Once Night Falls

by Roland Merullo

Just as the ninth bell sounded, Don Claudio opened the door and pulled the string that dangled from the bare ceiling bulb. With great trepidation, he approached the closet and took hold of the small round wooden handles of the accordion doors. The hinges squeaked their complaint. At first, he saw nothing more than six long vestments hanging from the pole, two of them white and gold for Mass, the rest black. “Rifles and a pistol,” the archbishop had told him, loaded guns. But Don Claudio saw nothing like that. He stood gazing at the robes, running his eyes from collar to hem, looking for anything unusual. If someone had, in fact, put guns in this closet, they’d done a clever job, because nothing could be seen, nothing. It occurred to him that maybe there was nothing to see, that the archbishop had gotten poor information or that the courier had been intercepted en route and killed. Or perhaps tortured until he revealed his destination. In which case, the Gestapo would be here momentarily.

  But when the priest reached forward to examine the material more closely, he felt something hard beneath the fabric of the third robe from the left. He opened the robe at the chest and saw three automatic rifles hanging from a wooden coat hanger by their straps, neat as neckties. He couldn’t bring himself to touch them. On closer inspection, he saw that one of the pockets of one of the black robes was sagging. The pocket faced the back of the closet, but even so, he could tell something was weighing it down. He reached out gingerly and tapped the cloth with two fingers. He hadn’t held a gun since boyhood, when his uncle Patricio, a policeman, had sometimes let him shoot his service pistol in the back yard of the house in Benevento on Sunday afternoons. He’d enjoyed the feeling of power, and his uncle had taught him the safest way to handle and shoot the weapon. Cast back into the distant pleasures of his youth, curious beyond restraint, Don Claudio reached into the pocket, took the pistol in his hand, and turned it this way and that, admiring the way the metal stock gleamed in the artificial light. He was tempted, suddenly, to fire it. Foolish notions like that came into his head from time to time. On occasion, in the middle of Mass, he had an urge to simply lift the chalice and drink from it in big greedy gulps, or to burst into song, or to say he wanted a rest and walk off the altar in front of his astonished flock. Small temptations of the Devil, that’s all they were. But this time, he held the handle of the pistol in his right hand and the barrel in the fingers of his left and slipped off the safety with his thumb, just the way his uncle had shown him so many years before.

  At that moment, as if Uncle Patricio might be stepping out of the world of death and coming to pay him a visit, or as if the Gestapo had, in fact, come to arrest him, Don Claudio heard two loud footfalls. The door was pushed open wider. He looked up in terror and saw the tall German wobbling in the doorway, staring at the pistol in his confessor’s hand.

  Sixty-One

  The confidence Skorzeny had enjoyed, standing soaking wet at the top of the rock formation in Sardinia, did not disappear, but at moments, it wavered. After the crash of his reconnaissance plane, exactly twenty hours before he was to give the order to land a commando unit on La Maddalena, he’d had a visit from Selenzen and received word—again, via the obersturmführer’s supposedly unimpeachable source—that Mussolini had been hastily moved. “Destination unknown at this time,” Selenzen reported with one of his oily smiles. And then, after a pregnant pause, “However, we do know that he was flown away in a seaplane”—another pause—“which indicates a water landing.”

  “Helpful,” Skorzeny told him, soaking the word in sarcasm.

  Selenzen seemed tone deaf. He sat in his usual posture in the Frascati headquarters, breathing through his nose, slumped there like a lazy farmer who’d finished sowing his crops and believed he had nothing better to do now than wait for them to sprout and bear fruit. Skorzeny dismissed him, too weary of the man to shout or criticize or push any harder.

  He had his own sources, and the minute Selenzen left his office, he began cultivating them with renewed urgency. Phone calls. Lunches. Meetings for coffee with Italian intelligence officers, political figures, and Fascist Party luminaries who seemed to have an endless appetite for sugary espresso and no useful information whatsoever. Included among the intelligence cadre was one Italo Andreottla, who worked at Palazzo Venezia and who, for some reason, spoke decent English. Skorzeny had high hopes for him. He thought, perhaps, that, given his position, Andreottla might have his finger on the pulse of the king and his inner circle, might have heard or read something that gave a hint of the Allies’ intentions vis-à-vis il Duce. But no, nothing. A pinch of his crooked nose, a Neapolitan shrug, a genial profession of ignorance. The Palazzo Venezia crowd, Andreottla claimed, was as far in the dark as the rest of Italy.

