Once Night Falls

by Roland Merullo

  He opened the flap of his knapsack, and the first thing he saw was the cylinder of wafers Don Claudio had given him. God’s body, the priest believed, when the proper prayers had been said over them. It didn’t matter now; there was no one to save them for, no reason to leave food in the cabin. He put a handful of them into his mouth and chewed, but they were sticky and unsatisfying, and he washed them down with half the water he carried.

  He set the pack aside and lay back on the blanket, exactly where he and Sarah had made love. He abandoned himself to sleep and dreamed an unforgettable dream, a dream so powerful and realistic that, when he awoke, he wondered if the communion wafers had planted in him a mystical vision. In the dream, he was a bit older and still without Sarah—though he could sense her presence close by—and he was on one knee on a street in front of an elegant villa, the lake downhill behind him. There was an automatic rifle in his hands; he could feel the cool metal of the trigger against the tip of his second finger. Between him and the villa’s tall iron gates stood Benito Mussolini and his young mistress, Claretta Petacci. Il Duce looked thin and sickly but strangely unafraid. At first, his eyes were fixed on the weapon, but then he raised them to Luca and opened his arms wide. “Shoot me in the chest,” he said calmly, and in the dream, Luca did exactly that.

  He woke hungry and filled with bitterness, hoping against hope that Sarah might have returned. But he was alone.

  There was no chance now that he’d go back down the mountain and embark on the ridiculous fishing expedition. Even if it wasn’t a trap, Scutarro’s plan sounded foolish to him, an idea for amateurs. What if, after waiting for weeks, it turned out that the Luftwaffe didn’t station any planes on the other side of the lake? And if they did have planes there, wouldn’t they be guarded night and day?

  Another idea came to him then: he could take the rifles from the church and organize a small band of men on his own. Perhaps Masso would help him. Maybe Sarah was wandering in the trees, lost, not captured, not dead, and she could join him as well.

  He stood and went to the table where she’d eaten her meager meals and written her poetry. All that remained there, the only sign of her, was a sheet of white paper with a few words scribbled on it. The start of a poem, he supposed. He picked up the page and studied the words—written in haste, it looked like.

  Siamo andate a prendere il cioccolato

  We’ve gone for chocolate.

  It took him five seconds to understand.

  Eighty-Eight

  With a broken nose, broken left leg, two broken ribs, and a face so scraped and bruised that he could hardly bear to look at it in the nurse’s hand mirror, Silvio Merino lay in a large, open ward in Rome’s Fatebenefratelli Hospital with eight other victims of the latest Allied bombing. He couldn’t be sure, but it seemed to him that he’d been there several days, drifting in and out of consciousness and beset by all kinds of peculiar visions. At one point in the middle of the previous night, when the pain had been all but unbearable, a doctor had come to his bedside and injected him with something. Half-delusional at the time, Silvio wondered if the doctor—thick spectacles, one tuft of brown hair at the top middle of his forehead—might be a German operative in disguise, come to send him into the next world.

  “Sono il Dottor Grigiastro,” he thought the doctor had said. I am Doctor Grayish. But no doubt he’d heard wrong.

  Dr. Grayish administered the dose, patted Silvio’s good leg, and disappeared. In ten minutes that seemed like ten hours, the pain started to ease, and Silvio drifted into a heavenly sleep. He dreamed of Lisiella. She was sitting directly in front of him, older but still beautiful, and she was bouncing a plump laughing child on her knee. Around her stood a bevy of other kids, boys and girls both, of various ages. A happy scene until, in the dream, Silvio turned sideways and caught sight of himself in a mirror. He was old and gray, his face lined, cheeks sagging, ears gone suddenly large. A nightmare vision.

  Now the dawn had broken, and he seemed to be awake, trapped in a more youthful reality. Raindrops were tapping on the nearby window, and the pain had come to visit him again. How, exactly, he didn’t know, but somehow, over the course of his luxurious adult life, he’d learned the secret of dealing with it. The trick was to welcome it as a friend, to pay close attention to it, yes, but without pushing it away. Strangely enough, it was the facial pain—from the least important wounds—that bothered him most. That, and the thought that his beautiful Oldsmobile coupe was gone forever.

