A Thread of Grace

by Mary Doria Russel

  “Get his bullets!” Bruno said, shoving Angelo.

  “I’m not touching him! You can get a disease!”

  “You baby. I bet you made it up about that lady’s head in a bucket!”

  “Did not!” Scrunching up his face, Angelo waved at the flies, put his hand way out, and picked a bullet out of the dead guy’s cartridge belt with the tips of two fingers. He jumped back and Bruno laughed, but Angelo had the bullet, heavy and cold and important, in his palm.

  Bruno snatched it. “Watch! You take the lead out like this, see?” He pried the pointy part out of the brass case with a penknife he took off a littler kid. “Then you pour the gunpowder into little piles on a flat rock. Like volcanoes, see?”

  When you hit the volcanoes with another rock, they explode. The kids on the farm think Angelo made that up, but it’s true, so he’s going to get some bullets and show them.

  Angelo ignores the boxes and stuff, trudging on until he finds the paratrooper whose chute never opened and is almost for sure dead. Still, he might be faking, and taking bullets is sort of stealing, so Angelo sits down behind some trees and holds his breath as long as he can, watching to see if anything moves. When the body passes this test of deadness, Angelo looks around for a big, long stick and creeps out of the trees toward the rocks the paratrooper fell on.

  He pokes at the body a little at first, then harder. The real problem is, the gun’s underneath the guy. Angelo considers pushing the body over, but there’s a commando knife strapped to the top leg, and that would be as good as a bullet to show the kids at the farm. Holding his breath again, Angelo puts the stick down and reaches for the knife—

  A hoarse shout startles him. He falls backward, scrambles to his feet, puts his hands up, like in a cowboy movie. For a terrible moment, he thinks the men are fascisti, but nobody’s wearing a uniform. “Ei! Over here!” he calls, waving his arms over his head, so they won’t think he didn’t know they were partisans. “I found the airdrop! Over here!”

  He waits for them to arrive, dancing a little with excitement. There are nine men, clanking with guns and knives. The first ones are contadini for sure, short and thick: built like a brick outhouse, the factor always said. The last two must be city people, because they’re taller, and look tired. Nobody talks while the tallest, skinniest one stoops down to check the body.

  Angelo raises his hand, like he’s in school. The second-tallest one has a scary scarred face, but he snorts a laugh and nods permission to speak. “That guy’s dead,” Angelo tells him. “I made sure! But there’s another one up there, and I saw more boxes and stuff over there! I can show you!”

  The scarred-up man looks hard at him. “What’s your name, kid?”

  After a moment’s hesitation, he says, “Angelo,” but not his last name, because you never know.

  “Angelo Soncini?” the scarred-up man asks. “Schramm, this is Mirella’s boy! Angelo, it’s me, Renzo Leoni!” Angelo couldn’t swear to it, the man seems like maybe he could be the neighbor who came to Mother of Mercy wearing a priest dress one time. “Belandi,” the man swears, “what the hell are you doing out here? You could get killed! Look how big you are!”

  “I’m ten!” Angelo says. “Almost.” He looks at the lightening eastern sky and realizes his mother is going to know he snuck out. “We should get going,” he says, adding, “I saw some Germans coming, too!” to make sure everyone will hurry up.

  Angelo leaps from rock to rock, like an island-hopping giant in a white ocean, having a grand time. Considerably less amused, the men struggle along in his wake, trying not to fall into the pools of deep snow between the crags as they tramp down a ravine and across a frozen kettle pond and around the hip of a hill. They find a generator, a radio, and a canister of cigarettes at fifty-meter intervals, well packed and apparently unharmed, but the last of the Dakota’s cargo is higher on the mountainside in a drop zone nobody would have selected, and no footsteps lead away from the parachute.

  Lifting silk away from snow, they expect another corpse. Instead a drowsy young man stares up at them and blinks slowly. “I trie’ a roll,” he says.

  “Dig,” Schramm says, and everyone does, clearing the snow with their bare hands, tugging at the Tommy’s arms to pull him free. The Englishman begins to hum tunelessly, stopping now and then to make some remark and giggle. “Try not to jar him. Sometimes their hearts just stop,” Schramm warns. “We’ve got to get him warm as soon as possible.”

