And then, smiling coolly, he backhanded Rosa as casually as he might bat away a fly. She fell backward, into the arms of onlookers, but he leveled his pistol at them. “Down,” he ordered, and they laid her on the ground and backed away.
He descended the steps. Another terrible gasp swept through the crowd, a wave of horror that engulfed them all. Nina could see nothing. “What is he doing?” she cried.
Matteo was taller than them all. “He’s kicking her! Papà—”
His father grabbed at his sleeve. “Stay. Stay.”
Zwerger had returned to the top of the steps, his anger palpable, seething, rabid. “I know you’re here, Gerardi!” he shouted. “I can feel it—and I’m never wrong about such things. I know you are here, and you are watching me, and so I have but one question: Can you watch as I kill your family? Can you bear it?”
He scanned the crowd, his gaze narrowing on one spot only a few meters from Nina. He pointed at it with his pistol and the crowd, so many panicked fish in his net, dove out of the way. More words, unintelligible, and one of the soldiers darted forward. He emerged seconds later, his gloved hand clenched around the shoulder of a small, struggling figure. A child—a boy—Carlo.
Nina opened her mouth to scream, but Aldo’s hand smothered it, his arms banding her chest and arms.
“I’ve got your brat of a brother!” Zwerger exclaimed, his malice masquerading as delight. “He cries like a baby when he’s scared—don’t you?” He took hold of poor Carlo’s hair, and with every scream of pain from the child, Zwerger pulled ever more savagely. “Shall I shoot you now? Just as I shot that dog of yours? A single bullet would do it.”
The crowd began to scream, their chants of “Pig! Pig!” interspersed with pleas to release the child, and a little of the fury faded from Zwerger’s eyes.
He kicked Carlo away, the child forgotten. His gaze returned to the crowd, searching once more. “I have a better idea! Let’s find your whore of a wife—if she even is your wife. You told me you married her in Venice, but not a single priest in the city knows of it. What—you think I didn’t check? And I won’t stop there. I won’t stop until I uncover the truth. I’ll dig up your secrets—yours and hers. You know I will!”
A murmur rushed through the crowd. Eyes turned toward her. She was lost, lost—
And then, at the far fringes of the crowd, a blur of movement. She could barely see, held fast as she was by Aldo, but she had to know. Had the soldiers found one of the girls? Paolo?
“Holy Mother of God,” Aldo gasped, and the tumult around them rose, and a voice emerged from the horror of it all. A familiar voice, strong and beautiful and beloved.
“You don’t want them.”
Nico had been there all along. The crowd parted and he walked forward, straightening to his full height, pulling off the hat he’d been wearing. “They’re innocent. I’m the one who has been a thorn in your side. And here I am. Unarmed. Alone.”
A gleeful smile split Zwerger’s face. “Let them go,” he ordered, waving his arm, and there was a further commotion as Rosa and Carlo were pushed into the crowd. “But not you,” he shouted, pointing a shaking hand at Nico. “You stay where you are.”
Another volley of German, too fast for her to understand, erupted from Zwerger’s mouth. One of the soldiers now tied Nico’s hands behind his back and pushed him away from the steps and toward the stone wall that flanked the church.
Trapped in Aldo’s arms as she was, Nina could only watch, unable to look away, unable to hide. She was frozen, a pillar of ice.
The other soldiers shoved the crowd back and away, and when they were done Zwerger started shouting again, his voice raw and rising. “I declare you, Niccolò Gerardi, guilty of aiding enemy aliens, banditry, and a host of other crimes I can’t be bothered to enumerate now. Any one of them is enough to see you hanged”—and here he looked around the piazza, as dramatic in his posturing as Mussolini himself—“but we appear to lack a decent tree. Ah, well. I suppose we’ll have to make do.”
More words in German, barked at an indecipherable speed. The soldiers rushed to obey, their faces pale beneath their helmets. One, the same who had bound Nico’s hands, now pushed him back against the stone wall, then returned to take his place with the others. The soldiers stood in a row.
