Chapter Thirty-One
“Stop!” a man shouted behind him.
Pino startled, almost lost his full balance, almost pitched off the railing, almost plunged thirty stories to the stone piazza and death. But his mountaineering reflexes were too ingrained. His fingers caught the post. He steadied himself enough to look over his shoulder and felt his heart try to crawl out of his chest.
The cardinal of Milan was standing there, not three meters away.
“What are you doing?” Schuster demanded.
“Dying,” Pino said dully.
“You’ll do no such thing, not in my church, and not on this day of all days,” the cardinal said. “There’s been too much bloodshed already. Get down from there, young man. Now.”
“Really, My Lord Cardinal, it’s better this way.”
“My Lord Cardinal?”
The prince of the church squinted, adjusted his glasses, and looked closer. “Only one person I know calls me that. You’re General Leyers’s driver. You’re Pino Lella.”
“Which is why jumping is better than living.”
Cardinal Schuster shook his head, took a step toward him. “Are you the traitor and collaborator who’s supposedly hiding in the Duomo?”
Pino nodded.
“Get down, then,” Schuster said, holding out his hand. “You’re safe.
I’m granting you sanctuary. No one will harm you under my protection.”
Pino wanted to cry, but said, “You wouldn’t if you knew what I’ve done.”
“I know what Father Re told me about you. It’s enough for me to know I should save you. Take my hand now. You’re making me ill standing
up there like that.”
Pino looked down and saw Schuster’s hand and his cardinal’s ring, but he did not take it.
“What would Father Re have you do?” Cardinal Schuster said.
At that, something gave way inside Pino. He grabbed the cardinal’s hand, got down, and stood there, stooped and trying not to break down.
Schuster put his hand on Pino’s trembling shoulder. “It can’t be all that bad, my son.”
“It’s worse, My Lord Cardinal,” Pino said. “The worst. The go-to-hell kind of act.”
“Let me be the judge of that,” Schuster said, guiding him away from the balcony.
He got Pino to sit down in the shade of one of the cathedral’s flying buttresses. Pino did, vaguely aware of the music still playing below, vaguely aware of the cardinal calling to someone to get food and water.
Then Schuster crouched beside Pino.
“Tell me now,” the cardinal said. “I will hear your confession.”
Pino gave Schuster the spine of his story with Anna, how he’d met her on the street the first day of the bombardment, and then fourteen months later through General Leyers’s mistress, how they’d fallen in love, and how they’d planned to marry, and how she’d tragically died in front of a firing squad not an hour before.
“I said nothing to stop them,” he wept. “I did nothing to save her.”
Cardinal Schuster closed his eyes.
Pino choked, “If I really loved her, I . . . I should have been willing to die with her.”
“No,” the prelate said, opening his eyes and fixing them on Pino. “It is a tragedy that your Anna died that way, but you had the right to survive.
Every human has that basic, God-given right, Pino, and you feared for your life.”
Pino threw up his hands and cried, “Do you know how many times I’ve feared for my life in the last two years?”
“I can’t imagine.”
“Every time before, I had faith in doing the right thing, no matter the danger. But I just . . . couldn’t believe in Anna enough to . . .”
He started to cry again.
“Faith is a strange creature,” Schuster said. “Like a falcon that nests year after year in the same place, but then flies away, sometimes for years, only to return again, stronger than ever.”
“I don’t know if it will ever return for me.”
“It will. In time. Why don’t you come with me now? We’ll get you fed, and I’ll find a place for you to spend the night.”
Pino thought about that, and then shook his head, saying, “I’ll come off the roof with you, My Lord Cardinal, but I think I’ll slip out after dark, go home to my family.”
Schuster paused, and then said, “As you wish, my son. Bless you, and go with God.”
After dark, Pino slipped into the lobby of his parents’ apartment building and immediately recalled the prior Christmas Eve and how Anna had played the sentries to get the suitcase with the radio transmitter safely upstairs. Riding up in the birdcage elevator provoked another round of crushing memories, how they’d kissed going past the fifth-floor guards, and how they’d— The elevator stopped. He shuffled to the door and knocked.
