Once Night Falls

by Roland Merullo

  “Out late?” one of them inquired sarcastically.

  “Fishing,” Luca said. “This is Don Claudio, the priest at Sant’Abbondio. He never gets a chance to fish, so I decided to take him out.”

  By the time he finished talking, the two officers had come up close, one on either side of the cart. In their eyes, no mercy.

  “And you’re not in the military, why?” the one nearest Luca asked.

  Luca pointed to his eye, then held out his two arms, side by side. He saw a drop of blood on his left wrist. The man smirked, didn’t notice.

  “You always fish at night?” the other one asked.

  Luca and Don Claudio both nodded at once.

  “In this boat?”

  Luca nodded again.

  “Fish don’t bite at night. Surely you know that.”

  Don Claudio grabbed the tail of the whitefish and lifted it up into the light like a trophy.

  “You caught that?” the first officer said.

  “Just now. A hundred meters from shore.”

  “On what?”

  “A lure.”

  “Where’s the fishing gear?”

  “In the boat.”

  “You left it in the boat!”

  “It’s a cheap rod,” Luca said. “I’m just going to drive Don Claudio back to the church. He’s exhausted and has to say early Mass. Then I was going to come down and try my luck again.”

  “Did you get permission to go out on the lake at night?”

  “I didn’t know you needed permission. We never did before.”

  “This isn’t before. Where’s the permission slip?”

  “I don’t have one.”

  “Then we confiscate the fish.”

  “Please don’t, Officer. We’re hungry.”

  “Everyone’s hungry.”

  “Please don’t. This could feed Don Claudio for two days.”

  The carabinieri looked at each other across the seat of the cart. One of them unsheathed a knife at his belt and, holding the fish flat on the board to Don Claudio’s right, sawed through it just behind the gills. “We’ll leave you the head,” he said. “And viva il Duce.”

  “Viva il Duce,” they mumbled automatically. Mussolini is gone, Luca thought, biting down on his anger, and still we are required to salute him.

  As the officers were walking back to the car, Luca called out, “Where do I go for permission to be on the lake?”

  “Nowhere,” the heavier of the two officers called over his shoulder. “You don’t need permission.”

  The doors closing cut off the sound of their harsh laughter. The driver made a three-point turn and sped off into town.

  Don Claudio picked up the fish head and held it loosely in front of him in the fingers of both hands. “And these are our people,” he said bitterly.

  As if by magic, the donkey began to move. Luca steered the cart along the empty shore road and then very slowly up toward Sant’Abbondio. Ahead of them, the road curved to the right, and from that angle, they could see the flames again. The smell of smoke reached them.

  “It’s not the church,” Don Claudio said. “It’s closer to your mother’s house.”

  Eighty

  After they’d been climbing for the better part of an hour, Sarah was caught and held by a terrible thought: if the Gestapo saw Maria’s body, they’d search her house and find the slop bucket in the attic and her mother’s clothes there. They’d send a party of men and dogs after them, track them into the hills and as far as the cabin. So, exhausted though she and her mother were, they wouldn’t be able to stay very long, and if Luca wasn’t there, they’d have to leave a note of warning and climb for the border on their own.

  The idea haunted her: the cabin wouldn’t be safe any longer. But there was no option—her mother had to rest. And so did she.

  At last they came to the basket and the split tree. She knew to turn left there, and then, though the path was rocky and difficult to see—the moonlight dim now behind a bank of clouds—the walking was more or less level, and they were able to go along at a slightly better pace. At last, hours after they left Maria’s house, Sarah saw the dark shadow of the cabin, dull moonlight on the broken tile roof. Inside, her note had not been moved, and there was no sign of Luca. It seemed to her that the child in her womb was wailing. Her mother collapsed on the makeshift bed and lay there with her eyes open and fixed on the ceiling. “You have no idea,” she said, weariness in her voice, “what a joy it is to breathe the air, to be able to see trees and touch the ground.” She took a deep, ragged breath and let it out. “Even these mosquitoes make me happy.” She sighed and went silent. Sarah thought she was asleep until she asked, “Do you have any idea what happened to Maria, what made her do that?”

