Once Night Falls

by Roland Merullo

  “Six points for the son!” he said as they walked up the court for the next round, played in the opposite direction.

  “Beh,” his father said, almost an emotional outburst for a man like him. “Good.”

  Things, Silvio thought, were warming up. Soon there would be an armistice.

  They played along, Silvio losing his brief lead steadily and happily, his father buried in concentration and playing with a cautious precision that marked everything else he did in life, from driving to eating. As a teenager, in certain angry moments, Silvio had wondered about his father’s lovemaking style. Precise, he guessed. Careful. Making sure the mattress was not overused so it would last longer. It was a miracle they’d had eleven children.

  On that day, entertaining no such bitter thoughts, he told himself that, for strategic reasons, he’d allow his father to win, though the truth was the old man beat him eight of every ten games no matter what he did. The final score was 21–16, which his father announced with a certain muted satisfaction.

  But Silvio made a big fuss of it. “Babbo,” he said, “you should see if there are any tournaments among the embassy employees and foreign service officers. You’d certainly win. You haven’t lost your touch at all.” And so on.

  He’d brought along two cigars—another rare treat—and handed one over to his father in a posture of surrender. “Let’s sit and smoke,” he said, gesturing to a bench beneath a spreading fig tree.

  A syllable of thank-you, of agreement. The slightest breath of warm air between them now. His father placed the folded newspaper beneath him before he sat.

  “Everything all right here, Babbo?” Silvio asked when they were seated not too close beside each other and puffing out clouds of sweet smoke.

  “Eh. Good enough.”

  “They’re paying you.”

  “On time.”

  “My brothers and sisters? Well?”

  His father turned to look at him and then moved his eyes forward again, as if to say: Find out for yourself, why don’t you?

  This mild version of torture went on for half an hour, Silvio pulling the answers out like a dentist pulling a series of deeply rooted teeth. He smiled, laughed, even once gently elbowed his father when the talk turned to the women at the embassy and the delicate question of possible romance.

  At last, when he could sense that his father’s patience for him had reached its end, and when the cigars had been put out and tossed aside, Silvio ventured the main question as casually as he could. By then they were walking back toward the building. “Il Duce,” Silvio said quietly. “You’ve heard the news, I take it.”

  “Unnh.”

  “A disaster, no?”

  His father shrugged, looked away. It had always been hard to guess his politics. Some nights at dinner, he’d have two or three words of praise for il Duce. Other times, he’d frown when he said the man’s name. In the end, Silvio believed he’d come to adore Benito Mussolini, like so many other gullible Italians.

  “Where do you think they have him, Babbo?”

  Silvio watched the smallest smile touch the corners of his father’s lips. The old man liked to win at bocce, liked to drive, and he liked, most of all, to be the one who knew things others didn’t know. Being around him in the old days, when his mother was alive and his father had been a bit more fond of speaking, meant listening to a constant litany of know-it-all complaint, delivered from on high. This driver made this mistake; that driver made that mistake. Look at the stronzo, making a turn like that. Look at the idiots who are running things. What do they care for the poor, the workingman? In time, the well of complaint had gone dry and, with it, his father’s urge to speak.

  Silvio kept trying. “You have your finger on the pulse of the city. What do you think happened to him? Did they turn him over to the Allies? Shoot him? Throw him in the ocean?”

  “Maybe,” his father said to the last possibility.

  “Have you heard anything?”

  His father looked away, swallowed.

  Silvio studied the stubbled cheeks and small eyes.

  “I heard,” his father said after a long hesitation, “I heard they took him south. To the water. Put him on a boat.”

  Silvio thought: A dozen words without stopping! A miracle! He said, “Really?”

  His father nodded, loosening up a bit. “A driver friend told me. To a port city. Latina, I think. Put him on a military boat, a ship.”

  “God help him, then, Babbo.”

  “Si,” his father said. Silvio waited, hoping in vain for more, then took the hundred-lire note from his pocket, palmed it, and reached out for one of his father’s crushing handshakes. “What’s this?” the old man asked, pretending he wasn’t pleased. He was a proud man, yes, until it came to money.

