“Right, but we saw it from five thousand meters. If it turns out we were wrong, if it’s all rocks and steep slopes there, I’m going to give the order to land anyway. I wanted you to know.”
Skorzeny couldn’t read his friend’s face. A crash landing could mean anything from broken bones, to paralysis, to death for the occupants of the gliders, and even if the pilots were particularly skillful and especially lucky and no one was injured, it would certainly mean the destruction of the expensive planes. Disobeying a direct order could mean court-martial, too—in some cases, execution. General Student wasn’t known for leniency.
“Our Benito better be there, then,” Radl said grimly. “He better not have been spirited off again.”
“I think he’s there. If I’m wrong, I’ll bear the blame, no worries.”
“None here,” Radl said. “Those bombs were close. If they hit the gliders, none of this will matter.”
But, though the runway was pocked with half a dozen craters, the planes themselves had been spared.
“Allied accuracy,” Radl quipped.
Skorzeny detected the lining of concern behind the remark. Failure here, again, would be like the earth eroding under their boots. Gliders were notoriously dangerous tools of war, thin-skinned, difficult to steer, much more vulnerable to antiaircraft fire than the heavily armored bombers and fighter planes. And those could be shot down, too, as he well remembered. After the expensive, almost deadly debacle off Sardinia, if this didn’t work, General Student wouldn’t authorize a third mission, and he and Radl couldn’t keep their men around indefinitely, waiting on information from Selenzen or a loose-lipped Italian. They’d be sent back to fight in Russia.
The sky had cleared beautifully, not only of American B-17s but of the earlier cloud cover. They checked their gear a final time and, silent to a man, climbed aboard. Shortly after one p.m., nine Hentschel towplanes trundled one after the next down the damaged runway, dodging bomb craters and tugging nine featherlight DFS 230 gliders behind them.
Skorzeny commanded the mission, but the officer in the first glider—better trained for such things—was in charge of getting them there. So he was perched on the centerboard in the third glider, enjoying, as he always did, the lift and tilt, the rocking motion, the jostling excitement of flight. It made him wish, not for the first time, that the Luftwaffe hadn’t rejected him. Then again, in the Luftwaffe, he might have passed the entire war without being given an assignment like this.
Once they’d reached altitude and turned east, he listened to the tow pilot give his coordinates and tried as best he could to trace their movement on a topographical map. As Radl had said, from the aerial photos, he knew there would be a triangular field just behind the hotel, perfect landing place for the gliders. If all went as planned, a second team of commandos would make an assault on the base of the funicular—the only other access route to the summit—at the same time the gliders were landing. The Italian guards would be stunned, paralyzed, he hoped, and would offer little resistance.
His only real concern was the accuracy of his own methodical calculations—educated guesswork, really: no one had reported actually seeing Mussolini at the ski hotel.
Fat cumulus clouds sailed in rows over the Apennines’ forested slopes. When the gliders emerged into clear air again, at five thousand meters now, the pilot of the towplane told him the first two gliders had somehow disappeared. Fallen behind them, he hoped, or drifted off course. Their navigator was in one of them.
“No antiaircraft fire here, is there?”
“Not a whisper,” the pilot said.
Skorzeny had no navigation instruments and not much training, but he volunteered to lead the rest of them in. Cutting a hole in the cellophane side window with his battle knife to get a clearer view, he peered down at a scene of folded slopes, winding roads, and small clusters of tile-roofed houses. It required a bit of back-and-forth maneuvering, instructions given to the tow pilot via the microphone system as he looked from the land below to his map, but at last he recognized the L’Aquila valley and saw the line of their own trucks moving toward the base of the funicular. Another minute, one last cloud slipping away beneath them, and the brown brick hulk of Campo Imperatore appeared almost directly below. He could see the small gray building at the top of the funicular and, beside it, the hotel’s raised patio and curving front wall. He gave the order for the towropes to be slipped.
The flock of gliders swooped down in great silent circles, light-feathered birds of prey, Skorzeny balancing on the centerboard and staring through the hole he’d cut, looking for the triangular field. One half of the gradual downward spiral gave him a good view of the target; on the other half, he lost sight of it.
