“No,” Uncle Albert said, blocking the way. “You are not going down there.”
“Get out of my way, Uncle, or I’ll throw you out of my way.”
Albert dropped his eyes, stepped aside, and said, “She’s in the far hall, on the right. Do you want me to show you?”
“No,” he said.
Chapter Thirty-Two
Pino found Dolly Stottlemeyer first.
General Leyers’s mistress was still dressed in her ivory gown. Between Dolly’s breasts a chrysanthemum of blood had bloomed, wilted, and dried. Her slippers were gone. Her eyes and mouth were half-open, frozen in rigor. Her fingers had died clutching her thumbs, exposing the red nail polish, and making it all the more lurid against the robin’s egg color of her skin.
Pino looked up then and saw Anna down the hall. His eyes clouded with tears, and his breath became short and ragged as he tried to keep down the emotion surging everywhere within him, trying to thrash its way out of his chest and through his windpipe. Mouth open, lips moving to form silent words of sorrow, he went and knelt beside her.
There was a bullet hole below Anna’s bra, and a flower of blood on her exposed belly similar to the one on Dolly. Whore had been written across her brow in the same red gloss the partisans had used to make her lips look so garish.
Pino stared down, engulfed by misery, swallowing against grief and trembling with loss. He lowered the camphor pouch from his lips and nose. Breathing in the ungodly putrid air in the hallway, he untied the pouch and put the camphor aside. He used the handkerchief to wipe the lipstick from her brow and from about her lips until she was almost the Anna he remembered. He set the handkerchief down, clasped his hands, and gazed at her as he sucked in the smell of her death, drawing it deep into his lungs.
“I was there,” Pino said. “I saw you die, and I said nothing, Anna. I did . . .”
The pain threw tears from his eyes and doubled him over.
“What did I do?” he moaned. “What did I do?”
Tears dripped off his cheeks as he rocked back and forth on his haunches and stared down at the wreckage of his love.
“I failed you,” Pino choked. “Christmas Eve, you were there to stand by me, come what may. And I wasn’t there for you. I . . . I don’t know why. I can’t even explain it to myself. I wish I’d stood against the wall with you, Anna.”
He lost track of time as he knelt there by her, vaguely aware of people moving past him, glancing at Anna’s chopped hair and making comments about her under their breath. He didn’t care. They couldn’t hurt her now. He was there, and they couldn’t hurt her any further.
“Pino?”
He felt a hand on his shoulder and looked up to find his father and uncle there.
“We were supposed to have . . . everything, Papa,” Pino said in bewilderment. “Our love was supposed to be forever and ever. We didn’t deserve this.”
Michele was tearing up. “I’m so sorry, Pino. Albert’s only just told me.”
“We’re both so sorry,” his uncle said. “But we have to go, and I hate to tell you this, but you have to leave her now.”
Pino wanted to rise up and beat his uncle to a pulp. “I’m staying with her.”
“You’re not,” Michele said.
“I’ve got to bury her, Papa. Make sure she has a funeral.”
“You can’t,” Uncle Albert said. “There are partisans checking who’s claiming the bodies. They’ll think you were a collaborator, too.”
“I don’t care,” Pino said.
“We do,” Michele said firmly. “I know this is hard, son, but—”
“Do you?” Pino screamed. “If this were Mama, would you leave her?”
His father cringed and stepped back. “No, I . . .”
Uncle Albert stopped him. “Pino, it’s what Anna would want.”
“How do you know what Anna would want?”
“Because I saw in her eyes how much she loved you that Christmas Eve at the shop. She would not want you to die because of her.”
Pino looked down at Anna again, choking back emotion. “But she won’t get a funeral, a headstone, anything.”
Uncle Albert said, “I asked the man in the chapel what happens to the unclaimed bodies, and he said they’ll all be blessed by Cardinal Schuster, cremated, and buried.”
Pino’s head swung slowly back and forth. “But where will I go to . . .”
“See her?” his father said. “You go to where you were both happiest, and she’ll always be there. I promise you that.”
Pino thought of that small park in Cernobbio at the southwest end of Lake Como, where he and Anna had stood at the rail and she’d taken his picture wearing the headband, and everything had seemed perfect. He looked down at Anna’s cold face. Leaving her seemed a second betrayal, one with no possibility of forgiveness.
“Pino,” his father said softly.
“I’m coming, Papa.” He sniffed and wiped his eyes with the handkerchief, smearing some of her lipstick on his face, and then tucked the tear-stained hankie in her bra.
I loved you, Anna, Pino thought. I’ll love you forever and ever.
Then he leaned over, kissed her, and said his good-bye.
Pino stood, wobbly. With his uncle and father holding on to each elbow, he left, and did not look back. He couldn’t. If he did, he swore he’d never move again.
By the time they returned to the chapel, Pino could walk without their help. He was already trying to get the image of her corpse out of his head by recalling Anna in Dolly’s kitchen the night after he’d saved the general’s life, and how she told him about her childhood birthday mornings with her father out on the sea.
That memory carried him through the rest of the process of shrouding Mario and moving him out of the upper gallery to the partisans checking the bodies. They recognized Mario’s uniform for what it was and waved them through. They found a cart and pushed the corpse through the city to an undertaker who was a friend of the family.
They didn’t make it home until after dark. Pino was spinning from exhaustion, from grief, from lack of food and water. He forced himself to eat, and he drank too much wine. He went to bed the way he had the night before, with the shortwave tuned to static. He closed his eyes, praying that he’d see Anna alive again in his dreams.
But she wasn’t alive there, not that night. In Pino’s dreams, Anna was dead and lying alone in the lower galleries of the Cimitero Monumentale. Behind his eyelids, Pino could see her, as if lit from above in a dark place. Every time his dream self tried to get closer to her, however, she slipped farther and farther away.
The cruelty of it made him cry out in pain. Pino startled alert into the waking nightmare of Anna being gone all over again. He gasped and held his sweating head for fear of its bursting. He tried to clear his thoughts of Anna but could not, and he could not sleep. That was done. He could either lie here while memories and regrets ripped him up, or he could walk and let movement calm his mind as it had since he was a boy.
Pino checked his watch. It was 3:00 a.m. on Sunday, April 29, 1945.