  “From your boy. For food, cigars, my brothers and sisters. Whatever you want. Some friends of mine are curious about il Duce, and they’re paying me well for information, so if you hear anything else . . .”

  Against all history and hope, Silvio waited for some signal of gratitude, a smile, an embrace, a quick grazie, even. Nothing. A glance. One half of a nod that might have meant anything from agreement to condemnation.

  It didn’t matter. Lisiella was a genius: drivers did, in fact, talk to each other. Mussolini had been taken to Latina and put on a small military boat! Giovanni, the half-American, would no doubt pay handsomely for that piece of news. And perhaps there would be ways of learning more.

  Forty

  That night, when the square of wood that covered the attic entrance was slipped aside, Maria saw the round metal bottom of the slop bucket, took hold of it, and brought it down into her arms. The smell was horrible. She couldn’t keep herself from looking inside. Blood today, mixed with everything else. She was about to carry it off to the toilet when she heard Rebecca make a hissing sound, barely audible. She looked up—the once beautiful face, gaunt now, with protruding eyes. Gray hair hanging down like strings. “I must go, Maria,” Rebecca whispered.

  “Go where?”

  “Into the woods. I can’t stay here another day. I’m losing my mind; I’m dying. Let me go. I need to find my daughter. I need to breathe the air. Please!”

  Maria watched her for a few seconds, then shook her head. “When my son comes again, he’ll take you. Have courage. Another few days, a week at most. And then I’ll let you go. Have courage. Have faith.”

  She could see that Rebecca didn’t believe her, and she could see, too, the start of a thinly veiled insanity. It was asking too much of a person, living in a hot, windowless box. How long had it been? Seven weeks? Eight? She’d have to find a solution. When Luca came to visit her again, she’d ask him to do something, take Rebecca into the hills, procure false papers. Something. Anything.

  She saw a flash of lightning outside the kitchen windows, then heard a long rumble of thunder. A stormy night, it would be; she hoped Luca and Sarah were safe. She said a prayer that the lightning would spare them.

  Forty-One

  Not long after first light, while the summer sun over Lake Como still had a soft, post-rainstorm quality to it—kind, not punishing—Luca stepped out of the trees behind Gennaro Masso’s farmhouse and sounded three knocks on the old man’s back door. After a moment, the farmer appeared. He’d just shaved—a bit of soap clung to the bottom of one ear—and, smooth cheeked and barefoot, he answered the door in a pale-blue T-shirt and black work pants held up by suspenders. The sight of him brought a rare smile to Luca’s lips. There were various ways of protecting oneself from the Germans—hiding, collaborating, fleeing. Masso’s way was to pretend, on occasion, to be stupid. For a few seconds, he made his fool’s face for Luca, letting one side of his mouth hang down, dulling his eyes, wiping a palm upward across his high forehead as if it were the middle of the day and he was sweating, or as if he were trying to clear away the shield that stood between his brain and the world.

  Luca reached out and wiped the soap from Masso’s earlobe, playing along. “It’s
Thursday, Gennaro. Hai dimenticato? Did you forget?”

  “Tursday when? Which Tursday, January?”

  “August already. Market day in Dubino.”

  “Ah, Dubino!” Masso exclaimed, “a town in England!” and waved him inside.

  For decades, Gennaro Masso had made a good living growing everything from apricots to zucchini on his large property. In the towns north of Menaggio—Dongo, Stazzona, Brenzio, San Benedetto, Dubino—people were used to seeing him carrying his fruits and vegetables along the roads in a wooden cart drawn by his famously stubborn donkeys, Culillo and then Culillo II. But Masso was seventy-five; it made sense that he’d hire a younger man to take over some of the trips to market. So now, every other week, Luca loaded up the cart, took hold of the reins, and led Masso’s temperamental Culillo II along the statale with his load of tomatoes, or lettuce, or pickles, whatever was in season and could be sold. Often enough, the cart carried something else besides—a message, money, knives, tools.

