Once Night Falls

by Roland Merullo

  The door was opened, and that man strode into the room. He was smaller and thinner than Skorzeny remembered—he’d seen him only at a distance before this—but there was an electric charge emanating from his body. His eyes, especially, seemed to be thrumming with energy, with certainty. Skorzeny and the other officers saluted, and he told them to stand at ease.

  For a full minute, he paced back and forth in front of them, staring at the floor, hands clasped behind his back, his body rigid with tension, rippling with energy. I would gladly die for you, Skorzeny found himself thinking. They were each asked to give their name and rank.

  At last, the Führer stopped and faced them. “Who knows Italy?” he asked.

  Skorzeny was the only one to raise his hand.

  Hitler nodded curtly and resumed his pacing.

  “Assignment,” he said in a clipped tone. That single word, Zuordnung, echoed against the walls. And then, “News reached us last night that Mussolini has been taken prisoner by his own government, a disaster for our forces in Italy.” He made a fist and slashed at the air with it. “No doubt the Italians are now on the verge of surrender. No doubt the spirit of the fight is completely gone from them. We need to learn his whereabouts, design a rescue plan, find him, and restore him to power or else our southern flank will be . . .”

  Hitler stopped speaking. A terrible pause seemed to swell out against the windows as the officers waited for details, for instruction, to be given their commands. And then Skorzeny felt his intuition click into gear: something in the Führer’s tone, eye movement, or body language made him sense that Hitler wanted one man, not all of them. One man would be chosen to develop a plan and find and rescue the Führer’s good friend. Exactly the kind of assignment he’d been hoping for.

  “Herr Führer, I am Austrian!” The words had burst from Skorzeny’s lips, unintended, but the meaning behind them was clear: Austria had been forced to cede South Tyrol to the Italians after the World War; in the mind of a true Austrian, there was no love lost for the Italian military, and there would be no mercy shown to Mussolini’s captors. Hitler’s eyes bored into him like sabers. Skorzeny thought, for a moment, that his disrespect would be rewarded with demotion or even court-martial. But there was something else in the eyes. Recognition. A flicker of admiration perhaps.

  “From where, exactly?” Hitler asked him.

  “Vienna, mein Führer.”

  Hitler stood in front of the captain with the deep circular scar on his left cheek and skewered him with his eyes. The Austrian führer, it turned out, wanted an Austrian for the job. “The others are dismissed,” he said. “Captain Skorzeny remain.”

  Thirteen

  During the seventy-minute ride north from Milan to the station at the southern tip of Lake Como, Luca stared out the window and clenched and unclenched his fists. Stepping up onto the train, he’d slid his eyes right for one second and seen the man in the felt hat board the car behind his. There seemed to him little chance now that the man was there by coincidence. You didn’t stare at someone instead of looking at dead bodies and then just happen to follow that person for two kilometers on a crooked route to a train station and then just happen to get into the car behind him. If the man had hard evidence from Alonso’s interrogation, Luca would have been in German hands by now—he knew that. If the man were working with the archbishop, or with someone else among the partisans, there were better, safer ways to make contact. No, Luca thought, he has to be one of Mussolini’s men. A Fascist bully, perhaps working for pay, perhaps only for the cause, acting on a hunch, hoping Luca would lead him to a secret meeting, a hidden Jew, a cache of weapons, hoping to make a name for himself among his fellow thugs.

  The woman sitting to Luca’s right held a loop of rosary beads in her gnarled old hands. Short, wizened, dressed all in black, she whispered her prayers just loudly enough for him to hear. He’d been raised Catholic, was close with his devout parents, and was now working with a brave priest and an even braver archbishop, but Luca had little feeling for their faith. He’d left this woman’s God behind with his adolescence. To his mind, the Church offered no proper explanation for the world’s inequities, for why some were born whole and others not, why some tortured and killed and others made peace. Christian or not meant little to him: the love of his life was Jewish. Religion was all superstition, all wishful thinking. How, after a horror like what he’d just witnessed, could any just God ask you not to kill?

