Beneath a Scarlet Sky: A Novel Page 36

Chapter Twenty-Eight

  They were at the chancellery until dusk. General Wolff left. General Leyers and Cardinal Schuster discussed ways for the Germans and the resistance to trade prisoners.

  It was only outside with the setting of the sun that Pino remembered again that he was charged with taking Leyers prisoner before midnight. He wished the partisans had given him specific instructions beyond an address where he was to take the general. Then again, they’d given him responsibility, a task, just like they’d given Mimo the task of sabotaging tanks. The details were his to work out.

  But as he reached the staff car, Pino was still trying to decide how best to arrest the general, given that he always sat directly behind him in the backseat.

  Opening the rear door to the Fiat, Pino saw Leyers’s valise there and cursed to himself. It had been there the entire time they’d been inside. He could have excused himself and spent time looking at the files in that valise, probably the ones Leyers had saved from the fires.

  General Leyers climbed in without glancing his way and said, “The Hotel Regina.”

  Pino thought about pulling his Walther and putting Leyers under arrest right then and there, but, unsure of himself, he shut the door and got behind the wheel. Due to all the German vehicles jamming the narrow streets, he had to take a convoluted route to Gestapo headquarters.

  Near Piazza San Babila, he saw a German lorry filled with armed soldiers stopped at the exit to a parking garage a half-block away. Someone was standing in the street aiming a machine pistol at the windshield of the Nazi lorry. Pino was stunned when the gunman turned.

  “Mimo,” he gasped, slamming on the brakes.

  “Vorarbeiter?” General Leyers said.

  Pino ignored him and climbed out. He was no more than one hundred meters from his brother, who was waving his gun at the Germans and shouting, “All you Nazi swine lay down your weapons, drop them out of the lorry, and then all of you, facedown on the sidewalk there.”

  The next second seemed like an eternity.

  When no Germans moved, Mimo touched off a burst of fire. Lead bullets pinged off the side of the parking garage. In the ringing silence that followed, the Germans in the back of the lorry began to throw down their guns.

  “Vorarbeiter!” Leyers said, and Pino was surprised to find he’d gotten out of the car as well and was watching the scene over his shoulder. “Forget the Hotel Regina. Take me to Dolly’s instead. I just realized I left some important papers there, and I want to—”

  Emboldened by Mimo and without a thought, Pino drew his pistol, spun around, and stuck it into Leyers’s gut. He enjoyed the look of shock in the general’s eye.

  “What is this, Vorarbeiter?” Leyers said.

  “Your arrest, mon général,” Pino said.

  “Vorarbeiter Lella,” he said firmly. “You will remove that weapon, and we will forget this happened. You will drive me to Dolly’s. I will get my papers and—”

  “I won’t drive you anywhere, slave master!”

  The general took that like a slap to the face. His expression twisted with rage.

  “How dare you address me like this! I could have you shot for treason!”

  “I’ll take treason against you and Hitler any day,” Pino said, equally angry. “Turn around, and hands behind your head, mon général, or I will shoot you in the knees.”

  Leyers sputtered but saw Pino was serious and did as he was told. Pino reached around and took the pistol Leyers carried when he was in business clothes. He pocketed it, waved the Walther, and said, “Get in.”

  Leyers moved toward the rear, but Pino shoved him instead into the driver’s seat.

  With his gun aimed at General Leyers’s head, Pino climbed into the backseat and shut the door. He put his forearm on the valise, as Leyers often did, and smiled, liking this role reversal, feeling like he’d earned it, that now, at last, there would be justice done.

  He looked past Leyers through the windshield. His brother had twenty Nazi soldiers on their bellies, hands behind their heads. Mimo was unloading and stacking their weapons on the opposite sidewalk.

  “It doesn’t have to be like this, Vorarbeiter,” Leyers said. “I have money, lots of it.”

  “German money?” Pino snorted. “It will be worthless, if it isn’t already. Turn the car around now, and as you have told me so often, don’t talk unless you’re spoken to.”

  The general paused, but then started the car and did a three-point turn. When he did, Pino rolled down the back window, yelling, “I’ll see you at home, Mimo!”

