Where much of the roof had been, a gaping, smoking hole fed the smoke scroll in the sky. The picture windows of Le Borsette di Lella lay in blackened splinters and blades. The purse shop itself looked like the chipped interior of a coal mine. The blast had incinerated everything else beyond recognition.
“Oh dear God, no!” Michele cried.
Pino’s father let go of his violin case and fell to his knees, sobbing. Pino had never seen his father cry, or didn’t think he had, and he felt gutted, sorrowful, and humiliated by witnessing Michele’s misery.
“C’mon, Papa,” he said, trying to get his father to stand.
“It’s all gone,” Michele wept. “Our life is all gone.”
“Nonsense,” Uncle Albert said, taking his brother-in-law’s other arm. “You’ve got money in the bank, Michele. If you need a loan, I’ll give it to you. An apartment, furniture, purses, you can rebuild.”
Pino’s father said weakly, “I don’t know how I’m going to tell Porzia.”
“Michele, you act as if you had something to do with a random bomb hitting your place,” Uncle Albert sniffed. “You’ll tell her the truth, and you’ll start over.”
“In the meantime, you’ll come stay with us,” Aunt Greta said.
Michele started to nod, but then turned angrily to Pino. “Not you.”
“Papa?”
“You are going to Casa Alpina. You’ll study there.”
“No, I want to be in Milan.”
Pino’s father went berserk. “You are not staying! You have no say in this matter. You are my firstborn. I won’t have you die randomly, Pino. I . . . I couldn’t take it. And neither could your mother.”
Pino was stunned by his father’s outburst. Michele was the sort to steam and brood about things, not to rage and yell, and certainly not on the streets of San Babila, where the gossips of the fashion world would take note and never, ever forget.
“Okay, Papa,” Pino said quietly. “I’ll leave Milan. I’ll go to Casa Alpina if you want me to.”
PART TWO
THE CATHEDRALS OF GOD
Chapter Five
At the central train station late in the morning of the following day, Michele put a roll of lire in Pino’s hand and said, “I’ll send your books, and someone will be waiting for you at your stop. Be good, and give my love to Mimo and Father Re.”
“But when will I come back?”
“When it’s safe to come back.”
Pino glanced unhappily at Tullio, who shrugged, and then at Uncle Albert, who studied his shoes.
“This isn’t right,” he said, furious as he picked up a rucksack filled with clothes and boarded the train. Taking a seat in a near-empty car, he stared out the window, fuming.
He was being treated like a boy. But had he gone to his knees and cried in public? No. Pino Lella had taken the blow and stood there like a man. But what was he supposed to do? Defy his father? Leave the train? Go to the Beltraminis’?
The train lurched and squalled, pulled out of the station and through the train yard where German soldiers guarded hordes of vacant-eyed men, many in shabby gray uniforms, loading flatbed cars with crates of tank parts, rifles, submachine guns, bombs, and ammunition. They had to be prisoners, he thought, and that upset him. Pino stuck his head out the window and studied them as the train left the yard.
Two hours into the trip, the train rolled through the foothills above Lake Como, heading toward the Alps. Ordinarily, Pino would have stared lovingly at the lake, which he thought the most beautiful in the world, and especially the town of Bellagio on the lake’s southern peninsula. The grand hotel there looked like some rose castle in a fantasy.
Instead, the boy’s focus was down the hill from the train tracks, where he kept catching glimpses of the road that hugged Lake Como’s eastern shore and a long line of lorries crowded with filthy men, many in the same sort of dull gray outfits he’d seen back in the train yard. There were hundreds, maybe thousands of them.
Who were they? he wondered. Where were they captured? And why?
He was still thinking about the men forty minutes and a change of trains later, when he got off at the town of Chiavenna.
The German soldiers on duty there ignored him. Pino walked out of the station feeling good for the first time that day. It was a warm, sunny, early autumn afternoon. The air was sweet and clear, and he was heading up into the mountains. Nothing else could go wrong now, he decided as he crossed through the station. Not today, anyway.
“Hey, you, kid,” a voice called.
A wiry guy roughly Pino’s age leaned up against an old Fiat two-door coupé. He wore canvas work pants and a grease-stained white T-shirt. A cigarette smoldered between his lips.
“Who you calling kid?” Pino asked.
“You. You the Lella kid?”
“Pino Lella.”
“Alberto Ascari,” he said, thumbing his chest. “My uncle told me to come pick you up, bring you to Madesimo.” Ascari flicked the cigarette and held out his hand, which was almost as big as Pino’s and, to his surprise, stronger.
After Ascari had almost broken his hand, Pino said, “Where’d you get the grip?”
Ascari smiled. “In my uncle’s shop. Put your stuff in the back there, kid.”
The “kid” thing bothered Pino, but otherwise Ascari seemed decent enough. He opened the passenger door. The car was immaculate inside. A towel covered the driver’s seat, protecting it from grease.
Ascari started the car. The engine had a sound unlike any other Fiat Pino had ever heard, a deep, throaty growl that seemed to make the entire chassis shake.
“That’s no street engine,” Pino said.
Ascari grinned, and shifted the car into gear. “Would any race car driver have a street engine or transmission in his own car?”
“You’re a race car driver?” Pino said skeptically.
“I will be,” Ascari said, and popped the clutch.
They went screeching out of the little train station and swung onto the cobblestone road. The Fiat bounced sideways into a slide before Ascari whipped the wheel the other way. The tires caught traction. Ascari shifted gears and hit the accelerator.
Pino was pinned against the passenger seat but managed to brace his feet and arms before Ascari shot them across the little town square, deftly dodged a lorry filled with chickens, and shifted gears a third time. They were still speeding up when they left the town behind them.
The Splügen Pass road climbed in a steady series of chicanes, S-turns, paralleling a stream at the bottom of a steep-walled valley that cut north into the Alps toward Switzerland. Ascari drove the Splügen like a master, diving the car into every turn and weaving past the few other vehicles on the road like they were standing still.
The whole time, Pino’s emotions ran wild from abject fear to joyous exhilaration, envy, and admiration. It wasn’t until they were approaching the outskirts of the town of Campodolcino that Ascari finally slowed.
“I believe you,” Pino said, his heart still pounding.
“What’s that?” Ascari said, puzzled.