“And you always shared.”
He grunted, coughed again, lay still. “But now I think . . . now there are going to be times when I am asked to kill.”
“Germans?”
“Human beings. Men.”
He fell silent, and Rita reached out and took hold of his forearm, the tips of her fingers squeezing the powerful muscles there. “Can you refuse?”
Aldo let out a sorrowful laugh, one syllable. An answer as clear as any word.
When they’d been quiet for another little while, she decided to offer a secret to match his secret. “I visited my brother, the way I always do.”
“The monk.”
“Yes.”
Another cough. “I didn’t think the buses were running there anymore, the way you go.”
“Sometimes, they run . . . He told me something I’m not supposed to tell you.” She took a breath and said the first words of the Hail Mary, silently. “There’s an American spy living with them in the monastery. He’s gathering information so that when they come, when the Allies reach the city, they’ll know where to attack. Where the Nazis are. Where their guns are. You can’t tell anyone.”
“And you can’t tell what I told you, either.”
“I keep secrets well,” she said.
He ran his fingers across the top of her thigh. “The Allies are that close, then. Forni and the others will be glad. Once the Germans are gone, they’ll make a fortune—you’ll see. Everything will be for sale to the Allies, everything from women to Nazi souvenirs to gasoline.”
She nodded, five, eight, ten times, her chin pressing down against her neck, a new bond between them now, after all these years, with their tattered pasts. “Our secrets,” she said. She felt like she was reaching back for the new place that had seemed, for a few seconds, to have opened between them. More than anything, she wanted him to offer some words that acknowledged that new place, to speak about feelings, not facts, not money. But after a short while, she heard his breathing change, felt his right leg twitch once in sleep.
She got up and went over to the window in order to latch the tapping shutter back in place. Just at that moment, the lights of the city went out.
Twenty-Two
By the time Colonel Scholl left his new office in Castel Capuano, it was long after dark. The day had been a tiring one—the trip from Rome, the official transfer of power from the two Italian generals, news that one of his men had been killed by a sniper on the city’s outskirts, first meetings with a series of captains and majors to get a sense of the situation in Naples and of their responsibilities and attitudes, the pile of paperwork to read (he still carried some of it in the briefcase beside him on the seat)—and he felt a certain weariness come over him as he climbed into the front seat of the staff car. He’d hoped Captain Nitzermann might join him on the ride to the hotel—anything to offset the company of the tiresome Renzik—but Nitzermann, he remembered, had been sent to coordinate with some of the city’s tank commanders and check on persistent troubles with the radio frequencies. If it were true that the Allies were soon going to attack the city, their approach would have to take them through one of two routes: along the coast in Ercolano or farther to the east, on the other side of Vesuvius. Tanks and the Capodimonte artillery would be the first line of defense.
Lieutenant Renzik started off through the dark city, gripping the wheel tightly with both hands, like a teenager.
“Do you know the best way?”
“Yes, Herr Colonel. I’ve spent a little time here. And I’ve been looking at the map.”
Good that you can read one, Scholl thought. As they went, he turned his head out the window and studied the streets. All but lightless at this hour, they were a maze of shadows. The Allied bombing had ceased weeks ago and, along with it, apparently, the rules about illumination. Here and there, from buildings where the electricity was still functioning, he could see a lit window or storefront, sometimes the headlights of a lorry or other military vehicle coming in the other direction. Based on what he’d seen on the way in, Naples was a mess, a jumble, a city that looked as though a child had organized it in the schoolyard dust and then, in a fit of anger, taken his small hand and knocked parts of it to pieces. He’d seen the cone-shaped Vesuvius. He remembered reading about it as a Stuttgart schoolboy, seen the photos of . . . what was the name of the ruined city? Pompeii. That was another maze, the wooden roofs burned away, brick walls still standing in places and broken apart in others. Naples would look like that soon, he mused, though not because of a volcanic eruption. Perhaps, years into the future, the modern Neapolitan ruins would be a travelers’ destination, tourists from Berlin and Vienna making the trip to remember one of the important moments of the war.
Instead of taking what seemed to be a direct route, Renzik turned this way and that, choosing smaller side streets and moving along at a snail’s pace. “Why the rush?” Scholl asked, and he could see that it took the lieutenant a moment to realize the question had been sarcastic. The best drivers had been sent to the front, the rest left behind to chaperone officers.
“Because, Herr Colonel,” the man said after a pause, “the other drivers told me that some of the streets are blocked.”
“By what?”
Another small fit of confusion. Did the man not speak German?
“By the stones, you know. From the bombs, you know . . . and some unofficial . . . barricades.”
“And we can’t clear the main roads well enough for our own vehicles to pass? How do the tanks get through?”
Renzik shrugged, blinked, clutched the wheel. Scholl looked away. Here and there, he could see a few old men and women sitting out in front of their buildings, as if waiting for a bus that would never come or sons who would never return. One ragged palm tree, looking underfed. A street sign dangling from its pole. Small bands of half-dressed urchins, not yet old enough for service, but too old, apparently, to be at home with their parents after dark. The whole scene seemed to him the precise opposite of orderly. No wonder the Italian Army couldn’t fight; the men had been raised in whorehouses.
At last, Renzik pulled to a stop in front of a building with ALBERGO PARCO in unlit letters out front, then hurried around to open the passenger-side door. “I’ll wait,” the lieutenant said.
“For what?”
“F-for you, Herr Colonel.”
“I’m living here, as you yourself told me,” Scholl said, holding back a last word of the sentence—idiot—that climbed into his mouth. The man’s eyes were blue-green encyclopedias of stupidity. “Be here tomorrow at seven.”
Scholl carried his black leather briefcase through the front door—no one there to hold it open—and encountered no trouble at the registration desk. They knew who he was. A nod, a key to a third-floor suite, an apology for the broken elevator. Between the desk and the bottom of a curving marble stairway, Scholl had to cross a carpeted lobby with an enormous vase—empty—sitting not quite in the middle of a round table. To one side of the lobby were a sitting room and a small bar, and as he passed, he looked through the arched doorway and saw a collection of sordid souls, nursing drinks, a few standing at the bar, others occupying the tables. Sordid, perhaps, but they were meeting his eyes with a certain familiar eagerness. Men and women both. Young. Looking fairly well-fed and fairly well-dressed, the men in tight pants with shirts open at the neck. He let his eyes linger for a few seconds—too long!—then snapped his face forward and mounted the steps to his floor.