Beneath a Scarlet Sky: A Novel Page 17

  Aunt Greta said something to the general in German. He spoke back.

  “Pino,” his aunt said, “General Leyers would like a word with you.”

  Pino swallowed, came around the front of the car, and saluted him with a halfhearted “Heil Hitler,” even as he realized that he and the general wore the same uniform and distinctive armband.

  Aunt Greta said, “He wants to see your orders, Pino, and to know where you are positioned in the Organization Todt.”

  “Modena,” Pino said, dug in his pocket, and showed the general his papers.

  Leyers read them, and then spoke in German.

  “He wants to know whether you can drive in your present condition,” Aunt Greta said.

  Pino raised his chin, wiggled his fingers, and said, “Very well, sir.”

  His aunt translated. The general spoke back. Aunt Greta responded.

  Leyers looked at Pino and said, “Do you speak any German?”

  “A little,” he said. “I understand more than I can speak.”

  “Vous parlez français, Vorarbeiter?”

  Pino said, “Oui, mon général. Très bien.” Yes, my general, very well.

  “You are now my driver, then,” the general said. “This other one is an idiot who knows nothing about cars. You are sure you can drive with your hand like that?”

  “Yes,” Pino said.

  “Then report to Wehrmacht headquarters, the German House, tomorrow morning at oh six forty. You’ll find this car in the motor pool there. I will leave an address in the glove compartment. You will go to that address and pick me up. Do you understand?”

  Pino bobbed his head. “Oui, mon général.”

  General Leyers nodded stiffly and then climbed in the back of the staff car, saying something sharp. The driver gave Pino a filthy look, and the car rolled away from the curb.

  “Come inside, Pino!” Uncle Albert cried. “My God! Get inside!”

  “What did he say there to the driver?” Pino asked his aunt as they followed him.

  Aunt Greta said, “He called him a jackass good only for latrine duty.”

  His uncle shut the shop door, flipped the sign to “Closed,” and shook his fists in triumph. “Pino, do you realize what you’ve done?”

  “No,” Pino said. “Not really.”

  “That’s Major General Hans Leyers!” Uncle Albert said, sounding giddy.

  Aunt Greta said, “His formal title is Generalbevollmächtigter fur Reichsminister für Rüstung und Kriegsproduktion für Italien. It translates as ‘Plenipotentiary to the Reich Minister for Armaments and War Production in Italy.’”

  Seeing Pino didn’t understand, she said, “‘Plenipotentiary’ means ‘full authority.’ It’s given to someone so high ranking that they have the full authority of a Reich Minister, free to do whatever is necessary for the sake of the Nazi war machine.”

  Uncle Albert said, “After Field Marshal Kesselring, General Leyers is the most powerful German in Italy. He works with the full authority of Albert Speer, Hitler’s Reich Minister for Armaments and War Production, which puts him two steps from the führer! Whatever Leyers wants to happen, happens. Anything the Wehrmacht needs in Italy, Leyers gets it, or forces our factories to build it, or steals it from us. He makes all of the Nazis’ guns, cannons, ammunition, and bombs here. All the tanks. All the lorries.”

  Pino’s uncle paused, staring off at something dawning, and then said, “My God, Pino, Leyers has to know the location of every tank trap, pillbox, land mine, and fortification between here and Rome. He built them, didn’t he? Of course he did. Don’t you see, Pino? You are the great general’s personal driver now. You’ll go where Leyers goes. See what he sees. Hear what he hears. You’ll be our spy inside the German High Command!”

  Chapter Fifteen

  His head still reeling from his sudden and dramatic change of fate, Pino rose early on August 8, 1944. He ironed his uniform and ate breakfast before his father was even out of bed. As he sipped coffee and ate toast, he remembered that Uncle Albert had decided that no one but he and Aunt Greta should know Pino’s covert role as driver for Major General Hans Leyers.

  “Don’t tell anyone,” Uncle Albert said. “Not your father, mother, Mimo. Carletto. Anyone. Telling someone could lead to someone else knowing, and then a third someone else, and soon you’ll have the Gestapo at your door, taking you away for torture. Do you understand?”

