by Jon Land
The root cellar, Michael thought, moving fast for the refuse of the farmhouse.
SEVENTY-SEVEN
CALTAGIRONE, SICILY
Michael stood outside the shell of the house briefly before continuing on, long enough to see the inside again as he remembered it. His mother always seemed to be cooking in the kitchen, his sister Rosina either crying loudly or totally silent, his father at the kitchen table paying bills and keeping a running tab of the transactions on a piece of loose-leaf paper with the fringe carefully peeled off.
It was another long-forgotten memory, though, that stirred him now. Of finding a padlock on a heavy plank door angled over the ground at the farmhouse’s rear, the one spot the sun never reached. His father had caught him and slapped him across the face, telling him it was dangerous, that he’d closed up the old root cellar after a particularly wet spring had flooded it and left only mold and mildew behind in place of the ruined crops.
But one night Michael remembered being roused from bed by a strange creaking sound while he sat reading by flashlight under the covers. He’d gone to the window and spotted the last of his father’s frame disappearing through the same plank door, leaving it hoisted open behind him. Maybe it had only happened that one time or, perhaps, other memories of it had merged into this one.
Michael pulled more of the thick brush, bramble, weeds that had grown into thickly knotted vines and moss aside to reveal that plank door, now faded to a sickly, washed-out gray color. The lock was still in place, all rusted over, and broke apart as soon as Michael tugged on it.
The doors resisted at first but then gave with a jolt that pushed dust and grime into the air behind a gush of rancid air escaping from below. Dry and spoiled, laced with must and decay, from being trapped for so long.
No food had been stored down here for a very long time. And, even before he shined a flashlight about and descended a set of plank stairs into the darkness, Michael doubted food storage was ever the root cellar’s primary purpose. One of the wooden steps gave under his weight and two others cracked audibly before he reached the bottom, sweeping his flashlight around to find piles of petrified refuse that had once been freshly harvested crops. Just enough to throw anyone coming down here in search of something else off the track. The root cellar was cramped and claustrophobic, no more than ten feet square with a ceiling just high enough to accommodate Michael’s six-foot frame. He continued to shine his flashlight around the earthen walls and kicked at the petrified remnants of crops that must’ve been stored down here in the days before the massacre.
Wishing he’d donned gloves first, Michael then began pulling the collection of spoiled rot away to see what the floor and walls might reveal. Something inside him expected to find some secret passage or doorway into the clandestine world his father had forged. He imagined a closet-size chamber full of secrets stacked and catalogued in alphabetical order to ease the sorting process.
What he uncovered in a rear corner beneath the pulpy remains of stench-riddled turnips and radishes was a single metal footlocker covered in a cheap tarpaulin that had weathered the years reasonably well. Michael peeled away the plastic, having to pry some of it from the metal, to reveal a lid which caught stubbornly until Michael wedged a pen into the narrow gap and pried it open.
He saw the weapons first: World War II vintage, a pistol and a rifle. Then cardboard boxes packed with old pictures and letters dating back, it seemed, to his father’s own childhood, left hidden down here along with the never-revealed secrets of his life.
Under the spill of his flashlight, an assortment of pictures greeted Michael first, all capturing his father around the same time as the mug shot of Davide Schapira. There were more weapons too—old pistols, rifles manufactured by a long-bankrupt Italian gun manufacturer, even a Thompson machine gun—all sheathed in a coating of dust that hid the rust the moist air had draped over the old weapons.
It was all here, the secret life of Vito Nunziato from tattered birth certificate missing two edges and browned through the middle forward. Pictures of him as a boy, a teenager, one that looked like it had been taken on Isla de Levanzo around the time an ancient gold relic had cried out to him from the shallows.
The last thing Michael spotted was a thick notebook missing its cover to reveal the yellowed pages within. The pages of the notebook were full of notations of addresses, descriptions of places and people coming and going, each entry ending with a bold strike being drawn through a name.
A German name. They were all German names.
All written in Italian in his father’s scratchy scrawl. Regarding that handwriting again now, for the first time in so many years, sent a chill up Michael’s spine. He hadn’t thought about his father very much in a long time. Right now, though, Vito Nunziato was all he was thinking about.
Or Davide Schapira, that is.
The notebook sat upon a stack of larger, ledger-size journals bound in cheap leather or vinyl. He eased the journal from the top of the pile to him and thumbed it open to find the same familiar handwriting, the dark paint-like ink a bit faded by the years but otherwise intact. Michael started to run his flashlight over the contents, then spotted an old oil lantern on a nearby ledge. He pulled his cigar lighter from his pocket and touched it to the wick, then turned the knob to increase the flow of oil.
Surprisingly, the oil still burned. The light came up instantly in surprisingly bright fashion, just as it must have for his father all the times he’d sneaked down here to lose himself in the past. When Michael realized the lantern was dulled by its dust-encrusted glass, he swiped it clean as best he could to let the light better sift through. He imagined his father positioning the lantern to maximize the spill before he started writing, just as Michael did before he started reading.