  The train left its passengers at the Como station and reversed direction toward Milan. Luca helped the old woman down onto the platform and, trying to seem casual about it, headed off toward the hills. He’d left his knapsack there, hidden in a favorite place, because he hadn’t wanted to be stopped on the streets of Milan with a hunting knife and wire cutters in his possession. Now that seemed like a mistake. Across the outskirts of the small city he went, up a cobblestone road through the streets of Santa Eligia, an hour’s walk still from the cabin where Sarah was waiting. If the felt-hatted stranger followed him only a bit farther, the man would discover something very different from a cache of arms or a hidden Jewess.

  The road turned to dirt, passed a handful of close-set houses—not a creature to be seen here, except for one small, fenced-in mongrel that barked at him as he passed. Luca did not turn around. The road curled to the right, narrowed, passed an old farmhouse and its fields, two scrawny goats chewing on a leather strap and eyeing him without affection. Well behind him, he heard the small dog again. No question now: he was being tailed. He walked faster.

  Beyond the end of the last cleared field, the road narrowed to a path through thick woods. He was strangely calm—this was his territory—his mind eerily still, as if he’d been anticipating this kind of encounter for a decade. When he reached the tall stone behind which he’d left his backpack, he veered off the path, making no sound. He bent over the small pack only long enough to take out his father’s hunting knife, then crouched there, quieting his breath, listening, waiting.

  Another two minutes and Luca heard the man approaching. No chance now that he was an ally in the cause. No, an ally, a fellow fighter, would have called out to him. The man’s steps were quick and quiet, small rhythmic touches of shoe leather to dirt. He would be armed. A pistol, a switchblade, brass knuckles. He’d also be carrying a fanatical allegiance to his Duce. A fire of hatred in his brain. An urge to help remake humanity according to his idol’s twisted ideas, any and all means justifying that end.

  As the sound of footsteps came closer, Luca felt his mind pull tight into a single point of focus. His heartbeat seemed to slow; he drew a long breath. The man went past the stone at a steady pace. Luca saw the felt hat, saw something in the man’s left hand. He leaped out from behind the stone, and the man heard him and turned, but Luca was upon him, thrusting the knife up just below the bottom of the breastbone. Their faces were very close; the man’s eyes were opened wide; a hideous gasp escaped between his teeth. Luca drove the knife in as far as it would go, lifting the Fascist off the ground with the force of his one strong arm. The hat fell off. Something—a knife—clattered on the gravel path. Luca tumbled forward, pinning the man beneath him, his left forearm across the stranger’s throat. He heard a choked last breath, then ripped out the knife and felt the Blackshirt shudder beneath him once and go still.

  Fourteen

  As Don Claudio expected, there were exactly four attendees at morning Mass, all of them women of a certain age. It didn’t matter; the point was that the daily Mass was being said. So far, at least, the Germans, while occupying the town and committing every manner of atrocity and indecency, had left the services alone and left him alone for the most part. Foolish of them, of course. In their eyes, no doubt, he was nothing more than a fat priest, a fool for loving his invisible God. Let them always think so.

  Thanks to his heroic friend, the archbishop of Milan, the same man who’d gotten him involved in the secret work, he had enough wafers and wine for another three months of services. Sometimes,
knowing what he knew of the hunger in the towns along the lake, Don Claudio wondered if it would be more Christian to hand them out as food and drink rather than saving them to be turned into the body and blood of Christ. But a gesture like that would only draw attention to him, and the good it might do wouldn’t last long in any case.

  So, in front of his meager congregation, in the nave of dark marble and candle smoke, he went through the ancient ritual, its stately liturgy, its slow dance of familiar gestures. When Maria came up to receive the Eucharist, he met her eyes for a few seconds. A husband on the Russian steppe. A son in the hills. A Jew in the attic. If the Germans found out either of those last two facts, she would suffer horrifically, as they’d both seen others suffer: the Rossos had been beaten to death with boots and clubs, slowly, brutally, in front of an audience. The memories of those scenes played before his eyes at night like visions of hell. He did what he could now to banish them. He offered Maria a smile of encouragement, a tiny testament of faith in something beyond this awful world, and placed the host gently on her tongue.

