“Best for all of us to stay away, then,” General Leyers said, backing up. “I can’t afford to be sick. Not now. I’ll sleep elsewhere tonight.”
“No,” Dolly said. “I want you here.”
“Not tonight,” Leyers said coldly, pivoted, and left with Dolly shouting angrily after him.
Pino dropped the general at German headquarters under orders to return at 7:00 a.m.
He left the car at the motor pool and trudged toward home, seeing in his mind’s eye the carnage and destruction he’d witnessed that day. How many men had he seen die from his safe vantage point? Hundreds?
The sheer brutality of it ate at him. He hated war. He hated the Germans for starting it. For what? Putting your boot on another man’s head and stealing him blind, until someone with a bigger boot comes along to kick you out of the way? As far as Pino was concerned, wars were about murder and thievery. One army killed to steal the hill; then another killed to steal it back.
He knew he should be happy to see the Nazis defeated and retreating, but he just felt hollow and alone. He desperately wanted to see Anna. But he couldn’t, and that suddenly made him want to weep. He choked back his emotions, forced his mind to put a wall around his memories of the battle.
That wall held as he showed his documents to the sentries in the lobby of his apartment building, and when he rode the birdcage past the Waffen-SS soldiers on the fifth floor, and as he dug in his pocket for his keys. When he opened the apartment door, he thought he’d step inside an empty apartment, fall to the floor, and let it all go.
But Aunt Greta was there already, collapsed in his father’s arms. When she saw Pino, she broke into deeper sobs.
Michele’s lower lip quivered when he said, “Colonel Rauff’s men came to the shop this afternoon. They ransacked the place and arrested your uncle. He’s been taken to the Hotel Regina.”
“On what charges?” Pino asked, shutting the door.
“Being part of the resistance,” Aunt Greta wept. “Being a spy, and you know what the Gestapo does to spies.”
Michele’s jaw began to tremble, and tears dripped down his cheeks. “You hear her, Pino? What they’ll do to Albert? What they’ll do to you if he cracks and tells them about you?”
“Uncle Albert won’t say a thing.”
“What if he does?” Michele demanded. “They’ll come for you, too.”
“Papa—”
“I want you to run, Pino. Steal your general’s car, go to the Swiss border in uniform with your passport. I’ll give you enough money. You can live in Lugano, wait for the war to end.”
“No, Papa,” Pino said. “I won’t do that.”
“You’ll do as I say!”
“I’m eighteen!” Pino shouted. “I can do what I please.”
He said this with such strength and resolve that his father was taken aback, and Pino felt bad for having shouted. It had just burst out of him.
Shaking, trying to calm down, Pino said, “Papa, I’m sorry, but I’ve sat out too much of the war already. I won’t run now. Not while the radio still works and the war goes on. Until then, I’m at General Leyers’s side. I’m sorry, but that’s the way it has to be.”
Ten days later, on the afternoon of March 2, 1945, Pino stood by General Leyers’s Fiat, studying the exterior of a villa in the hills east of Lake Garda and wondering what was happening inside.
Seven other cars were parked there as well. Two of the drivers wore the uniforms of the Waffen-SS, and one the Wehrmacht. The rest were in plain clothes. Under Leyers’s orders, so was Pino. For the most part, Pino ignored the other drivers and continued to watch the house with intense fascination because he’d recognized two of the German officers who’d followed General Leyers inside nearly twenty minutes before.
They were General Wolff, head of the SS in Italy, and Field Marshal Heinrich Von Vietinghoff, who’d recently replaced Kesselring as commander of all German forces in Italy.
Why is Vietinghoff here? And Wolff? What are they all up to?
These questions went round and round in Pino’s head until he couldn’t take it anymore. He got out of the Fiat into the lightly falling snow and moved off toward a hedgerow of ornamental cedar trees that flanked the parking area. He stopped and took a piss in case any of the other drivers were watching, and then pushed through the cedars and disappeared.
