Once Night Falls

by Roland Merullo

  After a rest of two days in Vienna and Munich, Mussolini and Skorzeny boarded a private aircraft, a Junker, and flew east toward the well-camouflaged FHQ, Hitler’s headquarters. It was a bright day. They could see the landscape clearly, the gray tops of mountains at first, then brown and green foothills, and then the series of ponds dotting the East Prussian plain.

  The two men engaged in a long conversation about Fascism and National Socialism, plans, war stories, life experiences. As they circled the runway and came in for a landing, Mussolini felt a mix of nervousness, excitement, and shame. It seemed to him that Skorzeny had looked upon him with a measure of pity, spoken to him with the tiniest note of falsehood in his voice, as if he were trying to prop up an old man who was still pretending to be young.

  He worried about what Hitler might want from him now.

  Once they landed and the doors opened, however, most of the shame and worry disappeared. From the top of the stairs, he saw that Hitler himself had come to greet him. They embraced on the tarmac, shook hands warmly, and stood that way for a long time, hands clasped. Hitler seemed moved to tears and was, at first, unable to speak. Finally, the Führer turned to Skorzeny, who was standing at attention off to one side, and said, “I will never forget what I owe you,” and it was that remark more than anything, that confirmation of Hitler’s esteem and love, that gave il Duce a warm thrill.

  On this earth, he thought, on this vicious earth, what a fine gift it was to have a friend like Adolf Hitler.

  Ninety-Four

  The rain had started again. It took several minutes for Rebecca to stop crying. “I could have killed you! I could have killed you!” she kept muttering as Sarah held her with one hand and pressed a bit of cloth against Luca’s bleeding ear with the other.

  They told him about finding his mother and starting the fire, and he told them about Don Claudio killing the German officer and the two burials, and for a time after that, they sat watching rain drip from the edge of the overhang and said nothing. Still wrestling with Don Claudio’s revelation, Luca couldn’t keep himself from turning to Rebecca several times and imagining her with the priest. He couldn’t say anything about that, of course, not at a time like this. If he had a moment alone with Sarah . . .

  She moved so their bodies were touching from hip to shoulder. “Your ear has stopped bleeding.”

  He nodded without looking at her.

  “I want the three of us to go to Switzerland,” she said.

  Luca stared straight ahead.

  “Luca, look at me, please. I know you want to fight, but we can’t stay here. If the Germans find us, and eventually they will, my mother and I are going to be sent to the work camps.”

  “I’m to blame,” Rebecca put in.

  “I’m not going to just push you across the border and leave you, Mother.”

  “You could. I can find my way. I’ve—”

  “I’m not going to do that. You didn’t abandon me all these years; I’m not abandoning you.”

  “I’ve arranged for papers for you,” Luca said. “I can get them for you, too, Rebecca, but it will take time.”

  “We don’t have time,” Sarah said.

  “It was you who said you wanted to fight with us.”

  “That was before this, before your mother was killed, before—”

  Luca stared out into the wet trees. “There’s something else,” he said. “I’ve been thinking about it. There has to be something else. My mother wouldn’t have just suddenly decided to poison a house full of German officers because one of them struck or insulted her.”

  He could feel Sarah go silent beside him. He turned and looked at her. Now she was staring straight ahead, not even blinking, the muscles of her beautiful face still, empty. “You know something,” Luca said to her, and then she turned and looked, and there were tears in her eyes. Her lips were trembling. She made a very small nod.

  “Tell me.”

  She waited, breathed, opened and closed her mouth, and then said, “I left the cabin and went down there. I wanted to see my mother so badly. I’m sorry. I know you didn’t want me to, but I had to.”

  Luca watched her, reading her face.

  “I got as far as the house, and I heard something in the kitchen. I went closer and stood beside the window and peeked in at the side of the curtain. I saw—” She stopped and looked away. “If I tell you what I saw, you’ll never come with us, but I can’t lie to you.”

  “Tell me, Sarah.”

  She swallowed, couldn’t face him.

  “Tell me.”

