The Secret of Santa Vittoria Page 29

  The colonel’s anger and harshness and scorn were very difficult for the captain to take. He lowered his eyes at last and he looked at the floor not conscious of the mayor’s body lying on it.

  “Get him up and hit him,” Colonel Scheer said. Several of the soldiers lifted Bombolini to his feet.

  “It isn’t the hitting, Colonel. I can hit.” He surprised them by pulling back his arm and smashing his fist into Bombolini’s face. He hit him on the swollen lump and it split on the impact like a grape between the fingers, and blood splattered from it.

  “You have been baptized,” Scheer said. “Now you are one of us.” He was easier toward the captain now.

  “I believe you now,” Captain von Prum said. “The wine is here. I am humiliated. Now I ask one thing of you.”

  “Will you hit him again, good and hard? Would you knock an eye out?”

  “Yes,” von Prum said.

  “Then ask.”

  “I want a chance to restore my honor in my own way,” the captain said. “I want to find the wine and bring it to you by myself.”

  “And if you don’t?”

  “I’ll find it.”

  “I give you five days.”

  Von Prum was overjoyed. “You will have your wine,” he said, “and if you don’t I shall resign my commission.”

  Scheer laughed at him then. “That’s generous of you,” the colonel said. “If you don’t, you’ll find your ass on the eastern front—excuse my peasant manners, von Knoblesdorf. What kind of war do you think we’re running here?”

  They went outside then, and as von Prum wrote in his log that evening, he was surprised to find that the sun was out and it was still day.

  “Five days, then,” Colonel Scheer said. “Do you know, I am a very generous man.”

  “Now that I know the wine is here there’s no question of its being found, but I am thankful to you, Colonel Scheer.”

  The colonel put a hand on the captain’s shoulder. “And if, on the fourth night, you still haven’t found the wine, when it comes time for pulling out fingernails, you’ll pull them out, and when it comes time for crushing testicles, you’ll crush them, and if you have to kill, you’ll kill.”

  Von Prum said nothing. He gave the impression that he believed, but within himself he denied it, not because he couldn’t do it, but because he wouldn’t need to do it.

  “You’ll do it,” Colonel Scheer said, “because you’re one of us and this is the way we do things. You will surprise yourself, von Prum.”

  When they were gone Captain von Prum went back to the wine cellar. Some women were already washing the mayor’s wounds.

  “I had to do that, do you understand?” the captain said. “It was required of me, a matter of form.”

  Bombolini was facing away from the captain toward the wall. He was in great pain, and yet he was pleased with himself. He had discovered that he wasn’t afraid of the punishment and that he would say nothing despite the pain of it.

  “It was unworthy of you,” Bombolini said.

  “It was a matter of form,” the captain said.

  The mayor turned toward the captain. His face was badly battered and, as von Prum later wrote, it was almost disgusting to have to contemplate.

  “After all of the things you told me,” Bombolini said.

  “I still believe them,” the captain said. “Now the wine will be found. I try to force no answer from you. I ask you as a reasonable man to save both of us effort and pain. Now that they are gone, where is the wine?”

  Bombolini smiled at him, although it was painful to smile and the air that touched the broken tooth caused him to gasp aloud.

  “There is no wine.”

  To his surprise, the German found that his hand was opening and closing and that he wanted to smash Italo Bombolini’s eye.

  HE WAS confident, and his confidence passed to the men. Now that he had no doubt that the wine was in Santa Vittoria he had no doubt that it could be found.

  “It is a matter of reason and logic and science,” Captain von Prum told them. “I want no force and no violence.”

  The matter of violence had become important to him, because of the “Bloodless Victory,” which only the day before he had contemplated giving up, and because of the beliefs he had invested in it, and—something he wasn’t prepared to consider then—because of Caterina Malatesta and the respect he wanted from her, and the love.

  He wanted to find the wine easily and gently, he wished to find it wittily, to touch the right place, almost sadly and say, “The wine is here. I’m very sorry, it was a good effort but it wasn’t quite enough. I’m truly sorry about it.”

  Because he was certain of finding the wine, he had time on his side and instead of beginning the search at once, in a haphazard fashion, they sat down and constructed a detailed map of Santa Vittoria, which is still the best map ever made of our city, and they divided the city into sections and quarters and into logical geographical situations that would lend themselves to the hiding of one million bottles of wine. There were only five or six of these.

  “It is a simple process of logical anticipation followed by logical elimination, which in the end will leave no other possibility except the place where the wine must be and, so, will be.” Von Prum put this down in his log and then, finding it good, read it to his men.

  “Oh, we’ll find it all right,” Corporal Heinsick said. “If they hid it, sir, then we’ll find it.”

  This was the true logic: that if the Italians had been smart enough to hide the wine, then it stood to reason that the Germans must be smart enough to find it.

