Once Night Falls

by Roland Merullo

  “For the Irish embassy, yes. You remembered.”

  “Well, wouldn’t it make sense that, wherever our Duce was taken, he was taken there by a driver?” She paused, pressed closer. Now he could feel her chest rising and falling. “And drivers speak to drivers, do they not? They have a kind of . . . linkage, no?”

  Silvio smiled up at the dark ceiling and turned to touch her lips with his. “You, my gorgeous friend,” he said, “have, among other fine qualities, a magnificent mind.”

  Thirty-Seven

  From the back of his mother’s house, Luca slipped into the woods and went northward on mostly overgrown paths that traversed the hillside parallel to the lakeshore. Soon he was deep in the trees, so deep that the lake couldn’t be seen. Even so, as was his habit, he went along without making a sound. His father had told him that in America, the native hunters had been exceptionally quiet, needing to kill at close range and able to move silently through the woods so as not to make the animals aware of their presence. In his case, it was German soldiers not animals, and he was the hunted not the hunter. Unlikely as it was, even this far from the town, they might have the occasional patrol, looking for people who’d left their homes—Jews, mainly, but anyone trying to sneak across the border into Switzerland. Or maybe there was a special team out searching for the man who’d stabbed the Fascist not far south of these hills. He had an excuse, yes: the mushroom sack, the missing eye. Still, it was wise not to have one’s papers examined too often. And, if they searched him, the wire cutters and large knife would be difficult to explain.

  It was impossible for him to use these overgrown trails without thinking of his father. And whenever he thought of his father—he imagined his body lying frozen on the Russian front, left there by retreating German troops—it was impossible to contain the frustration he felt at not being given more important assignments. Other men, he imagined, were blowing up bridges and shooting at German planes, freeing Italian prisoners, helping the Allies find their way through the Sicilian hills. All his life, people had underestimated him because he could see out of one eye not two, because he had a strong right arm and a weaker left. According to the word that reached him now from Mentone and his Bolshevik friends, German divisions and machinery were pouring over the Brenner Pass in greater and greater numbers. It made sense, of course. If the rumors of surrender were true, if Italy was, in fact, about to stop fighting the Allies, then Germany’s situation would be perilous. Any fool could understand that if the Allies had bomber bases in Italy, the Fatherland would be easily within reach from two directions—the British in the north and the Americans here. There were other rumors claiming that the Allies were about to make another landing down south, Salerno or Battipaglia or Napoli or Sardinia—the stories varied—which meant that more Italian civilians would lose their lives, and more Americans, Canadians, British, and Australians would be fighting for his homeland. And what was he doing? Slowing down a column of German troops with a rockslide, closing a road for an hour with a felled tree, knocking out a phone line. Killing someone who wasn’t even a German soldier.

  Not enough.

  Lost in thought as he was, it took him an extra second to realize he was hearing voices not far ahead. He cursed his carelessness under his breath. No wonder Mentone wasn’t entrusting him with more complicated jobs.

  He moved off the path, angling uphill. The voices grew louder, definitely German. He could hear branches snapping, words he took to be curses, boots on the path—the furthest thing from the silent Indian hunters. Luca had time to go only about twenty meters. He stopped there, crawled behind a large boulder, and flattened himself on the ground. If they caught him that way, he’d be finished, but this was better than having to explain what he was doing up there with wire cutters in his knapsack. He had to hope these particular Germans were too lazy to move uphill.

  Here they came, though, talking, cursing. He could smell cigarette smoke, hear boots crunching in the stony soil, bodies crashing through the brush. It seemed to him they’d wandered off the path, closer now. The voices were clearer. He caught a few words he knew: verloren—lost—and then a phrase that made his spine go cold: tötete ihn mit einem Messer—killed him with a knife. It wasn’t a random patrol: they were looking for him, or, at least, for the killer in the hills.

