Street Boys

by Lorenzo Carcaterra

  When the German evacuation came, the Nazis opened all the prison doors and sent the convicts back to the street. Most of them did as they were told and walked out of Naples, under the steady gaze of Nazi guards. Petroni made sure he and his team of thieves hid and waited. He saw no profit in fleeing. Nor was there any in fighting, as far as he could tell. But Petroni did see a potential opportunity opening up in the next few days. If it all evolved as he envisioned, Petroni would end up with the Germans on one side, the Americans on the other and the Italians, as always, stuck in the middle. It was a golden moment to make some money and begin his postwar life with a pocketful of cash. All he needed to do was play one side against the other and stay alive. And those were talents Carlo Petroni had learned to master since he was a toddler just free of diapers.

  “How much longer do we wait?” Piero asked. At thirteen, the youngest thief in the group was quiet and shy, two traits that hid the fact that he was also deadly with a knife and all too willing to prove it.

  “Until we see Nazi uniforms,” Petroni said. “And then we’ll find out if what we heard is true, that some crazy boys are going to try and stop them from doing what they were sent to do. If that happens, then we step in.”

  “Step in and do what?” another in the group, Aldo, asked. “Fight with the boys against the Nazis?”

  Carlo looked at the boy, his same age but much smaller in both stature and girth, and shook his head. “The guards beat on your head a little too much while you were inside,” he said. “What are you thinking? We join no one’s army. We listened to no one while we were under Mussolini’s rule. Why should we listen to anyone, especially those our own age, when there is no one to rule?”

  “So what do we do?” Marco asked. He stood apart from the group, staring out through a broken window at the remains of the gardens below. He was shirtless and shoeless and had a small handgun wedged in the back of his brown pants. “You say we’re going to step in. What does that mean?”

  “It means money in our pockets,” Petroni said. “We follow all that goes on between the Germans and the boys. We join with both groups and tell each what they need to hear. Tell the Nazis where the boys are hiding. Tell the boys where the traps are set. Stay back and watch as they all kill each other.”

  “I haven’t heard anything about money yet,” Piero said, still not convinced Petroni’s plan was worth his time or energy.

  “The Germans will see us for what we are and they will pay for the information we give,” Petroni said, stomping out the last of his cigarette with the heel of his foot.

  “The Germans have money they can give us, maybe even some food,” Marco said. “But the boys have nothing to give. So why bother with them?”

  “Everyone has something,” Petroni said, standing and walking between the small gathering of boys. “If these street fighters can’t give us money or food, we’ll take their weapons or clothes. But we’re looking for more than that from them. The Nazis won’t stay long. They’ll set the city on fire and leave, head back to Rome and then to the north. That leaves Naples to whoever’s left, and that will be us.”

  “They’ll know we’re convicts,” Aldo said. “And they’ll know not to trust us. Why would they take us in?”

  “Because we can fight,” Petroni said. “Probably better than anyone in their ranks. They sit around fires at night and talk like brave men. But none of them has been in fights like we have, none has killed to survive. They’ll want us because they’ll need us. They won’t be happy about it, they’ve been warned all their lives to stay away from boys like us. But the people who were so quick to warn them away are dead, and we are still here. Ready to help them.”

  “How many are there?” Piero asked.

  “Does it matter?” Petroni asked with a shrug. “A hundred, maybe two hundred. Even if there’s a thousand, what difference does it make? Each one in our group is worth fifty of theirs. It’s a match made in hell and hell is where we live.”

  “And if we’re found out?” The question came from a large boy sitting on the one chair left in the room, his long legs stretched out before him, arms folded across his chest, his dark eyes rimmed red from infection. “Or even if a few of them suspect us of dealing with the Nazis. What then?”

  Petroni walked toward the boy, arms spread wide, a bemused look on his face. “You’re the last one I’d expect to hear such a question from, Bruno,” he said with mock surprise. “You know the answer to that better than I do. In fact, you know it better than anyone in this room.”