  The first “logical anticipation” was the Roman wine cellar, as the most obvious and convenient place to put the wine, and it was the first to be eliminated. Sergeant Traub told the other soldiers, “Even the wops are too smart to put their wine down there.” And they went on to the second anticipation, which was the Fat Wall around the city. It was a possibility that had to be checked, that the wall or some stretch of it had been hollowed out and was being used as a massive container for the wine. In the morning they began going over the wall almost brick by brick, striking the sides with their trench knives and bayonets, listening for that hollow sound that would tell them that the brick front was false and the wine was hiding behind it. By the middle of the morning they were still not halfway around the city. It is very hard to explain to someone who was not there on that day, how ironic the tapping on the bricks was to the people of the city.

  When Heinsick suggested ways to speed up the process, the ways were rejected by Captain von Prum.

  “Carefulness is the keystone of our method here, Corporal,” the captain said. “Thoroughness. Time is on our side, not on theirs. Each time we finish one area the remaining areas grow smaller. The noose draws tighter.”

  They were good words, and the soldiers liked them. “The noose grows tighter.” It offered a satisfaction, even when the search found nothing. It proved that nothing indeed was there; and that in itself was something. The captain and the sergeant found a true satisfaction in inking out the sections on the map that had been found wanting. Each failure only meant that they were that much closer to the end.

  When they were through with the Fat Wall they began to investigate the possibility that the wine was in some fashion buried in the very bowels of the city, and that there must be some old storage place, probably built in ancient days as protection against marauding armies, that could be reached by old stairways and trap doors in the floors and cellars of the old houses or through the church or the Palace of the People. Late on the first afternoon they began a step-by-step, door-by-door, systematic, logical examination of every house in Santa Vittoria.

  They began in High Town and from there they started down the lanes to the Piazza of the People, down from the Goats to the Turtles and, if needed, to the Frogs in Old Town, where the wine would almost surely lie.

  They picked up the beds and the mattresses on the floors, and the rush mats, and they t
apped the stone floors and the earth floors, and they tapped the tile floors (of those fortunate enough to have tiles) with metal rods and wooden sticks and stone hammers.

  The search of the houses took longer than they had thought, and although time was on their side time also was fleeing from them. Von Prum began to urge them to go a little faster and a little faster, and the stop for lunch was only ten minutes long and there was no rest, and then they ate their supper while they worked. At night we still went down the mountain and, since the evenings were becoming cool, it was comfortable in the Roman cellar. The Good Time Boys played cards by themselves, and if we were quiet we could hear the sound of the stone hammers all the way down the mountain. Young men went up and watched the Germans’ progress and told us where they were—now in Francucci’s old house, now in del Purgatorio’s, now in Vittorini’s, tapping, tapping, tapping, until the lights went out in the Roman cellar.

  We woke to the same sound. They were at it before the sun was up.

  * * *

  Bombolini never heard the tapping on the stones, because all of those days he slept. At times he awoke, but then he would sleep again. They had carried him up to his old bed in his old home above the wineshop, so that Angela Bombolini could take care of him. On the third day he was able to sit up and take some soup, and they made him a chicken soup in which an entire chicken had been used, a very great thing here. When he finally awoke for good, although he could not see because of the swelling of his face, everything seemed clear to him. He felt that he could see things as if they were written on glass through which a light was shining, and all of the answers were simple and clear. It was he, for example, who knew at once what must be done with The Band.

  As the Germans neared the houses in Old Town, Pietrosanto came to him in terror.

  “So you didn’t kill them after all,” Bombolini said.

  Pietro hung his head in shame. “I tried to. I had my rifle ready, and then I looked into those big stupid ox eyes of Francucci’s, and I couldn’t make my finger pull the trigger.”

  “I’m ashamed of you. What would The Master say about you?”

  “Yes, it is shameful.” Instead of killing them, he had hidden them in the cellar of one of the oldest houses by the wall at the bottom of Old Town.

  “As soon as it is evening take them out of the cellar and up the back lane around Old Town and put them in the cellar of Copa’s old house. They’ll be safe there. The Germans will never come back.”

  Because of the systematic manner of the German search we always knew where they were going and where they had been. A criminal might have stayed one house ahead of them or one house behind and been perfectly safe all of the while.

  And when Fabio came down from the mountains, Bombolini knew what to do with him.

  “This act must be avenged,” Fabio said. “The time for crawling has passed, the time to act is at hand.”

  Fabio had grown a beard in the mountains, and since it was the same color as his hair, so deeply black that when the light struck it it was blue, the beard against the long whiteness of his face made him look more like a martyr than before.

  “It isn’t the blows to you as an individual,” Fabio said.

  “No, of course not,” Bombolini said. He allowed his fingers to touch the swelling of his face and his tongue tipped his broken tooth.

  “It is to you as our leader,” Fabio said. “This is what hurts. These blows to you wound us, the damage to you demeans us. When they strike you, they wound me. I am the one who is insulted.”

  He then went on to outline the attack he planned on the Germans, on von Prum and on the drunken soldiers in the cellar.

  “I agree with you, Fabio,” Bombolini said. “The time to act has come.”

  A plan was made at once. The Red Flames would come down out of the mountains that night and gather in back of Copa’s house, just outside the Fat Wall. At two o’clock, at the sound of a goat, Pietrosanto and the other soldiers would drop ropes and pull them up over the wall into Santa Vittoria where they would join forces and prepare the assault on the enemy. Fabio was moved to tears.

