Once Night Falls

by Roland Merullo

  Masso was watching him closely now, the fake foolishness completely gone, a chill in the room. “Santa Eligia is on your route, that’s all. I thought you might have seen or heard something.”

  “How did you know about it? How do you know for sure he was a Fascist?”

  “A friend found the body. Dragged it off the path. Hid it as best he could. He said there was a Party ID in the man’s pants. And nearby was a knife like the knives they carry.”

  At that, as if a curtain had been pulled to one side, revealing a complex mural that had been there all along, Luca suddenly understood. “You had someone following me. In Milan. There was someone else, behind me and behind the Fascist. I heard the dog bark, I . . .”

  Masso was silent.

  “The whole time I was at Loreto, two people were watching me, not one.”

  “È vero,” Masso admitted. That’s true.

  “Why?”

  “Because if you were working for the other side, I needed to know. If you weren’t, I wanted someone to watch out for you.”

  “That you’d think I would work for the Germans, that you’d think I needed watching out for . . . Two insults.”

  “I’m sorry,” Masso said, but Luca detected no regret in his voice, no real apology at all. His anger was short lived: he’d been harboring the same doubts about Masso, after all. “I have my reasons,” Masso said. And then, after hesitating one beat, “One of the three men you’re going to see tonight is a spy, an informer. He won’t live until your next trip north.”

  “Mentone?”

  Masso shook his head. “Scutarro.”

  “That’s a joke, isn’t it?”

  “Last thing from a joke. The very last thing.”

  “Then you want me to kill him?”

  “That job is for someone else. Prinzano knows. You can give Scutarro Sarah’s passport, play along. Prinzano will take care of him and get the papers changed for you, too.”

  “Does Mentone know?”

  “Mentone’s a minor player.”

  “Mentone’s a minor player? But Mentone has been giving me jobs for months now. He acts like the boss, he—”

  “Relaying orders, not giving them.”

  “Then who are the major players?” Luca couldn’t keep himself from asking. But by the time the last word was out of his mouth, he had his answer. “You are, aren’t you? You and the archbishop.”

  Masso didn’t smile or change expression. “I’m an old farmer, Luca. You’re my helper, an innocent mushroom gatherer who makes a little extra money driving my cart to market every two weeks because gas is so expensive and because I’m too old to wrestle with Culillo.”

  “And what then? What happens? What do I do? Who do I listen to?”

  “You play your role. For now, listen to Mentone and say you’ll follow his orders.”

  “And then?”

  “And then we’ll have other work for you, bigger things. You should be giving orders now, not Mentone. In fact, if something happens to me, I want you to take over.”

  “What?”

  “That’s to be discussed another time. For now, finish your coffee and go. It’s a long way. Four bushel baskets. Peppers. Apricots already. Apples. Fennel and zucchini, too. I doubt you’ll get the new papers for Sarah on this trip, but if you do, keep them underneath the boards where you sit. In fact, put the passport there now, rather than keeping it on your person. You’ll see how. I used to keep my money there when I slept at the inn. I made a secret place, a little wooden drawer. You’ll see it. Go now. The trip will take longer with all the Germans on the road. Eat whatever you want of the food, and take some for Sarah, for your mother. I have all the money I need. God be with you.”

  Luca sat there, a dozen questions circling in his thoughts. But then Masso was standing, and so he stood, too; thanked him for the food; and shook his hand before he went out the door.

  He walked across the dusty yard and toward the stubborn donkey. Masso’s words—“Most valuable man,” “You should be giving orders now,” and “If something happens to me, I want you to take over”—spun up swirls of dust in his thoughts. They were either tricks, horrible tricks, or the exact kinds of things he’d been hoping to hear for months. He wondered if killing the Fascist had been some kind of test. He’d passed, apparently, and now he’d be promoted . . . Unless Masso was the traitor and not Scutarro, in which case his meeting that night north of Dubino would be nothing more than an appointment with death.

