Once Night Falls

by Roland Merullo

  Still, within the Church’s vast network of nuns, priests, and monks, there were many like himself who had decided that conciliation was not an acceptable option. This secret activity was a sin, perhaps, a breaking of his vow of obedience. And there was physical danger, too: outside these walls, the robes of the clergy offered no protection against Nazi atrocities and Fascist hatred.

  At first, it had been the death of Giacomo Matteotti that had awakened him to the evil of Mussolini’s mind. Matteotti, a brave, outspoken, and popular opponent of the regime, had been snatched from the streets of Rome and beaten to death by Mussolini’s squadristi, and the thugs had dumped his body in a ditch on the city’s outskirts.

  Through subterranean channels, through small comments among friends, that outrage had connected Archbishop Maniscalco to the man he was about to see, a half-American who called himself Giovanni. As the months passed, as their friendship and mutual trust deepened, this so-called Giovanni had recruited him for a new cause, a secret battle against il Duce and his Nazi friends. Now, the trim, mild-mannered archbishop preached patriotism from the pulpit and ran a stable of underground resistance fighters. Through various couriers, Giovanni sent him money and supplies; he funneled them to the partisans. I trust the man implicitly, Maniscalco told himself as he stepped into the small trattoria where they’d agreed to meet. I trust him more than anyone else in my life right now. I pray that will not turn out to be a mistake.

  After they’d greeted each other and taken their seats, Giovanni said, too loudly, “I’ve invited someone else to join us,” and looked around as if he’d meant join us for lunch.

  But the archbishop knew that was not what he’d meant at all.

  Four

  On that same hot July Sunday, in Milan, six hundred kilometers to the north, fifteen bodies—Italian partisans all of them—lay in grotesque poses on the hot cobblestones of an open square called Piazzale Loreto. To either side of this gruesome display—rotting flesh, broken bones, puddled blood—stood Nazi soldiers in their jackboots and lidded helmets, their spines straight, their gray eyes scanning the crowd. Not five meters in front of them, a distance enforced by swings of rifle stocks, huddled the families of the slain fighters. Mothers and wives, mostly, with a few old men and a number of weeping children. The bodies had been lying there for two hot days and two warm nights, and the assembled mourners could hardly bear the wretched smell. From time to time, one of the women would make a tearful entreaty, but the German occupiers had their orders: they would wait until the stink became overwhelming, until the bodies were crawling with flies, and only then allow the families to claim and bury their dead. It was an order that would come back to haunt them, a decision Italians would remember, along with the name of this humble square, for generations to come.

  Safely behind the first rows of family members, smoking a cigarette with a nervous nonchalance and fingering a coded note in his jacket pocket, twenty-year-old Luca Benedetto stood and stared. With only one working eye and one strong arm, he’d been declared unfit for military service. A great relief, yes, but how he wanted to fight! He’d hated Mussolini from long before il Duce’s alliance with Hitler, and he hated the Germans—who’d sent his father to the Russian front—even more. People said there were already hundreds of thousands of Nazi soldiers in this country and more pouring over the northern border by the day. His only wish now, his only work, was to make their lives miserable.

  He sensed he was being watched—a man in a felt hat standing to his left and slightly behind—but after the first glance, he didn’t turn his head. In Milan for a clandestine meeting, he’d heard about the reprisal killings at Piazzale Loreto and decided to see the horror for himself. It was the kind of decision—spontaneous, risky—that sent his so-called superiors into fits of anger and vitriol, the reason, or one of the reasons, they hadn’t given him bigger assignments. But the German treachery was more personal to him than it was to them. He stood to lose the three people he loved most on this earth—his beautiful Sarah, his mother, and his father—and so he waited there, fixing the horrific sight in his memory: disemboweled heroes missing teeth and covered with flies, smug nazisti with smirks showing at the corners of their mouths. Into the fabric of his brain he wanted to weave this vision tight. He wanted never to forget what he’d heard and seen in other places, too—the stories of raped Italian girls, the faces of terrified Jews as they were stripped of jobs and property and made to crawl in the streets like dogs. He pulled hard on the last of the cigarette, then turned to one side and spat. He swore a silent oath that Piazzale Loreto, this plain-faced square a kilometer northeast of Milan’s centro, would one day be remembered in the history books. It would be remembered. Si, certo. But not only for this.

