Fire in the Hills

by Donna Jo Napoli

  They fell together in a natural rhythm, Lupo and Saetta walking or eating or working side by side, while the other two talked over strategy for their next mission. The more Volpe Rossa and Turbine paired off, the more Saetta and Lupo paired off.

  One night when Volpe Rossa was up in the farmhouse helping their most recent farm family host and the guys were alone in the barn, Turbine said, “So, Saetta, tell me what they did to you?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Something made you hate me. And it’s nothing I did—we’ve had no quarrel. I’m used to working to earn the trust of partigiani. But I can’t seem to earn yours, no matter what I do. What did my fellow countrymen do to you?”

  Lupo blinked back his curiosity. It was more important to protect an honored tradition among partigiani, the tradition of privacy. “You don’t have to answer, Saetta.”

  “That’s right,” said Turbine. “Our pasts are our own business. But your past could get in the way between you and me. We all depend on one another. And you and I are the only ones with rifles.”

  “Lupo’s old enough to carry a rifle,” said Saetta.

  Lupo’s stomach twisted. So far he hadn’t had to defend his lack of a weapon.

  “We’re talking about you and me,” said Turbine, to Lupo’s relief. “About the problem between us. Maybe it will help to put it in the open.” He folded his hands and locked eyes with Saetta. “If we don’t have friendship, how can we keep up our spirits? And our spirits are our strongest weapons.”

  Turbine’s voice was so clear, even Lupo felt compelled. He moved closer to Saetta to lend support.

  “I stole a watermelon two summers ago.” Saetta sat with his back against the barn wall. Now he rested his head against the wall, too, and looked up. “From a truck. The truckload was for the Nazi headquarters. An SS officer caught me. He drove me home, with the watermelon on my lap.” Saetta spoke to the rafters. Though Lupo could see only the outline of his face in the dark, he sensed that Saetta was crying. “When we got home, the officer made me sit at the table until all my family got there. My father, my mother, my sister, my brother. Then he told them to sit, too, around the table. The SS officer made my mother cut the watermelon. The sweet smell filled the room. It was glossy red inside. Perfect. He held a submachine gun. He told me to eat the watermelon. I ate. My little sister cried for a piece. We’d been hungry for so long. But the officer said it was my melon; I had stolen it, after all. I ate and ate while my sister cried. I puked. Then I ate some more. When I finished, he shot them. He killed my family. But not me. And he said, ‘Let that be a lesson, dirty thief.’ ” Saetta stretched out on the straw.

  Turbine and Lupo lay down, too. Lupo knew they were all crying.

  Saetta’s behavior toward Turbine didn’t change after that. But Turbine no longer seem moved to try to change it. He let Saetta keep his distance.

  And somehow Lupo knew that Turbine was right to let it go. Saetta couldn’t make himself befriend Turbine, but he’d told Turbine his story. And that meant he accepted Turbine.

  They were a team. They could count on each other. All of them.

  26

  MARCH BEGAN JUST AS COLD as the winter months before. Lupo shivered and hugged himself in the dark. He finished setting the fires for an Allied plane supply drop-off, then rushed back into the shadows beside scrub bushes and waited. This was a new drop-off point; Lupo felt skittish.

  Turbine and Saetta and Volpe Rossa watched from a nearby hill. Whenever Lupo was the one to set the fires, he always had to squelch the urge to look in their general direction. He had to be careful not to give them away, in case anyone was watching him and saw where he looked.

  He kept his eyes on the sky.

  The familiar drone came. Then he saw the plane. But as it passed overhead, he made out only one parachute.

  Clunk! So many clunks!

  Lupo nestled back deeper into the bushes. What was going on? Was someone throwing things? Were there Germans in the trees over there?

  He noted carefully where the single parachute had landed. That was important, otherwise it would be really hard to find it. He waited a good half an hour before he got up the nerve to go for it. Then he sneaked from bush to bush toward his goal.

  He stumbled over something hard. He felt around in the faint moonlight. The pieces of a wooden crate lay scattered, with belts of ammunition between them.

