In the Spagnoli, a lively, poor, densely packed district that sloped up from Via Toledo toward the Vomero, he heard the sound of voices from inside those houses that had not been destroyed, and came upon a trio of men about his own age sitting out in the darkness, sipping what he guessed to be wine from coffee cups. He nodded to them, and as he passed, one of them called after him, “Careful tomorrow, brother.”
West of the Spagnoli, almost to Santa Lucia now, he passed a group of four street kids sitting on the concrete posts at Piazza del Plebiscito. He found a coin tucked into a fold in his pocket and flipped it in their direction. One of them caught it and made a show of dancing around in front of his friends, celebrating.
Little bits of life remained, Giuseppe thought. His feelings for Lucia, the quartet of scugnizzi, the guys on the sidewalk, those grand old buildings that had not been bombed. The Nazis hadn’t been able to take away everything. Not yet, at least.
Wondering what kind of reaction he’d get this time at Lucia’s father’s door, distracted by the apprehension and so not as careful as he might have been, Giuseppe turned a corner onto Via Solitaria and ran chest to chest into a German soldier. The man was staggering drunk, the top collar of his uniform unbuttoned, his hat on sideways. After he recovered from the first contact, he put his hands to Giuseppe’s shoulders and shoved him back, saying something in his own language and then “Merde Italiano!” Shit Italian.
For a few seconds, the two men glared at each other, one sober, one not. The street was dark; there was no one else around. What had been building up inside Giuseppe—the limping officer and his horse manure, the shame of Lucia’s courage set against his own need to hide, the sounds of his city being destroyed, the image that would never leave him of his mother and father on the steps of the Ministry of Health—was like a huge pile of kindling soaked in gasoline. The German’s hands against him had sparked it into a blaze. Giuseppe stared through the smoking hatred for one more second, then took hold of the man by his upper arms, turned him, and smashed his head back against the wall of the corner building. Already wobbling from the alcohol, the soldier sagged, half-unconscious. Giuseppe straightened him up, smashed him against the wall a second time, let him drop there. And then he ran.
It was only a few hundred meters to Lucia’s father’s house, a straight sprint through the Palazzo Calabritto and right onto Via Bisignano. Then down Via Sospiri, little more than a crooked alleyway, a street so narrow that, even before the bombing, a single vehicle could have blocked it. Aldo Pastone’s metal door, the bad memories. Gasping for breath, praying that Lucia’s father was home, Giuseppe pounded his fist on the metal. Nothing at first, no response. He looked to the corner, expecting soldiers with rifles raised. He pounded again. The door was thrown open and there was the face, the scar, the icy block, the steely eyes.
“I’m . . . I’m Giuseppe,” he said between hard breaths. “I just—”
“I know who you are,” the man replied, staring. Two miserable seconds of nothing, and then Giuseppe saw the door open wider and heard Lucia’s father say, “Entra.”
Thirty-Three
On Via Gennaro Serra, not far from Piazza del Plebiscito, where Armando and Tomaso had agreed to meet the rest of the coro, they came upon two German army trucks parked one behind the other at the curb. Without saying a word to each other, they stopped walking and studied the scene. The cabs and open beds of both trucks were empty. Ten meters in front of the forward truck, on a stone bench tucked into a circular alcove, the drivers sat smoking. While Tomaso slipped around to the street side of the rear truck, out of view, Armando walked up to the soldiers with his hand out. He turned down his mouth and squeezed his eyes partly closed, making his face into a mask of supplication and speaking a steady stream of words designed to disguise the sound of air being let out of a truck tire. “Please, please, men. Please. I’m so hungry. A coin, a few coins, please. I know you’re generous, please, men!” One of them waved him away, but Armando kept pleading—“Look at me. Look at how hungry I am”—until the other soldier reached out and tried to extinguish the cigarette butt on the boy’s palm. Armando pulled his hand away in time, and by then he could see Tomaso going past, down the middle of the street at a fast walk, and he joined him. They looped around the block and onto the huge cobblestone square, hid for a few minutes until they felt they were safe, and then, still ready to run, sat there on one of the concrete posts. They were facing the great church with its columns and rounded roof, the two curving parts to either side that always made Armando think of the wings of a giant stone bird. More so even than Naples’s other big churches, this one seemed to him like the House of God. Or at least what the House of God must look like in heaven. He’d never been inside.
“Completely flat?” he said without looking at his friend.
“Almost. They can probably drive it, but they’ll cut up the tire. Plus, I bent the thin metal piece, the little tongue, the way I showed you last time, so they won’t be able to fill it up again.”
“We’re tire experts now.”
“Right,” his brave friend said, and Armando wondered again if he should have let Tomaso keep the German soldier’s hat. He shrugged, spat, watched the corner.
“Do you ever want to do more?”
“Always.”
“Any ideas?”
Tomaso shook his head, and they saw their other two friends striding toward them across the cobblestones.
Armando was thinking about the murdered girl and her murdered grandparents, about the package the men had carried off the truck in the Materdei, about Zozo Forni. There were rumors of fighting in the streets, small battles in different neighborhoods, one against one, two against four, quick exchanges of gunfire. But he hadn’t seen the evidence with his own eyes and didn’t know whether the stories were true. People kept saying the Allies were close, but they’d been saying that for a month now and nothing had happened, and he could feel a kind of nervous itch in his arms and hands. He wanted to do something more than carrying a few pistols to a woman’s house and flattening truck tires. He wondered if he should take a risk and lead his boys back to Zozo Forni’s place in the Chiaia and see if the man had other work for them.
Up beyond the Spagnoli, they could see the light cast by the rising moon. “Piena,” Armando said, as if to himself. Full. Sister Marcellina had always told him that la luna piena was a reminder that one day they would see the Lord’s face, not merely reflected in the people around them, in the clouds, in the birds, but full and close and massive. “The blinding light of love,” she had said. Armando tried to imagine it.
As they sat there, a young man walked past. Guaglione was the word in dialect. A guy. They eyed him, as they eyed everybody, and, as always, Armando made his judgments. Somebody you wouldn’t want to fight, he thought, with those shoulders and arms, but he was wearing glasses, too, so maybe he wasn’t so tough after all. As they watched, the man reached into his pocket and flipped them a coin. Armando made the catch, nodded to the man, then taunted his friends with a victory dance. They watched him and laughed: they’d all benefit. The two lire from Zozo, the mysterious peach, the coin from Padre Paulo, and now this—good things were falling into his hands; the saints were smiling on him.