  Five

  From her place at the deep, rust-stained sink in the kitchen of a hillside house above Lake Como, Luca’s mother, Maria Osolla Benedetto, ran a knife through the hard crust of three-day-old bread, the last of their weekly supply. The windows were open on the warm morning, and a light breeze carried vulgar laughter from the house—a hundred meters away—where the Rosso family had once lived, a beautiful stone box of a house with a red tile roof and a magnificent view down over the lake and across to the eastern mountains. For the sin of refusing to turn it over to a group of SS officers, Rafaelo Rosso and his wife, Antonetta, had been beaten to death in the yard of that house, their bodies dumped there like slaughtered sheep. Now the bedrooms held SS officers with their women and drink. Late into the night, one could hear them.

  Maria despised the Germans for taking her husband from her to fight their foolish war in Russia. She hated the harsh chords of their language, hated the way they fondled the local girls at will and convinced some of them—a few—to go into that house at night in exchange for food for themselves and their hungry children, or a sense of safety, or out of some twisted loyalty to il Duce and a way of life, a way of thinking, that, long before the Germans appeared, had seemed so alien to her, Sabatino, and Luca. She was old enough to have known Italy before Fascism. There had been problems, yes—social, economic, political—but there had also been a dignity and sanity to their lives. That was gone now.

  When the hilarity ceased, she listened for any sound, any movement above her head. Her windowless attic hid Rebecca Zinsi, a Jewish woman, the mother of her son’s lover and her closest friend since their second year of grade school. Maria knew that sometime after dark, she’d have to tap on the small hatch in the hallway ceiling, hand up a little food, and take Rebecca’s slop pail. She was afraid, of course, every hour of every day, so she’d discovered it was better not to think about how hungry Rebecca must be, what kind of air she’d be breathing, hidden behind a wall of rough-hewn boards and plaster, sleeping there, crouching or standing stiffly during the long, burning days. Better not to think about Rebecca’s daughter, Sarah, a local beauty who’d disappeared months ago and hadn’t been heard from since. Luca promised he was taking care of her, but he wouldn’t say where or how.

  The war had made her son—always so happy and full of life—into a tight-lipped and intense young man. She suspected he was helping the partisans, the mountain fighters, small bands of men and some women, young and not so young, rumored of late to be sabotaging German troop movements and equipment. It made sense, because Luca knew the hills the way she knew her kitchen, the way she knew the touch of her husband’s hands. But he never spoke of it. How sad she and Sabatino had been when Luca was born with one sightless eye and a weakened left arm. What a torment that had been for him as a boy. And now, it seemed, a blessing. The army would never take him. A blessing in disguise.

  She heard a sound above her, a creak of boards as Rebecca shifted position—and she glanced quickly out the window at the Rosso house. No movement there. No laughter now.

  Leaning wearily on the crutch of faith, she lifted a prayer to the Virgin Mother. That her husband and son might survive the war. That the bad times would soon pass. That the Germans would leave. That someone—
the Americans, the British, even the Russians—might come and rescue them from Mussolini’s insanity and the merciless SS. How much worse can things get? she wondered. How much longer would she be able to keep her guest alive on the meager amount of food she could buy in Mezzegra with the ration coupons, grow in the stony soil of her back yard, or accept from the local priest? She’d heard that there were house searches now in towns along the lake. How much longer before the men across the empty lot grew suspicious and came to check her attic?

