A tap on the doorjamb, a squeak of hinges. “He wants to speak with you,” her father said behind her.
She turned and faced him. Fear there, also. “What for, Father? Who?”
“The German. He’s spoken with everyone. Me. Eleonora. He’s interviewing Cinzia now, downstairs. You next, he says. They believe it wasn’t an accident, that someone planted a bomb to kill Massimo.”
“I’m terribly upset, Father. I’ve been ill all morning. Surely they don’t suspect me. Or you.”
Her father stood still, staring at her, and at last said, “It was you who asked me to invite him, Vittoria. You said Massimo should visit again.”
“Father! I asked as an apology, not in order to kill him! How can you think such a thing!”
Her father shrugged and, for a moment then, he seemed to her like a frightened boy, confused, grasping at any explanation. And for that moment, washed again by another wave of guilt, she wanted to cross the room and hold him in a warm embrace, hold him and rock him as if he were a child. He’d lost his wife, now his best friend. The daily reports from the South made it seem that their world—his world—so carefully constructed, so perfectly luxurious, so neatly labeled, was about to be shattered like a beautiful ceramic plate thrown against the wall. The Allies were moving north. How would they treat a man who’d been sending his finest wines to the SS? Whose best friend’s factories had made uniforms and boots for the Fascist army? How would the Nazis react if they discovered that deserters had been hidden in his barn?
Her father’s cheeks were bubbling, his blue eyes swinging side to side.
“They . . . I don’t know. Who knows? Something is happening, Vittoria. They have apparently killed one of the horses!”
“What! Father, oh Lord and Savior. Is Enrico safe?”
Her father nodded as if in a trance. She did cross the room then and take him by both hands. “Please tell them I’m ill, that I’ve been vomiting ever since Massimo died. My own godfather. Look at me, I’m broken, Father.”
It was all another act. The words seemed to lift out of a dark place, the throat of another person. A small, terrified, guilty person, but one who was capable of putting on an act in order to save herself.
“Broken,” Umberto repeated, his cheeks shaking, and for a moment Vittoria believed that her act had worked.
But then her father swung his head from side to side, bent his lips in against each other. “I can’t, Vittoria,” he said. “The man, this captain. He’s insisting. Who knows what else he’ll do if we refuse. Kill the other horse. Set the house on fire. You must come downstairs. You must. Now.”
He squeezed her hands once, turned and walked out of the room, and she saw no option but to follow. Better that than hear the sound of boots on the marble stairs and see the demon captain standing at the door of her bedroom, grinning, unbuckling his belt.
Before she’d gone even halfway down the stairs, she could see his black boots, then the trousers of his military pants, his hands clasped behind his back, and at last his head, uncovered by the usual military cap. He held the cap in one hand, and she wondered if, after pissing on their vegetables, he could possibly have taken it off out of respect for the house.
Two more steps and she saw the man spin around and lock his eyes on her, then run them from her face down to her feet and back again, as if assessing a farm animal he was thinking of buying.
Her afternoon merenda, tea with a slice of bread and their own salami, was pushing up against the back of her throat. She stopped in front of him and waited. Without a word, he reached out and took hold of her arm, and led her across the foyer into the small sitting room where her mother had often sat sewing, and where she’d sometimes breastfed Enrico when her husband wasn’t around to forbid such a “public display.” The captain said nothing, not a word, just kept holding her with his fingers tight on the back of her right arm, as if she might try to run away. Vittoria was doing her best to pretend she was unafraid, but her breath was coming in short gulps and she could feel rivers of perspiration running down her sides, trickling along her ribs.
Still grasping the back of her upper arm, the captain led her with a peculiar gallantry to a brocade sofa and gestured that she should sit. He pulled up a straight-backed chair—too close—and sat opposite her, adjusting his wire-rimmed spectacles, setting his hat （she noticed a piece of straw clinging to it） carefully on the coffee table, brushing back with three fingers what was left of his thinning brown hair. All in all, he was a particularly unattractive man, his face thin, centered by a blunt nub of a nose, his eyes slightly asymmetrical and the irises a pale-brown color with yellow streaks. With the first word out of his mouth, “Allora”—all right now—Vittoria remembered his awful Italian.