  His brother looked up in wonder, realized who was yelling at him, and threw his fist over his head.

  “Uprising, Pino!” Mimo shouted. “Uprising!”

  Pino felt chills go through him as Leyers drove them out of San Babila and toward the address Mimo had passed along from the partisan commanders. He had no idea why he was supposed to bring Leyers to that specific address, and he didn’t care. He was no longer in the shadows. He was no longer a spy. He was part of the rebellion now, and it made him feel righteous as he barked directions and turns at the general, who drove stoop shouldered.

  Ten minutes into the ride, Leyers said, “I have more than German money.”

  “I don’t care,” Pino said.

  “I have gold. We can go and—”

  Pino poked Leyers’s head with the pistol barrel. “I know you have gold. Gold you stole from Italy. Gold you murdered four of your slaves over, and I don’t want it.”

  “Murdered?” Leyers said. “No, Vorarbeiter, that’s not—”

  “I hope you face a firing squad for what you’ve done.”

  General Leyers stiffened. “You can’t mean that.”

  “Shut up. I don’t want to hear another word.”

  Leyers seemed resigned to his fate then, and drove sullenly through the city as Pino entertained a voice in his head that said, Don’t miss your chance. Exact some punishment. Have him pull over. Shoot him in the leg, at least. Let him go to his fate wounded and in agony. Isn’t that the way you’re supposed to enter hell?

  The general rolled down his window at one point and put his head out as if to smell his last moments of freedom. But when they rolled up to the gate at the address on Via Broni, Leyers stared straight ahead.

  A gunman wearing a red scarf came out the gate. Pino told him he’d been ordered to arrest the general and was there to turn him over.

  “We’ve been waiting,” the guard said, and called for the gate to be opened.

  Leyers drove into a compound and parked. He opened the door and tried to get out. Another partisan grabbed him, spun him around, and handcuffed him. The first gunman took the valise.

  Leyers looked back at Pino with disgust but said nothing before he was dragged off through a door. It slammed shut behind him, and Pino realized he’d never told the general he was a spy.

  “What happens to him?” Pino asked.

  “He’ll go on trial, probably be hanged,” the guard with the valise said.

  Pino felt acid in his throat as he said, “I want to testify against him.”

  “I’m sure you’ll get your chance. Car keys?”

  Pino handed them over. “What do I do?”

  “Go home. Here, take this letter. Show it to any partisan who might stop you.”

  Pino took the letter, folded it, and put it in his pocket. “Can I get a ride?”

  “Sorry,” he said. “You’ll have to walk. Don’t worry, in ten or twenty minutes, it won’t be hard to see at all.”

  “Do you know my brother, Mimo Lella?” Pino asked.

  The guard laughed. “We all know that terror, and we’re happy he’s on our side.”

  Despite their praise for Mimo, Pino walked to the gate feeling let down and cheated somehow. Why hadn’t he told Leyers he was a spy? Why hadn’t he asked what he was burning in those files? What was it? Evidence of slavery? And what were those papers he wanted to retrieve from Dolly’s apartment?

  Did the papers matter? The p
artisans had the valise and at least some of the files Leyers had saved from the bonfires. And Pino would testify against him, tell the world what he’d seen General Leyers do.

  When he exited the gate, Pino was on the southeast side of Milan in one of the most heavily bombed neighborhoods. In the darkness, he kicked things and stumbled and worried about falling into some crater in the wasteland before he could find his way home.

  A rifle shot rang out not far away. And then another, followed by a burst of automatic gunfire and a grenade explosion. Pino crouched, feeling like he’d walked into a trap. He was about to turn around, try to find another way home, when in the distance he heard the Duomo’s smaller bells start to peal. Then the cathedral’s big bells and carillon joined, donging and tolling in the darkness.

  Pino felt summoned, pulled toward the basilica. He got up and started toward the bells and the Duomo, not caring about the rifle shots that crackled in the streets around him. Other church bells began to peal, and soon it all sounded like Easter morning.

