Fire in the Hills

by Donna Jo Napoli

  Angry mutterings came from all sides.

  “Go home,” said the officer. He waved them away. “Get out of here. Come back later.”

  “No!” The pregnant woman pulled a rolling pin out of her shopping basket and held it over her head.

  Lupo’s face went slack. She was pregnant with two children to protect. Had she lost her mind?

  The woman shook the rolling pin. “I will not go away empty-handed again. I came prepared.”

  A rolling pin? The Fascist officer had a gun in the holster at his waist and a rifle slung across his back. Who did she think could help her? The crowd watched, alert, tense—but they were unarmed.

  But the pregnant woman didn’t seem to be looking for help. She swung that rolling pin high, wielding it like a bat, as though she thought she was a real threat. “Mussolini is supposed to protect the family. He told women to stay home and have children. That’s what the Fascists have been saying for two decades. Well, look at me. Look at my children.” Her voice rose to a shout. “I’m not leaving without coupons.”

  The Italian officer put his hand on the hilt of his gun. Lupo felt Volpe Rossa stiffen beside him. He took her arm to still her, but he already knew it was useless.

  “She’s right,” said Volpe Rossa loudly.

  That was it. Volpe Rossa would get arrested now, too. Well, he’d failed her before. He’d never do it again. “We need coupons,” said Lupo in a croak. For a moment he couldn’t hear anything but a buzz inside his head.

  Then, “We all have families,” came the call from the back of the crowd. “Look at us.”

  “Coupons,” said another voice.

  “Coupons,” joined more voices, louder. “Coupons, coupons.”

  The crowd chanted now. “Coupons, coupons, coupons.”

  The pregnant woman still brandished that rolling pin.

  The officer looked stunned. “All right,” he said at last. “I’ll open the door, and those who are here right now have to rush in so I can close the door fast. We have enough coupons for you, but not for anyone else.” He opened the door, and the crowd pushed through.

  Later, as they were leaving, Volpe Rossa came up on one side of the pregnant woman and Giovanni’s mother came up on the other. Lupo followed. They walked her and the children to the milk store.

  “You’ve got courage,” said Volpe Rossa.

  “And the right reaction to desperation,” said Giovanni’s mother. “Join us.”

  The woman stopped. She looked at her children. Then she shook her head. “It’s true, I can’t stand this anymore.” She laughed. “And what else have I got to do?”

  And so the resistance grew. One ordinary, desperate person at a time.

  19

  LUPO AND VOLPE ROSSA changed homes often, to protect their hosts. Florence offered lots of hosts.

  They spent weeks secretly dispersing those rifles around town. Lupo delivered some in shopping bags with lettuce on top. Volpe Rossa delivered some wrapped in blankets in baby carriages.

  Not batting an eye, they walked past German soldiers and tanks. Lupo didn’t know how Volpe Rossa got up the nerve to do it. He always had to fight the urge to run, to run and run, all the way to Venice. What kept him here was the power of song; he recited partigiano songs in his head. But it wasn’t the words that mattered now—it was simply their very existence. Songs filled his head and pushed aside everything else.

  Lupo hadn’t seen those rifles in action, but he heard the news of what they did. A German jeep outside town had been shot at from who knew where. A truck had had its tires blown out. A group of drunken Nazi soldiers had been ambushed in the night. Partigiano rifles were nothing in an open showdown against German submachine guns. But these weren’t open showdowns. These were snipings—the only kind of warfare possible when the scales were so unbalanced.

  Lupo lay in bed late one morning, thinking about that imbalance. He knew it was a mistake to dwell on it; it would only disable him, keep him pinned to that bed.

  He got up, and his gaze happened to go out the window. Nazi soldiers marched Italian men down the street. Lupo didn’t recognize anyone, of course, but he knew what was going on. The Italian men were surely known anti-Fascists. The Nazis were marching them to the train station, to put them on cattle cars that would carry them to prisons in Mantova and Belluno. These processions happened often. This was the second one down this street since he’d been at this host’s home—and he’d been here only five days.

  One of the men was wounded and stumbled along. As they passed under Lupo’s window, he fell. Clearly, he couldn’t walk another step. A Nazi shot him.