  Still, Skorzeny found it almost impossible to believe that anyone, even the devious Italians, could hide one of the most recognizable human beings on the planet for more than another few days. Somewhere a leak would appear in the system. Someone would boast about having been part of the operation—there had to have been dozens of men involved. His job was to be in position to hear those whispers when they were spoken. There was no need for discretion at this point: everyone he met with knew that the Führer was desperately looking for Mussolini.

  Skorzeny had been trained to be methodical, a kind of scientist of the military world, so, over the next few days, on a pad of paper in his office, he wrote down every piece of gossip, every rumor, every tidbit of information that reached him. Little by little, with a crooked inconsistency that nearly drove him mad, these pebbles began to lead in a certain direction. A talkative Italian colonel let him know, as an aside, that the army was having trouble finding a new place for their trainees, who’d been moved from an isolated mountaintop hotel in the Abruzzo. Aerial reconnaissance reported a strengthening of Italian troops in the L’Aquila valley—near that same mountain. One of his men, known for spending too much time in the bars looking for women, had heard something about the same place—Campo Imperatore, it was called. An evacuation there, all the regulars moved out. Maybe it was being turned into a hospital, a nurse friend had told him.

  Maybe, Skorzeny mused. Or maybe not.

  At one of their daily meetings, General Student had told him about a German army doctor who was looking for a building where he could send wounded soldiers who might recover and rejoin the battle. It was clear by then that the conflict would be moving up the peninsula: Sicily was gone; a week earlier, there had been another Allied landing at Salerno on the southwestern coast; the bombing raids were becoming more troublesome. So, on a hunch, Skorzeny sent the doctor to Campo Imperatore on a fact-finding mission. To the Italians, it would seem innocent enough: Was the hotel a place where German soldiers might be rehabilitated when and if the front moved north?

  True, the good doctor didn’t realize it was a ruse. And true, there would be some danger to him if the Italians suspected the real motive. But Skorzeny felt no guilt in using him. This was war; everyone had to sacrifice.

  Still, he was relieved when the man returned earlier than expected, alive and unhurt. And even more relieved when he heard what the doctor had to say. He came into the office, saluted, and made his report. “Herr Captain, I couldn’t even get close to the hotel. There’s no road, and the ski lift is heavily guarded from below. There are rumors it’s a prisoner-of-war camp, high-level Allied officers there, taken in the battle for Sicily; you can’t get anywhere near the place.”

  Before the doctor had even finished closing the door behind him, Skorzeny had his hand on the telephone. He told the Luftwaffe commander at Pratica di Mare that he wanted aerial reconnaissance of Campo Imperatore, and from an altitude that wouldn’t bring suspicion. He hung up the phone, pondered a minute, then called back. “I want to go myself,” he said. “Lieutenant Radl and I. Get us a recon plane for early tomorrow morning if the weather’s clear. And tell no one about the destination. For now, not even the pilot. No one.”

  Sixty-Two

  Don Claudio would never decide whether it was God or the Devil who took hold o
f him at that moment. Usually he was an indecisive man, prone to act only after long deliberation. But when he looked up and saw the German officer, and when he understood that the man must have returned for further counseling or to argue with him, and realized, in that same instant, that the officer could clearly see the pistol he held in his hand, Don Claudio simply aimed and pulled the trigger as if he’d been planning to do it all along. As if, after hearing what had been done to Maria, he’d laid a trap, the German had stumbled into it, and the trap was now sprung.