  Forty-Two

  In his regular weekly meeting with General Kurt Student—the terrifying paratroop commander who had implemented Göring’s order for the reprisal killings of hundreds of civilians after the invasion of Crete, and who kept an office next to the torture cells so he could listen in before going to bed—Skorzeny was obliged to give a report admitting that there was not yet any solid information on the whereabouts of il Duce. They had some of the best intelligence officers in the entire German armed forces on the job, he said, hundreds of sources in central Italy; Selenzen was raking his fingers through the mold, but so far, nothing beyond the fact that Mussolini had been put into a car late at night and taken south from the carabinieri barracks in Rome. “After that point,” Skorzeny told his general, “the trail seems to have gone absolutely cold.”

  When he was finished, Skorzeny waited, uneasy in the general’s company. Student was a good-looking man, but something about his middle-aged face—a slight downward slant at the outside of the eyes and edges of the lips, a bubbling pot of acid behind the pupils—hissed torturer, torturer, torturer—and Skorzeny found the echoes difficult to ignore. General Student had sat through the brief report with his lips pressed up beneath the bottom of his nose and an expression of the deepest dissatisfaction on his face. There was no noise from the room next door, but a terrible smell seeped into the office from that direction. General Student seemed not to notice. He was staring at the wall, not blinking.

  “Captain, listen to me,” the general said at last, shifting his eyes to Skorzeny and moving them back and forth over his scar. “The Italians who are running this country now, Badoglio and the Little King, are—we strongly suspect—in secret discussions with the Allied high command. Surrender—or, as they are wont to call it, ‘armistice’—is the likely outcome. Within weeks. Possibly within days. What do you think will happen then?”

  “I’m a soldier, Herr General, not a politician, not a strategist.”

  “Then let me educate you. What will happen is that the Italians will side with the Allies. A few thousand soldiers, worthless though they might be, will remain loyal to us. All the others will turn. We’ll find ourselves in the midst of a civil war, with the people who know the roads, towns, and mountains better than anyone, fighting for the enemy. The civilians will resist us even more than they already have. The only person who can keep this country together, and on our side, is this clown Mussolini. Their duce . . . What does the word mean anyway?”

  “Leader.”

  “Their leader, their duce. If he’s dead, fine, he’s dead. A disaster. But if he’s alive, and I suspect he is, then we have to find him as quickly as possible and bring him to the Führer.”

  “And then?” Skorzeny risked asking.

  General Student fixed him with a merciless glare. “And then the Führer will decide what to do!”

  The general pushed his chair back with a loud scraping noise, lifted his lanky body to a standing position in one lithe movement, and stormed out of the meeting room without another word, leaving the door open behind him. Skorzeny sat there for a time, staring at the map on the opposite wall, forcing himself not to flee the terrible smell. He ran his eyes over the Italian peninsula from bottom to top, trying to imagine where they would hide a man who’d become the most wanted figure in the war. His gaze moved to the island of Crete, and he wondered if the things that had been said about General Student’s actions there could actually be true. Elderly men, pregnant women, small children—ordered killed without the s
lightest sign of unease, the slightest hesitation. The rattle of machine guns. The screams and fountains of blood. Slaughter in the street. The general, they said, had watched all of it, arms crossed over his chest, lips twisted into a thin smile.

  After a time, Skorzeny stood and went out into the hall and up three flights of stairs. He was walking back toward his office, not in the best of moods, when he saw Selenzen coming the other way. Even before Selenzen looked up and saw him, Skorzeny could sense he had new information. It was written on his fat cheeks.

  They saluted each other in the hallway, and Skorzeny immediately escorted the shorter man into his office. He did not even bother to sit down. “What do you have?”

  Selenzen smiled; Skorzeny resisted the urge to slap him.

  “Herr Captain,” Selenzen said, “after a great deal of effort, after maximizing the use of my many sources, I have found him.”

  “You personally?”

  Selenzen stifled an uppity little grin. “One of my . . . contacts. In fact, this contact—”

  “Reliable?”

  “I believe so. Absolutely. Yes. This contact, in fact, stood directly in front of Mussolini and spoke to him for several minutes.”

  “Where?”

