Silver Stars

by Michael Grant

  Rio got her first Purple Heart.

  Frangie Marr spent those weeks enduring two more operations to pull out the last bits of shrapnel. She got a Purple Heart too.

  And Rainy Schulterman? After narrowly avoiding arrest by an eager patrol, she made her way to a picturesque little town outside Rome to await the invasion.

  We were all awaiting the invasion, and somehow we had convinced ourselves Italy would be easy.

  Easy.

  I want to put my fist through a wall just thinking of it. And it is with a sense of mounting dread that I tell myself to stop stalling and get on with telling that story. We are perhaps halfway through my long tale of war and woe, but there were laughs and fun too.

  Yes, there was fun sometimes. Even in Italy.

  Two more lines before I reach the bottom of this sheet of paper. The letters are getting sketchy, and I’ll need to change the ribbon in the typewriter.

  And then, Gentle Reader, I will tell you about Italy.

  Bloody, goddamned Italy.

  PART III

  OPERATION AVALANCHE

  THE INVASION OF ITALY

  25

  RAINY SCHULTERMAN—GENAZZANO, ITALY

  Rainy is dressed all in black, just another young Italian war widow walking the two miles to the nearest market, string bag at the ready to carry bread and wine and olives and maybe a small piece of fish. There is a food shortage in Italy and it is growing worse; there is no shortage of women in mourning in Italy. The older ones were still in mourning from the last war; the younger ones mourn soldiers lost in this war. Italy has much experience with mourning.

  Rainy had stolen the clothing months earlier from a drying line on the outskirts of Rome, just outside the Porta Maggiore, a double arch of stone that long ago—very long ago—had formed a gate in the Aurelian walls on the eastern edge of the ancient city. It had been worth the risk taking the clothing—people didn’t look at women in mourning, they were all but invisible.

  She had walked out of Rome in her purloined outfit and, after two days spent walking and hiding at night in barns or sheds, she had at last collapsed, exhausted, in a weed-grown cavern cut long ago into the hillside just beneath a vertical rise precariously topped with three- and four-story apartment houses. And there she lay for three days as a fever made her teeth chatter and her body ache. Lay there without food, the only water coming from a trickle down mossy stone walls that she had to crawl to and lick. On the fourth day, as the fever began to break, while Rainy was too weak to even crawl to water, a boy and girl, brother and sister, found her.

  They had summoned help, and in the end she’d been half carried, half dragged to a church and given over to the care of hard-faced but kind nuns. A day earlier and they would have found her raving in English as the fever twisted her mind into pretzels of illogic. But with clean water and bites of bread and cheese, she had managed to stick to Italian.

  It wasn’t Italian that would fool a local but for the fact that Italian has so many dialects and regional accents. She told the nuns she was from the Venezia area. That she had come south to visit her dead husband’s commanding officer in Rome, but that he had turned her out without so much as a glass of wine or a hundred lire.

  The nuns believed her, or pretended to. The nuns had fed her and bathed her and washed her filthy mourning weeds.

  She had concealed her guns—the silenced .22 and the gun that had chafed her thighs so cruelly—in the cave. She had transferred her suicide pill to her stolen dress and it had, to her amazement, survived a thorough washing. And she still had money, concealed in the false bottom of the purse she had kept.

  With her strength recovered, Rainy had stayed with the good sisters until the reverend mother had suggested that she should register with local authorities to avoid any problems arising.

  Rainy had taken this as a sign that it was time to move on. In the night she took bread and cheese, several tins of sardines, and two bottles of wine, then she left two thousand lire—which she believed to be about twenty dollars—pinned with a note that said simply, grazie, and snuck away.

  She retrieved her weapons and walked up into the hills outside Genazzano, looking for and eventually finding an abandoned stone house that leaned back against a thirty-foot escarpment. The back wall of the house was the cliff face, rock and dirt. She could easily see why the house had been abandoned—there was a two-foot hole in the roof where a slab of stone had fallen from the escarpment. The rock still sat there like an odd artwork in the single room. The hole in the roof at least let in sunlight, which was pleasant until the autumn rains started, and then the entire room could be flooded an inch or more deep.