Using the hedge for cover, Pino got to the villa’s north wall, where he crouched and slunk along, pausing beneath windows to listen, and then rising up to peek through.
From below the third window he heard shouting. One voice roared out, “Was du redest ist Verrat! Ich werde an einer solchen Diskussion nicht teilnehmen!”
Pino didn’t quite understand. But he did hear the sound of a room door slamming. Someone was leaving. General Leyers?
He bolted back down the side of the villa and to the cedar hedge. He ran down the length of it, peering through breaks, seeing Field Marshal Vietinghoff storm from the villa. His driver leaped from his car, opened the door to the backseat, and they soon drove off.
Pino had a moment of indecision. Should he go back to the window, try to hear more? Or should he go back to the car and wait, not risk his luck?
Leyers came out the front door and made the decision for him. Pino eased out through the hedge and jogged to meet him, trying to remember what Vietinghoff had shouted before leaving.
Was du redest ist Verrat!
He kept repeating the phrase silently as he opened the door for a very unhappy General Leyers, who looked ready to bite off a kitten’s head. Pino climbed into the front seat, feeling the rage coming off the German like waves.
“Mon général?”
“Gargnano,” Leyers said. “The insane asylum.”
Pino drove the car through the gates of Mussolini’s villa above Lake Garda, fearing what they might encounter. When General Leyers announced himself at the front door, one of Il Duce’s aides told him that it was not a good time.
“Of course it’s not a good time,” Leyers snapped. “That’s why I’m here. Take me to him, or I’ll have you shot.”
The aide became irate. “Under whose authority?”
“Adolf Hitler’s. I am here under the führer’s direct orders.”
The aide remained furious, but nodded. “Very well, if you’ll follow me.”
He led them to the library and opened the door slightly. Despite the dwindling day, there were no lights on yet in Mussolini’s library. The only light came in through the French doors. The pale beam cut diagonally through the room, revealing books strewn everywhere, and papers, and broken glass, and furniture busted and turned over.
In the aftermath of what had to have been a colossal tantrum, Il Duce sat behind his desk, elbows on top, brick jaw in his hands, staring straight down as if looking through the desktop at the ruins of his life. Claretta Petacci lounged in an easy chair in front of Mussolini, smoke lazing from a cigarette in one hand while the other clamped an empty wineglass to her bosom. To Pino, it looked like they could have been frozen in those positions for hours.
“Duce?” General Leyers said, moving deeper into the shambles of a room.
If Mussolini heard him he didn’t show it, just stared dully at the top of his desk while Leyers and Pino walked closer and closer. The dictator’s mistress heard them, though, and looked over her shoulder with a wan smile of relief.
“General Leyers,” Petacci slurred. “It’s been a trying day for poor Beno. I hope you’re not going to add to his troubles?”
The general said, “Duce and I need to have a frank talk.”
“About what?” Mussolini asked, head still down.
Closer now, Pino could see the puppet dictator was staring at a map of Italy.
“Duce?” Leyers began again.
Mussolini raised his head, glowered bizarrely at the general, and said, “We conquered Ethiopia, Leyers. And now the Allied swine have brought Negroes north into the land of Tuscany. Negroes rule the streets of Bologna and Rome, too!
It is a thousand times better for me to die now than to live. Don’t you think?”
Leyers hesitated after Pino translated, and said, “Duce, I can’t begin to advise you on such things.”
Mussolini’s eyes wandered as if searching for something long lost, and then brightened as if enchanted by some new and shiny object.
“Is it true?” the puppet dictator asked. “Does dear Hitler have a secret superweapon up his sleeve? A missile, a rocket, a bomb like we’ve never seen before? I hear the führer is just waiting to use the superweapon when his enemies have drawn close enough to wipe them all out with a series of devastating strikes.”
Leyers hesitated again, then said, “There are rumors of a secret weapon, Duce.”
