Beneath a Scarlet Sky: A Novel Page 15

  Rauff got back into the Kübelwagen. Father Re, Brother Bormio, Pino, Mimo, and the other boys stood there, silently watching the German lorries turn around. They waited until Rauff and his soldiers were five hundred meters off, gone down the muddy two-track to Madesimo, before they all broke into wild cheers.

  “I thought for sure he knew we had you all hidden in the trees,” Pino said several hours later. He and Father Re were eating at the table with the relieved refugees.

  The father of the two boys said, “I could see that colonel coming the entire way. He walked right under our tree. Twice!”

  They all started to laugh as only people who have just avoided death can laugh, with disbelief, gratitude, and infectious joy.

  “An inspired plan,” Father Re said, clapping Pino on the shoulder and raising his glass of wine. “To Pino Lella.”

  The refugees all raised their glasses and did the same. Pino felt embarrassed to be the object of so much attention. He smiled. “Mimo was the one who made it work.”

  But he felt good about it, elated actually. Fooling the Nazis like that made him feel empowered. In his own way, he was fighting back. They were all fighting back, part of the growing resistance. Italy was not German. Italy could never be German.

  Alberto Ascari came into Casa Alpina without ringing the bell. He appeared in the dining room doorway, hat in hand, and said, “Excuse me, Father Re, but I have an urgent message for Pino. His father called my uncle’s house, and asked me to find Pino and deliver it.”

  Pino felt hollow inside. What had happened? Who was dead?

  “What is it?” he asked.

  “Your papa wants you to come home as soon as possible,” Ascari said. “To Milan. He said it’s a matter of life and death.”

  “Whose life and death?” Pino said, getting up.

  “It sounded like yours, Pino.”

  PART THREE

  THE CATHEDRALS OF MAN

  Chapter Thirteen

  Twelve hours later, Pino sat in the passenger seat of Ascari’s souped-up Fiat, barely noticing the long drops off the side of the serpentine road from Madesimo down to Campodolcino. He didn’t look at the lime-green leaves of spring or smell the blooms in the air. His mind was still at Casa Alpina and on how reluctant he’d been to leave.

  “I want to stay and help,” he’d told Father Re the night before.

  “And I could use your help,” the priest said, “but it sounds serious, Pino. You need to obey your father and go home.”

  Pino gestured at the refugees. “Who will take them to Val di Lei?”

  “Mimo,” Father Re said. “You’ve trained him well, and the other boys.”

  Pino had been so upset, he’d slept fitfully and was dejected when Ascari came to pick him up to take him to the train station at Chiavenna. He’d been at Casa Alpina almost seven months, but it seemed like years.

  “You’ll come to see me when you can?” Father Re asked.

  “Of course, Father,” Pino said, and they hugged.

  “Have faith in God’s plan for you,” the priest said. “And stay safe.”

  Brother Bormio had given him food for his journey and hugged him, too.

  Pino barely said ten words until they reached the valley floor.

  “One good thing,” Ascari said. “You have taught me to ski.”

  Pino allowed a mild smile. “You catch on fast. I wish I could have finished my driving lessons.”

  “You are already very, very good, Pino,” Ascari said. “You have the touch, the feel for the car that is rare.”

  Pino basked in the praise. Ascari was an amazing driver. Alberto continued to astound him with the things he could do behind the wheel, and, as if to prove it, he took them on a white-knuckle ride down the valley toward Chiavenna that left Pino breathless.

  “Scary to think what you’d do in a real race car, Alberto,” Pino said when they pulled into the station.

  Ascari grinned. “Give it time, my uncle always says. Come back this summer? Finish your training?”

  “I’d like that,” Pino said, shaking his hand. “Be good, my friend. And stay out of the ditch.”

  “Every day,” Ascari said, and drove off.

  Pino had come down so much in altitude, it was nearly thirty degrees warmer than it had been up at Motta. Chiavenna was painted in flowers. Their scent and pollen hung thick in the air. Spring in the southern Alps wasn’t always this fabulous, and it made Pino even more reluctant to buy his ticket, show his documents to a German army soldier, and then board the train heading south to Como and Milan.