  Not pleasant, not in the least, but better than the alternative. And surely the Allied landing would come soon.

  As she walks into town, Rainy keeps her head down and avoids eye contact with other people on the street. Genazzano is a small, hilltop village of no great distinction, cobbled streets, faded apartments and homes, with few shops beyond the necessary. The limestone walls still bear the iconography of the now-deposed Mussolini—portraits, slogans, exhortations—but these had all now been defaced. Mussolini no longer ruled Italy, the German army did.

  Though Rainy avoids contact or conversation her presence is of course known to the locals. Strange women with “Venetian” accents simply don’t appear and take over abandoned properties in small towns and go unnoticed. But small towns have a habit of secrecy, especially when it comes to the police, and with the police now lacking all authority she feels she might be safe, at least from that direction.

  Rainy enters the bakery, the panificio. She waits her turn behind two other women, nods to the baker’s clerk, who says, “Signora?”

  “Pane, per favore.”

  There is only one type of bread currently available—a foot-long, flattened dome made of equal parts wheat and sawdust—and no one is allowed to buy more than one. But the formalities must be observed, and she must state her preference as though she has a choice. Rainy takes her loaf of still-warm bread and crosses the narrow street to the drogheria, the grocer. It is a small, dark shop with few shelves and even fewer things to be found on those shelves. She gathers a can of sardines, a packet of dried beans, pasta, a can of tomatoes, and a single garlic bulb. She is running low on cash and is very careful to husband it, but the grocer has been keeping his customers alive on credit so he is always happy to see her and her lira notes.

  Since arriving in Italy, the land of fabled foods, Rainy has lost twelve pounds between the fever, her constant hunger, and the exercise of walking to and from town, as well as her optimistic and probably doomed effort to revive a long-neglected garden. She is thin but not weak. If anything, Rainy has hardened—there are few better exercises than climbing hills.

  And she has perhaps hardened in mind as well, or at least deepened. Long, long days and nights with no one to talk to, no books, newspapers, or radio have forced her to think more deeply about many things: the war, God, her family, Halev, her future.

  She is contemplating college as she climbs the long slope back to her borrowed home, shifting the net bag from hand to hand every now and again. The pistol, retrieved from the cave, is still strapped to her leg and she’s quite used to it now, would feel naked without it.

  Back at her temporary abode, Rainy uses the rusted knife with a broken-off tip she’d found in a drawer to cut off a hunk of bread. She slices a wedge of cheese, considers the sardines, and decides to save them for later. Instead she piles the cheese and a half dozen olives on her slab of bread, sticks an opened bottle of red wine under her arm, and goes outside to eat atop a stone wall beside the well. The weather is fine, just a bit chilly but sunny and very clear.

  A bite of cheese. A bite of bread. An olive. A swig of wine.

  “Life could be worse,” Rainy says. She has long since stopped worrying about talking to herself, though for safety’s sake she talks to herself in Italian.

  “It will be worse soon,” she answers h
erself, taking on a glum tone. “You’re down to three thousand, four hundred and seventy lire.” Perhaps thirty-five dollars in round numbers, and the prices are rising as the shortages worsen and as the authorities have ceased to show much actual authority against price gouging and profiteering.

  Thirty-five dollars in cash is more than most people in Genazzano have, but most of them have jobs or farms, and all of them have local family and connections to help out.

  If only she had some idea what was going on in the war. The local newspapers are censored and useless, good only for reading between the lines. It’s clear that the Allies have taken Sicily, but beyond that, no news at all. No news and of course no letters. Her parents must think she’s been captured or killed; she’s never gone this long without writing to them.

  Halev . . . well, he’s surely found someone else by now. Not that they really even had more than a friendship. Halev owes her nothing, and she owes him nothing. But she cannot quite bring herself to dismiss Halev—friends, family, the memories of home have become vital to her survival.

