THIRTY-SEVEN
Lucia
June 4, 1944
It was happening.
Lucia’s hands shook as she hooked them into her elbow creases, pacing the dim room, her calves warming each time she passed through a square of early-morning sunlight on the floor. While everyone else gathered in the courtyard at the heart of the convent, full of joy, she’d remained in her room. Her heart swung between elation, relief, disbelief, and guilt. Was it really happening?
The news had been everywhere for the past two weeks: all over the wireless, on the lips of every person on every street corner, worming its way into houses and trams and stores and hideouts.
The Allies had broken through on both fronts.
They’d mounted a heavy offensive on the Gustav Line in the middle of May, and soon after the news had thundered in that the German line was broken. After that, Rome came alive, crackling with energy, brimming with hope. People filled the churches to pray for peace, while others walked the streets, smiling but white-knuckled. After all, they’d hoped before. Could this really be the beginning of the end?
Now on this bright morning, the end had clearly arrived. The city brimmed with noise as a river of metal churned through it. German tanks, trucks, and armored cars crossed bridges onto ancient roads in an endless procession, fleeing north. Lucia stared out the convent windows, frowning with nerves, unable to see the source of the noise, though she knew what it was.
It was the first sound of liberation. The Germans were leaving.
She inhaled, marshaling her feelings and moving to the armoire to run a comb through her hair. It was time. She couldn’t avoid it any longer. She blinked, tugging the comb over her limp curls before dropping it and gathering her handbag. Good enough.
“You’re not going out?” Francesca appeared in the door just as Lucia turned toward it.
She cleared her throat. “A quick errand.”
Francesca leaned against the jamb, her sharp hip angling her skirt, her hair long on her back. She looked Lucia over, contemplating her, before speaking quietly. “You shouldn’t leave the convent. Not now.”
“But you said they’re retreating without a fight.”
“Mostly.” Francesca nodded. She’d been gone for two days, having been called by leaflets dropped from Allied planes. Stand shoulder to shoulder, the leaflets implored. Do everything in your power to prevent the destruction of the city. So Francesca had spent a day and a night guarding and demining the city with bands of partisans, bracing for violence that so far hadn’t come, and she’d only just returned to the convent to rest for an hour or two.
Francesca looked toward the window while she spoke. “The Germans will be moving through Rome for most of the day as their divisions retreat. I watched their tanks and trucks stream over the Ponte Milvio all night. It was like an endless river. There are others stealing cars, handcarts—whatever they can find. It’s not safe until the last German leaves, Lucia. There could still be snipers. Or saboteurs. Or just desperate, angry soldiers.”
“I can’t wait for them all to leave. I might already be too late.”
“Your mother?”
The air left Lucia’s lungs. “Sì.” She glanced around the empty room. “When the Allies landed in Anzio, my mother spoke of following the Germans north. She wanted to take my father to Bavaria to avoid the Allied advance, and whatever might happen afterward . . . I can’t let her do that, do you understand? I can’t let her travel deeper into danger, where bombs fall every—”
“Don’t.” Francesca shook her head. “You can’t rescue your parents. If they followed fascism this far, they’ll follow it to its end.”
Lucia hesitated, her thoughts scrambling. She hadn’t seen her mother since the night she came to warn them, months ago. Was Francesca right? Should she leave her parents to whatever fate they chose? They had, after all, chosen Il Duce her whole life, over everything. Even over their sons. But just as Lucia was about to put down her handbag and relent, a different face appeared in her mind. She saw her old friend, Noemi Bruno, blinking up at her on her front stoop, her silver hair speckled under fluttering bougainvillea. We can all be strong, she’d said, gripping Lucia’s hands with her bony fingers. Her kind eyes stared through the memory. Lucia sighed, brushing the wrinkles from her skirt with a shaking hand. If Noemi were alive, she would tell her to help her parents.
“I have to see my mother.” Lucia turned back to Francesca. “It’s the right thing to do. She came for me. She came for me and Matteo, when we were in danger.”
“But will she even be safer here?” Francesca dropped her voice to a whisper. “They’re collaboratori. How will people respond to Fascists like your parents when their protectors are gone?”
Lucia wavered again. Would her parents be safer up north, away from their history? Her father would probably go without her mother, if he had a choice. He’d follow Il Duce until he died. And if he stayed, he’d face the wrath of all the neighbors and citizens he’d watched be arrested, persecuted, and starved. Her mother deserved that wrath, too. But Lucia thought of the bombers flying low over the convent, weeks ago, the windows exploding while a building was leveled across the street, and guilt raked her soul. The bombings were worse in the north, with entire cities pummeled and leveled. She had to tell her mother to abandon her dying ideology, to remain in Rome, to change. She would have to face whatever wrath she’d earned when peace came, but she didn’t have to run.
