by Robert Ryan
He thought about the Mozzie, lost in the silty blackness in the depths of the lake. There would be panic by now back at the base in Sardinia. Missing plane, pilot, navigator, OSS man and, more important than all that, the Red Stocking radio gear. Well, they wouldn’t have to worry about that. He suspected its final resting-place was too deep for any recovery effort.
Kirby was dressed in a clean singlet and pair of rough trousers with … he checked: no underwear. He wondered if his hosts had dried his flying gear. There was silk underwear, an inner flying suit filled with kapok and the sidcot canvas outer layer. He’d ditched the gloves fumbling to get out of the plane, he recalled, so they were lost.
He shuffled across to the side of the mattress, swung his legs off and put his weight down and took two steps, before deciding it was a bad idea. As he slumped back on the bed, he was aware of a movement in the corner. He wasn’t alone.
‘Hello?’ he asked.
In answer, a lighter flared and a cigarette was lit but there was no verbal reply. Kirby pulled himself up once more, staggered to the window and yanked back one of the thick curtains, releasing a puff of dust. A soft grey morning light entered the room, lifting it from dark to merely gloomy. The person sitting in the gilded chair looked to be fourteen or fifteen, at an age, anyway, where he shouldn’t be smoking. But then, he was also at an age where he probably shouldn’t have a double-barrelled shotgun across his knees either.
As Kirby limped across to the bed and sat once more, the boy got up, broke the shotgun over his arm, and left the room. Kirby hoped he had gone to find a grown-up.
He heard the arguments raging before anyone came to ask his opinion.
‘Did he say anything?’ A man’s voice.
‘You told me not to speak to him.’ The boy.
‘We should move him soon.’ A softer voice, a woman.
‘Where? He won’t make it over the mountains.’
‘And if the Black Brigades find him, they’ll kill him.’
If the Brigate Nere were likely to kill them, this made his saviours the partigiani, the partisans.
‘Then us,’ chimed in the boy.
‘We could take him south,’ the woman suggested.
‘Fausto said to wait here.’
‘That was before we got ourselves lumbered with a pilot.’
‘If he is a pilot … an English pilot, at least.’
‘You think …?’
‘I don’t know. Fausto should decide.’
‘He won’t be walking for a few days anyway. Not on that ankle,’ the woman said.
Kirby listened to a few further exchanges, before he decided to interrupt. ‘Hey, hello!’ he bellowed. ‘Can I just say—’
She appeared in the doorway, a perfectly framed silhouette. As she stepped forward into the shaft of light from the window, he could tell from the way the faded blue dress hung and the angularity of her cheekbones, that she was a good few pounds below her fighting weight, but the sight of her still took his breath away.
‘Yes?’ she asked.
‘Can I just say,’ he continued in his halting Italian, ‘that I do speak the language.’
She smiled and took her hand from behind her back. It held his Colt automatic, chambered for .38, which was now standard issue on Red Stockings. Nobody ever said anything explicit, but Kirby knew it was meant more for use on pilot and crew than the enemy. Just in case anyone was a bit tardy with their cyanide pill.
‘How convenient.’ She moved the gun in his direction and he felt a spasm of fright.
‘Careful.’
‘Safety is on.’
It wasn’t reassuring. He’d figured out what was going through her mind. ‘You don’t think I’m a plant, do you?’
‘It happens.’
‘Do they normally infiltrate people by crash-landing them in a twin-engined plane on the lake?’
She laughed at this and lowered the gun. ‘It was quite an entrance.’
The boy was behind her now, another cigarette in his mouth, leaning against the doorframe, peering over her shoulder like a guardian angel. ‘My name is Francesca Lombardi. This is Spider.’ The kid nodded. ‘The man downstairs is Pavel.’
‘I’m—’
‘Jack Kirby,’ she said. ‘We had to go through your belongings.’
‘My sidcot?’
‘Your what?’
‘Flying suit,’ he explained.
‘It can be repaired. It ripped as you were getting out. All your things are safe. You were lucky to get free, I think.’
