She reached down and kissed Uncle Donato on the top of his head. A man, she thought, who had most likely never known the joys of physical love, making it easier for others to enjoy them. Tonight, though, lovemaking was not what she had in mind. She considered telling Donato about the proclamation, then decided against it. He didn’t need another person pouring troubles onto him, and she wanted to tell Giuseppe first, in any case.
She went through the open entranceway and up the stairs, tapping on the apartment door—which stood partly open—then stepping inside. Giuseppe greeted her with a warm embrace and, after one glance into her eyes, “What’s wrong?”
“I just came from the printer. Two thousand copies of a poster. Tomorrow it will be put up everywhere in the city. A proclamation. It’s the new Nazi, the colonel I told you about. Scholl is his name. He’s declaring martial law, saying that any Italian found with a weapon will be shot on sight, and that all men between the ages of eighteen and thirty-three must report to the headquarters at Castel Capuano day to be sent to Germany to work! You have to hide!”
“Sit, sit,” Giuseppe said, pulling two chairs out from the kitchen table and sitting beside her, one hand on her knee. “They can’t take me. I have a job.”
Lucia stared through the lenses into his eyes, wondering how it was that such an intelligent man could, at times, think in such a twisted fashion. She could feel the pulse in her throat, feel a burst of anger rising inside her. She tried to speak calmly, but couldn’t. “Nonsense, Giuseppe! They don’t care about the Archives! They’ll take you to Germany, to the camps. They’ll work you to death!”
Giuseppe held up one hand and then placed it on her shoulder and squeezed. “All right.”
“You have to hide!”
“I have my map to finish, Lu. I saw something today that I have to include. I thought the place might be unguarded, but there were soldiers there, Germans. And there are still a lot of places I haven’t—”
Lucia slapped both hands down hard on the tops of her thighs. “Giuseppe!” she yelled.
“What? It’s all right. I just—”
Tears in her eyes now, the familiar tightening of her neck muscles, the pulse thumping there. She had to squeeze the material of her dress in both fists to keep from waving her arms around, finding a glass and smashing it on the floor. She loved Giuseppe, loved him, but he could be maddeningly stubborn. “Stop, Giuseppe, stop! Listen to me! They’re going to be taking men from the streets—not just one here and there but everyone. You’ll be ordered to report. Not next month or next week, tomorrow!”
He was staring at her sadly, the way he always did when she let the temper get the best of her. But how else to get through to him? She took a long breath, relaxed her hands, looked down at the floor and then back into his eyes. “Let me go and get the map. Please. I know someone I can give it to now. She knows someone she can give it to. A spy. An American. You have to hide!”
“Hide where, Lucia?”
“My father knows places, and has friends who can take you there. Go see him, ask him. He’ll help you.”
“Your father despises me.”
“He doesn’t know you, that’s all. He can change. He’ll change. You’ll see. He’ll help you.”
“For your sake, maybe.”
“Go see him, please.” Lucia slammed a fist down on top of her right thigh and felt the tears rising up again. “Please, Giuseppe! Twenty-one Via Sospiri, in the Santa Lucia. Bottom floor. Please go. Now.”
“I know where it is. You took me there that one time, remember?”
“Please, Giuseppe. For me, please.”
“I’ll go, I’ll go. Come with me.”
She shook her head. “I make him uneasy. And my boss, Bruni, is—”
“You’re his daughter.”
“I make him uneasy. Go alone. Please,” Lucia said, the words bursting out of her in a fast stream. “I’ll find him tomorrow after work—Bruni is forcing us to come in on a Saturday—and ask him where you are, and I’ll come to you. I saw a message on the teletype, in German. ‘Take the young men and the Jews,’ it said. ‘Reduce the city to ashes and mud.’ I’m leaving work after tomorrow. Not going back. I went to see a woman, the purest of women. My father’s friend. When I was sitting with her, I realized I can’t work there anymore. I’ve been trying to destroy some of the files—the Jews—and if they find out, they’ll arrest me, or kill me.”
“You can spy on them without doing that.”
She shook her head violently. “I’ll go in tomorrow, then simply disappear.”
“You’ll starve.”
“We’re starving anyway. Please, give me the key. Let me take the map to her before it’s too late.”
Giuseppe turned his eyes left, in the direction of the room his parents had slept in. The door was closed, and Lucia was almost sure that no one had set foot in there from the moment she’d been sent to get the blanket off their bed and bring it to the Ministry so it could be used to wrap their mutilated bodies. She watched Giuseppe breathing, watched his chest rise and fall. It sometimes seemed to her that his obsession with the map was the only thing that had kept him sane after his parents’ deaths, that, without it, he’d have done something crazy to avenge them—savagely beaten a German soldier in the street, found a gun and killed one of them, lit their headquarters on fire. She knew that asking him to hand the map over to her before it was finished was like asking him to pull the heart out of his chest and lay it on the table, and she knew that asking him to go and seek help from her father was even more painful to him. They were the kind of favors, she thought, you could ask only of a true love. The kind of sacrifices only a true love would offer you in return. She breathed slowly, watched him, tried to keep herself from saying anything else.
After one long, terrible minute, Giuseppe leaned sideways, pulled the key out of his pocket, and handed it to her. “The front door,” he said. “The lock sticks sometimes.”
Lucia jumped up and kissed him, then held on to him after the kiss, held him and held him. “I’m sorry I yelled. I love you. I’m sorry.”
He was nodding, saying, “Yes, yes, same, same. I’m stubborn, yes, go.”
“I can trust this woman, I know I can. I love you so much!”
Just as the last syllable was out of her mouth, they heard a tremendous crash.
“The bombs again,” Giuseppe said. “My uncle!” He was on his feet, heading out the door, Lucia one step behind.
But there had been no siren, and when they reached the street, they saw immediately that, instead of hiding in shelters, the few people on the sidewalk had turned in the direction of the sound, west, toward the sunset. Uncle Donato was looking that way, too. Lucia saw a plume of smoke there, bubbling up lazily into the evening light.
“Uncle,” Giuseppe said. “We have to get inside.”
Donato turned and looked at him, then shook his head. “Non ci sono aerei, Giusepp’,” he said. “There are no planes, Giuseppe. It didn’t come from the air.”
“What, then?”
“The Nazisti. They have begun the destruction of Naples.”