“Aha!” Mussolini said, springing to his feet with a finger held high. “I knew it! Didn’t I say so, Clara?”
“You did, Beno,” his mistress replied. She was pouring herself another drink.
Mussolini was as high now as he’d been low. He strode around the desk, full of excitement, almost gleeful.
“It’s like the V-2 rocket, isn’t it?” he said. “Only so much more powerful, capable of leveling an entire city, isn’t that right? Only you Germans have the scientific and engineering brainpower to do such a thing!”
Leyers said nothing for several moments, then nodded. “Thank you, Duce. I appreciate the compliment, but I was sent to ask what your plans are, should things worsen.”
That seemed to confuse Mussolini. “But there’s a great rocket bomb. How could things worsen in the long run if we have the great rocket bomb?”
“I believe in planning for contingencies,” Leyers said.
“Oh,” the dictator said, and his eyes started to drift.
Claretta Petacci said, “Valtellina, Beno.”
“That’s it,” Mussolini said, focused again. “If we are pushed, I have twenty thousand troops who will follow me to the Valtellina Valley north of here, right up against Switzerland. They will defend me and my fellow Fascists until Herr Hitler launches his rocket of maximum destruction!”
Mussolini was grinning, looking off and reveling in anticipation of that wondrous day.
General Leyers said nothing for several moments, and Pino glanced at him sidelong. Did Hitler have a superweapon? Was he going to use it on the Allies if they got close enough to Berlin? If Leyers knew one way or the other, he wasn’t showing it.
The general clicked his heels and bowed. “Thank you, Duce. That’s all we wished to know.”
“You’ll alert us, Leyers?” Mussolini said. “When Hitler is going to use his magnificent rocket bomb?”
“I’m sure you’ll be among the first to know,” General Leyers said, turning.
He stopped in front of the dictator’s mistress. “Will you, too, go to Valtellina?”
Claretta Petacci smiled as if she’d long ago accepted her fate. “I loved my Beno when times were good, General. I’ll love him even more when they’re bad.”
Later that day, before describing the visit to Mussolini, Pino repeated the few words he’d heard below the window at the villa in the hills east of Lake Garda.
“Was du redest ist Verrat.”
Aunt Greta sat upright on the couch. She’d been living at the apartment since Uncle Albert was taken, and helping Baka with the daily radio transmissions.
She said, “Are you sure it was Vietinghoff who said that?”
“No, I’m not sure, but the voice was angry, and right afterward, I saw the field marshal leave the villa very angry. What does it mean?”
“Was du redest ist Verrat,” she said. “‘What you suggest is treason.’”
“Treason?” Pino said.
His father sat forward. “You mean like a coup against Hitler?”
“I would have to assume so, if they were talking to Vietinghoff in that way,” Aunt Greta said. “And Wolff was there? And Leyers?”
“And others. But I never saw them. They arrived before we did, and left afterward.”
“They see the writing on the wall,” his father said. “They’re scheming to survive.”
“The Allies should know that,” Pino said. “And about Mussolini and the superweapon he thinks Hitler has.”
“What does Leyers think about this superweapon?” Aunt Greta said.
“I can’t tell. He has a face like granite most of the time. But he would know. He told me himself he started working for Hitler by building cannons.”
“Baka is coming in the morning,” his father said. “Write down what you want London to know, Pino. I’ll have him send it along with the other transmissions.”
Pino took paper and pen and scratched his report out. Aunt Greta wrote down the words of treason he’d overheard.
At last Pino yawned, checked his watch. It was almost nine. “I have to report to the general, get my orders for tomorrow.”
“Will you be back home tonight?”
“I don’t think so, Papa.”
“Be careful,” Michele said. “You wouldn’t have heard those generals talking treason if the war wasn’t close to being over for good.”
Pino nodded, went for his overcoat, saying, “I haven’t asked about Uncle Albert. You saw him this morning in San Vittore, yes? How is he?”
