“You must have so much to do,” she said to the lieutenant. “But can’t we offer you something to eat or drink?”
“A glass of water only, please, if you would be so kind.”
As Maria hurried away to fetch it, Constanza maneuvered Helmut gently outside. It was shimmeringly hot. The sky was a fathomless Italian blue, and the shadows of the cypress trees that sheltered the house from the road laid cool, dark fingers on the gravel. It was hard to believe that not far away young men around Helmut’s age were hell-bent on killing one another. The German officer and Constanza stood beside his motorcycle, and he took off his helmet. Without it, he looked years younger.
“We will be in action soon,” he said. “I hoped I would see you today because I wanted to say . . . I wanted to tell you . . .”
Maria appeared with his glass of water, and he stopped speaking to gulp it down. When she had gone indoors, he began again.
“There’s so much to say, if it were possible. But so little time. You are half English, of course. And your father . . .”
“My father is away from home, as you know. We none of us know his whereabouts at the moment.”
“My father is in a difficult position, too,” said Helmut quietly. “We are a military family. He is a colonel, a professional soldier. He served in the last war and now, more recently, with General Rommel in North Africa, but he has never been in agreement with the Nazi high command and what they are doing to our country. It has put him, and his career, into considerable danger. I want you to know this. I can tell you because I trust you, and your family. I cannot bear that we should be enemies, because I . . . you are . . .” And then, without realizing it, he lapsed into German, speaking so softly and urgently that Constanza, who understood the language only slightly, could hardly follow what he said. Though she thought she caught the words “so dear to me.”
Eventually he fell silent and took her hand. He was looking at her so intently that she hardly knew how to reply. Then, abruptly, he straightened himself, handed her back the empty glass, and put on his helmet. Without another word, he kicked the engine of his motorcycle into life and drove off down the drive.
Constanza stood there for a moment, looking after him. She really liked Helmut. He was the kind of young man, she reflected, that her father would have gotten along well with had they met in some other, happier world: one in which they were not fighting on bitterly opposed sides. She realized what a compliment he had paid her by telling her about his own father and background. He was such a serious man, made more serious still by the enormous weight of responsibility that had been put upon him as a German officer at war. He was not many years older than she was — twenty or twenty-one, perhaps — and it touched her that he had not been able to express his feelings for her except in his own beloved language. It was difficult for her to think of him as The Enemy, someone against whom she and her family were about to pit all their courage and ingenuity. Slowly, she turned around and wandered thoughtfully back into the house.
That evening neither Paolo nor Constanza made any fuss about taking themselves off to their rooms very early. But not, of course, to sleep. The tension in the house meant that was out of the question. As darkness fell, Maria, too, retired to her own quarters off the kitchen, leaving Rosemary alone to pace nervously from room to room. She turned off all the downstairs lights, keeping only one burning in the hall, then opened the windows of the living room, which looked out onto the terrace.
It was a still, hot night, full of stars. Somewhere out on the main road she could hear heavy vehicles — German tanks and military trucks, probably — rumbling toward the city. Then all was silent. She lit a cigarette, smoked half of it in a vain attempt to calm herself, and then stabbed the rest out in disgust. She went once more to the window. Out there beyond the terrace, where the trees cast dense shadows on the parched grass, she thought she caught a glimpse of a slight movement. A man detached himself from the dappled gloom of the hedge and came stealthily toward the house.
Summoning all her courage, she went outside and paused at the top of the steps, peering into the dark.
“Buona sera,” she said stiffly.
“Buona sera, signora.”
She could see his rifle but not his face, which was hidden under the peak of his cap.
“You’d better come in.”
The man turned back a few paces and gave a low whistle. At the sound, two other figures emerged from the darkness. She beckoned, and all three men filed inside.
Rosemary shuttered and closed the French doors, drew the curtains, and switched on the lights, then turned to face them. All three were dressed more or less alike in Italian work clothes, but the two younger men were unarmed. One was tall, broad-shouldered, and dark. The other man was slighter and very fair, with a small mustache. Both looked thin and unkempt and had dark circles of fatigue under their eyes.