He asked about the bodies in the lake, and she explained about the executions and the dumpings. The Germans had also captured their group’s BLO during a radio transmission to Switzerland when he had stayed on-air too long. He, too, had been on the train, and had been shot at the lake with the others. Kirby tried to speak but nothing came. There were too many questions he wanted to ask. Such as, what was a BLO?
‘How many dead?’ he finally asked.
‘Three, four hundred I think,’ she continued. ‘We attacked the garrison on the Cannero island, just a feint, a few well-timed explosions, while we got some of the bodies ashore …’ So those were the lights he’d seen, the flashes of detonations. ‘Then you dropped in.’
‘Where am I?’
‘In a safe house in San Marco, above Cannero Riviera, on the road to Domodossola.’
He was none the wiser. ‘Which lake did I crash in?’
‘Maggiore.’
‘The one that runs to Switzerland?’
She knew where that thought was going. ‘And the one that is well patrolled by the Decima-Mas marines and the Swiss border guards. Yes. Are you hungry?’
‘I am,’ he admitted. ‘You have food?’
Francesca looked at the boy. ‘Some stew left,’ he said with a shrug that suggested a certain reluctance.
‘Just don’t ask what the meat is,’ she warned.
He didn’t care what poor animal the stringy flesh had once belonged to. There was a lump of stale bread which he soaked in the broth and he cleared the bowl, including the chewy lumps of vegetable matter, which appeared to be chestnuts. As he ate she kept up a stream of questions, and he explained that his Italian came from his mother, who was part of the Manzoni family which had ice-cream parlours along the south coast of England, including one in Brighton, where she had met his father.
She told him about the partisan sweeps which were taking place in other parts of the lake district. That he was lucky to be found by their group.
‘And your group is?’
A heartbeat of a hesitation. ‘Gruppo Fausto.’
That name again. ‘What are you? Green Flames? Garibaldis? Christian Democrats?’ He reeled off some of the names of the endless partisan groups that the Intelligence Officer had droned on about. It was a fraction of the total running around these hills, he knew. He wished he’d paid more attention to the briefing.
‘Just anti-fascist.’
Kirby continued to eat in silence until there was a commotion downstairs in the hallway, and several doors slammed. He heard new voices, raised and angry, faster than his rusty Italian could keep up with.
‘Is that Fausto?’ he asked.
She frowned. ‘Perhaps. Stay here.’ Then she slipped out of the room, closing the door behind her.
Kirby counted to ten, put the food tray aside and hopped over after her. He cracked the door and listened. He could hear Francesca’s voice to his left, on the stairs, he guessed, from the way it echoed around the big circular hallway below. Directly in front of him was an ornate balustrade that ran around the whole of the level, with a break for the staircase. He could see a series of doors to his left and right, probably other bedrooms.
He dropped down to his hands and knees and slithered forward. There were five strangers downstairs in the hallway, each with a bright red neckerchief which, as the IO had told him, was used to denote one’s unit or brigade. The red suggested the Garibaldis—Communists. Facing them were Ragno and an
older man, the one she had called Pavel, both with guns levelled at the newcomers. Francesca was on the stairs, with Kirby’s Colt aimed straight and true at the man who appeared to be the leader of the group. He saw her thumb ease off the safety. She wasn’t bluffing this time.
Kirby examined the figure lying on the floor between the protagonists. From the mass of congealed black across his chest and stomach he had been badly wounded, but it wasn’t that which held Kirby’s unwilling gaze. It was his face. His ears had gone, and his nose, and both eye-sockets were completely empty. His left leg was kicking, and the low, animal moan Kirby could hear coming from the bloody cave of a mouth meant that this sorry creature was still alive.
‘That was uncalled for. The remark about tarring and feathering. I apologise.’
I was back at Lake Maggiore in 1964, with Francesca at my shoulder, breaking into my thoughts, holding a glass for me. I took it and sniffed. It was Scotch, and a single malt at that. ‘Jesus, if I’d known this was hidden here …’
‘I brought it with me,’ she said. ‘In my bag. I thought we might need a drink after seeing this place.’
I remembered now why she was so easy to fall in love with.
‘To Vittorio,’ I said, raising the grubby glass.
‘To Vittorio.’ We both drank.
‘There is something else,’ she said. ‘Something that really has been here all the time.’