And she knew.
She knew. She fought to free herself, run to him, but Aldo was far stronger. He tried to turn her head, to make her look away.
“No,” she implored. “Let me see.”
Nico stood alone against the wall. How many times had they walked past it together, arm in arm, content in their lives and their love? He stood alone now, tall and resolute, and surely he had to be frightened. He had to know what was to come.
His eyes searched the crowd, as if he cared nothing of the soldiers and their guns and Zwerger’s toxic presence nearby. He was looking for someone—for her.
“Nico!” she screamed.
He heard her. Their eyes met. He did not look away.
The soldiers shouldered their guns. The crowd fell silent.
“Stop this madness!”
It was Father Bernardi, bursting from the crowd so he might place himself in front of Nico.
“Get out of the way!” Zwerger snarled. “He is a bandit—a criminal!”
“You’ve conducted no trial. You’ve presented no evidence. If you kill him now, you’ll make a martyr of him! And every one of us here will bear witness to your infamy!”
The crowd in the piazza, afire with rage, was growing by the minute. There had to be at least two hundred people gathered, more than enough to overrun Zwerger and his men.
But Father Bernardi wasn’t finished. “If you murder him, you will have to kill me as well, and likely scores of others in this piazza. Our deaths will stain your souls and consign you to eternal damnation. Is that a price you are willing to pay?”
A sweating, shaking Zwerger wiped his brow with his sleeve, and then he smirked, as if he’d just thought of something terribly clever. “Very well, Bernardi. Have it your way!”
He then turned to his soldiers, and whatever he said was impossible to make out above the rising protests of the crowd.
The soldiers began to advance on Nico and Father Bernardi, their guns at the ready. They pushed Father Bernardi away. And then they reversed their rifles and began to hammer at Nico with the guns’ wooden stocks, blow upon blow upon blow to his stomach, his back, his shoulders, his arms, and finally his head.
He fell, his blood pooling grotesquely on the ground.
He lay still, so piteously still. If Aldo had not been holding her, Nina would have fallen as well.
Zwerger waved his arm in the direction of the kübelwagens. Two of the soldiers grabbed Nico by his boots and dragged him to the back of one of the vehicles, and then, struggling to manage his dead weight, they tossed him inside.
“Where are you taking him?” It was Father Bernardi again, heedless of his own safety. “I demand that you tell me!”
Zwerger leaped down from the church steps and advanced on the priest. “Are you really that stupid? Do you honestly believe you have any control over what happens to your precious Nico now?”
“The archbishop will hear of this outrage—”
“The archbishop can go to hell!”
“But what will you do with him?”
“Whatever I like. And there’s nothing you, or anyone here, or anyone in your precious church can do to stop me.”
With that Zwerger strode back to his car, and in seconds the entire convoy drove off, taking Nico, bleeding and broken, away with them.
Away forever, for Zwerger had spoken the truth. He could do anything he liked to Nico and there was nothing they could do to stop him. Nothing.
Someone was speaking to her. “Nina? Nina! Listen to me.” It was Aldo. “We need to hide you. What if Zwerger comes back for you, too?” And he put her in the arms of another man.
It was Matteo, his face wet with tears. “Don’t fight me,
” he begged. “Please don’t fight me.”
He carried her, running now, and Aldo was beside him, a bruised and battered Rosa in his arms, and Paolo had the girls. But Carlo—where was Carlo?
He had fallen, but Paolo stopped and gathered him up, and they ran on.
She caught sight of Carlo’s dear little face, maddened by the horrors he had just witnessed, and she recognized the look in his eyes. She had seen it on her father’s face more than a year ago, and she knew it was written across her own features now.
The death of hope.
She opened her mouth to scream again, but she couldn’t find her breath, not so much as a whisper. Deeper she fell, ever deeper, and then all was night and she knew no more.