The older man was sweating heavily. He removed his cap and loosened his scarf to reveal close-cropped hair; small, slightly slanting eyes; and several weeks’ growth of rusty-red beard. Rosemary turned toward his two younger companions, who, she realized, were not much older than her own daughter.
“You must be tired,” she said. “You’ll be sleeping in the cellar here — not very comfortable, I’m afraid, but we’ve made up some mattresses on the floor, and it’s quite dry. But first, you must be hungry. We’ve prepared something for you to eat, if you’d care to follow me. . . .”
They looked at her blankly and shuffled their feet.
“They don’t understand, signora,” explained their companion. “They don’t speak any Italian.”
“Oh — of course. Forgive me.”
After she had repeated herself in English, both young faces visibly relaxed. The tall, dark man gave her a grin of gratitude. “Thanks, ma’am. It’s real kind of you, what you’re doing for us. And yes, we sure would appreciate something to eat.”
He’s American, or possibly Canadian, thought Rosemary. She smiled at him and turned to his companion.
“It’s most awfully good of you,” said the fair one. He had the kind of unmistakable English voice that Rosemary had not heard for a long time. It made her heart contract with a sudden pang of homesickness for the country she had left so many years ago, a country that, for all she knew, no longer existed as she remembered it. She wanted to ask him where he came from and about his family and how he had been taken prisoner. But she knew that this was not the moment for conversation. And anyway, the less she knew about these uninvited guests, the better. Instead, she picked up a small oil lamp and said simply, “Follow me.”
The makeshift accommodation that she and Maria had prepared in the cellar was indeed very primitive, but it was as welcoming as they could make it. Some plates of food, a pitcher of water, and a bottle of wine were laid out on an upturned packing case, and the two young men fell on it ravenously. They ate in silence, then slumped down on the mattresses, heads and shoulders drooping with fatigue, already nearly asleep.
Rosemary turned to address the older man, but he had already disappeared. She found him in the hall, preparing to leave.
“One night only, remember,” she warned him, keeping her voice as steady as she could.
“Yes, yes, certo. But I have to tell you we may need your help in another small way, signora.”
“That’s out of the question. I’m already putting myself and my family in a dangerous situation, as you well know. You mustn’t ask any more of us. . . .”
“It’s essential to our plan, I’m afraid. I wouldn’t ask it of you otherwise, and besides, it’s already arranged. Tomorrow night we have to get these two men into Florence, where some of our people — never mind who — will be waiting to take them out of the city. They will then be able to rejoin their units in time for the next big push northward. It will not be long now before Florence is in Allied hands.”
“I know all this. But I insist that you remember my position.”
“Of course. But the
se two men can’t speak Italian. If they go unaccompanied into the city and are stopped by the police or a German military patrol — which is more than likely — they’ll need someone with them, someone above suspicion . . . a member of your household, perhaps?”
There was a long pause as this sank in. Rosemary was too shocked even to feel fear. She burst out angrily, “How can you suggest that? Do you think I would allow anyone — anyone at all — to risk such a venture? No one, not even you, has a right to ask such a thing of us.”
The man made no reply. He was not looking at her but over her shoulder, at the staircase. She glanced around. Halfway up the first flight of stairs, in the dark, sat a figure watching them through the banister rails.
“Paolo!” gasped Rosemary. “How long have you been there?”
He got to his feet, embarrassed. When at last he spoke, it was not to his mother. Instead, he addressed himself directly to the man he now recognized as the one who had given him the message for his mother — the same man he had encountered up in the hills, the one who had rescued him and then restored his bicycle to him when he had thought it lost for good. Now he was almost sure he knew who this man was: Il Volpe himself.
“I could go,” he said. “I’ll take my bicycle. No one will suspect me. I’m a local boy. They know me. I could do it.”
