“Coffee, Babbo?” he said when he’d invited him in. “You’ve never come to visit me. I didn’t think you knew where I lived.”
His father was looking around, taking in the messy bedroom—seen through an open door—the expensive mahogany dining room table, the framed artwork on the walls. “Lucia knows,” he said without meeting Silvio’s eyes.
“Ah, the most beautiful sister,” he said, spooning coffee grounds into the espresso maker. His father had taken a seat at the head of the kitchen table, moving his hands about on the wood in a way that was completely alien to him. He looked to be patting it, keeping it in place, smoothing the already perfectly smooth surface.
Silvio set the cup in front of him, slid the silver sugar container toward him, and sat down.
His father fixed him with an eager stare, as if his blood were pumping at twice the usual rate. He ignored the coffee at first. “I found out where he is,” he said.
“Who, Babbo?”
His father waved one hand in the general direction of Palazzo Venezia.
“Mussolini?”
His father nodded and only then sweetened his coffee and took a sip. He smacked his lips. The look on his face was one of patriotic fervor. Unprecedented. In the first three minutes, he’d already spoken more words than in a typical lunch hour.
“He landed in a plane. On the water. Bracciano. Plane with the red cross on the side.”
“When?”
“A few days ago. Before lunch. They took him to Campo Imperatore.”
“Campo Imperatore? Gran Sasso? The hotel at the ski resort?”
A nod.
“That makes no sense, Babbo. What? They wanted to get him ready for ski season, give him the right size boots, a warm jacket?”
His father missed or ignored the humor completely. He was intent, focused. A runaway bull trotting down a narrow alley, one thing on his mind.
“No one else is there. They put him on the funicular. They sent him to the top. Three army men with him. All the other people, they made them leave the hotel before he came.”
“Who told you this?”
“The man who drove him. Eugenio Sacrosancto. My friend.”
I didn’t know you had friends, Silvio wanted to say, but two thoughts occurred to him then. The first was that taking il Duce to Campo Imperatore, one of the most isolated spots in the whole country, might, in fact, make sense after all. If they were trying to keep him in a place where no one could reach him, then the top of a ski resort in summer was a good choice. Especially Campo Imperatore. He’d been there himself, years before, a second-rate hotel at the top of a mediocre ski mountain. You couldn’t drive to the hotel because the access road went only as far as the base of the chairlift. It would be easy to guard him there, impossible for him to escape.
And then, the second thought: his father’s excitement came not from patriotism but purely and simply from the idea that there might be money involved, that the information was valuable to the people who were employing his son. For a moment, Silvio was tempted to judge him: he looked like a little boy there at the head of the table; he’d left his post at the Irish embassy and driven across the city, not out of anything as high-minded as familial love or moral responsibility but because he thought he might earn a few hundred lire in doing so . . . even though he was well paid, even though Silvio had set him up in a perfectly adequate apartment, and even though there was no need for extra money.
The temptation to pass judgment evaporated: it occurred to him that he and his father were not so different after all.
But then, as he pondered the new information, sipped his coffee, and looked at the curtains to avoid his father’s eyes, something else occurred to him. Two ways in which they were, in fact, very different. First, much as Silvio liked money, there was some other motivation acting within him these days—a hatred of the German bullies, a love of his beautiful Italia. And the second difference: he could keep a secret. His father, famously taciturn though he was, could not. He liked to be the one who knew.
“Babbo,” Silvio said carefully. “When you heard about this, did you tell anyone? Anyone besides me? Did you go into a bar after work or something and maybe mention it?”
His father looked down at his coffee cup. He didn’t answer the question.
As far as Silvio was concerned, he didn’t have to.
They sat there like that for another minute, old arguments clouding the air between them. His father, previously a grudging supporter of il Duce, was now, it seemed, willing to sell the man to his enemies for a few hundred lire. A few hundred it would be. Silvio went into the bedroom, found his wallet, and took out three hundred-lire notes. When he returned to the kitchen, his father was standing. He wanted to thank him, but for some reason, the words wouldn’t leave his throat. His father took the money and crushed it into his pants pocket, then, halfway out the door, looked up and met Silvio’s eyes. Something else there now. Still a boy, but a boy who’d accidentally broken a bedroom window with a rock, and wanted forgiveness. “I shouldn’t a told anyone,” he said.
“That’s okay, Babbo. As long as the guy you told wasn’t German, that’s okay. Don’t worry about it. Come see me anytime, and if you hear anything else, let me know.”
A grunt, a nod. His father was in the hall, walking toward the top of the stairway. He turned his head and looked at Silvio with one eye. No expression there now. No love, not even affection. Then the back of his square head again. Silvio listened to his feet scuffing the marble stairs and then the sound of the front door closing.
As long as he wasn’t a German, he thought, or reporting to one.
He went inside and dialed the secure number Andreottla had given him. Three rings and he heard a familiar voice say, “Pronto!”
“Italo,” he said, “it’s Silvio. I have something nice to give you. I need to wash and shave. I’ll be at our café in thirty minutes.”