  His eyes were closed, his cheek and right ear pressed into damp moss. He didn’t dare look up or turn his head. He wondered if his feet showed at the side of the rock or if he’d left prints in a damp patch of earth. The men—three, he guessed—came even closer. He could hear them gasping now, winded from the climb. He squeezed his eyes tight and tried not to breathe. The Germans were resting just on the other side of the boulder. He smelled more cigarette smoke, could almost taste it in his own mouth. He heard someone pissing in the leaves, then a comment, the word klein. Small. Harsh laughter. The rock was the size of a delivery truck, but all they had to do was step around behind it and they’d find him, and that would be the end. Not only would he be killed, but there would be less food for his mother, less for Rebecca Zinsi. And what would become of Sarah and their child?

  He kept his eyes squeezed tight, kept his breathing shallow, resisted a sudden urge to jump out from behind the rock and try to kill them all. He heard one of the men burp. The others laughed, made comments he didn’t understand. He heard water gurgling in a canteen, the cap being clumsily screwed back on. He smelled the sulfur from a match and then more cigarette smoke. Then someone walking. Then all of them walking, the footsteps and talk and tobacco smoke fading away slowly to the south. He lay there for another quarter of an hour, making sure one of them hadn’t been left behind, and then he stood, wiped the pine needles from his shirt and hair, and started off again. The daylight was disappearing; there would be guards at the border around the clock but, he hoped, no more patrols in these trees after the sun went down. Once night fell, he liked to think, Italy belonged to the Italians. He walked through the dusk and twilight, walked until the darkness grew so thick that he couldn’t see the way, then sat and waited for the moon to rise. Hours it would be. As he waited, he thought of Sarah and Rebecca and his mother. How could the older women move through terrain like this? And if they somehow reached the border, how would he ever get them across?

  Thirty-Eight

  Mussolini had passed several days on La Maddalena—two or three or six; as one blended into the next, he lost count. Nicolina prepared his meals, Vittorio played games of briscola with him at the card table in the living room. Perhaps they actually respected him, or perhaps their polite deference was being paid for by the government he’d once controlled. Forbidden from all news, he was nevertheless allowed to walk around the island, exploring its hidden beaches, both sand and gravel, and nodding at the locals, who knew who he was now but still kept a distance, eyeing him with a mixture of fear and curiosity. Even on these walks, an armed soldier followed him, and the machine-gun emplacement in front of Casa Weber was manned night and day. No chance of escape, then. He didn’t know how long he could bear it. That night, perhaps, or the next, he’d ask Vittorio if there was a chance of getting a pistol. He’d tell the man—not the brightest star in the sky—that he wanted to walk to the back of the island and practice shooting, keep his aim sharp in case the Allies landed on the beach early some morning. He’d hold on to the pistol and, if things became too bleak, if it seemed they were going to do something like turn him over to the Americans in exchange for Italian prisoners of war, then he’d take refuge in the noble deed and end his life.

  In the midst of this musing, he heard a knock on the door. Nicolina, he supposed, asking what he wanted for supper. He sat up on the bed, called “Entra!”

  A young man appeared on the threshold, little more than a boy, really. Fourteen or fifteen, he guessed. The boy seemed tremendously shy, looking up at il Duce from beneath dark eyebrows as if he were in the presence of a god. Glad for the company, Mussolini invited him to pull up the one chair and sit opposite. But something wasn�
�t quite right. The boy was dressed in the rough gray shirt and heavy trousers of island fishermen, but his face was barely tanned, and his hands were soft looking. “Your Excellency,” he said in a quiet voice, “m-may I speak with you for a moment?”

  “Of course, of course. Are you unwell? Is there some problem on the island?”

  “N-no, no problem,” the boy said. He sat uneasily, hands clasping and unclasping between his knees, eyes somewhat dull, as if he were ill or medicated.

  “What, then?”

  “J-just,” the boy said, “just that I-I’m a fisherman, or my father is. I help him sometimes. Like today. He comes over from the mainland with his boat.” The boy floated one arm in the direction of the window and seemed to lose courage.

  “And what happened?”

  “N-nothing happened. It’s my mother; she has dreams. She dreamed you ate a bad mushroom and died, and my father and I have been very upset about it, and he came here today to deliver some fish to this house. He’s visiting now, with someone else, a woman, next door, and . . . and—”

  “Don’t be afraid, young man. I’d never harm you. I had a son like you. Bruno. A sensitive boy. Our third child. He died a hero, fighting for his country. When you’re a little older, you will serve, yes?”

