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All too soon, a British officer picks him out of the crowd, and waves him to the sideline of the carnival. “Powell, S.O.E.,” this captain says, shouting to be heard. “We landed by Lysander at Vesime. You were ordered to keep these men out of Sant’Andrea!”
Concentrating mightily, Simon struggles to recall such an order. Yes— there was a transmission from Field Marshal Alexander in Tunis, sometime in the past few days. “Under no circumstances are the irregulars to attack the northern cities until Allied forces arrive to lead them. They are to hold their positions and limit their actions to harrying missions.”
For a year and a half, the partisans of northern Italy fought the Fascists with minimal outside help. Carpenters and lawyers, farm boys and shopkeepers, carabinieri and theology students, butchers and musicians and railway workers put aside every social and political difference among them. Together, they swarmed over roads, bridges, train tracks, airports, wiping out German columns sent to demolish Italian infrastructure, attacking every remaining Fascist garrison. They endured hunger, brutal weather, thousands of casualties, untold grief and suffering, and on the brink of victory, Alexander wanted them to stand down. Simon knew the boss well enough to anticipate his response to that. Rather than deliver the decoded message to Renzo, Simon had simply tossed the crumpled paper into a campfire.
Now, with a smart salute, he gathers all the bleary dignity he can muster and lies. “Like King Canute, sir, I tried to stem the tide. Regrettably, it did no good, sir.”
“Yes, I see the difficulty,” Powell says, himself distracted by a lovely brunette offering a bottle and an open-armed welcome. “Mille grazie, signorina. Too kind,” he says formally, adding, “Carry on, Corporal,” before plunging into the crowd for a dance.
PENSIONE USODIMARE
PORTO SANT’ANDREA
Above the city proper, Antonia Usodimare turns toward the footsteps behind her. Looking better for a bath, twenty hours’ sleep, and a change of clothes, the man she knew as Ugo Messner joins her in the doorway and listens to the bells. “They’re still having their fun,” she says. “All night, they’ve been drinking.”
“A gigantic national hangover in the making,” he remarks.
“But I’ll be the one with a headache.” Everyone knows what happened when the Reds took over Russia. Before long, boys with guns will pronounce sentences on Republican officials, landlords, bankers, anyone faintly aristocratic, anyone with money, anyone whose death will profit a personal enemy. Antonia survived this war by taking German and Fascist boarders, and she knows she’s in for trouble. “I’m an old woman,” she says. “A widow with no sons. All I have is this pensione. How long before a mob comes to burn me out?”
“Duno and Claudia will be awake soon, signora. They’ll vouch for you. I left British cash and a letter that should help as well. In the meantime?” He takes her hand, raises it to his lips. Kisses it respectfully, and winks. “Make a flag, signora. And practice looking happy.”
Hands in his pockets, hat tipped back, Renzo Leoni strolls away, enjoying a peacefulness he’s never felt before. “Why is it so easy now?” Claudia asked him once, when she returned to the brigade, no longer pregnant. “I can’t seem to be afraid anymore.”
“You have no one to live for,” he told her. “It’s a kind of freedom.”
Ambling downhill, he finds a local barber heating water in a German helmet over a small fire, and sinks blissfully into all-but-forgotten sensations. A chair beneath him. A warm towel draped around his face. A close shave, and a decent haircut.
He tips the barber handsomely. Finds a newsstand and buys all the one-page papers available. Following the scent of finely ground coffee hoarded in anticipation of this day, he locates an outdoor café. Sits at a table in its little island of swept pavement. Lights a cigarette, orders an espresso, lays the papers out, and pieces the story together.
Sometime last month, von Vietinghoff requested permission for Army Group C to retreat back to Germany. From his bunker in Berlin, Hitler ordered Italy destroyed instead. Despairing of their Führer’s sanity, Wehrmacht and SS generals burned their records, and contacted Church officials. In return for safe conduct back to Germany, their troops would not carry out the scorched-earth command from Berlin; civil authority would be handed over to the Committee for National Liberation. Bishops and archbishops relayed their messages to partisan commanders.
The CNL happily responded that Eisenhower’s orders were clear: no negotiations with the enemy. The Germans were invited to surrender unconditionally. Von Vietinghoff wavered, then refused. Partisan attacks redoubled. The Reich’s defeated divisions indulged in a final spasm of barbarous attacks on civilians, but by the end of the week, all German armies in Italy surrendered. The ceremony lasted seventeen minutes.
The local news is startlingly unheroic. The CNL plans to present a united front in negotiations with the Allies for control of the Sant’Andrea city government. Political parties are dividing up spheres of influence: food distribution, telephone and electric utilities, police and fire departments. He recognizes a name or two. Jakub Landau will be the head of a civil engineering group; il polacco will begin sewer repairs immediately.
Sewers, Renzo thinks with a snort. I’d rather be dead.
The bells have stopped ringing. A weeping girl, still plump from German food, rushes past. Her head is shaved and doused with red paint. Reprisals have begun. There’s gunfire somewhere near the warehouse district. Pockets of resistance being cleaned up, most likely. Republican soldiers who held out until the end.
The wrong kind of patriots, he thinks.
He stubs out the cigarette, drops a pound note on the table. Leaving the papers for the next patron, he walks downhill, toward the center of town. The whole city seems to have had huge holes bashed in it by a colossal hammer. Walls still standing are plastered with grainy news posters: il Duce and his mistress hung upside down from a Milanese lamppost. Scrawled graffiti everywhere. Down with Mussolini! Death to Fascism! There’s no intact glass anywhere; shards glitter under broken masonry and rusted iron. Most of a child lies near a pile of debris.
San Giobatta’s bell tower has collapsed. The gap allows a view of the docks, where Italians long past delusions of dignity hold out tin pails for food flung into the crowd by British sailors who were shelling them a week ago.
Crouched on a curb, a tiny barefoot boy holds out muddy cigarette butts salvaged from gutters, begging people to buy them. Like an ancient Roman tossing bread at the circus, Renzo flips the kid a pack of Gold Flakes. Stu
A few blocks way, the curving marble staircase of the municipal palace is exposed to smoky daylight. Scorched papers blow through the collapsed facade and flutter down the street. In the piazza itself, bodies hang from a makeshift gallows. The north wall of the palazzo still stands, decorated with dripping starbursts of red, chest-high. The executions are presided over by a sixteen-year-old boy with a Sten. The head of the tribunal is a year or two older. Renzo congratulates himself on his own exquisite timing.
Then he sees the mountainous corpse. Executed by firing squad, too heavy to risk on a noose.
With Osvaldo Tomitz dead, there was no one left to testify on Serafino Brizzolari’s behalf. Despairing, Renzo tries to remember when he heard the shots. Was I drinking coffee? Belandi. If I’d skipped that goddamned haircut…
The rest of his plan is flawless— aided, even, by this final failure. The piazza is filled with people eager to finger others, and now simply asking about Brizzolari is enough to arouse hostility. “That’s Ugo Messner!” cries the rabbity little waiter who served cappuccino to Nazis for eighteen months. “I heard him say, ‘My faith in the Führer and the Vaterland is unshaken! I am a good Nazi,’ he said, ‘and I hate the partisans!’ ”