“Why?”
“Why? Because Hitler will want him back in power, here in Italy. In the north, probably, where the Germans still hold—”
“The Germans are everywhere. They’re in Sicily. They’re—”
Masso was shaking his head. “They’ve been chased out of Sicily already. And there was just now another landing in the south. At Salerno. Our soldiers have surrendered by the thousands—most of them don’t want to fight. But the Germans are at their backs, forcing them. The real war has begun now, our war, and it will go on for a long time. Some Italian troops are loyal to the demon. If they think Mussolini has abandoned the country, they won’t fight. Hitler knows as much. He’ll force Mussolini to return, whether the Duce wants to or not. I’m sure of it.”
Luca didn’t remove his hand from the pocket. He had an urge to take out the pistol and point it at Masso, forcing the truth out of him, but it wouldn’t do any good. The man was unafraid to die: that much, if nothing else, was true. “Go on,” he said.
“When I heard Orlando’s voice on the phone line—worried but not panicking—I thought the people would be taken to the camps, not shot. In order for them to be taken to the camps, they would have had to go in trucks, south along the statale, as far as the station in Como. The trains leave from there and head up on the other side of the mountains, through Lugano, eventually to Austria. It’s the route along which they take the Jews. My people have seen the cattle cars. But they’re taking Christian Italians now, too, to the work camps. They don’t trust us to fight, so they’re bringing us to their factories.”
“How do you know all this?”
Masso watched him, both hands flat on his thighs now, almost in a posture of resignation. “I have contacts,” he said. “I run a group of . . . fighters”—he waved an arm in a small circle above his head as if indicating his territory—“in this area.” He looked away, looked back. “You among them.”
“What else?”
“You know there are four tunnels along the statale between here and Como. I have men stationed near the end of the third tunnel. I called them as soon as Orlando called me, because I assumed our people would be taken by that route, not killed, as I said. By now my men have felled a large tree across the southern opening of the tunnel, as instructed. I chose that tunnel because they live close by, and because, just before the opening, as you’re heading south, you come around a sharp turn—”
“I know the roads, Masso.”
“You come around a sharp turn, and there’s the opening right there, suddenly in front of you. A large tree will be across the road. The Germans won’t have time to do anything but put on the brakes. My men will open fire, careful not to shoot Don Claudio, I hope. And then, if all goes well, they will take him into the hills.”
“And if all doesn’t go well?”
“How many Germans were in the jeep?”
“Three. The driver and the officer in front, one guard in back with Don Claudio.”
“And I have eleven men there, with rifles. The only trouble will come if Don Claudio can’t get out of the way fast enough. If he sees the blockade, the tree, and gets down immediately, he’ll have a chance. The German soldiers will not.”
“Why would I believe you?”
“Because late last night, I had a message from someone in contact with a certain priest in Switzerland. Sarah and her mother are safe. Exhausted, hungry, their skin and clothes torn by brambles but, as of yesterday morning, safe.”
At the mention of Sarah, Luca released his grip on the pistol. “Who are you?” he said suddenly.
The tiniest of smiles caught the corners of Masso’s lips, then instantly disappeared. He took another sip of water, blinked, ignored the question. “You told me once that you wanted bigger assignments. Is that still true?”
“Truer now than ever.”
Masso picked up the half-eaten apple, raised it to his lips, then lowered it. “If il Duce is forced to come back, he will most likely come back here, to the north, because the Allies are in the south now, heavy fighting there, and that will be too great a risk. If he does come back to Italy, and if we can figure out where he is, we will, of course, want to assign someone to kill him.”
As he watched the old farmer’s face, Luca was picturing his mother lying in the dirt, covered with blood. He was remembering the promise he’d made to her, and he was remembering the sight of Sarah and Rebecca disappearing into the trees on the Swiss side of the border. He was thinking of his unborn child and of his father, too, and the people—including the little girl—who’d been slaughtered in front of Orlando’s bar, the bodies of the partisans lying on the stones of Piazzale Loreto, the fear on Don Claudio’s face as he was being driven away. It was, all of it, food for the angry beast inside him.
That new creature, driven to the edge of madness by everything it had seen, spoke the “Si” that came out of Luca’s mouth when Masso asked him this question:
“Is that an assignment you might want?”
Epilogue
In fact, just as the fictional Gennaro Masso predicted, Mussolini was allowed a ten-day rest in Germany, and then, in September of 1943, Hitler ordered him back to Lake Garda in northern Italy. In an attempt to maintain the appearance that Italy would be Fascist again one day, Mussolini was forced to preside over a sham nation there, The Republic of Salò, named after a nearby town on that lake. Housed in a luxurious private residence, il Duce was watched night and day by German guards and Gestapo spies, and his moods vacillated between abject depression and bitter despair. As head of The Republic of Salò, he presided over, among other things, the execution of his own son-in-law, Galeazzo Ciano, and other Fascist Party members who had voted him out of power less than a year earlier. Both Rachele Mussolini and Claretta Petacci, wife and mistress, joined Mussolini at Lake Garda, though in separate houses.
