A Thread of Grace

Buntenhof appears in the doorway. “Sir, I have Standartenführer Reinecke for you.”

On the telephone, Knyphausen briefs Reinecke on the kidnapping. Messner watches worriedly. Wincing at Reinecke’s response, Knyphausen holds the handset a few centimeters from his ear. Messner motions for it. When Knyphausen refuses, Messner shouts, “Helmut, my friend! You must help! Think of Martina!”

“Buntenhof!” Knyphausen calls. “Get this man out of here!”

Messner is pulled from the office, still pleading at the top of his voice. It’s difficult to follow what Reinecke is shouting. Clark’s Fifth Army has launched a huge attack. A ferocious battle is under way. Kesselring wants the partisan threat behind his lines liquidated.

“But Gruppenführer von Thadden—?” Knyphausen asks.

“Damn you, Knyphausen— we have our orders!”

Reinecke cuts the co

Six hundred short of the figure in their own municipal records. Lies. Deception. They had their chance. “Messner!” Knyphausen shouts. When the anxious Volksdeutscher presents himself, Knyphausen points to the mountains looming above this wretched little nest of vipers. “Tell those bandits they are to release the hostages unharmed by noon, or pay the price. There will be no negotiation.”

Messner looks stu

Knyphausen turns on his heel. He needs to get out of the damned sun, back into the relative cool of his office—

“Prego, Sturmba

It’s that damned one-legged priest again, at the edge of the piazza crowd with a stocky little goblin of a man at his side. “Sturmba

“I’m the one,” the ugly brute is saying. “Just me! No one else—”

Messner shouts something. The sergeant shoves him on his way.

“They were abusing a girl,” the priest says. “Santino only wanted to—”

Knyphausen stomps down the steps, into the glare, his head pounding. “Are you telling me that this— this one man, this one man, this single piece of stinking shit killed five German soldiers?” Knyphausen draws his Luger, points it at the priest’s head. “He is some kind of spaghetti-sucking Übermensch? Is that what you expect me to believe?”

The crowd surges forward, their shouts and cries drowning Knyphausen’s rage. Sentries push back with rifles at present arms. Dogs lunge. Officers’ arms rise and fall, whips striking at anyone in range. A soldier smashes his rifle butt into the priest’s shoulders. Cawing and clawing her way to the priest’s side, an old black crow screams abuse at the soldier, and then simply screams when she, too, is knocked to the ground between the goblin and the priest.

Three flat, loud reports echo against the buildings. Bodies jerk, flop, go still. In the sudden silence, Knyphausen does not need to shout. “Get the rest of these people into that church.”

Hazy sunlight yields to featureless cloud cover. By late afternoon, the valley seems to steam. Claudia Cicala sits on a high rock ledge, her husband’s Carcano ’91 cradled in her arms. A man she does not recognize works his way up the mountain toward the hunchback’s house. Trudging doggedly, he disappears around a switchback or behind the trees, reappearing whenever a terraced field interrupts the forest. His limp is obvious, but long before she can see his face, she knows this is not Don Leto. He has two arms— not Pierino then. He is too tall, too slim to be Santino.

Two hours later, close enough to speak, he shows himself unarmed, and removes his hat. “Giulietta, I have bad news.”

She looks more carefully. He is changed, but she remembers the day he called her that. He is not a German, Don Leto told her. He is a Jew. An Italian Jew who was once a soldier.

“Sono desolato,” he says. “Your Romeo was an honorable man.”

With painful effort, he lowers himself, sitting at her side. For a long time, they watch the darkness gather. A widow of sixteen. A cripple of thirty-one. In the distance, thousands of birds coalesce in the smoky dusk, wheeling, diving, soaring in unison on scythe-shaped wings.

The man lifts a hand toward them. “Apus apus, of the family Micropodidae,” he says. “I was killing time in a library once, and looked them up. ‘The common swift is the most aerial of birds,’ ” he recites, “ ‘so perfectly adapted to flight, the species’ feet are nearly vestigial.’ ”

“Micropodidae,” she whispers. “Tiny feet…”

“They never land on the ground or perch on branches. Swifts ride air currents all night, sleeping. They eat, and preen— even mate in the air. I wouldn’t have believed it, but I saw them when I was a pilot. They collect nesting material on the wing. Straw, dry grass, flower petals. Anything light enough to be carried by the wind. Swifts nest just long enough to raise their young, and then… They return to their element.”

“We thought if he turned himself in, no one else would be hurt,” she says.

The wind rises. To the south, there are flashes of white light within and below the clouds. Lightning, and artillery. She knows the difference now, instructed by Pierino. Each evening all summer, Mussolini’s San Marco brigades have blindly lobbed 155mm shells into Valdottavo; the partisans replied with captured 81mm mortars, aiming just as blindly at the sound of the San Marco guns. Any effect on the opposition was purely accidental. Today was different. Across the valley, there were battles and skirmishes. Fires, everywhere. Borgo San Mauro and a dozen other towns smolder. Santa Chiara is gone. Zia Tercilla, she thinks. Bettina. Cesare Brondello. All the people who took Claudia and her father in, and treated them like family.

The temperature begins to drop. Outru

The man gets to his feet, graceless as a grounded swift. “We have a roof,” he says. “We should get inside.” The first fat drops hit her face. She lets him help her up. “Prego,” he says, trying to take the heavy rifle from her hands. “Let me carry this for you.”

She lifts the rifle, holds it closer. She studies this strange, scarred man she barely knows. “Will you use it?” she asks. He looks away, then meets her eyes. She waits until he nods, and then she hands it over.

Standing at his window, Helmut Reinecke stares at the teeming rain while his adjutant reads the draft report. “ ‘In response to recent partisan ambushes and attacks, three battalions of the 2nd SS-Panzerkorps Regiment, 12th Division Waffen-SS Walther Reinhardt, were ordered to engage the enemy in Valdottavo, where partisan bands have roamed freely. A show of force near their strongholds was sufficient to cause the male population to flee into the mountains, carrying firearms and grenades. The bases of these bandits were destroyed. A number of houses were burned to the ground when partisan munitions hidden within them exploded. Several Communist sympathizers were executed.’ ” Scheel looks up. “Should I have mentioned the civilians in that church, Standartenführer?”

Reinecke’s conscience is clear. Huppenkothen said it: when soldiers take off their uniforms and conceal their weapons, they are no longer protected by the Geneva Convention. And neither are those who support them. “Items of military importance only, Scheel.” Perimeter floodlights create pyramids of gilt raindrops so close together they seem solid. “What is it the French say? Après moi, le deluge! Something like that…”