  They had their regular arrangement and a kind of friendship, but whenever he spent time with Masso, Luca heard a faint whispering in his inner ear, as if some message he could not quite understand was being relayed to him. The old farmer had somehow known about his secret work, and he, not Don Claudio, had been the one who introduced him to Mentone, Prinzano, and Scutarro—the men who had become Luca’s three contacts in the northern mountains. Luca had never been completely comfortable with that trio of partisan fighters. They were communists, for one thing, and he had little sympathy for communism. But his discomfort went deeper than that.

  Still, every other Thursday, he made this two-day trip, earned a little money, brought food to a few dozen hungry people, met his trio of secret contacts . . . and came back to the hills above Mezzegra listening to the nagging voice of doubt.

  There was bread and cheese and good tomatoes, even a little salt—Masso had been expecting him—and Luca sat at a scarred kitchen table and, somewhat guiltily, ate a small meal. The farmer brewed two cups of espresso and joined him. “What do you hear?” Masso asked. “Word doesn’t reach me. A radio is too expensive for an old man, the news too upsetting.”

  Luca shrugged. It was a chess game, a gambit, all part of Masso’s disguise. The old man knew everything there was to know. “The Allies are in Sicily,” Luca began, watching Masso’s face.

  Masso nodded, giving away nothing.

  “And, since the last time I saw you, people are saying il Duce is gone, taken prisoner by the king, Badoglio, Grandi, and the other Council members, his old comrades. No one knows where they took him. Rumors are flying.”

  “As they always do.”

  “Is it true about il Duce? Is he gone?”

  After a small hesitation, Masso nodded again, wrinkling his thick neck. So much for the lack of a radio, for the idea of word not reaching him. He twirled the small porcelain cup in front of him, met Luca’s eyes, and at last spoke. “Think about where our little king finds himself, Luca. To the south, the English-speaking people of the world—Americans, Australians, Canadians, British—are conquering Sicily. To the north, Hitler is filling up the country with troops and weapons. Now the king has removed il Duce from power and hidden him away, and everybody is desperately trying to find him—the Allies to take him prisoner, Hitler to rescue him, our comrades to kill him. The intrigue, the rumors, the occupation, the invasion, the hunger, the suffering—a national nightmare. And our little royal sitting on top of all of it, riding a wild horse without a saddle.”

  Luca could find nothing to say. In his heart, there was no sympathy for Vittorio Emanuele. The king, after all, had practically handed Mussolini the reins of power and then cowered before him for decades, letting the Duce make decisions while he himself played the royal role . . . and did nothing. It had taken the Allied invasion to bring him out of his stupor.

  Masso burped, brushed a sleeve across his mouth. “How are things for you, closer to home?”

  “My mother suffers.”

  “Bring her here. It would be nice to have the company of a woman again.”

  Luca took a bite of the fresh bread. For a few seconds, that idea seemed plausible, attractive even—Masso had more food than most people, and the Germans had so far left him alone—until he remembered Rebecca. He decided not to mention her. Behind this semicomic, half-sincere veil, his farmer friend was a mysterious creature, a man he liked and almost completely trusted.

  “The Germans are making her cook for them now,” he said. “Dinner. Every night.”

  “She should poison them.”

  Luca looked up at Masso’s tanned face and mostly bald head, the close-set, rheumy eyes and deeply cleft chin, a many-layered expression, impossible to read. Could it be that, among all the other things Masso somehow seemed to know, he was aware of the lepiota in Maria’s kitchen? “I hadn’t thought of that,” he lied, and immediately felt a twinge. Here was the heart of the matter these days: you had to put your life in the hands of a few friends and not look back, not give in to doubt. “A web of trust,” Don Claudio had called it, the first time he’d spoken to Luca about the secret work. That conversation had led him to the mustachioed priest at the Duomo in Milan—who had never revealed his name—and eventually to Masso.