  “Y-yes, Duce. Yes, of course. I . . . I just wanted to make sure you’re careful what you eat. When we found out you were here, in this house . . . We weren’t supposed to know, but the woman—h-his friend—said something to my father, that she had seen you, and he didn’t believe it at first, so he wanted me to come here and tell you, warn you, and to see that it was really you.”

  “It is.”

  “And you’re . . . safe? They’re not taking you away again?”

  “I don’t know. Who knows? I’m bored, that’s all.”

  “I-I’ll bring you, next time, a f-fish,” the boy said. “My father will, a tuna maybe . . . Would you like that?”

  “Of course, yes,” Mussolini said, though he’d eaten almost nothing but fish for the past week.

  At that, the boy stood, too quickly, as if startled or terrified. His hands were twitching madly at his sides. “I have to go now,” he said. “Be careful, Duce; so much depends on you still.”

  He reached out a hand and Mussolini, standing now, took it. The boy would never make a soldier, he thought; the handshake was weak. He put an arm around the boy’s shoulders and squeezed in a fatherly way. The boy flinched. “Thank you for caring about my life,” il Duce said in a grand tone. “Thanks to your mother and father, also. I’ll be careful about the mushrooms.”

  “G-good,” the boy said, and he slipped out the door, leaving it open as he went.

  Mussolini stepped over to the window and, in a moment, heard the front door close below him and saw the boy hurrying down the stone walk, one shoulder lower than the other so that it seemed he might suddenly veer off sideways like a cart with one bad wheel. On he went, down the path, across the road, along a footpath that led toward the harbor. Il Duce studied him, thinking, This is what I’ve been reduced to, counseling troubled youth now, meeting with the sons of drunken fishermen instead of heads of state, generals, and popes. Listening to the dreams of women who are not even my wife.

  He went and lay on his bed, clouds of depression closing in around him. These dark moods were becoming daily visitors. After a long time, he fell into a restless sleep disturbed by shards of dream. Claretta. Rachele. The members of the Fascist Grand Council sitting around a smoky table, arguing about him as if he wasn’t even in the room, Grandi and Badoglio leading them into treachery.

  Thirty-Nine

  For the visit with his father—Lisiella’s idea—Silvio decided he would take the yellow Fiat Cinquecento. The trip to the Irish embassy was risky enough—someone might think he was looking for asylum—so it was better to keep a low profile this time. Better to dress down a bit, too. His father was a plain, gruff man, overly concerned with money and resentful of those who were better off. Before he left the apartment, Silvio folded a hundred-lire note into his pants pocket, thinking he’d make a small gift, help the family, ease the conversation a bit.

  On the drive to Via Giacomo Medici, he wondered why his father had never seemed to approve of him. Unfair, of course. Over the fifteen or so years that he’d lived in Rome, he’d brought three of his brothers, his father and mother, and two sisters to the capital; found work for all of them; found them decent places to live. True, in doing so, he’d enriched his network of contacts, but weren’t his family members better off here than on the pitiful farm outside Troisi? Especially now, with all the fighting in Sicily?

  He’d found his father a position as a driver for the Irish embassy, Villa Spada—not the ambassador’s driver, more like the man they sent to market for supplies or to the airport to pick up low-level visitors. Because of Ireland’s neutrality in the war, theirs was the only Western embassy that remained open after il Duce’s alliance with Hitler. Once his father had established himself there, Silvio took to hanging around Villa Spada, made friends, brought small gifts to the secretaries, even enjoyed a brief affair with one of them. Who knew how such acquaintances might come in handy if the fortunes of war shifted? His sisters—both of them nurses—worked at Bambin Gesù, the famous children’s hospital, so he cultivated contacts there, too, and could sometimes be a source of certain medications for friends and associates who desired to use them without having to obtain a prescription. His brothers were working construction, at far higher wages than they’d been paid in Sicily, and were occasionally the source of extra building materials that were not really needed on the job. Was that wrong? Their lives were made easier, and he, the facciatu, was the source of their comfort.

