Fire in the Hills

by Donna Jo Napoli

  Volpe Rossa sat with both hands holding her side. She rocked back and forth in pain. He started for her. “No! Don’t worry about me,” she said. “Keep your eyes on her. Keep that gun on her.”

  The servant girl stood behind her mistress. She still held two water buckets. Her face was stricken.

  “Listen,” he said to her. “Help us or I’ll kill your mistress. Do you understand?”

  The girl nodded.

  “When is the car coming back?”

  “Not till tonight.”

  “Go get rope. Hurry.”

  The girl put down the buckets and ran.

  “My husband’s in the house,” said the woman. “He’ll kill you. Your only chance is to run for it now.”

  “Don’t talk,” barked Lupo. If there was anyone at the house, he’d have come out at that gunshot. They’d be dead already. “Lie flat.”

  “There’s a rifle in the house. My girl will shoot you from the window. Run for it now.”

  Lupo was almost sure that girl wouldn’t shoot them. She’d warned them, after all. But he couldn’t give her away to her mistress. He pointed the gun at the woman’s heart. “My finger’s on the trigger. If a bullet hits me, killing you will be my last act. So you better hope she’s smart enough not to shoot.”

  Volpe Rossa hummed in pain behind him.

  “How bad is it?” he asked.

  “Maybe not so bad. I think maybe it’s just a graze. Not so bad.”

  The servant girl was quick. She brought rope and twine and tape and a bread knife.

  “Help me or I’ll shoot you both,” said Lupo, for the sake of the show.

  They tied the woman’s ankles together, then her knees, then her wrists behind her back. They cut a rope for around her waist and another for around her neck and then tied the two together tightly, so that the woman’s torso curved forward, and she couldn’t look anywhere but down at her own body. They put tape over her mouth, and left her there.

  Then Lupo lifted Volpe Rossa gingerly and carried her to the house. He set her down on the sofa.

  The servant girl put the two buckets of water on the floor beside them. She ran and got soap and clean cloths.

  Lupo cupped his hands and filled them with water. He held them in front of Volpe Rossa’s mouth so she could drink. He filled them over and over.

  Then he gently pulled Volpe Rossa’s hands away from her side. He peeled up her bloody blouse. The bullet had hit in the side near her waist, and gone on by, taking a small chunk of flesh. It was more than a graze, but not much more. He’d seen a lot worse in the clinics. He washed the wound and doused it with the strongest alcoholic drink they had in the house—grappa.

  Volpe Rossa screamed.

  He pressed a clean cloth into the wound and taped it in place. “We’ll need to take a little pile of clean cloths with us,” he said to the servant girl, who had been watching him closely. “And the tape, too. And she needs clean clothes.”

  “You both do,” said the girl. “Use the rest of the water in this bucket for washing up yourself and your girlfriend, and I’ll get you clean clothes. Then I’ll make you a meal.”

  His girlfriend.

  Lupo flushed. “You help her wash up and change. I’ll make the meal.”

  The girl laughed in embarrassed surprise. “You cook?”

  “Badly. But we’re hungry, so it doesn’t matter.” Lupo carried one of the buckets into the kitchen.

  From the window he could see the woman lying up on the hill, like a trussed boar. She rolled over as he watched. It clearly took a huge amount of energy.

  Over to one side was a well. He didn’t see anything else of interest.

  He drank right from the bucket. He hadn’t been this thirsty since that time he’d sat with Maurizio in Turkey, watching the house of the man who owned the yacht.

  He set a pot of water to boil on the stove. The shelves held jars of tomatoes. He poured some in a pan and set it to boil, too.

  “Here, let me take over.” The servant girl came in. “Go wash yourself.” She peeled two cloves of garlic and chopped them. “I couldn’t find you any clean clothes, though. I’m sorry. The only shirts my master has in the house are black. I didn’t think you’d want a Fascist shirt.”

  Lupo hesitated in the doorway. “You have a well. Why were you getting water from the stream?”

  “The partigiani threw a dead cow down the well. By the time we got someone to pull it out, the whole place stank. My mistress thinks it’s too polluted to use yet.”

