Once Night Falls

by Roland Merullo

  After pushing himself hard for an hour through the dense undergrowth, he came, at last, upon a stone ridge that ran parallel to the slope. A familiar place. He and his father had spent a night here on one of their many expeditions, six or eight years ago it must have been. He sat on a ledge, back against a wall of rock, and stared out into the trees. A gruesome satisfaction had taken hold of him, grim, dark, coated in what felt like evil. This was what he’d wanted, to be a fighter. But there was something else behind that vague dream now, a sense that he’d crossed into new territory and, in doing so, left part of himself behind. He lowered his eyes to the dried blood on his skin and clothes. He couldn’t be sure, couldn’t grasp the truth behind the feeling, but he worried that the Luca he’d left behind was the person Sarah loved.

  He worried, too, about the body on the path and cursed himself for his moment of panic. It would have taken only a minute to drag it into the woods, cover the blood, hide the hat, take the knife, rifle through the man’s pockets for the Fascist Party card he knew would be there and for whatever money he might have been carrying. Luca ran his mind back over the past hour, wondering who could have seen him starting up the road by the farmhouse. Two goats, a dog, maybe whoever it was who had caused the dog to bark a third time.

  There was a little food and a bottle of water in the backpack, along with wire cutters, a small flashlight, extra batteries, a balled-up mesh bag. The tools of his trade. But he couldn’t eat now. The thought of it made him nauseous. He’d finish the long climb to the cabin, wash off the blood, tell Sarah what had happened, and hope he hadn’t left behind all his tenderness, all his youth, all the parts of himself she seemed to admire.

  After a while, he stood up and began to walk, more slowly and carefully now, making little sound, going along according to a mental compass it seemed had always been built into his bones. Flashes of guilt lit the dark sky of his thoughts: he could just as easily have ducked into the trees and let the man go on his way, but it was almost as if he’d had to prove something to himself, as if the scene on Piazzale Loreto had terrified him, and, in response to that terror, he’d had to become a killer, brutal, fearless, immune to what Don Claudio always called “the sanctity of human life.”

  Battered by these thoughts, he’d gone only a short distance, making his own path through the trees, when he came upon a cluster of Galerina marginata growing from a rotting log. The mushrooms looked like nothing so much as keyboard notes of the song of death itself. Lepiota was the slang term for them. Normally he would have passed on by, but something—the persistent echoes of Piazzale Loreto, maybe, the evil skin that covered him now, the guilt—made him stop and crouch beside them. He remembered his father pointing them out to him so many years ago, explaining how poisonous they were and what a horrible death would be experienced by anyone who ate them. “The only saving grace,” his father had said, “is that you die quickly.” Luca remembered thinking, even then, that there was a certain vicious beauty to these funghi, the toasted brown heads and elegant white stems, the way they lifted up from the log in a gentle curl. It was easy to understand how, over the centuries, people had been fooled by the shapeliness, had picked and eaten the lepiota, thinking them a gift from God. He could understand, too, suddenly, how it was that a person could decide to take his own life.

  He stared at the mushrooms for a while, counted eleven separate heads, and then, in an odd gesture—this was the new Luca acting, a different man now, a killer—cut them off at the base with his knife, one by one, and, using a large leaf to protect his fingers, loaded them into the mesh bag. He put the bag carefully into his backpack, cleaned the knife blade in the dirt, and walked on.