  “You don’t know how long I have waited for this,” Fabio said. “The hour has come when we will pay acts of dishonor with deeds of honor.”

  It is embarrassing, after what happened, to write that Fabio then kissed him on both swollen cheeks.

  And it was Bombolini who began the silent evacuation of the city. They got Padre Polenta’s parish list and began to write down the names of all the people they felt could not keep their silence if the Germans turned to violence. These people would be allowed to work in the terraces but never to come up into the city. In the next two days they sent down almost all the women of the city and they sent the old men and people like Fungo the idiot, and Rana because he was wild and Capoferro because he was crazy and Roberto Abruzzi because they were afraid he might cry out something in English if they tore out a fingernail. And because the Germans were the way they were, because they didn’t really know what we were doing, they never noticed the women gone, the children vanished, the old out of sight.

  Because of what happened to Bombolini there was a good feeling in the city about the prospects of physical violence.

  “If he can do it, if Bombolini can take it, then I can take it,” the men said.

  Only Tufa, who said nothing aloud to all this, had no faith. “They don’t know,” he told Caterina Malatesta. “They don’t know what’s going to happen to them.”

  “Then why don’t you tell them?”

  “It won’t do any good. They feel good now, and why should I spoil that? They may not turn to it after all, so why should I frighten everyone?”

  He told Caterina then what they would do. The soldiers in the city now wouldn’t do it. They would send for the professionals, for the Gestapo or the SS secret police.

  “Then they all break,” Tufa said. “No man can stand it. They do things to men that it is impossible for men to believe even when it is happening to them.”

  “But Bombolini stood it,” Caterina said.

  “No, no, no, no. He stood nothing. After five minutes with the SS he will beg them to break his jaw or put out his eye if only they will stop doing what they are doing to him.”

  In the end she persuaded him to go to Bombolini and tell him. And what the mayor heard saddened him, because he had been feeling confident about himself and about his people.

  “But it takes time to break a man, isn’t that true?” Bombolini said.

  “Sometimes it takes two minutes and sometimes ten and sometimes an hour, although they don’t generally live after that.”

  “I was nothing then?” He was very sad.

  “You were brave, Bombolini, and you were nothing. This goes beyond bravery. They all break sooner or later.”

  “So there is no hope.”

  “There is no hope.”

  And then Tufa was astonished and even angered to see that Bombolini, to the best of his ability, was trying to smile at him.

  “I have some people no one in the world can break,” Bombolini said.

  “They all break,” Tufa said. He almost shouted at the mayor. “You must believe me and be prepared for it.”

  But Bombolini only shook his head and continued smiling, like the statues of some saints one sometimes sees, gentle and all knowing and at peace with the world.

  “I have some men who won’t break,” Bombolini said, and fell back to sleep then.

  * * *

  That night he told Caterina about it.

  “I tried to tell him, to make him understand, but he wouldn’t listen,” Tufa said. “He kept insisting he had men who would not break.”

  The two of them did not go to the shelter—Caterina because she was excused to care for the people in the Palace of the People, and Tufa because he chose to be defiant. She had been asleep when he came in, but he did not get into bed with her. He sat on the edge of the bed and looked at his hands in the moonlight. He didn’t know that
she was watching him.

  “Why are you looking at your hands that way?” she asked him.

  He said nothing, but finally decided to tell her. “Because I’m afraid,” he said. “It’s my nails. I’m afraid what I might do if they pull out my nails.”

  “There’s no reason to be afraid,” Caterina said. “There are only ten of them. You should try to remember that.”

  Tufa turned on her. “My God, you’re hard. A man reveals his fear to her and she tells him there are only ten of them. Do you have any more advice like that?”

  “I didn’t say it to demean you,” Caterina said. “I meant to make the pain understandable. It’s only human pain. People lose nails all the time.”

  “Not this way.”

  “Have you seen it?”

  “Yes,” Tufa said, and after a pause he admitted that he had done it, in Greece, and to Arabs in North Africa.

  “Did they die?”

  “No.”

  “Then you can bear it, Carlo. You only imagine the pain because you feel guilty about what you did.”

  “They told us what we wanted to know,” Tufa said.

  He went to the window and looked at his hands, and it was while he was there that he saw the first of the Petrarch Brigade, Fabio’s Resistance movement, come up over the wall and drop down into Grapebasket Lane, where they were met by Pietro Pietrosanto and led down the lane to Copa’s house.

  These must be the ones that Bombolini was counting on not to break, the young idealists, Tufa thought.

  “The ability of our people to deceive themselves is the highest art of the nation,” Tufa said aloud.

  It was almost dawn when Pietrosanto went down into the Piazza of the People and reported to Bombolini what they had done with Fabio and the rest of the Red Flames. They had led them to the cellar, the same one in which The Band was hidden, and they had bound and gagged them and put them in the darkness beneath the house.

  “How did they take it?” Bombolini asked.

  “They vowed to kill first you and then the Germans,” Pietrosanto said.