  The first car he entered was filled with a company of Fascist soldiers. He turned around and went forward, finding a car with only a handful of people. Drowsy from lack of rest, he stowed his bag, used his knapsack for a pillow, and fell asleep.

  Three hours later, the train pulled into Milan’s central station, which had taken several direct hits but stood much as Pino remembered it. Except Italian soldiers no longer guarded the transit hub. The Nazis were in total control now. As he walked down the platform and passed through the station, keeping his distance from the Fascist soldiers from the train, he saw the German troops glancing with contempt at Mussolini’s men.

  “Pino!”

  His father and Uncle Albert hurried to greet him. Both men looked dramatically older than they had at Christmas, grayer about the temples, and their cheeks more sunken and sallow than he’d remembered.

  Michele cried, “Do you see the size of him, Albert?”

  His uncle gaped at Pino. “Seven months and you go from a boy to a big, strapping man! What was Father Re feeding you?”

  “Brother Bormio is a great cook,” Pino said, grinning stupidly and pleased by their scrutiny. He was so happy to see them both that he almost forgot to be angry.

  “Why did I have to come home, Papa?” he asked as they left the station. “We were doing good things at Casa Alpina, important things.”

  His uncle’s face clouded. He shook his head, said in a low voice, “We do not talk about things good or bad here. We wait, yes?”

  They took a taxi. After ten and a half months of bombardment, Milan looked more like a battlefield than a city. In some neighborhoods, nearly 70 percent of the buildings were rubble, yet the streets were passable. Pino soon saw why. Scores of those vacant, bent-back men in gray uniforms were clearing the streets, brick by brick, stone by stone.

  “Who are they?” he asked. “Those gray men?”

  Uncle Albert put his hand on Pino’s leg, pointed a finger at the driver, and shook his head. Pino noticed that the taxi driver kept looking in the rearview mirror, and he surrendered to not talking until they were home.

  The closer they got to the Duomo and San Babila, the more structures were still standing. Many were unscathed. They passed the chancellery. A Nazi staff car sat out front, a general’s by the flag on the hood.

  Indeed, the streets around the cathedral were packed with high-ranking German officers and their vehicles. They had to leave the taxi to go through a sandbagged and heavily fortified checkpoint into San Babila.

  After showing their papers, they walked in silence through one of the least damaged areas of Milan. The shops, restaurants, and bars were open and filled with Nazi officers and their women. Pino’s father led him to Corso Matteotti, about four blocks from where they’d lived before, still in the fashion district, but closer to La Scala, the Galleria, and the Piazza Duomo.

  “Get out your documents again,” his father said, pulling out his own.

  They entered a building and were immediately confronted by two armed Waffen-SS guards, which surprised Pino. Were Nazis guarding every apartment building in San Babila?

  The sentries knew Michele and Pino’s uncle, and gave only a cursory glance at their papers. But they studied Pino’s long and hard before allowing them to go on. They used a birdcage elevator. As they rose past the fifth floor, Pino saw two more SS guards standing outside a door.

  They exited on the sixth floor, went
to the end of a short hall, and entered the Lellas’ new apartment. It was nowhere near as large as the place on Via Monte Napoleone, but it was already comfortably furnished. He recognized his mother’s touch everywhere.

  His father and uncle silently motioned for Pino to put his bags down and to follow them. They went through French doors out onto a rooftop terrace. The cathedral’s spires attacked the sky to the east. Uncle Albert said, “It’s safe to talk now.”

  Pino said, “Why are there Nazis in the lobby and below us?”

  His father gestured to an antenna about halfway down the terrace wall. “That antenna is attached to a shortwave radio in the apartment downstairs. The Germans threw out the old tenant, a dentist, in February. They had workers come in and completely rebuilt the place. From what we’ve heard, it’s where visiting Nazi dignitaries stay when they’re in Milan. If Hitler ever came, it is where he’d stay.”

  “One floor beneath us?” Pino said, unnerved by the idea.

  “It’s a new and dangerous world, Pino,” Uncle Albert said. “Especially for you.”