  Sarah knew exactly what had happened. She opened and closed her mouth. What good would it do to tell her mother now? What good would that do? She shook her head and went over and took off her mother’s shoes and filthy socks and began to massage her feet.

  Sarah watched one tear dribble down the side of her mother’s face. “You slept here?” she asked after a moment.

  “Only the last few weeks. Luca moved me from one safe house to another at first, but they all became too dangerous, so he decided to bring me here.”

  “Where is he?”

  “He’ll come. Soon. I know he will.”

  They were quiet for a time. Sarah slapped at the mosquitoes and went on rubbing her mother’s feet, trying not to look at the thin legs, listening for footsteps, for any sound at the door.

  “What if they come here?” her mother asked at one point.

  “We’ll stay only tonight and tomorrow so you can get some strength back.”

  “Too long,” her mother said. “Too risky. I’m too afraid, Sarah.”

  “We have the gun.”

  “One pistol against all of them. Let me rest for a few hours, and then we’ll climb in the darkness. If there are no clouds, we can see by the moon.”

  “It feels like rain, Mother. And we have to wait for Luca.”

  “We’ll slow him down. We should get a head start, leave him a note. I’ve been hiding in a house for eight weeks. I don’t want to hide any longer. I can’t carry the weight of my fear any longer.” She lay there with her eyes closed, and Sarah thought, again, that she’d fallen asleep until she said, “It’s Shabbat, isn’t it? Friday?”

  “Yes, Mother.”

  “Fine, then.” She began, “Blessed are you, Lord our God—”

  And Sarah finished the familiar line of prayer. “King of the universe.”

  Eighty-One

  By the time Luca and Don Claudio reached the top of the road, they could tell it was the Rossos’ house on fire. “My mother,” Luca said. “My mother cooks for them there.”

  They tied the donkey to a tree, and Luca hurried on ahead of the priest up a dirt lane. A crowd of perhaps a dozen people, women and old men, had gathered at the end of the lane, firelight turning their faces into flickering masks and the leaves of the nearby trees into specters. The brigade had arrived, though it was obvious that, with their one truck and handful of elderly firefighters, there was little they could do. They faced an inferno, the dark skeleton of the house visible against an orange background, flames leaping out of every window and through what was left of the roof, rafters collapsing one after the next in great loud crashes and showers of sparks. Luca could feel the heat from sixty meters away. A German staff car was parked on the other side of the house, two Gestapo officers standing beside it, arms crossed over their chests, as if measuring the degree of effort made by the brigade or already calculating their revenge. One of the neighbors recognized Luca and, nodding at the Gestapo, said in a quiet voice, “They’ll blame all of us.”

  “People inside?”

  “SS officers, some women, too, I think.”

  Don Claudio arrived, heaving for breath, and he and Luca moved off to one side as a gust of wind sent sparks and burning air in their direction. Trying to pu
sh away a wave of panic, Luca searched the firelit perimeter of the Rossos’ yard for his mother. He didn’t see her. Another gust caught him then, a sudden premonition. He imagined her inside the house, lying dead in the embers. Maybe she’d accidentally started the fire by being careless in the kitchen. Or maybe not so accidentally. Maybe she’d escaped.

  “We have to check my mother’s house.”

  He and the priest started away from the blaze, across the uneven ground of the empty lot where Rosso had grown crops for as long as either of them could remember. Nothing but weeds and stones now, and for Don Claudio, the walking was difficult. Luca supported him with a hand under one elbow. His parents’ olive trees ahead. He remembered picking the olives by hand—always on a sunny day in fall, before the weather turned—placing them carefully (“Gently, gently” his parents would say. “Treat them kindly and they’ll treat you kindly.”) into the cesto di vimini, the reed basket, so they could be brought to Giulianova for pressing. His parents would always give him the first taste of the newly pressed oil, on fresh bread. He’d harvested the olives as recently as two years ago, but the memories seemed a century old. He could hear Don Claudio breathing heavily beside him.