  “La Maddalena Island, close to the northern coast of Sardinia. A stone and concrete house called Casa Weber.”

  “You’re sure?”

  “Mostly sure, yes.”

  “Guarded?”

  “Rather heavily.”

  “Thank you. Dismissed.”

  Skorzeny went over to the map table, seething, his eyes on Sardinia, his mind already formulating a plan. “Mostly sure,” the brilliant Selenzen had said. “Mostly.”

  And based on this mostly, he was supposed to put at risk the lives of a hundred of his best men.

  Forty-Three

  From the window of his sparsely furnished room, Mussolini looked out on the La Maddalena morning. Cloud cover, but he could see the first patches of blue sky, and he felt the day would be calm and warm. The promise of fine weather gave him little comfort. He couldn’t remember the last time he’d felt lonely. He didn’t like the feeling, didn’t even like the word, which seemed to him to imply weakness.

  Nicolina knocked on the door. When he called her in, she greeted him pleasantly, then set down a tray on the small table near the window. A bunch of green grapes, a glass of milk, half a loaf of bread. “It’s a shame about your digestion, Duce. We could cook you something more suitable.”

  “It’s nothing,” he said bravely.

  She nodded, offered a timid smile. He noticed the gold cross around her neck and stopped her as she was about to leave. “Sit and talk with me,” he said.

  “But I’ll interrupt your breakfast.”

  “Sit.” He almost used the word please but caught himself.

  With the meager meal between them, Nicolina sat on the edge of the chair opposite, leaning slightly forward, anxious, as if she were ready to jump up and run.

  “Tell me,” il Duce said, watching her, “why do you wear that cross?”

  The woman reached up and twirled the gold crucifix between her second and third fingers. “Why, Excellency, does it bother you?”

  He shook his head. “I just ask why you wear it. What does it mean to you?”

  “It means the sacrifice of Jesus Christ. For us. For our sins.”

  “Ah. And you really believe he existed, that what happened to him, what is said to have happened, is actually true.”

  “Of course, Excellency!” she said in a surprised voice. “It says so in the Bible!”

  “But you never consider that someone may have tampered with the facts of the story, exaggerated. For the purposes of . . . propaganda?”

  The woman peered at him, then made the sign of the cross. “Duce! How can you say such a thing?”

  “I don’t know,” he said helplessly. He looked away, blood pressing up against the skin of his cheeks. “I don’t know what I believe anymore.”

  She reached out a hand as if to touch him but didn’t dare. “This is because of your suffering,” she said. “Because you’ve been confined. You must get out and walk more. You must try, if you can, to have some pasta. Let me cook you some for dinner.”

  “Yes, thank you, of course,” he said, but even in his own ears, his voice sounded weak, glum, grim, the voice of a captive.

  Nicolina stood, keeping her eyes on him. She was worried now, he thought. Worried that he had become a prisoner, not just of Badoglio and the new government but of the Devil as well.

  “You must keep the faith, Excellency,” she said. “All shall be well in the end.”

  “Yes, thank you. I will. Yes.”

  “May I go now? I have duties—”

  “Yes, go. Good. Good day to you.”

  “Thank you. Please call if there’s anything we can bring you between now and lunch.”

  A revolver, Mussolini thought, but he pushed his lips together in a confident pretense and nodded to Nicolina as she left. Tomorrow he’d ask Vittorio for the revolver. Thinking about it, imagining the act, and going over the words he’d just spoken, he felt wrapped in a cloak of shame. He was becoming weak, physically and mentally. What would Hitler think of him?

  When he finished his meal, he picked up the copy of the Bible in his room, paged through it absently for a time, then set it back down. At the window, looking out at the weather-carved stone formations, gray as depression, and the flat blue water, he said aloud, “He died for our sins.” And then a second time, “He died for our sins.”

  Perhaps, one day soon, people would say that of him.

  Moored just offshore, in the harbor below Casa Weber, he could see a Red Cross pontoon plane. It had been there for two days now, and he wondered what it might be used for—evacuation of the wounded? Here, where there was no fighting and probably never would be?