  “You’ve got to be careful,” Aunt Greta said. “Being a spy is beyond dangerous.”

  “Just ask Tullio,” Uncle Albert said.

  “How is he?” Pino said, trying to get his mind off getting caught and tortured.

  “The Nazis let his sister see him last week,” his aunt said. “She said he’d been beaten, but never talked. He was thin and sick with some stomach thing, but she said his spirits were high, and he spoke of escaping to fight with the partisans.”

  Tullio will escape and fight, Pino thought as he hurried through the streets as San Babila began to awaken. And I am a spy. So I am kind of in the resistance now, aren’t I?

  Pino was at the German House near the Porta Romana by 6:25 a.m. He was directed to the motor pool, where he caught a mechanic under the hood of Leyers’s Daimler-Benz staff car.

  “What are you doing there?” Pino demanded.

  The mechanic, an Italian in his forties, scowled. “My work.”

  “I’m General Leyers’s new driver,” Pino said, looking at the carburetor settings. Two had been moved. “Stop messing with the carburetor.”

  The mechanic, taken aback, sputtered, “I did no such thing.”

  “You did,” Pino said, taking a screwdriver from the mechanic’s box and making several readjustments. “There, she’ll purr like a lioness now.”

  The mechanic stared at him as Pino opened the driver’s door, stepped up on the running board, climbed into the seat, and looked around. Convertible roof. Leather seats. Buckets up front, bench in the back. The G4 was easily the biggest vehicle Pino had ever tried to drive. With six wheels and a high ground clearance, it could go virtually anywhere, which was the point, Pino guessed.

  Where does a Plenipotentiary General for War Production go? With this car and total authority, anywhere he wants to.

  Remembering his orders, Pino looked in the glove compartment and found an address on Via Dante, easy to find. He didn’t want to aggravate his wounds, so he played with the shifter to get his hand position and grip right. Then he tested the clutch and found every gear. He used his ring finger and the thumb of his right hand to turn the key. The raw power of the engine vibrated through the steering wheel.

  Pino eased out the clutch. It had a hard release. His hand slipped off the shifter. The Daimler lurched forward and stalled. He glanced at the mechanic, who gave him a sneering grin.

  Ignoring him, Pino started the car again and teased the clutch out this time. He rolled through the motor-pool yard in first and then second gear. The roads at Milan’s center, laid out in horse-and-carriage times, were narrow at best. At the wheel of the Daimler, Pino felt as if he were driving a minitank down the twisting lanes.

  The drivers of the two cars he encountered looked at the red Nazi general’s flags fluttering on either front fender of the Daimler and immediately backed out of the way. Pino parked the staff car on the sidewalk just beyond the address on Via Dante Leyers left for him.

  Pino got looks from several pedestrians, but no one dared protest with those Nazi general’s flags flying. He took the keys, climbed out, and went into the lobby of a small apartment building. Sitting on a stool by a closed door near the staircase, an old woman, a crone with thick-lensed glasses, peered his way as if barely seeing him.

  “I’m going to three-B,” Pino said.

  The crone said nothing, just nodded and blinked at him through her spectacles. She was creepy, he decided as he climbed to the third floor. He checked his watch. It was exactly 6:40 a.m. when he rapped sharply on the door.

  He heard footsteps. The door opened
inward, and his entire life changed.

  Flashing her slate-blue eyes at him and smiling, the maid said, “You are the general’s new driver?”

  Pino wanted to reply, but he was so stunned that he couldn’t. His heart boomed in his chest. He tried to speak, but no sound came out. His face felt hot. He ran a finger in his collar. Finally, he just nodded.

  “I hope you don’t drive like you talk,” she laughed, playing with the braid of her tawny-blond hair with one hand and gesturing him inside with the other.

  Pino stepped past her, smelled her, and felt so dizzy he thought he might fall.

  “I’m Dolly’s maid,” she said behind him. “You can call me—”

  “Anna,” Pino said.

  When he turned to look back at her, the door was closed, her smile had fallen, and she was regarding him as if he were some form of threat.