  “I just want to hear it come out of your mouth,” Bruno said, raising his eyes up to Petroni. “Have you say it to me and everyone else here. It’s a decision that needs to be made now. Before it starts. And once you make it, you have to keep to it.”

  “There is no problem with this, Bruno,” Petroni said. “Not for you, me or anyone who’s spent a day inside that prison together. If our plans are found out or even if you suspect someone of knowing what we’re up to, then that person must die. Whether he is a German soldier or an Italian boy. The same punishment applies.”

  Bruno Repello pulled up his legs and stood. He was several inches taller than Petroni and, at twenty, the oldest of the group; he was also its most violent member. He was born into a family of Camorristas that held the city in its grip much like a hawk would hold a squealing mouse. Mussolini’s reign had tempered their control, but not enough to wash the taste of power from their mouths. Repello knew that eventually Naples would be returned to its people, a war would end, Germans and Americans would go back to their own lands, savoring a victory or overcoming a defeat. And once again, the Camorra would control the streets. He wanted to be at the controls when that happened. “Then we have talked enough,” he said to Petroni. “Let’s go out and meet our new friends and give them all the help they need.”

  20

  16TH PANZER DIVISION, FORTY MILES OUTSIDE OF NAPLES

  SEPTEMBER 26, 1943

  Colonel Von Klaus stood in the center of the railroad tracks, looking down at the large electrical circuit box by his feet. “Are these the main power feeds?” he asked.

  “Yes, sir,” Kunnalt said. Ernst Kunnalt was tall, with a thick head of red hair buried under his large pith helmet and a relaxed sense of humor he very seldom exhibited around his more serious-minded fellow soldiers. He relished his role as Von Klaus’s aide-de-camp and made sure that all his assigned missions were completed promptly, no matter how uncomfortable they might be. “These go in to all the railroad connections. The men discovered another one a half-mile farther down the road that leads into the city.”

  “Destroy them both,” Von Klaus said. “I don’t want anything to be able to get in or out of Naples. Also, cut any electricity that may be feeding into the city. There is to be no power of any kind at any time.”

  “Most of the current was cut off by the evacuating team,” Kunnalt said. “From the looks of it, they were pretty thorough.”

  “Not thorough enough,” Von Klaus said. His voice was hoarse, aggravated by a rash of allergies from which there was no relief. Physically, Von Klaus was more suited to the hard-rock terrain and subzero temperatures of the Russian front than to the sun-drenched and dusty roads of southern Italy. “These last few miles, we’ve passed a number of overhead lines. One or two might still be active. Send a team of men and two tanks to backtrack and cut down any wires they find. Also blast apart the poles and any boxes that may contain electrical wiring. I don’t want anything left that has even the remote possibility of being reconnected.”

  “And where would you like the mines placed, sir?” Kunnalt asked. “We’ve already buried fifty of them under the tracks. Any train that happens to come through won’t make it into the city.”

  “I want them everywhere you can place them,” Von Klaus said. “Side roads, dirt roads, main roads. I want it so no one can follow us into or out of Naples. I also want bombs on timers set on all perimeters, covering railroad tracks and the main highways.”


  “Timed to go off when, sir?” Kunnalt asked.

  “Give them the maximum time,” Von Klaus said. “Give it enough so all the tanks are a safe distance away. And keep the bombs clear of the mines so one doesn’t set off the other. Once that is completed, we can move into Naples.”

  “Do you anticipate any resistance?” Kunnalt asked.

  “Who is there left to resist?” Von Klaus asked. “The advance scouts reported little movement throughout the city. Children and the elderly mostly, neither of whom should pose a problem. We have more than enough to handle whatever there is. It shouldn’t take us more than two, three days on the outside to complete the mission.”

  “I’ve never been sent to destroy a city,” Kunnalt said, gazing up at the bright sky. “I guess it’s not something you think about when you go off to fight a war.”

  “Losers destroy,” Von Klaus said. “Winners conquer. You just happen to be on the wrong side, Kunnalt. If you were with Patton, you’d have sat next to him as he rode through the streets of Sicily, mobbed and cheered by its people. Instead, you will be by my side, riding into an empty city to bomb and burn whatever is left. To the losers fall the unpleasant chores.”