As his glider descended and the hotel came into focus, disappeared, came into focus again with each slow turn, he realized that, yes, there was a triangular field. But what he and Radl had been unable to see from an altitude of five thousand meters and what he could see so clearly now was that the field sloped steeply away from the hotel, so steeply it would be impossible to land there with anything but a parachute. “Trouble,” he said to Radl between clenched teeth. “Not flat. Not flat at all.”
“Land in front, then.”
“All stones there. The planes will be torn to shreds. Student will—”
“The Führer, not Student, gave the order to find Mussolini. We’ve come this far, Captain. We’re this close to getting him.”
Skorzeny nodded once. He closed his eyes, counted to three, then gave the order into the microphone. “Crash landing.”
The pilot didn’t hesitate. He dipped the left wing, the glider descended much more sharply, circled, descended, flattened out, made a quarter turn, and smashed, belly-first, into the rocky ground barely twenty meters from the hotel’s raised front patio.
Skorzeny heard the tearing of the thin canvas fabric, watched one wing fall away, and, an instant later, felt himself catapulted sideways out the door. He got to his feet and sprinted toward the building, shouting one of his favorite Italian phrases: “Mani in alto!” Hands up! He pointed his eight-shot Luger at the stunned Italian guards who stared, wide-eyed, from the front of the building. There would be more men inside, he was sure, but the Italians were watching one glider after the next crash-land in front of the hotel, dozens of German commandos pouring out and running straight toward them, guns raised, all of them screaming in two languages. Some of the Italians had rifles, but they weren’t lifting them, just standing there, stunned. Exactly as he’d hoped.
He sprinted through the first door he saw and found himself in the telegraph room, one man with a headset there at the controls. Skorzeny kicked the chair out from under him, ripped the headset off, and stomped on it so hard that a piece went flying across the room and into the man’s face. As the operator scrambled sideways toward the wall, staring up in terror, Skorzeny lifted the chair and smashed it against the telegraph machine, then sprinted out again.
Except for a handful of men who’d been badly injured, his cadre had gotten themselves free of the broken planes and were sprinting up the hill toward him, other gliders still landing, the small Storch—il Duce’s means of escape—touching down behind them, roughly, bumping along the stony slope, then coming to a stop less than ten meters from a vertical drop-off.
Skorzeny grabbed Radl, bent him in two, leaped onto his back, and was able to climb from there onto the terrace of the patio. He heard a window open above him, second floor. A face appeared there. Haggard. Recognizable. A marvelous sight.
“Inside, inside!” Skorzeny shouted. “Duce, inside!” He ran through the main entrance and found a crowd of Italian soldiers and carabinieri there, all of them wearing the same astonished look on their faces, none raising so much as a fist. A head taller than the tallest man, Skorzeny pistol-whipped a path through them, knocking one sideways, shoving others, kicking, forcing his way through to the bottom of the stairs. He kept listening for gunshots behind him, but the Italians seemed unwilling t
o risk a drop of blood for their Duce, and no one on their side was giving orders. He took the stairs three at a time, turned left onto a hallway, guessed at a door, and shoved it open to find Benito Mussolini inside the room, wearing a white T-shirt, a two-day growth of beard, and staring at him as if he were a creature from a dream.
Skorzeny stood to attention and gave the Nazi salute. “Duce,” he said, “the Führer has sent me. You are free!”
Seventy-Four
From her place in the dirt of the overgrown lot, her right shoulder, right ear, and right hip pressed into the weeds, her stomach and intestines on fire, Maria kept her eyes locked on the Rossos’ house. She was almost sure now from his stocky build that the man in the doorway of the Rosso house was the redhead. Backlit by the kitchen lamp, he was on his feet but leaning in an odd way, at too sharp an angle, against the doorframe. He held something, the pistol, in his right hand. She watched him try to raise it, and then he stumbled backward and disappeared into the house. She closed her eyes, opened them halfway, saw him again, on his hands and knees now, the pistol pointed at her. A shot rang out. One explosive pop that echoed in the trees. A series of others, four, five—she lost count. She heard a small tree branch falling. She tried to move, to press herself into the dirt, but couldn’t manage it.