  Six

  In the rectory of the church of Sant’Abbondio, a twenty-minute walk from Maria’s house, Don Claudio DeMarco lifted himself with a grunt to a sitting position and swung his swollen legs over the side of the bed. As he did every morning upon rising, the priest sat for a moment and prayed for his relatives in the beleaguered south, for his neighbors and friends, for all those who were drowning in the terror of war. He prayed, too, for courage, something the Lord had never given him in abundance. He drew and expelled a breath and then, tapped by a finger of guilt, said a prayer that the twin demons—Hitler and Mussolini—would soon be killed. A sin, surely, to pray for someone’s violent death, but he’d seen too much these past years, heard too much in the confessional. With the arrival of the German occupiers, some boundary fence of his faith had been trampled. Some sense of confidence in his own people had been undermined by their embrace of the violent cult of il Duce—his vicious gangs, the squadristi; his ludicrous military adventurism in Africa, Albania, Greece, and Yugoslavia; his friendship with Hitler, a living Satan; the murder of the heroic Matteotti.

  Christ, he well knew, had dealt with evil people and had prayed for them. But that was Christ. He himself was Claudio DeMarco, round-faced and fat and, in better times, jolly. A man who loved to eat, who had sinned with one woman, and who had thought, many times, of sinning with others. To this day, the product of one of those sins walked the earth. In safety, he hoped. He said a special prayer for her every morning. He would, he hoped, be forgiven. And the Germans, he hoped, would never imagine what kind of work the fat local padre was actually doing.

  With the ghost of fear wrapping its cold fingers around his thoughts, Don Claudio waddled into the washroom and cleaned himself, then shuffled into the rectory kitchen—abandoned by all the usual serving people now and by the one assistant priest—to make himself a weak cup of espresso and to prepare for morning Mass. Already he could feel perspiration gathering on his neck and under his arms. Beyond the window, the day seemed sunlit and hot, pure torment for a man of his dimensions. He would bear it as penance. He would trust in the Lord and ask that he be given strength to keep his secrets if the day ever came when he was caught and carried away to the torture cells.

  Seven

  When the car pulled through the gates of Villa Savoia, the king’s summer residence, Mussolini noticed three carabinieri vehicles and a police ambulance parked there in patches of shade. Mildly unusual. It occurred to him that the Allied landing on Sicily—a fluke not a harbinger—had sent everyone into a panic for the past two weeks. The curse of his people was that so many of them were afraid of war. He was not. As the car rolled to a stop, he dropped one hand to his thigh and, through the fabric, absently fingered the raised scar from his battle wound. He’d nearly lost his life then, twenty-eight years ago, or, at least, he’d told people that story for so long now that he himself had come to believe it. Already in this conflict, his beloved son, Bruno, had perished in a bomber crash. People wanted a world without violence, but violence was as much a part of the human condition as was sexual intercourse: there was no life without it. Shying away from violence brought only destruction, humiliation, surrender. He knew that. Hitler knew it. He had tried to make his countrymen understand that fact, and for a while, it seemed they did. There had been successes: Albania, Libya, Ethiopia. But now a few battalions of American and British soldiers had come ashore in Sicily, a thousand kilometers to the south, and one saw panic in every face, and police vehicles at Villa Savoia.

  Mussolini stood up out of the car, straightened the jacket of his suit with a downward tug and a flex of his powerful shoulders, then strode toward the steps of the grand stone building, where the king was standing in a pose of calm respect. Eyes at the level of Mussolini’s shoulders, Vittorio Emanuele held out one soft hand in greeting.

  “My king,” il Duce said, trying not to let a note of sarcasm leak into the words. After all, it had been the king’s weakness in the face of labor unrest that had opened the door to power for Benito Mussolini when he was just an ambitious member of the Chamber of Deputies; he tried always to remember that.

  “My Duce. Come, sit with me inside. Today is insufferably hot.”

  They sat in an elegantly furnished parlor—velvet drapes, leather armchairs, walls hung with portraits of the king’s ancestors and trimmed in dark mahogany—and were served small cups of espresso on porcelain plates by a manservant in a tight white uniform. Mussolini found the scene slightly disgusting: the tiny man they called king, with his high forehead and fluffy mustache; the servant with his effeminate ways; the flowers; the electric fans; the polished marble; the smells, already, of dinner being prepared in the kitchen. They might have been at an ambassador’s reception in peacetime for all the sense of deprivation here. And outside, the police cars, the ambulance. For what? In case the king fell ill with a summer cold? It made his bowels ache.

