Once Night Falls

by Roland Merullo

  Luca went back to his gruesome work, both eyes—sightless and sighted—lensed with tears. The ground was harder at this depth, the firm surface turning slick in the rain. As the night deepened, he and Don Claudio made progress at a slower and slower rate, at one point the two of them having to get down into the hole and wrestle out a stone the size of a soccer ball.

  Don Claudio’s black pants were muddy to the knees. “I can’t go much longer, Luca,” the priest said. “I’m sorry.”

  The hole was thigh deep. It would have to be enough.

  Together they set their tools aside, lifted Maria’s body, and carried it closer to the makeshift grave. While Don Claudio said another prayer over her, Luca went inside and took a sheet from his mother’s bed. He wrapped her in it, tenderly, his tears making small gray stains on the blue material. He and Don Claudio lifted her again, both of them crying now, and carefully lowered her into the hole. For several minutes, Luca stood by the side of the grave, torn in half by an even mix of sorrow and fury, staring down at the wet blue sheet.

  It began to rain harder. Luca took the shovel, used his foot to drive it into the pile of dirt, hesitated, then made himself toss the first shovelful into the hole and onto his mother’s wrapped body. The wet earth made a sound like someone being slapped. With a little help from Don Claudio, he worked for another half hour, refilling the hole. When that was done, the priest fashioned a crude cross from two lines of stones and set them at the head of the grave. “Later,” he said quietly, “we’ll have a real burial, a real funeral Mass, as she deserved.” He recited another prayer, but Luca only wiped a sleeve across his face and turned to the side and spat. Raindrops pattered on the roof. If they came here, the Nazis would see the fresh grave and wonder, but there was nothing to do about that now.

  “Rebecca!” the priest said.

  They hurried into the house, tracking more muddy footprints through the kitchen and up the hallway. Luca tapped the attic door with the handle of the broom. No answer. He tapped again. Pulled a chair into the hallway and climbed up and looked. A slop bucket, stinking in the close air. A small pile of Rebecca’s clothes, a few books, a notebook and pencil. The old boxes he’d used for his childish war games. He climbed through the opening, hid things as well as he could, carried the bucket down and emptied it in the yard, then filled it with mud and left it there. The priest was sitting at the kitchen table with his head in his hands, too exhausted to move. Luca looked for the apple he’d left and didn’t see it. Its absence, and Rebecca’s, were the puzzle pieces he couldn’t fit. He must have come here when his mother was still at the Rossos’ house, cooking, and then she must have poisoned them, and then, perhaps, started the fire and escaped as far as the place where they’d found her. But how had Rebecca known? The sound of the shot? The fact that Maria hadn’t returned? Was her body in the burned house?

  “They’re going to count the bodies,” Don Claudio told him without looking up. “They’re going to know one is missing. Even in the unlikely event they decide the fire was an accident—a houseful of soldiers asleep or too drunk to escape—they’ll wonder about the other one. We should leave. Everyone in the town should leave now, before they kill us all.”

  “What does God do to them?” Luca asked. He’d almost said your God but had held the bitterness back. “What do you really believe happens to them . . . after?”

  Don Claudio raised his face, a mask of pain and weariness. “Divine justice,” he said. “We have to believe that, or else how could we go on?”

  We make our own justice, Luca thought, but what he said was, “Sarah’s pregnant,” and he watched a ripple of something like joy cross the priest’s round face. “I’m going to take her across the border. I’ll take you, too.”

  The priest smiled tiredly and shook his head. “Too old, Luca. Too old and too fat to make a climb like that. Take me back to Sant’Abbondio. I’ll pray there for your child”—he hesitated—“my grandchild. I’ll pray there, and I’ll wait to learn what fate the Lord has in store for me.”

  Eighty-Four

  In midmorning, in a steady rain, having slept the sleep of the dead for a few hours and then shared with her mother one hard-boiled egg and a glass of water, having torn a sheet of paper from her notebook and left a coded message for Luca, and having stood in the open doorway and waited as long as she could bear to wait for her lover to appear, Sarah led the way out of the cabin. They were carrying extra sweaters and a bit of food and water. All she knew was that the Swiss border was directly to their west, and she remembered Luca saying it was a climb of a little over an hour. A little over an hour for him, she thought: for her and her mother, it could take the whole day.

