He dressed and slipped out of the apartment, took the stairs, and went out through the empty lobby. The night was dark and the streetlamps infrequent as he wove through San Babila, heading north, retracing much of the route they’d used to bring Mario’s body to the funeral home. At ten past four, Pino was back at the Cimitero Monumentale. Partisans stopped him, checked his papers. He told them his fiancée was inside. Someone had seen her body there.
“How are you going to see her?” one of the guards asked.
Another guard lit a cigarette.
Pino said, “Could you give me three of your matches?”
“No.”
“C’mon, Luigi,” the first guard said. “The kid’s trying to find his dead sweetheart, for Christ’s sake.”
Luigi took a deep drag, sighed, and flipped Pino the box.
“Bless you, signore,” Pino said, and hurried across the piazza toward the colonnades.
Rather than walk among the corpses, Pino looped around to a door that took him to the long hallway where Anna lay. When he got to where he thought she’d been, he lit a match and shone it around.
She wasn’t there. He looked about, tried to get his bearings, and thought he might be short. The match went out. He walked another three meters and lit another match. She wasn’t there. No one was there. The gallery floor was empty for at least twelve meters on either side of where she’d been. The unclaimed bodies were gone. Anna was gone.
The finality of it felt smothering. He sank against the wall there and sobbed until he could not cry anymore.
When Pino at last trudged down the steps from the memorial chapel, he felt the burden of her death like a yoke that could never be shed.
“Find her?” the guard asked.
“No,” Pino said. “Her father must have gotten here first. A fisherman from Trieste.”
They exchanged glances. “Sure,” Luigi said. “She’s with her papa.”
Pino wandered aimlessly through the city, skirting the central train station, now heavily guarded by partisan forces. He got turned around in an unlit area, had no idea where he was at one point. But then dawn began to glow across rippling low clouds, and he could soon see well enough to realize he was northwest of Piazzale Loreto and Beltramini’s Fresh Fruits and Vegetables. He ran and got to the fruit stand in the first good light of day. He pounded on the door, called out toward the upstairs windows. “Carletto? Carletto, are you there? It’s Pino!”
He got no answer. He kept pounding and calling, but his friend did not reply.
Despondent, Pino walked south. It wasn’t until he’d walked past the telephone exchange that he understood where he was going and why. Five minutes later, he cut through the kitchen of the Hotel Diana and pushed on through the double doors into the ballroom. There were American GIs and Italian women passed out here and there—not as many as two mornings before, but empty bottles were everywhere, and broken glass on the floor crunched under his shoes. He looked into the hallway that led to the lobby.
Major Frank Knebel was there, sitting at a table against the wall. He was drinking coffee and looking very hungover.
“Major?” Pino said, walking toward him.
Knebel looked up and laughed. “Pino Lella, the boogie-woogie kid! Where the hell have you been, buddy? All the girls have been asking for you.”
“I . . .” Pino didn’t know where to begin. “Can I talk to you?”
The major saw the seriousness in his eyes and said, “Sure, kid, pull up a chair.”
But before Pino could, a boy about ten years old burst in the front door and yelled in broken English, “Il Duce, Major K! They bring the Mussolini to Piazzale Loreto!”
“Now?” Major Knebel said, getting up fast. “Are you sure, Victor?”
“My father, he hears this.”
“Let’s go,” Knebel said to Pino. Pino hesitated, wanted to talk to the major, to tell him—
“C’mon, Pino, you’ll be a witness to history,” the American said. “We’ll take the bikes I bought yesterday.”
Pino felt a break in the fog of Anna’s death and nodded. He’d wondered what would become of Il Duce the last time he saw him in Cardinal Schuster’s office, when Mussolini was still praying for Hitler’s superweapon to be unleashed and still hoping for a bed in the führer’s secret Bavarian bunker.
By the time they’d grabbed two bikes Knebel had stashed behind the registration desk and exited the hotel, other people were running toward Piazzale Loreto, crying, “They’ve got him! They’ve got Il Duce!”
Pino and the American major jumped on the bikes, pedaled hard. Other bikes soon joined them, racing and waving red scarves and flags, all of them lusting to see the dictator now that he’d been deposed. They rode past Beltramini’s Fresh Fruits and Vegetables and into Piazzale Loreto, where a thin crowd was already gathering around the Esso station and the girders Pino had stood on to witness the execution of Tullio Galimberti.
Pino and Major Knebel put the bikes aside, and went forward to see four men clambering up onto the girders. They carried ropes and chains. Pino followed the American as he fought his way to the front of the growing crowd.
Sixteen bodies lay there by the petrol pumps. Benito Mussolini was in the middle, barefoot, his massive head resting on his mistress’s chest. The puppet dictator’s eyes were vacant and opaque, the madness Pino had seen in them at the villa on Lake Garda just a memory. Il Duce’s upper lip was pulled back, baring his teeth and making him look as if he were about to launch into one of his tirades.
Claretta Petacci sprawled beneath Mussolini with her head turned away from her lover, as if being coy. Some of the partisans in the crowd were saying that Mussolini had been having sex with his mistress when the executioners arrived.
Pino looked around. The crowd had quadrupled, and there were more coming, throngs from every direction, like a chorus gathering on a stage at the end of a tragic opera. Shouting, angry, they all seemed to want to wreak personal vengeance on the man who’d brought the Nazis to their doors.
Someone put a toy scepter in Mussolini’s hand. Then a woman old enough to have been the crone in Dolly’s apartment building waddled out. She squatted over Il Duce’s mistress and pissed on her face.
Pino was repulsed, but the crowd went feral, sinister, and depraved. People were laughing hysterically, cheering, and feeding on the anarchy. Others began shouting for more desecrations while ropes and chains were being rigged. A woman darted forward with a pistol and put five rounds in Mussolini’s skull, which provoked another round of jeers and catcalls to beat the bodies, to tear the flesh from their bones.