  “This is why we brought you home,” his father said before he could reply. “In fewer than twenty days, you turn eighteen, which makes you eligible for the draft.”

  Pino squinted. “Okay?”

  His uncle said, “If you wait to be drafted, they’ll put you in the Fascist army.”

  “And all new Italian soldiers are being sent by the Germans to the Russian front,” Michele said, wringing his hands. “You’d be cannon fodder, Pino. You’d die, and we can’t let that happen to you, not when the war is so close to being over.”

  The war was close to being over. Pino knew that was true. He’d heard only the day before on the shortwave receiver he’d left with Father Re that the Allies were once again battling over Monte Cassino, a monastery high on a cliff where the Germans had installed powerful cannons. At long last, the monastery and the Germans had been pulverized by Allied bombers. So had the town below. Allied troops all along the Gustav Line of fortifications south of Rome were close to breaking through.

  “So what do you want me to do?” Pino asked. “Hide? I’d have been better off staying at Casa Alpina until the Allies drive the Nazis out.”

  His father shook his head. “The draft office has already been here looking for you. They knew you were up there. Within days of your birthday, someone would have gone to Casa Alpina and taken you.”

  “So what do you want me to do?” Pino asked again.

  “We want you to enlist,” Uncle Albert said. “If you enlist, we can make sure you’re put in a position out of harm’s way.”

  “With Salò?”

  The two men exchanged glances, before his father said, “No, with the Germans.”

  Pino felt his stomach sour. “Join the Nazis? Wear the swastika? No. Never.”

  “Pino,” his father began, “this—”

  “Do you know what I’ve been doing the past six months?” Pino said angrily. “I’ve been leading Jews and refugees over the Groppera into Switzerland to escape the Nazis, people who think nothing of machine-gunning innocent people! I cannot and will not do it.”

  There was silence for several moments as both men studied him.

  Finally, Uncle Albert said, “You’ve changed, Pino. You not only look like a man, you sound like one. So I’m going to tell you that unless you decide to escape to Switzerland yourself and sit out the war, you are going to be drawn into it one way or another. The first way, you wait to be drafted. You will be given three weeks’ training, and then be shipped up north to fight the Soviets, where the death rate among first-year Italian soldiers is nearly fifty percent. That means you’d have a one-in-two chance of seeing your nineteenth birthday.”

  Pino made to interrupt, but his uncle held his hand up. “I am not finished. Or someone I know can get you assigned to a wing of the German army called the ‘Organization Todt,’ or the OT. They don’t fight. They build things. You’ll be safe, and you’ll probably learn something.”

  “I want to fight the Germans, not join them.”

  “This is a precaution,” his father said. “As you said, the war will soon be over. You probably won’t even make it out of boot camp.”

  “What will I tell people?”

  “No one will know,” Uncle Albert said. “We’ll tell anyone who asks that you’re still in the Alps with Father Re.”

  Pino said nothing. He could see the logic of it, but it left a nasty taste in his mouth. This wasn’t resistance. It was malingering, dodging, the coward’s way out.

  “Do I have to answer now?” Pino asked.

  “No,” his father said. “But in a day or so.”

  Uncle Albert said, “In the meantime, come with me to the store. There is something you can do for Tullio.”

  Pino broke into a grin. Tullio Galimberti! He hadn’t seen him in, what—seven months? He wondered whether Tullio was still following Colonel Rauff around Milan. He wondered about his latest romantic interest.

  “I’ll come,” Pino said. “Unless you need me for something, Papa?”

  “No, go on,” Michele said. “I have some bookkeeping to take care of.”

  Pino and his uncle left the apartment and took the elevator again, seeing the guards outside the fifth-floor apartment. The sentries in the lobby nodded as they left.

  They wound through the street toward Albanese Luggage, with Uncle Albert questioning Pino about the Alps. He seemed particularly impressed by the signal system Father Re had devised, and the coolness and ingenuity that had gotten Pino through several of his hair-raising predicaments.

