The Girl From Venice Read online

  “Have you ever played three-card monte?” Giorgio asked.

  Cenzo nodded.

  “Did you ever win?” Giorgio asked.

  “No.”

  “Well, this time you have to win.”

  Giorgio scampered away. On his own, Cenzo felt the ponderous force of the tank as it crushed the tunnel’s floor.

  “Still there?” Giorgio reappeared with a crowbar, a mere toothpick compared to the Panzer; but when he inserted it between two of the tank’s interlocking plates of armor the beast came to a shuddering halt, rocked back, released itself, and came to a standstill.

  Cenzo leapt out of his pants and rolled away to the mouth of the tunnel.

  “That was fucked,” he said.

  “Doubly fucked.” Giorgio bent over laughing. “I’ve never seen a man get out of a pair of pants so fast in my life.”

  • • •

  They brought the soldier’s body with them as they backed out of the tunnel. The scene looked less like a battlefront and more like a medical unit. In the noise and confusion, Giulia barely looked up from the tourniquet she was tying to the leg of a soldier.

  “Tell me, Cenzo, is the war over for this boy now? Do you have to find more bodies?” she asked.

  “He knows what he’s doing,” Giorgio said.

  “No he doesn’t. He has no idea, any more than this boy does. How old do you think he is? Sixteen? Seventeen?”

  “Fifteen,” Steiner said. “Cenzo, put on some shoes, please, and, Giorgio, find Mussolini and tell him that we have lost our escape route north.”

  “You mean, find the German army,” Giorgio said.

  “There is no more German army. Get to Mussolini. He’ll recognize you.”

  Giulia said, “We should take you to the hospital. You’re wounded too.”

  “And abandon my men? Some are still missing,” Steiner said.

  “You’re crazy. God has forgotten them,” Cenzo said. “He has no idea where they are.”

  31

  For twenty years the grandees of Italian industry had prospered as partners of Il Duce. Now they lined up their cars on the Salò golf course waiting to be rescued, to be lifted into the air out of harm’s way. Mussolini himself was cosseted with Claretta in the backseat of a bulletproof Mercedes and guarded like Humpty Dumpty by a score of German SS. It was unclear whether they functioned as bodyguards or held him under house arrest.

  Cenzo and Giulia watched from the far side of the Salò golf course as Giorgio failed to deliver Steiner’s message. He approached group after group and was rebuffed time after time. Eminent financiers and respected industrialists were ready to show their leader they were loyal to the last. No one, however, wanted to be the bearer of bad news, and no one had told Mussolini about the explosion at the tunnel.

  The Salò airstrip was an undulating fairway that had been overwhelmed by weeds. It was small, a nine-hole golf course, two hundred meters across the fairway and another ten meters across the green. Soldiers were posted along the perimeter of the field. They ignored the presence of Giulia and Cenzo as part of a bizarre Italian scene.

  “How many passengers can go?” Giulia asked.

  “They all think they’re going,” Cenzo said. “That’s why they don’t want to cause any trouble. They don’t want to lose their seat. If the Germans send a nice fat bomber like a Junker, they can stuff it with about twenty passengers. Two Junkers, forty passengers. The alternative is a recon plane like the Stork that only carries two passengers, three at the most.” Often with Mussolini, Cenzo had the sense not so much of a well-run operation as of a traveling circus.

  “What makes them think there will even be a plane?” Giulia asked.

  “They have no choice but to believe there will be. It’s a matter of self-delusion.”

  “What is going to happen if a plane doesn’t come?”

  “Then he’ll be trapped here in Salò.”

  Mussolini better hope that the American Ninth Army reached him before the partisans did, Cenzo thought. The Sherman tanks of the American Ninth Army might be blocked by the tunnel, but Dante’s partisans could swarm in overnight.

  “I don’t see your brother,” Giulia said.

  “He’s probably talked his way into the clubhouse. He’s good at that sort of thing.”