  One shot was all he could manage. But one shot turned out to be enough. The bullet hit the German in his throat. He stumbled backward, a river of blood spouting from his neck. He had his hand there, blood between his fingers, blood streaming in two rivulets down the inside of his gray sleeve. He fell back against the wall beside the doorframe and slid straight down to the floor, his eyes fixed on the priest, his mouth producing the most hideous choking sounds. He took three short, horrible breaths, exhaling a fountain of bright-red sprays. He seemed to be trying to speak, to be repeating a German word, or a name. Don Claudio watched him in a state of shock. Without realizing he’d let it go, he heard the pistol drop from his hand and strike the marble tile floor. His eyes were locked on the German’s eyes, going glassy now. The man’s legs began to twitch violently, the backs of his heels tapping out a death rhythm. This went on for perhaps fifteen seconds—it seemed an eternity—and then the man went still, the bloody hand against the floor, the eyes open, the lips frozen in what might have been a grimace.

  For perhaps a full minute, Don Claudio stood there, a wooden man. And then, as if he were accustomed to such things, as if he’d made a career of dealing with corpses instead of raising the sanctified host, his hands took on a life of their own. He grabbed one of the black robes in the closet and, moving like an automaton, went over and wiped up as much blood as he could. The floor was smeared with it. It had spurted onto the wall in odd spiral designs and onto the small oriental carpet that had been given to him upon his ordination by a rich aunt in Avellino. He took hold of the German’s ankles and pulled him onto the carpet, then wrapped it and the blood-soaked robe around him. Grunting and breathing heavily, Don Claudio pulled the body out of the cloakroom and slowly along the hallway that led to his living quarters, looking to see if any trail of blood had been left. Yes, a thin trail. He kept going, walking backward, step by terrible step, dragging the rolled carpet with the dead body inside. At last, he reached the kitchen and stopped there, let go. It was dark outside the windows. But what was he going to do, dig a grave in the back garden and drop the officer down? Impossible. Soon enough, the man’s colleagues would come looking for him and see the blood, or the fresh grave, and all would be ended. They’d torture him; he’d talk. The entire operation, his part of it at least, was in jeopardy. He decided he’d have to get messages to the archbishop and to Luca, yes, immediately, but how? Luca was in the hills, the archbishop’s phone likely listened to by spies. His breath was coming in quick gulps, and his mind was a landscape ravaged by a hurricane of terror, thoughts whipping frantically back and forth like the branches of tormented trees.

  He washed his hands, then grabbed the mop, wet it in the sink, and walked it along the route he’d just traversed, cleaning the trail of smeared evidence as he went. The marble tiles were black with irregular bands of white, and now there was a pinkish tint to the wet film covering them. It would never work. Too much blood. He stood staring at the floor for a moment, then set the mop handle against the end of a pew, went to the telephone in the kitchen, and dialed Masso’s number. It rang and rang without being answered. Don Claudio set the phone quietly in place, walked like a hypnotized man to the altar rail, knelt, and began to pray.

  Without a miracle, there was no hope now, none. He’d pray for as long as he could, then mop up the rest of the blood—more to sanctify the church than to protect himself—and wait for the Germans and his punishment.

  Sixty-Three

  Once the German officer had gone through the side door of Sant’Abbondio, Sarah waited a few minutes to make certain he didn’t reappear and then, keeping inside the tree line, headed for Maria’s house. A mountain wind had started to blow, producing eerie whistles in the higher branches and stirring the leaves around her. She heard a Klaxon, then another, rising up from the statale, and she wondered where Luca might be. Somewhere on that road, she hoped, on his way back to her, carrying the new papers. In their early months of dating, he’d taken her on a number of hikes in the beautiful hills on both sides of the lake, the “silent, perfect hills” he called them. They’d even borrowed a friend’s car and driven up to St. Moritz one summer day, on a winding road that took them through territory so elevated they’d seen snow on their way back home—flakes in the air in July! They’d gotten out of the car and kissed in a chilly field. She’d written a poem about it.

  She understood why he felt the way he did about the high territory and about the forest. There was a purity to those places, no one there to mock what he called his “deformities.” But she’d never really been able to understand his godlessness. Jewish, Catholic, that didn’t matter; it just seemed to her that some humility was called for in this life, some kind of bowing down before the majesty of creation. They’d talked about it a few times, never argued. He never criticized her for saying a Sabbath prayer or two. It seemed strange, though, that he was so close to Don Claudio and, from what he’d said, that his father and mother were devout, and yet he himself had no religious feeling. Was he angry with the Lord for not making him whole? Walking along, she wondered if it might be possible to bring up their child—children, she hoped—with some new idea of God, something both of them could agree on. God as a mountain spirit, a silent presence in the trees or over the surface of the lake. God as kindness, to compensate for the brutality they were living through now. She wondered if she would ever be skilled enough to express such a hope in stanzas on a page.