  Lupo went into the living room. Volpe Rossa was leaning back on the sofa in a fresh skirt and blouse. In those fine clothes, she looked like a lady. She was gorgeous. “You look good.”

  “Wash your face and go find us some toothbrushes.”

  “How do you feel?”

  “Hungry.”

  They ate a meal of spaghetti with tomato sauce, then cold, thinly sliced roast pork, then fresh pears. They packed a dinner of the rest of the pork, boiled potatoes, and a bunch of pears and nuts. And they packed a sack of cloths for bandages, and the bottle of grappa, just in case. And one bottle of water.

  “Come with us,” said Volpe Rossa to the servant girl.

  “I don’t want to. I’ve seen how the partigiani live. I can’t do that.”

  “Wait till about a half hour before you expect your master home, then cut your mistress free,” said Lupo. “Don’t do it any sooner than that. We’ll be moving slowly. Give us as much time as you can.”

  “Okay.”

  “She’ll know we left earlier,” said Volpe Rossa. She picked up a kitchen pan. “She has to believe you were out cold and you cut her free as soon as you could. Come here.”

  The girl put her hand over her mouth, but she nodded. Volpe Rossa smacked her on the side of the head with the pan.

  Lupo gasped as the girl reeled backward and fell.

  She looked up at them with tears streaming down her face. The spot where she’d been whacked was deep red.

  24

  THEY WALKED SLOWLY the rest of the day. The stream ran north, so they stayed as close to it as the vegetation allowed. Lupo carried the food and bandages over one shoulder, shifting regularly. In his pocket the woman’s gun lumped and thumped. Volpe Rossa didn’t complain. She didn’t make even the smallest whimper. They sang, and her voice was as strong as his.

  They stopped at dusk to eat.

  “You were right,” said Lupo as he made a bed of pine needles for them to sit on. “The people in that house were Fascists. I’ve been thinking about it all day. Not all rich people in Italy are like them, though.”

  “Of course not. But richness isn’t just a matter of money. It’s how you think. The upper classes believe in order. That’s what the Fascists offer.” Volpe Rossa sat slowly, and then carefully lowered herself to lie on her good side. “Me, I like the creative exuberance of disorder.” She laughed, then stopped with a wince. “Chaos, even.”

  Maybe there was no one in the world with more exuberance than Volpe Rossa. Lupo spread out the food.

  “Do you think,” asked Volpe Rossa in a small voice, “do you think there’s enough grappa that I could drink a little? Just to ease the pain.”

  “Sure.”

  “That looks like a good meal,” said a man, coming out from behind a tree. He spoke Italian with a German accent that made Lupo’s neck hair stand on end even more than the rifle he pointed at him.

  “Don’t be alarmed,” said another man, behind him, also pointing a rifle, this one at Volpe Rossa. He was Italian, and his accent told Lupo he was definitely from somewhere near Venice.

  The combination of hearing a voice that gave him the sense of being in mortal danger and another that felt so familiar and friendly made Lupo dizzy.

  “We’ve got these guns on you,” said the Italian, “just to make sure you don’t do something stupid like shoot us before you figure out what’s up.”

  They were filthy. And skinny. But they looked strong, and their rifles didn�
��t waver. Lupo put his hand on the outside of his pocket, but there was no point in going for that gun. These men would certainly shoot—and Lupo wouldn’t.

  “Put your gun on the ground,” said the German man. “The one in your pocket.”

  Lupo couldn’t believe he’d given himself away so easily. He lay the gun on the ground.

  The Italian picked it up and put it in his own pocket. Then he sat down with his rifle across his lap. “Let’s eat.”

  The German sat, too. “What is it?” he said to Volpe Rossa in a friendly way. “What happened to your side? Want to show me? I’m not bad at medical things.”

  Lupo bristled. “How do you know about her side?”

  “We’ve been following you. She favors one side. She’s obviously in pain.” The German smiled. “You sing good. ‘Wo man singt, da setze dich ruhig nieder, denn böse Leute haben keine Lieder.’”

  “‘Wherever people sing, there set yourself peacefully down, for evil people have no songs,’” Lupo translated, for Volpe Rossa’s sake. “Who are you?”