  Kunnalt stood next to Von Klaus, each relishing the silence that surrounded them. “There are farmlands and houses on either side of the tracks,” Kunnalt said after several moments. “Shall I have them searched?”

  “There’s no need,” Von Klaus said, shaking his head. “Split the division and have the farmlands torched and the houses destroyed. We’re to leave nothing behind but burnt ground. Let them have their victory, but let it come at a price. I may be out here on a loser’s mission, Kunnalt, but I guarantee you, I’ll make it a successful one.”

  21

  VIA VICARIA VECCHIA, FORCELLA, NAPLES

  SEPTEMBER 26, 1943

  Angela cut a thin slab of cheese off a week-old hunk of provolone and handed it with the tip of the knife blade to her cousin, Tino. Crowding beside her in the small olive grove, the boy grabbed the cheese with dirty fingers and jammed it into a corner of his mouth. “Chew slowly,” she warned him. “This is the last of the food.”

  “Are you going to have some?” Tino asked. He was seven, the only relative she had left. He was rail skinny and had severe asthma, his attacks coming on without warning and often lasting for hours. With medicine in short supply, Angela felt he was only a frightened breath away from death.

  “I had mine for lunch,” she said.

  “Thank you for taking me here,” Tino said. “It’s been a while since I got to see them. I was worried the bombs had moved the graves.”

  “I told you they wouldn’t leave you, didn’t I?” Angela said, gazing down at the simply marked graves of her aunt Carmella and uncle Francesco. Tino’s parents had been killed during a morning bombing raid.

  “Yes, you did,” Tino said.

  “I’ll leave you alone with them,” Angela said. “I’ll wait for you over by the olive trees.”

  Tino nodded. “I’m going to tell Mama and Papa I caught a fish and that I helped clean it and grill it. I think they will be happy to hear that.”

  Angela kissed the top of his head. “Don’t forget to tell them yours was the biggest fish in the net. And you were the youngest one in the boat.”

  “I’ll also tell them you have been taking good care of me,” he said. “So they don’t worry so much about me.”

  “And then tell them you’ll be the one taking care of me when I am old and ugly and too fat to move off a chair.” Angela began walking up toward the olive grove. “And no one else can stand to even look at me. But you will be there, Tino, with your smile, a large basket of fruit by your feet and your arms filled with new dresses.”

  “Every day,” Tino said in a low voice. “I promise.”

  Angela leaned against a thin olive tree. She used to love this time of day, cooking smells blending with the odor of wood burning in stone fireplaces, signaling that the afternoon meal was coming to a full boil. Shoeless children crammed the alleys and halls leading into their crowded apartments, the echoes of youthful laughter bouncing off hard walls. Elderly women, dressed in widow’s black, sat on straw chairs, an arm’s reach from the kitchen entrance, peeling skin off fresh vegetables.

  Angela was born in Forcella and had lived in the tough neighborhood all her life. She knew full well what the rest of the city thought of the people who prowled its streets; there was hatred in the stares and venom in the whispered comments whenever she ventured out of her part of town. Her people were feared and despised, written off as thieves and ruffians, quick to snatch a purse or take advantage of a wayward tourist. She was old enough to understand that many of those feelings sprang from truth, that the high incidents of crime and the large enclave of criminals who lived on Forcella’s darkened streets had earned it the right to be called the most dangerous area in Italy.

  But she also knew it was the poorest and most neglected neighborhood in Naples. The men were the last hired for jobs and the first to be laid off when factory work was in decline. Many of the women, her mother included, married after they were pregnant, and were often abandoned after several difficult and violent years, left to tend to the needs of small broods of hungry children. Kitchen pantries were as bare as a poor man’s pockets, and the black market thrived on the streets of Forcella years before war brought their trucks into even the richest areas. The days were filled with struggle and the night hours were held hostage to the whims of despair on these five ragged city blocks that no one in Italy wanted to know about. Forcella was Harlem, Watts, East St. Louis and Appalachia all jammed inside a small pocket of a city in decay, with no chance for either rescue or redemption.