The journal, all in Italian, looked to begin in a period around 1958 and opened on the first page with a title in capital letters:
OPERATION SLEDGEHAMMER
SEVENTY-EIGHT
FROM VITO NUNZIATO’S JOURNAL
That’s where this all starts, an odd name for a secret operation but they had to call it something.
See, as the war neared its end, and the Nazi war machine fell, an estimated thirty thousand Nazi soldiers and cadre managed to flee Germany ahead of the coming Allied invasion. In the wake of the surrender and ensuing armistice, the United States Department of Justice, working in concert with the Organization of Special Services, OSS (that would soon become the CIA), formed the Office of Special Investigation. Though its existence was not acknowledged until decades later, the OSI joined forces with similarly formed French and British bureaus to bring as many of these Nazi war criminals to justice as possible. In the early years following the war, this mandate was carried out in the spirit of Nuremberg, an overriding obsession to parade as many Nazis before public tribunals as possible.
In later years, beginning in the late 1950s, it became something much different.
The world could stomach and relive only so many atrocities committed at Nazi hands. Ultimately, the public tired of the spectacle and the endless string of trials became redundant. Captures and subsequent incarcerations were paid less and less heed, until some escaped Nazis even dared to live in the open, not bothering to disguise their experiences, if not their very identities. They refused to go away.
So Operation Sledgehammer was born.
With the rest of the world’s attention turned to the Cold War, the Office of Special Investigations and its various international partners coordinated a worldwide effort to recruit a team of Nazi hunters dedicated to tracking down and bringing to justice the remaining Nazi fugitives. The focus being on the worst offenders culled from the rolls of extermination camps, the Waffen SS, and the Gestapo.
The problem faced by those doggedly administering Operation Sledgehammer was that the traditional Nazi hunters pulled from the ranks of elite American, French, and British agents could not operate in such closeted regions without arousing a level of suspicion likely to spo
ok their targets into flight. The solution was to expand the ranks of Sledgehammer to include troops previously excluded from serving the former Allied cause due to their Axis leanings. Indeed, Italian, Austrian, and even fellow German operatives would stir far less, if any, attention to their true cause. They would work entirely as individuals instead of teams and be dispatched to regions hardly adverse to their specific nationalities to provoke even less scrutiny.
During the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, for example, many Italians from Western Austria-Hungary settled in Transylvania. During the interwar period, even more Italians took up residence in Dobruja, more than enough to assure that the arrival of an Italian in a small village would draw no notice. That made me the perfect candidate to go to Romania where my arrival in the town of Bună Ziua raised no eyebrows at all. So I was recruited from my position in military intelligence, an opportunity I welcomed greatly for such a noble cause.
My father had fought on the side of the Axis powers in World War II. He’d been involved in Anzio and some of the biggest battles of the war. I was too young to understand that at the time, just as I was too young to understand he fought on the side of Hitler and the Nazis. As I grew older, the mere thought of this revolted me. I know choices must be viewed through the prism of history, but I was disgusted by the thought of my father as a Black Shirt serving the Fascist regime of Italy and wanted more than anything to atone for the blood he had spilled and the lives he had taken for such a wicked and unworthy cause.
Operation Sledgehammer provided me that opportunity. And I became Davide Schapira, an Italian Jew searching for lost relatives in Romania nearly fifteen years after the war’s end. It was a solid cover, since Mussolini had merely exiled Italian Jews from the country instead of following the German example. Still, the practice led to a million people displaced and isolated from family members spread through other countries. As Davide Schapira, I wouldn’t be the first Jew to go in search of what might remain of his family, and I wouldn’t be the last.
The perfect cover, in other words.
Once in Romania, with the help of a beautiful young woman who befriended me almost from the start, I uncovered a hive of Nazi fugitives far larger than had been reported or estimated. But I never expected to fall in love with Stefania Tepesche and I suppose I did from the first time we met, no matter how well I managed to hide it. Loving her, I realize now, gave me hope, reminding me there was beauty amid all the ugliness. A number of very powerful Nazis had not gone away after World War II; instead they had attached themselves to the Romanian countryside like parasites, living off the land they’d ravaged, supported, and protected by any number of organizations like Odessa created to hide them from their crimes under new identifies. By the time I arrived in Romania, a large number of them had managed to blend in unobtrusively with the locals and had grown so emboldened as to feel themselves free to enjoy their lives after destroying those of so many.
I welcomed the opportunity to impart justice on them and Stefania became a beacon of light shining through that darkness. She was nineteen, barely more than a child, and I had just turned thirty. Her smile refreshed me, her touch reenergized me, and her mere presence filled me with hope that my actions had relevance. That there was a greater purpose in those actions beyond pinpointing targets who’d managed to escape justice for their own personal judgment day.
Times were difficult under the communists, Romania becoming little more than a bank for Stalin’s Soviet Union where only withdrawals were made, no deposits. The only exceptions to this were the older mountain villages, too remote and too small for the Soviet Union to concern itself with. As such, small pockets of private ownership continued to exist, especially in Transylvania and especially in the form of small establishments that were called crismas. Generally, these were combination bar and restaurants known and frequented only by locals. All that was required to stay in business was a relatively modest stipend paid to officials of the local Securitate, the Romanian Secret Police. Though these crismas were in no way brothels, young women were free to take the local men to rooms maintained upstairs for just that purpose. Such a practice was neither advertised nor criminalized.
