Beneath a Scarlet Sky: A Novel Read online

  He felt his brows knit. “Okay?”

  “I’m not ready to reveal my scars to you. I don’t want you to see me human and flawed and whole. I want this . . . us . . . to be a fantasy we can share, a diversion from the war.”

  Pino reached out to stroke her face. “A beautiful fantasy, a wonderful diversion.”

  Anna kissed him a fourth time. Pino thought he heard a woodwind join the strings vibrating in his chest, and his mind and body were reduced to one thing, to the music of Anna-Marta and nothing more.

  Chapter Nineteen

  When General Leyers and Dolly returned from dinner, Pino sat on the front hall bench, beaming.

  “Have you been sitting there two hours?” Leyers asked.

  Amused and drunk, Dolly eyed Pino. “That would be a tragedy for Anna.”

  Pino blushed and looked away from Dolly, who chuckled and sashayed past him.

  “You can go, Vorarbeiter,” Leyers said. “Drop the Daimler at the pool, and be back here at oh six hundred hours.”

  “Oui, mon général.”

  Driving the Daimler through the streets as the curfew approached, Pino couldn’t help thinking that he had just had the best evening of his life at the tail end of the worst day of his life. He’d experienced every emotion possible in a span of twelve hours, from horror to grief to kissing Anna. She was almost six years older, it was true, but he didn’t care in the least. If anything, it made her more magnetic.

  As Pino walked back to the Lellas’ apartment on Corso Matteotti after leaving the staff car at the motor pool, his mind once again lurched between the emotions of seeing Tullio die and the music he’d felt kissing Anna. Riding the birdcage elevator past the Nazi sentries, he thought, God giveth, and God taketh away. Sometimes in the same day.

  Unless he was up playing music with a group of friends, Pino’s father usually went to bed early, so Pino opened the front door to the apartment, expecting a light to be left on for him and the place quiet. But the lights were blazing behind the blackout curtains, and on the floor were suitcases he recognized.

  “Mimo!” he cried softly. “Mimo, are you here?”

  His brother came out from the kitchen, grinning as he ran over and grabbed Pino in a bear hug. His little brother might have grown an inch, but he’d certainly filled out in the fifteen weeks since Pino left Casa Alpina. Pino could feel the thick cables of muscle in Mimo’s arms and back.

  “Great to see you, Pino,” Mimo said. “Really great.”

  “What are you doing here?”

  Mimo lowered his voice. “I told Papa that I wanted to come home for a short while, but the truth is, as much good as we were doing at Casa Alpina, I couldn’t take it anymore, being up there hiding while the real fighting was going on down here.”

  “What are you gonna do? Join the partisans?”

  “Yes.”

  “You’re too young. Papa won’t let you.”

  “Papa won’t know unless you tell him.”

  Pino studied his brother, marveling at his audacity. Just fifteen years old, he seemed to fear nothing, throwing himself into every situation without a shred of doubt. But joining a guerilla group to fight the Nazis could be tempting fate.

  He watched the blood drain from Mimo’s face before his brother pointed a shaky finger at the red band and the swastika sticking from his pocket and said, “What is that?”

  “Oh,” Pino said. “It’s part of my uniform, but it’s not what you think.”

  “How isn’t it what I think?” Mimo said angrily, backing up to take in the entire uniform. “Are you fighting for the Nazis, Pino?”

  “Fighting? No,” he said. “I’m a driver. That’s it.”

  “For the Germans.”

  “Yes.”

  Mimo looked like he wanted to spit. “Why aren’t you fighting for the resistance, for Italy?”

  Pino hesitated, and then said, “Because I would have to desert, which would make me a deserter. The Nazis are shooting deserters these days, or hadn’t you heard?”

  “So you’re telling me that you’re a Nazi, a traitor to Italy?”

  “It’s not so black and white.”

  “Sure it is,” Mimo said, shouting at him.

  “It was Uncle Albert and Mama’s idea,” Pino shouted back. “They wanted to save me from the Russian front, so I joined this thing—the OT, the Organization Todt. They build things. I just drive an officer around, waiting for the war to be over.”

