Once Night Falls

by Roland Merullo

  “Don’t be shy with us,” he said. “You are our cook now, our friend. We know you to be a good woman.”

  She picked at the food at first, just breaking off bits of onion and nibbling. The redhead still hadn’t lifted his fork. “Lost your appetite?” he asked quietly. The others seemed not to be paying attention.

  At that point, Maria realized the man must have detected something in her face or her movements. She decided it didn’t matter anymore. If she was going to die without seeing her husband again, this was as good a way as any—painful, brutally painful, but fast. And she would take a houseful of German officers with her. She thought of her son. Of Rebecca. She swallowed several large forkfuls in succession, and only then did the redhead begin to eat. She waited for something to happen, but her stomach felt normal. She wished she’d asked Luca for a more exact timing, an antidote perhaps, but that was in the past now. Most likely Sabatino was gone, frozen to death months ago in an alien land. Most likely her soul would be joining his today in a more peaceful world. She asked for wine and was served half a glass. She asked for bread. She drank as much water as she could without attracting attention. Perhaps she could dilute the poison and survive.

  The men ate quickly, emptied the wine bottles as if they were filled with water, mopped up the last of the gravy with pieces of bread. They sat back, sighed, complimented her, and made more bad jokes about Russia and Russian food. As soon as the first one stood up and went off with the woman to his other pleasures, Maria left her seat, left her meal half-eaten, and began clearing the plates. Poisonous though it was, the food had tasted fine, and the men—even the redhead with his late start—had eaten all of it. She felt something in her belly now, a bad tightening, as if a thin, venomous viper were winding itself around her intestines, preparing to bite. She was about to make herself throw up in the sink, but that would have drawn too much attention, so she left the plates unwashed and hurried out the back door.

  She made it only about fifty meters before the first vicious cramp hit her, knocking her to her knees. She got to her feet, went on a few more steps, then another cramp hit, a knife in the lower belly, bad as the pains of childbirth. She fell to her knees again, went down on all fours, then rolled onto her side as the pain radiated through her abdomen, sharp fingers taking hold of her there and squeezing without mercy. She was lying in the dirt, looking back at the Rossos’ house, as if it were part of a terrible dream. The men had eaten more than she’d eaten, but their bodies were larger, and they were in better condition. She retched, violently, and could think about nothing but her own pain and death. She began to pray and had gotten through the first line—Ave Maria, piena di grazia—when she heard the Rossos’ door slam open and saw someone there, leaning sideways against the jamb, backlit by the kitchen lamp. The man had one hand on his belly and, in the other, what looked, from this distance, like a pistol.

  Sixty-Nine

  Luca tied the donkey to a tree beside the church and fed the tired beast three of the shriveled apples. He’d get water inside, water and a bucket. He’d visit with Don Claudio, perhaps share a glass of wine with him, ask his advice about what Masso had told him. He’d take the donkey back to Masso’s, give him the report, get the money, then climb to the cabin so Sarah wouldn’t worry. Though he doubted the front doors of the church would be unlocked at this hour, he approached them anyway. There was no sound from the nearby houses and very little light, but not many people lived in this part of Mezzegra anyway. To his surprise, the old wooden doors were unlocked. He tugged on one side quietly. The hinges squeaked.

  Inside, a few votive candles flickered; it took his one working eye a moment to adjust to the meager light they cast. He walked slowly past them, toward the altar, scanning the empty pews and, as always, not feeling much inspiration from the marble statues along the walls. Something else hung in the air of the old building, though, some other spirit. He stopped and listened. From the front of the church, he thought he heard whispered prayers. Someone had come here at this late hour, praying for a husband or brother on the front or a son in the mountains. He went forward another few steps, and the praying ceased. He could see a figure at the altar rail now, kneeling. A man. A few more steps and he saw the man turn and look at him over his shoulder, a terrified gesture. It looked like Don Claudio himself, and across the pews of the dark nave, Luca called out one word: “Padre?”

