice: peace with the Allies at the Germans’ expense—had tempered the mood of the five officers. There was no loud laughter, no hilarity from the rooms above, just a band of surly men in uniform sitting around the Rossos’ family room listening to the radio and drinking their beer. She wondered what they did when they were gone all day—patrols in the mountains, no doubt, or along the shores of the lake—and if they were ever afraid of what might be awaiting them. Or if their notion of superiority conveyed, in their minds, an immunity to suffering and death, to any kind of punishment in the afterlife.

  It was, of course, not a question she could ask.

  As she was putting together a salad of fresh greens, with a lamb shank baking in Antonetta Rosso’s oven and potatoes boiling in a pot of water on the stove, the redheaded officer—Rolf, he’d said his name was—came into the kitchen and stood not far from her.

  “Any news for us?” he asked after watching her work for a moment.

  Maria glanced at him and shook her head.

  “You’ll notice at dinner a change in treatment. You’ll remember our agreement, I’m sure.”

/>   “I remember,” she said.

  “We’re very generous to those who cooperate with us. We have plenty of food and can get more. For you. For your family and friends. What I asked of you in return was a simple favor. Not difficult.”

  “If I hear anything, I’ll tell you.”

  “I hope so,” he said, unsmiling. He put his hand on her shoulder, and she flinched. He let out a kind of laugh, one note, and left her to her work.

  When she was serving the meal, the tall, bald officer didn’t touch her. She set the plate in front of him, her own mouth watering, and without looking at her, he said, “You have children?”

  At first Maria didn’t realize he was speaking to her. He turned his face a few degrees in her direction and repeated the question out of the side of his mouth without looking at her. She wondered if he was already drunk.

  “You have children?”

  “One. One child. A son.”

  “And he is where?”

  “Fighting,” she lied. “In Russia I think, but I cannot know. He cannot write. My husband is there also, I believe. I haven’t heard anything from them.”

  The man turned his face forward again, dismissing her. Maria made several trips into the kitchen for plates, served the men without speaking, and then stood off to the side for a few minutes, as she’d been instructed. The tall, bald officer—the others always seemed to defer to him—tasted the lamb and nodded. Drank from his glass of wine. Looked up at her. “How is the food there; did your boy say? In Russia.”

  “He cannot write.”

  “Ah, yes. I remember now. Well, in honor of him, why don’t you cook us a Russian meal one night. Ha!”

  “I don’t know Russian food.”

  “Beef stroganoff,” one of the other men suggested, and the tall officer nodded and laughed his airy chuckle. “Yes, we’ll procure the ingredients. Stroganoff every Saturday! What else will you need, potatoes?”

  She shook her head nervously and shrugged. Waited. Tried to but could not hold the word inside. “I have some mushrooms.”

  The other officer who’d spoken said, “Beef,” as if she didn’t know that, and they all laughed. When the laughter settled, he added, “My wife makes it. You need noodles, sour cream, mushrooms.”

  “The mushrooms, they seem to have,” the tall officer said. “The other things we will procure.” He turned his eyes to Maria. “Beef stroganoff every Saturday. In honor of your brave husband and son!” He raised his glass, and the others followed suit. Maria could feel the eyes of the redhead on her. She pressed her teeth together, waited until the men were involved in their dinners, and then went into the kitchen and tended to the pots. When they were cleaned and set aside in the strainer, she wiped her hands and paused a minute, looking out the window at a graying landscape. Maybe, she thought, despite their terrible suffering, despite having been beaten to death in old age, Antonetta and Rafaelo Rosso were to be envied: their torment was over.

  She walked home in the dark, across the weedy field, through her small grove of olive trees, through the gate in her fence. The Germans would never let her stop cooking for them; she understood that now. Rebecca would have to be moved. But where? Maybe Luca knew someone who had a safe house. She’d ask him the next time he came, and she’d remind him never to let them see him with her or, if they did, to say he was a nephew not a son.

  In her kitchen, she looked at the mesh bag of lepiota, sitting there on a shelf like a ticking bomb. So unlike her gentle boy to offer such a thing. So unlike his mother to accept.

  Thirty-Six

  From shortly after his first sexual experience—on his thirteenth birthday with a Palermo prostitute his uncle procured for him—Silvio Merino had come to the realization that the Church had been lying to him all along: there was absolutely nothing sinful about sex. In fact, it seemed to him as he grew older that the act of love should be considered sacred. It created life, after all (though he himself had not yet had the pleasure of fatherhood). What could be more sacred than that?