  He traveled on legs accustomed to twenty or more hard kilometers a day, feeling the sun make its slow arc across the afternoon and dealing with a new urge—alien to him—to ask forgiveness. He could almost sense the earth’s silent spin, almost feel a lost kinship with the lake and the hills, almost believe that he had now set himself outside the natural order by taking a life he could have spared. In time, as he knew he would, he came upon a rough dirt road, long unused. The road turned into an old donkey path, then a trickle of trail heading deeper into the high hills, then a line of eroded stones that would mean nothing to a person who didn’t know this forest. From the end of the trail of stones, he was able to see just the roof of a cabin where shepherds had once taken shelter in storms. The cabin—little more than a shack, really—hadn’t been used since long before Mussolini came to power, fifty or even a hundred years. Overgrown with vines and surrounded by trees and bushes, it blended into the landscape so perfectly that you could be standing thirty meters away and not see it. The small fields around it were overgrown, the sheep only a memory. The cabin itself had a leaky roof, vipers in the foundation, no glass in the two small windows, a door made of three planks and a rusty handle. He looked down at his bloody clothes, stepped forward, and tapped twice on the wood. No one answered. For a moment, he felt a surge of panic, but then he heard steps and saw Sarah coming out of the trees, her hair freshly washed and her beautiful face touched only lightly by the fear of what she was seeing.

  Seventeen

  The German officers treated Maria as a servant—something she expected. But on that first night, at least, they didn’t touch her, or say crude things in front of her, or invite their women to the table. In a pantry next to the Rossos’ kitchen, they kept a larder of vegetables that would have fed all of Mezzegra for a week. Maria had no idea where the food had come from, deliveries from Vienna or Berlin, or maybe they simply took what they wanted from the local markets. Who was going to complain or stop them?

  Though there was meat, too, in the refrigerator, she did as she was told and cooked the chicken she’d killed and made a sauce with the tomatoes, onions, and peppers, a kind of cacciatore, a simple hunter’s dish but one that her husband, Sabatino, had favored. She’d loved his passion for food and, in the early years, for her. He was a rough man, unshaven half the time, with calloused hands and a blunt way of speaking. Her parents, educated people, had wanted more for her, better, richer, more refined. But Sabatino had always been amazingly tender, always a gentleman in his own rough way, always a man who cared about his house and made their family the heart of his days. Instead of going down to the bars in town to drink coffee and play cards with the other men, he’d take their one-eyed Luca up into the mountains on camping and hiking trips, even when the boy was very small. He taught their son which snakes to avoid and which plants were edible—almost as if he could see into the future and had been preparing him for the deprivations of the war years. She remembered so well the way her men had said goodbye to each other when Sabatino had been sent off to war, the two of them, one stocky, one slim, standing in the road in front of the house and looking down at the lake. Before dawn on the day Sabatino left, they’d stood that way for the better part of an hour and then turned as if on some shared instinct, held each other close, and quickly walked off in separate directions.

  Luca told her later that his father had given him his prized hunting knife.

  She wondered, at times, if Sabatino had seen into the future another way, had known he would never return, and so the parting had been that much more difficult for him. She wondered if Luca and his father were both killers now, a thing she could not imagine.

  Thinking about that possibility, she cut her hand with the Germans’ sharp knife. A superficial wound, a scratch. She sucked the blood from her finger and brought her thoughts back to the meal. They even had salt, the bastardi. She spent two hours over the preparations—she did not know how to cook other than the slow way her mother had cooked—and the men, eating in their undershirts (something Sabatino had never done) seemed to appreciate it. They didn’t offer her any food, however, or speak a single compliment, and they drank more than she expected SS officers to drink.

  But when the meal was finished, one of them, a boyish-looking redhead with a weightlifter’s thick neck, actually thanked her—
a single, quiet, heavily accented grazie—and as his comrades went off to their rooms, as women slipped in the door so that all Maria could see of them was their backs and shining, just-washed hair, he said he’d eaten his fill and left her a bowl with a third of a meal in it. When he walked away, she ate it with a fresh spoon, quickly, quietly; cleaned the dishes; and left.

  On that first night, she did not dare steal so much as half a carrot, but she carried away an idea. It was the kind of vulgar idea she never would have entertained for so much as a second before the war; it was spawned by hatred, by hunger, by the awful things she’d seen with her own eyes and heard about from friends. She’d used the last of their oil, and the man who seemed to be in charge, the tall drunk with the bald head, the one who’d sneaked up behind her in her yard, told her she should bring her own oil next time, because “You Italians can’t cook anything without it, and surely you must have some from your trees.” She said that she did, which was true, and, leaving in the summer darkness, with a few drops of light rain pattering on the leaves and a furious hatred boiling inside her, she carried away an idea.