  But Angela Rummerta never saw Forcella as a neighborhood in turmoil. It was her home and she had long ago learned to love the odors of the fruit and fish carts that rambled past her bedroom window in that quiet hour before the sun began to share its light. She knew the words to the soulful ballads sung by women young and old as they hung morning wash on clotheslines too weak to bear their wet burden. She saw smiles and knowing nods where strangers were timid witnesses to hard looks and shifting glances. She could navigate herself into and out of every secret alleyway in the neighborhood’s tight streets and could travel blindfolded the hidden passages that linked one stone tenement to another. Now, standing with her back to a burnt-out olive grove, looking down at a little boy crying over the graves of his parents, she longed for the sights and smells of her old neighborhood as much as she did for the family she left buried in its ruin. Angela knew all that was now a part of her past, to be revisited only in memory.

  She took a deep breath, closed her eyes and rested her head against the base of the tree, its bark singed from the heat of the bombs.

  She heard the snap of the twig but didn’t move.

  She steadied herself and waited, listening for the weight of the next step to tell her what she needed to know. She held her breath and looked across the dirt path and spotted Tino, clearing debris from his parents’ grave. A childhood spent on the hard streets of Forcella had taught Angela how to distinguish between the simple rustling of an early evening breeze and the slow, deliberate movements of lurking danger. She turned her head to the right as soon as she heard the small stone roll against the side of a tree. She spread her feet, took one more look down at Tino, and then jumped to her right.

  She stood, her arms by her side, her dark shoes firmly planted on brown soil, staring at the thin end of a German soldier’s rifle. The soldier was young, in his early twenties at most, tall and gaunt, his uniform suited to a much larger man, hanging loose across the sleeves and trouser legs. He motioned with his rifle for her to raise her arms and move back against the tree. Angela moved with careful steps, praying that Tino would not call up to her, shielding him from the German’s flat eyes with her body. The soldier dragged his feet several steps forward, the heels of his boots kicking up pockets of dirt, staring at Angela, a brown-tooth smile spread ac
ross his face. He said something in German she did not understand, then lowered his rifle and rested it against the side of her dress. He held the smile as he used the rifle to search her body for weapons, running it slowly around her waist and against the sides of her neck, then down her hips, stopping at her ankles. Angela swallowed hard but held his gaze and didn’t flinch when he brought the rifle against her inner thighs and began to move it slowly up. She nodded at the soldier and smiled, lowering her arms slightly, bringing them down to the edge of her blue blouse, her fingers skimming the length of her long, brown hair. The soldier’s eyes widened as he held the rifle butt inches below the front of Angela’s panty, swaying it gently from side to side. The soldier stepped closer, keeping one hand on the rifle, stroking her face and neck with the other. She ran her tongue across her dry lips and rested a hand on top of his, rubbing the tips of his fingers. “Bella,” the soldier said, using all the Italian he knew, leaning toward Angela’s face, their lips only inches apart, rifle now hanging down against his leg. The arid heat of his breath warmed the side of the girl’s cheek and neck and a dirt-smeared hand ran its way around the edges of her small breasts, squeezing and pinching them through her thin layers of clothes. He brought his mouth down hard against hers, the pressure of his cracked lips forcing Angela’s eyes shut and pushing her head up against the thin tree. The soldier let the rifle fall to the ground, both his arms now wrapped around the back and waist of his Italian catch.

  Angela rested one arm around his shoulders and rubbed the top of one of her legs against the soldier’s knee. She moved her free hand down beneath her hair and under the top of her blouse. She gently unclipped the snap on the knife strap she kept around her neck, held in place by a brown leather wrap given to her by a grandmother keen on the ways of wayward men. She gripped the handle on the sharp, slender blade and brought it out of its sheath, still holding the soldier’s kiss, feeling him unbutton her blouse and move his hands onto her flesh. Angela tossed off the soldier’s helmet and grabbed the back of his head, pressing her lips tighter against the force of his kiss. She tasted his saliva, bit at his tongue and then let the power of the knife take its course.