  “We can stay if you want,” her mother offered.

  Sarah shook her head. She guessed, she hoped, that Luca would come back to the cabin, probably that same day, and she knew he’d see and understand the message she’d left and set out immediately to find them. As they started slowly along the path, she began to leave fingertip-size scraps of cloth, torn from the tails of her blue blouse, to show him the route they were taking. Only the most attentive and suspicious German soldier would notice bits of cloth stuck to the bushes at waist height. She hoped the dogs wouldn’t be able to track the scent on them, and she wondered what they’d find at the border. Guards, tall barbed-wire fences. And on the other side, Swiss military men protecting their country from desperate refugees. If Luca didn’t come, they’d never make it.

  But what were their options? Even if they weren’t tracked and caught there, they’d go insane in the cabin and likely starve. What was she supposed to do—send her mother off to Switzerland on her own? Wait for Luca and then make him walk at their pace, with the Germans tracking them?

  Her plan was to get as close to the border as she could without arousing the suspicion of the guards—though she wasn’t sure exactly how she’d accomplish that or how, exactly, she’d know when they were near. Sneak ahead a little way and look for the tops of the fences? Once they were close, she and her mother would find a comfortable place and wait there for Luca. If he made it that far, he’d think of something. Barely a high school graduate, not fond of reading (though he seemed to appreciate her poetry), he was, she’d often thought, a certain kind of genius. He knew where to find edible plants and how to cook them. He could move through the forest like a deer and navigate by the constellations. He could take apart and repair any kind of motor or appliance, from an automobile engine to a simple household fan, and, with his hands and mouth, he could play her body like a musical instrument, bringing her with so much patience to moments of such physical ecstasy that her fingertips were left vibrating for minutes afterward.

  What more could a woman ask for in a husband? As she walked, she thought of ways she might convince him to come with them. His mother was gone, but would he know that? Would she have to tell him? Shouldn’t a wife and child mean more to a man than the hope of killing Germans?

  Following her mother up the slick path, letting the older woman set the pace, Sarah battled an onslaught of worries: that Luca had already been killed or captured; that he’d arrive after dark, too late to follow the cloth trail; that he’d find them only to refuse to take the risk of sneaking across the border and insist that she and her mother go back to the cabin.

  After only a few minutes of climbing, her mother had to stop and rest. They took shelter beneath a chestnut tree, drank from one of the water bottles, caught their breath, wiped the perspiration and rainwater from their foreheads and necks. The rain had stopped, but the day was still humid and overcast. What would happen to them if they had to sleep in the forest?

  “I’m pregnant, Mother,” she said suddenly.

  Her mother turned to meet her eyes and then wrapped her bony arms around her neck and held on for a long time. When they finally separated, Sarah could see the tears.

  “It’s a happy thing, Mother.”

  Her mother was nodding, nodding, brushing at her eyes, unable to speak.
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  “It’s a happy thing,” Sarah repeated, convincing herself.

  “I feel like I almost can’t bear a happy thing now,” Rebecca said at last. “I feel like I can’t hope anymore for a normal life. I feel like I have to live one minute at a time and not let my mind move anywhere beyond the immediate present . . . Does Luca know?”

  Sarah nodded, watching her.

  “He’s a good man. He’ll make a good father.”

  Sarah tried to smile, but she was wondering if she would ever again see her child’s father.

  Eighty-Five

  Luca accompanied Don Claudio as far as the back entrance to Sant’Abbondio and stopped there. By then, the overnight rain had strengthened a bit, but the sky in the east was touched with gray light, and he thought this might be the end of the storm. “Come in,” Don Claudio said. “I have a little food and a little something to drink. Not much. But if you’re going to climb, I want you to have it.”

  Luca hesitated, nodded. “Va bene, Padre.”