“I’m going. I won’t be long.”
She was nearly out when Francesca’s urgent whisper pulled her back into the room once more. “Wait.”
She turned, and Francesca motioned for her to close the door. Then Francesca unbuttoned her blouse a little at the navel, reaching around to pull a dark object from her own waistband. A gun glinted in a shaft of yellowing sunlight. “You should take this,” she murmured, passing it to Lucia and giving her a quick tutorial. “This lever is the safety, but we’ll leave it off in case you have to act quickly. If you need to fire, you’ll pull the slide back to load the chamber. See here? This pulls the hammer back, and then it’s ready. Here, tuck it into your underwear—turn around, against your lower back—in case something happens.” Without preamble, Francesca fiddled with Lucia’s backside, stretching the waistband of her garments to tuck the gun in place, fluffing her blouse, and reassembling it all.
Lucia patted the back of her skirt, which now held a solemn weight.
“If you need to shoot, it’s quite accurate at close range. Easy to use.”
“I won’t need to shoot.”
Francesca came around to her front, her face grave. “You might. If it means coming back to your little boy, do it without hesitation. Now go, while it’s still early.”
It only took a second, as Lucia followed her father into her parents’ apartment, to see that they were indeed packing. Her mother stood over a pile of clothes, her earrings swinging when she turned to see Lucia appear in the doorway. A sob burst through Nonna Colombo’s habitually pursed lips. She dropped the skirt she’d been folding and stepped across the marble floors, arms out, face stricken, and pulled Lucia in close. But after a volley of sobs, she tidied up her emotions, sniffing them away and releasing her embrace.
“I didn’t know what had become of you,” Nonna Colombo whispered. She moved her hands down and gripped Lucia by the wrists, holding her still for inspection like she’d done years ago, when Lucia was a little girl. She cleared her throat. “When I came back to your house that night it was ransacked, and you and Matteo gone . . . Nobody could tell us anything. None of your father’s contacts—” Her voice hitched. Her eyes searched Lucia’s, startled and pained at the same time.
“We’ve been in hiding, Mamma. But we’re safe.” Lucia pulled back a little, casting her gaze over the empty suitcases and stacks of clothes. Piero’s photo sat on top of the nearest stack. He laughed out from the frame, forever jaunty in his airman’s uniform, forever young.
“What are you planning to do?” Lucia managed.
Her father drifted to the sofa behind her, settling down with a groan. “We’re leaving,” he muttered. “Il Duce still has a firm grip on the north. The Germans will establish another line now that they’re abandoning Rome, so we’ll go north of it—”
“No.” Lucia said the word with more force than she’d intended, stopping her father short. “When the Germans leave, Rome will finally be at peace. Papà, Mamma, why would you choose to follow the war? Where would you even go?”
Nonna Colombo’s voice was unsure, but she answered. “I managed to get through to a cousin, in Bavaria. They’ll take us in, though we’re also thinking about going to your father’s relatives in Vicenza . . .” She pivoted, looking around her living room as if she were lost.
Lucia stepped into her gaze. She took her mother’s hands, sensing her father’s stare as she spoke. “Mamma, you’ve lived in Rome most of your life. You don’t want to go to Germany, do you? Stay here. Matteo needs a grandmother. He’s lost . . .” She inhaled, subduing a surge of sorrow. “He’s lost his father. And Mamma, I need you. I don’t have anyone else now.”
Nonna Colombo’s bony fingers tightened. She blinked quickly, expelling tears from her eyes as fast as they came. They coursed down her pinched face, glittering in the afternoon light like the jewels dangling from her ears.
“We can’t stay,” her father interrupted from the couch.
Lucia turned to look at him, her palms gripped in her mother’s, and everything within her stilled. He stared at the floor, head hammocked in his hands like an old man. Why couldn’t he stay? Everything she knew of her father swam into her mind, all at once. She saw his boots, which he’d stacked by the front door every day of her life. He’d polished them himself on Sundays, and she could conjure the scent of bootblack even now. She blinked, and there she was as a little girl, sitting quietly at her father’s side, legs swinging, while he buffed his leather to a deep shine. She’d studied him while he worked on his boots, wondering why they were so important, wondering why he was so important, wondering what he did every day. He’d always been a mystery, and as children do, she’d accepted it. When she’d grown, she understood that he was a mid-level government official, a paper pusher with his feet planted firmly in family money. What more was there to ask? But questions occurred to her now. What paper, exactly, did her father push? And what had he done since the Germans came to Rome?