  A spasm went through Lupo’s shoulders.

  From a window on the other side of the road, someone shot the Nazi. Lupo saw the rifle disappear back inside.

  The other Nazi soldiers quickly gunned out the windows on that side of the street—all the windows, even though they, too, surely saw that rifle, so they knew which window the shot had come from. The air shook. A high-pitched wail circled everything. The officer in charge motioned them ahead, and the procession continued on to the station.

  “We must do something,” whispered Volpe Rossa. Lupo hadn’t even realized she’d been standing there. She squeezed his arm.

  And he knew she was right.

  At mealtime that evening, Volpe Rossa walked into Nazi headquarters. She just walked right in, through the front door, an apron tied around her waist. She was going to find the list of anti-Fascists and change the names on it—make up phony names—so people couldn’t be rounded up and marched off to prison.

  Lupo waited for her in the piazza. His breath was raspy with fear. He had no instructions. He had no weapon on him—only his phony documents and a small wad of money. If she got into a jam, he would do whatever he could. He’d think fast, because he had to think fast. Please, let him be able to think fast.

  Neither of them had been in these Nazi headquarters before. But hotels had a lot in common. And Lupo had described to Volpe Rossa how the Nazi headquarters at the hotel in Naples had been arranged. The office would surely be on the ground floor behind the reception desk in plain view of anyone coming out of the dining room. The kitchen would be on the far side of that dining room. So a kitchen helper, as Volpe Rossa was pretending to be, would have no excuse for being near the front office. But if she acted like she knew what she was doing, like she had a right to be there, maybe. . . . That was her plan, at least.

  The piazza was empty, of course. Everyone was home eating. The quality of the air slowly changed. Lupo could feel early evening on his arms and cheeks. Volpe Rossa was taking too long.

  He wanted to run. But for the first time since he’d joined the resistance, his impulse was to dash toward danger, not away. To race in there and grab her, protect her. His lips pressed shut hard to hold in a shout.

  And there she was, coming out the front door, walking lightly, seemingly not even in a hurry.

  Lupo started toward her.

  A Nazi officer came out the door after her. He drew his gun. “Halt!”

  She stopped, slowly turned, and tilted her head at him.

  He kept the gun pointed at her—that mesmerizing gun—and he spoke. In German. Lupo could hear, because there was no other noise in the piazza. The officer was asking what she had been doing. He’d seen her coming out of the office, hadn’t he? What was she doing there?

  Lupo pulled his focus away from the gun. He dug the money out of his pocket and curled it in his fist. He ran up to them. “Were you with that officer again, sister?” he said angrily in Italian to Volpe Rossa. “Papà will be so mad. Mamma will cry.”

  “No!” Volpe Rossa shook her head frantically. “I was helping in the kitchen. See my apron.”

  “You’re lying.” Lupo grabbed Volpe Rossa roughly by the arm and reached his other hand down the front of her bodice, then pulled out his hand and opened his fist. The paper money swelled like a blooming flower. He slapped her across the face.

  The office
r holstered his gun. He shook his head and took the money. “If she wants a career at this,” he said in German to Lupo, “tell your sister to use her next pay on a pretty dress. Even I would be interested in her if she cleaned up a bit. In fact, I’ll be on the lookout for her.” He pinched Volpe Rossa on the cheek that was still red from where Lupo had slapped her, and went back into headquarters.

  “We can’t stay in Florence,” said Lupo, hurrying Volpe Rossa through the streets toward home. “It’s too dangerous now.”

  “But there’s so much work to be done in this city,” said Volpe Rossa. “For the past few months we’ve been running constantly. They need us.”

  “No. You won’t walk past those Nazi headquarters again. Ever.”

  “You’re worrying about me. I told you. You can’t afford to—”

  “No!”

  20

  THE NEXT DAY LUPO AND VOLPE ROSSA drove a wagon full of munitions from a farmhouse outside Florence to another on the edge of the city of Bologna.

  Immediately they took on the job of delivering the wagon cargo to members of the resistance scattered around the city. Lupo dug out the inside of loaves of bread, stuffed them with dynamite, and turned them upside down into bags, so that the unbroken end of the loaf showed. He carried the bags in broad daylight.