The redhead was flat on his stomach, both elbows on the ground, his head raised and the gun held out in front of him. In the light from the doorway, she thought she could see his whole body twitching. She closed her eyes, focused on the pain, willed herself not to be taken into the next life. Not yet. Let them all die. Let the redhead die. Let his friends in the house suffer and die. Let the bald one come home to that sight, his men lying in their vomit and blood, poisoned dishes in the sink. Let him understand.
She tried again but could not make any part of her body move. The pain was like heavy chains wrapped around her middle, choking her. She was beginning to have difficulty breathing—the final symptom. Not yet, she thought. I cannot die yet. She watched the redhead try to bring the barrel to horizontal. With great difficulty, he pointed the pistol at her. His whole body was shaking violently. Before he collapsed, he managed to squeeze the trigger again one time. Maria heard the sound of the pistol firing and immediately felt a burning pain on top of her left thigh. She tried to turn and look. With an enormous effort, she managed to reach her hand down and feel the wound, the sticky blood and torn fabric of her dress. Superficial. She would live. She was determined to live. She’d get Rebecca and go to Don Claudio, and they’d escape together into the hills or find Luca and have him guide them to Switzerland, all of them.
She tasted blood. The pain in her belly was immense, horrific. The redhead had stood up again and fallen straight backward. She could see the bottoms of his boots in the doorway like two small, dark gravestones, monuments to defeat.
Seventy-Five
Don Claudio was so surprised to see Luca there in the darkened church that he was, at first, completely unable to speak, unable to get a single syllable to come out of his mouth. He stood up from the altar rail and embraced his young friend, led him to the cloakroom, and showed him the blood on the wall and then, in the kitchen, the dead German officer wrapped in a rug and priest’s robe. His hands were trembling, his eyes pushed open wide, his throat so choked with fear that he couldn’t swallow. “What?” he managed to pronounce in a hoarse whisper. What should we do? he’d wanted to say, but he was shaking so violently that he couldn’t push the rest of the sentence into the air.
“Wet a towel,” Luca told him, so calmly that it seemed to the priest the young man’s mind had gone into a different zone. Cold. Clear. “Wipe the wall clean and the floor. I’m going to take another one of your robes and wrap him up better and drag him out to the wagon. When you’re done, follow me to the door and make sure you wipe up every drop of blood. Every drop. Then take the towel and come with me.”
“I have to stay. If I’m not here, they’ll know. He may have told someone he was coming here—”
“No, Padre. Clean up every drop you can and come with me. You can’t stay.”
“He,” Don Claudio blurted out, and then completely lost his nerve. He wanted to tell the truth but, looking into Luca’s one working eye, he realized he wouldn’t be able to speak the words to describe what he’d heard in the confessional. Not now. Probably never. But he had to tell him something. So he said, “He hit your mother, this man,” and watched Luca’s face change again. A new shadow across his features. “Assaulted her,” Don Claudio stumbled on. “He came to confession. Bragging.”
Luca watched him, waiting for more, and Don Claudio was almost physically pushed backward by the expression on his face, a face he’d been looking at since the day of Luca’s baptism. High cheekbones; wide, expressive mouth; one foggy eye. There was a hardness there now, something he’d never seen; the expression belonged to a killer.
“Bragging?” Luca asked after a moment, very quietly.
The priest nodded, looked away, started to say something more, then stopped. He didn’t want a lie to be the last thing he ever said to Sarah’s lover. He still had the Saint Jude statuette in his pocket. He brought it out and thrust it at Luca, as if such a gesture expressed all the war’s secrets, all the unspoken pain and battered hopes, all the mystery of suffering. “Money inside. Take it . . . From the archbishop.”
Luca took the statue and jammed it carelessly into the deep pocket of his work pants. “Find me something heavy, Father,” he said in a voice that was like wind on the coldest winter night. The voice of command now.
“What?”
“Anything. Anything heavy.”