“I know you cooperated with them, Papà,” she ventured. How bad could it be? She thought of his tidy desk at work, with its pens lined up and files neat in a drawer. “But lots of people cooperated with the Germans. Do you think they’ll all run away? Surely, we can move forward after the war ends, rebuild—”
“I didn’t just cooperate with the Germans, Lucia. I worked for them.”
Nobody spoke for a moment. He worked for the Germans? The floor of her stomach opened like a trapdoor. For the first time, it occurred to her: she didn’t know her father at all. He’d moved like a shadow in the background of her life, providing for his family, but she’d never thought to ask how. He stood, smoothing out his pant legs with shaky hands.
“You and I, Lucia, we’re on opposite sides of a wall now. You’re my daughter first, but second? You’ve made yourself my enemy. Your mother and I are leaving. We’ll let you know how Marco is doing, if you care anymore. Last we heard, he was still on the Russian front, God be with him.” He paused, shifting his dark stare to the open window off the balcony, where noise from the departing army thundered like a constant storm. “At this point, all I can say is good luck to you. Take care of my grandson.”
With that, he strode from the room, shoulders back in defiance.
Nonna Colombo still gripped Lucia’s hands, and she tightened them now. “I’ll write when I’m able,” she croaked, nodding as if that settled everything. Lucia’s lips trembled, and she tried not to cry. Questions skated through her mind, and she guessed at the answers. Her father was not just a loyal follower of Il Duce. He was a collaborator, a betrayer of his own people, a man who had something to hide. And her mother?
“I should have thought for myself,” Nonna Colombo said, lips pursed. “He’s not that important in the scheme of things, Lucia—I can see what you’re thinking. Your father is several rungs down from the top. Yet he’s on the ladder. And that worries him with a change in government upon us.” She cast her hand around the room, gesturing at the waiting bags, despair in her face. “I never had much to say about any of it. I didn’t follow the news really, didn’t care for politics. Even now: I don’t want to go, but I’m going. Learn from my mistakes, Liebling, and follow your own mind.” She laughed a little, lifting her liquid eyes and a trembling hand to Lucia’s face. “What am I saying, darling? I know you will. You’re far braver than I’ve ever been.”
Lucia hurried through the heat of oncoming summer, ducking along her parents’ street, her pulse underscored by the continual rumble of engines somewhere to the north and intermittent gunfire. Her back and the fabric under her armpits were sweaty, but whether from nerves or the strengthening sun, she didn’t know. A bell tower rose over a corner, casting its shadow, and Lucia glanced at its dark shape. German snipers could very well be watching these streets. Her shoulders tensed. Even now, a rifle could be trained on her silhouette, ready to shatter her spine. She thought of Matteo’s beautiful face, and fear lurched in her stomach. Maybe Francesca was right. She shouldn’t have come here. She’d achieved nothing, and now she was out while Germans were yet in Rome, with little left to lose.
She came to Via Veneto, which was eerily quiet in the brightening day. Somewhere in an adjacent neighborhood, gunshots burst out at sporadic intervals. Lucia glanced toward the stately hotels a few blocks down, and bile rose in her stomach as she jogged across the street. She suddenly felt too alone, too exposed. Had German command left yet? Or were they still here, packing their things into black staff cars, preparing their retreat? Her gaze dropped from the hotels to the few silhouettes on the sidewalks, all of them ducking and hurrying. She turned onto a narrow street, her cardboard heels slapping cobblestones as she strode onto a yet narrower alley. It was empty, and she fought the urge to run.
The walls on either side of her were scrawled with graffiti; people had left traces of their anger and desperation all over the city’s stone. She glanced at the looping messages. Some were unreadable, having been scrubbed out or overlapped with a more recent scrawl. The largest letters simply proclaimed, Bread! Her eyes slid over it as she passed, nearing the next intersection, and when she swung her gaze forward, all the air left her chest in a horrified gust.
Hans Bergmann strode around the corner, boots clicking stone, legs swinging, and his eyes nailed to her with furious intensity.
She pivoted to run, but it was too late. In one swift movement, Bergmann grabbed her from behind, raked her across the ground, and pinned her up against the wall, her legs pedaling.
