Once Night Falls

by Roland Merullo

  Forty-Five

  Before dawn, armed with a camera and accompanied by two of his best men, Skorzeny left the Pratica di Mare airfield southwest of Rome in a Heinkel He 111 medium-range bomber, headed for Sardinia. He doubted very much that Selenzen, so terrified of losing his position as acting assistant chief of Italian intelligence, so concerned about forfeiting the promotion it promised, had made up the story of il Duce on La Maddalena, but he didn’t trust the man, not the way one needed to trust an intelligence officer. And so he was about to do a reconnaissance flight and see the area with his own eyes before he got too deep into detailed planning. Certainly before he committed any of his men to the rescue.

  Because the skies west of central Italy were known of late to be busy with enemy aircraft, his pilot took a circuitous route, heading north toward Elba and then across to German-controlled Corsica and back south to Sardinia. En route, they saw only one plane—a Red Cross seaplane, trundling along slowly below them in the opposite direction, as if carrying the weight of the war.

  His pilot refilled on Sardinia, at Pausania, and then took off again and made the short flight north to Palau, a stone’s throw from the place Mussolini was supposedly being held. After conferring with some of the Luftwaffe officers stationed there—they’d heard nothing of note—Skorzeny boarded the He 111 a third time, crawled forward, and positioned himself on his belly in the bomber’s glass nose, just behind the port gun. He had his camera and a marine chart, and he felt a familiar twinge of excitement. If Selenzen wasn’t lying or misinformed, if he could get decent photos, if they had a little time to plan the operation, if they were able to include some of their troops stationed on Corsica for good measure, if they could retain the element of surprise, then he believed he had an excellent chance of success. And success would mean promotion, maybe even the Knight’s Cross, Germany’s highest battlefield honor. For a minute he allowed himself to savor an image of Otto Skorzeny, promoted to major, standing in front of the Führer in the camouflaged compound and basking in his approval, perhaps having a decoration pinned onto his chest. It wasn’t so impossible to hope that the name Skorzeny would go down in the lore of the Waffen-SS.

  For a little while, as they approached La Maddalena Island, he busied himself by snapping photos and admiring the pale greens and blues of the tropical waters. From an altitude of five thousand meters, Sardinia looked like an island paradise, Italian-style. He was no more a fan of sea bathing than of the too-warm Italian weather; still, he could imagine coming here for a month after the war with a beautiful woman, perhaps even his wife, eating and drinking, and then heading back north to work.

  All was going according to plan . . . until his pleasant musings were interrupted by the words of the rear gunner coming over the plane’s speaker. “Two British pursuit planes behind,” the gunner said in the grim, calm voice that was called for in these situations. Another few seconds and Skorzeny could hear the rat-a-tat-a-tat-a-tat of the rear gun and see tracers flashing by. He took hold of the triggers in front of him, but there was no way to turn and fire backward, so he was forced to wait, imagining a bullet in the spine.

  The pilot took evasive action, tilting the craft down and toward the starboard side in a sharp curl. Nothing but the screeching noise of air against glass and steel and the rough lifting of the entrails. Skorzeny thought that was the end of it—how could the British damage such a machine?—until he realized the downward motion wasn’t changing. The descent had grown steeper; he was nearly standing on his head now, pressing one palm against the gun handle and one against the glass to keep himself from sliding forward. He glanced to the side. The port engine had been hit, the propeller twisting helplessly in the wind. Another two quick breaths and they were heading almost straight down, the green and blue surface racing toward them at a terrifying rate. Someone called out, “Brace for a hard—” and they struck.