  A nursing nun came into the room. Prim, officious, her cheeks pinched tight in the white wimple. There was some activity with the bedpan—horribly embarrassing—but when that was finished, she wiped his face tenderly with a clean washcloth and asked if he wanted something to eat.

  “Una piccola bistecca,” he answered through bruised lips. “A small steak, medium-rare if possible, with grilled eggplant and perhaps some polenta on the side. Or, if that’s not available today, a seafood risotto and a glass of cold white wine. Vermentino, if you have it. Or Vernaccia di San Gimignano.”

  The nun looked down at him with what amounted to pity. Silvio wondered: Could faith in God and a sense of humor coexist? “Well then, whatever you happen to have, Sister,” he added in as respectful a tone as he could manage. The nun raised her thin eyebrows and went out of the room, the folds of her long white habit swishing behind her.

  The rain slapped harder against the glass. Silvio looked out at blurred rooftops, a broken city, a gray occupied Italy at war. To his left, a half-conscious old man moaned in his bed, captive of nightmares. The room smelled of iodine and floor polish; there were crucifixes on the walls, bare light bulbs overhead, the sound of soft-soled shoes and lowered voices in the hallway. He winced at a sudden flash of pain and then, when it passed, wondered if one of his two nearby sisters—both nurses—would get the word and perhaps come visit him. He’d ask her for some extra morphine, ask quietly so the nuns couldn’t hear, remind his sister of the favors he’d done.

  The pain moved up a notch, harder to welcome now. He decided that, when the good nun returned with his tray of food—horsemeat, he guessed it would be, horsemeat and a single sliced tomato—he’d ask if the mysterious Doctor Grayish might visit again and allow him another dose of the magical medicine. She seemed to be taking a very long time—perhaps the kitchen was far away, or perhaps they fed their patients according to how compliant they were, how humorless, how devoted to the Lord.

  He was watching the doorway anxiously when the bent nose, spectacles, and high forehead of Italo Andreottla appeared there. Another dream, Silvio thought for a moment. He blinked hard, three times, but no, there was the famous “Giovanni” in the flesh, approaching his bed. At the sight of his new friend, Silvio couldn’t help letting out a laugh, but the laughter was cut short by pain in his left side. The ribs there. His mind flashed back to the feeling of lying under the upside-down coupe. He’d been ready to die then; there was a certain comfort to be taken from that. Despite his many sins, he’d been ready to be carried up into the next world.

  Andreottla stood by the side of the bed with both hands on the railing and a look of what seemed to be sincere compassion on his face.

  “Now my nose looks like yours” was the first thing Silvio said to him.

  The man smiled in a rueful way but said nothing.

  “I have some interesting information for you,” Silvio went on quietly, uncomfortable with the silence. What if he’d been wrong about this “Giovanni” all along? What if the game had now played out to its final scene, and the half-American was going to poison him or reach down and tap a metal rod against the broken ribs until Silvio screamed in agony and revealed his secrets? What if the nuns in this hospital were actually sympathetic to Mussolini and his Nazi friends and had arranged for Andreottla to visit and squeeze information out of his suffering acquaintance?

  Silvio waited, watched, blinked away the foolish thoughts, turned his head to be sure the man in the next bed wouldn’t hear, and said very qu
ietly, “Il Duce is at Campo Imperatore. The ski resort. In the mountains near Gran Sasso. My fa—”

  “Gone,” Andreottla said in a barely audible voice. “We just heard.”

  “Gone where?”

  “He was there; you’re right. But the Germans got him. Gone to Hitler now, no doubt.”

  “The bastards.”

  A nod, another rueful smile.

  The pain spiked to a new level. Leg, face, ribs—at least the important parts of the machinery had been spared. Silvio wasn’t sure whether to ask Andreottla to call the doctor or try to make another joke. On top of everything else, he was hungry.