Sixty-Five
Don Claudio couldn’t stop shaking. His knees hurt, pressed as they were against the marble kneeler by the weight above them. His hands were clasped in front of him, elbows on the rail, mouth and nose resting on his knuckles. Again and again, he repeated his petition to Mary, the beautiful prayer that ended with those harrowing words, “and at the hour of our death.” He had killed a man. It felt as if, in that one small movement of his second finger, he’d stepped through some kind of sacred barrier, a curtain of Christ’s words, and away into another universe. He had killed a man. In his mind’s eye, he could not stop seeing the bubbles of blood at the corners of the German’s mouth, the wet scarlet spirals on the wall. In his inner ear, he could not stop hearing the horrid choking gurgles. Had the officer been trying to speak his wife’s name?
He had taken a life.
And now he would pay. There was no possibility the Germans would fail to come looking for one of their own. Sant’Abbondio might not be the first place they’d check, but they’d be here eventually, and even in the unlikely event he was able to clean up all the blood himself, even in the extremely unlikely event he’d be able to hide the body, there was no way he’d be able to lie to them under interrogation. Even a simple question—“Have you seen Major So-and-so? A tall man, bald?”—would be enough, he knew, to set his face twitching. They were crude men, these Germans, but not stupid, and they seemed to have a sixth sense for secrets. All these months he’d been able to deceive them, protected by his robes and this building, by the improbability of a fat old priest working with the resistance. Now he would pay.
Mind whirling, he decided that he should at least try to make the dark, hours-long walk to Masso’s farmhouse and warn him, but when he heard the squeak of the doors, he knew he was too late. They had come for him. Already. The shaking turned violent. His teeth ground against each other as he prayed, making a horrible scratching sound. Mary, protect me, he thought. Protect me now. Give me strength now. He heard footsteps, barely audible, followed by a terrible silence. There would be no running now. More foots
teps. He tried but couldn’t keep himself from turning to look. A man there, a dark figure. He heard one word.
“Padre?”
Sixty-Six
Maria did what she could to make the poisonous mushrooms resemble edible ones. Some shaping with a knife, a bit of color added by virtue of potato skins boiled in a pot for half an hour. When she was finished, she chopped them into pieces no larger than the top knuckle of a finger, then washed her hands carefully, placed the mushrooms back in the mesh bag, took her bottle of oil, and forced herself to walk across the empty lot to what she still thought of as the Rossos’ home.
She kept her eyes down, fingers squeezing tight to the rough mesh and the top of the bottle. She didn’t know what she’d do when she saw the tall one’s face. She didn’t know if she’d smash him on the head with the bottle or erupt in tears, but as she walked, she prayed to Saint Jude, patron of hopeless cases, to give her strength. There wasn’t the slightest doubt in her mind now that God wanted this from her. She’d be acting, not only for herself but for all the other decent women in Italy, the girls, the female babies just being born. She stepped through the back door of the house as she always did, just another Italian woman serving the masters of the world.
In the kitchen, she set to work—lighting the gas stove from a box of matches she carried in her dress pocket, taking their fine beef from the refrigerator and chopping it, slicing an onion and setting it in a pan with the piss-oil, starting a pot of water boiling for the noodles, mixing flour and water and adding a spoonful of their sour cream to make the kind of brown gravy they liked on meat and which she herself would never in a thousand years put into her mouth. They had offered her some on other nights, and she’d refused, saying she didn’t like the taste. Perfect, she thought. A perfect excuse. Her only concern was that, once set into a warm pan with oil, the lepiota would smell different, so she waited until the fragrance of the cooking onions had filled the kitchen before pouring oil into another pan and putting in the mushrooms. For good measure, she covered them: if someone came into the room, he’d have no reason to doubt that these were simply the same kind of delicious funghi they’d eaten in her chicken cacciatore.
One by one, the men thumped downstairs in their black boots—they were like animals; the smell of food drew them from their lairs. Maria’s hands had started to sweat, and a drop ran down from her right armpit and into the side of her brassiere. She could feel her heart beating in her throat. She listened for the voice of the tall one and didn’t hear it. Perhaps he’d gone off into the woods and hanged himself out of guilt, drunk as he always seemed to be.
Through the open window, she heard the bells of San Domenico sounding out the hour. Nine o’clock—traditional dinner hour for Italians, but the Germans liked to eat earlier, so there was a note of impatience in the dining room’s loud voices. A woman had joined them. Well, that was a shame. She’d have to perish with her Nazi friends, that’s all.
Maria took as long as she could over the preparations, wanting the men to be ravenous by the time the food was served. No one came into the kitchen. Everything seemed to go perfectly. When the noodles were almost ready, she put salt and pepper on the meat, added a few more spoonfuls of sour cream, a dash of their harsh red wine. Next, the mushrooms went into the mix. Her hands did not shake; her resolve did not waver, not for a second. She knew—everyone in those parts knew—what kind of death they’d face: agonizing stomach pain, vomiting, explosive diarrhea, paralysis, and then, with a terrible slowness that would last, in fact, only a minute or two, the loss of the ability to breathe. They’d remain conscious to the end. She wondered how long it would take—less than half an hour, her son had said—and if the alcohol would strengthen or weaken the poison.