  Skorzeny was briefly knocked out. When he came to, he’d been thrown sideways and up into the cockpit, there was debris everywhere, and the plane was floating back toward the surface like a half-full beer bottle thrown hard into the sea from above. He was knee-deep in water, the ocean pouring in. He and the forward gunner managed to open the top hatch and pull themselves up and out. They fell over sideways into the sea. The pilot popped out next, clutching a signal flare and already inflating the rubber dinghy. Relieved of their weight, the plane lifted a meter or so higher in the water, enough to allow the two men in the rear bubble to get out. Non-swimmers apparently, those two clambered onto the wings and stood there, waiting for the pilot to maneuver the dinghy toward them. Skorzeny scrambled up past the ruined engine, climbed in through the cockpit hatch, hurried into the half-submerged fuselage for his camera, and squeezed out again seconds before the plane went into another nosedive, not in the air this time. Half a minute later, it had disappeared.

  One man rowing and one of the better swimmers in the water, pushing the dinghy from behind, they managed, after twenty minutes of work, to reach the nearest shore. They ran the dinghy onto the pebbled beach and climbed a trail up the side of a low cliff, looking for high ground. Uniforms soaked, boots full of water, their brains recovering from the terror of the last few minutes, they stood silently in the sun, composing themselves like the soldiers they were, waiting to see what would happen. Skorzeny felt a pain burning along his left side—no blood, though—and stood apart from the others, wondering if the crash might be an omen. No, he decided, just the opposite: all his life, he’d been protected by a kind of miraculous luck. Nothing could kill him, not Russian bullets, not exploding tank shells that had taken the life of the soldier beside him near Minsk, not British fighter planes. He felt a strange certainty take hold of him then: he’d survive the war, rescue Mussolini, make a name for himself. In the end, the truth would win out. The master race would rule.

  After an hour or so—almost long enough for the brutal Sardinian sun to dry their wet uniforms—they saw a military boat approaching along the strait that separated them from the main island. His pilot sent up the flare from the signal pistol. The boat slowed, turned toward them. They clambered back down, paddled out, were taken aboard.

  Ironically enough, the ship was an Italian antiaircraft vessel. The men there gave them a lukewarm greeting, fed them, stood apart from them on the deck. With allies like this, Skorzeny thought . . .

  Next day, after a night spent grinding his teeth against the pain and struggling to find a comfortable sleeping position, he learned from the company doctor that he’d broken three ribs.

  Forty-Six

  In the early-morning darkness, Colonel Anzellini and four armed men led Mussolini down the path to the water. The Red Cross seaplane had been moved up next to the dock, and il Duce was instructed to climb aboard. It was useless to ask where they were taking him; he knew that, but he asked anyway, in as stern a voice as he could manage.

  “We can’t say, Duce,” the colonel answered. And not, it seemed to Mussolini, in a tone of apology.

  “You can, but you won’t,” he said. The colonel wouldn’t even look at him. The plane’s engines were loud, the whole machine seeming to tremble, as if it were anxious to be airborne, as if it sensed how important it was to get him away from La Maddalena as quickly as possible. Unafraid though he was, Mussolini had long held to the superstition that he would die in an airplane crash. He was a skilled pilot, he’d flown many thousands of kilometers without incident, but the notion haunted him—at takeoff especially. He took his place grumpily in a window seat and, after two or three minutes of waiting, felt the plane leave its mooring. The pilot turned it toward open water. The seaplane gathered speed, bounced across the blue surface, and, as gradually as if it were carrying a battalion of soldiers, became airborne. Off they went in first light, the quiet bay dropping below them and then the broader expanse of the Tyrrhenian Sea showing itself and revealing the curve of the Earth. Through the glass, he could see the sun cresting the horizon. They were headed east, then, back to the Italian mai
nland.

  He turned to the colonel beside him and over the noise of the propellers asked, “Who do you work for?”

  The colonel pinched up his eyes. “Che?”

  “Who do you take orders from? Who do you serve?”

  “The Italian state.”

  “But I am the Italian state.”

  “No longer, Duce.”

  “The title has not been taken from me.”

  Colonel Anzellini shrugged, looked away. The engines droned on. The day spreading out around them seemed the very definition of peace, and for a moment, Mussolini let himself wonder if there was any possibility that some God presided over it all as Nicolina believed, a Jesus in the sky, watching them. If so, then how could such a God allow treachery and ingratitude? What kind of God would that be? No, his father had been correct: religion and belief in God were substitutes for action. Palliatives. Hopeful lies.