  She swallowed again, brushed at her eyes. “I saw a German soldier sitting in one of her kitchen chairs. He was leaning back with his eyes closed. Your mother . . .”

  “Tell me.”

  “Your mother was on her knees . . . She . . . He . . .” She got that far and burst into tears. Rebecca let out a gasp and began to sob so loudly that Sarah had to reach out and put a hand over her mouth for a few seconds.

  In a kind of trance, Luca moved his eyes from Sarah to Rebecca and back again.

  One thought filled his mind: No mercy.

  “Now you’ll never come with us,” Sarah said, squeezing his right forearm as hard as she could. “Now you never will.”

  Ninety-Five

  The three of them climbed slowly in the rain, keeping as low as they could in the stunted trees and dripping bushes, stopping every few steps to listen. It was a bit flatter here but rugged terrain all the same, sharp outcroppings of rock, small ragged pine trees clinging to the stony soil, dozens of small caverns, ledges, low cliff faces. Sarah went along almost without seeing any of it, feeling her mother gasping for breath behind her, stopping when Luca stopped in front of her, giving one word of direction now and then to lead him back to the place she’d found. A heavy weight of dread lay across the backs of her wet shoulders, as if the strands of her hair were made of iron. She carried the sweaters in one hand and the pistol—empty of bullets now—in her dress pocket. She could feel it bump against her upper thigh every time she took a step.

  After ten minutes, she could see the first of the two rocks that marked the ends of the protected stretch of fence. She tapped Luca between the shoulder blades, but he’d seen it, too, and he climbed on without turning or speaking. A few more steps and they were protected from view there. Still without saying anything, without turning to look at her, Luca took wire cutters out of his small pack and began to work, clipping away as quickly and quietly as he could. Her mother was holding on to her. Sarah watched Luca’s right hand working, then lifted her eyes to the bright-yellow signs: VIETATO! VERBOTEN! INTERDIT! She was sure that somewhere on the other side, there would be Swiss guards, but the light was fading now, and perhaps she and her mother could cross over without being seen. They’d be given no better chance than this. Working methodically, Luca cut a neat doorway a meter high and half a meter wide, just three sides of it, top, right, bottom.

  Then, at last, he turned to look at her.

  “Please,” she said. “Luca, please! I love you. Our child. Please!”

  The stony face he’d worn since she told him about his mother finally broke open. She thought for a moment that he would cry, but he only reached out both arms, took hold of her shoulders, pulled her against his chest, and held her there. Sarah felt her mother let go, heard her weeping quietly beside her. Her own tears cascaded down both cheeks and onto Luca’s soaked shoulder.

  “I’ll wait,” he said very quietly into her left ear. “I’ll never be with anyone else; I don’t care how long the war lasts. I’ll survive, and I’ll wait. You wait, too.”

  She was nodding against his neck, great sobs filling her chest and leaking out against his skin.

  “Go now. Don Claudio said there’s a priest there who can help you. Father Alessandro in Bellinzona. The church is Santa Teresa. It’s not far, he said. Don Claudio—your . . .” Luca squeezed her even more tightly against him. “Don Claudio said you’d be safe there. He said to be sure to give you
both his love.”

  At those words, Rebecca turned away, toward the opening in the fence. She crouched, crawled through, and, with some difficulty, stood up again and looked right and left. Then Sarah. Once she’d made it to the other side, she pressed herself back against the fence, clinging to the chain-link with the fingers of both hands and pushing her face close. There was so much pain in Luca’s one good eye that she could barely look at him. “I ask you one last time, Luca.”

  He shook his head. She watched him reach into his pocket and take something out, a small statue, porcelain, parts of it painted blue and parts red. A Christian saint, it looked like. He peeled away the felt at the bottom and banged the statue hard against his thigh. Coins fell out, hundred-lire gold coins, the king’s face on one side and, on the other, a woman standing beside an old-fashioned plow. Eight, nine, ten of them. He bent and picked them out of the mud and handed them two by two through the opening.

  Sarah took them and dropped them into the pocket of her dress, then pressed her lips against one of the diamond-shaped holes and kissed him that way, quickly.