  Then, without warning, and for the first time in nearly two years, streetlamps all around Milan flickered on and brightened, banishing the night and the city’s long misery in the shadows of war. Pino blinked at how bright the lamps were, and how they made Milan’s ruins and scars stand out scorched and livid.

  But the lights were on! And the bells were ringing! Pino felt an enormous sense of relief. Was this it? Was it over? All those German units agreed not to fight. Correct? But the soldiers Mimo arrested had not laid down their guns without threat.

  Gunfire and explosions went off to the northeast, toward the central train station and the Piccolo Theater, Fascist headquarters. He realized partisans and Fascists must be fighting for control of Milan. It was a civil war. Or perhaps there were Germans there as well, and it was a three-way battle.

  In any case, Pino went west, looping toward the Duomo, away from the fighting. On street after street, the people of Milan were tearing down blackout curtains in the buildings that survived and letting more light flood out into the city. Whole families hung out their windows, cheering and calling for the Nazis to be driven into the sea. Many others were out in the streets, looking up at the lights as if they were a fantasy come true.

  The elation was short-lived. Machine gun fire erupted from ten different directions. Pino could hear its rattle-and-pause near and far. He recalled the battle that had raged around the cemetery where Gabriella Rocha lay. The war isn’t over, he realized. Neither is the insurrection. The pacts made in Cardinal Schuster’s office were falling apart. By the pace of the fighting, Pino soon believed he was absolutely hearing three-way combat: partisans versus Nazis, and partisans against the Fascists.

  When a grenade exploded in one of the adjacent streets, people began to scatter and run back into their homes. Pino bolted into an erratic, zigzagging run. When he reached Piazza Duomo, six German Panzer tanks still squatted around the perimeter of the square, their cannon barrels aiming outward. The cathedral’s floodlights were still on, illuminating the entire church, and the bells were still tolling, but otherwise the piazza was deserted. Pino swallowed and moved fast and diagonally across the open ground, praying no snipers were waiting on the upper floors of the buildings that framed the square.

  He reached the corner of the cathedral without incident and walked on in the shadow of the great church, looking up and seeing how soot from the years of bombardment and fire had darkened the pale-pink marble facade. Pino wondered if the stains of war would ever leave Milan.

  He thought of Anna then, and wondered whether she was settled into Dolly’s new place in Innsbruck, and sleeping. It comforted him to think of her like that, safe, warm, so elegant.

  Pino smiled and moved quicker. In ten minutes he was outside his parents’ apartment building. He checked his pocket for his papers, climbed up the stairs, and pushed through the front door, expecting the SS sentries to be eyeing him. But there was no one on guard, and when the birdcage elevator rose past the fifth floor, the guards there were absent as well.

  They’re gone! They’re all running!

  He was genuinely happy as he dug out his keys and fit them into the lock. He pushed the door open to find a small party underway. His father had his violin on its stand, and he’d opened two bottles of fine Chianti, which sat on the living room table by two empty bottles. Michele was drunk and laughing by the fireplace with Mario, his cousin’s son, the pilot. And Aunt Greta? She was sitting on her husband’s lap smothering him with kisses.

  Uncle Albert saw Pino, threw his arms up in victory, and cried, “Hey, you, Pino Lella! You come over here and give your uncle a hug!”

  Pino burst out laughing and ran over to hug them all. He drank wine and listened to Uncle Albert’s dramatic recounting of the uprising in San Vittore Prison—how they’d overpowered the Fascist guards, opened up the cells, and released everyone.

  “The best moment of my life, besides meeting Greta, was marching out the front gates of that prison,” Uncle Albert said, beaming. “The shackles were off. We were free. Milan is free!”

  “Not quite yet,” Pino said. “I walked a long way through the city tonight. The pacts Cardinal Schuster made are being ignored. There’s fighting in pockets all over.”

  Then he told them about Mimo and how he had faced down all those German soldiers single-handedly. His father was stunned. “Alone?”

  “Completely,” Pino said, full of pride. “I think I have a lot of guts, Papa, but my little brother is something else.”