  “How did you know my name?” she said. “Who are you?”

  “Pino,” he stammered. “Pino Lella. My parents own a purse store in San Babila. I asked you to go the movies with me outside the bakery near La Scala last year, and you asked how old I was.”

  Anna’s eyes unscrewed as if she were retrieving some vague, buried memory. Then she laughed, covered her mouth, and studied him anew. “You don’t look like that crazy boy.”

  “A lot can change in fourteen months.”

  “I can see that,” she said. “Is that how long it’s been?”

  “A lifetime ago,” Pino said. “You Were Never Lovelier.”

  Anna’s eyebrows shot up, annoyed. “Excuse me?”

  “The movie,” he said. “Fred Astaire. Rita Hayworth. You stood me up.”

  Her chin dropped; so did her shoulders. “I did, didn’t I?”

  There was an uncomfortable moment before Pino said, “It’s a good thing you did. That theater was bombed that night. My brother and I were inside, but we both made it out.”

  Anna looked up at him. “True?”

  “One hundred percent.”

  “What’s wrong with your hand?” she said.

  He looked at his bandaged hand and said, “Just some stitches.”

  An unseen woman with a thick accent called, “Anna! Anna, I need you, please!”

  “Coming, Dolly,” Anna cried. She pointed to a bench in the hallway. “You can sit there until General Leyers is ready for you.”

  He stood aside. The maid passed him close in the narrow hallway. It took his breath away, and he stared after her swinging hips as she disappeared deeper into the apartment. When he sat and remembered to breathe, Anna’s female-and-jasmine scent lingered in the air. He considered getting up and wandering through the apartment, just to see and smell her again. He decided he had to take the risk, and his heart began to pound wildly.

  Then Pino heard approaching voices, a man and a woman talking and laughing in German. Pino sprang to attention. A woman in her early forties appeared at the other end of the short hall. She sashayed toward him wearing an ivory lace-and-satin robe and beaded gold slippers. She was leggy and pretty in a showgirl way with pendulous breasts, green eyes, and a riot of auburn hair that fell artfully about her shoulders and face. She wore makeup even at this early hour. She eyed Pino while smoking a cigarette.

  “You are tall for a driver, and good-looking, too,” she said in Italian with a heavy German accent. “Too bad. Tall men are always the ones who die in war. Easy targets.”

  “Guess I’ll have to keep my head down.”

  “Mmmm,” she said, and took a drag. “I am Dolly, Dolly Stottlemeyer.”

  “Vorarbeiter Lella, Pino Lella,” he said with none of the earlier stammering.

  Dolly seemed unimpressed, and called out, “Anna? Do you have the general’s coffee ready?”

  “Coming, Dolly,” Anna yelled back.

  The maid and General Leyers converged on the short hallway at the same time. Pino snapped to attention, saluted, his eyes darting to Anna as she came over to him, her smell all around him as she held out a thermos. He looked at her hands and fingers, how perfect they were, how—

  “Take the thermos,” Anna whispered.

  Pino startled, and took it.

  “And the general’s valise,” she muttered.

  Pino flushed and awkwardly bowed to Leyers, then picked up the large leather valise, which felt full.

  “Where is the car?” the general asked in French.

  “Out front, mon général,” Pino replied.

  Dolly said something to the general in German; he nodded and replied.

  Then Leyers fixed his eyes on Pino and snarled, “What are you doing there, staring at me like a Dummkopf? Take my bag to the car. Backseat. Center. I’ll be down soon.”

  Flustered, Pino said, “Oui, mon général. Backseat center.”

  Before leaving, he dared a last glance at Anna and was discouraged to see that she was looking at him as if he had mental problems. He left the apartment and lugged the general’s valise down the stairs, trying to remember the last time he’d thought of Anna. Five, six months ago? The truth was he’d stopped believing he’d ever see her again, and now here she was.

  Anna was all he could think about as he passed the blinking old crone in the lobby and went outside. The maid’s smell. Her smile. Her laugh.

  Anna, Pino thought. What a beautiful name. Rolls right off the tongue.