  The colonel left his seat and went forward into the cockpit.

  Staring out the window into the morning sunlight, Mussolini saw another plane above them, larger, moving in the other direction—back toward Sardinia. He squinted and tried to make out the insignia. A German bomber? It suddenly made sense to him why he was in a Red Cross plane and not one from the Italian air force: his captors worried that someone would shoot them down.

  The larger plane moved on, west, a Heinkel it might have been; he couldn’t be sure. Part of him worried it had been a lone British aircraft that had just dropped a load of explosives on the great city of Rome, an idea, a possibility, that made him sick to his stomach. The Vatican, the magnificent ruins of the empire, the civilians at risk—Churchill and Roosevelt, those two animals, would do anything, kill anyone, to win the war.

  In less than an hour, the plane began to descend. Below, through wisps of cloud, Mussolini could make out his country’s distinctive western shoreline, but he couldn’t yet tell exactly where they were headed. North of Rome, he guessed. From beneath the thin clouds, he could see Italy’s mountainous spine. There was the peak of Gran Sasso, standing tall over the Apennines like a father over his children. The fuselage began to rock and dip in moderate turbulence, and he heard one of the men behind him vomiting. Lower still and he could see the outlines of a large lake. Bracciano, it must be. North of Rome was correct, then. Not very far north, either. He sat up in his seat, wiped his forehead with the palm of one hand, brushed a few crumbs from his pants legs. They were returning him to power!

  The pilot wasn’t particularly skillful. After circling the lake once in gusting winds, he banged the plane down onto the water. It bounced high, hit the rough surface again, made another small bounce, and then they were skimming along the lake toward a dock set just downhill from a building that had once housed a famous hillside restaurant. It was closed now; Mussolini could see the shuttered windows. He himself had eaten there on several occasions, and now he tried to remember the name. After a moment, it came to him: Il Re e la sua corte. The King and His Court. The King and His Court was out of business now.

  The seaplane taxied to the dock, where a small caravan awaited him. Three trucks, a police car, another squad of Italians in uniform. To a man, they saluted. He returned the salutes with dignity. He was escorted to the back seat of the car, a soldier to either side, two in front, and the caravan moved away from the lake like a dark serpent twisting along the curving country road. In the half hour of silence that followed, as they headed south on that road, his thoughts flipped this way and that like a fish on the dock. He was going to be returned to power. The king would flee or beg his forgiveness. Or perhaps, he thought after a moment, a surrender had been arranged.

  But then, when they came to the ring road at Prima Porta, instead of heading straight on, into the heart of the city, the driver followed the truck ahead of him left, east, and then onto the Salaria, the ancient salt road that had been built by the Romans. Il Duce’s thoughts flipped again. He could barely keep himself from crying out in joy, from laughing, from clapping his captors on their epauletted shoulders. They were heading into the Abruzzo, a part of Italy he loved, a people he admired more than any others. A meeting with the king there, perhaps, or with the traitorous Badoglio. A negotiation. A reinstatement under certain conditions he could soon ignore.

  Through the windshield, he caught a glimpse of Italy’s tallest peak, soon to be snow-covered, rising up like a father, a leader, a beautiful promise. “Gran Sasso,” he said, almost in jubilation.

  The driver glanced at him in the mirror. “Si, Duce,” he said, as if their destination had been obvious all along. “Si.”

  But something in the driver’s tone of voice was off, and the idea of celebration suddenly seemed misplaced.

  Forty-Seven

  Culillo II was hungry and so, sensing the end of his day’s work, a bit more cooperative. In the gathering darkness, Luca led the donkey north out of Dubino, away from the market, its hooves clacking on the cobblestone streets. Monte Disgrazia loomed close in front of him—The Mountain of Disgrace—almost purple in the last of the twilight. German searchlights flashed across it to the east where the road—one hairpin turn after the next—wound like a huge black snake across the pass from Innsbruck. The mountains and hills were living creatures to him, had always been. In the shadows now, they seemed to be whispering in his ear. Imagined instructions. “A job worthy of your skills,” they promised. “The most valuable man they have . . .” “You should be giving the orders.”