Aunt Greta opened the door with a big grin on her face. “There you are, Pino! We’ve been holding dinner for you and Mario. Have you seen him?”
Pino swallowed hard and said, “He’s dead. They’re all dead.”
His aunt stood there in shock as he moved past her into the apartment.
Uncle Albert and Pino’s father had heard him and were getting up from the living room couch.
“What do you mean he’s dead?” Michele asked.
“A man who wanted his wristwatch called him a Fascist and shot him in the head in the public gardens near Porta Venezia,” Pino said dully.
“No!” his father said. “That’s not true!”
“I saw it happen, Papa.”
His father broke down, crying, “Oh dear God. How will I tell his mother?”
Pino was staring at the living room rug, remembering how he and Anna had made love there. The best Christmas present of his life. He wasn’t
hearing the questions Uncle Albert was firing at him. He just wanted to lie down there and mourn and grieve.
Aunt Greta stroked his arm. “It’s going to be okay, Pino,” she soothed.
“Whatever you’ve seen, whatever you’ve suffered, you’re going to be okay.”
Tears welled in Pino’s eyes and he shook his head. “No, I won’t. Not ever.”
“Oh, my poor boy,” she cried softly. “Please, come and eat. Tell us all about it.”
In a wavering voice, he said, “I can’t talk about it. I can’t think about it anymore, and I’m not hungry. All I want to do is sleep.” He was shivering as if it were the middle of winter again.
Michele came over, put his arm around Pino. “Then we’ll get you to bed. You’ll feel better in the morning.”
Pino barely understood where he was as they led him down the hall to his bedroom. He sat on the edge of the bed, all but catatonic.
“Do you want to listen to the shortwave?” his father asked. “It’s safe
now.”
“Father Re has mine.”
“I’ll get Baka’s.”
Pino shrugged listlessly. Michele hesitated, but then left and returned with Baka’s radio. He set it on the end table.
“It’s there for you if you want it.”
“Thanks, Papa.”
“I’m right down the hall if you need me.”
Pino nodded.
Michele shut the door behind him. Pino could hear him talking to Uncle Albert and Aunt Greta in worried whispers that faded to nothing. Through the open window he heard a single shot to the north and people laughing and carrying on in the streets below.
It felt like they were all taunting him with their joy, kicking him at his lowest moment. He slammed down the window. He pulled off his shoes and pants, lay down on the bed, shaking with rage and regret as he turned off the light. He tried to sleep, but was haunted not by the aria but by the black
accusatory look Anna held on to as she died, and the love that fled from him with her soul’s passing.
He turned on the shortwave and tuned it until he heard a slow piano solo playing against the whisk of a drum cymbal. Soft, warm jazz. Pino closed his eyes and tried to go with the music, which was as gentle and playful as a summer stream. He tried to imagine the stream, tried to find peace in it, and sleep, and nothingness.
But then the piece ended, and “Boogie Woogie Bugle Boy” came on.
Pino sat up with a start, feeling like every twitching beat in the song was there to goad and torture him. He saw himself the night before in the Hotel Diana with Carletto playing and partying. Anna had been alive then, not yet taken by the mob. If he’d just gone by Dolly’s rather than . . .
Feeling destroyed all over again, Pino grabbed the radio and almost hurled it against the wall, intending to bust it into a thousand pieces. But all of a sudden he was so overwhelmed, so exhausted, he merely turned the dial until the radio emitted static. Pino rolled up in the fetal position. He closed his eyes, listening to the hiss and crackle of the wireless and praying that the gaping wound in his heart was enough to stop it from beating before he awoke.
In Pino’s dreams, Anna was alive. In his dreams, she still laughed like Anna and kissed like Anna. She smelled of her own perfume and gave him that sidelong, amused look that always got him wanting to hold her and tickle her and— Feeling someone shaking his shoulder, he startled awake in his bedroom. Sunlight poured through the window. Uncle Albert and his father were standing by his bed. Pino looked at them as though they were strangers.