  Did General Leyers always spend the nights with Dolly? He desperately hoped so. Or was it an unusual thing? Once a week or something? He desperately hoped not.

  Then Pino realized he’d better focus if he wanted to see Anna again. He had to be the perfect driver, he decided, one that Leyers would never dismiss.

  He reached the Daimler. It was only then, as he was lifting the valise into the backseat, that he thought about what might be inside. He almost tried to open it right there, but then realized that foot traffic was building and there were German soldiers about.

  Pino set the briefcase down, shut the door, and came around to the driver’s side of the staff car, so he could see back toward the apartment building. He opened the rear door and moved the valise closer. He looked at the hasp, which had a keyhole. He looked up at the fourth floor, wondering how long it took the general to eat.

  Less time with every second, Pino thought, and tried the hasp. Locked.

  He looked up at the fourth-floor window and thought he saw the drapes flutter as if someone had let them go. Pino shut the back door. A few moments later, the door to Dolly’s building opened. General Leyers exited. Pino sprinted around the car and opened the other side.

  The Nazis’ Plenipotentiary General for War Production barely gave him a glance before climbing in next to his case. Leyers immediately checked the hasp.

  Pino shut the door behind the general, his heart hammering. What if he’d been looking inside the valise when the Nazi came out? That thought made his heart hammer all the more as he slid behind the wheel and looked in the rearview mirror. Leyers had set his peaked hat aside and was digging out a thin silver chain from beneath his collar. There was a key on it.

  “Where are we going, mon général?” Pino asked.

  “Don’t talk unless spoken to,” Leyers said sharply, using the key to unlock his case. “Are we clear, Vorarbeiter?”

  “Oui, mon général,” Pino said. “Very clear.”

  “Can you read a map?”

  “Yes.”

  “Good, then. Drive on toward Como. When you cross out of Milan, stop and drop my flags. Store them in the glove compartment. In the meantime, be quiet. I have to concentrate.”

  After they were moving, General Leyers put on reading glasses and began intently working on a thick stack of papers in his lap. Yesterday at Albanese Luggage and this morning at Dolly Stottlemeyer’s, Pino had been too flustered to look at Leyers in any great detail. Now he drove and kept taking glances at the general, really studying the man.

  Pino figured Leyers was in his midfifties. Powerfully built, especially through the shoulders, the general had a bull neck
that strained against his crisp white shirt and jacket. His forehead, broader than most, was defined by receding salt-and-pepper hair slicked back and glistening with pomade. His thick, dark brows seemed to throw shadows across his eyes as he scanned reports, scribbled on them, and then set them aside in a separate pile on the backseat.

  Leyers’s concentration seemed total. In the time it took for Pino to drive the Daimler out of Milan proper, he never once saw him raise his head off the work before him. Even when Pino stopped to take down the general’s flags, Leyers stayed on task. He had a blueprint spread out across his lap and was studying it when Pino said, “Como, mon général.”

  Leyers adjusted his glasses. “The stadium. Around back.”

  A few minutes later, Pino drove along the long west side of the football stadium on Viale Giuseppe Sinigaglia. Seeing the staff car, four armed guards at an entrance snapped to attention.

  “Park it in the shade,” General Leyers said. “Wait with the car.”

  “Oui, mon général.”

  Pino parked, shot out of the car, and had the back door open in seconds. Leyers seemed not to notice, got out with his valise, and walked by Pino as if he did not exist. Leyers treated the guards the same way as he disappeared inside the stadium.

  It was early in the day, and already the August heat was building. Pino could smell Lake Como on the other side of the stadium, and he longed to go down and look up the western arm toward the Alps and Casa Alpina. He wondered how Father Re was, and Mimo.

  He thought about his mother, and what her latest purse designs might look like, and whether she knew what had happened to him. He felt melancholy, realized he missed Porzia, especially the way she charged into everything in her life. Nothing had ever frightened his mother, as far as he knew, until the bombing had started. Since then, she and Cicci had been living in Rapallo, listening to the war on the radio, and praying for it all to be over.