Scutarro was still staring. “I thought you always got the money at Masso’s.”
“If the contact brings it to Masso, yes.”
“And he didn’t bring it?”
Luca stared down at his hands, almost too angry to speak. “No, he didn’t,” he said after a moment. He lifted his eyes, felt a strange new thought sparking in his brain: What did these men do with the money anyway? Spend it on themselves? “I told you that already. Are you accusing me of taking it, Scutarro? And spending it on what? A new car—”
“Basta,” Mentone interrupted. Enough. And then, in a voice barely audible from two meters away, “All right. Next time, then. When you come to get the papers . . . Right now we have something else for you, though this something else won’t happen for a while. A week, a few weeks, we can’t say.”
“My mother is cooking for the Germans now,” Luca blurted out, as if that would convince them to make this “something else” happen sooner. “In the Rossos’ house. They’re forcing her to cook.” He knew he shouldn’t go on, but he couldn’t stop himself. The nervousness had ahold of him. Beside it, he could feel the same demon that had inhabited his soul on the path west of Santa Eligia. He couldn’t look a second time at Scutarro. “I brought her the lepiota. If you give the order, it will be easy enough for her to mix them in with—”
Prinzano shook his head impatiently. “Too much,” he said. “They’ll be killed, yes, and then their Nazi brothers will murder a hundred Italians.”
“What are we supposed to do, then? Never kill them?”
“Your eagerness should be hammered into patience. Think of our comrades in the Soviet Union, what they’re going through now.”
Luca wanted to say, Yes, and what my father’s going through. Instead he took a breath, said, “I’ve been patient a long time.”
“And you’ve done us great services.”
“Tiny things. I want something important. I want to be trusted!”
“You wouldn’t be here if you weren’t trusted,” Scutarro said in a low, nasty voice. “You wouldn’t walk out of this barn alive.”
Luca turned then and looked him full in the face. He thought of the knife in his belt, the Fascist on the path. He tried to slow his breathing. The new idea sparked inside him a second time. Maybe there was another, better use for the money when Don Claudio passed it on to him. It was a risky game, but he’d come all this way again, done all these things, and he could feel, with a sickening certainty, that he wasn’t yet one of them. He wasn’t a party member, never wanted to be, but he was a partisan. A new breed of Italian fighter. Their goal was the same goal, at least for now: a free Italy. He could feel the new idea swelling up in his thoughts. “You should be giving orders,” Masso had said.
“Calm yourself,” Mentone told him in a way that made Luca want to spit.
“There’s a landing strip,” Scutarro said, “in Varenna. On the other side of the lake from you. We have information that soon, within the month, there will be Luftwaffe there. Fighter planes. Focke-Wulf 190s. The Nazis are worried to the point of insanity about what will happen now that Mussolini’s gone. And the Allied bombers are getting more aggressive. Doing more raids. On Rome now. They bombed Frascati the other day where the Germans have their headquarters.”
“How do you know that?” Luca asked, and immediately regretted it.
Scutarro swallowed, glared at him, went on. “Everybody knows. Word is all over Rome. The Nazis feel the Americans creeping up the legs of their pants, about to cut off their balls. Our contact there tells us the landing strip is being readied.”
Luca listened, watched Scutarro’s eyes, waited. Our contact, he thought. You and your Nazi-loving contact have maybe another day to live. He pressed his lips tightly together.
“We have a boat docked in the flats not far from Lenno. You know the area?”
Luca nodded. He knew it well. Sarah had been born and raised there.
Mentone spoke up. “A friend’s boat. A small rowboat. A fishing pole hidden there on one side. You’ll know it because the gunwales are trimmed in blue. We want you to start using it to go out on the lake at dusk. Stay out in the darkness for a few hours. Pretend to be fishing.”
Luca waited. “That’s all? Pretend to be fishing? At night?”
“Patience, Luca,” Prinzano said quietly. “We have to set things up. We’re working on a tiny budget, with few weapons, a very small number of men. We have to put the pieces in place long before we do anything big.”