I took another hit of the whisky, placed the glass on the floor and took the brown greaseproof-paper parcel from her. The weight and shape gave it away, but I still unwrapped it carefully and held the Colt automatic for the first time in twenty years. Before being stored, it had been oiled and greased, and it looked just as it did the last time I handled it, moments before tossing it to Francesca and telling her to keep it. I looked at her, then across the curve of the stairs, and knew she was remembering the same scene as me.
Lying on the dirty, cracked marble of the mezzanine, Kirby held his breath, straining to follow the debate raging below between the newcomers and his saviours. The problem was, this was conducted in some local dialect. He could pick out names—Fausto, more than once, Udone, Invernicci, Giuliano, Rosario—and the initials of some partisan groups, but the main thrust of the argument kept slipping away.
If these people weren’t welcome, he thought, how come they hadn’t been stopped down the road? Surely Gruppo Fausto posted guards. If not, what was to stop the Germans?
Then a machine pistol crackled from above him and he felt the cartridge cases bounce off his back. He covered his ears and squeezed his eyes shut, but not fast enough to escape the image of the poor eyeless wretch on the floor dancing spasmodically as rounds slammed into his already ruined body. Another gun opened up, across the way, also firing down into the hallway, the bright muzzle flashes burning through Kirby’s closed lids.
From below, there was the boom of a shotgun, the more feeble crack of a handgun—possibly his Colt—and then a long burst from one of the machine pistols nearby, followed by the hollow ring of a brass case rolling lazily across the marble and falling through the rails to bounce on the hall floor. Kirby tensed as he waited for the bullet in the back of his head.
‘Who the hell is this?’ demanded a voice from behind.
Kirby opened his eyes. The hallway floor was covered in bodies, the terrazzo slick with their blood. Standing among the carnage were Ragno and Francesca, while Pavel was going through the pockets of the dead leader. Kirby looked across to the other side of the mezzanine and there was a short man with a shaved head, a stubble of beard, and a smile on his face, dressed in black jacket and trousers. A partisan, not a German.
Kirby rolled over and looked up at the character who had spoken behind him. This man was fair, with a rough but handsome face, piercing grey eyes, also dressed in black well-worn clothes, with a blue-and-white kerchief around his neck. So it had come to this. The feuds between the various factions had turned into the sort of gangsterism you expected in Prohibition Chicago.
‘Who are you?’ the man barked.
‘He’s a British pilot,’ said Francesca, coming up the stairs, apparently unfazed by the mass murder in which she had participated. The beauty that Kirby had admired suddenly seemed tainted and brittle. ‘We pulled him out of the lake.’
‘Ha!’ shouted Pavel from below. ‘Look.’ He was holding up a sheaf of papers. ‘Not Garibaldis, Banda Carità. Repubblicani assassins.’
Kirby looked up at the figure looming over him, still wreathed in smoke from the Labora machine pistol he held. ‘You are English?’ asked the man.
Kirby nodded.
The man cleared his throat as if he were going to spit on him, but instead he held out his hand. Kirby raised his to meet it and felt hard fingers wrap around his wrist; he was jerked to his feet. An arm steadied him as his ankle gave way.
‘Pavel!’ the man shouted down. ‘Get rid of the bodies!’
‘The valley?’
‘The valley.’ After a moment’s hesitation the man pointed to the twisted form of the torture victim and added, ‘But leave Vittorio. We will bury him.’ He turned back to Kirby and put an arm around him, supporting him under the armpit. ‘Come on. We must talk. My name is Fausto.’ But Kirby already knew that.
Kirby, Francesca, Rosario—the little shaven-haired partisan—and Ragno sat around the table in the heavily beamed kitchen. It was dominated by a vast blackened range, and one wall and much of the ceiling were festooned with ancient pots and pans. There was little evidence of food to put in them, however. Kirby slowly pieced together some of what had happened.
The Banda Carità was an offshoot of the Brigate Nere. Vittorio, the savagely mutilated man, had been a member of Gruppo Fausto; the Banda had tortured him to find out the location of the safe house, then made out that they had liberated him from the Villa Trentino, the main fascist headquarters in the area, to get past the guards placed on the approaches. Fortunately, Fausto and Rosario had seen them donning the phoney Garibaldi kerchiefs.