“He’s lost weight, which isn’t a bad thing,” Aunt Greta said, smiling wanly. “And they haven’t broken him, though they’ve tried. He knows many of the other prisoners, so it helps. They protect one another.”
“He won’t be in there much longer,” Pino said.
Indeed, as he walked through the streets back toward Dolly’s apartment building, Pino’s sense of the time that remained between now and the end of the war was small, much smaller than time after the end of the war, which felt infinitely long, and filled with Anna.
Thoughts of a limitless future with her buoyed Pino to Dolly’s door. To his relief, Anna answered, smiling, no longer sick, and very happy to see him.
“The general and Dolly have gone out,” Anna said, letting him in.
She closed the door and fell into his arms.
Later, in Anna’s bed, their singing bodies glistened with sweat and love.
“I missed you,” Anna said.
“You’re all I think about,” Pino said. “Is it bad that when I’m supposed to be spying on General Leyers, or trying to memorize where we’ve been, and what we’ve seen, I’m instead thinking of you?”
“It’s not bad at all,” Anna said. “It’s sweet.”
“I mean it. When we’re apart, I feel like all the music stops.”
Anna gazed at him. “You’re a special person, Pino Lella.”
“No, not really.”
“You are,” she insisted, running her finger on his chest. “You’re courageous. You’re funny. And you’re beautiful to look at.”
Pino laughed, embarrassed. “Beautiful? Not handsome?”
“You are handsome,” Anna said, caressing his cheek now. “But you are so full of love for me, it beams from you, makes me feel beautiful, which makes you beautiful to me.”
“Then beautiful we are,” he said, and nuzzled her closer.
Pino told Anna about his sense that everything that would happen from now until the war’s end would someday seem very short, while time after the war seemed to stretch out toward an invisible horizon.
“We can do anything we want,” Pino said. “Life is limitless.”
“We can chase happiness, live passionately?”
“Is that really all you want? To chase happiness, and live passionately?”
“Can you imagine any other way to do it?”
“No,” he said, kissing Anna and loving her all the more. “I guess I really can’t.”
Chapter Twenty-Six
General Leyers and Pino were on the move again almost constantly the following two weeks. Leyers went twice to Switzerland after visits to the train yard in Como, not Monza, which caused Pino to think that the general had had the boxcar with the gold moved. Apart from those trip
s to Lugano, Leyers spent the majority of his time inspecting the state of roads and train lines running north.
Pino didn’t understand why, and it wasn’t his place to ask, but when they drove to the Brenner Pass road on March 15, the general’s intentions were laid plain. The train tracks up through the pass to Austria had been bombed repeatedly. Service had been interrupted in both directions, and gray men were toiling to repair the line.
The Brenner Pass road went through a snowpack that still ran all the way down to the valley floor. The higher they drove, the higher the snowbanks flanking them became, until it seemed they were in a roofless tunnel of gritty white. They came around a bend that gave them a stunning view of the vast Brenner drainage.
“Stop,” Leyers said, and climbed out with his binoculars.
Pino didn’t need binoculars. He could see the road ahead and a mob of gray men like a single enslaved organism that dug, chopped, and shoveled the snow that blocked the way to the top of the Brenner Pass, and Austria.
They’re a long way from the border, Pino thought, and gazed higher. There had to be ten or twelve meters of snow up there. And those dark smudges way up, back toward Austria, looked like avalanche tracks. Below those smudges, there could be fifteen meters of snowpack and debris across the road.
Leyers must have made a similar assessment. When they drove far enough to get to the Waffen-SS troops overseeing the slaves, the general climbed out and lit into the man in charge, a major by his insignia. They had a shouting match, and for a moment Pino thought they were going to come to blows.
When General Leyers returned to the car, he remained in a fury.
“At the rate they’re moving, we’ll never get the hell out of Italy,” he said. “I need lorries, backhoes, and bulldozers. Real machines. Or it’s impossible.”
Beneath a Scarlet Sky: A Novel Page 33