  Oh, he got it now: the other parachutes had failed to open.

  By the time Saetta and Turbine and Volpe Rossa arrived, Lupo had made a pile. There was the box from the parachute that had worked, plus whatever contents he could gather from the shattered one he’d stumbled over. But he hadn’t found anything else. He tried to remember how many clunks he’d heard. At least five.

  The four of them searched the rest of the night for the missing boxes. Dawn came and they knew they should go back to their present quarters—another farmhouse. Daylight had become more dangerous than night in the hills, because the Germans now scouted for partigiani by day. And carrying supplies always took several trips; the supplies from just these two boxes would take a couple of trips. They should start right away.

  But they couldn’t stand the idea of German scouts finding those other supplies.

  They kept searching.

  When the sun was overhead, Turbine ran across Lupo. “Let’s get the others and carry back what we have.”

  Lupo agreed. He was dead tired. And clouds had formed to the east. The wind was picking up. It might rain. They should get those supplies back to the farmhouse fast.

  Turbine whistled. That was their secret call. It was supposed to sound birdlike.

  In a few minutes Volpe Rossa showed up.

  They waited.

  Turbine whistled again.

  Saetta didn’t come.

  They spread out looking for him. But finding a person in these hills was as hard as finding a box that fell from a plane. They didn’t dare call out his name.

  They met up in half an hour, as they’d planned. Volpe Rossa had come across another smashed box of supplies, but most of the rifles in it had been destroyed on impact. They followed her to it and brought back whatever they could salvage. Then Volpe Rossa and Turbine loaded their arms with what supplies they could carry and headed back to the farmhouse. Lupo kept searching for Saetta.

  He climbed to the closest high peak and stared in one direction for about ten minutes, hoping to spot movement. Then he shifted his gaze by a few degrees and stared in a new direction. It took him more than an hour to scan a full circle.

  This wasn’t possible. People didn’t just disappear.

  Lupo whistled. He was lousy at it. It didn’t carry far, not like Turbine’s whistle. The rain had started, and his lips were so cold. Chills shook his whole body. But he tried again, with more force. He whistled and whistled. He knew it was stupid to keep it up. Anyone who heard would know that wasn’t a bird. Any Nazi hiding in the trees.

  There could be Nazis hiding anywhere. Everywhere. Was that a German helmet, or just a treetop? Was that a German signal, or a real crow caw? Every rustle sent him spinning this direction and that.

  Now he saw movement in bush branches. He hurried toward it, as silently as he could. But it was just Volpe Rossa and Turbine, returning to pick up more supplies.

  “Come with us,” said Volpe Rossa.

  Lupo shook his head.

  Volpe Rossa put her hand to Lupo’s cheek. Her head tilted to the side; her eyes held all the sadness in the world.

  For an instant the only thing Lupo wanted was for her hand to stay there, on his cheek, forever. Nothing else mattered.

  But her hand fell.

  Turbine and Volpe Rossa left.

  Lupo walked in straight lines now, or as straight as the cover of bushes allowed. He went back and forth, sweeping the area, like he’d seen German planes do. He came across a fourth box of supplies—this one with nothing at all salvageable.

  And no Saetta.

  He kept
searching, watching over his shoulder, jumping at every noise, but searching anyway. Nothing could make him give up.

  When Saetta had failed to appear at Turbine’s first whistle, a sense of dread had danced at the very edge of Lupo’s consciousness. By now that sense of dread had grown monstrous; it slammed its way through his thoughts. He looked up into the trees. He looked for a body.

  He stomped on in the rain, searching through branches, stumbling over rocks. Looking, looking, looking. The rain pounded.

  The next thing he knew, Volpe Rossa was pulling his arm across the back of her shoulders. Turbine did the same to his other arm. They helped him to his feet.

  He must have fallen asleep. He pushed them away. “I’m okay. I have to find Saetta.”

  Volpe Rossa took his hand. “They probably got him.”

  “What if they didn’t? What if he’s hurt and waiting for us to find him?”

