Once Night Falls

by Roland Merullo

  And so, when he arrived home from the visit with his father and found a note under his door, written in a kind of strange code but apparently requesting another meeting, two days later, at the same café on Via Veneto, he decided to exact a bit of what might be considered revenge.

  Given that he knew where Giovanni worked and that the man had such unusual facial characteristics—the badly bent nose—it wasn’t difficult to find out his real name. Silvio had a number of friends in government, including a Sicilian pal in the transportation office who was engaged to a woman who worked at Palazzo Venezia, Mussolini’s White House—Giovanni’s place of employment. It was easy enough to ask the friend to ask his fiancée to find out the name, and only a little more difficult to persuade the woman to tell him where this “Giovanni”—actual name: Italo Andreottla—lived. At an address just opposite the Pamphili Garden, it turned out, in Rome’s Monteverde Nuovo section.

  It proved easier still to call in another favor and ask another friend, who specialized in such things, had the proper tools, and enjoyed his work, to go over there with him for a few minutes and pick the lock on Andreottla’s second-floor flat.

  So on the eve of their scheduled meeting at the café, Italo Andreottla, perhaps tired from a long day at the office and the stresses of living his secret life, opened his own door only to find an uninvited visitor sitting at his kitchen table with his feet up on a chair and a half-empty bottle of expensive Ligurian wine in front of him. Silvio was sipping the wine and sampling a dish of sliced fresh figs garnished with a wedge of Gorgonzola. He’d brought the wine and figs, borrowed the Gorgonzola from the refrigerator. He allowed himself a moment to take in the look of astonishment on Andreottla’s face, then lifted his glass and said, “Welcome home, my friend!”

  Andreottla stood there, briefcase still in hand, and seemed to be deciding how angry he should be. But then—and this would endear him to Silvio for as long as they were both alive—he smiled, came to the table, poured himself a glass, and sat down.

  “Nice place,” Silvio said. “I’m assuming we can speak freely here?”

  Andreottla nodded with his mouth full. Swallowed, ran his tongue inside his teeth. “The landlady let you in?”

  Silvio shook his head. “Other methods. I have a bit of news, and I came to deliver it in person.”

  “You did well with the Saint Jude.”

  “Thank you. I enjoyed it, and the compensation was fair.”

  “There will be other assignments, if you’re willing.”

  “Perfectly willing,” Silvio said. He let his mind travel to Lisiella for a moment—another trip to Milan would be pleasant—then took his feet down from the chair and, since his mother had raised him to be a polite man, made a show of brushing off the seat. He leaned forward with his elbows on the table and the stem of the wineglass cradled between both hands and delivered his nugget of news. “On the night he was deposed, il Duce was taken from Rome to Latina by car.”

  “How do you know?”

  Silvio shrugged, lifted his eyebrows, allowed himself a tiny grin.

  Andreottla removed his eyeglasses and wiped them clean on his napkin, but Silvio could practically see the gears of his mind turning. “Latina’s on the coast,” the half-American said, as if speaking to himself.

  “Exactly. No reason to go there unless you were heading out to sea. My sources tell me he was put on a small military ship.”

  Andreottla rested his fingertips against his temples, the classic pose of a thinking man. “Good source?” he asked, looking up.

  “Impeccable.”

  “The trip to Latina could have been some kind of feint, a ruse.”

  “Almost no one knew he’d been deposed at that point. No one was looking for him. I doubt they’d waste time on a ruse. I’ve done some research—boats from there usually go to Ponza or La Maddalena.”

  “Ponza’s had air-raid troubles,” Andreottla said.

  “La Maddalena, then. Or someplace else on the coast of Sardinia. Or Corsica, maybe.”

  Andreottla reached across, took a piece of fig between two fingers, and held it that way on the table in front of him. “The Germans are on Corsica. He’s not in German hands, as far as we know.”

  “And we don’t wish him to be, correct?”