  Volpe Rossa put a dozen pistols in a cloth sling over her shoulder and walked it straight across a busy piazza, smiling at the Nazi soldiers she passed, as brazen as could be. Anyone who saw her and thought for just a moment could tell that sling held something heavy, something suspect. But the soldiers never seemed to think when they looked at Volpe Rossa. All they saw was a beautiful girl.

  But even though only one at a time delivered the munitions each day, they worked as a team; the other one was always nearby, ready to swoop if trouble came.

  Once when Lupo was carrying a sack of dynamite-stuffed bread, a Nazi soldier stopped him and tapped the end of a loaf. He put his hand around it to pull it out of the bag.

  But Volpe Rossa called to the soldier from nearby, “Hey.” She waved, wiggling her fingers in the air. “Big boy,” she said in lilting Italian. “Hungry?” She carried her own sack of real baked goods. “Wouldn’t you prefer a coconut tart?” And she offered one, blushing and blinking.

  Lupo never understood how she could bring color to her cheeks so quickly. The Nazi fell for it. And Lupo couldn’t understand that, either. How could it be that time after time Germans assumed Italian women were mindless?

  Everywhere Lupo went he kept his ears open for information about the partigiani activities. Underground radio programs came from the mountains of Tuscany.

  He kept his eyes open, too. Underground newspapers came from Milan.

  Then Bologna started its own paper. Sometimes Lupo helped deliver it, so he met the people who worked on it. Women, all women. They told Lupo women were putting out underground papers all over Italy. He wondered if his mother was working on a paper in Venice. She used to march in war protests; she’d have the courage to write for an underground paper.

  Lupo read about how the partigiani blew up viaducts and bridges and railroads. They sneaked Jews north into Switzerland, walking over mountains. They stopped trains full of prisoners because of “mechanical problems”—but really they stopped them to help prisoners escape. They ambushed supply vehicles.

  He read how in Verona and Padua, towns near Venice, people made posters about the need for a new constitution. With democratic elections. At night people plastered those posters on town walls, and the next day the Nazis ripped them down. But they reappeared by morning.

  Knowing these things helped Lupo. His tasks were small, but they were part of something giant. The giant beast of the resistance that sang in his head at night. What he did mattered. It mattered politically, for Italy. But it also mattered personally, for the memory of Ivano and Maurizio and, especially, Samuele. His best friend. His Jewish friend, who had died in Ukraine. He thought about Samuele a lot. All it took was the sight of a Jewish armband to trigger those memories.

  There was but a handful of Jews left in Bologna. But the handful dared to walk outside. They were forced to wear armbands with a yellow star. Samuele had an armband like that. He had taken it off before they were kidnapped.

  Lupo had been in Bologna three weeks already when he sat down on a park bench to wait for Volpe Rossa. An old man with an armband came up carrying a chair. The man set the chair by the end of the bench and dropped onto it with a tired “ooof.”

  “What?” said Lupo, spreading his hands half in question, half in offering. “I’m not so fat that we can’t both sit on the bench side by side.”

  The old man waved Lupo’s remark off, but his face stayed agreeable. “I’ve come to this bench every day for seventeen years. Now they tell me Jews aren’t allowed to sit on a public bench. So I bring my chair.”

  “That’s absurd.”

  The old man looked at Lupo with bleary eyes. “They call us Untermenschen. It means ‘subhumans.’”

  Volpe Rossa came rushing up.

  Lupo stood. “Meet my friend,” he said to Volpe Rossa.

  “Excuse my not getting up,” said the old man.

  They shook hands. No one exchanged names.

  Volpe Rossa bit her bottom lip and glanced around. “Do you have family here?”

  “Not any longer.”

  She looked at Lupo meaningfully. But Lupo didn’t understand what could be on her mind. The partigiani could never help this man escape to Switzerland. He was too old to travel like that.

  “If you want to take off that armband, we’ll hide you,” she whispered, though no one was near enough to hear.