Chapter 23
It was almost dark when she awoke. She was on the bed in her and Nico’s room, and someone had covered her with a blanket. She was cold, and her head felt fuzzy, and there was a moment, as she floundered back to awareness, when she felt certain it must have been a dream. Only a dream, and when she sat up and went downstairs all would be well.
Then she heard the children weeping.
Not a dream. A nightmare, and she was trapped in it, and there was nowhere to hide from the pain. Such all-consuming pain. She lay on her side, stricken, watching the last of the sun fade to nothing, and she waited for the stars to bloom.
The door opened. A weight pressed down near her feet, and a cool hand pushed the tangled curls back from her eyes.
“Rosa?”
“I’m here.”
“It’s not a dream. It really happened.”
“It did.”
“He’s dead,” she said dully. “Dead.”
“We don’t know that. Father Bernardi has been trying to find out all day. And I know what Zwerger said about not being able to stop him, but Father says the archbishop will go to one of Zwerger’s superiors. Will plead for mercy. They’ll probably just put him in prison. Or they might send him to a labor camp in Germany. That’s where a lot of the other partisans have been sent.”
“Zwerger hates Nico. Hates him for reasons beyond any of this. And he will do what he promised. I know he will. He’ll kill Nico, and we’ll never find out how, or when, or even where. And I don’t think I can bear it. I really don’t.”
Rosa now took hold of Nina’s hands, her grip strong and certain and very nearly reassuring. “You can. You must. For the sake of your baby, and the other children, too, we must all be strong.”
“And lie to them?”
“No. I don’t think it’s fair to tell them that Nico will come back. Not when we know so little. But we can tell them that Zwerger hasn’t broken us. We can tell them that we still have hope.”
And in the absence of hope? What then?
“You should come downstairs and eat something,” Rosa now suggested.
“I’m not hungry.”
“The baby is, though. Come.”
Rosa was right; it would do the baby no good if Nina starved herself. “Can you help me on the stairs? I don’t want to fall.”
“Of course.”
Rosa leaned forward, setting down the lamp she carried on the stool by the bed, and the light fell upon her face for the first time. Her right cheekbone was badly bruised, and above it her eye was blackened and swollen almost shut. There were bruises on her arms, too, where Zwerger had kicked her.
“Your poor eye,” Nina whispered, her heart seized anew by horror.
“It will heal. But that swine Zwerger will never forget the moment I spat in his face. That alone was worth every bruise.”
Nina’s limbs had stiffened, but with Rosa’s support she made it along the hall and down the first flight of steps. She had to stop and catch her breath when they reached the landing, but the second flight was easier, and soon they were in the kitchen.
Nothing about it had changed since breakfast that morning. The room was warm and familiar and comforting, filled with good smells and happy memories. It was still her favorite room at home.
Rosa set down a bowl of soup, and Nina started to eat, though her hand was shaking so much it was difficult to wield the spoon without making a mess.
“It’s shock,” Rosa said, noticing. “Take your time. It will get easier.”
It did, and before long the bowl was empty, and Nina began to feel a little stronger. In a few minutes she would ask to go back to bed, and then she would press her face into the pillow and cry. Once she was alone in her and Nico’s room, she wouldn’t have to pretend to be strong.
Aldo came into the kitchen, followed by a second man. Father Bernardi. For the first time ever, in all the years she had known him, he didn’t offer her a smile along with his greeting.
“Nina, my dear. How are you?”
“A little better.”
“Do you have news?” asked Rosa.
“I do. They’ve taken him to Verona. To the headquarters of their secret police. The SD.”
“That’s it?” Aldo asked. “That’s all you were able to find out?”
“For the moment. The archbishop thinks we may be able to persuade the Germans that a prison sentence is appropriate. Particularly since the evidence Zwerger cited was pure speculation. And now, if you and Rosa don’t mind, I wonder if I might have a few moments of privacy with Nina. So we may speak of, ah, spiritual matters.”
Father Bernardi waited until he and Nina were alone, and then he sat on the chair next to her and lowered his voice so only she might hear. “I am not giving up on Nico,” he said. “I will move heaven and earth to bring him home to you. I promise you I will.”