  Seventy

  Sarah awoke with a start and found herself looking up, through tree branches, at a starry sky. She felt the damp moss beneath her back and heard an owl calling in the trees, and, for a moment, before she remembered where she was and what had brought her there, she enjoyed a bit of peace.

  A strand of hair had fallen across her right eye. She tucked it back in place, stood up, and looked around. A few hundred meters ahead of her, Maria’s house loomed in the shadows, moonlight like a dusting of flour on the stony southeastern wall. Sarah was overtaken by a sudden fit of terror, one of those vague premonitions, the same “bad air” she remembered from childhood. In the summer darkness, the house seemed to her like some kind of mausoleum, an oversize gravestone. What if, just after she hurried away from the window, the German had strangled Maria, then found out her mother was hiding there and raped and killed her, too? What if, by running away, she had failed to save them? She placed the palm of her right hand on her belly and walked closer, keeping in the first line of trees. No lamplight showed in the kitchen this time. She stood still, eyes fixed on the windows.

  As the night deepened and the air cooled, as she waited in that spot longer and longer—ten minutes, fifteen—it began to seem strange to the point of impossibility that all was dark in Maria’s house. She took the wild apple out of her pocket, had one sour bite, then threw it aside. There was no sound from the house, no door closing, no water in the sink, no toilet flushing. Nothing. Luca called his mother la regina dei nottambuli, the queen of night owls: she never went to sleep this early—just after ten, she guessed. Never went out except to church and the market. It made no sense.

  At last, she decided she had to take the risk. She stepped out of the trees and went quietly across the back yard, trying not to startle the sleeping hens, skirting the edge of Maria’s garden, holding to the fence post there for a few last seconds. She didn’t want to step into the house unannounced, and she didn’t want to knock, either, for fear of waking the sleeping women—if they were sleeping—and frightening them to death. She hesitated another minute, considering her options. She decided to open the door as quietly as possible and step inside, and as she did so, she had a sudden sense that she’d find Maria sprawled on the kitchen floor in a pool of blood, having slit her own wrists.

  But the house felt empty. All was silent. She went from room to room—first bedroom, second bedroom, bathroom, living room, kitchen—feeling her way like a blind woman. No one. At last, she turned on the smallest kitchen light she could find. One apple there, perched beside the sink. Maria’s dinner or breakfast. Something had been carved into its skin. A heart. It would be so like her mother to come downstairs, find Maria gone, and leave her this message. So like her mother to starve herself to death so others could eat. So like her mother, with a determination that often crossed the line into pure stubbornness, to decide she’d had enough of hiding and convince Maria to climb into the hills and make a try for the border.

  As she was about to turn away, she remembered something Luca had told her once—a little game he and his mother had played when he was young—and a spurt of tears blinded both eyes. He’d been here, maybe only minutes ago, stopped by on the way to the cabin, and left this apple. He’d find the cabin empty, see the note, come looking for her!

  She took a broom into her hands, fixed her eyes on the hatchway that led to the attic, turned off the lamp, and walked forward until she guessed she was standing directly beneath it. She tapped the hatchway three times with the end of the handle. No response. She was about to give up—her mother and Maria were both gone—but dec
ided to tap once more. There was a shuffling above her head; she heard the wooden square slide sideways. A person there, invisible in the darkness. A face, familiar. “Mother?” she said, barely above a whisper.

  In answer, she heard one choked sob.

  Seventy-One

  Given what his father had said—or, more precisely, what he hadn’t said—Silvio decided it was essential to get the new information to Italo Andreottla as quickly as possible. It wouldn’t do to have il Duce fall into German hands.

  A fast shower, a shave, and he was dressed and out the door twenty-two minutes after his father left him. He decided to take the coupe for this short trip, because there was a new feeling to the adventure now, a feeling worthy of celebration, and the convertible seemed to fit that. Not two weeks ago, his motivation for working with the mysterious “Giovanni” had been simple and straightforward: money. Lately, however, a different impulse had started to find its way into Silvio’s thoughts. It felt strange and somehow uplifting: the money mattered, of course; Silvio Merino didn’t work for nothing. But beyond that, and beyond the sense that his exploits would be exciting to Lisiella Aiello in bed, something else was moving him forward. To his surprise, he realized that he was actually feeling a surge of patriotism, a love of the true Italia . . . or his idea of it. He felt, as he left the apartment, almost noble.

