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“Where’s the wireless? The Marconi?” Simon looks from face to face. “I have to report in. I was supposed to go to Milan, but I don’t know why. Major Salvi had all the orders, and if he’s dead, I don’t know what—”
Otello stops him, and translates. “The boss says, ‘The radio is safe. You will use it tomorrow.’ ” The doctor lifts the smaller of the two sleeping girls out of Simon’s lap. The tired angel takes the older one into her arms and sends the boy out of the room. “Now this lady takes you to rest,” Otello says.
The angel smiles encouragingly and shows Simon to a staircase.
Half an hour later, with Stefania, Angelo, and the English boy in bed, Mirella returns to the kitchen. Renzo and Schramm are alone at the table, deep in quiet discussion. “We have coffee,” she tells them. “Should I put some on now? No— maybe you should get some sleep.”
“Mirella,” Renzo says, “stop fussing and go back to bed!”
“I’m fine. I’m fine,” she says, bustling distractedly from task to task. “Are you sure about the coffee? I could put some in a sack for you. Il maggiore can get more. We have eggs. Should I make you some eggs? Werner, lie down upstairs awhile. I can take Rosina now.”
“Ah, but it’s such a pleasure to hold her.” A pale dawn brightens the curtains above the sink and finds its way to Rosina’s curls. Her chubby cheeks are the color of peaches, as her mother’s used to be. Schramm frowns at Mirella’s nervy, cheerless agitation. “You’re pale,” he tells her. “And thin. Are you eating enough? How far along are you?”
“Almost three months,” she says, as though dismissing some minor inconvenience. “I’m fine, Werner. Some morning sickness, that’s all.”
She glances quickly at Renzo. “Mirella—” he says, and stops for a deep breath and long moments of tapping the tabletop. “Where is Iacopo?” he asks finally. “Why are you alone here?”
“He’s in Sant’Andrea with the refugees—”
“God damn that man! Can’t he ever put his own family first?”
She doesn’t want Renzo’s anger. She has her own, and the gnawing fear that goes with it. “There was no one else,” she says. “Osvaldo Tomitz has been arrested.”
GESTAPO INTERROGATION CENTER
PORTO SANT’ANDREA
“I never used to smoke,” Artur Huppenkothen says. “My sister complains about the smell. Erna can’t understand why I have taken up such a filthy habit. My nerves, I tell her. It helps my nerves.”
He has smashed terrorist cells, one after another, but what good has it done? He is a blacksmith, bringing his hammer down on the anvil time after time, but there’s no iron to bend to his will. The enemy is like water, like the sea. You might as well pound a rising tide.
“The Soviets have taken the Balkans,” he tells the priest. “Yugoslavia, Bulgaria, Rumania. Religion is finished there. Do you want that to happen in Italy? Do you understand whom you are protecting, Father? Jews, who do not believe in Jesus. Communists, who do not believe in God at all! You are a good man, but you’ve been duped. You haven’t seen what I’ve seen. Communists took over München when I was a boy, and let me tell you something— they were all Jews!”
Beneath its bruises, the face remains impassive, the eyes downcast.
“Are you praying, Father? Then pray for wisdom!” Artur pleads. “In the Gospel of John, Jesus says, ‘Whoever belongs to God hears the words of God— if you do not listen, you do not belong to God.’ Who do the Jews belong to then? They killed Christ in Satan’s service! They poison and kill and steal from Christians. They hate us with a hate so vast, so— so violent, they want us all to die! The Jew is capable of any kind of evil. There is nothing they won’t stoop to, Tomitz! Why do you protect them?”
Artur opens a thick file, shuffles through the crackly onionskin papers. “In Spain, the Communists killed thousands of priests and monks and nuns! The pope himself said Jews form the principal force of Bolshevism! Jews subsist through contraband, fraud, and usury. They have tentacles everywhere, Tomitz— in contracts and monopolies, in postal services and telephone companies, in shipping and the railroads, in town treasuries and state finance— Here!” he says, finding a clipping from Civiltà Cattolica. “From the Vatican newspaper! ‘Jews are uniquely endowed with the qualities of parasites and destroyers. They pull the levers of capitalism and communism— a pincer assault to control the entire world! They grow fat off the arts and industry of the nations that give them refuge!’ ”
Silence.
Artur watches smoke give shape to light coming through the office window, trying to fathom this man. He looks so ordinary, so normal. Nothing in his physiognomy marks him as a race traitor, a Communist dupe, a Jew lover. Sadly, once the infection takes hold, no amount of reasoning can break its grip. Artur squares the sheaf of papers, closes the file, replaces it in his briefcase. “I gave you every chance,” he says. “You leave me with no choice.”
He was dozing in the backseat of the car, waiting for il maggiore to return from a meeting in the Palazzo Municipale. By the time he was taken into custody, he’d heard so many stories, he could anticipate every detail. The Gestapo men in leather coats. The pistol pointed at his chest.
There would be prison. Interrogation. You know you’ll be beaten, but you don’t really know. You can’t, until you feel that first blow, because it carries a completely unexpected message. It does not say, “Tell me what I want to know!” It says instead, “You are helpless.”
Even on the battlefield, the Red Cross or the medics find their way to the wounded. The compensation for being hurt is the expectation of help, and when that expectation is destroyed, a part of you dies. You realize with numb surprise that those who hold you prisoner can do anything they like. They don’t simply punch you in the face. They reach through the air and shatter the boundaries that make you an individual. They impose themselves on you as they please. It is a kind of rape.
The next surprise is heartening. Like a little boy in his first schoolyard scuffle, you discover you can take a punch. The fright and pain of the first blow fade remarkably quickly. A kind of giddiness takes hold. The pain is not, after all, unbearable. It’s not as bad as a toothache, for example. Hit me all you want, you think then. It’ll get you nowhere.
And so: the shuffle down an endless corridor illuminated by bare bulbs hanging from cords furred with dust. A turn, a stairwell. Another corridor three flights down. Doors on each side at two-meter intervals; men behind them weeping, moaning. “Coraggio,” someone shouts to the shackled newcomer. “Courage, comrade!” A man behind a different door laughs shrilly.
A large brick room. A high vaulted ceiling. His clothes are taken from him. While his hands are manacled behind his back, his eyes follow a thick-linked chain rolling over a pulley anchored in the ceiling, spooling onto an oaken uptake spindle with an iron crank.
The strappado. Machiavelli endured it, survived it. He wrote The Prince afterward. Or, rather, he dictated it. Nevertheless. It is possible to live through this. There can be a life after the strappado.
Huppenkothen is waiting. He is a small man, neat, with the kind of round soft features that look good-natured. “I hate this,” he says, pacing. “The screaming. The shitting, the pissing. I hate it.” He pauses to light another cigarette, his hands unsteady, and jerks his head toward a civilian with a flamboyant mustache and a long blue jaw that works like a pump handle as he chews the last of a sausage panino. “Signor I
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