  For some reason, though, with Masso, he found that kind of total vulnerability more difficult. Masso was watching him, perhaps not fully trusting him, either. “There would be reprisals,” Luca said.

  Masso pursed his lips, didn’t move his eyes. “Tell your mother to kill them all,” he said. “I’ll help if she wants. If we have to die, we’ll die, that’s all.”

  A nod, a sip from the small cup, Luca’s mind whirling and twisting, trying to understand how much of it was an odd joke and how much real.

  “What else?” Masso demanded.

  “Sarah’s with child.”

  The jowls of the old man’s face twitched, and a genuine smile blossomed, showing what remained of his teeth. “Congratulations!”

  “Yes, ordinarily a great blessing.”

  “A great blessing even now. Your child will grow up without knowing war.”

  “You’re so certain, Gennaro.”

  Masso kept smiling. “If il Duce is truly gone, then most Italians won’t fight anymore. Not for Hitler, at least. The German bastardo can’t conquer the entire world by himself.”

  “He’s halfway there.”

  “Losing in Russia.”

  “You know that for a fact?”

  Masso shrugged, adjusted the clasp on one of his suspenders. “I hear things.”

  “I thought you said news doesn’t reach you.”

  Another shrug, another display of the bad teeth. “I have talkative friends, that’s all. We play cards; we drink. There are rumors—the Germans losing in Russia, the Allies winning in Sicily. An armistice, maybe. The king making a deal with Roosevelt and Churchill now that our Duce is gone.”

  “Any word of my father?”

  Masso shook his head. “I would tell you if I knew.”

  “Sarah wants to help. When I see Mentone tonight, I’m going to ask him to get her new papers.” He tapped his shirt. “I have her passport with me.”

  “Ah . . .”

  It seemed to Luca that Masso was about to say more but stopped himself.

  “I don’t want her to,” Luca said. “Especially now.”

  Masso pondered a moment, salted another slice of tomato, and placed it on his tongue. He chewed and swallowed before speaking. “Years ago, when my Amelia was alive, we used to have a beautiful bird that would come here in the summer.” He paused, scratched his chin with one finger. “A bird like you’ve never seen. Dark purple here”—he rubbed his rough hands along the outsides of his arms—“but here”—he placed them flat on his chest—“a color like the inside of a peach. Incredible. It used to make her very happy to see this bird. Part of me wanted to set a trap for it and catch it and keep it in a cage in the house to give my wife pleasure. But if I had done that, the bird would
have died, and Amelia would have been miserable. Me too.” Masso took another sip from his small cup and raised his eyes.

  Luca watched him for a few seconds, then nodded. “And the Germans think you’re stupid, Masso.”

  “Let them.”

  The farmer took the last sip from his cup and set it aside, and Luca sensed it was a signal: the comic routine was over. “Anything for Mentone and the others?”

  Something crossed Masso’s face then, a flicker of trouble. “There was supposed to be,” he said. “Don Claudio’s delivery has been delayed, it seems. There were supposed to be . . . funds. Rome, to Milan, to me, to you, to them. But our good priest hasn’t yet returned. Tell Mentone and his comrades they’ll have it next trip.”

  “They won’t like that.”

  Masso worked his lips, and the trouble appeared again. “And what are they going to do, Luca, shoot you? Fire you? You’re the most valuable man they have.”

  They sat for a moment in silence, Luca nursing his surprise. “The most valuable man they have.” No one had ever said anything like that to him. Masso looked out the window, then back at his guest. “Someone was killed in the hills near Santa Eligia two days ago. A Fascist. Stabbed.” He brought one hand up to the middle of his belly. “Here.”

  Luca nodded in a noncommittal way, watched.

  “Know anything about it?”

  The subject had caught him by surprise. In the space of two seconds, a silent argument took place within his thoughts, a voice making the case that he should hold back the true answer, protect himself, that there was something odd about this supposedly simple man. How did all this information reach him? His card-playing friends? Fascist contacts?