The closeted natures of these mountain villages and towns had also made them preferred hideouts for the Nazis I was hunting. And several had been identified by Operation Sledgehammer’s intelligence in Bună Ziua itself.
Stefania, meanwhile, preferred being poor over prostituting herself in the crisma where we first met. Orphaned by the war herself, it would’ve been easy to have chosen the path so many other young women did in Romania. Those other women, not nearly as pretty as Stefania, made a decent wage, but it was some of their primary customers that most interested me, men Stefania and the other girls at the crisma called “the Strangers,” since none seemed to be natives and yet they were all Romanian citizens and spoke the language perfectly.
So my early days were spent locating and identifying each of them, chronicling their comings and goings from the crisma and other parts of the town, as well as their places of employment, with notebook in hand. One at a time over the ensuing weeks, I followed them to where they lived, cataloguing everything I learned and saw. I was not a killer, though. My assignment was to conduct reconnaissance and build intelligence, then wire my findings in coded telegrams to a drop that would funnel my reports to the parties overseeing Operation Sledgehammer. My role ended with that. I never met the killers who were dispatched and only occasionally learned of the product of their work. Most of the deaths were made to look like accidents, attesting to their level of expertise.
That meant exercising patience, something this mission seemed to reject. How long could I remain in place before I too was found out, perhaps by Odessa, which was known to check up on areas where a substantial concentration of former Nazis had been resettled under fake covers and identities? But my task was made possible by the fact that my targets lived in locations that were often isolated and, as near as I can tell, made virtually no contact with each other to avoid drawing suspicion. In fact, very likely the only time they glimpsed one other was in the crisma where they came to be in each other’s company over alcohol and women. So as their number was depleted, they could just as easily believe relocation was to blame instead of foul play.
I came to learn that the larger than expected number of Nazi fugitives who’d settled in the region was no accident. Hives like the ones I had uncovered in Transylvania were the result of carefully orchestrated planning to resettle as many Nazis as possible in preparation for the expected rise of another Reich. In essence, I’d hit the jackpot.
As I write this I have no idea of Stefania’s ultimate fate. I’m sure I’ll learn it someday, but it’s not a subject for these pages. Stefania made the success of my mission possible. She and the other young women became my de facto spies, willingly enlisting themselves after I rescued one of their own from a brutal beating.
Stefania, though, was the most beautiful by far. She had come to the crisma to work for food and lodging from a life on the streets, forced into destitution and poverty as a child after her family’s bombed-out apartment building was officially condemned. We went there together one day and I watched her eyes fall on it excitedly, as if just for that moment expecting to see it miraculously restored and her relatives waiting happily to greet her.
But it was just a pile of wood and rubble, nothing recognizable still standing. In that moment, I wanted so much to tell her who I really was and why I’d really come to Romania. That the people responsible for destroying the country and leaving it for the communists deserved the fates I was helping to dispense. I would probably have lost count of all the men I’d marked for death if I didn’t keep meticulous records of all those I identified as were my orders.
It was the longest and most dangerous year of my life, made tolerable only by Stefania and all the hope and good she represented. I let myself believe I had a future with her far away from the darkness and depravity of this place. I le
t myself believe I could take her with me.
Until the day my life changed forever.
SEVENTY-NINE
CALTAGIRONE, SICILY
A chill breeze interrupted Michael’s reading, ruffling the lantern flame. It seemed to come from a back corner of the root cellar, an illusion likely fostered by the depth of his concentration and sudden realization of how cold it was down here below a patch of ground the sun barely reached. But then he felt the breeze again and briefly lifted his gaze from where it seemed to be coming, wanting only to return to his father’s journal.
Michael found himself utterly enraptured by its contents. He imagined his father filling the journal’s pages down here, under the light of the very same lantern. But it was a different man from the father he thought he’d known.
For the past five years, his ruminations on the medallion had branded his father as perhaps nothing more than the vehicle to deliver the relic unto him. But this journal, written in his own hand, proved otherwise. And yet he had died so violently, in a hail of bullets as if he could not escape the legacy he thought left behind in Romania, as if those acts left their own indelible impressions on a fate that had ultimately chased him down.
And, directly because of that, the relic had ended up with his son. Fate again.
But why had Vito Nunziato buried the truth of his heroism down in a root cellar?
The only way to find the answer to that was to read on.
EIGHTY
FROM VITO NUNZIATO’S JOURNAL
That day a former Nazi arrived in Bună Ziua. His real name was Hans Wolff and I recognized him immediately from the scar on his right jaw near his chin. I recalled from my briefings that he was one of Operation Sledgehammer’s prime targets. If there was any man I’d been sent into Romania to find, it was him. He had been the youngest SS officer Colonel Himmler had ever made in that loathsome outfit. A sadist and cold-blooded murderer, Wolff oversaw operations at the Nazi concentration camps throughout Eastern Europe and was especially fond of gutting children and making their parents watch them die in slow and agonizing fashion.