  She worries at times about her father and Vito the Sack. No doubt Tomaso and his father are furious that she’s escaped without killing the priest, but her deal was with Vito Camporeale to deliver Cisco, and she delivered Cisco. So no one should have any beef with her father.

  From the stone wall, Rainy can look out over most of a mile of road. The road twists and turns along escarpments, through woods, behind occasional homes, but for the most part she can see anything or anyone coming this direction. Twice she has seen German vehicles passing on their way west to Rome.

  There’s very little else to do aside from picking insects off the scraggly, never-to-ripen carrots and peppers in the garden. Her days are full of silence. Her nights are full of the small sounds that cause her to wake suddenly and check the door. She lives in fear of the sound of tires on the gravel outside, of slammed car doors and German voices.

  But mostly she is bored. Somewhere the war goes on, but she is no longer in it.

  Missing, presumed dead. So sorry, that girl had promise, what was her name? The little Jew with the hair like a bird’s nest and the odd name. You remember. Snowy. Or was it Breezy?

  A car passes by on the road below, driving fast. Ten minutes later, an oxcart moving slow. The oxcart driver stops his beast, goes to the side of the road, and unbuttons his fly, needing a pee.

  Rainy looks away, and it is this bit of delicacy that almost causes her to miss the open car. But she hears the engine and looks back, then peers intently as the car slows to maneuver past the stopped cart.

  Four men in the car, none in uniform. She should breathe a sigh of relief, but something is wrong, very, very wrong about that car and those four men. She can’t see the spot where the car would have to turn off onto the driveway and reach the house, but instinct is screaming at her to run, so she races for the house. She grabs the rest of her bread and the bottle of wine, piles out of the side window, and runs to the shelter of the nearest trees.

  The car pulls up when she is still exposed and in the open.

  “Halt!” a voice shouts.

  She runs, low bushes whipping her bare legs.

  Voices yell in German. A shot! More yelling, angry, berating. Alive! she translates. Take her alive!

  The suicide pill is in the pocket of her dress, but surely it’s not . . . no, it can’t be . . . She fumbles for her pistol.

  She glances back. Two young men, both fit, neither hampered by women’s shoes. They’ll be on her in ten seconds.

  The pill is in her fingers. The gun in her hand. My God, no, it can’t have come to that. It can’t be . . . not now . . . not yet!

  She fires fast, without aiming, hoping to make them cautious.

  And then, turning to run again, Rainy trips, throws out her hands instinctively. The suicide pill flies free, but she tracks it, sees it peeking from beneath a fallen pine twig. Rainy grabs for it, footsteps so close now, her fingers find the pill, raise it to her mouth, and she is hit from behind, a knee in the spine. Electric pain shoots through her body.

  She has a split second to see the shoe that smashes into the side of her head, sending her consciousness spinning through the void, twirling, dragging her down and down. The second punch finishes the job.

  Rainy lies crumpled, unconscious on the ground, her wine gurgling out onto the pine needles. Her gun beside her.

  26

  RIO RICHLIN—ABOARD LST-902, OFF SALERNO, ITALY

  It is Rio Richlin’s first battle briefing as a corporal, an NCO, a noncommissioned officer. Corporals aren’t always included, but Stick has brought her along and Rio is very sensible of the compliment.

  Sensible of the compliment . . . and resenting it. She had not asked to be made a corporal, had not wanted to be made a corporal, had argued with Cole and their new lieutenant, and had been told to shut up and do what she was told.

  That part at least she understood.

  In addition to the NCOs, their new lieutenant, Frank Stone, is there. No one knows much about Stone yet aside from the fact that he looks almost absurdly young, smokes like a fiend, blinks a lot, and seems to have a chip on his shoulder.

  The main hold on the tank deck of the LST has the feeling of a warehouse made of steel. It is a vast oblong box stuffed full of Shermans, twenty tanks in all, plus two half-tracks and a couple of jeeps.