  The leather shop was thankfully without customers. Uncle Albert put the “Closed” sign up and drew down the blind. Aunt Greta and Tullio Galimberti came out of the back.

  “Look at the size of him!” Aunt Greta said to Tullio.

  “A brute,” Tullio said. “And look at that face, different now. Some girls might even call him handsome. If he wasn’t standing next to me.”

  Tullio was still his bantering self, but the confidence that once bordered on cocksureness had been tamped down by hardship. He looked like he’d lost a lot of weight, and he kept staring off into the middle distance, chain-smoking cigarettes.

  “I saw that Nazi you used to follow around, Colonel Rauff, yesterday.”

  Tullio lost several shades of color. “You saw Rauff yesterday?”

  “I spoke to him,” Pino said. “Did you know he was raised on a farm?”

  “No idea,” Tullio said, his eyes darting to Uncle Albert.

  Pino’s uncle hesitated before saying, “We believe you can keep a secret, yes?”

  Pino nodded.

  “Colonel Rauff wants Tullio brought in for questioning. If he’s caught, he’ll be taken to the Hotel Regina, tortured, and then sent to San Vittore Prison.”

  “With Barbareschi?” Pino said. “The forger?”

  Everyone else in the room looked at him, dumbfounded.

  “How do you know him?” Tullio demanded.

  Pino explained, and then said, “Rauff said he was in San Vittore.”

  For the first time, Tullio smiled. “He was until last night. Barbareschi escaped!”

  That boggled Pino’s mind. He remembered the seminarian as he was on the first day of the bombardment, and tried to imagine him becoming a forger and then escaping prison. San Vittore, for God’s sake!

  “That’s good news,” Pino said. “So you’re hiding here, Tullio? Is that smart?”

  “I move around,” Tullio said, lighting another cigarette. “Every night.”

  “Which makes things difficult for us,” Uncle Albert said. “Before Rauff took an interest in him, Tullio could move freely about the city, undertaking various tasks for the resistance. Now, he can’t. As I said earlier, there is something you might be able to do for us.”

  Pino felt excited. “Anything for the resistance.”

  “We have papers that must be delivered before curfew tonight,” Uncle Albert said. “We’ll g
ive you an address. You carry the papers there, and turn them over. Can you do that?”

  “What are the papers?”

  “That’s not your concern,” his uncle said.

  Tullio said bluntly, “But if the Nazis catch you with them, and they understand what’s written on those papers, they’ll execute you. They’ve done it for less.”

  Pino looked at the packet his uncle held out to him. Other than the day before, and the day Nicco had died holding the grenade, he’d felt little actual threat from the Nazis. But the Germans were everywhere in Milan now. Any one of them could stop him, search him.

  “These are important papers, though?”

  “They are.”

  “Then I won’t get caught,” Pino said, and took the packet.

  An hour later, he left the leather shop on his uncle’s bicycle. He showed his documents at the San Babila checkpoint and at another on the west side of the cathedral, but no one patted him down or seemed much interested in him.

  It took him until late afternoon to maneuver through the city toward an address in the southeastern quadrant of Milan. The farther he got from the city center, the more devastation he saw. Pino rode and pushed his bike through blistered, charred streets of desolation and want. He came to a bomb crater, slowed, and stopped at the edge of it. It had rained the night before. Filthy water lingered in the bottom of the crater, giving off a putrid stench. Children laughed. Four or five of them, black with filth, were climbing and playing on the skeleton of a burned-out structure.

  Were they here? Did they feel the bombs? See the fires? Do they have parents? Or are they street urchins? Where do they live? Here?

  Seeing the children living in the destruction upset him, but he pressed on, following the directions Tullio had given him. Pino crossed out of the burned area into a neighborhood that had lost fewer buildings. It put him in mind of a busted piano, with some keys broken, some gone, and some still standing yellow and red against a blackened background.

  He found two apartment buildings side by side. As Tullio had instructed, he entered the right one, which teemed with life. Sooty kids roamed the halls. The doors to many of the apartments were open, the rooms packed with people who looked battered by life. A record was playing in one, an aria from Madama Butterfly that he realized was being performed by his cousin Licia.