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Angelo ignores the boxes and stuff, trudging on until he finds the paratrooper whose chute never opened and is almost for sure dead. Still, he might be faking, and taking bullets is sort of stealing, so Angelo sits down behind some trees and holds his breath as long as he can, watching to see if anything moves. When the body passes this test of deadness, Angelo looks around for a big, long stick and creeps out of the trees toward the rocks the paratrooper fell on.
He pokes at the body a little at first, then harder. The real problem is, the gun’s underneath the guy. Angelo considers pushing the body over, but there’s a commando knife strapped to the top leg, and that would be as good as a bullet to show the kids at the farm. Holding his breath again, Angelo puts the stick down and reaches for the knife—
A hoarse shout startles him. He falls backward, scrambles to his feet, puts his hands up, like in a cowboy movie. For a terrible moment, he thinks the men are fascisti, but nobody’s wearing a uniform. “Ei! Over here!” he calls, waving his arms over his head, so they won’t think he didn’t know they were partisans. “I found the airdrop! Over here!”
He waits for them to arrive, dancing a little with excitement. There are nine men, clanking with guns and knives. The first ones are contadini for sure, short and thick: built like a brick outhouse, the factor always said. The last two must be city people, because they’re taller, and look tired. Nobody talks while the tallest, ski
Angelo raises his hand, like he’s in school. The second-tallest one has a scary scarred face, but he snorts a laugh and nods permission to speak. “That guy’s dead,” Angelo tells him. “I made sure! But there’s another one up there, and I saw more boxes and stuff over there! I can show you!”
The scarred-up man looks hard at him. “What’s your name, kid?”
After a moment’s hesitation, he says, “Angelo,” but not his last name, because you never know.
“Angelo Soncini?” the scarred-up man asks. “Schramm, this is Mirella’s boy! Angelo, it’s me, Renzo Leoni!” Angelo couldn’t swear to it, the man seems like maybe he could be the neighbor who came to Mother of Mercy wearing a priest dress one time. “Belandi,” the man swears, “what the hell are you doing out here? You could get killed! Look how big you are!”
“I’m ten!” Angelo says. “Almost.” He looks at the lightening eastern sky and realizes his mother is going to know he snuck out. “We should get going,” he says, adding, “I saw some Germans coming, too!” to make sure everyone will hurry up.
Angelo leaps from rock to rock, like an island-hopping giant in a white ocean, having a grand time. Considerably less amused, the men struggle along in his wake, trying not to fall into the pools of deep snow between the crags as they tramp down a ravine and across a frozen kettle pond and around the hip of a hill. They find a generator, a radio, and a canister of cigarettes at fifty-meter intervals, well packed and apparently unharmed, but the last of the Dakota’s cargo is higher on the mountainside in a drop zone nobody would have selected, and no footsteps lead away from the parachute.
Lifting silk away from snow, they expect another corpse. Instead a drowsy young man stares up at them and blinks slowly. “I trie’ a roll,” he says.
“Dig,” Schramm says, and everyone does, clearing the snow with their bare hands, tugging at the Tommy’s arms to pull him free. The Englishman begins to hum tunelessly, stopping now and then to make some remark and giggle. “Try not to jar him. Sometimes their hearts just stop,” Schramm warns. “We’ve got to get him warm as soon as possible.”
“I live right over there,” Angelo tells Renzo. “Mamma will take care of him.” The men pause and look at one another. “It’s safe,” Angelo says confidently. “The owner is a big shot with medals and stuff. He knows all the fascisti, and they don’t bother us.”
“Renzo,” Schramm says in a low voice, “if you want this man to live…”
Renzo closes his eyes, weighs priorities, issues orders. “Tullio, get back to base. Send your father back here with twenty men— wait, make it thirty— as fast as they can travel. You, you, you: take the radio equipment to Monteverdi for safekeeping. You two stay here to dig. Otello, go down to the farm with Angelo, so his mother doesn’t think he’s making this up.”
“And tell her to get a good fire going,” Schramm orders. “Heat some water!”
Still half-buried, the Englishman waves to the dispersing partisans. “Bye-bye!” he calls cheerily, then begins to sing, loudly and in a variety of keys. “Weeee’ll mee’ tagain, don’ know where, don’ know wheeeen…”
“Hurry,” Schramm says. “When they stop making sense, they don’t have much time.”
The paratrooper’s halfway to Tipperary when they’ve dragged him to the surface. Breathless from the effort, they listen to the jaunty march for a few minutes, then struggle to their feet.
“Schramm,” Renzo says as they make ready to carry the half-frozen paratrooper toward Villa Malcovato, “the ski instructors said if someone’s hypothermic, you warm him up slowly.”
Schramm concentrates on uncoupling the Englishman’s harness and lines. “We did some research,” he says vaguely. “Faster is better.”
Hearing comes first. People whispering. Boots on wooden floors. His own existence is next. He’s warm. Sitting in a chair. His legs feel heavy in an odd sort of way. He opens his eyes, blinks owlishly, takes in his surroundings a little at a time. A fireplace. A window.
“Caporale?” he hears a woman say.
She is, alarmingly, pretty as an angel, although Simon never expected heavenly beings to look so tired. Two sleeping cherubs snuggle on his lap, one under each arm, wrapped inside the same blankets tucked around him. That’s when he realizes he’s been stripped to his socks and army-issue Y-fronts, and that a bare-chested man is sitting right behind him.
The tired angel puts her hand against his chest, to keep him from leaping out of the chair. “Calma ti,” she says soothingly. “Tu sei fra amici.”
Amici means friends, but standing just beyond her is a group of fearsome-looking men, apparently outfitted at a jumble sale. Italian army jackets, city tweeds, hand-knit jumpers. Baggy peasant pants, trousers from woolen suits or German uniforms. Laced hunting boots, wooden clogs, street shoes, German combat boots. They’re heavily armed with an equally international collection of military-issue weapons, shotguns and hunting rifles, police pistols and meat cleavers.
Their disorderly appearance contrasts with the attention and obedience they give a slender, middle-aged man with a badly scarred face and a submachine gun slung casually over his left shoulder. Noticing Simon, Scarface breaks off their conversation and comes closer. “Parli italiano?”
Simon spots his uniform drying on a rack in front of the fire. “There’s a phrase book in my kit,” he tells them, pointing with one finger. Reaching around the little girls, he mimes opening a book with his palms. “Book? An Italian-English phrase book?”
The man behind him oozes out of the chair, speaking Italian. Simon instantly feels the chill of his absence against his own bare back, and realizes why this person was there in the first place. The angel speaks sharply to a boy— her son? — and the child hurries to get the phrase book, watching wide-eyed while Simon flips through it.
“There,” Simon says, and slowly sounds out transliteration. “Sahno key eye-tar-low: I am here to help you.” He hands the book over, pointing at the phrase.
The leader’s brows rise. Judging from the resulting laughter, he says something along the lines of, “Well, thank God for that! We’re safe now that this bedraggled little limey is on the scene.”
From the string of orders subsequently issued, Simon picks out just one word: Maria. The kitchen empties itself of partisans, leaving Scarface, the angel, and a thin man, all of whom continue discussing the situation. The bloke who sat behind him listens to them, nodding repeatedly while buttoning his shirt. “I am called Otello,” he tells Simon. “I visit England for one year. We are partigiani: partisans. Anti-Fascists. We are all friends for you. Your comrade is misfortunately dead. This is the doctor of us.” The thin man raises a hand in greeting. “He says you must rest.” Otello indicates Scarface next. “The boss says it’s dangerous for this lady if you stay here. So you will rest one night. Then we’ll go to our camp with you. Have you undestand everything?”