  Before he could get a word out, his guest said, again very quietly, “The Americans are in Sicily. And now in Salerno, too. The Russians have reached the Dnieper.”

  “It’s over, then. The war is over.”

  “Not quite,” Andreottla told him. “Not yet quite over. We’ll need you again when you recover.”

  “Because I’ve performed so brilliantly.”

  “In fact, yes.”

  “And the money, the gold, went . . . where?”

  A shrug, eyebrows and shoulders. The barest hint of a smile. “We trust you,” Andreottla said, and at those words, strangely, Silvio felt a small obstruction form in his throat. Two seconds and it was gone, the sentimental mood chased off by pain. There was the nurse now, carrying on her tray an inedible lunch.

  From an inside pocket of his sport coat, Andreottla took out a small bottle of grappa. He set it on the bedside table. The nun frowned. With the tap of two fingers on Silvio’s shoulder, the half-American sauntered out of the room. He turned sideways at the door, glanced back for a moment, then disappeared.

  Eighty-Nine

  Sarah and Rebecca climbed on slowly in the light rain, stopping every five or ten minutes to sit and rest. They drank but did not eat, saving the food as long as they could, though it seemed her mother was growing weaker by the hour. At last, in late afternoon, Sarah told her they’d gone as far as they should go. They found a strange rock formation—a huge flat piece of granite with what almost looked like a stone roof over it. At first glance, it might have been taken for the mouth of a cave, but the cave was only a few meters deep. Mostly dry, though. She and her mother crawled in and sat with their backs against stone. Sarah opened their small package of food—a heel of bread, cheese, and apples from the cabin, the jars of water and piece of hard salami from Maria’s house—and they ate for a time without speaking.

  “Luca will find us now,” she said, trying to convince herself. “He’ll know what to do.”

  Her mother blinked and pressed her lips together.

  “Don’t lose hope, Mother.”

  Rebecca sat looking out over the tops of the trees, toward the mist-covered lake. A drop of rain slid down her cheek like a disoriented tear. “You’ll raise the baby in Switzerland,” she said.

  “If I can, yes. Then we’ll come back to Italy after the war.”

  “If there is an ‘after the war.’”

  “There will be. Luca says the Americans have landed on Sicily. The Germans will collapse in the sewage of their own hatred.”

  “I hope I live to see it.”

  Sarah waited a few minutes, gathering her strength, trying to decide on a plan. “I’m going to climb up a little farther and see if I can find the border. I think we’re close. Stay here and wait for me. I’ll get back as soon as I can.”

  Her mother was stubbornly shaking her head. “They’ll find me here,” she said. “They’ll bring me down and torture me. I’ll never see you again.”

  “Mother, don’t.”

  More headshaking. “I want to go where you go. I’ve come this far.”

  “You can barely walk.”

  “I’ve come this far, Sarah. I can go a little farther.”

  “It’s too dangerous, and we can’t cut through the fence in any case without Luca.”

  “We could wait another day.”

  “We’ve eaten almost all our food, Mother. Let me go and see how close I can get, see what the fence looks like. We may have to dig under it tonight. I want to go up there while it’s still light and scout out a place. If the rain has made the ground soft enough, we should be able to dig with our hands or branches. I’ll leave you the pistol. Luca will find us. If the Germans come before he does, shoot them.”

  Her mother turned her head away, a gesture Sarah knew well—it meant that the plan was absurd, ridiculous; it was a way of expressing many things: anger, fear, frustration. She’d grown up with these wordless signals, her mother’s way of trying to swallow her bitterness at the hand she’d been dealt. She had loved one good man, and her whole life had been a torment because of it. Sarah took the pistol out of her pocket and carefully handed it over. “You know how to use it?”

  “I’m not a child, Sarah. It’s simple, isn’t it? The safety, the trigger. Anyone could do it. But I won’t hesitate. I’ll see them and I’ll shoot.”