  “I live right over there,” Angelo tells Renzo. “Mamma will take care of him.” The men pause and look at one another. “It’s safe,” Angelo says confidently. “The owner is a big shot with medals and stuff. He knows all the fascisti, and they don’t bother us.”

  “Renzo,” Schramm says in a low voice, “if you want this man to live…”

  Renzo closes his eyes, weighs priorities, issues orders. “Tullio, get back to base. Send your father back here with twenty men— wait, make it thirty— as fast as they can travel. You, you, you: take the radio equipment to Monteverdi for safekeeping. You two stay here to dig. Otello, go down to the farm with Angelo, so his mother doesn’t think he’s making this up.”

  “And tell her to get a good fire going,” Schramm orders. “Heat some water!”

  Still half-buried, the Englishman waves to the dispersing partisans. “Bye-bye!” he calls cheerily, then begins to sing, loudly and in a variety of keys. “Weeee’ll mee’ tagain, don’ know where, don’ know wheeeen…”

  “Hurry,” Schramm says. “When they stop making sense, they don’t have much time.”

  The paratrooper’s halfway to Tipperary when they’ve dragged him to the surface. Breathless from the effort, they listen to the jaunty march for a few minutes, then struggle to their feet.

  “Schramm,” Renzo says as they make ready to carry the half-frozen paratrooper toward Villa Malcovato, “the ski instructors said if someone’s hypothermic, you warm him up slowly.”

  Schramm concentrates on uncoupling the Englishman’s harness and lines. “We did some research,” he says vaguely. “Faster is better.”

  Hearing comes first. People whispering. Boots on wooden floors. His own existence is next. He’s warm. Sitting in a chair. His legs feel heavy in an odd sort of way. He opens his eyes, blinks owlishly, takes in his surroundings a little at a time. A fireplace. A window.

  “Caporale?” he hears a woman say.

  She is, alarmingly, pretty as an angel, although Simon never expected heavenly beings to look so tired. Two sleeping cherubs snuggle on his lap, one under each arm, wrapped inside the same blankets tucked around him. That’s when he realizes he’s been stripped to his socks and army-issue Y-fronts, and that a bare-chested man is sitting right behind him.

  The tired angel puts her hand against his chest, to keep him from leaping out of the chair. “Calma ti,” she says soothingly. “Tu sei fra amici.”

  Amici means friends, but standing just beyond her is a group of fearsome-looking men, apparently outfitted at a jumble sale. Italian army jackets, city tweeds, hand-knit jumpers. Baggy peasant pants, trousers from woolen suits or German uniforms. Laced hunting boots, wooden clogs, street shoes, German combat boots. They’re heavily armed with an equally international collection of military-issue weapons, shotguns and hunting rifles, police pistols and meat cleavers.

  Their disorderly appearance contrasts with the attention and obedience they give a slender, middle-aged man with a badly scarred face and a submachine gun slung casually over his left shoulder. Noticing Simon, Scarface breaks off their conversation and comes closer. “Parli italiano?”

  Simon spots his uniform drying on a rack in front of the fire. “There’s a phrase book in my kit,” he tells them, pointing with one finger. Reaching around the little girls, he mimes opening a book with his palms. “Book? An Italian-English phrase book?”

  The man behind him oozes out of the chair, speaking Italian. Simon instantly feels the chill of his absence against his own bare back, and realizes why this
person was there in the first place. The angel speaks sharply to a boy— her son? — and the child hurries to get the phrase book, watching wide-eyed while Simon flips through it.

  “There,” Simon says, and slowly sounds out transliteration. “Sahno key eye-tar-low: I am here to help you.” He hands the book over, pointing at the phrase.

  The leader’s brows rise. Judging from the resulting laughter, he says something along the lines of, “Well, thank God for that! We’re safe now that this bedraggled little limey is on the scene.”

  From the string of orders subsequently issued, Simon picks out just one word: Maria. The kitchen empties itself of partisans, leaving Scarface, the angel, and a thin man, all of whom continue discussing the situation. The bloke who sat behind him listens to them, nodding repeatedly while buttoning his shirt. “I am called Otello,” he tells Simon. “I visit England for one year. We are partigiani: partisans. Anti-Fascists. We are all friends for you. Your comrade is misfortunately dead. This is the doctor of us.” The thin man raises a hand in greeting. “He says you must rest.” Otello indicates Scarface next. “The boss says it’s dangerous for this lady if you stay here. So you will rest one night. Then we’ll go to our camp with you. Have you undestand everything?”