  “Shall we do formal introductions?” said the Italian. He held out his hand. “I’m Struzzo—‘Ostrich.’”

  “And I’m Turbine—‘Whirlwind,’ ” said the German.

  Typical partigiano war names.

  Lupo shook hands with each, hesitantly. “I’m Lupo.”

  Volpe Rossa shook hands with them, too. “Volpe Rossa.” Did she trust them? Her face was unreadable.

  The Italian picked up the small bundle of pork and politely held it out to Volpe Rossa. The German offered Lupo a potato. Everything had turned all crazy.

  Lupo burst out, “What’s a German doing with the resistance?”

  The German stayed a moment, with his hand extended toward Lupo. Then he took a bite of the potato himself. “What’s anyone doing with the resistance? I was in the army. At Dachau. Do you know about Dachau? Do you know what they do to the Jews there?”

  “Is it a death camp?”

  “A death camp.” The German breathed tiredly. He took another bite of potato. “My people—my friends—my own brother, we worked in a death camp. Imagine it. I thought I was losing my mind.”

  Volpe Rossa raised her head with a jerk. “That’s what Gufo wrote.” She slowly worked herself up to sitting. “Those were exactly his words.” She looked at the German with her lips parted slightly. Her face was sad wonder.

  “Was he German?”

  “No. But he saw things. Here in Italy. We both did.”

  “So . . . ,” said the German. He finished the potato. “Thousands of us Germans deserted. Thousands of us are working for the resistance in these hills, and in the countryside of France, and in Germany and Poland. We aren’t enough, but we do what we can to end this war.”

  And that’s what Volpe Rossa herself had said to Lupo once. Maybe not the exact words. He couldn’t remember spoken words exactly, like he could written words read over and over. But he knew she’d talked about doing whatever she could to end the war. This German sounded genuine, Lupo had to admit it, though he still felt off balance. There was something about this man that he didn’t like.

  “We’re in need of new partners,” said the Italian.

  “Then I guess we came along at the right time,” said Volpe Rossa.

  The German laughed. “What a motley crew. One Italian man, one woman, one German, and a boy. Who’s going to trust us?”

  A boy? Lupo winced.

  “They’ll learn to trust us,” said Volpe Rossa.

  “Soffia il vento,” sang the Italian.

  “Urla la bufera,” joined in the other three.

  They sang as they ate, as they packed up, as they walked off into the night.

  25

  THEY BUILT A FIRE in the pattern of a gigantic X. It glowed bright in the frigid January air, a signal to an Allied plane, showing it where to drop supplies for the partigiani. Their assignment tonight was supply pickup. They’d built signal fires like this many times before. Supplies were dropped off on this hillside twice a month—so they felt secure in their experience; they knew how to do this job. They waited beside the fire: Struzzo, Turbine, Volpe Rossa, and Lupo.

  The four of them had become an inseparable team. They went on so many different missions. They delivered arms to hiding places in gardens, helped prisoners escape from local holding points, dynamited strategic roads, sabotaged telegraph lines, delivered medicines and doctors’ advice to makeshift clinics, brought food to women left alone with small children, passed messages with information about enemy troops and plans—anything and everything.

  Other teams did all that and sniped at German trucks, too. But the band of partigiani they reported to wouldn’t give Volpe Rossa direct battle assignments because she was a girl. That meant that the entire team of four never went to battle. Lupo was grateful. He wanted Volpe Rossa as far from battles as possible. And he wanted to reach home alive. And he wanted to do it without killing anyone.

  So this work suited him well. He stood as close to the fire as he dared, for the warmth it let off, while still staying in the shadows. That was a rule: stay in the shadows unless you were forced out. He watched the sky.

  The familiar drone came first. Then the plane was finally in sight. Supply boxes floated down on parachutes.

  He was about to hurry toward where a box had landed when . . . Bang! Bang bang bang! From the dark all around Germans came running out, shouting and shooting. An ambush!

  Lupo ran. He fell and got up and ran. He ran blindly, smacking into branches, tripping over rocks. He ran as hard as he’d ever run. Into the hills. Away.