  He picked up the wine bottle and poured himself another glass, feeling deliriously good. Had Anna been by his side celebrating the insurrection with his family, he would have felt near perfect. Pino wondered when he’d see her again, when he’d hear from her. He checked the phone and to his surprise found it working. But his father said they’d received no calls before his arrival.

  Long after midnight, glowing and woozy with wine, Pino crawled into his bed. Through the open window he heard the growl of the Panzer tanks starting up, and then their treads clanking across the cobblestones, moving away to the northeast. He dozed before hearing explosions and automatic rifles in the direction the tanks had taken.

  All through the night, the sounds of battle in Milan rose and fell like one chorus after another, each voice singing of conflict, each song reaching a crescendo, and then ebbing off to echoes and strains. Pino wrapped his head in his pillow and finally slept deeply and full of dreams: of that disgusted look General Leyers had given him walking away, of snipers shooting down on him as he ran through the city, but mostly of Anna and their last night together, how magical and powerful it had been, how perfect and God given.

  Pino awoke on Thursday, April 26, and looked at his clock.

  Ten a.m.? When was the last time he’d slept that long? He didn’t know, but it felt delicious. Then he smelled bacon cooking. Bacon? Where had that come from?

  When he’d dressed and reached the kitchen, he found his father setting crisp bacon on a plate and gesturing to a bowl full of fresh eggs Mario was holding.

  “A partisan friend of your uncle Albert just brought these,” Michele said. “Albert’s out in the hall talking to him. And I’m using the last of the espresso I had hidden in the closet.”

  Uncle Albert came in. He looked very hungover and a little concerned.

  “Pino, you are needed for your English,” he said. “They want you to go to the Hotel Diana, and ask for a man named Knebel.”

  “Who’s Knebel?”

  “An American. That’s all I know.”

  Another American? The second in two days!

  “Okay,” he said, looking longingly at the bacon frying, the eggs, and the coffee brewing. “But do I have to go now?”

  “After you eat,” his father said.

  Mario the aviator cooked Pino scrambled eggs, and he wolfed them down along with the bacon and a double espresso. Pino couldn’t remember when he’d last had such a feast at breakfast, and then he did—at Casa Alp
ina. He thought about Father Re, wondered how he and Brother Bormio were getting on. The next chance he had, he’d take Anna up to Motta to meet the priest and to ask him to marry them.

  That thought made him happy and confident in a way he’d never felt before. It must have shown, because Uncle Albert came over as Pino was cleaning dishes, and said in a whisper, “You’re standing there grinning like a fool and staring off, which means you’re in love.”

  Pino laughed. “Maybe.”

  “The young lady there, who helped you with the radio?”

  “Anna. The one who loves your work.”

  “Does your father know? Your mother?”

  “They’ve never met. Soon, though.”

  Uncle Albert patted Pino on the back. “To be young and in love. Isn’t it remarkable that something like that can happen in the middle of a war? It says something about the inherent goodness of life, despite all the evil we’ve seen.”

  Pino adored his uncle. There was an awful lot going on in that man’s head.

  “I should go now,” Pino said, wiping his hands dry. “Meet Signor Knebel.”

  Pino left the apartment building and headed toward the Hotel Diana on Viale Piave, not far from the telephone exchange and Piazzale Loreto. Within two blocks he saw a body, a man, facedown in the gutter, a bullet wound to the back of his head. He saw the second and third corpses five blocks from the apartment: a man and a woman in their nightclothes, as if they’d been dragged from their beds. The farther he walked the more dead he saw, almost all head shot, almost all lying facedown in the gutter in the building heat.

  Pino was horrified and sickened. By the time he reached the Hotel Diana he’d counted seventy corpses rotting in the sun. Sporadic shooting continued to the north of his route. Someone said the partisans had encircled a large number of Black Shirts trying to escape Milan. The Fascists were fighting to the death.

  Pino tugged on the front doors to the Hotel Diana and found them locked. He knocked, waited, and got no response. Going around the back, he tried a door and got it open. He entered an empty kitchen that smelled of recently cooked meat. One set of padded swinging doors on the other side of the kitchen led to a dark, empty restaurant, and the other to a dimly lit ballroom.