  “Go,” he said. “Go now, Sarah. Vai.”

  She held her eyes on him for another few seconds, as if to fix the memory of his face in her mind, then she turned, took hold of her mother’s arm, and went downhill along a grassy slope toward a row of trees and a faint, misty glow of light below them in the distance.

  Ninety-Six

  Luca watched them until they were enveloped in gray mist, and then he stood there a while longer, staring at the point where they’d stepped into the trees, wondering if Sarah might reappear and wave a hand to him one last time. “Don Claudio is your father,” he said quietly to no one. He pushed the statue—patron saint of hopeless cases—down into his pants pocket. Saint Jude in one, he thought, a pistol in the other. He tried to pray, got as far as saying, “Protect her. Protect them,” then he turned and made his way with great care down the slope on the Italian side.

  Ninety-Seven

  It had rained hard for two straight days, and now a steady drizzle was falling on the cobblestones in front of Bar Lake Como. Don Claudio was wet and cold. Nineteen citizens of the town of Mezzegra were lined up on the sidewalk there beside him. They ranged in age from a girl of four, clasping a stuffed animal to her chest and weeping uncontrollably, to a woman in her late eighties—stooped, wearing a soaked wool sweater, and clinging to the arm of a middle-aged man who might have been her son. There were more women than men—the men of fighting age had been called away—all of them dripping rainwater, hair plastered against their faces. Orlando, the bar owner, was part of this group, chin held high, standing near the middle of the line.

  A German motorcycle stood parked at each end of the ragged assembly. A short, plump Gestapo standartenführer, three green stripes on his sleeve, was stepping slowly back and forth in front of them in high leather boots and a dripping black-lidded gray hat.

  “Più informazione?” he asked in bad Italian. More information?

  For a moment, no one spoke—the only sound was the sobbing of the little girl—and then a young woman near the left end of the line called out, “We know nothing, Officer!” The German stepped over to her and, with a violent chopping motion of his right arm, struck her between the neck and shoulder and knocked her to the pavement like a felled tree. She lay there, half-conscious, bleeding from the mouth. The little girl screamed, but no one reached down to comfort her or to help the fallen woman.

  “Good, then,” the officer went on. “Molto bene. Italian ignorance. Very good. Four of our best men, dead. And one missing. As I’m sure you know, we exact a payment of ten Italians for every German killed, so there should be more of you here. We’re being generous today. And because there is the slightest chance, the very slightest chance that, as some of you claim, the fire could have been a strange accident, I am going to be even more generous. If one of you volunteers to go to the camps and work for us, for the cause, I’ll issue a reprieve for the rest. Anyone?”

  The seconds seemed to tick by like hours. Don Claudio watched. He’d been standing there so long that his back hurt. He was soaked to the skin, fear running up and down inside him like a herd of terrified animals. His cheeks were shaking, his mouth dry as paper. Any second, his bowels would go loose. The silence to either side of him seemed to be made of stone. He drew a breath, said, “Mary, help me,” and took one trembling step forward.

  The German looked him up and down and laughed. “You’ll lose some of that fat, Padre,” he said, and he gestured for one of his men to come and take the priest away. “To the camp,” he said loudly. And then, after the officer had paced another few steps and Don Claudio was being turned and marched toward a waiting truck: “As for the others, shoot them.”

  The Nazi soldier was holding him by the back of the neck with one hand, pushing him forward, so Don Claudio couldn’t turn around. When he heard the machine guns open fire and the screams, the priest cringed, nearly soiled his pants, but tried to twist his head and look back. The soldier kicked him hard behind the left knee, shoved him, headfirst, into the bed of a small pickup, and climbed in after him.

  There was a sudden terrible silence in the square, broken only by a faint echo of gunshots rebounding across the lake. Don Claudio sat up and, holding on to the edge of the truck bed, forced himself to look back at the carnage. But it was too late. The truck was already moving. It bounced down an alley, a corner of the bar building blocking his view, then turned and sped away from the square. Caught in a trance, Don Claudio stared over the opposite side, past the German soldier. They were headed south—toward Como, he thought, and the train station there. He began to pray, very quietly, for the souls of the murdered ones.