  “You won’t need to shoot anyone, I’m sure.” Sarah leaned over and held her mother for a long moment, then kissed her near the side of her cracked lips, crawled out of their resting place, and hurried away without looking back.

  Ninety

  Luca saw the first scrap of cloth almost immediately. It was raining again, but he climbed steadily on, his heart lifting each time he came upon another piece of wet cotton, a signal from the woman he loved. Up and up he went, rain dripping down inside the back of his collar, the soles of his boots slipping on wet stones and roots, a confusion bubbling inside him along with everything else. She was going to Switzerland, taking their baby and running toward a better life. It was a crazy scheme. She had no papers. There was a fence, two sets of guards to get past, and then what? Climbing down the Swiss side of the mountain, pregnant, in soaking wet clothes, hoping to find someone who would take her in? And then? Live somewhere until the war ended, give birth there, with no identification? And what was he supposed to do, abandon his battle against the people who’d killed his mother—and go with Sarah? And do what in Switzerland? Beg? He felt as though his insides were being shredded.

  Ninety-One

  Sarah tried to climb the steep hillside without making any sound. There was no path here, just slippery stones, stunted fir trees, and a stronger wind. The rain had quieted, at least. After every few steps, she stopped to listen, looking for landmarks that would guide her on the way back down, trying to make sure she didn’t drift off to the right or left. She heard voices and flattened herself behind a stone. She heard footsteps fading. She waited another minute, then crawled around the side of the stone on her hands and knees and moved a few meters higher. There, in the distance, she thought she saw a pair of men walking, but it had been a quick glimpse, and she couldn’t be sure. She angled away from them, crouching, climbing. The slope was flattening; she kept low to the ground and went along one step at a time. Suddenly she could see the top of a fence, such a surreal sight there in the middle of the dripping trees—barbed wire on top, chain-link below. The idea of crossing over suddenly took on a new level of reality. Save her child, her mother, and herself but abandon her lover?

  She swung her eyes to either side. Ten meters to her right, she could see what seemed to her the perfect place to try to get through: there were two enormous boulders, pieces of the mountain, really, set less than five meters apart, the fence having been cut from the bottom so it sat tightly on top of them. Dirt between the stones. There were signs in three languages. STRICTLY FORBIDDEN. And fine print about prosecution and imprisonment. But if she and Luca could somehow manage to dig a hole beneath the fence, just at that point, with the large stone outcroppings to either side, hiding them . . . If they could find their way here unnoticed at twilight, start digging, and if the patrols were infrequent after darkness fell . . . then they might actually have a chance.

  Just as she’d taken a last look and turned and started back down the mountain, crouching, stepping very carefully, she heard a single gunshot.
It seemed to come from near the place where she’d left her mother. Suddenly she could barely breathe. She went along faster, slipping, grasping at the branches of small trees for balance, stopping every few steps to listen, wondering if she’d imagined the sound, if she was already losing her mind.

  Ninety-Two

  This stretch of hillside—no path now, no more scraps of cloth to guide him—was particularly steep, and Luca had to use his hands to help him get past the larger stones and outcroppings. He knew by the steepness and the stunted trees that he must be getting close to the summit of this range of hills, which would mean he was getting close to the border. From time to time, he stopped and raised his head, looking for the top of the fence and not seeing it.

  He went forward again, stepped on a twig, and heard it snap. Atypically careless of him. He paused, came to a rock face, and, rather than walk all the way around it through thick wet foliage as Sarah must have done, he put one boot in a crack, found a handhold, and hoisted himself up. Another foothold. He pushed his weight down on his right foot and lifted himself above the top of the plateau and, at exactly the same moment, saw Sarah’s mother sitting on an outcropping and heard the report of a pistol. The bullet nicked the top of his left ear with a horrible hissing sound. He ducked, heard a click, click, click, waited, lifted the top half of his face over the stone edge, and called as quietly as he could, “Rebecca! Stop! It’s me!” He saw her drop the pistol, put a hand to her mouth, and burst into tears, and then he saw Sarah come out of the trees behind her.

  Ninety-Three