Mr. Conte said dully, “You didn’t do this, Pino. Those partisans last night must have . . . But who would leave a grenade where . . . ?” He shook his head, and choked, “Can you get Father Re? He needs to bless my Nicco’s body.”
Even though he’d been up since the dead of night, and had covered nearly twenty-three kilometers in steep terrain, Pino was determined to run the entire way, as if his feet and speed alone could separate him from the brutality of what he had just witnessed. Halfway up the trail, though, the smell of the blood on his clothes, and the vivid memories of Nicco boasting about being a better skier than Pino, and the fiery flash that took the little boy were too much for him. Pino stopped, bent over, and vomited his insides out.
Weeping, he staggered the rest of the way to Motta as daylight faded to dusk.
When he reached Casa Alpina, Pino was ashen, wrung out. Father Re was shocked when Pino came into the empty dining room.
“I told you to stay—,” Father Re began, then saw Pino’s bloody clothes and struggled to his feet. “What’s happened? Are you all right?”
“No, Father,” Pino said, starting to cry again, and not caring as he told the priest what had happened. “Why would someone do that? Leave a grenade?”
“I have no idea,” Father Re said grimly as he went for his jacket. “What about our friends you guided?”
The memory of Luigi, Ricardo, and Maria disappearing into the woods seemed like ages ago. “I left them with Mr. Bergstrom.”
The priest put on his coat and grabbed his cane. “That is a blessing, then, something to be grateful for.”
Pino told him about seeing the four men with rifles.
“But they didn’t see you?”
“I don’t think so,” Pino said.
Father Re reached up and put his hand on Pino’s shoulder. “You did well, then. You did the right thing.”
The priest left. Pino sat on a bench at an empty table in the dining room. He closed his eyes and hung his head, seeing Nicco’s missing face and arm, and the boy who’d been blinded, and then the dead girl with the missing arm from the night of the first bombardment. He couldn’t get rid of those images no matter how hard he tried. They just kept repeating until he felt as if he were going crazy.
“Pino?” Mimo said sometime later. “You okay?”
Pino opened his eyes to find his brother crouched at his side.
Mimo said, “Someone said the innkeeper’s little boy died, and two other boys might.”
“I saw it,” Pino said, and started to cry again. “I held him.”
His brother seemed frozen by the sight of his tears, but then said, “C’mon, Pino. Let’s get you cleaned up and to bed. The younger boys shouldn’t see you like this. They look up to you.”
Mimo helped him to his feet and down the hall to the shower room. He stripped his clothes and then sat a long time in the lukewarm water, mindlessly scrubbing Nicco’s blood off his hands and face. It didn’t seem real. Except it was.
Father Re gently shook him awake around ten the next morning. For a few moments, Pino had no idea where he was. Then it all came back with such force that it took his breath away all over again.
“How are the Contes?”
The priest turned grim. “It’s a terrible blow for any parent to lose a child under any circumstances. But like that . . .”
“He was such a funny little kid,” Pino said bitterly. “It’s not fair.”
“It’s a tragedy,” Father Re said. “The other two boys will live, but they’ll never be the same.”
They shared a long silence.
“What do we do, Father?”
“We have faith, Pino. We have faith and continue to do what is right. I got word in Madesimo that we will have two new travelers for dinner tonight. I want you to rest today. I’ll need you to guide them in the morning.”
It became a pattern over the course of the following weeks. Every few days, two, three, or sometimes four travelers would ring the bell at Casa Alpina. Pino would lead them out in the wee hours of the morning, climbing by what light the moon offered, and using the carbide miner’s lamp only during cloud cover and the dark of the moon. On these trips, after handing over his charges to Bergstrom, he went to the shepherd’s hut.
It was a crude affair with a stacked-stone foundation dug into the side of the slope, a sod roof supported by logs, and a door that swung on leather hinges. There was a straw mattress and a woodstove with split wood and a hatchet. Those nights in the hut as he stoked the fire, Pino felt lonely. He tried to summon up memories of Anna to comfort him more than once, but all he could recall was the squall of the trolley as it blocked her from his view.
His thoughts would then turn abstract: to girls and to love. He hoped he’d have both in his life. He wondered what his girl would be like and whether she would adore the mountains as he did, and whether she skied, and a hundred other questions with maddeningly unknowable answers.
In early November, Pino led the escape of a British Royal Air Force pilot, shot down during a bombing raid on Genoa. A week later, he helped a second downed pilot to reach Mr. Bergstrom. And almost every day more Jews came to Casa Alpina.
In the dark days of December 1943, Father Re grew worried because of the increased number of Nazi patrols going up and down the Splügen Pass road.
“They’re becoming suspicious,” he told Pino. “The Germans haven’t found many of the Jews. The Nazis know they’re being helped.”
“Alberto Ascari says there have been atrocities, Father,” Pino said. “The Nazis have killed priests helping Jews. They’ve pulled them right off the altar while they were saying Mass.”
“We have heard that, too,” the priest said. “But we can’t stop loving our fellow man, Pino, because we’re frightened. If we lose love, all is lost. We just have to get smarter.”
The next day, Father Re and a priest in Campodolcino came up with an ingenious plan. They decided to use watchers to track the Nazi patrols on the Splügen Pass road, and they improvised a communications system.
In the chapel behind Casa Alpina there was a catwalk around the interior of the steeple. From it, through shutters that opened on the flank of the tower, the boys could see the upper floor of the rectory fifteen hundred meters below in Campodolcino, and one window in particular. The shade was drawn in that window when the Germans were patrolling the Splügen. If the shade was up during the day or a lantern shone there at night, refugees could be safely taken up the mountain to Motta in oxcarts, buried under piles of hay to avoid detection.
When it became clear that Pino could not lead every Jew, downed pilot, or political refugee who came to Casa Alpina seeking a way to freedom, he began to teach the routes to several of the other older boys, including Mimo.