He stepped inside, dusting off his hands. “You’re in here, aren’t you, traitor?”
Pino said nothing and held his position in the darkest shadow, almost sure the man could not see him pivot toward him and crouch ever so slowly. The man kept coming even as Pino’s fingers groped on the floor and found a piece of discarded steel reinforcement rod, probably left over from the repair job on the opera house after the bomb hit it. It was as thick as Pino’s thumb, as long as his forearm, and heavy. When the man from the fountain was just a couple of meters from him and squinting to see better, Pino whipped the rod backhand, aiming at his shins. But his aim was high, and he hit the man in the kneecap.
The man screamed. Pino came up fast, took two big steps, and drove a fist into the side of the man’s face. He went down. But behind him, two of the others who’d been chasing Pino appeared. He spun and took off, deeper into the darkness, hands out, groping and navigating toward the tenor who’d started to sing. Pino stumbled twice and caught his pants on wire while also trying to listen for pursuers behind him, so he did not recognize the aria the tenor was practicing at first.
But then he did. “Vesti la Giubba,” “Put on the Costume,” from the opera Pagliacci, The Clowns. The aria reeked of grief and loss, and Pino’s thoughts of escape were slashed by images of the bullet’s impact and Anna falling. He tripped, hit his head against something, saw stars, and almost went down.
When he roused himself, the aria was into its second verse. Canio, the heartbroken clown, was telling himself to go on, to put on a mask and shield his inner pain. Pino had heard recordings of the aria dozens of times and felt prodded to action by it, and by the sound of footsteps pounding in the passages behind him.
He pushed on, still groping until he felt air on his cheek, then turned and saw a slant of light ahead. Running now, he pushed open a door and found himself backstage in the great opera house. He’d been there several times watching Licia, his cousin, practice. A young tenor stood center of La Scala’s stage. Pino caught glimpses of him out there under the low lights as he launched into the third verse.
“Ridi, Pagliaccio, sul tuo amore infranto.”
(“Laugh, clown, at your broken love.”)
Pino went through a curtain and down stairs that led to the side aisle for loge seating. He started up the aisle toward the exit even as the tenor sang, “Ridi del duol, che t’avvelena il cor!” (“Laugh at the grief that poisons your heart.”)
The words seemed to hit Pino like arrows that weakened him until the tenor stopped and cried out in alarm, “Who are you? What do you want?”
Pino glanced back and saw he was addressing Pino’s three pursuers, who’d joined the tenor on the stage.
“We’re after a traitor,” one of the men said.
Pino pushed through the door, and it made an ear-splitting squeak. He took off again, across a landing, down the stairs, and into the lobby. The doors were open. He jogged out, tearing off his shirt, which left him in a sleeveless white T-shirt.
He glanced to his left. Home was only five or six blocks away. But he couldn’t go there and risk jeopardizing his family. Instead, he went straight across the trolley tracks and into a knot of people celebrating the end of the war around the statue of Leonardo da Vinci. He tried to stay focused, but in his head he kept hearing the clown’s devastated aria, kept seeing Anna crying for help, hunching up at the bullet’s strike, and then crumpling.
It took everything he had not to lie down and dissolve into sobs. It took everything he had to put on a smiling face, as if he, too, were overjoyed by the Nazis’ retreat. He kept it up through the Galleria, smiling and moving, not quite sure where he was going.
Then he stepped free of the shopping mall and knew. A huge crowd was celebrating on Piazza Duomo, eating, drinking, playing music, and dancing. Pino melted into them, slowing, smiling, and trying to look normal as he moved toward the trickle of people heading into the cathedral to pray.
To Pino, the Duomo meant sanctuary. They could chase him inside the cathedral, but they couldn’t bring him out.
He was almost to the front doors when he heard a man shouting behind him. “There he is! Stop him! He’s a traitor! A collaborator!”
Pino looked back and saw them coming across the piazza. Following several women old enough to be his mother, he slipped into the basilica.
With the stained-glass windows boarded over, the only light in the Duomo came from votive candles flickering in the various alcoves and chapels to either side of the cathedral’s central aisle, and more burning at the far end around the altar.
Even with the candles, the inner cathedral was a charcoal-shadowed place that day, and Pino acted swiftly to take advantage of it. He moved away from the chapels on the Duomo’s left side, heading toward the right aisle and the confessionals: bleak affairs offering no privacy to the penitent, who knelt outside a tall wooden box and whispered their sins to the priest inside.
It was humiliating, and Pino hated going to confession there. But from his times kneeling at the Duomo confessionals as a young boy, he knew there was a space between the booth and the wall, thirty centimeters, fifty at best. He hoped it would be enough as he eased behind the third confessional booth, farthest from the candle stands.
He stood there, shaking, hunched down so he’d be fully hidden, and was glad that no priests seemed to be taking confessions on liberation day. The aria started again in his head, and with it the horror of Anna’s death, until he shook it off and forced himself to listen. The clicking and murmurs of women praying the Holy Rosary came to him. A cough. The squeak of the main doors. Men talking. Pino fought the urge to peek out and waited, hearing loud footsteps coming. Men moving fast.
“Where did he go?” one said.
“He’s in here somewhere,” said another, sounding like he was right in front of the confessional booth.
“I’m coming,” a male voice said, amid other footsteps approaching.
“No, Father,” one man said. “Not today. We’re, uh, going to one of the chapels to pray.”
“If you sin on the way there, I’ll be waiting,” the priest said, and the door to the confessional booth opened.
Pino felt the box settle under the priest’s weight. He heard the two men move off deeper into the cathedral. He waited, hardly breathing, giving it time. Once more the clown sang in his head. Once more he tried to will it away, but the aria would not leave his head.
He had to move for fear he’d burst out crying again. Pino tried to step gingerly out from behind the confessional, but his shoe caught the kneeler.
“Ahh,” the priest said. “A customer at last.”
The screen slid back, but all Pino could see in there was blackness. He did the only thing he could think of and knelt.
“Bless me, Father, for I have sinned,” Pino choked.
“Yes?”