Don Claudio hurried into the nave and looked around frantically, his mind all static and rush. For one second, he thought of giving Luca the chalice, but he settled on the altar’s tall brass candlesticks, so heavy he could only pull them across the floor behind him, one in each hand. By the time he returned, Luca was at the rear door, walking backward and dragging the wrapped body, leaving a trail of blood and carpet fibers. Don Claudio opened the door, helped Luca lift the body and heave it into the back of the wagon.
“Blankets,” Luca said. “Or a tarpaulin. Something to cover.”
Don Claudio went to his own bedroom, ripped the blanket off his bed, brought it out, and threw it over the body. It wasn’t enough. Breathing as if he’d run uphill all the way from the Bar Lake Como, he went back into his church, hastily cleaned whatever blood he could find, and carried out an armful of firewood from the kitchen stove. He flung it on top of the blanket. Luca had brought some branches and twigs from the edge of the trees and was throwing them in, too. “Climb in, Padre.”
With some effort, the priest hoisted himself up onto the wooden seat. Luca untied the donkey, turned the cart, and started down the hill toward the lake. At the bottom of the road, he turned right, then left, into a neighborhood of small, poor homes, set close together. Sitting beside him in a silent trance, Don Claudio realized after a moment that they were in Lenno, on Quercia Street, the street where Rebecca had lived. Another few seconds and the cart passed by the house that held the apartment where they’d slept together. For as long as he could, Don Claudio kept his mouth closed, and then, when the words, the confession, would no longer stay inside him, when the lie he’d lived had finally become too heavy to carry along with his other sins—he had killed a man!—he made himself say, “Do you know who Sarah’s father is?”
“Even she doesn’t know,” Luca muttered between clamped teeth, staring straight ahead.
Don Claudio listened to the slow, steady clop of the exhausted donkey’s hooves, waiting, every second, for a German officer to come out of an alley with a flashlight, shine it on them, ask what was in back. Luca pulled the cart past the ramshackle house. The priest turned his head to study it as they passed—the sagging roof, the untended yard, the windowpanes broken by the Gestapo raid, something illegible scrawled in paint beside the front door. It seemed to him that half his spirit still lived there, in
the tiny bedroom where his daughter—his daughter!—had been conceived. Another fifty meters and they reached an inlet, the end of a small mountain river, really, that fed into the lake. A dock there. A boat with blue trim. As they came to a stop, Don Claudio was able to speak two more words: “I am.”
Luca looked at him—it seemed that not even this could surprise him now; nothing could penetrate the hard shell of hatred that had formed when he’d heard about his mother. Frightening enough, that shell. What would happen if he heard what the German had really done?
Luca tilted his head slowly sideways, a gesture the priest couldn’t read. “True?”
Don Claudio nodded, saw the hard expression soften for just a moment, saw Luca working backward across a series of clues. “I’m glad, Padre,” the young man said, and then he climbed down from the seat and went to work.
Seventy-Six
“I can’t make it; I can’t walk,” Rebecca told her daughter when they’d gone only a few steps across Maria’s back yard. “My legs have no strength.”
“You have to, Mother. Once we get into the trees, we’ll go very slowly.”
Sarah had hold of her mother’s arm and was clasping it against her side. They moved forward at the pace of a toddler, stopping every few steps.
The third time they stopped, Sarah heard something, one syllable. An animal grunting, she thought, a boar that had come down this far to forage. They went forward again, stopped. The same sound. One syllable from the middle of the vacant lot.
“That’s Maria!” her mother whispered. She tugged on Sarah’s arm and turned her in the direction of the Rossos’ house, through the gate in the fence. There was a handful of unpruned olive trees in front of them and then the empty square of land where, in better times, the Rossos had raised animals and grown food.
They’d gone only a dozen more steps when they saw a figure lying on the ground, touched by moonlight. They heard another strained syllable. Sarah let go of her mother’s arm and ran. Maria lay on her side, one cheek pressed into the dirt, her hands trembling uncontrollably. Vomit in a pool beside her, blood spreading across the fabric at her left hip.
Once Night Falls Page 24