  “Quiet!” their father said, coming into the room. “The sentries downstairs will hear you!”

  “Is it true, Papa?” Mimo said in a forced whisper. “Pino wears a Nazi uniform to ride out the war while other people step up and free Italy?”

  “I wouldn’t put it like that,” Michele said. “But, yes, your mother, Uncle Albert, and I thought it best.”

  That didn’t mollify his second son. Mimo sneered at his older brother. “Who would have thought it? Pino Lella, taking the coward’s way out.”

  Pino hit Mimo so hard, and so fast, he broke his brother’s nose, and dropped him to the floor. “You have no idea what you’re talking about,” Pino said. “None at all.”

  “Stop it!” Michele said, getting between them. “Don’t hit him again!”

  Mimo looked at the blood in his hand, and then at Pino with contempt. “Go ahead and try to beat me down, my Nazi brother. It’s the only thing you Germans know how to do.”

  Pino wanted to bash his brother’s face in while telling him about the things he’d seen and done already in the name of Italy. But he couldn’t.

  “Believe what you want to believe,” Pino said, and walked away.

  “Kraut,” Mimo called after him. “Adolf’s little boy’s gonna be safe and sound?”

  Shaking, Pino shut his bedroom door and locked it. He stripped, got into bed, and set the alarm on his clock. He turned off the light, felt his bruised knuckles, and lay there, thinking that life had swung hard against him again. Was this what God wanted for him? To lose a hero, find love, and endure his brother’s scorn, all in one day?

  For the third night in a row, the whirlwind of his mind finally slowed on memories of Anna, and he drifted to sleep.

  Fifteen days later, a Waffen-SS soldier lashed a team of six mules dragging two heavy cannons up a steep, arid mountainside. The whip laid open the flanks of the mules, and they brayed in pain and fear, dug in their hooves, and kicked up a dust cloud as they climbed toward the heights of the Apennine Mountains north of the town of Arezzo in central Italy.

  “Get around them and be quick about it, Vorarbeiter,” General Leyers said, looking up from his work in the backseat. “I’ve got cement pouring.”

  “Oui, mon général,” Pino said, pulling around the mules and accelerating. He yawned, and yawned again, feeling so tired he could have lain right down in the mud and slept.

  The pace at which Leyers worked and traveled was stupefying. In the days after the executions in the Piazalle Loreto, he and Pino were on the road fourteen, fifteen, sometimes sixteen hours a day. Leyers liked to travel at night when possible, with slit canvas blinders over the headlights. Pino had to concentrate for hours on end keeping the Daimler on the road with only slivers of light to navigate by.

  When he passed the poor mules, it was past two in the afternoon, and he’d been driving since long before dawn. He was further irritated by the fact that the constant movement had hardly left him a moment to be alone with Anna since they’d kissed in the kitchen. He couldn’t stop thinking about her, how it had felt when she was in his arms, her lips against his. He yawned but smiled at that happy thought.

  “Up there,” General Leyers said, pointing through the windshield into rugged, dry terrain.

  Pino drove the Daimler until big rocks and boulders blocked the way.

  “We’ll walk from here,” Leyers said.

  Pino got out and opened the back door. The general exited and said, “Bring your notebook and pen.”

  Pino glanced at the valise in the ba
ckseat. He’d had the duplicate key for more than a week now, courtesy of some friend of Uncle Albert’s, but he’d had no chance to try it. He got the notebook and pen from under the map in the glove compartment.

  They climbed up through rocks and friable stones that slid around their feet before they reached the top. They were afforded a view looking over a valley framed by two long, connected ridges that on the map looked like a crab’s open claw. To the south, there was a wide plain divided into farms and vineyards. To the north, and high on the crab’s inner claw, an army of men worked in ungodly heat.

  Leyers walked resolutely up the ridge toward them. Pino trailed the general, stunned at the sheer number of men up and down the side of the mountain, so many they looked like ants with their hill split open, teeming and crawling all over one another.