The next morning, while their two clandestine guests slept the sleep of total exhaustion in the cellar, the rest of the Crivelli household was in turmoil. Maria was in no shape to be of any use at all. She was convinced that the Gestapo would come at any second and they would all be shot. Rosemary herself was distraught. She felt she was being sucked into an escalating nightmare of danger, involving not only herself but now her family. She had never, ever fought with Paolo about anything as big as this before. Arguments and family squabbles, yes, but this brick wall of blatant disobedience and indifference to her entreaties was new to her. Last night this mad scheme involving Paolo as an escort for two escaping Allied prisoners of war had been simply foisted on her. It had all been arranged before Il Volpe had disappeared off into the darkness, and this morning all Paolo would say was “It’ll be all right, Mamma. It’ll only take an hour or two, and then I’ll be back — I promise.”
Constanza was anxious, too. He seems to think he’s the hero in some kind of adventure movie, she thought as she watched her brother nonchalantly eating his breakfast. Does he really have no idea how dangerous this is? Harboring two escaped prisoners of war in the cellar was crazily risky. But the whole enterprise had gone much too far now for either her or her mother to do anything about it.
Things only got worse as the day wore on. It became obvious that it was useless for either Constanza or Paolo to avoid all contact with their guests in the cellar. When the two men woke, at about noon, Paolo kept guard in the deserted yard and tried to stop Guido from barking while they slipped out to wash themselves under the cold tap. Maria was refusing point-blank to have anything to do with them, so it was Constanza who took them their food.
The two young men, sitting crouched on their mattresses in the semidark, were bored as well as scared, and desperate for company. Even in that dim light, the sight of Constanza did a lot to improve their morale, and they tried hard to detain her as they ate.
Constanza’s English was good. Now she wished it were better. But she was able to discover that the young, fair-haired Englishman was Flight Lieutenant David Graham, a Royal Air Force pilot whose Spitfire had been shot down near Monte Cassino. After bailing out with only minor injuries, he had been treated in a German military hospital and then transferred to a prisoner-of-war camp near Bologna. His companion was Sergeant Joe Zolinski of the First Canadian Division. He had been captured when he had run into a column of German panzers during some heavy fighting around Pontecorvo and had ended up in the same prisoner-of-war camp. Like his English comrade, he still bore the marks of exhaustion. He was tall and deeply sunburned and would have had an athletic build if the months of captivity had not taken their toll. Constanza had a swift impression of light gray eyes set in a haggard, unshaven young face. He broke into a wide grin. “They treated us OK, more or less,” he said. “The food was pretty terrible, but the boredom was worse — caged up all the time with nothing to look at but barbed wire. David and I were in the same hut. We played a hell of a lot of chess — he’s not much good at it, but I’m worse.”
“You can say that again,” said David.
“It was when the rumor got out that we were going to be moved north to another camp in Germany that I got seriously scared. Well, we all did — but I’m half Jewish. Never bothered me before. Why should it? My dad died when I was a kid, and my mom’s French-Canadian, so I was brought up a Catholic, like her. But it’s the Jewish last name that registers with these Fascists. Even if you go to Mass every Sunday, they still get suspicious.”
“Camps in Germany are a lot tougher,” added David. “So we knew if we wanted to escape, it was now or never.”
“How did you manage it?” asked Constanza.
“It was the Partisans who helped spring us,” Joe told her. “They’ve got contacts, those boys. I got a message inside a bread roll. Don’t ask me how they got it in there. It told me they could get two of our guys out, me and one other, so I picked David. Seems like I’m fated to be stuck with him.” They exchanged comradely grins in the dark.