  Mussolini stepped out on his car’s running board to shout, “So the Germans blew themselves up at the Garda Tunnel. There’s German efficiency for you. The obnoxious boasting we’ve had to endure.” Mussolini puffed up his chest and crossed his arms as if he had scored a major victory. It was a pose that had hypnotized Italy for more than a dozen years. “The world will be astonished and those who betray Il Duce will be hung by their tails like rats.”

  There was always the promise of a new weapon. A giant rocket. A superbomb. A jet plane that could sweep up everything in the air. Cenzo had listened to this sort of Fascist spiel most of his life and he still found it breathtaking in its insanity.

  When the day grew dark, Il Duce, Claretta, Vera, and their inner circle of Fascists retreated to the airstrip’s old clubhouse, entertaining themselves with descriptions of how they would take revenge on deserters. The Germans, meanwhile, camouflaged their trucks, ate spartan rations, and filled up jerry cans with petrol.

  Late into the evening, Mussolini and Claretta reenacted Napoleon’s escape from Elba. Marshal Ney had promised to bring Napoleon back to Paris in an iron cage, but he could not resist the call of his former emperor when Napoleon declared, “Soldiers, your general, called to the throne by the choice of the people and raised on their shields, has come back to you.” Then Napoleon opened his famous greatcoat, stuck a red, white, and blue cockade in his hat, and declared, “Let him among you who wants to kill his Emperor, fire!”

  “Not a shot was fired,” Claretta said with well-practiced awe.

  What was not mentioned was that Napoleon’s escape route had ended at Waterloo.

  Cenzo and Giulia melded in among the birches. She interlaced her fingers with his. “I remember the first time I touched your hands, thinking how hard they were. Do you remember how we danced for shrimp? I was sure the Germans were going to fire at us.”

  “You showed great promise at fishing and dancing.”

  She dropped his hand. “Such a sad story about the girl and the fisherman. You said it was up to me whether I stayed or not. Maybe I would have preferred that you told me to stay.”

  “You would go crazy living in Pellestrina. I don’t want to watch you go crazy.”

  “You’re right. Life would be a little dull.”

  Cenzo was trying to think of a rejoinder when someone stepped out of the trees behind him and the loop of a garrote fell around his neck, not hard enough to draw blood but with enough tension to keep him still.

  “Be quiet,” the Spaniard whispered.

  “I am quiet,” Cenzo said.

  “The girl?”

  “I’m quiet too.”

  The Spaniard slipped the garrote off Cenzo. He seemed genuinely relieved he didn’t have to pinch Cenzo’s head off. “Is this the girl you were looking for? She won’t scream and run about like a chicken?”

  “She won’t.”

  “That could lead to dire circumstances for everyone.”

  “This is my friend,” Cenzo said, introducing Giulia to the Spaniard.

  “Friend? Hard to say. It’s not so much that you’re a dishonest man as that you’re a bad liar.”

  “Is that what you came to tell me?”

  “Dante has changed his mind. He doesn’t want Giorgio dead. Not yet, at least.”

  “What does he want?”

  “He wants your brother alive.”

  “Really?” Cenzo asked. “Isn’t a dead Giorgio Vianello what every partisan prays for?”

  “I wouldn’t know. I’m an atheist.”
<
br />   “So why has Dante changed his mind?”

  “You shouldn’t ask so many questions.” The Spaniard rolled up the garrote and stuffed it in his jacket. “I like you in spite of yourself. Why are you still here? Go back to Pellestrina. By tomorrow, Mussolini will look like an old sock and you will, too, if you’re with him. You don’t want that to happen.”

  “Not me,” Cenzo said, but the Spaniard had already slipped into the dark.

  32

  At midnight, the trucks lined up crosswise and illuminated the airstrip with headlights as wide as baking pans. A perfect night for flying. Mussolini stepped out of the clubhouse into a welter of light. Cenzo thought all the scene needed was a roll of drums and wondered what an Allied plane passing overhead might think. Perhaps a late-night round of golf? The lights were doused and better aligned. Then turned on again.