  They’d gone only a short distance when he saw the figure lying there. Luca knew instantly that it was his mother. She was on her side in the flickering orange light, and even as he rushed over, he could see blood soaking her dress near her left hip and a small puddle of vomit next to her face. It took him two seconds to realize she was gone and two more seconds to put together the puzzle pieces. He knelt beside her, leaned his forehead down against her chest, and remained that way for a long time, speaking to her, promising the one thing he believed he could promise. He could feel Don Claudio’s hand on his back; the priest was weeping. He sensed again the murderous fury he’d first felt when he’d killed the Blackshirt. And then, swelling up beneath it, a sadness the size of the surrounding hills. One memory after the next rolled across his thoughts, a parade of caring, sacrifice, love.

  “We should have a burial Mass, a service,” Don Claudio whispered.

  Luca shook his head. What mattered now was survival. Survival and revenge, not services. “She poisoned them,” he said quietly. “With my lepiota. Look at the bile. Look at her face. And then she ran, and they shot her. Look.” He pointed to the blood and torn dress at her hip. “How she got the fire started, I don’t know, but I’m sure they made her eat with them. They suspected something. We have to bury her before they find her here like this and figure out what I’ve just figured out.”

  “Those Gestapo with the jeep will see us.”

  “Too far away,” Luca said. “Trees between us, the fence. And they’re watching the fire, like everyone else. We’ll dig in the garden on the other side of the house. My father kept shovels and a pickax in the shed. Help me lift her, Padre.”

  Struggling, breathing heavily, the two of them carried Maria’s body into her back yard, around a corner of the house, and set her down gently there on a patch of grass. Before Luca took tools from the shed where his father and mother had kept them, Don Claudio put a hand on his arm. “What did you say to her? May I ask? I didn’t hear.”

  Luca turned and met the priest’s eyes. In the background, he heard a thunderous crash. The rest of the roof collapsing. “I promised her something,” he said. “I made her a solemn promise.”

  “Yes, I thought so. What was it?”

  “That I would live to see Mussolini dead.”

  Eighty-Two

  Il Duce put on his black overcoat and black hat and allowed himself to be escorted down the stairs of the ski hotel and through the lobby by the German captain—Skorzeny, he said his name was. An unusual name, and a giant of a man with a most horrible scar on his face. To either side of the lobby, Italian soldiers, Duce’s guard supposedly, sat in a posture of surrender. Disarmed, backs against the walls, they stared at him as he went past. Cowards, all of them. He did not do them the honor of meeting their eyes. He and his rescuers marched out into the cool mountain air.

  A wreckage of broken gliders and a squadron of German commandos greeted him there. The men saluted with their right arms held out straight. Mussolini returned the Roman salute. A small plane, a Storch, sat on a rocky patch of land beside the hotel. Next to it stood a man with aviator glasses pushed up onto his forehead. Skorzeny introduced him as Gerlach, the pilot, and Mussolini shook his hand.

  “Let’s go,” Skorzeny said impatiently.

  “Who? How many?” Gerlach asked.

  “The three of us.”

  There followed a small argument in rapid German. Mussolini understood it perfectly. Gerlach was upset. Even though they’d moved the Storch as far back from the precipice as they could, he said, there was still not enough room to get up speed sufficient for takeoff. There were stones everywhere and, at the end of the more or less flat stretch, a drop-off so steep that, at a slow speed, the plane would go straight into a nosedive. The weight of two people was bad enough. With three, it would be impossible. “Suicide,” he said in a firm, quiet voice. Selbstmord.

  “Suicide for me,” Skorzeny shot back, “is having to go to the Führer and tell him we had his good friend Benito Mussolini in our hands, but there was no room for me in the Storch, and there was a crash, and Mussolini is now dead. What will be left for me then is the revolver. If il Duce dies, I die with him. All three of us are getting onto that plane!”