  “How are you, my Duce?”

  “Determined, as always, Your Highness, but not well. The ulcers have me. Rachele is in a panic. Last night’s Council vote, the Allied landing. I am the most hated man in Italy, it seems, after a lifetime of giving my blood and sweat to this land.”

  The king nodded solemnly. A travesty, yes, he seemed to be saying. He pursed his thin lips. “You have served your country well,” he said after a long moment, but the first signal of trouble was his inability to meet Mussolini’s eyes as he spoke. The king’s direct gaze had been his one saving grace, his single manly aspect. Now that, too, was gone. Mussolini nearly snorted. “But as for the vote, Duce,” the king went on, “I think it is a sign that your work is finished.”

  “Finished? How?”

  A cough, a flicker of eye contact, a gaze into the middle distance. The king molded his face into an expression of sorrow. “We have arranged,” he said quietly, “for you to be taken into custody. For your protection.”

  “Custody? Who will run the country? Who will lead the army?”

  Another cough. “The generals and I. You have brought the war to our soil, Duce. Il popolo non la voleva.” The people didn’t want that.

  At this hideous comment, this siding with the masses against their leader, Mussolini felt as though the burning pain of the ulcer was expanding like an inflated balloon, swelling up through his midsection, squeezing the air from his lungs. It seemed to him that his chest was about to burst open, scattering the buttons of his shirt and pieces of bloody rib into the king’s triangular face. A violent rage took hold of him; he had to set the clattering cup and saucer on the table. A few drops spilled on the oriental carpet. The king noticed. Mussolini felt the blood in the vessels around his eyes and wondered if he should strangle Vittorio Emanuele right there, then take the car home and face Rachele’s righteousness. Don’t go! Don’t go, Benito! He could hear the words echoing in his ears. He swallowed. He said, in a voice shaking with anger, “What kind of custody?” and heard footsteps at the doorway behind him.

  Eight

  Silvio Merino spent three minutes in front of the mirror in his second-floor apartment on Rome’s most fashionable street, Via Veneto. He made a slight adjustment to the knot of his silk tie, brushed an eyelash from the lapel of his sport coat, flashed his smile at himself. He tucked one errant hair back in place above his forehead. Already a touch of gray there, he noticed. Perfect.

  He had an important meeting that afternoon, so it was essential to make a good impression. The meeting involved a military man. Or perhaps a political man. Or perhaps a m
an who combined both. His contact had been a bit vague, saying only that there was intrigue involved, possibly real danger, but assuring him there could be a substantial profit. And that, of course, was the part that mattered: money whispered to him like a lover.

  Silvio thought of himself, to use a word popular in his Sicilian dialect, as a facciatu. A maker. Someone who made things happen by any means available. A more proper word might be the Italian facilitatore—facilitator, but Silvio preferred the sound of the rougher title. Facciatu. Fa-chia-TOO. On the island of his birth, it was sometimes considered a compliment. As, he thought, in his case at least, it should be.

  He closed and locked the door of the apartment with a satisfying click and made his way down two long flights of marble steps. From centuries of human traffic, the stair treads were worn in the center, a detail he loved. It spoke to him of the perspective of time and, as he descended them and then went out onto the winding downhill street he also loved—where else in Rome would one want to live?—he set aside a moment of nervousness by recalling his heroic triumph . . . over the circumstances of his birth.

  He’d come, as the expression had it, from nothing. The last of eleven Merino children reared on a patch of dusty farmland in central Sicily, he’d been the only one to understand, at a very young age, that the world was there to be manipulated. Played, in the same way an instrument was played by a master musician. Girlfriends, teachers, older relatives, even the midlevel mafiosi who ran that part of the island—he’d always been able to shine a smile on them, make a remark, a joke, tease, grin, empathize. Charmed and flattered, they’d do whatever it was he wanted them to do. Surrender their honor, give him a passing grade for substandard schoolwork, yank him from a nasty fistfight and make sure his opponent never bothered him again, slip him a coin and tell him he should enjoy life.