  A faint buzz trimmed the treetops and a plane not much larger than a toy hung in, and touched down at the end of an aerodynamic swoop. No German or Italian plane wanted to be in the air for long. The pilot executed his landing in less than ten seconds, bounced up the ninth fairway, and rolled to a stop. He pushed open his side panel and jumped to the ground. He was the same pilot whom Cenzo had seen on his previous visit to the airstrip with Otto and it was the same recon plane, a Stork.

  Mussolini stepped forward, received the pilot’s salute, and magnanimously announced that the bond between Italy and the Third Reich would never be broken. He declared he would fight to the bitter end and that other, larger planes would arrive soon. No one believed him, but what choice did they have?

  At this point events started to move quickly. Bars of gold were carried from the clubhouse to the plane. Mussolini climbed into the Stork. Standing by a wing, Claretta closed her eyes and crossed her fingers. There had been talk about flying her out with Mussolini; plainly, she had been replaced by more gold. It was the same model Stork that had earlier rescued Mussolini in the Alps and II Duce had all the faith in the world in it.

  The pilot removed the parking chocks, delivered two counterclockwise turns to the propeller, jumped in his seat, and discovered that much of the space around his feet was now taken up by loose bars of gold stamped “99% Pure London Good Delivery.” Mussolini pulled on his helmet, and dismay spread among his true believers. The dashboard trembled. The engine revved. There was little point in reaching for radio contact, since there was no German or Italian radio to make contact with. Cenzo caught sight of Otto Klein in his trademark white suit and remembered Maria’s description of him as a ringmaster of fleas. So he had gotten this far, but what did he plan to do?

  The pilot shouted over his shoulder, “Too much weight.” It was an embarrassing miscalculation. He handed down a dozen gold bars, and the plane waddled goose-fashion to the top of the fairway. As Mussolini, a Man of Destiny, stood up to give a valedictory wave, the plane’s windshield cracked around a bullet hole. One shot caught the pilot and he rolled off the wing onto the ground.

  Other bullets whistled past. Once the Spaniard fired, other partisans began sniping. German soldiers hustled Mussolini to his Mercedes. The Stork continued to roll forward in neutral, its propeller a blur, while Cenzo ran to the Stork and climbed in to apply the brakes. Giulia ran after him and nimbly climbed through the struts like a child on monkey bars.

  The plane bounced along on donut tires and gathered momentum as it reached the downslope of the fairway. Otto Klein ran along Giulia’s side of the plane, holding a gun.

  “Now you will halt!” Otto demanded. This was a new, more assertive film producer.

  “Don’t stop!” Giulia yelled over the sound of the motor. “It’s DaCosta!”

  “Otto?” Cenzo revved the engine and the plane leapt forward. There was confusion on the ground about whether to fire or not; no one liked to see bars of gold waltz out the door.

  “You will stop!” said Otto. He grabbed a wing, but the plane wasn’t nearly as fragile as it looked and kept on rolling.

  From the cockpit box, Cenzo took a thick-barreled flare gun and handed it to Giulia. A phosphorescent flare burned at thousands of degrees.

  “Shoot him!” Cenzo said.

  Giulia kicked the window flap open and fired. Otto ducked and let go as the flare hissed on a red line straight up to the sky.

  33

  It had been a long time since Cenzo piloted a plane and the air that streamed through the bullet hole in the windshield tasted cold and fresh. He stayed close to the ground and watched Allied bombers pass far overhead on their way to the railroad junctions of Verona. There was not much left to bomb and no opposition.

  Giulia hovered in the green light of the instrument panel. “DaCosta would have killed us both.”

  “I bet there isn’t anyone in this war that wouldn’t like to kill us. Allies, Germans, Fascists, partisans. What do you want to do with all this gold?” Cenzo asked.

  “I don’t know. What do you want to do with it?”

  “Well, we could head toward Switzerland. I hear they have a high regard for the stuff.”

  “Seriously?”

  “I don’t know. I only intended to stop the plane, I didn’t mean to steal it.”

  “Did you see Giorgio?” Giulia asked.

