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NEAR BORGO SAN MAURO
VALDOTTAVO
Tonio lugs lead batteries. Maurizio totes the cumbersome generator. The twelve-pound wireless transmitter bumps against Simon Henley’s own chronically bruised back. Twenty-some men form a guard around the precious radio equipment. When the sun comes up, the tracks of this mixed multitude will be plain as day through melting snow and the mud beneath it. “Won’t the Germans follow us?” Simon Henley asks his guide.
“Of course not,” Maria Avoni says.
“Why not?” he asks in sincere ignorance.
“Because they might find us.” She stands still, listening. Gets her bearings, and points. “There is a spring. We will drink some water and rest.”
Mirella Soncini seemed an angel of mercy who made his first day in Italy warm and safe. Maria Avoni is an altogether different example of Italian womanhood. Last month, at Renzo Leoni’s order, Maria appeared at Villa Malcovato toting a machine gun, with ammunition belts criss-crossed over her lovely bosom: Boadicea as dressed by Pancho Villa. “How was your flight?” she asked Simon, as though he were a tourist on holiday, not a paratrooper behind enemy lines. “I will show you to your first camping place,” she said. “We will have an enjoyable walk.”
She commands a band of two dozen partisans instructed to facilitate the British signalman’s work. Her English is competent, but Simon was bemused by her phrasing until she mentioned that her father was a mountain guide before the war.
She picks out a flattish rock to use as a picnic bench, and extracts panini from a backpack. The other partisans nudge each other, smirking, when Simon sits next to her. He wishes their vulgar assumptions were correct. He’s spent hours pretending to care about Maria’s nature talks, watching her hips as she climbs in the moonlight.
She is smart, and knowledgeable, and has volunteered for the thankless task of teaching him a bit of her language. Tonight’s topic has been the bewildering variety of Italian politics. As near as he can make out, the Garibaldi Brigades divide their time between ambushing Fascists and preparing for a Communist revolution after the war. Matteotti Socialists are left-wing laborites, but not Communists; they support trade unions and peasant agricultural cooperatives. Christian Democrats want to restore normality, a rather cloudy concept these days. Catholic Actionists differ from Christian Democrats in some way that even Maria is hazy about. “I think they’re more religious” was all she could come up with.
The Committee for National Liberation’s brief is to coordinate the actions of such groups for the common good— broadly defined as making the Germans leave Italy. The British SOE’s mission, in turn, is to encourage CNL cooperation with the Allies by dropping medical supplies, weapons, ammunition, money, and cigarettes, all in exchange for intelligence on enemy troop movements. Simon’s own orders are to transmit said intelligence, an activity the German SS and Italian Black Brigades wish devoutly to discontinue. By day, squads of them comb the district on foot or motorbike, searching in general for partisans and in particular for an Englishman with a wireless. Maria guides him to a new transmission location every seventy-two hours.
“And what are your political views?” he asks Maria, trying to sound worldly while chewing a cheese sandwich.
She licks olive oil from her fingers. “See those two farms? There, and there.” Hints of a rosy dawn flush the eastern sky. He can just make out the blackened ruins high on either side of the main valley. “The Fascists say Attilio Goletta helps the resistance. The Communists say Battista Goletta is a Fascist informer. Broken clocks are correct two times a day. The Black Brigades and the Garibaldini— they are both correct this time.” She shrugs, and with an act of will, he does not watch her breasts move beneath her battle jacket. “Most of the time, they are wrong. Fascisti think all peasants help the partisans, so they burn houses. Communisti think if a farmer’s house isn’t burned, he must be a collaborator. So they burn houses.”
“And your group?”
“We just want all these bastards to leave us alone. Germans, Fascists, Communists.”
Relieved the British are not yet on her list of bastardi, Simon clears his throat self-consciously. “Maria, I heard that there will be a dance. A lot of the partisans are inviting staffette… I was wondering if you would—”
Her face goes still. She moves her head from side to side, listening to a faint thumping on the other side of the low mountains to the south. Mortars, a valley or two away. “I’ll dance when the war is over.”
She stands, giving orders. Maurizio does as he’s told, hefting the generator, but Tonio mutters “Rompacoglioni” in a tone intended to provoke. Maria replies, a whiplash in her voice.
Simon straps the wireless onto his back but looks to Maria for an explanation of what just happened. She pumps the air near her crotch with both hands and jerks her head toward Tonio. “Ambidestro,” she says with a sneer.
He stifles a laugh when he works it out: two-handed wanker.
“He calls me ballbuster,” she tells Simon casually. “I say to him, ‘Lucky I hate the Germans more than I hate pricks like you.’ ” She studies Simon, knowing— the way women always seem to know— that his intentions are every bit as dishonorable as those of any other man. His tactics, at least, are more gentlemanly. “When war came, there were fewer tourists, and my father’s business went down. After the Germans? No tourists at all. From then on—” She meets Simon’s eyes with a level gaze. “I supported my whole family. Parents. No
They have begun to climb again when a small girl appears out of nowhere. She chatters and points toward a farm building about a mile down the mountainside. Simon sees a German soldier exit a barn.
Unconcerned, Maria sends the child off and leans again into the slope. Simon stumbles, looking over his shoulder. There are several Germans now, heads bowed over a map. One raises binoculars. “Maria,” Simon says with all the urgency he can muster, “if they spot us, they’re not likely to mistake this for a shepherds’ convention.”
“You worry too much,” she says, her pace unaltered. “They will stay there and have a breakfast.”
He has never been in combat. Maria has led ambushes, survived firefights, won skirmishes. She knows the country and the people. He trusts her judgment. With the war nearly over, many ordinary German and Italian soldiers merely go through the motions of pursuing partisans, but the SS have lost none of their zeal for hunting down unarmed Jews. In the past few weeks, Simon’s seen massive operations sweep through valleys like this. Barking mad, really, given how much those troops are needed elsewhere.
Suddenly, and for no reason he can identify, he feels… exposed, and very frightened. He sidesteps, not knowing why, moving to Maria’s left just as the machine guns open up.
Startled by the noise, he dives for cover, rolling behind a log in time to see Maria’s blouse stitched in red by a neat row of bullets. Four more partisans are hit before she topples to the muddy ground.
Three rounds zip over the log, their draft riffling Simon’s hair. They’re shooting at me, he thinks stupidly. Those people are trying to kill me. In the next instant, all the tedious months of SOE training and discipline take over. He looses a burst from his Marlin in the general direction of the gunfire and motions for Maurizio to move uphill.
Wide-eyed, Maurizio tightens the generator’s straps, scrambles through the muddy melting snow, then fires a burst of his own while Simon runs crouched and at top speed. Soon all the partisans are moving upward in pairs, alternately keeping the Germans’ heads down with covering fire and scrambling like hell for cover on higher ground.