  The closer they got, the ants turned human, and broken, and gray. Fifteen thousand slaves, maybe more, were mixing, transporting, and pouring cement for machine gun nests and artillery platforms. They were digging and setting tank traps across the valley floor. They were running barbed wire across the flanks of the slopes and using pickaxes and shovels to burrow out places for the German infantry to use as cover.

  Every group of slaves had a Waffen-SS soldier who goaded them to work harder. Pino heard screaming and saw slaves beaten and whipped. Those who collapsed in the heat were dragged away by other slaves and left to fend for themselves, lying on rocks, dying in the beating sun.

  It seemed to Pino a scene as old as time, an update on the pharaohs who enslaved generations of men to build their tombs. Leyers stopped at an overlook. He gazed down upon the vast companies of conquered men at his disposal and, at least by his facial expression, seemed unmoved by their plight.

  Pharaoh’s slave master, Pino thought.

  That was what Antonio, the partisan fighter from Turin, had called Leyers.

  The slave master himself.

  New hatred for General Leyers boiled up from deep in Pino’s gut. It was incomprehensible to him that a man who’d fought against something as barbaric as the decimation at San Vittore Prison could in turn rule an army of slaves without so much as a twitch of inner conflict or a tic of self-loathing. But nothing showed on Leyers’s face as he watched bulldozers piling tree trunks and boulders on the steep mountainsides.

  The general glanced at Pino, then pointed below them. “As the Allied soldiers attack, these obstacles will turn them straight into our machine guns.”

  Pino nodded with feigned enthusiasm. “Oui, mon général.”

  They walked through a girdle of interconnected machine gun nests and cannon installations, Pino following Leyers and taking notes. The longer they walked, and the more they saw, the more curt and agitated the general became.

  “Write this down,” he said. “The cement is inferior in many places. Likely sabotage from Italian suppliers. Upper valley is not fully hardened for battle. Inform Kesselring I need ten thousand more laborers.”

  Ten thousand slaves, Pino thought in disgust as he wrote. And they mean nothing to him.

  The general then attended a meeting with high-ranking OT and German army officers, and Pino could hear him shouting and threatening inside a command bunker. When the meeting broke up, he saw the officers shouting at their subordinates, who shouted at the men under their authority. It was like watching a wave build until it reached the Waffen-SS soldiers, who hurled the weight of Leyers’s demands on the shoulders of the slaves, lashing them, kicking them, driving them by any means necessary to work harder and faster. The implications were clear to Pino. The Germans expected the Allies here sooner than later.

  General Leyers watched until he seemed satisfied with the renewed pace of the work, then said to Pino, “We’re done here.”

  They walked back along the mountainside. The general would pause every now and then to observe some work-in-progress. Otherwise, he kept on marching like some unstoppable machine. Did he have a heart? Pino wondered. A soul?

  They were near the path that led back to the Daimler when Pino saw a crew of seven men in gray digging and swinging pickaxes, breaking rock and shale under the watchful eye of the SS. Some of them had a ravaged and mad look about them, like a rabid dog he’d once seen.

  The closest slave to Pino was uphill from the others, digging weakly. He stopped, put his hands on the end of the handle like a man who’d had enough. One of the SS soldiers started screaming at him and marching across the hill.

  The slave looked away and saw Pino standing there, looking down at him. His skin had turned the color of tobacco juice from the sun, and his beard was wilder than Pino remembered it. He’d also lost too much weight. But Pino swore he was looking at Antonio, the slave he’d given water to back in the tunnel the first day he’d driven for Leyers. Their gazes locked, and Pino felt both pity and shame before the SS soldier clubbed the side of the slave’s head with the butt of his rifle. He dropped and rolled down the steep embankment.

  “Vorarbeiter!”

  Pino startled and looked over his shoulder. General Leyers was standing about fifty meters from him, glaring back at him.

  With one last glance at the now unmoving slave, Pino broke into a trot toward the general, thinking that Leyers was responsible. The general hadn’t ordered the man struck down, but in his mind, Leyers was responsible nonetheless.

  It was past dark when Pino came through the door to Uncle Albert’s sewing room.