  In the years since that first terrifying encounter (the woman, blonde, large breasted, probably thirty-five, had practically had to lock the door and wrestle him backward onto the bed), he’d made love with many women, some Italian, some not, some beautiful, some not. Never, not once, had there been any unpleasantries, except perhaps in those few cases where the woman had for some reason imagined him as a candidate for the corral of marriage. Thin, plump, dark haired, blonde, Catholic, Jewish, or unattached to any faith, calm as the mountains or as neurotic as the sea on a stormy day, he’d found something lovable in each of them and had tried, as best he could, to see that they took as much pleasure from the lovemaking as he did himself.

  Of all these women, perhaps the one with whom the time in bed had been most enjoyable was Lisiella Aiello, a Milanese art collector, rebellious daughter of one of the city’s wealthiest families, and someone who, like him, had decided early on that marriage was an arrangement for which she was ill suited.

  After leaving the German checkpoint officer and supposed car lover to his underwear laundering, Silvio had paid a brief visit to the Duomo, Milan’s magnificent cathedral. There, as instructed, he left the statuette of Saint Jude beside a bank of votive candles in a side chapel and watched until he saw a mustachioed priest carry it away. Everything, it seemed, had gone according to plan. The gold had been delivered—God knew where it would end up—and he was safe and unharmed. He offered up a prayer of thanks, lit a votive candle for his parents, dropped a fifty-lire note into the cup of an old blind woman begging on the front step, and drove to the Grand Hotel de Milan. There he enjoyed a celebratory drink with his friend, Bella, who managed the famous American Bar. They joked, very quietly, about when and if the bar might be renamed.

  “Bar Roosevelt,” Bella suggested, depending on how the war ended up.

  “Or Bar Hitler,” he said, “if it goes the other way.”

  “God forbid!”

  Silvio’s drink of choice was vodka with ice and lime. After he’d finished the first of what he expected would be several of them, and feeling another twinge of guilt at the wartime luxury, he walked over to a phone and dialed Lisiella’s number. Never perfect to begin with, phone communication had been disrupted by the war, so he had to dial twice before getting through. The sound of her voice on the end of the line gave him a distinct sexual thrill. Yes, she was home. And yes, bored to tears by the suffocating war atmosphere. Yes, of course, she loved the Grand Hotel and had missed him badly and would be more than happy to find her way there for a meal and perhaps something more.

  And so it was that, after a leisurely dinner of excellent sliced beef and fresh broccoletti, and a surprisingly good bottle of Friuli Valpolicella, he and Lisiella found themselves relieved of their clothing and tangled in the luxurious sheets of one of the Grand Hotel’s corner rooms.

  She was an energetic and inventive lover, fond of moving, mid-intercourse, from lying on the bed, to standing by the window, to sitting astride him on a chair. That night was no exception. What Silvio loved about her was that, in and out of bed, she was completely without self-consciousness. She laughed and joked and teased while they were linked to each other; she’d suddenly tell him to stop moving and she’d lie there—on top of him, often as not—gazing into his eyes and whispering things that would have turned the cheeks of the good priest at the Duomo shades of communist red. At the climactic moment, she called out, “Dio aiutami!” God help me! and then laughed at herself when the tremors had passed.

  The early departure, the excitement of the day, the meal, the alcohol, the sexual gymnastics—when it was finished, just past midnight, Silvio lay beside Lisiella in a state close to total exhaustion. They were on their backs, holding hands like first-time lovers. He offered up a silent prayer of thanks, his second that day. His mother used to tell him that the last child in a large family was watched over with particular care by the angels. It had always seemed to be true. But along with the gratitude, he felt, yet
again, the light tap of guilt: so much suffering everywhere, and he was so happy.

  “Il nostro Duce è scappato,” Lisiella said in a quiet voice. Our Duce has skipped out.

  “Yes. No one knows where.”

  In the distance, they heard a faint thump, as if a single bomb had been dropped in Quarto Oggiaro on the far side of the city. They waited, listening, but there was no more of that.

  “You knew that I was friends with Sarfatti, one of his lovers, yes?”

  “Margherita, patron of the arts.”

  “She used to tell me he’d throw her to the floor and make love to her violently, quickly, like an animal. And then stand up and reach for his violin and serenade her in the kindest way.”

  “A madman.”

  “Agreed.” Lisiella held on to his hand and turned so that her bare breasts, those wonderful works of the Creator, were pressed against his left shoulder.

  A shame, he thought, that neither of them wanted to marry. “I’ve been asked,” he said, quietly and in as modest a tone as he could manage, “to use my various contacts to help find our lost Duce.”

  “Really, Silvio?”

  He nodded. He could sense that the assignment, the proximity to what might be called espionage, excited her, and he wondered if, in fact, his exhaustion was as complete as it seemed. “Any ideas?”

  Lisiella pushed their clasped hands gently to her body, moved herself against them almost imperceptibly. Through the slight fog of new arousal, he believed he could hear the golden gears of her beautiful mind click into motion. “No idea,” she said, also modestly. Her breathing had changed slightly. “Except that your father’s a driver, isn’t he?”