“Later,” Mentone said, “you’ll use the boat to go to the other side of the lake, to Bellano. You’ll leave the boat in front of a square white house just to the south of the main dock there, where the ferry departs from. You’ll see the ferry because they keep it there at night. You’re good with your hands, yes?”
Luca nodded.
“And you have some tools?”
“Every tool that exists,” he said. And then, “From my father.”
Scutarro smirked at him as if he were a little boy.
“Good,” Mentone went on. “When the time comes, we want you to take the boat there, then go by foot from Bellano to Varenna, find the airstrip, do as much damage as you can to as many planes as you can, and then make your way back to the dock and bring the boat back to Lenno. If you can’t get back to the boat for some reason, just leave it—leave nothing in it except the fishing pole—and go into the hills there and find your way home. Can you do it?”
“I can do anything!” Luca exclaimed, acting now, playing the role of the excited boy. If Scutarro were, in truth, a traitor, then the whole foolish plan—the boat, the nighttime fishing, the airplane sabotage—was probably his idea. A trap, a setup.
“You can take your Sarah along if it makes sense,” Scutarro said. “Your decision. Or we can use her in other ways. Is this what you want, her working with us?”
Luca nodded with as much conviction as he could summon. A setup for her, too, he was thinking. Another Jew eliminated.
“Is that what she wants?”
“I think so.”
“Take her with you, then. It looks better. A couple fishing in the moonlight. Romantic. For now, just take the boat out and pretend to fish. Can you row with . . . the arm?”
Luca stared at him, and eventually Scutarro nodded and broke eye contact, pretending to listen to the sound of a Klaxon beyond the barn walls.
“And do the other things you’ve been doing so well,” Mentone said. “The crash on the curve above Cadenabbia claimed two lives and damaged a Nazi troop truck.”
Luca tried not to show any expression. Finally, two actual German soldiers killed. Finally, something.
“That’s it, then. When you get back, go see your contact and get the money to us as soon as you can.”
Luca glared at him, waited for more. The men were silent. They wanted their money; the rest was talk and, in Scutarro’s case, treachery. Luca stood and brushed a few pieces of straw from his pants. He could feel Scutarro’s eyes on him. When he turned around, he felt a cold current run up along his spine, as if he were about to be shot.
Forty-Eight
Don Claudio lingered an extra day in Milano. He didn’t know why he hadn’t told the archbishop he was thinking of spending the night, why he hadn’t gone back to the curia and asked to be put up there, why he hadn’t suggested they have dinner together. He was exhausted; that was part of it—physically, emotionally, spiritually. Emptied of energy. Barely holding himself together. So, after his visit to the curia and after his inexpensive lunch, he’d found a cheap boarding house, rented a room (they still gave clergy a discount—that much hadn’t changed), collapsed on the sagging mattress, and slept right through dinner and breakfast and until midmorning of the following day. Wrong of him not to hurry back to Masso with the money and wrong not to be back at Sant’Abbondio saying Mass, he knew that. But Masso would understand. And the four women, his only regulars, would forgive him: it was wartime; ordinary schedules, ordinary expectations, ha
d to be set aside.
He left the rooming house and went and sat in the Duomo for a long while, burying himself in prayer, then found another inexpensive lunch and decided there was no option but to head home. With every step, the heavy statuette bumped against his leg, but it was the other part of the meeting he couldn’t stop thinking about. Guns. There had been dangerous assignments before this, yes, increasingly so, but he’d never been involved with guns, and he worried he might see the sadistic Austrian at the station, and the man, via some evil magic, might read the fear on his face.
He barely made the two o’clock train. On the ride north from Milan to Como, his second-class car was all but empty—one middle-aged woman with a crying baby sitting a few rows in front of him; that was all. Her grandchild, he was quite sure. Who knew what had happened to the mother and father? In the father’s case, it was easy enough to guess. The great Duce had sent him off to Greece or Albania or Libya or to help the Germans in Russia, sacrificing Italian blood on the altar of Hitler’s massive Nazi ego. The mother had been put to work in one of the armament factories in the Po Valley or lived in Milan and was sending her child out into the countryside because of the threat of air raids.