  The closer she came to Maria’s house—she guessed she was still at least five hundred meters away—the more difficult it became to imagine this God of Kindness. The scene she’d witnessed hours earlier through the window of that house had etched itself into her memory, and her own panic left her with the sour taste of guilt. She could imagine, easily, what had led up to that moment and what kind of raw wound it would leave. Somehow, combining sex with violence felt like an especially heinous crime. It meant taking the most tender and beautiful aspect of life, the warmest intimacy, and turning it inside out, drenching beauty with a putrid ugliness. She couldn’t be sure, but she thought the man she’d seen entering Sant’Abbondio just now was the same one who’d been in Maria’s kitchen, and, if so, she wondered if he might be going to the priest to ask forgiveness, the way Catholics did. How bizarre that would be! She couldn’t imagine what Don Claudio would say to him.

  A sudden tiredness swept over her. Not just physical tiredness from the pregnancy and the long day of walking, but a tiredness that came from being a good person surrounded by evil. The memory of what she’d seen through Maria’s curtains had drained away part of her spiritual strength. She asked herself, suddenly, if it was better to try to run away than to fight. Fighting would only bring out the evil inside all of them, the anger, the hatred. Maybe, after all, it was better to flee.

  She sat down to rest on a moss-covered rock and held her chin in her hands, wondering if she was going to spend the night sleeping in the woods, wondering if it would somehow harm the baby. She decided to lie back and rest for a while, gather her strength, gather her thoughts. Maria and her mother would be in the house when she arrived. Where else could they be?

  Sixty-Four

  Silvio Merino lay in his antique four-poster bed, eyes open, mostly awake, flexing and relaxing his toes. He’d stayed out too late the night before and drunk too much wine, but it had been a birthday celebration for one of his closest friends, and birthdays deserved to be marked, he believed, even in a time of war.

  Otherwise e
njoyable, the night had been tarnished early on by the presence of a table of German soldiers. Loud, obnoxious, spilling their supposed superiority over every surface. Having invaded Silvio’s favorite restaurant on Via Sicilia as if they were conquering yet another European country, the Nazi bastards showed no appreciation whatsoever for the traditions of the place, for decent conduct, for the people who’d been there long before their arrival. But who was going to complain?

  He and his friends did their best to ignore the interlopers. Silvio looked over once and saw a tall, terrifying-looking character with a deep, curving scar across his left cheek and a rather high, loud voice. The only saving grace was that this warrior and his German cohorts departed at an early hour, off to their beds and their murderous morning duties. All the same, they’d left a certain dirty mark on the festivities, a mark that required several bottles of wine to erase.

  So, as a kind of revenge, he was lying in bed on this clear morning, relaxing. A beam of sunlight leaked in through the curtains, and there was the sound of a radio from the room below, where his deaf landlord lived. He could smell coffee; he drew in a long breath and savored the fragrance. Let the Germans get up before dawn and live out their evil fate; to the extent possible during wartime, Silvio Merino was going to keep a normal human schedule and enjoy the harmless pleasures of adult life.

  There was something that resembled a knock at the door, two hard thumps. He sighed, swung his legs over the edge of the bed, pulled on a pair of pants he’d discarded in a drunken haste the night before, and answered it. To his utter astonishment, he saw his father standing there on the far side of the threshold. Short as a prepubescent teenager and wide as a small car, his father had not shaved the night before—unusual for him—and his cheeks made Silvio think of a forest of black tree trunks. Burned in a fire, chopped off near the ground. His father was wearing a neat green shirt and a pair of dark slacks—his work uniform—but the expression on his face suggested he’d slipped away from his embassy duties en route to the market or the airport. Excitement wasn’t a word one could ever associate with the man, but something like a diluted thrill animated his black eyes on that morning. Silvio wondered what it was.