  Don Claudio found himself wondering if this was, in fact, not earthly life but purgatory, if they were all locked in a dream. Could it be that their souls were being purified in preparation for some great celestial joy? He sighed at the thought, let his hand rest briefly on Maria’s shoulder, let her brave “Amen” cleanse his thoughts of fear. Here was a woman of substance, of holiness, of a remarkable courage that cast his own timidity into harsh relief. If Rebecca had sought shelter in his church instead of Maria’s attic, would he have welcomed her?

  He returned to the altar and wiped the chalice clean, drank down the last few sips of consecrated wine, recited the closing prayers.

  Afterward, Maria came to him as he moved toward the cloakroom, anxious to shed his hot robe. As he knew she would, she asked if he could hear her confession. In all the town of Mezzegra, this was no doubt the place safest from Germans. They seemed to have a superstition about it. When the stocky redheaded officer with the thick neck and big thighs had come, on that first day, to inspect the building, wondering if it might serve as a place for his men to live (not enough beds in the rectory, he’d decided; they wanted their comforts), he’d barely glanced at the confessional, had even seemed to shudder as he walked past it. Don Claudio had, of course, noticed. Now he went and sat in the central chair in darkness, the stole worn during the sacrament draped around his neck. Maria knelt to one side behind a curtain, leaned forward, whispered, “They are making me cook for them now.”

  “Cook how?” he whispered back. “What do you mean? With what food?”

  “The new SS officers who’ve come to the Rosso house. They have the food. A tall one came to my fence last night, drunk. Ordered me to kill one of my chickens and to cook for them . . . every night.”

  Don Claudio looked down at his clasped hands, stared at the ends of the purple stole beside them, pressed his eyelids tight. “You can’t refuse,” he said after a time.

  “I know.”

  “Perhaps it will lead to something good.”

  Silence. Maria, like the others, had grown tired of his optimism, forced as it was these days.

  “Maybe,” she said at last, a note of bitterness in her quiet voice. Forse. “Or maybe I will confess something else here one day. Something worse.”

  Don Claudio let the words, the idea, settle around him. “We cannot let hatred overtake us,” he said.

  Silence.

  For a time, they were quiet with each other, surrounded by darkness and stone, one kneeling, one sitting, their faces separated by a thin screen. How quickly life has changed, he thought. How far they had come from the people they used to be. “Is Rebecca all right?”

  “Alive.”

  “Any word from . . . your son?”

  “Not lately. You?”

  “Yes. He said he was going to Milan.”

  “Can you tell me who he meets with in Milan?”

  “I shouldn’t . . . Any word from your husband?”

  In the dim light from the nave, he could see Maria shaking her head. He heard one muffled sob. He wanted to reach through the screen and take hold of her. “Sarah?” he asked very quietly.

  “Alive, also. Beyond that, Luca tells me nothing about her, like you, in case . . .” Her voice trailed off into a chamber of sordid possibilities.

  “Hold to a vision of heaven,” Don Claudio counseled. “Hard as it may be, Maria. Hold to that vision. God will bless you for what you are doing now. Your sins, if you have any sins, are forgiven.”

  She listened to the lengthy Latin absolution, thanked him, stood. He heard the curtain being pushed aside and then the tap of her footsteps on the marble floor. She was kneeling at the altar rail, saying her penance. Then more footsteps, the squeak of door hinges. When all was silent again, Don Claudio sat in the confessional for a long time, fingering the ends of the stole. She was being made to cook for them now. The Nazis would be closer to her, would visit her home, bringing food to prepare. One slip, one sound from the attic, one careless word on her part or his, and their secret work—probably their lives—would be finished.