Beginning at about that time—late 1943 and early 1944—the Italian partisan movement, which had at first been composed of small, disorganized bands of fighters, began to coalesce into a force that would ultimately number 250,000 men and women and play an important role in the Allied victory. Regular soldiers—American, British, Canadian, Australian, and Italian—fought their way up the peninsula at an agonizingly slow pace, with German troops and loyal Italian Fascists putting up furious resistance, and the partisans committing acts of sabotage and revenge and engaging in more traditional warfare, as well. Allied bombing raids became more and more frequent, damaging not only the German forces but cities that, for centuries, had survived war, earthquakes, and invasion.
Though many Jews were hidden by brave Italians, and a few escaped to other countries, once Mussolini was deposed, some seventy-five hundred were captured by the Nazi occupiers and sent to the death camps.
Eventually, in the spring of 1945, threatened by the relentless Allied advance, il Duce fled the house on Lake Garda and tried to escape to Switzerland, carrying millions in gold and cash, accompanied by Claretta Petacci, and embedded in a column of retreating German soldiers. He made it a hundred miles west, as far as the city of Como, and then halfway up Lake Como’s western shore, before the column was stopped by a small band of partisans—tipped off, perhaps—who felled a tree across the shoreline road at the end of one of its many tunnels. The mountain fighters held Mussolini and Petacci for one night in a house in the hills above Mezzegra. On the next day, April 28, 1945, they brought their prisoners to a spot in front of the Villa Belmonte, where they were executed by a machine-gun-wielding partisan whose identity remains cloaked in the mists of history. Mussolini’s last words were reported to have been, “Shoot me in the chest.”
When the deed was done, the partisans loaded the bodies into a truck bed and brought them fifty miles south to Milan, where, in a symbolic gesture, they dumped them on the cobblestones of Piazzale Loreto. A mob of furious Milanese kicked, clubbed, shot, urinated on, and spat upon the corpses, then hung them by their ankles from a horizontal pole above a gas station.
T
here is a monument in that square now, monumento ai martiri di Piazzale Loreto. It bears the names of the fifteen murdered partisans whose bodies had been displayed there eight months before Mussolini was killed, but makes no mention at all of il Duce.
Begun: July 8, 2014, Campo Imperatore, Province of L’Aquila, Italy
Finished: April 14, 2019, Conway, Massachusetts, USA
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
First thanks, as always, to Amanda for her love, unflagging optimism, and travel expertise. My gratitude also to our daughters, Alexandra and Juliana, who inspire me every hour with their grace, courage, loveliness, and excellent sense of adventure.
Special thanks to Robert Braile for his brilliant editing of an early draft of this novel, as well as for his friendship and encouragement.
My gratitude to Emma Sweeney and Margaret Sutherland Brown for their invaluable help in reading, editing, and placing this novel in good hands. To Peter Grudin, who read an early draft and who has been a friend and supporter of my writing for thirty-five years. To Simone Gugliotta for Italian language guidance (any mistakes are my own). And to Harold Lubberdinck for finding us the perfect place to live at Lake Como in the summer of 2007.
I’m indebted to Chris Werner and David Downing, both of whom went the extra mile in polishing and shepherding this story. My thanks also to the excellent copyeditor Stacy Abrams, and to Nicole Pomeroy and her fine production management team.
Writing is easy work compared to some of the things I’ve done in my life and many of the things others do to earn a living. But it is, for the most part, a solitary business, speckled with uncertainty, rejection, and disappointment. I am forever grateful to the many friends who have offered, over forty years, a word of encouragement or support in various forms. If I tried to mention all of you here, I’d surely forget someone and feel horrible for all my days. But your generosity is written on my heart. Thank you.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Photo © 2019 Amanda S. Merullo
Roland Merullo was born in Boston and raised in Revere, Massachusetts. He attended Brown University, where he obtained a bachelor of arts in Russian studies and a master of arts in Russian language and literature. The author of more than twenty works of fiction and nonfiction, including Breakfast with Buddha and The Delight of Being Ordinary, Roland is the recipient of the Massachusetts Book Award, an Editors’ Choice Award from Booklist, an Alex Award from the American Library Association, a Best of the Year award from Publishers Weekly, and he was nominated for the International Dublin Literary Award. A former Peace Corps volunteer, he’s also made his living as a carpenter, college professor, and cab driver. Roland, his wife, and their two lovely daughters live in the hills of western Massachusetts. For more information, visit www.rolandmerullo.com.
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