  But it was a kind of self-defense—he knew that. A distraction from worrying about Scutarro. He’d taken his father’s knife from his knapsack and slid it into his belt, beneath the covering of his shirttail. He kept trying to parse Masso’s words. For lies, for trickery.

  The streets were quiet here, citizens in their homes, Germans asleep or going about their evil business. He passed the ancient church on the town’s northern margin, the church where his mother had taken him once when he was very small. He remembered her kneeling before the thin wooden Jesus on a cross and that there were no pews. How many wars, how many treacheries had that stone building witnessed? He was tempted to stop and go inside for a few minutes of contemplation—a new idea for him—but it was already late.

  In the tiny village of Nuovo Olonio, just outside Dubino, he stopped the cart in front of a two-story stucco building with a sign out front: LOCANDA ALPINA. Alpine Inn. How they stayed in business since the war started, he had no idea. No tourists now, no skiers in winter or hikers in summer. Maybe they, too, received funds from mysterious sources. Maybe there were Italian or American or British financiers funneling money to the resistance, through the archbishop, or Masso, or people he didn’t know.

  He unhitched the donkey and tied it to a metal fence rail. The innkeeper’s teenage daughter—mind of a six-year-old, heart of an angel—brought Culillo a bit of damp hay and showed Luca upstairs to his room. He washed, was given an apple, dried beef, some bread and weak tea for his supper, and then, instead of lying down to sleep as a normal guest would have, he summoned the last of his energy, reached down to the bottom of his courage, went out the back door, and climbed a crooked kilometer along a grassy slope to the barn.

  Just inside the door, he paused a moment to let his eye adjust to the darkness. The smell of hay, spiderwebs in the doorway, long-unused metal milk pails in the dirt at his feet. A bit of moonlight slanted in from a window in the loft. He checked the knife in the back of his belt, climbed a wooden ladder, and there, in the far left corner, found the three men who had been waiting for him, no doubt for over an hour now. Mentone, Scutarro, Prinzano. All of them wiry and dark haired. Intellectuals, politically active, self-serious. They nodded, gestured for him to sit. Without waiting, Luca took Sarah’s passport from the pocket inside his shirt, handed it to Prinzano, and asked if it would be possible to have new papers made for her. Another last name, a different religion. Prinzano stared at the passport in the frail light, then looked up.

  “She’s Jewish.”

  Luca nodded.
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  “And you trust her?”

  Luca stared back in answer until Prinzano looked away, nodded, set the passport aside. “She’s pregnant,” he said then.

  Prinzano nodded again, unsurprised, and offered nothing in the way of congratulations. “We’ll try to have it by your next visit,” he said after a moment. “It isn’t easy. A friend of a friend in Rome, some Sicilian, runs the printing operation. We have to be unbelievably careful trying to get things to him.”

  “I’ll expect it,” Luca said. “Next visit.” Something in Prinzano’s tone bothered him. These were his brothers-in-arms, yes, but hard-core Bolsheviks, too. There was only so far they’d go to help someone so indifferent to their miraculous party. For months, he’d been bringing them money and messages, following their orders, and they’d kept him outside the tight circle of confidence in which they operated, kept feeding him jobs large enough to get him captured or killed but too small to make him feel like a true member of the group. He could sense Scutarro staring at him. Suspicious, still, after all he’d done. A spy, a traitor, maybe a killer. Luca couldn’t force himself to look in his direction. He cleared his throat and was about to make his case for a bigger assignment when Mentone said, “Do you have the money?”

  Luca shook his head. “It wasn’t delivered to Masso’s by this morning, and I haven’t had a chance to see the contact. I’m going there tomorrow . . . as soon as I get back. I’ll bring it next time.”