  Andreottla looked up and nodded absentmindedly. “I take it you’ve done this kind of work before,” he said, putting his spectacles back in place and the fig into his mouth.

  “I’m Sicilian. We’re born doing this kind of work. Our mother is giving us the nipple, and we’re reaching into the pocket of her dress to see what we might find.”

  Andreottla smiled, swallowed, nodded his approval. There were sounds of sirens in the street, voices, shouting; even in wartime, the symphony of the Italian night went on.

  Silvio let his eyes wander around the apartment again. It was barely half a notch lower on the scale than his own, certainly not the kind of place one could afford on a bureaucrat’s salary. Andreottla was being compensated for his secret work, then, and handsomely. Probably had been for a decade or more, since the Western intelligence operations—aware of a half-American in Palazzo Venezia—had decided Mussolini was something more dangerous than a simple-minded narcissist.

  “And you’re from where?” Silvio asked him. “Besides Chicago?”

  “Napoli.”

  “Ah,” Silvio said, already standing. “No accent left, but I had the sense it was Napoli. The way you carry yourself, the way you dress. Southern pride.”

  Andreottla stood, too, and escorted his visitor to the door. “We have resources on Sardinia; we’ll start asking around. Thank you. Good work.”

  An honest man, Silvio decided as he went down the steps of Andreottla’s building and out into the cool evening. A fellow southerner. Perhaps a future friend.

  But all the way home—a twenty-minute drive through the heart of the city in his yellow Fiat—he kept one eye on the mirror to see if someone might be following him.

  Fifty-Four

  The bald German SS officer sauntered into Maria’s house and strode along the hall directly toward her. He hadn’t shaved that day; the dark stubble seemed to her like a shadow over his soul. “You have wine?” was the first thing he said.

  Maria couldn’t speak. She had an urge to put her arms straight out in front of her and push him away. She shook her head.

  “Grappa?”

  She hurried to a cabinet and took down what was left of the limoncello.

  “Pour,” the tall man said. “Two.”

  She filled two small mismatched glasses and brought one to him. He accepted it and took hold of her left wrist with his free hand. “Drink,” he said.

  She put the glass to her lips and sipped. She was shaking, and ashamed to be shaking. He watched her, waiting, she guessed, to see that she hadn’t been poisoned, then he drank down his limoncello in one gulp.

  “Finish,” he said, pointing to her glass. She drank. He squeezed her wrist too tightly and tugged down hard. She fell to her knees and let out a small scream. There was a sound above the ceiling—Rebecca startled from sleep, perhaps, or driven so crazy by the isolation that she would now open the hatch above and behind the German and call down, “Maria, are you all right?”

  Banging his empty glass down hard on the tabletop and then unlatching the strap of his holster, the German was too preoccupied to hear.

  Fifty-Five

  It was the thirst that bothered Sarah most. That and the need—the two seemed somehow to contradict each other—to empty her bladder. At one point, she left the path and went into the trees to squat. Her legs trembled, but she felt otherwise strong. Thirsty but strong. Prepared, as much as anyone could be, to give birth for the first time. She’d been walking every day, though Luca didn’t know it, up into the hills as far as the spring and back again, five, six, seven times. To keep sane and to keep her muscles from atrophying. It was as if some angel, some spirit, had been telling her to do that, knowing she would make thi
s downhill walk and perhaps a steeper one in the other direction.

  As she expected it would, the trip from the cabin to Maria’s house took two hours or more. She went horizontally across the hillside on the path Luca had used to bring her to the cabin, and then, at the tree that had been split in half by lightning, she stopped. She decided to leave the basket so she’d be sure not to miss this place on the way home. Home, she thought. A strange word for the cabin. She couldn’t imagine sleeping there late into her pregnancy, but she’d face that challenge when the time came.