As if his thoughts had mingled with physical reality, off to his left, Don Claudio spotted a pillar of thick black smoke. A bombed factory, he guessed. It meant the Allies were gaining control of the air, even this far north. Which meant that, in spite of all their antiaircraft artillery and fighter planes, the Germans were unable to keep the bombers away. They were necessary, these raids; he understood that: the factories made the tanks and trains and artillery shells that would end up killing the enemies of the Reich. All the same, innocent people, innocent Italians, would die in the bombing, or be maimed, or burned in horrible ways. Babies like this one squalling up ahead would be orphaned. The sorrow caused by war would stretch into future generations and make for a genealogy of wound and loss. Hatred, anger, bitterness, mourning. Italy would never be the same, and it seemed to him that Benito Mussolini and his supporters bore the full weight of that sin.
As the train approached Lomazzo—the halfway mark—Don Claudio slipped his hands into the pockets of his robe and pretended to sleep. His left hand took hold of the statuette. He was doing what little he could, moving sums of money and now guns, keeping a few life-or-death secrets, relaying messages. He had to believe there were scores of Italians like him, men and women, old and young, priests and nuns and laity, all of them risking these small acts of resistance. It wasn’t much against the hundreds of thousands of trained German soldiers with their tanks and machine guns, but the movement would surely grow, and maybe it would make a difference in the speed with which the Allies were able to fight their way up the peninsula. How long would it be? A month, a year, five years, ten? And what if Roosevelt and Churchill failed? What would happen to the resistance fighters then? What would happen to souls like Masso and Luca and Archbishop Maniscalco and the crying baby at the front of the train car? What would happen to Italy?
At the Como station, he had to wait more than an hour before catching the last bus north along the western side of the lake. In peacetime, this ride was an exhibition of stunning natural beauty, emerald hills folding down against sapphire water, sunlight playing on the lake and casting dark shadows in the valleys, small towns with their clusters of shops, quaint cobbled streets, church steeples. Now, although the physical circumstances were the same, all that beauty seemed to be painted in shades of gray. It made him think of how beautiful Rebecca Zinsi had been as a young woman with her long dark hair and vibrant eyes, and how age—not war—had gradually muted her good looks. Time wore all of them down, administered harsh lessons in humility to even the finest physical specimens. She was still such a fine woman, though; the years hadn’t changed that. Still the same warm, brave soul she’d been during their brief affair and afterward. As the bus trundled along the statale, his mind traveled back to their childhood along this lake, their friendship, the skinny Jewish girl and the fat Catholic boy.
That early connection had persisted even after he’d taken his vows and been assigned, first to Verona and then, back in his own hometown, at the Church of Sant’Abbondio. They’d greet each other on the streets, sometimes stop to converse about simple things, the weather, mutual friends. For reasons he found puzzling—could it have been anti-Semitism even then?—Rebecca had never enjoyed a lasting love relationship, and he’d always been able to read the loneliness in her eyes without a word being spoken about it.
He had his own lonely hours. Seven years into his vow of celibacy, much to his surprise and shame, he’d found himself assailed by the voices of temptation, battered by waves of doubt. There had been a small slip in Verona—not lovemaking but physical affection. A slightly older woman. Two times.
And then, in his new assignment, as he walked Mezzegra’s familiar streets, temptation reared its head again. He wrestled with it, tried to turn his thoughts away from desire and toward prayer, even spoke about it with Archbishop Maniscalco on one of his trips to Milan.
One autumn day, in a period of particularly intense loneliness, brought on, he supposed, by the passing of his mother, he was walking along the promenade and saw Rebecca coming the other way. It seemed to him that God had sent her—a female friend—to salve his pain. They talked a bit, agreed to meet for coffee. That was the beginning: first, morning coffees in the Bar Lake Como, then walks along the promenade, all of it so innocent, so helpful to him in his grief and spiritual confusion. Their deep conversations, circling as they did around their twin unhappinesses, their diverse faiths, the state of their nation, were like doses of medicine. One of those walks took them past her small ramshackle home in the flats, Quercia Street in Lenno, and, on a whim, she invited him in for lunch. Nothing could have been more innocent, nothing. Except that, alone with her in that tiny apartment, with the bedroom visible from the kitchen table where they sat and talked and ate, an idea took hold of him. A wisp of thought. Wasn’t what he felt for Rebecca a genuine manifestation of love? And wasn’t she suffering from loneliness? And wasn’t it true that no one would be hurt, that the vow of celibacy was perhaps outdated, or that his vocation wasn’t as sincere as he’d thought it had been? He reached his foot forward under the table and touched her ankle, tentatively, something that could almost have been interpreted as an accident. She looked up at him, surprise shining in her eyes. Surprise and a barely concealed joy. It was a short distance then, a very short distance, from that table to their secret life.