  GIs are berthed in rectangular cells all around the outer edge of the boat. This ship has a nominal capacity of 217 men, which is nonsense—there are soldiers crammed everywhere. The upper deck is crawling with soldiers. The busy sailors have trouble at times pushing through the crowds of soldiers to reach their stations and genially curse the men and women in green as “sand fleas,” “lubbers,” “clumsy bastards,” and more, but never with real animus. The sailors know that soon these soldiers will be ashore . . . and they will not be.

  Twenty tanks, something like 305 men, barrels of oil, ammo—the contents of this one ship could start a war all by itself, Rio thinks.

  The colonel, a West Pointer, has given a little rah-rah speech and turned the briefing over to Captain Jesus “Paco” Morales, also a West Pointer, a shinily bald, broad-shouldered officer in a spotless uniform. Morales urges the two dozen noncoms to line up around a low sand table. The sand table is a lovingly sculpted diorama of the Salerno beach.

  “Okay, men. And lady,” Morales begins. “We have a tough one here, a real ball-buster, begging your pardon, Corporal.”

  Two specific references to Rio—she is the only female present—and both times every head but Stick’s swivels toward her.

  Rio is aware, very aware, of being an object of great interest. The army as a whole has not changed its opinion of women soldiers. The army, to put it simply, hates the idea of women soldiers. This hatred is expressed in a variety of ways: from verbal harassment to crude attempts at seduction down to the more subtle means of slur and exclusion. But Rio Richlin is not just the only female NCO—a very unwilling NCO—at the briefing, she comes with a reputation.

  So curious eyes, many but not all hostile, take in her stance, her expression, her uniform, and her koummya, then add in the stories that have circulated about her, including the fact that she refused to ship out after being injured. They reach various conclusions, mostly that she is some sort of freak of nature, a standout, a very odd duck, probably a man hater, likely to end up an old maid, and more on that same line.

  “As you can see, we have a very long stretch of beach, almost twenty-five miles end to end. We’ve had a bit of luck with some intelligence giving us a notion of Herman’s positions.”

  Herman, like Jerry, Kraut, Heinie, the Hun, the Natsee, and more, is a common term for the Wehrmacht, its officers, the German people, and Adolf Hitler himself. Morales likes to mix and match his slang terms.

  “We are facing a full panzer division,” Captain Morales says. “Fortunately twenty-five miles of beach is a lot for a single division to defend. Unfortunately the Hun is cl
ever and experienced. They have broken the Sixteenth Panzer Division into four mobile battle groups, roughly here, here, here, and here. And eight reinforced strong points: here, here, here, these three here, here, here.” With each “here” he stabs his pointer at a place on the sand table. “They’ve got massed artillery on almost every high spot: here, here, here, and possibly here.”

  There is a discontented murmur from the NCOs, many of them experienced combat soldiers, though there are some green hands too. The experienced sergeants see nothing but problems ahead: a long beach swept by artillery, a beach that opens onto a triangular plain bordered to the north by mountains, to the south by mountains, and to the east by more mountains. The goal is the city and port of Naples, Napoli to the Italians, and Naples is thirty-five miles north from Salerno along a road that is in plain view of mountainside artillery almost every inch of the way.

  Rio focuses all her attention on the sand table, trying to commit every detail to memory, willing it to sink deep into her brain. But she spares a glance at Stick, solemn and engaged, and hopes that any life-or-death decisions will fall on his shoulders, not hers. And just beyond him, head tilted, cold cigar in his mouth, is Sergeant Cole. There is reassurance in those two. Cole is a soldier’s soldier, and Stick is close to achieving that same status.

  “Damn river,” Cole mutters.

  “Speak up, Sergeant,” Morales says, looking sharply at Cole, who is not in the least intimidated.

  “Well, sir, it’s that river.”

  The sand table shows a winding stream, the Sele River.

  Morales nods. “You are correct, Sergeant, the river is a problem. It splits our battlefield and at least at the start there will be Brits on one side, us on the other. We need to close that gap pronto or the Hun will drive his tanks right down through us.”