“They told us to act normal and be on the alert,” Joe went on. “Mostly we were kept in the camp, only allowed in the exercise yard at certain times. But sometimes some of us were taken out on working parties. Repairing roads, that sort of stuff — under guard, of course. So we were out digging ditches on a stretch of road near a field of corn, and there was this scarecrow stuck up there — old raggedy coat, battered hat, straw hair, and all. Except it wasn’t a scarecrow. There was a guy inside who started firing at us with a rifle. Just a few shots — missed us, of course, since he wasn’t trying to hit us, but it sure grabbed the attention of our guards. They were yelling at each other in German and firing back, and in all the commotion, this other guy appeared out of nowhere and got us away. We ran like hell up a path behind an olive grove and into the woods before they noticed we were gone. The guy in the scarecrow managed to get away, too — can’t think how he did it. They seem to know how to kind of melt into the landscape.”
“They took us on foot through the mountains, and we’ve been hiding out with them until they arranged to bring us here,” David told her. “It was hard, being with the Partisans. They’re a pretty tough lot. There’s a guy in charge — the one who contacted you — but they’re not all buddies or in total agreement with each other. Far from it. There’s a lot of tension between them. Some of them hate the Communists, the Reds. But they are holding together, at least until our chaps liberate Florence.”
“Which will be soon?” asked Constanza.
Joe shrugged. “Who knows for sure? I guess so. I sure want to be back with my outfit before it happens, though.”
For Rosemary, sitting upstairs in her room, the day was dragging by interminably. She was attempting to relieve the tension by writing to her mother — a letter that she knew was extremely unlikely ever to arrive. Postal communication between Italy and England, two countries at war, was totally unreliable.
“We are all well here and managing to avoid food shortages somehow,” she wrote. “I do hope it’s the same for you, Mummy, and you’re not getting too exhausted with all the work you’re doing for the war effort.”
She paused.
Why am I writing this kind of bracing, optimistic stuff when I know she’ll probably never read it? she thought. Mind you, I never did tell her anything about what’s really happening to me, anyway.
The old prewar England she remembered was becoming a kind of faraway edifice of her own memories, and her mother was rapidly becoming part of it.
When her father had died, in 1938, it had been one of the great sadnesses of Rosemary’s life, a loss from which she would never fully rec
over. She had seen so little of him in the years since her marriage. There had been visits to London with the children, of course, mostly without Franco, who had been too busy to accompany them. Her father had been deeply worried about the rise of Fascism in Europe and the inevitability of another war. For his generation, having witnessed the carnage in the trenches during the First World War, it was an unthinkable dread. She had watched his old sociable optimism turn to gloomy introspection and his health decline as a result. And when he had died suddenly of a heart attack, she had not been there.
Once war had been declared against Britain, Rosemary, living in Florence and married to an Italian, could have little contact with her English mother, though she guessed that she would be surviving widowhood with her characteristic brisk energy. War work would provide her with an ideal opportunity to overcome her grief. When the bombing had begun in earnest, Rosemary had pictured her mother channeling all her formidable organizational skills into helping to evacuate London children and running canteens for servicemen and servicewomen and hostels for bombed-out families.
The rare letters that had gotten through from her had been full of buoyant enthusiasm. Her mother’s only complaint was that the deafening nightly barrage from the big anti-aircraft guns on Primrose Hill was robbing her of a decent night’s sleep.
If only I could be more like her, thought Rosemary. I’d give anything to be so single-minded.
Her own position in Florence demanded a different kind of bravery, though. It was a lonely life of waiting, keeping a low profile, and trying to protect her children. And it was all falling apart. She seemed to have lost control altogether, and all she could think was that she had put her family in mortal danger.
She buried her face in her hands. Oh, Franco, she thought, if only you were here.
Paolo, meanwhile, was hanging around the house in a state of high excitement, finding it impossible to settle down to anything. He just wanted the action to start. The trip to Florence was planned for just after dark, when, with luck, there would not be too many military police patrols around. His stomach turned over with fear every time he thought about what he had agreed to do. But there was no going back now. He had checked his bicycle three times already that morning, and he was ready. At last he was going to get some action, a real man’s job. Helping Allied servicemen escape was really something special, something he could tell his father about when he came home, even if he could never let on about it to his friends.
Hero on a Bicycle Page 5