“You,” he growled, his voice like the tremor before an earthquake. “I’ve been looking for you for a long time, you piece of partisan shit.”
His hand was on her throat, and he pushed in, narrowing her windpipe.
“You thought you could get away with everything? That you’re invincible? You almost were, darling. My scout was just about to leave his post outside of your old building. If you’d waited a few more hours to visit your parents, you would have gotten away clean.”
Her pulse throttled, and she tried to look up and down the alley, searching for help, but he pressed her head harder against the graffiti and grinned.
“Do you think someone is coming to rescue you? Don’t you realize I’ve killed off your friends, one by one? We filled the prisons with them, the goddamned traitors, and then we emptied those prisons.”
Lucia opened her mouth, trying to scream around the pain in her throat, trying to scramble her way out of a trap that was quickly closing. She dropped her purse and clawed at his hands, filling her fingernails with his skin, but he just laughed. Terror trundled through her soul, and one word repeated in her mind, timed with the laborious pumps of her own blood.
Matteo. Matteo. Matteo.
“I thought about killing you here. The second I was alerted to your presence, I thought I might just shoot you in an alley and leave your body to rot, like all of your friends rotting away in those putrid caves. But then I realized: You’ve never seen the land of your ancestors, have you? Bavaria, wasn’t it? How about you come along to our northern lines, and I’ll throw you into a cattle car that’s passing right through Bavaria on its way north?” His voice was sharp, derisive, and he smiled over her weakening breaths. “Yes, I think that’ll suit you well. I’d rather not kill you yet, darling. Dying slowly, with plenty of time to consider your mistakes—that’s an appropriate fate for a traitor like you, Signora Moretti.”
He let go of her throat but grabbed her left wrist, tightening his grip as she fell in a wheezing heap. “Stand up, bitch.”
He threw his leg back and kicked her, hard, with his steel-toed boot. When he dropped her wrist, she fell, her spine hitting the ground, wheezing and whirling with pain. She pinned her eyes shut, trying to breathe, and despite her smothering fear, she sensed a metal object digging into the small of her back, pressed against the cobblestones. Bergmann laughed over her curling body, and she looked up in time to see him wind up for another kick, his expression hardening. His boot hit her in the stomach, and the air left her lungs, replaced by bile rising into her burning throat. The sky fractured behind him as she choked back pain and acid. She reached behind her back, sucking in air and shaking, as if she was going to push herself up from the ground.
He was laughing when her fingers found the Beretta, feeling for its grip beneath her underwear and clamping down. He glanced up the street, checking for onlookers and readying another kick, and she brought out the gun. With a trembling hand she squeezed the slide and pulled it back. Bergmann’s gaze fell to her and he froze, eyes widening as he stared down a loaded barrel.
“Don’t move a fucking muscle,” she breathed, her words coming out in cold, fluid German. Propelled by some inner force, she stood smoothly, ignoring the pain in her stomach. She kept the gun level with his head.
“You wouldn’t,” he spat. His eyes darted around in small movements, the rest of his face still, and he took a careful step backward. “You don’t even know how to shoot.”
“I’m a partisan, you Nazi pig. I’ll put a bullet in your Aryan brain if you move another inch.”
He froze again, hands up, but she could see it in his eyes. He was planning, calculating. She should do it. Shoot him now, she commanded herself. Shoot him while you have the advantage. But what if she missed? She held his stare, and he held hers, his pale eyes icy with hatred, and she felt the same cold hatred rise up on a swell in her chest. Her finger tightened on the trigger.
But no. Her heart pulsed between her ears, her finger loosened slightly, and she knew: she wasn’t a killer. She would never again pretend to be something she wasn’t. And if she shot this devil, she’d see his face in her mind for the rest of her life.
“Run.” She flicked her chin minutely, gesturing up the street.
He hesitated, glancing at his own shadow.
“Run away, you Nazi bastard. Get the hell out of my city.”
She aimed the gun slightly to the left and pulled the trigger. The bang was tremendous, and her hand jerked back when the bullet left the chamber, leaving a whiff of white smoke as it sliced past Hans Bergmann. In an instant, all the fury fell from his face. Fear widened his eyes instead. He stared at her for a half second, shocked wordless, and then he turned and ran up the lane. His steel-toed boots slipped a little, and he stumbled to his hands and knees on the cobblestones, scrambling back up. He ran on, never looking back, until he skidded out of sight and away from the aim of Lucia’s Beretta.