With her preparations and slow work, the meal was unusually late. The officers were calling out for food. Even the woman called out once, a high voice, the men laughing at her imitation of their accented Italian.
Sixty-Seven
By the time Luca reached Mezzegra, darkness had enveloped the town. In anticipation of air raids, Mussolini had ordered the streetlights to be kept off and lights from homes and businesses to be hidden as well as possible by curtains and blinds. But there was still some light from the stars and from the shaded windows of the shops, and, in any case, he could have steered the donkey through the streets by memory. He heard the church bells sound the hour. San Domenico, the larger lakeside church that still had a bell ringer. He’d grown up with that sound—seven a.m. and nine p.m.; to this day, it comforted him.
At the bottom of Piazza Garibaldi, he thought of continuing straight along the lakeside road—it was only another three kilometers to Masso’s house. Originally he’d planned to visit Don Claudio, return the cart with the proceeds from the market sales, and then slip up into the trees and come to his mother’s house, like a shadow, from the forest. But the military traffic had put him well behind schedule. He paused for a moment, and then decided and turned the donkey right, uphill. The climb was steep and the beast exhausted, and there was a risk in visiting his mother this way, in plain sight. Still, he was working—anyone could see that. He was unfit for military service—anyone could see that, too. He had his papers in order. He had a few unsold apples and some leaves and stems in the back, plus the empty bags that had held his mushrooms. What could they do to a son visiting his own mother?
Two ambulances raced past him on the statale, their horns sounding and retreating, the pulse of someone’s sorrow.
Up and up he went at the pace a man could walk. Exhausted as it was, the donkey seemed to have given up resisting. It placed one hoof in front of the other with a painful deliberateness, hoping for food and water at the end of its torment, hoping to be left alone then. Not unlike the Italian people, Luca thought bitterly.
He paused for a moment in front of the church but thought better of going in. Later, if there was time. He wanted to hold his mother, to bring her one of the apples, then carry the rest up to Sarah, later that night. The idea of taking her out in a boat on the lake had grown more absurd with every kilometer; he had another idea now about what to do for the cause . . . and what to do with Mentone’s money.
He pulled the cart to a stop at the side of his mother’s house and tied the reins to a tree. Without making a sound, he stepped quietly down the alley between the south wall and a steep drop-off. He turned the corner, every sense alert. There were no lights on behind the curtains, which was strange. It was too early for his mother to go to sleep. In the distance, he could see the Rossos’ house. He wondered if they were eating at this hour—late for German soldiers—and pictured his mother at the stove, a slave for them. Mocked. Humiliated.
Nursing a flame of anger, he reached the door and turned the handle, torn between not wanting to make noise and not wanting to startle his mother, who, having finished her duties, might be sleeping in a chair just inside. He opened the door, stepped quietly across the threshold, and turned on a lamp. From there, he could see the living room and kitchen. No one. He turned off the light, felt his way down the hall, and peeked into both bedrooms. Empty. She wasn’t asleep, so she must still be cooking or cleaning their dirty dishes.
For a little while, he stood in the darkness, seething, wondering if he should tap on the doorway above his head. But no—his mother probably had a signal, so his knocking would only terrify Rebecca. At last, time passing, he pulled the apple from his pocket and set it on the kitchen counter in a place he was sure his mother would see. He took out his knife, cut away a heart-shaped piece of the skin—an old signal of theirs from grade school days, a story that made Sarah smile—then went silently back outside, around the house, and turned the cart in the direction of Sant’Abbondio.
Sixty-Eight
It seemed to Maria that the meal had a somewhat strange smell, but, listening to the hilarity from the dining room, she decided the Nazi officers would be too drunk to notice. She carried in the bread and the butter they liked to smear all over it, a pot of noodles
—overcooked on purpose—and more bottles of wine, as they’d requested. And then, with anger bubbling up inside her like water at the boil, she mouthed a prayer; lifted the large platter of beef, onions, and mushrooms; and carried it to their table. The tall one wasn’t there. The rest of them raised a cheer for her when they saw the food, and said things, in their broken Italian, like “Our great chef!” “Maria the queen of the kitchen!” and “At last!” She nodded once and did what she could to keep any expression from her face. Not pride, not fear, not worry, not apology, not hatred. She could feel the redhead watching her, staring. When, after a suitable wait, she tried to retreat to the kitchen, he said, “Stay and eat with us tonight, Maria.”
She shook her head, started to say, “Not hungry,” but that would have been a too obvious lie. “I don’t really want to tonight. This kind of food—”
“Ah, yes, but we want you to, don’t we, men?”
A cheer went up. Mean. Sarcastic. Mocking. No one reached to pull out a chair for her. The redhead pointed to the place where the tall one usually sat and spooned a helping of the stroganoff onto a plate for her. “Wine?” he asked. “It’s Manischewitz.”
More brutal laughter. She pretended not to understand. Most of the men had started eating, shoveling food into their mouths and tearing at hunks of bread, sloshing the wine into their glasses and drinking down mouthfuls. But the redhead hadn’t touched his fork. He was watching her, smiling with no teeth showing. She took the seat and looked at the huge Nazi flag on the wall behind him.
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