  Mussolini watched them talk and gesture for another minute, but Skorzeny was a larger and more powerful man, energetic to the point of controlled frenzy, the horrific scar on his face arguing for him. The pilot relented. They climbed into the Storch, Gerlach in front, Mussolini beside him, Skorzeny in back. With his face set in an expression of suppressed fury, Gerlach started the propeller and ran it up to its highest speed. Skorzeny’s men held the wings.

  On a hand signal from the pilot, the men let go, and the Storch bounced forward over the rocks and dirt. It went less than fifty meters, bumped hard against a rock, shot up and out into the thin air, and, exactly as Gerlach had predicted, immediately turned downward. From the moment the argument started, Mussolini had been haunted by the old superstition, by images of himself dead in a mangled fuselage. Now all he could hear was the wind screaming at the side windows. All he could see were the stones in the valley below, one large triangular boulder in particular. He glanced sideways at Gerlach’s clenched hands on the controls, then turned and watched the boulder as it drew closer. Down and down they went at a terrible speed, his stomach in his throat, his hands squeezing the seat, the wind screaming past the fuselage. It seemed to him that the Storch was being sucked toward disaster by the twin forces of gravity and the turning propeller, and by some vengeful spirit besides. Some demon that wanted to end the reign of il Duce forever. The diagonal metal struts were vibrating, thin marsh reeds in a gale.

  Less than a hundred meters from the bottom, he watched Gerlach pull back hard on the control stick and felt the plane start to respond. It seemed to be fighting against the vectors of nature, doing battle with the vengeful demon. Another three seconds and Mussolini could no longer see the boulder. The nose was turning up, slightly at first. Then up a little more. Then they were flying crazily across the valley, only twenty meters above the ground, and his stomach was settling more or less back into place, the superstitious vision retreating into the distance. Had there been any trees, the plane would certainly have crashed into them, but it was all slanted green meadow and stone here, and soon the remarkable Gerlach had his plane fully under control, and they were skimming along the valley at a fast clip, then turning back, lifting up and over a slope, over the crest of one of the park’s lower hills. They rose into a brilliant blue sky, flew over the hotel, the wrecked gliders, the stunned soldiers, and then the pilot turned them west, toward Rome.

  Mussolini offered two words, addressing them to both Skorzeny and the pilot. “Ben fatto,” he said nobly, with a Duce’s dignity, in a tone meant to indicate that h
e hadn’t been afraid at all, had never doubted that he’d be rescued.

  Well done.

  Eighty-Three

  The place Luca chose for his mother’s burial was protected from view by the corner of her house. The earth there had been loosened by years of cultivation. He worked the pickax, lifting it over his head with both hands and driving it downward mostly with the right, his weaker left hand just keeping the handle in line. Even as tired and broken as he was, for the first meter or so, the work wasn’t difficult. He and Don Claudio labored quietly, the priest shoveling out the softened dirt, heaving for breath, mumbling prayers. Only once did Luca stop to rest. Leaning on the handle of his pickax, he peered around the corner of his mother’s house and stared across the dark vacant lot at what was left of the Rossos’ home. He remembered that the house had always smelled of rosemary, because Antonetta Rosso grew that herb in the strip of soil beside their patio. Now it was a black shell, the roof caved in, two charred and burning rafters standing at angles in the moonlight like antiaircraft guns, the fire brigade spraying thin streams of water. Now, instead of rosemary, he could smell smoke—twisting gray columns were still rising into the sky along with a few spurts of flame—and the stink of burned human flesh. As he watched, a light rain began to fall.

  No Gestapo officers there now, but he had very little doubt about what had killed their comrades, and he knew the deaths wouldn’t go unanswered. The Nazis seemed actually to believe that human lives were valued on some kind of perverted scale, with German military men at the highest end and Jews just a notch below Italians at the bottom. It was as if a collective insanity had taken hold of them, all kindness, mercy, and compassion gone, replaced by hard, inhumane certainty and a violent belief in their own superiority. He thought of it as a disease, an infection Hitler was spreading—first in Germany, then Austria, Czechoslovakia, Poland, Russia. Mussolini had been suffering from a similar disease and had made the mistake of befriending the mustachioed madman and catching a more virulent strain.