  “Not once the plane started to roll.”

  “He was shooting at the partisans, I think. It was hard to say which side he was on.”

  “That’s often the way with Giorgio.”

  Bits of glass blew off the windshield frame. The wet footprints of Lake Como and Lake Maggiore passed below while the plane dropped and bounced back.

  “This weather is getting nasty,” Cenzo said.

  With so much gold, Cenzo had to fly full throttle to keep from stalling. Altogether, between ingots in satchels and ingots loose on the floor, the Stork could be carrying as much as six hundred extra pounds. There had been no time to properly stack and tie down the bars. When the cargo shifted, the entire plane swung from side to side.

  “We’re too heavy,” he told Giulia. “I don’t have enough control or altitude. We have to dump some weight.”

  “How much?”

  Cenzo felt his mouth go dry. It was too painful to contemplate. “How much gold do we have?”

  “About twenty bars, I think.”

  Cenzo glanced over his shoulder. The gold gleamed like beautiful fish. “Start with two.”

  She opened the window flap and pushed out two gold ingots, watching them plunge one by one into the dark. Cenzo felt the plane float upward, then drop like an elevator.

  “More,” he said.

  Giulia lifted two more bars. They dropped like golden tears.

  Soon the plane was swinging low over Venice, a small corner of the Mediterranean. A hundred heartbeats more and the plane crossed from one side of the island to the other. He passed over the old madhouses on San Servolo and San Clemente, the hospital that Giulia had escaped from. Fishing boats were dots of light on the surface of the lagoon.

  Cenzo had not attempted to land a plane in years. The plane’s speed and pitch gauges were no longer functioning, the altimeter had started to drop, and the crosswind be damned.

  “All the rest,” Cenzo said. “Dump all the rest.”

  The plane was low enough now to see the bars plunge into the water. Cenzo reminded himself: Level out. Flare. Touch down. He hoped he wasn’t forgetting anything. He cut the lights and the Stork descended into the dark, aiming straight for the breakwater. He cut the engine and glided silently over the village of Pellestrina, too low to use parachutes and too high to jump.

  “Do you have any idea where we’re going to land?” Giulia asked.

  “I have an idea. It shouldn’t be more difficult than parking a car.”

  Cenzo pulled the plane’s nose up.

  “Hang on,” he said.

  “What does that mean?”

  “It m
eans hang on.”

  Cenzo wasn’t trying so much a landing as a controlled stall. The plane was no better than a glider now, and the thing about gliders was that there were no go-arounds. At the last moment he turned on his lights and passed over nets hung on poles and dinghies deep in water. Giulia bent over in her seat and prayed, “Merda, merda, merda.” Cenzo was running out of anywhere to land when the Stork plowed through the wooden stakes of a vegetable garden and crashed into a potting shed, the impact cushioned by a trellis of grapes.

  His head ringing, he opened his eyes and looked over at Giulia. Her head tilted to one side, her hair covered her face, and blood ran down her forehead. Cenzo unbuckled his straps so he could loosen hers and he caught her as she fell forward.

  He leaned her back and pressed his bandana against her forehead. She opened her eyes. “Did we land or did we crash?”

  “A little of both,” Cenzo said. “Are you okay?”

  “I’m a little dizzy.”

  Nido emerged from the bar wearing a nightshirt and carrying a flashlight. He walked up to the plane and peered in.

  “Cenzo? Is that you?”

  “It seems so.”

  “Did you intend to land in my garden?”

  “More or less.”

  “Who’s that with you?”

  “Giulia. Can you help me lift her out?”

  They carried her into the bar and gently stretched her out in a booth. Cenzo was unable to look away from the blood that outlined her cheek.

  “She got the air knocked out of her,” Nido said. “I’ve seen it happen in the ring a hundred times. She should sit up and breathe deep. Once you clean up the scratches she’ll feel a lot better. I’m just wondering why you chose to land a plane in the dark. Dare I ask, is anyone chasing you?”

  “Everyone is . . . after Cenzo,” Giulia said.