‘Did you mean to shoot Vittorio?’ asked Francesca.
Kirby’s appreciation of her beauty was somewhat restored now he knew the truth.
Fausto held out his hands and shrugged. ‘You think he’d want to have lived like that? It was a mercy.’
Francesca nodded, her eyes closed. ‘I shall have to tell Rosa.’
‘Can we eat?’ asked Rosario. ‘I am famished.’
Francesca and Ragno exchanged glances and Kirby said hesitantly, ‘Oh dear, I think I might have finished off lunch.’
‘You English. You even take the food off our plates.’ Then Rosario grinned, reached into his inside pocket and pulled out a string of fat, marbled sausages, followed by a brown paper bag which he rattled. ‘Rice.’
Fausto said: ‘There might be a bottle of wine left in the cellar, Ragno.’
The boy scuttled off as Fausto produced a large onion with a triumphant flourish. Francesca rose to her feet, but Rosario snatched it from Fausto’s outstretched hand. ‘I’ll cook it. My risotto is better than yours.’ He turned to Kirby and made a face. ‘Too dry. It should be a wave. All’onda.’ He made a flowing motion with his hand.
‘He means soggy,’ countered Francesca.
‘You be the judge,’ said Rosario to Kirby, who instantly knew he was about to win one friend and alienate another, no matter which way the contest went. As Rosario fetched down the pans he needed and sharpened a knife to cut the onion, and Francesca worked the bellows to heat the charcoal, Kirby tried to block out the noises he could hear from beyond the door as bodies were dragged across the terrazzo.
Ragno reappeared with an unlabelled bottle of red wine, some of which Rosario decanted into a pan, and each of them received a tumbler full. Kirby sipped and suppressed a cough. It tasted like vinegar, but nobody else seemed to mind.
Fausto had been studying him for some time. Finally, he asked, ‘How do you know Italian?’
Kirby explained about his mother.
‘You ar
e young for a pilot. What are you? Nineteen—twenty?’
Kirby felt himself bristle. This man couldn’t be thirty, yet he was treating him like a junior clerk. He could tell from the way the others behaved around him, from the way they spoke his name, that they thought Fausto was something special. Well, not to him. ‘It isn’t about years, is it?’ he said carefully. ‘It’s about what you can do.’
Fausto smiled. ‘Are you a good pilot?’
‘Yes,’ he replied with conviction. ‘Very good.’
‘Yet you crashed.’
Kirby suppressed the urge to explain about the self-immolating engine. ‘It happens.’
‘You know we lost our BLO? Got himself arrested.’ Before he could answer, Fausto added, ‘Not that we’ll miss him. He didn’t speak the language and he was like a damned parrot. Sabotage and subversion, sabotage and subversion. You know, if the English worried a little less about the politics and government of Italy after all this is over—as if it is any of your business—then we might get somewhere, instead of facing another winter with the fascists breathing down our necks.’
‘You made it our business,’ Kirby said softly.
‘What?’
He spoke up. ‘By siding with Hitler, you made it our business.’
Fausto grabbed his wrist and yanked him across the table. ‘You know less than the last bastard.’
Kirby pulled his hand back. ‘We risk our lives to drop you supplies—weapons, medicine, food. You think flying through these mountains is a piece of cake?’
‘Oh yes. Sten guns. Pistols. Explosives disguised as mule shit. Very useful. And they always come with a price tag. Here’s the guns, now do as we tell you.’
‘What do you expect?’
‘Mortars. Light artillery. Heavy machine guns. Grenade launchers. Something to fight a proper war with. No strings attached.’
‘Perhaps it is not practicable.’
‘Ask Pavel. He is from Yugoslavia. They get ten times what we do.’
‘What is he doing here?’ Kirby asked. ‘He’s a long way from home.’
Francesca answered. ‘A lot of Jews moved west, across the border, because of the more lenient treatment in Italy. At least, that’s how it used to be. You saw last night what is happening now. Pavel joined us six months ago, when the round-ups began in earnest.’ She lowered her voice. ‘We were out on the lake looking for his family among the dead.’