  It took him four minutes of fast walking to reach the warehouse. Another three to find the friend who worked there and who held on to his keys in case the cars had to be moved. Two more minutes to lower the canvas roof, and he was out on the streets of Rome in his white-walled American convertible, running late, going to a new meeting place Andreottla had just suggested on the phone—a restaurant inside Vatican City’s walls—about to deliver a piece of information that would lead to the capture of the Duce, the evil clown. He felt bathed in a succulent satisfaction: he was playing a role in history, a good and important role.

  Holding the wheel with one hand and listening absentmindedly to the whine of an air-raid siren in the distance—it seemed fairly far off—Silvio wondered if his name might eventually find its way into schoolbooks, in Italy and abroad. True, he himself had barely opened those books and certainly had never read them with any care. Still, it would be an honor.

  He was imagining various outcomes—seeing his face in a chapter on WWII espionage, picturing himself telling the story to Lisiella in a room at the Grand Hotel—and at the same time working his way impatiently through Rome’s notorious traffic (even in wartime, the streets of the city could be choked at certain hours). The sirens were still going off, a bit louder here as he turned onto Via Vittorio Emanuele, but he was lost in the new kind of excitement, enjoying what almost amounted to a nascent religious feeling. Maybe, after the war, he’d become a churchgoer again.

  There was a thump, an explosion, the sound of tinkling glass. Only a few blocks over, it must have been, because it was strong enough to make the heavy car shimmy to the left. Another thump, this one very close. Cursing under his breath, Silvio turned away from the noise and concussion, down a side street. He was looking for an alley to pull into, someplace safer than the middle of an open road, when there was a deafening crash in his right ear and a tremendous rush of wind. The coupe flipped over as if it were made of balsa wood. His head hit the pavement, hard, and he was on his back on the concrete, a sharp pain in his face, his legs entangled in the steering wheel, blood running into one eye, the coupe upside down and covering him like the lid of a casket.

  He took a couple of ragged breaths, tried to stay calm, to force a confident grin, but it hurt to move his lips, and there was blood on them besides. Probably his beautiful nose had been broken. He’d look like Andreottla now for the rest of his days. Another breath. A surge of pain but no panic. The coupe seemed to be slowly settling down on him, squeezing his legs against the wheel. The back of the driver’s seat was just above his face now, so close he could spit on it. It was becoming difficult to breathe. He kept slipping in and out of consciousness, fading away, coming back. There were sirens, voices, someone screaming. Maybe, he thought, this is my time. So be it.

  Seventy-Two

  Sarah didn’t want to turn on the kitchen light again. Stumbling about in the darkness, banging into the wall, a standing lamp, the edge of the same table where the German had been sitting, she managed to locate and carry over one of the kitchen chairs and help her mother down from the attic. She held Rebecca against her for a long time and let her sob there. She could feel her shoulder blades, feel the tears dripping down her own neck, and for a few minutes, nothing mattered but the fact that she was touching her mother again, that they were both alive. The quiet sobbing went on and on. At last, Sarah took hold of her mother’s bony shoulders and held her at arm’s length. In the darkness, her face looked like it belonged to a ghost. “Where’s Maria?” she asked.

  “I don’t know!” Rebecca whispered. “She’s here every night. Every night she feeds me, takes my . . . bucket. She’s never missed a night!”

  “It means the Germans have her, Mother.”

  “They can’t; they can’t!”

  “We must leave.”

  “Leave where? How? There’s no place to go!”

  Sarah turned her mother toward the back door, leading her down the dark hallway and into the kitchen, one hand holding her by a skeletal arm, the other feeling for the wall and doorway, then the backs of the kitchen chairs.

