A Thread of Grace

It’s a poor angle. Santino goes for a body shot. The round goes sideways through the boy’s back. His grip on the girl flies open. His screams join hers, and those of the castrato.

“How many more?” Santino asks. “Where are the others?”

“Two dead, three wounded,” Tercilla says grimly.

“One ran,” Claudia tells him as Pierino returns.

“Fffinish them,” Pierino advises.

The girl is rigid with fear, her half-nude body gaudy with brilliant red and sickly yellow. It can’t get worse for her. Santino takes a deep breath. Lets it out slowly. Sights. Squeezes. Once. Twice. Three times.

Claudia and Pierino bolt down the slope. Pierino kicks bodies and collects sidearms while Claudia leads the girl up the slope. It’s Maria Avoni, Tercilla realizes, disgusted. Blouse ripped, legs bare, Maria’s face is all open mouth and dirt and tears. Everybody knew something like this would happen, and the little tramp has put the whole of Santa Chiara at risk, coming up here to do her dirty business.

Neighbors arrive in groups of two and three. Some carry knives. Old Cesare Brondello has a shotgun. When he sees the bodies, Cesare sends his granddaughter back for picks and shovels, and goes to Claudia’s fidanzato, digging a rag out of his own back pocket.

“Wipe your mouth,” he says, when the Calabrian’s done emptying his stomach. “You never killed before?”

Pasty-faced, Santino shakes his head. “Only animals.”

“Then nothing has changed,” the old man says. “We’ll bury the bastards, but you’d better say good-bye to Claudia. You can’t stay here.”

Five minutes, Claudia thinks. We had five minutes, and now he’s gone off somewhere with Pierino, and who knows when we’ll see each other?

She and the girl are ankle-deep in the creek. The other women stand at the edge of the water, talking behind their hands while Claudia sluices soapy water over a young body frighteningly like her own. “Sit down,” she says. “I’ll wash your hair.”

“I’m dirty,” the girl says angrily, nails scraping at her thighs. “There’s still dirt.”

“Those are bruises.” Claudia dips the rag into the water over and over, searching for blood and brains in crevices, behind ears.

“I want to confess!”

“You didn’t do anything wrong,” Claudia tells her, glaring at the village women, whose eyes shift away. “My name is Claudia. What’s your name? Tell me your name.”

“Maria,” the girl says, breaking down again. “Like Our Lady. Like the Virgin!”

Tercilla waits with a dry cloth. “Get dressed. You’re clean.”

“No! I’m still dirty. I want Don Leto! I have to confess!”

“Maria, listen to me!” Claudia cries. “You didn’t do anything wrong! It was the soldiers—”

“But I agreed!” Maria wails. “He promised— We were hungry, and I agreed!” She looks at the others, her eyes pleading. “But just to one— not to six! Not to six!”

Old and young, the women of Santa Chiara look at one another, and then at Claudia, who is still pure. You see? their faces ask. You see what happens? Guard your virtue, or you’ll end up like that little slut Maria Avoni! Maria can see it in their eyes. “You think I don’t know what you’re thinking?” She wipes her nose on the back of her hand, defiant now. “Puttana tedesca! Go on, say it! German whore!”

Suddenly furious, Tercilla Lovera splashes into the creek and hits Maria hard, twice, across the face. “God help you!” she snarls. “God help us all, when the Germans find out what you have caused!”

HEADQUARTERS, SS-PANZERGRENADIER

2ND REGIMENT

12TH WAFFEN-SS WALTHER REINHARDT DIVISION

ROCCABARBENA

The sun sets. Europe’s airwaves fill with coded transmissions. Snow on flowers; grass on high hills; bright birds sing. The images of poetry, drafted for war service. Opera, too, has been dragooned. On Radio Berlin, Siegfried sings of reforging his father’s broken sword: a German counteroffensive is cleared to begin twelve hours later. Tonio declares his love for the Daughter of the Regiment on Radio London: some partisan band can expect a British airdrop, this time tomorrow night. The telephone exchange between Erhardt von Thadden and Helmut Reinecke seems an ordinary conversation about Reinecke’s baby daughter, by contrast.

“Ach! I almost forgot,” von Thadden says. “My Martina sends greetings to your dear wife, and apologizes for a missing line in that recipe she sent on Wednesday. It should begin, ‘Boil the macaroni.’ ”

“Thank you, Gruppenführer,” says the recently promoted Standartenführer Reinecke. “Will you be joining us for di

“Nothing would please me more.”

Kinder und Kuchen conscripted for war work now.

Allied commanders have finally learned Blitzkrieg. Fluid lines, fluid operations. Commanders encouraged to be bold, to let armored columns break through wherever possible without worrying about flank protection or supply. Vast numbers of Wehrmacht troops have been encircled. The Red Army is on the Prussian border, the American fifty kilometers from Köln and the Ruhr. Soviet factories churn out three thousand planes a month, and nearly as many tanks. American armament plants run around the clock. “They can add rooks and knights and bishops to the board on every play,” von Thadden said, “and Germany has no pawns left.”

The two men have been close from the day Reinecke became von Thadden’s adjutant. Not quite father and son but kindred spirits, they’ve disagreed on one issue alone: conduct of the antipartisan war. Reinecke argued for the lure, hoping to win anti-Communists to their side. Von Thadden gave it a fair trial, but every kilometer lost to the Allies has given comfort to the insurgents. Bolder by the day, they’ve accounted for thirty thousand German casualties since May, nearly matching the numbers lost to the British Eighth and American Fifth Armies. “It’s time for the cudgel,” Reinecke conceded. “Allow me to wield it, Gruppenführer.”

For the first time since he left Russia for Italy, Helmut Reinecke is back in the field, no mere lieutenant but a Standartenführer at the head of a panzergrenadier regiment. With five thousand of von Thadden’s men under his command, Reinecke has used the early weeks of his new rank well: deploying troops, positioning artillery. “We are to hold northern Italy, at all costs,” he told his company commanders, and he read to them Kesselring’s latest orders, with particular emphasis on their final lines. “The situation in the Italian theater has deteriorated to such an extent that it constitutes a serious danger to fighting troops and their supply lines, as well as to the war industry and economic potential. The partisans are a motley collection of Allied, Italian, and Balkan soldiers, and even German deserters who lead native civilians of both sexes, of different callings and ages. The fight against them must be carried out with the utmost severity. I will protect any commander who exceeds our usual restraint in the methods he adopts against the partisans. A. Kesselring, Field Marshal.”

Gruppenführer von Thadden will arrive on Sunday evening. The action is scheduled for the following Wednesday. Everything is settled, but the plan receives added impetus when Reinecke’s own adjutant— a laconic man named Scheel— appears at the office door with a dispatch. On a routine patrol this afternoon, German soldiers from the San Mauro garrison were ambushed by local farmers. A savage firefight ended with five Germans dead. A sixth escaped to report the squad’s massacre.

The Geneva Convention could ask no more. Quickly Reinecke dictates the wording of the notice to Scheel. “Print five hundred,” he orders. “I want them posted by dawn.”

CHURCH OF SAN MAURO

17 SEPTEMBER

Leto Girotti lifts his eyes, extending, raising, and joining his hands together. Bowing his head, he turns to face the congregation once more and makes the sign of the cross over them. “Benedicat vos omnipotens Deus: Pater, et Filius, et Spiritus Sanctus.” Some six hundred of the faithful sing their “Amen” with the choir.