  That night, with great care, almost as if it were a religious ceremony, she took a spoonful of urine from Rebecca’s slop bucket, mixed it into a large bottle of olive oil, and set it on the counter for use at the Germans’ table.

  Every time she cooked for them now, they would be consuming some of a Jewish woman’s piss.

  Eighteen

  As the two of them strolled away from the Café Dello Sport, Silvio decided he liked this “Giovanni.” The man had style, flair. The lenses of his eyeglasses sparkled; his cheeks and strong chin were perfectly shaved. But, in contrast with the elegant grooming and the clean lines of his jaw, Giovanni’s nose was bent sideways, as if he’d been a boxer in his youth. His hair—just enough gray to add a distinguished touch—was swept back from his forehead, his shoulders wide, his walk . . . what was the word? Disinvolto. Jaunty. Probably in his late forties, the man cut a bella figura. And what mattered more than that?

  They meandered past the American Embassy—closed, of course; Americans were an extinct species now, in Italia—the two of them attracting the stares, it seemed to Silvio, of every woman they passed. They turned onto Via Ciambotta, one of the nicest side streets of the Ludovisi neighborhood, flowers gone from the grand entranceways of the three-story houses here but the same sense of amorous intrigue hiding behind the curtained windows and leonine gargoyles.

  “So,” Silvio said after they’d passed several blocks with no conversation, “I understand you are a military man, an officer.”

  “Something like that,” Giovanni answered. As they walked, he looked around them with subtle glances, as if expecting to be spied upon, listened to by operatives of one side or another. Not working for the Germans, Silvio hoped, but he couldn’t quite bring himself to raise the question.

  “Born where?”

  Giovanni glanced at him out of the corner of his eye, smirked, sauntered on. “Chicago,” he said at last. Barely moving his lips.

  “You’re an American?”

  “Not so loud with that word, please.”

  “But your Italian is impeccable. Better than mine. I have the Sicilian accent, the U sound where the Florentines and Tuscans say oh. And your look, your walk. Everything sings ‘Roman nobility’!”

  “Yes, and I was told you specialized in flattery.”

  Silvio laughed. “Only for those who deserve praise. Truly, I never would have guessed.”

  “Italian father. American mother. I moved back here for love years ago. Was drafted, against my will. Completed my service in peacetime and went into intelligence work. I tolerated it, endured it . . . until the racial laws, until Hitler.”

  “Amazing. And now?”

  “Now I’m a midlevel functionary. Military intelligence. I have an office in Palazzo Venezia.”

  “Mussolini’s White House. Perfect. You’ve seen many things.”

  “Too many.”

  “You no doubt have access to sensitive information.”

  “No doubt.”

  “And you’re using it how?” Silvio was finally able to say. “For which cause, which side?”

  “You don’t need to ask that question,” Giovanni replied quietly. “We know your sympathies. I never would have contacted you otherwise.”

  “And this knowledge of me comes from where, exactly?”

  “A long period of surveillance.”

  “Which means the other side knows my sympathies, as well.”

  Giovanni shrugged, appeared to smile. “I would advise you to be careful, that’s all. To work with professionals not amateurs. It’s one thing to help would-be resistance fighters steal a truckload of cigarettes. Something else entirely to be seen helping the actual enemies of the Reich.”

  “But isn’t that what you’re about to ask me to do?”

  “Yes.”

  “And the difference is?”

  “The difference is you’ve been helping amateurs who were playing with dynamite. We package our dynamite better and use it more carefully.”

  “Literal dynamite?”

  Again the partial smile, a shake of the head. A pause, as if Giovanni were deciding how much to reveal. “Money, messages, sometimes weapons. You were vouched for, among others, by someone at the Irish embassy.”

