She found the building without trouble, went along the alley beside it, and saw the mechanics’ shed, a rectangular wooden box that was missing a section of one wall. There was her young friend, his head resting on an old motorcycle tire, as sound asleep as any prince in any luxurious bedroom. Careful not to awaken him, Rita took the peach from her pocket and set it beside him on the wooden floor, then, tired and hungry, hurried back up the alley and turned toward home.
She’d gone only as far as Corso Garibaldi—two blocks—when she heard a commotion in front of her. Shouting, at first, and then the most horrible screams. By instinct, she stopped and looked for shelter. A ruined tram car sat there, frozen on its tracks, right in the middle of the street. No glass in the windows, the roof caved in. Rita ducked behind it, heard the shouts again, the cries of a child. She placed both hands on the warm metal of the tram’s front end and peered around its nose. Halfway up the block, two German soldiers were dragging a pair of children out of a house, their heels scraping on the pavement, the girl’s right shoe falling off, the boy swinging his arms wildly, the soldiers holding them by their shirt collars. Jews, the children must have been; it was unlike the Nazis to take children away unless they were Jews. Rita watched, horrified, as the boy and girl were squeezed into the front of the truck from both sides, one soldier shoving them through each door and then climbing in after them. She focused all her attention there, willing something miraculous to happen, willing the children to escape, the soldiers to have a change of heart, the truck to stutter and stall.
Before the engine could be engaged, she heard gunshots, and then the whole scene in front of her went suddenly chaotic, a photograph cut into puzzle pieces, the pieces flung into the air. She ducked down closer to the street, but couldn’t keep herself from pushing her head out past the tram’s front end and watching, praying. It took her a few seconds to understand: someone was firing at the truck from the top floor of one of the houses on the left side of the street. The soldier on the driver’s side started firing back, the long, dark barrel of his rifle pointing out the truck window. There was a series of loud exchanges, then the rifle sagged and fell. She could see the man’s arm hanging limp over the edge of the truck door. A second passed, two seconds, and she saw a line of bullet holes—from a machine gun?—moving along the truck’s rear fender like the small, circular footprints of an invisible animal. One tongue of flame erupted at the end of the line of bullets, and suddenly the truck was burning, the passenger door thrown open, one soldier sprinting away, the children screaming as they tumbled out and then, tripping and falling, raced back into the house. Small tongues of flame licked over the truck fender, and then there was an explosion, and a piece of the truck went flying up in the air and came crashing down against the back end of the tram just as a blast of air knocked Rita onto her back. She lay there for a few seconds, stunned but unhurt, mouthing a Hail Mary, the smell of smoke and burning rubber, the scene already replaying itself in her mind’s eye like a bizarre dream.
Someone, some ordinary Italian, had a machine gun in a third-floor apartment and had used it to shoot at German soldiers! One soldier was dead, the other running for his life.
Impossible.
Twenty-Five
Aldo was sitting alone in his apartment, nursing a glass of lifeless beer and going over every facial expression and tone of voice from the underground meeting and his visit to the Spagnoli, every word that he, Zozo, and the Dell’Acquas had spoken, every word he’d said to Rita, and every word she’d said to him in return. This was his compulsion, and had been for as long as he could remember. It was as if his mind didn’t work fast enough to process interactions on the spot, so he had to go over them time and again after the fact, to see if he’d embarrassed himself, given too much away, made himself look foolish or vulnerable, or if there had been some secret meaning, some bad intent, in the things people had said to him.
With Rita, of course, there was no worry about bad intent, but there had been something new between them yesterday, something so different and puzzling that he couldn’t find the right way to think about it. With Zozo and the Dell’Acquas, it was similar in this one way: something unspoken and unfamiliar had lurked beneath the conversation. That loaded question: “Are you happy working for us?” could have been a threat. And the new job smacked of a cover for something else, a disguise, a trick. How were he and his helper going to steal German military equipment? What would they do, lure Nazis into the woods, slit their throats, then remove and sell the tires that had been on their cars, or the boots that had been on their feet, the pistols and rifles they’d been carrying? Then he was supposed to sell it to the Allies, but the Allies were still probably a hundred kilometers away. It made no sense. It was a trick of some kind, but, though he replayed the meeting a dozen times, he couldn’t penetrate to the heart of it.
As he sipped and pondered, there were three quiet knocks on the metal door. Afraid of nothing and proud of being afraid of nothing, Aldo opened it without hesitation, and as if his thoughts had summoned the man, there, a meter in front of him, stood Zozo Forni, feet spread wide, a grin on his unshaven face. The lightweight dark jacket. The curly hair and low forehead, the narrow eyes that made him look, always, as if he’d just been awakened from a dream in which he was arranging to make someone disappear. The large, straight scar glistened in the middle of his neck, a razor cut from childhood; people said his own father, a small-time criminal, had tried to kill him in a fit of drunken anger and nearly succeeded.
“Permission to enter,” Zozo said, and the grin—a boss’s grin, a killer’s—widened.
Aldo had rented the ground-floor apartment in a dark mood, after the big argument with Lucia, and it was a dark place. Two rooms. One small, chest-high window on each side of the door that led to the street. A tiny kitchen and tiny bathroom crammed together at the back, with another window there—a glassed slit in the wall—and a bedroom half as large as the cell he’d shared with three boys in Nisida. Strangely enough, though, the furnishings (he’d had to sell two of the three lamps) were old and elegant, the chairs upholstered and heavy-legged, a half-broken chandelier hanging over a mahogany table it would have taken four strong men to move. In one corner of the room where he ate, the previous owners (he imagined them as an elderly couple whose fortunes had withered as they aged, but who’d retained, for sentimental reasons, a few pieces of furniture from their ritzy villa in the hills) had set two armchairs at an angle to each other, both covered in purple upholstery and lined with decorative brass pins. Aldo sat often in one of them. In his time there, no one had ever sat in the other.
Zozo was the first. Aldo had one bottle of beer left. He opened it, poured it into a glass, handed the glass to his visitor, and sat opposite him. It took him a quarter of a second to notice that Zozo had a pistol in a holster at his ribs. The Camorrista had small, chubby hands, fingers like sausages, and nails, even in wartime, kept in impeccable condition. He was overweight, not grossly so, but even with the hefty belly, he moved like an athlete and somehow always seemed perfectly relaxed. He blinked, and Aldo thought the man might fall asleep.
“To your new assignment,” Zozo said, lifting the glass. When they’d drunk, he tapped the pistol beneath his jacket and said, “This is for you,” but made no move to take it from the holster and hand it over.