WHEN HE ENTERED the lobby of the apartment building in the Piazza Garibaldi, he thought for a moment he saw someone slipping out through the back entrance, but it was dark and he didn’t make too much of it. He was in a rush to get this over with and get to Bellorotondo. He took the stairs two at a time and when he reached the third-floor landing he heard some noise and knew that Franco was at home. Continuing up the stairs, he hid in a corner of the stairwell to catch his breath and load his gun. When he felt ready he went back down, kicked in the door and caught the Black Knight by surprise.
Franco screamed. Then, when he recognized Vitantonio, his panic changed to puzzlement.
‘I thought you were still in the mountains.’ He saw Vitantonio’s weapon and asked, ‘What are you doing with a gun? You aren’t planning on shooting your cousin, are you?’
Vitantonio didn’t answer. He went over to the table and swept off all the papers with his arm. Then he picked up the radio transmitter and threw that to the floor as well.
‘Are you still working for the fascists or are you now working directly for the agents of the Germans?’ he asked him, beside himself.
‘I am a patriot and I do my duty,’ Franco said in his defence when he saw that the game was up. ‘The Germans are our allies.’
‘You bastard!’ Vitantonio spat out, looking straight into his eyes. ‘Do you know what you’ve done?’
‘The king and Badoglio are just puppets …’
Vitantonio lost his temper completely. He couldn’t stand his cousin’s false naivety; he couldn’t believe that Franco was really incapable of telling the difference between good and evil. He went over and hit him, hard.
‘They have nothing to do with this. I’m talking about the good people that are dead because of you. All your life you’ve spread pain around you. You and your friend are sick, and you’re going to rot in hell.’
As soon as the words had left his mouth, he realized that Franco’s accomplice wasn’t in the room. In his anger, he had forgotten about him. He turned towards his old bedroom, but it was too late: the door was just opening and the man with the blackened teeth was already firing.
After the first shot, everything happened very fast. Vitantonio felt a burning sensation on one side of his forehead: the bullet had grazed his temple. But he kept his cool and fired back twice; both bullets lodged in the chest of the man with the rotten teeth, and he suddenly crumpled, like a puppet whose strings have been cut. Vitantonio ran his hand over his temple and felt an unpleasant, viscous mass of blood and hair that had been ripped away by the bullet. Warm blood streamed down his cheek, but he didn’t let himself panic.
However, before he had time to react, he saw the main door open and a new character enter the stage. At first he didn’t recognize him, but he soon registered the uniform of an American army officer. Captain Lewis Clark held a revolver in his hand. He fired, and this time Vitantonio felt a burning in his stomach and he had to lean against the table to keep himself from falling.
‘I gave you a chance to keep quiet and save your life but you refused. Now I’m going to have to kill you. I can’t let you spread any more rumours about chemical weapons and endanger many months’ worth of work.’
But just as the American was about to shoot him a second time, another figure emerged from behind the door and hurled himself between them. Two more shots rang out and Vitantonio saw Clark limping out of the apartment with a bullet in one leg. Then, from the back, he recognized the new gunman, now on the point of collapse: it was Salvatore. He ran to hold him up, but didn’t reach him in time. Salvatore keeled over, bleeding profusely from an ugly chest wound. When Vitantonio sat down next to him, their blood pooled together on the floor. He tried to get him talking, to calm him down.
‘You were the one hiding by the back door earlier on …’
‘I was waiting for the man with the black teeth, to settle a score that’s been eating away at me for years. When I saw the American following you up the stairs I knew I had to intervene to make sure you didn’t get caught between two gunmen. Before Roosevelt and the others left for the airport they told me about the fight you’d had …’
Suddenly Salvatore was quiet but a flicker in his eyes showed he was on the alert. Vitantonio turned and saw that Franco was preparing to fire the revolver that his accomplice had dropped. His hand was shaking and he missed. Killing was what Franco liked best, but he was so useless at it that he always needed someone else to do the dirty work for him. Vitantonio stood up. He was just the opposite: he didn’t enjoy shooting, but it came easily to him. He saw that Franco was still shaking as he tried to pull the trigger again, but his finger froze. Vitantonio watched him with a disgusted expression and took aim.