  He went back and sat on his bed, feeling the bleak mood choking him. He shook his head violently, stood up, sat down again. He thought of doing his exercises—push-ups, sit-ups, deep knee bends; he should try to stay in shape—but the motivation was as feeble as a child’s whisper. He passed the day in near paralysis, barely touching the pasta Nicolina prepared for him, barely moving. When the sun finally set, he took off his clothes and lay on his back beneath a sheet, eyes open, thoughts whirling in the gloom, until a shallow sleep finally took him.

  He was awakened before dawn by a knock on the door—he ignored it. The knock sounded again; he ignored it a second time. Finally, a third knock, followed by a voice, a male voice. “Duce?”

  Bleary-eyed, dreading the day, he mumbled, “Come in, Vittorio.”

  Into the room stepped a man in uniform, a colonel, unfamiliar. It was becoming a pattern—early-morning visits by military men. He was tired of it. The colonel gave the Roman salute and stood at attention. “Duce,” he said, “your whereabouts have been discovered. It’s no longer safe here. We are required to move you again.”

  “I don’t want to be moved. Let them find me, whoever they are.”

  “I’m sorry, Duce. I am Colonel Anzellini. I have my orders. We must move you today, now. Please cooperate.”

  No longer safe. What did that mean exactly? He wanted to ask the soldier. But he knew it would be useless. He was given fifteen minutes to get dressed, and he wondered, lacing up his shoes, if there was any chance the strange boy who claimed to be a fisherman’s son had actually been some kind of spy, an Allied plant. Or someone recruited to report to Germans on the mainland, to confirm the fact that Mussolini was, in fact, on La Maddalena. Maybe that was the so-called “danger”: Hitler had discovered where he was.

  Forty-Four

  Luca arrived in Dubino not long before the sun dropped behind the western hills. It wasn’t exactly the typical market hour—in fact, most of the stalls were empty. All that remained of the day’s activity were a few farmers packing up their boxes, a few stems and leaves in the gutter, and two smashed, rotten plums on the cobblestones. Nothin
g edible could be seen. The stubborn old donkey and the military traffic had made him late, very late in fact, but he was here now. He suspected there would still be people looking for food—hunger knew no clock—so he simply pulled the cart up in front of the row of stalls, tied the reins to a post there, and waited for customers. He didn’t have to wait long.

  Among those who came to peruse Masso’s offerings were the usual array of kerchiefed women, their faces painted in various shades of pain. Luca recognized these expressions from seeing them on his own mother’s face. A husband on the Russian front. A son or sons in Albania or Greece. Or buried not far away. There were those, of course, women and men both, who consoled themselves with the notion that Italy was fighting a great war of liberation, that Mussolini had been sent from God to bring order and prosperity to the bel paese. But his own mother had never been one of those. Luca didn’t see a lot of triumphant patriotism on the faces of these women, either.

  A few children stopped by as well, sent from home, clutching lire notes or ration cards in their small hands and staring up at his chalky eye with innocent faces. He charged them half price, always.

  The rest of his clients included a young priest, a carabinieri officer, and one German soldier, bespectacled and quiet, who actually paid for his three apricots and actually said thank you—a miracle.

  And then, at last, when Luca had sold the best of his produce, along came a very old woman walking with a cane and wearing a blue shawl on the warm evening. She paid with coins—one bunch of fennel was the purchase—and said not a word to him. It was the blue shawl that mattered. A signal: the barn meeting was still safe. He could tie up the donkey in the usual place; make his way into the hills in darkness, going by moonlight, taking a crooked route; do his business; and return in time to sleep at the inn, then steer the donkey and cart back to Mezzegra in the morning. Just the sight of her made an acrid sweat form in his armpits. One: he did not have the money the trio was expecting. Two: if Scutarro was, in fact, a spy, he might be bringing along SS friends or Fascist police who would arrest him. Three: if Scutarro wasn’t a spy, if Masso was playing a trick, if the old man was actually working for the other side and bitter about the killed Fascist, then he would never see Sarah again.