  “If he’s hurt only a little, he’ll find us. Or other partigiani. If he’s hurt bad, he’d want us to leave him. Just like I’d want you to leave me. This is our job, Lupo. We have to get back to work.” She pulled him tripping after her. They returned to the farmhouse.

  They never saw Saetta again.

  At first they didn’t want any more new partners. It felt unlucky to have a fourth. Volpe Rossa was adamant; she said they shouldn’t doom anyone else.

  But it was too hard to do everything with only three of them. Four allowed them to split into partners for all sorts of tasks. So they soon banded together with Pecora—“Sheep.” He was short and stocky, but he was fast on his feet and a hard worker. And he barely spoke.

  When they did pair off, Volpe Rossa insisted on taking Pecora as her partner—as though she thought she could better protect him. She made Lupo think of those little dogs that yap at bigger dogs, thinking they’re so tough.

  Or maybe it was something else—something even more heartbreaking. Maybe she was protecting all the men—this way, if something terrible happened to Pecora, neither Turbine nor Lupo could blame himself. Lupo had to look away when Volpe Rossa would choose Pecora as a partner for fear that she’d see the guess in his eyes. The tough one—Volpe Rossa was always the tough one, all-business. She’d hate being revealed.

  One night in April it was Pecora’s turn to build a signal fire. This was an extra important mission because they expected an extra large supply drop. The American President Roosevelt had died the week before. But instead of that causing a pause in the Allied war effort, the new President Truman was sending the partigiani more and better supplies than ever: ammunition, automatic rifles, machine guns, 45-millimeter mortars. The Brits were giving more, too.

  Lupo stood on a nearby hill with Turbine and Volpe Rossa and scanned the area below for the flaming X.

  “There! See it?” Turbine pointed.

  The three of them fastened their eyes on that spot, trying to memorize recognizable trees and rock outcroppings from where they were to that X. They were supposed to wait till the plane passed. Then they’d slowly make their way to the signal point, going from landmark to landmark.

  They had to go slowly in case Germans had seen the signal and were swarming the area. They were determined that no German would ever get the chance to ambush them again.

  They were looking in concentrated silence at the signal fire that Pecora had set, when, oh no, they saw a second flaming X, a few kilometers to the west.

  Lupo knew instantly what had happened: a German decoy. Just a few days ago the Germans had set a decoy for another Allied plane supply drop-off. Spies had infiltrated the partigiani bands in these hills. Everyone had suspected it. But now it was definite.

  There were still men who had served in Mussolini’s army at the start and remained loyal to the Fascists. Not many. Someone said it might be ten thousand at most. But that was enough to cause problems. The Nazis never could have spied successfully on the partigiani without the help of Italian Fascists.

  Someone Lupo had known, someone he had maybe talked to, maybe shared bread with, had betrayed them. And now here they were, on the brink of who knew what.

  But what was to follow couldn’t be too awful, it couldn’t be. It was a luscious spring night. The air was sweet with honeysuckle. The breeze refreshed. Night birds tapped out mating calls. Bats swooped, then rose again, with leathery beats of their wings. It was way too fertile a night to be the stage of a disaster.

  Lupo moved closer to Volpe Rossa to reassure her. This would end well; he had to believe that.

  “All right,” said Turbine. “Here’s what we do.”

  He was taking charge. Again. No one had put Turbine in charge of them; he’d developed the habit on his own. And Volpe Rossa didn’t seem to mind. Usually Lupo did, though. But not tonight. Tonight he wanted someone else to be responsible. He wanted Pecora’s fate to lie in someone else’s hands. He listened closely.

  “We run toward whichever X the plane flies over. If it’s the decoy, the Germans will be waiting. You both hang back while I go in shooting. As soon as I’ve killed a few, there will be guns for you, too. We’ll fight them for those supplies. And if it’s the real X, our X, then we can be sure the Germans will be rushing over soon. But at least you two can pick up guns from the new batch of supplies. Either way, tonight’s a battle.”

  Lupo’s first battle.

  They stood in a line, watching.

  “We might as well sing,” said Volpe Rossa. “A whisper song, at least.”

