Tito said, “Tell your man back there to unlock that handcuff and give me that suitcase, or I am going to blow your head off and then his.”
Carletto was breathing heavy and fast. Pino glanced at him and saw his friend was shaking with alcohol and rage.
“Tell him,” Tito said, and jabbed Pino again.
Pino did, in French. Leyers said nothing, didn’t move a muscle.
Tito shifted the shotgun barrel toward the general.
“Tell him he’s about to die,” Tito said. “Tell him you’re all about to die, and I’ll take the suitcase anyway.”
Pino thought of Nicco, the innkeeper’s dead son, jerked on the door handle, threw his weight against the door, and slammed it against the left side of Tito’s body.
Tito stumbled to his right, slipped on the snow, and almost went down.
A pistol fired from the backseat of the Fiat.
The man standing by Carletto’s door died of a bullet through the cheek.
Tito got his balance, shouldered the shotgun, and tried to swing it at Pino, screaming, “Kill them all!”
The next second seemed endless.
Carletto pulled the trigger on the Thompson and blew out the Fiat’s windshield; at the same moment General Leyers fired a second time, hitting Tito square in the chest. As Tito fell, his shotgun went off, blasting the Fiat’s lower-quarter panels with buckshot. Carletto’s second machine gun burst killed two of the six remaining men in Tito’s gang of smugglers and highwaymen. The other four were trying to get away.
Carletto threw open his door and ran after the fleeing men. One of them was hit already and stumbling. Carletto shot him as he ran by in pursuit of the last three, screaming hysterically, “You partisan bastards killed my father! You killed him and broke my mother’s heart!”
He skidded to a halt and opened fire again.
He hit one man in the spine and dropped him. The other two turned to fight. Carletto mowed them both down dead.
“Paid in full!” Carletto screamed wildly. “Paid in . . .”
Shoulders sagging and shaking, Carletto began to weep. Then he went to his knees and sobbed.
Pino came up behind him and put his hand on his friend’s shoulder. Carletto jerked around, crazed. He pointed the barrel up at Pino and looked ready to shoot.
“Enough,” Pino said softly. “Enough, Carletto.”
His friend stared at him, and then broke down all over again. He dropped the gun and stepped up into Pino’s arms, bawling. “They killed my papa, and they made my mama want to die, Pino. I had to take revenge. I had to.”
“You did what you had to do,” Pino said. “We all did.”
The sun began to burn through the clouds. It didn’t take them long to clear the snow and move the bodies from the road. Pino went through Tito’s pockets, thinking about Nicco, until he found the money clip stolen from him two New Year’s Eves before. He looked at Tito’s boots and left them, but picked up the envelope with their papers. Pausing at the driver’s door, he peered into the backseat where General Leyers still sat, still holding a US Colt M1911 pistol, just like the one Major Knebel carried.
Pino said, “We’re even. No favors owed.”
Leyers said, “Agreed.”
In the last eight kilometers toward Austria, Carletto acted like someone head shot. He sat there empty with no spirit in his skin or bones. Pino was not much better. He drove on because it was all he could do. There was no thinking at the wheel for him now, no grief, no shell shock, and no regret, just the road ahead. A little more than three kilometers from the border crossing, he punched on the radio and tuned it to dance music and static.
“Turn that off,” Leyers snapped.
“Shoot me if you want,” Pino said, “but the music’s staying on.”
He glanced in the rearview, saw his own defeated eyes and the general staring back at them in victory.
American paratroopers and two Mercedes-Benz sedans waited at the border crossing in a narrow, forested valley. There was a Nazi general in uniform, whom Pino did not recognize, standing there by one Mercedes, smoking a cigar and enjoying the building sunshine.
This isn’t right, Pino thought as he pulled the Fiat to a stop. Two paratroopers came toward him. Pino opened the envelope and scanned the paper inside before handing it to them. It was a letter of free passage signed by Lieutenant General Mark Clark, commander of the US Fifth Army, at the behest of General Dwight D. Eisenhower, Supreme Allied Commander.
A redheaded paratrooper nodded to Pino and said, “Showed a lot of moxie and grit to get him up here, safe and sound. The US Army thanks you for your help.”
“Why are you helping him?” Pino said. “He’s a Nazi. A war criminal. He worked people to death.”
“Just following orders,” the GI said, glancing at the general.
The second soldier opened the backseat and helped General Leyers out, the suitcase still handcuffed to his wrist.
Pino climbed out. The general stood there waiting for him. He held out his free hand. Pino stared at it a long beat, and then reached out his own.
Leyers shook his hand hard, and then pulled Pino close, and whispered in his ear.
“Now you understand, Observer.”
Pino stared at him in disbelief. Observer? He knows my code name?
General Leyers winked, released his grip, and whirled in his tracks. Striding away, Leyers never looked back. The paratrooper opened the backseat of one of the waiting cars. The general disappeared inside with the suitcase while Pino gaped after him.
Behind Pino, in the Fiat, the radio turned to a news bulletin that Pino couldn’t make out for all the static. He just stood there, Leyers’s last words to him spinning in his mind and adding confusion to his despair and defeat when not an hour ago he’d had such homicidal clarity, sure that vengeance was his and not the Lord’s.
Now you understand, Observer.
How could he have known? How long had he known?
“Pino!” Carletto yelled. “Do you hear what they’re saying?”
The car bearing the general drove away and was quickly gone, heading down the road toward Stubaital and Innsbruck.
“Pino,” Carletto shouted, “Germany has surrendered! The Nazis have been told to lay down their weapons by eleven o’clock tomorrow morning!”
Pino said nothing, just watched the point in the road where Major General Hans Leyers vanished from his life.
Carletto came over and put his hand gently on Pino’s shoulder. “Don’t you understand?” he said. “The war’s over.”
Pino shook his head and felt tears stream down his face as he said, “I don’t understand, Carletto. And the war’s not over. I don’t think it ever will be over for me. Not really.”
AFTERMATH