  But his father—a conservative man in every respect, a man who liked money as much as his son did but had much less of it—did not approve. With him, everything had to be official, sanctioned, legal. Every week he put his small embassy paycheck in the bank and guarded it as if it were a gorgeous mistress.

  At the embassy, after a smile and a wave to the sentry at the gate, Silvio parked the Fiat and climbed the stairs to the main reception area. Assunta was on duty this day. He walked around the side of the desk and planted a kiss on each cheek, told her how lovely she looked, made her blush. The woman wasn’t lovely at all; there was something crooked about her face, the eyes set at slightly different angles, the forehead too high, the mouth unflattering and thin. But so what? That was the face she’d been born with, it wasn’t her fault, and the simple fact of its asymmetry no doubt made life much more difficult for her when it came to finding the pleasures of physical love. She was stranded here with bureaucrats twice her age. How many friendly kisses did she receive on any given day?

  “My father around?”

  Assunta was still blushing. She nodded, pointed. “In the cafeteria.”

  “May God help him, then,” Silvio said, and Assunta laughed and shooed him away.

  He found his father in the workers’ dining room, a plain square hall that smelled of foreign foods Silvio had no intention of sampling. His father was continually complaining about the menu, but his wife—Silvio’s mother—had passed away of poorly treated heart issues a year before, so there was no longer any hope of going home at midday for a delicious pasta puttanesca.

  There his father sat, alone at a table, the ruins of lunch on a plate beside him and a newspaper tilted up before his face. He could read—a rarity for Sicilian farmers of his generation—but only with a painstaking slowness, forming each word with his lips, sounding it out, pondering. He had a great and abiding interest in current events, but it rarely led to conversation, not with his son, at least. Filippo Merino, Silvio often thought, was the person for whom the phrase a man of few words had been invented.

  “Ciao, Babbo,” Silvio said as he approached, putting some extra energy into the greeting, preparing himself for what was to come.

  His father looked up from the paper and made a noise. “Unnh.”

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nbsp; That, Silvio knew, was the best one could hope for.

  “Lunch good?”

  “Eh.”

  “Anything interesting in the news?”

  “Nuh.”

  His father didn’t ask him to sit, so Silvio decided to take a different approach. “Care for a game of bocce?”

  A pause, a reluctant nod. His father folded the newspaper carefully under one arm and walked, more or less at Silvio’s side, along an immaculate corridor. At the end of the corridor, a door opened onto a modest yard enclosed by a three-meter concrete wall, where the workers were allowed to smoke and take their ease. To the Irish bosses’ great credit, they’d installed a bocce court there, little more than a dusty rectangle of earth bounded by low boards on all four sides. They’d invested in a set of ceramic balls, too, nine of them, four with a line around their equator and four unlined, plus a pallino, or little ball. One player tossed the little ball down the court, short or long, depending on strategy, and then they took turns trying to see who could get the larger balls closer. If all four of one player’s balls were closest, that meant eight points. Three balls were six points. One or two balls closest and you were given one or two points, respectively. Most games were played to twenty-one, and victory had to be by a margin of at least two.

  His father was a master player, though utterly conservative even here. Silvio, much more of a risk-taker, could enjoy stretches of greatness and then succumb to moments of epic failure. But he’d always loved the game. In his more optimistic hours, he liked to tell himself that bocce was what he and his father had instead of love.

  They took turns, his father grunting, Silvio calling out to each ball as if it might obey him. In the first round, after all his father’s balls had been rolled or thrown, the old man looked to have three closest to the pallino and was no doubt mentally giving himself six points. But Silvio had one more shot. He held the ball palm down, hefted it for a moment. Then, after swinging his arm like a pendulum three times and letting out three small grunts, he muttered, “Watch out now, Babbo!” and sent it out and up in a long, graceful arc. The ball crashed down between his father’s closest ball and the pallino, sending the small ball careering sideways into the opposite corner, where Silvio’s three other balls had been sulking in defeat.