  “I saw bad things today,” Pino said, emotional again. “I heard them, too.”

  “Tell me,” Uncle Albert said.

  Pino did the best he could, describing the scene with Leyers and the way the SS soldier had killed Antonio for taking a break.

  “They’re all butchers, the SS,” Uncle Albert said, looking up from his notes. “Because of the reprisal edict, there are stories of atrocities every day now. At Sant’Anna di Stazzema, SS troops machine-gunned, tortured, and burned five hundred and sixty innocents. At Casaglia, they shot down a priest on his altar and three old people during Mass. They took the other hundred and forty-seven parishioners into the church graveyard and opened fire with machine guns.”

  “What?” Pino said, stunned.

  Aunt Greta said, “It goes on. Just the other day, in Bardine di San Terenzo, more than fifty young Italian men, like you, Pino, were strangled with barbed wire and hung from trees.”

  Pino loathed them all, every single Nazi. “They have to be stopped.”

  “There are more joining the fight against them every day,” Uncle Albert said. “Which is why your information is so important. Could you show me on a map where you were?”

  “I’ve already done it,” Pino said, pulling out the general’s map from the glove compartment.

  Unfolding it on one of the cutting tables, he showed his uncle the light pencil marks he’d made to indicate the rough placement of the artillery, machine gun nests, armories, and ammo dumps he’d seen during the day. He pointed out where Leyers had piled the debris so the Allies would alter course into machine gun fire.

  “In this whole area, Leyers said the concrete is inferior, weak,” Pino said, gesturing to the map. “Leyers was very concerned about it. The Allies should bomb here first, take it out before they ever attack on the ground.”

  “Smart,” Uncle Albert said, taking notes on the longitude and latitude of the area. “I’ll pass it along. By the way, that tunnel you visited with Leyers, when you first saw the slaves? It was destroyed yesterday. Partisans waited until there were just Germans inside and then dynamited both ends.”

  That made Pino feel better. He actually was making a difference.

  “It would sure help if I could get into that valise,” Pino said.

  His uncle said, “You’re right. In the meantime, we’ll see about getting you a small camera.”

  Pino liked that idea. “Who knows I’m a spy?”

  “You, me, and your aunt.”

  And Anna, he thought, but said, “Not the Allies? The partisans?”

  �
��They only know you by the code name I gave you.”

  Pino liked that idea even more. “Really? What’s my code name?”

  “Observer,” Uncle Albert replied. “As in ‘Observer notes machine gun nests at such and such position.’ And ‘Observer notes troop supplies heading south.’ It’s deliberately bland. That way, if the Germans ever intercepted the reports, they’d have no clue to your identity.”

  “Observer,” Pino said. “Plain and to the point.”

  “Exactly my thought,” Uncle Albert said, standing up from the map. “You can fold the map up now, but I’d erase those pencil marks first.”

  Pino did so and left a short time later. Hungry and tired, he started toward home at first, but he hadn’t seen Anna in days, and he walked to Dolly’s apartment building instead.

  As soon as he got there, he wondered why he’d come. It was almost curfew. And he couldn’t just go up, knock on the door, and ask to see her, could he? The general had ordered him to go home and to sleep.

  He was about to leave when he remembered Anna saying that there was a back stairway just beyond her room off the kitchen. He went around the building, thankful for the moon overhead, and picked his way to where he figured Anna’s room and window were, three stories above him. Would she be in there? Or still cleaning dishes and washing Dolly’s clothes?

  Picking up a small handful of pebbles, he leaned back and threw them all at once, figuring she was either in there or not. Ten seconds went by, then another ten. He was about to leave when he heard a window sash go up.

  “Anna!” he called softly.

  “Pino?” she called softly back.

  “Let me in the back way.”

  “The general and Dolly are still here,” she said, doubt in her voice.

  “We’ll be quiet.”

  There was a long pause, and then she said, “Give me a minute.”

  After she’d opened the utility door, they crept up the back stairs, Anna in the lead, stopping every few steps to listen. At last they reached her bedroom.