Two upholstered chairs and a sofa in the front room. A pair of doors with paned glass backed by a curtain. Beyond them, bed, bureau, bath. Adequate was the word he’d use. Clean enough. He removed his boots, washed the city dust from his face, and lay for a time on the oversize bed looking up at the light fixture. On the endless drive between office and hotel, a particular kind of agitation had taken his body prisoner; a particular voice had begun sounding quietly in his thoughts. It plagued him most often when he was tired like this, and it was sometimes—now, for example—accompanied by the annoying facial twitch. He tried to silence it, but the images of the men and women in the bar had amplified both the agitation and the voice, and they haunted him now. The people there were nice-looking in a dark, exotic way. There for the taking. The cost would be minimal, a few lire notes stuffed into a hand.
It was exactly what had gotten him into trouble in Rieti, but how wrong his superiors had been to judge him for that! From the many tales he’d heard, other officers sought their pleasure in similar ways, and they’d never suffered any kind of censure. And how many of them carried the responsibility for subduing an entire city—a million people!—and caring for an essential section of the southern front?
The voice made its case, arguing persistently, persuasively. He stood up, took off his jacket, and loosened the top button of his shirt. He looked in the mirror, smoothed his graying hair, grimaced at the thinning front edge. “A man does not live by work alone,” he said aloud, but the line only half convinced him. The facial twitch clicked once, again, then subsided.
He went into the outer room, put his hand on the doorknob. Filled with a familiar anticipation, he opened the door, stepped out onto the ruby-red hallway carpet . . . but then something about the decor—the carpet; the garish wallpaper, lime green with gold stripes; the ceramic lamp sconces hanging every few meters, adorned with naked cupids prancing; the photo of Mussolini in a cheap yellow frame—it was the Italian aesthetic, too much of everything, and it muffled the persistent voice long enough to allow him to turn back. Muttering a curse under his breath, he locked himself in his rooms, took off his clothes, ran a bath. There seemed to be no hot water. The Italians couldn’t even manage that.
He sat on the edge of the tub, naked, and was staring at his bare feet when the electricity died and the world went dark around him.
Twenty-Three
Lucia worked in the Municipio on Via Imbriani, a grand five-story building that, before the war, had housed the offices of various functionaries and served in part as a collection area for not very important paperwork: parking and traffic fines, the recording of minor infractions—a fisherman tying up his boat in the wrong place, a teacher missing two days of school without an excuse, an old man written up for pissing on the street, drunk. In those days, her office had been presided over by an enormously obese man named Pasquale Lotesani, a harmless bureaucrat, unmarried, poorly schooled, who collected his paycheck and smoked his foul cigarettes, and who habitually thumbed through the stacks of papers on his desk as if the true meaning and purpose of life were hidden there, and, one lucky day, he might accidentally find it.
But then, with the start of the war, everything changed. The Fascist police, always a nuisance, burst through the front entrance one afternoon and came stomping down the long hallways, suddenly intent on instituting a machinelike efficiency. Lotesani was made to stand up and explain what he was doing, what his office was doing. Lucia saw him there, wobbling on his fat legs, his belly hanging down over his belt like a living creature, his chubby hands holding on to the edge of his desk and trembling. “It’s imp-imp-important work!” he managed under the questioning.
After that interview, Lotesani had been sent away—to some fly-infested outpost in the Basilicata, Rosalia told her—and a new man, Marshal Pierluigi Bruni, was installed on the top floor. Northern Italian. Perhaps half-Austrian, she couldn’t be sure. Suddenly, everyone in the building was required to arrive promptly at eight thirty, to cut their lunch break to forty-five minutes (she obeyed this order for only three days), to stay until exactly five o’clock. Germans in plain clothes came in and rifled through the filing cabinets, looking for what, Lucia couldn’t at first guess. And then she’d been promoted, moved upstairs to an office presided over by short-haired men who spoke Italian with an Austrian accent and who filled the drawers and cabinets with the files of Italian soldiers and government workers—photo, date of birth, place of residence, marital status, children, criminal record if any, religious background, physical condition. All that was required of her was to file these in a particular order, to answer the phone, to endure the compliments and the flirting, the occasional unwanted touch—things she’d long ago learned to deal with.
But then, when Mussolini was deposed and the German grip tightened, things changed again. Bruni himself summoned her and instructed her to go through the files looking for what he considered “signs of Jewishness”—certain names, facial characteristics, kinds of education. She did the job as haphazardly as she possibly could, misfiling people, slipping sheets of paper into drawers where they’d never be found. She was moved again, to a desk closer to his, where she still had responsibility for some files but also answered the phone for Bruni, kept his appointment book, supervised a regular flow of Fascist operatives who waited, straight-spined, in the hard chairs until they were called, then went into Bruni’s office and closed the door.
The place revolted her, but she needed the money to survive and, unlike some of the second-floor officers, Bruni left her alone. Didn’t touch her. Didn’t ask her to eat with him. Didn’t comment on her dress or her hair or her “soft, lovely voice.” Didn’t “accidentally” run one hand over the backs of her shoulders or brush against her buttocks as he walked past.
Until the murder of Giuseppe’s parents, she’d been able to maintain a separation between the woman she was at work—efficient, cooperative, and obedient only on the surface—and the woman she was the rest of the time. She told herself that so many other Neapolitan women were surviving by selling their bodies, that what she was doing didn’t really help the Fascist cause. But when Giuseppe’s parents were killed, that rationale withered.
She’d been walking with him hand in hand on Via San Biagio when someone he knew from the Archives ran up and told him that his parents—out scrounging for food on a Saturday morning—and a group of others had been arrested at random, pushed into the rear of two trucks, and brought to the Ministry of Health. There, they were being made to stand in three lines on the front steps while the Germans assembled an audience.
She and Giuseppe had set off at a run—the Ministry was a kilometer away—and made it three-quarters of the distance when they heard, first a muted applause, then screams, then machine-gun fire.
By the time they had turned the last corner, the German trucks were driving away and the Ministry steps were littered with bodies and blood, the single most horrific scene she had ever witnessed. Chests blown open, hands severed, faces reduced to raw red ovals, all presided over by a trio of black-uniformed Nazi officers with rifles at the ready. A stunned crowd milled about in the street, and someone—a man, a woman, she didn’t remember—had told her that the Nazis had forced them to kneel and applaud the execution, that the whole thing had been filmed for propaganda purposes.