  Fifteen

  Mussolini hadn’t been able to sleep—his captors left a light on in the corridor—and he was sitting on the edge of the cot with his face in his hands. They’d taken him in the back of a police ambulance, accompanied by uniformed men with automatic weapons, all of them sweating in the metal box. “For your protection,” the king had said, placing a tiny, womanly hand on his back as he was escorted away. Why the ambulance, then, and not his own car with a bodyguard? And why hadn’t the captain in charge offered an explanation—instead of a tepid salute, the same words, “for your protection,” then silence? And why now was there a soldier outside the door of this room—a police cadet station it was; he knew that—peering in through the glass every half hour in just the way a guard might check on a prisoner?

  His stomach hurt more than usual. He missed Claretta. Ordinarily he would have called her to Palazzo Venezia or stopped by to visit with her on his way home, and even in pain, even after a day of terrible news, his body would function as it had always functioned, and she would cry out in his arms and squeeze him against her large, beautiful breasts so tightly that, for a minute, the weight of his worries would lift away. Sometimes, afterward, he’d serenade her on the violin, and that would send her into a different sort of ecstasy. She’d close her eyes, tilt her head to one side, and smile as peacefully as any of Bellini’s Madonnas. By the time he returned to Villa Torlonia, Rachele would be sleeping, or pretending to sleep, and he’d lie awake for an hour beside her, going over the events of the day, searching the words of the great philosophers for a line or phrase that might make sense of his life.

  Now, the steel springs of a cot and a prisoner’s meal, most of which he couldn’t eat; dark army trucks standing like gravestones in the walled courtyard; and a circle of betrayers around him like hungry wolves circling a deer. Who could make sense of that?

  If this were, in fact, what he was beginning to suspect it was, an imprisonment that had nothing to do with his protection, then Hitler would surely find out. There were German spies everywhere—in his own office, perhaps among the servants in Villa Torlonia, among the secretaries of the Council and lackeys of the king. Hitler needed Benito Mussolini to lead the Italian forces against the Allies; they’d never fight for anyone else. It was obvious then: the Führer would find out what had occurred and send a team to rescue and reinstall him. If there were not that certainty in this world, that friendship and mutual esteem, then there was nothing.

  He lay down again and slept fitfully, dreaming of his father’s blacksmith hands and harsh words about the Church, his mother at the stove, cringing, cooking. From the brown stucco two-story house in Forlì, the scene suddenly shifted, and the face of Giacomo Matteotti flashed before him. Those dark eyes, that downturned mouth. Haunting him in his dreams. Mussolini awoke in a sweat. This was how you paid for your sins: you were
assaulted by your own memories, tormented by them in the night. But had it been a sin to rid the country of such a force for disruption? Such a traitor? A disrespectful socialist opponent, however popular? Had it truly been a sin? Hadn’t it been done for the good of the nation?

  He turned and turned, got up, paced, lay down again on the sagging cot. Eventually he fell back into a shallow sleep, a few bad hours torn by images, snatches of dream, voices echoing in church naves.

  In the deepest part of the night, he was awakened by the screech of the metal door. He opened his eyes and saw three unfamiliar men in uniform, one a lieutenant colonel. “Duce,” the colonel said in a sly tone, an order ribboned with fake respect, “you must now please come with us.”

  Sixteen

  Seconds after the felt-hatted Fascist expelled his last blood-choked breath, Luca heard the small dog start barking again. In the time it took for him to get to his feet, the eerie sense of calm deserted him. There was blood halfway up his right arm and on the front of his shirt and pants, and the man lay on his left side with his knees drawn up and his right arm flung out as if he were about to burst into song. The face was contorted, frozen in agony, the eyes open and dull. A switchblade knife, unsprung, lay on the path not far from the felt hat. For one long moment, Luca stood over the body, breathing hard, his mind whirling, then he kicked the knife into the underbrush, lifted his backpack from behind the stone, and angled off into the trees. Moving blindly, with hurried steps, he crashed down through a shallow ravine, then climbed the other side. Brambles and tree branches scraped at his face and arms, and a voice—overridden by an urge to put as much distance as possible between him and what he had done—kept counseling him to go back, go back now, take the switchblade, hide the body. He could no longer hear the barking dog.