  They sang “Bella Ciao”—“Beautiful Good-bye”—that song about partigiani dying for liberty. Don’t let it be prophetic, Lupo prayed silently. Let it be a charm against itself.

  The hum of the airplane came before they finished the first stanza. Parachutes floated down toward the enemy decoy X. They ran flat out.

  27

  WHY AREN’T YOU A MEMBER of the Fascist Party?” The Italian prison guard stood with his back to the door and an automatic rifle hanging across his chest.

  Volpe Rossa stood facing him. She put her hands on her hips. “You asked me this yesterday, when they threw me in here. Three times. And again this morning.”

  “And I’ll keep asking till you answer, foolish girl. If you’d had a member card on you, we could have found a place for you to sleep separate from these scummy men. Maybe you wouldn’t even have been locked up at all. You’re stupid not to be a member.”

  “I will tell you a story,” said Volpe Rossa. “Have you ever heard of Angelina Merlin?”

  “No.”

  Lupo hadn’t heard of her, either, but her name sounded Venetian. He’d been half dozing on the floor in the corner. Now he perked up.

  “She was arrested in 1924 for anti-Fascist activity and stayed in prison five years. Then she was arrested again almost twenty years later. They asked her why she wasn’t a Fascist Party member. She said, ‘Do you know the date of the origin of fascism? I do: March 23, 1919. Today is May 19, 1943. If I am not a member, it is because I am not a Fascist.’ ” Volpe Rossa sat on the end of her cot. “It’s almost two years later, but my answer is the same as hers.”

  “That kind of talk is dangerous,” said the guard. “You’ll get labeled rebels, rather than the bandits that you are.”

  “Bandits? We’re not bandits.”

  “If you ask me, you’re crazy,” said the guard. “Be glad we’re shorthanded enough that they postponed the real interrogation for a day. Otherwise you’d be writhing in pain now.” He pulled on the tip of his mustache and looked down at Volpe Rossa like an angry father. “If you play your cards right and listen to what I say—if you let them think you’re bandits and stop saying stupid things—then you’ll get out eventually. Rebels, ha, they get shot. And they deserve it. They should all be shot, like Hitler wants; none of them is smart enough to save his skin by giving information. They don’t even wage war in a sensible way. No banners. No valor. You don’t want to be associated with them.”

  “How can you possibly know who I want to be associated with?”


  “Look at you. You’re a pretty girl. And you’re young. You’ve got your whole life ahead of you. What are you doing running around all filthy, with lice crawling on you, dragging around that boy—who’s big enough to be shot, by the way—and, worse, the mute?” The guard pointed at Turbine, asleep on his cot. “He looks to be an idiot, too. He sleeps through everything. How on earth you entrusted a rifle to an idiot, no one will understand. You better figure that one out before they interrogate you. It was stupid. They would have shot him right there in the woods when he wouldn’t give his name if you hadn’t shouted he was a mute. They told me.” He made a tsk and threw up his hands in disgust. “Bunch of overgrown headstrong children—that’s what the rebels are. The oldest of them are hardly in their twenties. See them.” He jerked his chin toward the other people in the prison cell—four partigiani stretched out on their cots, staring at the ceiling. “If you change your mind and want to act civil to me, I might be able to keep you from the interrogations. I could even get you out sooner. Your father must be so ashamed.”

  “Look who’s here,” said Volpe Rossa.

  The door had opened behind the guard. A girl of about ten years old stood there. Lupo didn’t know her name. She hadn’t said it in front of him. She came yesterday at the same time—noon—right after those four other partigiani came back from their torture session. And she carried the same large basket in her arms.

  “What have you got in there?” asked the guard.

  “Clothes for mending. I gathered them from neighbors, and I have to bring them to my grandmother,” said the girl. “After I visit my uncle.”

  This was a lie. The basket was filled with food and water. And the guard knew that very well. But he pretended to be ignorant. The other prisoners had explained: it lowered tensions between the prison workers and the townsfolk to know the partigiani weren’t starving, at least. Things were about to explode around here; everyone had joined the resistance.