“It’s ten,” Uncle Albert said. “You’ve been asleep almost fourteen hours.”
The nightmare of the day before rushed back in. Pino so longed for sleep and the dreams where Anna still lived that he almost started to cry again.
“I know this is difficult for you,” Michele said. “But we need your help.”
Uncle Albert nodded. “We have to go look for Mario’s body at Cimitero Monumentale.”
Pino still wanted to roll over and search for Anna in his dream, but he said, “I left him in the public gardens. I ran from his body there.”
Uncle Albert said, “I went to look last night after you’d gone to sleep.
They said he was taken to the cemetery and we could look for him there along with all the other bodies that have been found in the streets the past few days.”
“So get up,” Michele said. “Three of us will find Mario quicker than
two. We owe his mother that much.”
“I’ll be recognized,” he said.
“Not with me, you won’t,” Uncle Albert said.
Pino saw there was no stopping them. “Give me a minute. I’ll be right out.”
They left him, and he sat up, aware of the pounding in his head and the deep and vast emptiness that fluctuated between his throat and gut. His brain sought memories of Anna, but he stopped the urge. He couldn’t think of her. Otherwise, he’d just lie there and mourn.
Pino put on clean clothes and walked back into the living room.
“Do you want anything to eat before we go?” his father asked.
“I’m fine now,” Pino said, hearing the flatness in his voice and not
caring.
“You should at least drink some water.”
“I’m fine!” Pino shouted. “Are you deaf, old man?”
Michele took a step back. “Okay, Pino. I just want to help.”
He stared at his father, unable and unwilling to tell them about Anna.
“I know, Papa,” he said. “I’m sorry. Let’s go find Mario.”
Eleven in the morning and already it was stifling hot outside. Barely a breeze blew as they walked through the streets, took one of the few trams running, and then caught a ride from a friend of Uncle Albert’s who’d managed to find petrol.
Pino would remember little of the journey. Milan, Italy, the world itself had become unhinged for him, disjointed and savage. He watched the
scarred city as if from afar, not at all a part of the teeming life that was beginning to return after the Nazis’ retreat.
The car dropped them in front of the cemetery piazza. Pino felt like he was in a dream turning nightmare again as he walked toward the Famidio, the octagonal-shaped memorial chapel of the Cimitero Monumentale, and the long, two-story, arched and open-air colonnades that jutted off the chapel left and right.
Cries of grief echoed from the colonnades before rifle shots sounded at a distance, followed by the deep rumbling exhale of some larger explosive. Pino didn’t care about any of it. He welcomed a bomb. He’d hug one and smash the primer with a hammer if he could.
A dump truck honked. Uncle Albert pulled Pino out of its way. In a daze, Pino looked at the vehicle as it passed. It was like any other dump truck he’d seen until it got upwind. The stench of death poured out. Stacked like cordwood, corpses filled the vehicle’s bed. Blue and swollen bodies stuck out the top, some clothed, some naked, men, women, and children.
Pino doubled over, started to dry-heave and then retch.
Michele rubbed his back. “It’s all right, Pino, with the heat, I knew to bring us handkerchiefs and camphor.”
The dump truck did a 180-degree turn and backed up to the lower arches of the western colonnade. A lever was thrown. A hundred or more bodies spilled out of the bed and flopped onto the gravel.
Pino stopped and gaped in horror. Was Anna in there? Buried?
He heard one of the drivers say that there were hundreds more bodies
coming.
Uncle Albert tugged Pino’s arm.
“Come away from there now,” he said.
Like an obedient dog, Pino followed them into the memorial chapel.
“Are you looking for a loved one?” asked a man standing inside the door.
“My cousin’s son,” Michele said. “He was mistaken for a Fascist and —”
“I’m sorry for your loss, but I don’t care why or how your cousin’s son died,” the man said. “I just want the body to be claimed and removed. This is an extraordinary health hazard. Do you have masks?”
“Handkerchiefs and camphor,” Pino’s father said.
“That will help.”
“Is there some order to the bodies?” Uncle Albert said.