  One block south, not far from the place where he and Luca had left the rowboat on their fishing expedition and very close to the site of his glorious sin, he looked into the hills and thought he saw someone. A young man, standing half-hidden behind the trunk of a large oak tree, only his good arm visible, a rifle held along his body. For one second, the priest thought to raise his hand in greeting, or farewell, or to make a signal asking for help. But the guard was watching him.

  “Ave Maria, piena di grazia,” he said aloud, fixing his eyes defiantly on the German across from him. Hail Mary, full of grace.

  Ninety-Eight

  From his hiding place in the trees above the western side of the statale, Luca made his way, quickly and stealthily, to Masso’s back door. He’d left the rifle against a tree at the edge of Masso’s property, but in the right-side pocket of his light jacket, he carried the German pistol, loaded now; in his heart a fiery rage; and in his crazed thoughts one central question: Why hadn’t Masso—one of the town’s richest residents, a good friend of the priest—been arrested with the others and killed in front of Orlando’s bar?

  He hesitated a few seconds on the small wooden porch behind Masso’s house, standing there beside the old farmer’s muddy boots, with Culillo II braying in a small corral behind him. The rage at seeing his neighbors slaughtered, then seeing Sarah’s father driven away with a Nazi guard, had brought him right to the brittle edge of sanity. Part of him wanted not even to give Masso a chance to speak but simply to step through the door, raise the pistol, fire one shot that would send the old man to hell, then retreat to the safety of the forest and embark on a murderous spree. A hundred Germans for every Italian killed, was the thought that gripped him. A hundred Germans and a hundred Italian betrayers.

  But before he could open the door, he heard a sound behind him. He wheeled, already reaching for the pistol, and saw Masso himself there, bald head covered in a tattered cap, an apple in each hand. “Come inside,” the farmer said, brushing past him and pushing the door open with one shoulder.

  Luca waited a few seconds, then followed.

  “Sit,” Masso told him, setting the apples on a small table between two chairs, then going to the sink and pouring himself a glass of water. There was no comic act now, no pretend foolis
hness.

  Masso was behind him, and Luca could feel the skin on the back of his neck, feel the handle of the pistol in the fingers of his right hand.

  Masso came around the chair—touching the younger man once on his shoulder—and sat opposite. He placed the water glass on the table, removed his cap, and gestured at the fruit. “Hungry?”

  Luca shook his head.

  Masso met his eyes and spoke quietly. “I know why you’re here,” he said. “Listen to what I have to say, and then, if you still don’t trust me, do what you’ve come to do. Most likely you’ll be sparing me a much more hideous end.”

  Luca watched him and said nothing. He did not take his hand from the jacket pocket.

  Masso bit into an apple, a large bite that sent juice flowing down one side of his mouth. He wiped a sleeve across his lips, chewed, swallowed, and said, “Just as the Germans were gathering people in the square, Orlando—another one of us—was able to call me from his bar.” Masso looked at the apple as if he might take another bite, then set it aside. “He was able to make that call, and then he, too, was taken.”

  “Gone now,” Luca said from between his teeth.

  Masso nodded.

  “All of them. Except for Don Claudio, who is gone in another way.”

  “I know.”

  “How? Your Nazi friends?”

  Masso took a sip of water without moving his eyes from Luca’s face. “I had someone watching from the upstairs room of one of the houses across the street. Someone hiding there. The telephones still work, at least. Some of the time.”

  “And you let it happen.”

  Masso blinked, waited. “I could hardly have stopped it, Luca. No one could have . . . I’m going to tell you several things now, and either you will believe me or you won’t. Here, have the other apple.”

  Luca shook his head.

  “First,” Masso said, “I have learned from my contact in the government that Mussolini is most likely in Germany. After the king, Badoglio, and il Duce’s other former friends had him arrested, they took him away. I’m not sure exactly where at first. But he ended up at Campo Imperatore in the mountains. Somehow, God knows how, the Germans found out he was there. And somehow, God knows how again, they were able to free him and carry him off. To Hitler is my guess.”