  “Where my blessed father is employed.”

  Giovanni grunted as if he knew. “And someone else I won’t mention.”

  “I have many friends.”

  “I’m sure they want you to remain alive.”

  “Yes, of course,” Silvio said, but the remark had seemed vaguely like a threat. He wasn’t sure now how much he liked this Giovanni, and he suddenly wondered if his dabbling in the partisan movement—tiny favors, really, and the movement itself was in its infancy—had been worth the small sums it had earned him.

  “Still interested?”

  “Most likely, yes,” Silvio said after the smallest hesitation. His own words surprised him, but he could not seem to stop himself. He felt he was being seduced but, for once, not by money. “Tell me how, exactly, I can be of service to Uncle Sam.” Silvio put a hand over his heart and made a solemn face. “I have great feelings for America, great feelings.”

  “Two things,” Giovanni told him. “First”—he paused, looked around—“we need someone to carry a sum of gold from a priest at the Vatican—”

  “Father Hugh O’Neil.”

  “How did you know?”

  Silvio shrugged, smiled. “The famous Irishman. Even the Germans have heard of him.”

  “From the Vatican to the archbishop of Milan.”

  “Federico Maniscalco.”

  “Another friend?”

  “I don’t know him. But I’ve heard—this is perhaps inaccurate—that he has the most impeccably pro-Fascist sympathies.”

  “Utterly inaccurate, as it turns out.”

  “The second favor?”

  “The second favor is simple. Mussolini was deposed. We—”

  “My God! Is this true? When?”

  “Two days ago. We would very much like to know where he’s being held.”

  “Ah, but there’s been no announcement, so that must simply be a rumor. We Italians are, as you know, famous for exaggeration.” They were passing the apartment of one of his former lovers. Silvio glanced up at the concrete balcony. No flowers there now, no sign of her, but the memories were so sweet! He was sure she still kept a photo of him in the drawer of her bedside table.

  “Well, the whole world will know soon enough.”

  “Amazing,” Silvio said. He still didn’t believe the report, but it piqued his interest. “I have two questions for you, then, Giovanni, one for each favor. First, I have a courier in mind, someone whose credentials are beyond doubt, a man who, even under torture, would not reveal his sources. However, he is said—more rumor, perhaps—to be associated with certain men in Sicily, a certain organization there, if you understand my meaning.
An organization that, for business reasons more than anything else, does not welcome the German presence. I’m assuming that would be fine with you?”

  “No good.”

  “But I vouch for this man with—”

  “We want you to carry the money yourself. I’m sure you see why. The fewer people involved, the better.”

  “Possible, but difficult.”

  “Go on.”

  “Expensive.”

  “Not a problem.”

  Silvio stifled a smile. “As for il Duce, if it is, in fact, true that he’s gone—”

  “It’s true.”

  “Then such a man would be difficult to hide for any length of time. I’d be happy to put out the word to my friends. But again, payment would have to be made. A reward, perhaps. An . . . incentive.”

  “Money’s not an object here,” Giovanni said curtly.

  Silvio thought: Words that are the anthem of my soul, but he kept an earnest expression on his face, lips pursed, eyes forward. Politics, he’d long ago learned, was a serious business. Power was involved, not simply money, and the lust for power was much more dangerous than greed. Especially now, especially here, there could be all sorts of complications. “Dangerous,” his contacts had said. Strangely enough, he found the idea appealing.

  A friend passed, going in the opposite direction. They greeted each other with slaps on the shoulder and a promise of a meal together, later, soon, perhaps even that same evening. “What’s fascinating to me,” Silvio said when the friend had passed on and they’d circled back to Via Veneto, “is the way information travels in wartime. There are spies everywhere, secrets in every office, every household, every brain. And the trust that must be established in order for things to work out well, that trust is more delicate, even, than the trust required for a marriage to be nourished, the trust between husband and wife.”