“The order they came in, and where we found a place to lay them.
You’ll just have to search. Do you know what he was wearing?”
“His Italian Air Force uniform,” Michele said.
“Then you should find him. Take those stairs. Start on the lower eastern colonnades and work your way out to the rectangular series of hallways off the main galleries.”
Before they could thank him, he’d already moved on to tell the next distraught family how to find its dead loved one. Michele handed out white handkerchiefs and fished the mothballs from a paper sack. He put the camphor into the center of the handkerchiefs and tied the ends to make a pouch, showed them how to press it to their lips and nose.
“I learned to do this in the first Great War,” he said.
Pino took the pouch and stared at it.
“We’ll search the lower galleries,” Uncle Albert said. “You start up here, Pino.”
His mind was barely functioning as he went out an open side door on the east side of the chapel and out onto the upper floor of the colonnade.
Parallel open arches hemmed the gallery some ninety meters to an octagon- shaped tower that marked a triple intersection of passages.
On any other day, these halls would have been largely empty save for the statues of long-forgotten Lombardy statesmen and members of the nobility. Now, however, the length of the colonnade and the galleries beyond were part of a colossal morgue taking in nearly five hundred corpses a day in the wake of the Nazi retreat. The dead bodies were lined up on both sides of the open-air halls, feet to the wall, faces close to a meter- wide path that ran between them.
Other Milanese walked the galleries of the dead that morning. Old women dressed for grief held black lace shawls across their lips and noses.
Younger men guided the quaking shoulders of wives, daughters, and sons.
Greenhead blowflies had begun to gather. They whined and buzzed. Pino had to swat at them to keep them from getting at his eyes and ears.
The flies swarmed the nearest body, a man in a business suit. He’d been shot through the temple. Pino looked at him no more than a second,
but the image seared in his brain. The same happened when he looked at the next corpse, a woman in her fifties, dressed in her nightclothes, a lone curler still clinging to her iron-gray hair.
Back and forth he went, scanning the clothes, the sex, the faces, trying to find Mario among them. Pino moved faster now, giving no more than a glance at the naked couples he figured for once prosperous and powerful Fascists and their wives. Portly. Older. Their skin had turned pallid and mottled in death.
He walked the first gallery to the octagonal intersections of the hallways and took a right. This colonnade, longer than the first, overlooked the cemetery piazza.
Pino saw strangled bodies there, hacked bodies, shot bodies. Death became a blur. The sheer numbers were more than he could handle, so he focused on two things. Find Mario. Get out of this place.
A short time later, he found his cousin lying among six or seven dead Fascist soldiers. Mario’s eyes were shut. Flies danced on his head wound.
Pino looked around and saw an empty sheet across the hallway. He got it and laid it over Mario’s corpse.
Now all he had to do was find Uncle Albert and his father and leave.
He felt claustrophobic as he ran back toward the chapel. He dodged through other searchers and got there out of breath and brimming with anxiety.
He went through the chapel, barreled down the stairs to the lower colonnades. A family was shrouding a body on his right. When he looked left, his uncle was coming toward him from down the gallery, his lips and nose pressed into the camphor and his head shaking to and fro.
Pino ran to him. “I found Mario.”
Uncle Albert dropped the camphor pouch and looked up at him with piteous, bloodshot eyes. “Good. Where is he?”
Pino told him. His uncle nodded, and then put his hand on Pino’s forearm.
“I understand now why you were so upset last night,” he said hoarsely.
“And I’m . . . I’m so sorry for you. She seemed like such a fine young lady.”
Pino’s stomach cored out. He’d tried to tell himself Anna wasn’t here.
But where else? He stared over Uncle Albert’s shoulder and down the long gallery behind him.
“Where is she?” he demanded, trying to push by.
“No,” Uncle Albert said, blocking the way. “You are not going down there.”
“Get out of my way, Uncle, or I’ll throw you out of my way.”
Albert dropped his eyes, stepped aside, and said, “She’s in the far hall, on the right. Do you want me to show you?”
“No,” he said.