  “Where’s the wireless? The Marconi?” Simon looks from face to face. “I have to report in. I was supposed to go to Milan, but I don’t know why. Major Salvi had all the orders, and if he’s dead, I don’t know what—”

  Otello stops him, and translates. “The boss says, ‘The radio is safe. You will use it tomorrow.’ ” The doctor lifts the smaller of the two sleeping girls out of Simon’s lap. The tired angel takes the older one into her arms and sends the boy out of the room. “Now this lady takes you to rest,” Otello says.

  The angel smiles encouragingly and shows Simon to a staircase.

  Half an hour later, with Stefania, Angelo, and the English boy in bed, Mirella returns to the kitchen. Renzo and Schramm are alone at the table, deep in quiet discussion. “We have coffee,” she tells them. “Should I put some on now? No— maybe you should get some sleep.”

  “Mirella,” Renzo says, “stop fussing and go back to bed!”

  “I’m fine. I’m fine,” she says, bustling distractedly from task to task. “Are you sure about the coffee? I could put some in a sack for you. Il maggiore can get more. We have eggs. Should I make you some eggs? Werner, lie down upstairs awhile. I can take Rosina now.”

  “Ah, but it’s such a pleasure to hold her.” A pale dawn brightens the curtains above the sink and finds its way to Rosina’s curls. Her chubby cheeks are the color of peaches, as her mother’s used to be. Schramm frowns at Mirella’s nervy, cheerless agitation. “You’re pale,” he tells her. “And thin. Are you eating enough? How far along are you?”

  “Almost three months,” she says, as though dismissing some minor inconvenience. “I’m fine, Werner. Some morning sickness, that’s all.”

  She glances quickly at Renzo. “Mirella—” he says, and stops for a deep breath and long moments of tapping the tabletop. “Where is Iacopo?” he asks finally. “Why are you alone here?”

  “He’s in Sant’Andrea with the refugees—”

  “God damn that man! Can’t he ever put his own family first?”

  She doesn’t want Renzo’s anger. She has her own, and the gnawing fear that goes with it. “There was no one else,” she says. “Osvaldo Tomitz has been arrested.”

  GESTAPO INTERROGATION CENTER

  PORTO SANT’ANDREA

  “I never used to smoke,” Artur Huppenkothen says. “My sister complains about the smell. Erna can’t understand why I have taken up such a filthy habit. My nerves, I tell her. It helps my nerves.”

  He has smashed terrorist cells, one after another, but what good has it done? He is a blacksmith, bringing his hammer down on the anvil time after time, but there’s no iron to bend to his will. The enemy is like water, like the sea. You might as well pound a rising tide.

  “The Soviets have taken the Balkans,” he tells the priest. “Yugoslavia, Bulgaria, Rumania. Religion is finished there. Do you want that to happen in Italy? Do you understand whom you are protecting, Father? Jews, who do not believe in Jesus. Communists, who do not believe in God at all! You are a good man, but you’ve been duped. You haven’t seen what I’ve seen. Communists took over München when I was a boy, and let me tell you something— they were all Jews!”

  Beneath its bruises, the face remains impassive, the eyes downcast.

  “Are you praying, Father? Then pray for wisdom!” Artur pleads. “In the Gospel of John, Jesus says, ‘Whoever belongs to God hears the words of God— if you do not listen, you do not belong to God.’ Who do the Jews belong to then? They killed Christ in Satan’s service! They poison and kill and steal from Christians. They hate us with a hate so vast, so— so violent, they want us all to die! The Jew is capable of any kind of evil. There is nothing they won’t stoop to, Tomitz! Why do you protect them?”

  Artur opens a thick file, shuffles through the crackly onionskin papers. “In Spain, the Communists killed thousands of priests and monks and nuns! The pope himself said Jews form the principal force of Bolshevism! Jews subsist through contraband, fraud, and usury. They have tentacles everywhere, Tomitz— in contracts and monopolies, in postal services and telephone companies, in shipping and the railroads, in town treasuries and state finance— Here!” he says, finding a clipping from Civiltà Cattolica. “From the Vatican newspaper! ‘Jews are uniquely endowed with the qualities of parasites and destroyers. They pull the levers of capitalism and communism— a pincer assault to control the entire world! They grow fat off the arts and industry of the nations that give them refuge!’ ”

  Silence.