  Just beyond the split tree, she turned right, went for a while along the wrong trail and then realized her mistake, doubled back, found another path, parallel, steeper, also downhill, and went on slowly and carefully, grateful that Luca had pointed out various landmarks the ordinary person might never notice: a cleft rock shaped like a pair of lungs, with a pool of rainwater in it (she drank but spat it out); a perfectly rectangular patch of moss that looked almost like a coverlet on a bed (she wondered if she and Luca would ever sleep again in a matrimoniale); a small tree with a few wrinkled apples hanging from its branches, still green (she picked one and put it in the pocket of her dress).

  From time to time, she’d stop and run her hand in circles across her belly, calming the child there. Or she’d sit on one of the many large rocks along the path and rest. She could sense the light changing above her—late afternoon now—and she began to doubt she’d be able to get back before dark. If she could at least find her way as far as the mossy patch, she might sleep there and feel relatively safe. “Once night falls,” Luca had told her in an optimistic mood, “Italy belongs to the Italians.” He wouldn’t return to check on her until the following day. And if he brought the forged papers with him—how long would it take them to transfer her photo?—then she’d spend a last night in the cabin with him and go elsewhere—to Como or Menaggio, Gravedona or Milan, anywhere they needed her. Once she began to show—another two months, she guessed—the Germans would probably leave her alone. Probably being the operative word. Even the Devil, she thought, would be reluctant to harm a pregnant woman.

  She heard a crack of thunder overhead and then a low, rolling rumble moving off up the lake. No rain yet, though. Another boom. A few hard drops. Then an eerie stillness.

  She went on—no more raindrops but a few thunderous echoes from the direction of Argegno. At last, Maria’s house came into view, brick chimney, tile roof, stone walls the color of the meat of a roasted chestnut. She liked to think of Luca sleeping there as a boy, lying in bed and feeling his first sexual stirrings, maybe imagining a girlfriend, a woman he’d someday sleep with. Maybe even thinking about his Jewish schoolmate with the long brown braids and nice eyes.

  Beyond the house and far below, she could see a piece of the blue lake. She waited in the trees, hoping Maria might come out into the yard at the end of the afternoon or even that her mother might take a crazy risk and stand in the open doorway and drink in a few breaths of air. Unlikely, she knew, but she thought that, if she could at least catch a glimpse of her, see with her own eyes that she was alive and more or less healthy, that would be enough for now. That would justify the long walk and the risk.

  When the day was beginning to lose its light—the first frail shadows crawling around the foundation of the house like animals looking for a place to sleep—she heard something through Maria’s open kitchen window. One short crack. It sounded like someone banging a coffeepot on a table to loosen the grounds, or a hard, heavy object—a paperweight, a full tin can—falling on a wooden floor. Maria at work, she hoped.

  Trying not to make even the tiniest sound, she crept up to one of the windows and peeked in through the side of the curtains. In the soft light she could see, at first, not Maria or her mother as she expected but a bald man in a German uniform sitting in one of the kitchen chairs, his head thrown back and his eyes closed. She drew in a quick breath, afraid he’d notice her, but something kept her at the window. Sarah stared, began to make sense of the scene, and then, horrified, stepped away from the house and vomited in the dirt. Driven by a gust of panic, trying to erase the moment from her mind, she turned and hurried back into the trees.

  Fifty-Six

  Don Claudio pulled open the heavy wooden door and stepped gratefully across the threshold of his church. In the old days, the days before war, once he’d taken the train and then the bus back from Milan, he’d usually have offers of a ride from the center of Mezzegra up the hill to Sant’Abbondio. Sometimes total strangers, seeing his priest’s robes or the black trousers and shirt he was wearing today, would go out of their way to bring him to the rectory. But civilian vehicles were scarce on the roads these days, and strangers kept to themselves. Once he’d left Masso’s, he’d seen and been greeted by half a dozen neighbors, but none of them had a horse or even a donkey, never mind a car with gas in the tank. And there were storm clouds in the southwestern sky, the sound of thunder there, a few drops of cooling rain on his forehead and hands.