  “We should leave something, a note,” her mother whispered frantically.

  “Too dangerous.”

  “Sarah, something. She won’t know. She’ll worry.”

  “Not now. Stay here.”

  Sarah felt her way back along the hallway, stood on the chair, and lifted the attic hatchway back into place. From there, she could smell the slop bucket, and she knew that, if she left it there, the stink would only get worse. No time to worry about that now. Maria was dead or in German hands. She’d never come back to this house. If she were in the custody of the Gestapo, it would be only a matter of minutes before she’d be forced to admit she’d been hiding a Jew. Maybe Luca had told her about the cabin, and if so, she’d be made to tell them that, also, and soldiers would be sent up into the trees to find her and the man she loved. She brought the chair back to its place in the kitchen and, reaching around blindly, almost knocked over two canning jars. She filled them with water, gave her mother the apple with the heart on it. “Eat,” she said. “You’ll need your strength.”

  “My legs are like sticks. I’m unused to walking.”

  “Eat, Mother.”

  Feeling around in the darkness—dishes, cups, a small towel—Sarah found, at last, a canvas bag. She put the water jars into it, searched the refrigerator and shelves for anything edible, and, finding one piece of salami, size of a fist, hard as stone, and a few hard-boiled eggs, she put those in the bag, too.

  “Let’s go.”

  “Where?” her mother asked. “The church? Don Claudio could hide us.”

  Sarah shook her head. Just before they stepped out the back door, she tried to say “Switzerland,” but the word caught in her throat. If Luca had found the cabin empty and left, looking for her, she’d either have to hope she’d meet him on the path, or go back to the cabin, wait there, praying that he’d return, praying the Nazis wouldn’t come. Or she’d have to take her mother across the border and never see him again. If she made it to Switzerland, if they accepted her there, she’d raise their child without a father.

  As she herself had been raised.

  Seventy-Three

  Three minutes before Skorzeny and his assembled men were to set off in their towplanes and gliders, the air-raid sirens sounded over the city of Rome, and the deafening whines sent them hustling for cover. “It’s happening more and more now,” he said to Lieutenant Radl as they trotted off the runway. “Three raids in just the past week.”

  They took shelter with the rest of the team, crouching in the airport’s concrete bunker, a tight, cramped u
nderground room that smelled of sweat and mold and was as damp, along the bottoms of the walls, as the inside of a wet boot. There was no conversation. They could sense but not hear the droning bomber engines above them, and, after a few minutes of nervous anticipation, they began to feel the concussions. Three-hundred-pound bombs, Skorzeny guessed. The Americans. From the force of the explosions, he could tell the difference between these and the five-hundred-pound British bombs—the American B-17s, the “Flying Fortresses,” were so heavily armored that they had to carry a lighter load.

  Still, three hundred pounds was enough. The concussions shook the thick walls and rocked the men in place, the earth vibrating beneath the soles of their boots. Skorzeny knew from his briefings that, though the Allies had been concentrating on the factories in the north and Naples and the cities of Sicily in the south, they were starting to focus more on central Italy now. The raids on Rome were quick and relatively light, aimed at railroad stations and key roadways, the massive bombers making one run, releasing their loads, and disappearing off to the south like flocks of angry geese fleeing winter. Very few Germans had been killed so far—more often than not, the casualties were Italian civilians—but the increased enemy activity was a bad omen for the forces of the Reich, and that, Skorzeny felt, gave his own mission even more urgency. Find il Duce, put him back in power, and they could hope to chase the Allies from the peninsula.

  When the concussions ceased, the men had to wait another ten minutes before the all clear sounded, and then they were clambering out of the concrete box as fast as they could move. “Karl,” Skorzeny said to Radl when the others couldn’t hear, “General Student gave me the order that under no conditions should there be any crash landings with the gliders.”

  “Shouldn’t be a problem, Captain. We photographed the grounds of the hotel ourselves. We both saw the open area.”