But something made him hesitate. He remembered Franco pestering Giovanna in the garden of the palazzo, the day that Nonna punished Vitantonio by cancelling his confirmation; he saw him a year later playing with the wooden sword, dressed as the Black Knight; he relived Salvatore’s beating at the hands of the fascists; he thought about little Michele, at the bottom of the gravina, and about how Skinny had been sacked and Dr Ricciardi exiled. In his mind’s eye Vitantonio saw the Matera Milizia barracks blown sky-high; he saw the eighteen men executed in the town square of Rionero, and all the others he had found as he climbed the road to the Maiella. Then he relived all the horror of the bombing of Bari and he knew there was no turning back.
He cocked the revolver. His last thought was of his mother, that very morning, when she was desperately trying to take in a breath. Then he angrily fired two shots into Franco’s forehead. His head jerked back violently, as if yanked by a cord, and his legs folded under him as if they were made of soft butter. Without time even to reflect his incredulity in his face, the Black Knight fell down dead. Vitantonio stood stock-still, his gaze fixed on the blood that splattered the wall. Through that gory mess he saw two holes near the balcony: the bullets had exited the back of Franco’s head and lodged in the wall, making the plaster fly. He lowered his eyes and took a look at his cousin’s lifeless body. He stared at it for a good long while. And he felt nothing.
He then ran to Salvatore’s side, and found he was choking on his own blood. Vitantonio took off his shirt and used it to try to staunch the flow. The blood streaming out of the bullet’s entrance wound was making little bubbles on Salvatore’s chest, as if air was escaping from a bicycle tyre. The bullet must have punctured his right lung. Salvatore coughed and more blood came from his mouth. He opened it as wide as he could, gasping for air, but must not have been taking any in because his face was turning purple. Then, still struggling to sit up, he surprised Vitantonio by speaking in a very clear voice.
‘Your work here is done. Now leave quickly and go to Giovanna.’
‘We need to get you to a hospital …’ protested Vitantonio.
‘We can’t,’ answered Salvatore. This time his voice was much fainter and Vitantonio had to lean in to hear him. ‘We shot an American officer and no one will believe us when we tell them what he did.’
Until that moment, Vitantonio hadn’t grasped the danger he was in. He could be considered a traitor: in just the last few hours he had challenged a captain of the American army twice and had killed two fascists who were most likely passing themselves off as loyal to Marshal Badoglio’s government. He rapidly started assessing the situation and tried to guess what might come next. The fact that his attacker had fled might mean that he was keen not to attract the attention of the military police. A shootout wasn’t something an army expert on chemical weapons wanted to get mixed up in, especially when he was part of a special unit that didn’t officially exist and secrecy was his top priority.
Vitantonio coughed and his stomach wound started to gush more blood.
‘You have to see a doctor and leave Bari, before they start searching for you in all the city’s hospitals,’ Salvatore said. ‘I don’t like the look of that wound.’
‘I’m not leaving without you.’
‘My time has come.’
Vitantonio saw the increasingly bluish tint of his friend’s face and sensed that he was right: Salvatore’s life was slipping away from him. But Vitantonio was still unwilling to abandon him.
‘I won’t leave you. We’ll go to a hospital together.’
‘Don’t try to be a hero! You have obligations now. It’s all over for me.’ Salvatore turned his head and looked at the corpse of the man with the rotten teeth. He grabbed Vitantonio’s arm tightly, looked into his eyes and said, ‘Thank you.’ He gave him an enigmatic smile, put his arms around his neck and kissed him on the cheek. ‘Give Giovanna a kiss from me,’ he said, kissing him again, this time on the forehead, and added, ‘and the baby too when he’s born; they say he’ll be a boy because her belly is high.’
He laughed, which made him cough and robbed him of the little energy he had left. He kept looking at Vitantonio with a smile on his lips and revealed, ‘The baby is yours, from that morning when Giovanna went up to Matera …’
Vitantonio felt his heart racing. He was about to say something, but Salvatore, still gripping him tightly, lost consciousness. When Vitantonio tried to bring him to, he felt his arms hanging limply and he realized that he had stopped breathing. He hugged Salvatore’s lifeless body, crying, like he had done that morning with his mother’s, wondering aloud, ‘God! What more do you want from us?’
He embraced him tightly once more, breathing in the scent of the black leather jacket that Salvatore had worn since those distant September days when he gave Vitantonio a lift on his motorcycle to school in Martina Franca. In a matter of seconds he relived the entire summer at the farmstead, when he had decided to adopt Skinny’s son as an older brother. And gripped by the memory of a summer haze, Vitantonio too passed out.