  He glanced at his watch. It had taken him the better part of an hour to reach the door of the church, one foot after the next, up, up, and up. He’d lost count of how many times he’d stopped to catch his breath, how many times he’d promised himself to lose weight. But now daylight was fading behind an advancing army of thunderclouds, and he was hungry again—what a curse it was to have an appetite! Still, he was a thousand times more concerned about what he’d find in the closet where his robes were kept than what he’d eat for supper. Three rifles and a pistol! Loaded! What was he supposed to do with them? And who had managed to sneak into the church carrying such dangerous cargo? Not Luca, certainly—he could never haul such an awkward burden through the woods. And why had he himself gotten into this work?

  The last question was easy enough to answer. His calling was to minister to his flock. And that flock, shrunken now almost to nothing, was suffocating under the weight of evil. What was the devout Catholic to do, even the cowardly devout Catholic? Stand by and whisper prayers?

  He sighed, lit a candle, and was on his way back to the changing room to make the unwelcome inspection when he caught sight of a man sitting at the end of one of the pews, near the confessional. The priest let out a small startled sound, a gulp of surprise. The man was bareheaded, bald, and Don Claudio could see the distinctive collar of his German army uniform. An SS officer, it seemed. Long neck, prominent ears. He felt his palms start to sweat.

  “Buongiorno!” the man called in badly accented Italian. “Buongiorno, Padre. I came to get confessed!”

  Badly as he wanted to, worried as he was about the guns, Don Claudio knew that, if his visitor had been baptized Catholic, his own vows didn’t allow him the luxury of refusal. He walked down the side aisle until he was even with the pew. The German was sitting there with his knees apart, slouched down as if he’d been napping. He hadn’t shaved—highly unusual for them—and was smiling with his teeth bared, his lips stretched sideways not upward. His hands were loosely clasped on one thigh, and for a moment, Don Claudio thought the man had actually been praying.

  “My sins weight on me,” he said in his bad Italian. “Confess me.”

  “You’re Catholic?”

  “I was baptized in the glorious Roman church!”

  “I have to get my stole.”

  He could see that the SS officer didn’t understand the word. He was squinting, still smiling, perhaps drunk. Don Claudio made a gesture as if wrapping something over the back of his neck. “I have to get my stole . . . purple . . . so it’s a true confession.”

  “For me,” the man said, “you don’t need it.” He was on his feet in one motion, a head taller, twenty years younger, turning the priest by his shoulder and pushing him toward the confessional. Certainly drunk. It seemed useless to resist, so Don Claudio went and sat there, behind the curtain, and waited for the soldier to arrange himself on his knees on the far side of the screen. Technically, without the stole, the confession and absolution wouldn’t be sanctioned,
but he had the sense that such a detail would matter little to the Lord. He found that his legs were trembling . . . from the climb, he told himself. The hunger gnawed at him. He wondered if the guns had been hidden or if they were sitting there in plain view. He reached down into his pocket and touched the statuette with two fingers.

  “Father,” the German began. “I am guilty of so many things.”

  Now, strangely, the man’s Italian had improved. Was grammatically correct, at least, and with less of an accent. “Sono colpevole di tante cose.” So it had been an act, his bad speech. Don Claudio tried to get his breathing under control.

  “Ma, devo incominciare con la più recente, si?” But I must begin with the most recent, yes?

  “As you wish, my son. How long has it been since your last confession?”

  The officer laughed cruelly. “One loses track,” he said.

  “Before . . . the war?”

  “Long before.”

  “Before your military service.”

  “Yes, of course. I have another god now.”

  The force with which the officer spoke these words seemed to propel them through the screen like stone and dust from an explosion. Shrapnel from a bomb of heresy exploding there beside him. The percussion sent the priest into silence. He rubbed the outsides of his thighs with both hands.

  “A very clear god. With very clear ideas. Easy to follow: no Jews, no weakness.”

  Don Claudio still couldn’t speak. The German must have been leaning forward: alcohol on his breath. Limoncello.