  “And live in a cupboard?” The old man waved off her words, like he’d waved off Lupo’s. “I used to publish books—very fine books—but they won’t let me anymore. I wear an armband. I’m not allowed at public events. And when I die, the newspapers will not be allowed to announce my death. But right now I’m alive. I walk around. I hear the birds. I breathe the fresh air.”

  Volpe Rossa pursed her lips. “If—”

  The old man took her wrist. “Hush. Help the young Jews, if you can find any. They’re the future.” He let go and folded his hands in his lap. “Go on now. Don’t get caught talking to me.”

  Volpe Rossa stood there.

  Finally Lupo dragged her away.

  21

  WEEKS SOMEHOW BECAME MONTHS. April 25 came and went, and Lupo turned fifteen without a whisper. Spring ended; hot weather came. Through it all, Lupo and Volpe Rossa worked faithfully. They reported daily to Dario’s sister, the partigiana woman in charge of this part of town.

  One morning Dario’s sister looked at Lupo in dismay. “Every day you grow taller.”

  Lupo shrugged. Yes, he was bigger. He no longer had paper stuffed in the tips of the boots Rina had given him.

  Dario’s sister shook her head. “We can’t use you anymore.”

  “What?” Lupo reeled in shock.

  “You don’t look like a harmless kid anymore. You can’t go out on these missions. Volpe Rossa will go alone.”

  “But—”

  “It’s too dangerous.” Volpe Rossa took Lupo by the upper arms. “You’re a man now.”

  Lupo blinked in frustration. They were right. He was suspect. The Germans stopped him on the street more and more often to look at his phony documents, which were somehow always accepted. So far, at least. But how long could that last? He was putting them all at risk.

  “You can join a group in the hills,” said Dario’s sister. “I’ll arrange it.”

  The partigiani in the hills sniped at German jeeps. Lupo would have to carry a rifle. He looked at Volpe Rossa.

  Volpe Rossa turned to Dario’s sister. “Not yet. He can help out here indoors.”

  “There’s nothing for a man to do indoors,” said Dario’s sister.

  “Then he’ll do what women do. Help me, Lupo.” Volpe Rossa pointed to her bicycle. “Help me load it up.”


  So Lupo took off the bicycle seat and tucked messages into the shaft and remounted it while Volpe Rossa tucked other messages inside her clothes. They had both delivered these kinds of messages so many times. Information about where Nazi troops were gathering, who had which equipment, what acts of sabotage the partigiani were planning, where and when the partigiani could expect a delivery of munitions from the Allies. They’d carried these past Nazi checkpoints, laughing together in relief after each time.

  A painful uneasiness brought cold sweat to Lupo’s cheeks and forehead. Volpe Rossa would be alone today. And from now on. If anything went wrong, he wouldn’t be there to back her up.

  Volpe Rossa touched a finger to his cheek. “Don’t be so upset. Make yourself useful inside. And I’ll tell you all about it tonight.”

  Her hair hung loose, forming a black cloud around her face and making her look more stunning than ever. In that moment Lupo understood why the Nazis couldn’t see beyond that beauty. She took his breath away.

  Then she was gone.

  He threw himself into indoor work with a maniacal passion that day. He made phone calls, passing messages that way—messages about women, always women; female pseudonyms fooled the Nazi phone censors. He packed bullets for delivery, marking the paper so it was easy to match them to the right guns. He worked without pause.

  Then it was evening, and Volpe Rossa was finally home again, and he breathed free, as she kept her promise and told about each task of the day.

  She’d done the same thing she’d been doing all along. She passed messages to other women, meeting them in bathrooms of coffee bars. And those women rode off on their bicycles, their hair flying behind them in curls, just like Volpe Rossa’s, and passed the messages to still other women. News traveled all across the north of Italy from the hand of one staffetta—“runner”—to the next.

  Volpe Rossa had done fine. She hadn’t needed Lupo.

  The next day started with the same cold sweat. And the day after that, and the day after that. Lupo worked like a whirling dervish while Volpe Rossa was off on her bicycle. His job concerned bicycles, too; he repaired them for the staffette. And he scrubbed the old bedsheets everyone dropped off, then ripped them into bandages of various sizes for the clinics. And he helped organize burials.