  The priest quietly opened the door. They paused at the threshold and listened, watched. The nave was empty. While Don Claudio set the fish head in his small refrigerator, then rummaged around in his kitchen trying to put together a meal, Luca wet a towel and went carefully over the walls of the cloakroom and the aisle that led to the altar rail where he’d seen Don Claudio praying. He found the pistol, cleaned it, put it into his pocket, and hid the rifles and a small cloth bag of ammunition beneath the altar. Three times he examined the marble tiles, going as far as the back door with his flashlight, making a slow inspection, and at last was confident that there were no traces left.

  That done, Luca found the pew where his mother and father used to worship at Sunday Mass, and he sat there and rested. How many hundreds of hours had he spent looking at that gold crucifix, this marble altar, the colored glass in those windows? How many times, in cold and heat, had he endured the sermons that seemed so endless to a child? The God his parents worshipped had been unfair to him, bringing him into the world with no left eye and a weak left arm. He had never been able to believe in a God who would do that, never been able to love such a God.

  Now he tried to make himself pray for his mother’s soul, but the pain was too fresh for that, and prayer had long ago become alien to him. The resentment was boiling inside him, bubbling over, hissing as it splashed on a hot stove top. He fingered the statuette in his left front pocket, the pistol in his right. He wondered if there were any boundaries left for him now, anything he wouldn’t do . . . And how would Sarah feel about having that kind of a man as a husband?

  After a time, Don Claudio emerged from the kitchen carrying a cloth bag. “A little fruit and bread and cheese,” the priest said. “Not much. Two wine bottles filled with water.” He cleared his throat. “I’ve put some communion wafers in there, too. Unblessed, of course. Not much, but they’re light, and they could help with hunger.”

  Luca nodded his thanks, tracing the thin lines of a sheepish new satisfaction on the priest’s face. Amazing as it seemed, if they all survived, the kindly priest might someday be his father-in-law and would always be grandfather to his child. What other impossible secrets lived in the air around him? And what would Sarah think when she heard that her father was a priest, a man she’d known all her life?

  “If you get across the border,” Don Claudio said quietly, “go to the town of Bellinzona. It’s not far into Switzerland. Five kilometers or less. There’s a church there, Santa Teresa. The priest is a friend, Don Alessandro. If he’s still there, I’m sure he’ll help you.”

  “Good, thank you, Padre.”

  “Maybe they’re together,” Don Claudio said, and for a moment, Luca thought he was speaking of his own mother and father. Together in heaven. Another sweet myth. But then he said, “If you find them, give them my love, will you?” and Luca understood.

  “I’ll send your regards, yes, Father.”

  The priest pressed his lips together, seeming, for a moment, stronger than Luca remembered him, less afraid. “No,” he said forcefully. “My love. Be sure to say I sent my love, not just my regards.”

  “Capito,” Luca said. Understood.

  He embraced Don Claudio and went out into the breaking day.

  Eighty-Six

  An accomplished pilot himself, Mussolini watched Gerlach with deep admiration. No one else on earth could have managed a takeoff like that. Damaged but functional—Gerlach said the left landing gear had smashed into a rock just before going over the edge—the Storch carried them through the valleys and over the green hills of the Abruzzo. In places, to avoid detection by enemy aircraft, Gerlach kept them only thirty meters above the trees. Approaching the Pratica di Mare airfield—a place il Duce knew like he knew the grounds of Villa Torlonia—he wasn’t surprised to hear Gerlach warn that the landing would be rough. But, as if he’d been practicing such landings all his life, the master took the plane down with a single bump and brought it to a twisting, skidding, sideways-leaning stop not far from the bland gray metal of the hangar.

  Mussolini relieved himself in the washroom there, rinsed and scrubbed his face with both hands, looked in the mirror. Grateful to have been rescued, but ashamed, too, he supposed he’d be flown to see Hitler now. He looked sickly and thin; he was in pain. And he was being sent to see the greatest general on earth, the way a troublesome younger brother might be sent to see the successful older one.

  It wasn’t his fault. His own people had failed him, lost faith in him. His own friends had betrayed him.

