“Of course I saw you. You should hope no one else saw you. What were you thinking?”
“In case the Nazis try to grab me.”
Aldo shook his head. “The Nazis? You should worry about the Dell’Acquas. Do you know who those men are? They’re killers. You don’t steal from killers, and if they saw you, don’t expect me to protect you.”
“I won’t. I don’t expect anything from you. Lucia doesn’t, either.”
Aldo stopped and took hold of the boy by the collars of his shirt. He shook him once, hard enough to make the glasses wobble on his nose. “Don’t ever speak to me about my daughter. Do . . . not . . . ever.”
“No one else will,” the boy said into his face, unafraid. “You’re her father! You act with her the way a stranger would act! Worse than a stranger!”
“Don’t tell me how I act. You’re an idiot. You stole from the Dell’Acquas!”
“You’re her father!” Giuseppe said again.
Disgusted, Aldo pushed him away, hard, turned his back and started walking. The idiot followed him.
“Tomorrow,” Giuseppe said from just behind, “they’re going to start rounding up men between the ages of eighteen and thirty-three and taking them north to work.”
Aldo couldn’t keep himself from emitting a short, bitter laugh. “I’m forty-two, next week. That doesn’t worry me.”
“Lucia asked if you could hide me, but I don’t want to hide. I want to fight.”
Another short laugh. “Fight them?” Aldo said. “With what, your hands? Your one stolen pistol?”
The boy reached out and took hold of Aldo’s wrist, and Aldo found that, strong as he was, he couldn’t twist it free. He stopped and turned. The boy’s face was twitching. “My parents were slaughtered by them,” Giuseppe said. “I cleaned up what was left of my mother and father and wheeled the remains all the way to Poggioreale and buried them there with my own hands.” He squeezed Aldo’s wrist in a grip tight enough to break bones. “I love your daughter, and I tell her so, something you have never done. So if you want to tell your friends I stole the pistol, and take away the one person in her life who treats her well, go ahead.”
Giuseppe released his grip and for a long moment, they stood facing each other, eyes locked, moonlight on the boy’s face. Aldo thought about the knife in one jacket pocket, and the pistol Zozo had given him, in the other. How easy it would be, and how horrible.
“Let me stay at your place tonight,” the boy said. “One night. Tomorrow, I’ll find my own place to hide. If not, do what you have to do about the pistol. Tell them if you want. Slice me up if you want. But think of what you’ll be doing to Lucia.”
Thirty-Seven
Colonel Scholl woke from a turbulent sleep, six restless hours wracked by a parade of lurid dreams. He lay in the comfortable bed for a time, letting the possibilities play in his mind, postponing the duties of the day, nursing a loneliness so subtle and so familiar, it felt like the whispering of a friend.
Eventually, the duties—his actual life, not the imaginary one—could be postponed no longer. He washed, shaved, put on his uniform, and by then his mind had cleared and the images set safely aside. In a flash of insight, the colonel understood his purpose for the day. All along, good soldier that he was, he’d been waiting for specific orders; now, good officer that he was, he realized he’d been assigned to Naples not to take orders but to give them. Hadn’t Kesselring said “use your own initiative”? In all the city, there was no officer senior to him (the Italian generals—Pentimalli and Del Tetto—had, shortly after his arrival, turned over their authority and fled the city. Where, he wondered, did they intend to go?).
At breakfast, sitting alone at a white-clothed table in a private enclave of the hotel dining room, he drank his Italian coffee and ate his Italian egg and waited for the annoying Lieutenant Renzik to report for duty. It wasn’t until 7:13, nearly a quarter of an hour late, that Renzik appeared at the door of the dining room, casting his eyes about as if watching for birds nesting in the corners. Eventually, he looked toward the enclave, saw his colonel, and practically sprinted across the empty main room.
The salute, the obligatory “Herr Colonel,” the sloppy posture.
“You’re late, Lieutenant.”
“My apologies, sir. There has been a small problem.”
Scholl watched him, almost amused. “Describe it, please,” he said when Renzik held to a trembling silence. “Has the proclamation not been printed?”
“No, sir. It has. They, the posters are ready, they—”
“What then?”
“Sir, the jeep in which I was supposed to drive you this morning has been . . . sabotaged.”
“In what way?”
“In the way in which it has been . . . Two tires were flattened and one sustained damage that made it hard to refill, sir.”
“Where had it been left?”
“In the usual parking garage, sir. Near the university buildings at the port. Which, I was told, has always been safe. A guard—”
“And you tried to drive it with the flattened tire, am I correct?”
“Correct, sir, because I couldn’t fill it with air, and I was late, because the nipple—”
“What nipple, Lieutenant?”
“The tire nipple, sir. Where you attach the hose. It was bent.”
“And how did you get here?”
“I drove the jeep, but the tire is ruined now, sir.” He took a sharp breath. “Shredded.”
“Lieutenant, listen to me. By the time I take the last sip of my coffee and walk to the front door, have another vehicle ready. I don’t care what it is, as long as it has four wheels with inflated tires. Has the proclamation been posted?”
“Everywhere, Herr Colonel.”
“Good. How many men do we expect to collect?”
“I don’t understand, Herr Colonel.”
Scholl leaned closer and peered into Renzik’s eyes, as if searching for something behind them. “If all the Italian men in this city,” he said very slowly, “between the ages of eighteen and thirty-three, report to us as required, approximately how . . . many . . . will . . . there . . . be?”
“Captain Nitzermann said thirty thousand, sir. He was wondering where to put them all. We—”
“Tell Nitzermann to bring as many as possible to the train station and the rest to the stadium. In the—what is the neighborhood called? The Vomero?”
“Vomero, yes, sir. It’s—”
“Go!”
Renzik saluted and hurried away. The obsequious Italian waiter—spying on them, no doubt—approached the table to inquire if the colonel had any other needs, now or later in the day. That was the way he put it. The “other needs” weren’t specified, but the look on the man’s swarthy face was one of sly awareness, suspicion, even superiority. Scholl shook his head, no, wondering if the waiter had been watching him, if he’d noticed the German colonel staring too long into the bar sitting room the night before. Or if, somehow, the German colonel’s reputation and choice of amusements had preceded him. Now or later in the day.