  He ran till he had no breath left. He stood, leaning forward, his hands supported on his thighs just above the knees. He couldn’t hear anything behind him. No more rifle sounds in the distance. Nothing.

  He went over what he’d seen in the split second after the first bang. Somebody falling. But he wasn’t sure who. Not Volpe Rossa, though. Someone taller. It could have even been a German, going down under friendly fire. Or maybe Turbine or Struzzo had taken someone down. They both carried rifles. Plus Struzzo still had the gun he’d taken off Lupo the first time they’d met.

  He couldn’t know now. He couldn’t know anything till morning.

  He sat with his back against a tree and finally fell asleep. At dawn Lupo headed for the farmhouse. The team always had a prearranged rendezvous point in case of disaster, regardless of the kind of mission they were on. Anything could turn dangerous in a flash.

  Like last night’s supply drop.

  But they were a good team, a lucky team. The others would be at the farmhouse waiting. Lupo knew they would.

  A very good team. They were always hungry—who wasn’t? They gnawed on bread that had turned black with mold. They slept on floors or muddy ground. They never had enough warm clothing. But Volpe Rossa’s gunshot wound had healed well. And they had gone through the winter this far without the coughs and congestion that plagued the other partigiani. No matter how long they’d had to stay outside, even in sleet, they were always healthy.

  The others would be at the farmhouse. They would.

  And two were already there when Lupo arrived.

  But Struzzo didn’t show up.

  They went back to look for him, walking separately, but always within hearing distance of one another. Turbine was the one to find Struzzo’s body, hanging naked from a tree, tied up by one foot. Turbine and Lupo took turns digging the grave while Volpe Rossa patrolled the area in case the Germans came back. The frozen dirt made the job take hours. The shovel that the farm woman had insisted they bring with them clanked on rocks now and then.

  At one point Turbine mumbled, “I wonder how many times she’s sent a partigiano off with a shovel.”

  But Lupo didn’t talk. He couldn’t. He had grown close to Struzzo. Not really because of anything they had in common. Mainly it was just that he loved hearing him talk, hearing an accent that felt like home.

  They lay the body straight in the gr
ave, and the three of them stood on the edges in respect and sorrow. Struzzo’s skin had turned gray with exposure to the bitter cold. Lupo had seen that before—in Ukraine, when both boys and soldiers died in the frozen winter. He’d seen it happen to his best friend, Samuele.

  “I’m sorry,” Lupo said quietly. “I’m sorry I don’t have extra clothes to put on you.”

  “He wouldn’t have accepted them,” said Turbine. “If we had extra clothes, he’d want us to give them to other partigiani . To the ones who are still wearing summer shorts in the sleet.”

  A stab of hatred went through Lupo’s gut. It made no sense to feel this way, and he knew it. Turbine was right. Turbine had turned out always to be right. Lupo should be grateful for that fact. It helped to have someone smart around.

  Almost immediately they found another partigiano to band together with: Saetta—“Thunderbolt,” so that they were a team of four again. But they changed their habits. From then on, only one of them built the signal fires and stayed at the drop-off point. The other three waited at a distance, then came up slowly to gather the supplies. That way if it was an ambush, they could try to ambush the ambushers. And Turbine and Saetta traded in their single-shot rifles for automatics.

  Lupo had rebelled instantly to Saetta’s name—for it felt as though the names themselves set Saetta and Turbine, the two that had to do with storms, against Lupo and Volpe Rossa, the two that were animal names. But Saetta quickly won him over.

  Saetta was sixteen, only a year older than Lupo. They joked together. About nothing. They made each other laugh out loud. And they confessed moments of ignorance and fear. Saetta seemed to like Lupo instinctively. And he distrusted Turbine deeply. He never chose to sit beside the German at meals or lie beside him at night. He never entered into casual conversation with him.

  Turbine noticed it. He offered Saetta food first. He did him little kindnesses.

  But Saetta stayed firm against him. That alone would have been enough to make Lupo warm to the boy. But the friendship between Lupo and Saetta went beyond that. For the first time since he’d left Rina’s farmhouse, Lupo had someone he could work beside without feeling any tension whatsoever. What a comfort that was—to care about someone with such ease.