She nodded, blinking back scalding tears.
“I also have an admission to make. I hope you will hear me out.”
“Go on.”
“I want you to know that I was a little concerned about your coming to stay with Nico and his family. In the beginning, that is.”
“Why? I thought it was your idea.”
“Would you believe it was Nico who suggested it? I told him of my friendship with your father. Of your father’s conviction that you were no longer safe in Venice. I told him that I was thinking of having you come to stay with me. I’d pass you off as a cousin of mine. An orphan in need of a home.”
“Why didn’t you?”
“Nico didn’t think it would work. And he didn’t think it would be fair to make a young woman hide away in a near-empty house with only an elderly priest for company. So he suggested you come and live with him, which of course would mean you’d have to masquerade as his wife. And that is why I was concerned.”
“I’m sorry, Father, but I still don’t understand.”
“I knew you to be an intelligent, brave, and affectionate girl. I was convinced—rightly, as it turned out—that he would need little encouragement to fall in love with you. And that would mean my selfish hopes for him to one day become a priest, and perhaps even take over from me here in Mezzo Ciel, would never be realized.”
“If you’re trying to make me admit that it was wrong for us to fall in love, I won’t,” she said, her voice rising.
“Nina, my dear. I’m trying to tell you that I was wrong. More than that, I’m trying to tell you that your love for Nico, and his for you, was meant to be. Some might call it fate. I prefer to think of it as an instance of grace.”
“Why are you telling me this?”
“So you won’t forget to hope. So you’ll remember that your love for him, and the strength you gain from that bond, will continue to exist—no matter how long you are separated, and no matter how distant you are from one another. Your love lives on. Can you remember that for me? Can you find a way to hope?”
“Yes, Father,” she whispered.
“I wonder, then, if you might wish to pray with me for a while. Perhaps we might choose one of the psalms?”
Memories assailed her. Nico’s face as he’d knelt before her, taken her hand in his, and vowed to love and honor her for the rest of his life. “There is a passage in the Song of Songs. It beg
ins with ‘Let me be a seal upon your heart’ . . .”
“I know it well.” Without opening his prayer book, Father Bernardi began to recite the blessed words. “‘Let me be a seal upon your heart, like the seal upon your hand. For love is fierce as death, passion is mighty as Sheol; its darts are darts of fire, a blazing flame.’”
“‘Vast floods cannot quench love,’” Nina whispered, “‘nor rivers drown it.’” And then, her eyes closed, her memories fixed on the night she and Nico had said their vows, “‘I am my beloved’s and my beloved is mine.’”
Despair and grief crashed over her, wave upon wave, and she was defenseless, drowning, alone. She was so alone.
“Father Bernardi? Are you there?”
“I am, but—oh, my heavens!” He jumped to his feet, his chair overturning, and hurried from the kitchen.
Everyone had left her. Her only companion was the pain, rising and fading and rising again. Only her pain remained.
“Nina? Nina? You need to listen to me.” Rosa took hold of her shoulders, her touch gentle but firm. “The baby is coming.”
She looked up, and was alarmed by the expression of panic on Rosa’s face. Rosa, who always knew what to do.
“I don’t understand,” she said, and then, following Rosa’s gaze, she looked down and saw the dark and spreading stain on her skirt.
“Your waters have broken. The baby is coming, and we must get you upstairs again.”
“I didn’t notice . . .”
“Well, poor Father Bernardi did. You’ve given him the fright of his life. Can you get up?”
“I think so,” Nina said, but when she tried to stand her legs crumpled under her weight.
“Papà!” Rosa called. “We need you!”
Aldo came running, and between him and Rosa they were able to get Nina to her feet and up the first flight of stairs. As they reached the landing, though, she was felled again by the pain, and only once it had passed was she able to breathe, let alone move.
“Do you remember anything from school?” Rosa asked as they lumbered up the second run of steps.
Our Darkest Night Page 19