  Artur watches smoke give shape to light coming through the office window, trying to fathom this man. He looks so ordinary, so normal. Nothing in his physiognomy marks him as a race traitor, a Communist dupe, a Jew lover. Sadly, once the infection takes hold, no amount of reasoning can break its grip. Artur squares the sheaf of papers, closes the file, replaces it in his briefcase. “I gave you every chance,” he says. “You leave me with no choice.”

  He was dozing in the backseat of the car, waiting for il maggiore to return from a meeting in the Palazzo Municipale. By the time he was taken into custody, he’d heard so many stories, he could anticipate every detail. The Gestapo men in leather coats. The pistol pointed at his chest.

  There would be prison. Interrogation. You know you’ll be beaten, but you don’t really know. You can’t, until you feel that first blow, because it carries a completely unexpected message. It does not say, “Tell me what I want to know!” It says instead, “You are helpless.”

  Even on the battlefield, the Red Cross or the medics find their way to the wounded. The compensation for being hurt is the expectation of help, and when that expectation is destroyed, a part of you dies. You realize with numb surprise that those who hold you prisoner can do anything they like. They don’t simply punch you in the face. They reach through the air and shatter the boundaries that make you an individual. They impose themselves on you as they please. It is a kind of rape.

  The next surprise is heartening. Like a little boy in his first schoolyard scuffle, you discover you can take a punch. The fright and pain of the first blow fade remarkably quickly. A kind of giddiness takes hold. The pain is not, after all, unbearable. It’s not as bad as a toothache, for example. Hit me all you want, you think then. It’ll get you nowhere.

  And so: the shuffle down an endless corridor illuminated by bare bulbs hanging from cords furred with dust. A turn, a stairwell. Another corridor three flights down. Doors on each side at two-meter intervals; men behind them weeping, moaning. “Coraggio,” someone shouts to the shackled newcomer. “Courage, comrade!” A man behind a different door laughs shrilly.

  A large brick room. A high vaulted ceiling. His clothes are taken from him. While his hands are manacled behind his back, his eyes follow a thick-linked chain rol
ling over a pulley anchored in the ceiling, spooling onto an oaken uptake spindle with an iron crank.

  The strappado. Machiavelli endured it, survived it. He wrote The Prince afterward. Or, rather, he dictated it. Nevertheless. It is possible to live through this. There can be a life after the strappado.

  Huppenkothen is waiting. He is a small man, neat, with the kind of round soft features that look good-natured. “I hate this,” he says, pacing. “The screaming. The shitting, the pissing. I hate it.” He pauses to light another cigarette, his hands unsteady, and jerks his head toward a civilian with a flamboyant mustache and a long blue jaw that works like a pump handle as he chews the last of a sausage panino. “Signor Innocente does not share my distaste, Father. You’ll talk sooner or later. I suggest sooner.”

  Innocente. It is the surname given to foundlings raised in Catholic orphanages. A euphemism for bastard.

  Innocente licks his fingers, steps forward, pulls the chain down, snugs its hook into the shackles. The chain rattles. The spool creaks, taking up the slack.

  “Names,” Huppenkothen says. “Addresses. Meeting places.”

  The hook draws Osvaldo’s hands upward, backward, away from his body. Sweat pops on his forehead, his upper lip. His feet leave the ground. Suspended a meter above the floor, he is able to think of Christ crucified for an instant.

  And then: he is transfigured, transmogrified, all body, no soul. All that was Osvaldo Tomitz gathers into his shoulder joints. His muscles quiver, first slightly, then more violently. He stops breathing, unwilling to spend strength on anything other than holding himself at half-oblique.

  “Everyone tries that,” PierCarlo Innocente tells him. “It never works.”

  From the spindle’s vantage, PierCarlo measures the naked body with a tailor’s eye, deciding how much chain will be needed to keep the feet above the floor. He hoists the priest another half meter up and chocks the spindle. Drawing closer, he inspects the priest’s shivering penis with detached curiosity. “Naughty worm,” he whispers with an odd lilting intimacy. “Naughty little worm…”