Forty-One
Countless times since her first terrible encounter with the SS captain, Vittoria had imagined being assaulted by him. The vision had obsessed her, invaded her dreams, but in her imagination, the assault had always occurred in her bedroom, and she’d always pictured herself fighting him off, as she’d fought off Massimo. From the time she’d taken it from her father’s fingers, she’d carried the small, loaded pistol with her wherever she went—to the convent, to the dining table at breakfast, even into the bathroom. Somehow, though, from the moment the captain had stepped out of his jeep and come toward her, nothing happened the way she’d imagined. It was the speed that caught her most off guard. Tobias was upon her in two seconds. She felt him take hold of her hair and yank her backward, she sensed Paolo trying to help, saw him being struck, but the Nazi was pulling her violently into the barn, and she thought only of trying to stay on her feet. He dragged her across the dirt and threw her so roughly down in the straw of Antonina’s stall that all the breath went out of her. Another second and he was lowering himself on top of her. She did try to reach for the pistol then, tried to get her right hand into the pocket of her dress, but his weight was on her, his tobacco breath in her face, her dress already up over her knees, his left forearm pressing down against her right elbow. She fought, but she could tell how useless it was—he was so much stronger. She bit at his glasses and felt one lens crack between her teeth, but it only made him press down harder against her, tearing at the front of his pants now, spitting, grunting. Lips bleeding, she closed her eyes and started to pray, and at that moment she felt the captain’s whole body go suddenly rigid, and heard him let out the most horrible scream. And then a series of grunts as if he couldn’t catch his breath.
She felt something sharp against her belly, warm liquid there. She opened her eyes to see the captain’s face contorted in agony, and, behind him, Enrico backing away, hands made into fists and pressed against his eye sockets.
She was able to slide halfway out from under the captain. He was gasping, spitting blood, grunting. She heard Rico let out a wail and only then saw the shaft of the pitchfork sticking out of the Nazi’s back. He was struggling to stand, on all fours, impaled, blood leaking out past the protruding tips of the three sharp tines. Holding on to the wall of the stable with one hand, he managed to get to his feet, and was reaching around behind himself with one hand to try and take hold of the pitchfork. He gave up, turned, grunting for breath, dripping blood, and took four wobbly, drunken steps out into the sunlight.
Enrico rushed over and wrapped her so tightly in his arms that he nearly knocked the breath out of her again. “Vita! Vita! Vita!” he kept saying, sobbing, soaking the side of her neck with tears. “Vita, I—I—I . . .” From just outside the barn, she heard a rattle of gunshots, and she wrenched her face toward the door, expecting to see Paolo and the deserters on the ground, and expecting, any second, to die in her brother’s arms.
Forty-Two
Paolo heard the scream, then the grunting noises—sounds a boar might make after it was shot—and he was torn exactly in two, leaning like a man wearing concrete shoes. He had risked one step, the bayonet centimeters from his throat, when he was stopped perfectly still by the sight of the German officer, glasses gone, face contorted, knees bending out crookedly to each side as he staggered from the barn. The man had barely made it into the courtyard when he fell straight forward on his face, a pitchfork—one of their own pitchforks—sticking up out of his back and wobbling like a tomato stake in a storm.
His men had turned, had started to move toward him, when Paolo heard a tiny sound above and behind him, a squeak of hinges, as familiar as the creak of the wagon wheels. He didn’t have time to look up at the small attic loading window before there was a burst of shots, impossibly loud, and the three Nazi soldiers were falling backward and sideways in bizarre contortions. Rifles thrown into the air, chests, necks, and faces erupting in fountains of red. They fell to the ground, two of them twitching and groaning, one completely still.
Paolo looked straight up and behind him and saw, at first, only the barrel of the automatica, then Antonio’s hands and arms, then the bottom of his jaw and his huge nose.
And then, as if in a dream, he watched Vittoria step out of the wide doorway, unsteady on her feet, straw in her hair, dress torn and stained at the front. Alive. Enrico was bent over double just behind her, weeping.
The officer was writhing on his face in the dirt, the pitchfork handle wobbling crazily. As Paolo watched, still frozen, Vittoria took three steps toward the man, put the small pistol to the back of his skull, and fired. Once. The officer’s head disappeared in an explosion of flesh and bone.