  In the hangar, he shook Gerlach’s hand warmly, thanked him with another simple ben fatto, and then Captain Skorzeny waved him aboard a larger plane. This, he knew, was a Heinkel, a medium-size bomber, very difficult to shoot down. Soon they were airborne again, flying north up the peninsula at a normal altitude, observing radio silence. The weather was clear at first, but a storm was moving east from the Swiss Alps, and the pilot warned them of rougher weather ahead. Mussolini gazed out the window for a time, running his eyes over the landscape as if searching for a lost and forgotten Italy.

  Once they were north of the Po Valley, they encountered the predicted cloud cover and then came the steady tick of raindrops on the windows. Il Duce turned to his rescuer, who was sitting beside him, perpetually at attention, it seemed. “Are we winning the war, Captain Skorzeny?”

  “Absolutely, Duce. Without question.”

  But Skorzeny couldn’t seem to make eye contact when he spoke those words.

  They landed in Vienna under low skies and were taken by car from Asbern field into the city. A fine suite in the Hotel Imperial and a shot of morphine from Dr. Keilter greeted him there, along with word that another commando unit had evacuated Rachele; she would soon join him. He wasn’t looking forward to his wife’s “I told you not to go, Benito!” but it would be good to see her again, better if Claretta could somehow be rescued as well. The simple fact that he was thinking about his wife and mistress heartened him. He’d always had a powerful constitution, and, bathing and shaving in the luxurious suite, he could sense the beginning of the return of his faculties. The shot had temporarily taken care of his pain and given him some energy. He’d be flown to Munich the next day and was already working on a plan for reestablishing the Fascist Party. He and Hitler would sit together and talk strategy. Italy would be saved. Fascism—the only system that could ever work in a human society—would be resurrected. He could feel it in his bones.

  Eighty-Seven

  Luca hadn’t slept in thirty hours. In that time, he’d buried a bloodied German corpse at sea and his mother in her own back yard. He’d also decided to hold back a thousand lire in gold from the men he was supposed to be working for, men whose honor, abilities, and commitment to Italy he’d long ago lost faith in. Who knew what they’d do with the money? Fund a communist cell, pass it along to a traitor, waste it on idiotic plans to disable a few aircraft that hadn’t even been seen yet on Italian soil? Better to use it to save actual Italian lives. Be
tter to use it the way his mother would have wanted it used—she’d risked more than they’d ever think of risking, hiding a Jewish friend. She’d probably killed more Germans in a single night than Mentone, Prinzano, and the traitorous Scutarro had in months of their so-called secret work. And she’d lost her own life doing so.

  Climbing the familiar trail that led from the trees near the rear of Sant’Abbondio to the hidden cabin, he felt as though he were carrying a hundred kilos of guilt and sorrow in the small pack on his shoulders. What haunted him was the idea that, if he hadn’t brought his mother the lepiota, she might still be alive. He was sure now that the deaths of the German SS men wouldn’t go unanswered. New officers would appear in Mezzegra in the coming days. They’d arrest a group of villagers, line them up, torment them for a while, then shoot them one by one and leave their bodies in the street.

  Still, his mother and Masso had been right. What else were you supposed to do? Wait like sheep for the slaughter, hoping the Allies would make it all the way up the peninsula before you were taken?

  He put his hand over the pistol in his pocket. He moved quietly but, very tired, not as quietly as before. By the time he was within a few hundred meters of the cabin, the rain had started again in gentler fashion. It tapped on the tree leaves and trickled down onto his head and shoulders. He kept a sweater in the cabin, and Sarah had towels. He couldn’t wait to see her, to touch her, to tell her everything that had happened.

  But when he reached the door and gave the signal with his knocks, she didn’t answer. He knocked again, not wanting to startle her if she was asleep, then pushed open the door and saw that the room was empty.

  It was too much. His mother, his future wife, their child. All gone. Too much. In his exhaustion, he crumpled onto the floor and sat there, head in hands. His mind was filled with a thrumming wordless darkness, two parts sorrow, two parts anger, six parts hatred. He would kill them all now; it didn’t matter. Reprisals or no reprisals, he would dedicate every ounce of strength and ability to killing as many Germans and Blackshirts as he could in the time left to him.