“No one.”
The officer slapped him just as forcefully with the other hand. Paolo tilted over to his left but didn’t fall. He straightened up, wiped a sleeve across his bloody mouth, kept his eyes fixed on the eyes behind the lenses. Nothing in them now. Circles of ice. L’ora della nostra morte, he thought. This was his penance for the deed he had done, for the taking of a human life.
The officer removed his pistol from its holster and placed the cold tip of it against the middle of Paolo’s forehead. “Let me ask you last time.”
From behind him Paolo heard a hideous “No!” screamed out into the air, felt a frenzied movement, and then saw Enrico flash past. The boy threw himself with all his weight against the officer’s midsection. The pistol went off, the bullet flying up into the ceiling, causing a shower of splinters and dust to fall on them, and Enrico and the Nazi crashed hard to the dirt, arms and legs flailing. In an instant, all three soldiers had taken hold of Enrico, dragged him to the side, and begun kicking him—in the ribs, the knees. The boy curled into a ball and covered his face, grunting, shrieking. The officer clambered awkwardly to his feet, and pointed the gun at Paolo’s face again, spectacles crooked, hat gone. The voice was no longer calm. His hand was shaking, and the words came hissing out between his teeth.
“For a German life,” the officer hissed, “we kill you all. All of you! But since it was the Italian you killed . . .” He whirled, arm outstretched, and fired three quick shots into the neck of the horse. Antonina fell over sideways, her head cracking hard against the stable’s wooden wall, blood spurting into the hay.
Chaos. Enrico, blood pouring from his nose, scrambling sideways away from the soldiers’ boots and crawling over to the horse. Children screaming. Adults weeping. Gennaro Asolutto vomiting loudly into the straw. The officer straightened his glasses. One of his men was holding out his hat, but the officer ignored him. He spat forcefully into Paolo’s face, said, “Next time I come here you have a name for me, or I shoot you one after the next, beginning with the idiot. Then the children. Then the rest.” He pointed to Marcellina. “You, fat whore, we shall leave alive. To clean the blood.” And he stormed out.
Paolo wiped the blood and spittle from his face with the sleeve of his shirt and watched the soldiers leave. The children were crouching around Antonina, crying and rubbing her flanks as if they might bring her back to life. Enrico, nose dripping blood, lips swelling, was holding the horse’s head in his lap, silent now, staring blankly out into the courtyard. Paolo felt Marcellina’s eyes on him, and he turned to meet them but couldn’t read the expression on her face. Defiance, surrender, hatred, he couldn’t read it. He thought he heard the attic door open, a rumble of running feet above, but in another second he realized it was the sound of planes. The drone of Allied bombers. He wondered if the pilots—en route to the industrial cities of the North—would see the German military vehicles in the courtyard and release part of their deadly cargo. But the noise faded, the planes disappeared, and he was left standing there, face throbbing, hatred filling the place inside him where the guilt and fear had been.
Twenty
Three days after the ambulance came and carted away what charred pieces of Massimo’s body could be retrieved from the wreckage of the black Ford, it seemed to Vittoria that her family’s vineyard had been invaded. Late in the day she heard the sound of engines, stepped over to her bedroom window, and saw two Nazi vehicles careening onto the property. Soldiers climbed out and began summoning the workers—just back from the fields—and herding them roughly through the open barn doorway. Watching them, Vittoria realized with horror that her brother was among them, and that one of the uniformed men was the rail-thin Nazi officer with the wire spectacles. Tobias. She waited, watching the open doorway, feeling her heart thumping behind her left breast, clutching her hands, afraid to leave the manor house and try to help. And guilty at not having the courage to do so. For fifteen minutes there was no sign of anyone, and she stood there as if her feet were cemented to the floor. At one point she thought she heard a shot, or shots, and her whole body twitched violently at the sound. And then the soldiers reappeared, one after the next. She was squeezing her hands together so hard they hurt. Maybe the uniformed demons had shot every one of the workers, and her brother and Paolo and the others were bleeding to death in the stables.
After a few more seconds, the officer—the demon captain was the way she thought of him—stepped out of the barn and walked calmly across the courtyard. His men were standing around the flatbed truck that had brought them, but Tobias ignored them, stopped, ran his gaze over the manor house windows. She stepped back at an angle so he couldn’t see her, and was sure he was going to march over to the main door and walk inside without knocking. Instead, he turned away, and strode past the mule’s enclosure toward the large rectangular vegetable garden. As she watched, the captain unbuttoned his trousers and urinated on the tomato and pepper plants, turning himself this way and that as if wielding a hose. Then he buttoned his trousers and sauntered toward the house. As he came closer, because of the protruding patio roof, she could no longer see him. She heard the sound of planes overhead, glanced up, and then hurried away from the window. She pretended to busy herself changing the arrangement of silver candlesticks and a family photo on the top of her bureau, but her mind was a wild spinning circus of voices and thoughts that wound themselves around spindles of fear, and her hands were trembling. They could be dead, all of them. She’d made no move to save them. The spoiled princess. The would-be partigiana. A minute. Two minutes. Fifteen hideous minutes.