His uncle’s face clouded. He shook his head, said in a low voice, “We do not talk about things good or bad here. We wait, yes?”
They took a taxi. After ten and a half months of bombardment, Milan looked more like a battlefield than a city. In some neighborhoods, nearly 70 percent of the buildings were rubble, yet the streets were passable. Pino soon saw why. Scores of those vacant, bent-back men in gray uniforms were clearing the streets, brick by brick, stone by stone.
“Who are they?” he asked. “Those gray men?”
Uncle Albert put his hand on Pino’s leg, pointed a finger at the driver, and shook his head. Pino noticed that the taxi driver kept looking in the rearview mirror, and he surrendered to not talking until they were home.
The closer they got to the Duomo and San Babila, the more structures were still standing. Many were unscathed. They passed the chancellery. A Nazi staff car sat out front, a general’s by the flag on the hood.
Indeed, the streets around the cathedral were packed with high-ranking German officers and their vehicles. They had to leave the taxi to go through a sandbagged and heavily fortified checkpoint into San Babila.
After showing their papers, they walked in silence through one of the least damaged areas of Milan. The shops, restaurants, and bars were open and filled with Nazi officers and their women. Pino’s father led him to Corso Matteotti, about four blocks from where they’d lived before, still in the fashion district, but closer to La Scala, the Galleria, and the Piazza Duomo.
“Get out your documents again,” his father said, pulling out his own.
They entered a building and were immediately confronted by two armed Waffen-SS guards, which surprised Pino. Were Nazis guarding every apartment building in San Babila?
The sentries knew Michele and Pino’s uncle, and gave only a cursory glance at their papers. But they studied Pino’s long and hard before allowing them to go on. They used a birdcage elevator. As they rose past the fifth floor, Pino saw two more SS guards standing outside a door.
They exited on the sixth floor, went to the end of a short hall, and entered the Lellas’ new apartment. It was nowhere near as large as the place on Via Monte Napoleone, but it was already comfortably furnished. He recognized his mother’s touch everywhere.
His father and uncle silently motioned for Pino to put his bags down and to follow them. They went through French doors out onto a rooftop terrace. The cathedral’s spires attacked the sky to the east. Uncle Albert said, “It’s safe to talk now.”
Pino said, “Why are there Nazis in the lobby and below us?”
His father gestured to an antenna about halfway down the terrace wall. “That antenna is attached to a shortwave radio in the apartment downstairs. The Germans threw out the old tenant, a dentist, in February. They had workers come in and completely rebuilt the place. From what we’ve heard, it’s where visiting Nazi dignitaries stay when they’re in Milan. If Hitler ever came, it is where he’d stay.”
“One floor beneath us?” Pino said, unnerved by the idea.
“It’s a new and dangerous world, Pino,” Uncle Albert said. “Especially for you.”
“This is why we brought you home,” his father said before he could reply. “In fewer than twenty days, you turn eighteen, which makes you eligible for the draft.”
Pino squinted. “Okay?”
His uncle said, “If you wait to be drafted, they’ll put you in the Fascist army.”
“And all new Italian soldiers are being sent by the Germans to the Russian front,” Michele said, wringing his hands. “You’d be cannon fodder, Pino. You’d die, and we can’t let that happen to you, not when the war is so close to being over.”
The war was close to being over. Pino knew that was true. He’d heard only the day before on the shortwave receiver he’d left with Father Re that the Allies were once again battling over Monte Cassino, a monastery high on a cliff where the Germans had installed powerful cannons. At long last, the monastery and the Germans had been pulverized by Allied bombers. So had the town below. Allied troops all along the Gustav Line of fortifications south of Rome were close to breaking through.
“So what do you want me to do?” Pino asked. “Hide? I’d have been better off staying at Casa Alpina until the Allies drive the Nazis out.”
His father shook his head. “The draft office has already been here looking for you. They knew you were up there. Within days of your birthday, someone would have gone to Casa Alpina and taken you.”
“So what do you want me to do?” Pino asked again.
“We want you to enlist,” Uncle Albert said. “If you enlist, we can make sure you’re put in a position out of harm’s way.”
“With Salò?”
The two men exchanged glances, before his father said, “No, with the Germans.”
Pino felt his stomach sour. “Join the Nazis? Wear the swastika? No. Never.”
“Pino,” his father began, “this—”
“Do you know what I’ve been doing the past six months?” Pino said angrily. “I’ve been leading Jews and refugees over the Groppera into Switzerland to escape the Nazis, people who think nothing of machine-gunning innocent people! I cannot and will not do it.”
There was silence for several moments as both men studied him.
Finally, Uncle Albert said, “You’ve changed, Pino. You not only look like a man, you sound like one. So I’m going to tell you that unless you decide to escape to Switzerland yourself and sit out the war, you are going to be drawn into it one way or another. The first way, you wait to be drafted. You will be given three weeks’ training, and then be shipped up north to fight the Soviets, where the death rate among first-year Italian soldiers is nearly fifty percent. That means you’d have a one-in-two chance of seeing your nineteenth birthday.”
Pino made to interrupt, but his uncle held his hand up. “I am not finished. Or someone I know can get you assigned to a wing of the German army called the ‘Organization Todt,’ or the OT. They don’t fight. They build things. You’ll be safe, and you’ll probably learn something.”
“I want to fight the Germans, not join them.”
“This is a precaution,” his father said. “As you said, the war will soon be over. You probably won’t even make it out of boot camp.”
“What will I tell people?”
“No one will know,” Uncle Albert said. “We’ll tell anyone who asks that you’re still in the Alps with Father Re.”
Pino said nothing. He could see the logic of it, but it left a nasty taste in his mouth. This wasn’t resistance. It was malingering, dodging, the coward’s way out.
“Do I have to answer now?” Pino asked.
“No,” his father said. “But in a day or so.”
Uncle Albert said, “In the meantime, come with me to the store. There is something you can do for Tullio.”