After that, for weeks after that, he’d find excuses to slip away from Sant’Abbondio and meet her. He supposed their love affair had begun like so many others, and that the thrill they felt, skin to skin in her small bedroom, kissing, touching each other in intimate ways, making love, was something billions of others knew well. But he didn’t know it well. The feel of her naked body was a continual surprise to him, a gift from God. He remembered walking back uphill to the church, sticky with sweat, elated. He remembered feeling, despite the breaking of his vows, that he was blessed.
What had it been, five weeks? They’d stopped by mutual agreement because one night they’d come within seconds of being seen on a bench kissing in the dark. But perhaps there had been other, more powerful reasons: guilt, the limits of their affection for each other, a preference, in both of them, for the solitary life.
And then, a few weeks later, she came to the rectory bearing her news, with her beautiful face shadowed by dread. Immediately, he’d offered to leave the Church and be a real father to the child. Part of him wanted to do that, and part of him did not. But, terrified though he was of the shame that awaited him, he’d offered, multiple times. Rebecca had refused, absolutely, saying she couldn’t bear any more guilt. But secretly he thought she realized, even then, that she wouldn’t be happy with him as a husband. Something about him wasn’t suited to the domestic life, and he’d be no equal companion for a beautiful, intelligent, vivacious woman like her. And part of him c
herished his solitude, his hours alone with God. Perhaps she knew him better than he knew himself. Now she was living in an attic, hunted like an animal, and he was finding ways to keep her fed and alive until this madness passed.
Gazing out the bus window, studying the brush of afternoon light on the mountainsides on the far side of the lake, a new idea occurred to him. He pushed it aside.
But it returned and, just then, as the bus from the Como station passed through one of the road’s many tunnels and emerged into a view of the pretty hillside town of Argegno, he made a decision. If he survived the war, if Rebecca survived it, he’d leave the priesthood and ask her to marry him. If she agreed, he’d be as much of a father to Sarah as he could in the time that was left to him.
The decision brought him a sudden sense of peace.
The bus let off passengers just beyond the River Telo, his next-to-the-last stop, and there a pair of SS officers climbed aboard and walked slowly down the aisle demanding papers. When they reached Don Claudio, one of them said, “You’re fine, Padre,” but the other stood there, shaking his head. “Papers,” he demanded.
Don Claudio reached into the inside pocket of his robe and took out his identification papers. The SS man held them in one gloved hand and studied them carefully before looking up. “A real priest or a fake one?”
“Real.”
“How do we know?”
At the unexpected question, Don Claudio felt a wave of fear rise up inside him, felt his feet, ankles, and calves start to tremble again. The statuette seemed to have grown five times as heavy in his pocket. The second SS man had come over now; they were both staring down at him. For some reason, just at that moment, Don Claudio remembered the decision he’d come to not ten minutes earlier: to leave the priesthood and marry the only woman he had ever loved, to give her a measure of respectability for the first time in her adulthood, to tell their daughter the truth and see if she would allow him to be a father to her after all these years. He looked into the eyes of the SS men, felt the fear, started to utter a stuttering response, but then he experienced what he could only describe as the hand of grace, the touch of an angel—it seemed to come directly from his new resolution. The fear remained, but now, in some inner world, he was no longer ashamed of being afraid. It seemed almost as if he were embracing his terror, then turning it to stand beside him as an ally, the way one might welcome a wayward brother with an arm around his shoulders. He looked directly into the eyes of the sterner of the two officers and said the first thing that occurred to him: “You will answer to God one day.”
Once Night Falls Page 17