Pino broke into a grin. Tullio Galimberti! He hadn’t seen him in, what—seven months? He wondered whether Tullio was still following Colonel Rauff around Milan. He wondered about his latest romantic interest.
“I’ll come,” Pino said. “Unless you need me for something, Papa?”
“No, go on,” Michele said. “I have some bookkeeping to take care of.”
Pino and his uncle left the apartment and took the elevator again, seeing the guards outside the fifth-floor apartment. The sentries in the lobby nodded as they left.
They wound through the street toward Albanese Luggage, with Uncle Albert questioning Pino about the Alps. He seemed particularly impressed by the signal system Father Re had devised, and the coolness and ingenuity that had gotten Pino through several of his hair-raising predicaments.
The leather shop was thankfully without customers. Uncle Albert put the “Closed” sign up and drew down the blind. Aunt Greta and Tullio Galimberti came out of the back.
“Look at the size of him!” Aunt Greta said to Tullio.
“A brute,” Tullio said. “And look at that face, different now. Some girls might even call him handsome. If he wasn’t standing next to me.”
Tullio was still his bantering self, but the confidence that once bordered on cocksureness had been tamped down by hardship. He looked like he’d lost a lot of weight, and he kept staring off into the middle distance, chain-smoking cigarettes.
“I saw that Nazi you used to follow around, Colonel Rauff, yesterday.”
Tullio lost several shades of color. “You saw Rauff yesterday?”
“I spoke to him,” Pino said. “Did you know he was raised on a farm?”
“No idea,” Tullio said, his eyes darting to Uncle Albert.
Pino’s uncle hesitated before saying, “We believe you can keep a secret, yes?”
Pino nodded.
“Colonel Rauff wants Tullio brought in for questioning. If he’s caught, he’ll be taken to the Hotel Regina, tortured, and then sent to San Vittore Prison.”
“With Barbareschi?” Pino said. “The forger?”
Everyone else in the room looked at him, dumbfounded.
“How do you know him?” Tullio demanded.
Pino explained, and then said, “Rauff said he was in San Vittore.”
For the first time, Tullio smiled. “He was until last night. Barbareschi escaped!”
That boggled Pino’s mind. He remembered the seminarian as he was on the first day of the bombardment, and tried to imagine him becoming a forger and then escaping prison. San Vittore, for God’s sake!
“That’s good news,” Pino said. “So you’re hiding here, Tullio? Is that smart?”
“I move around,” Tullio said, lighting another cigarette. “Every night.”
“Which makes things difficult for us,” Uncle Albert said. “Before Rauff took an interest in him, Tullio could move freely about the city, undertaking various tasks for the resistance. Now, he can’t. As I said earlier, there is something you might be able to do for us.”
Pino felt excited. “Anything for the resistance.”
“We have papers that must be delivered before curfew tonight,” Uncle Albert said. “We’ll give you an address. You carry the papers there, and turn them over. Can you do that?”
“What are the papers?”
“That’s not your concern,” his uncle said.
Tullio said bluntly, “But if the Nazis catch you with them, and they understand what’s written on those papers, they’ll execute you. They’ve done it for less.”
Pino looked at the packet his uncle held out to him. Other than the day before, and the day Nicco had died holding the grenade, he’d felt little actual threat from the Nazis. But the Germans were everywhere in Milan now. Any one of them could stop him, search him.
“These are important papers, though?”
“They are.”
“Then I won’t get caught,” Pino said, and took the packet.
An hour later, he left the leather shop on his uncle’s bicycle. He showed his documents at the San Babila checkpoint and at another on the west side of the cathedral, but no one patted him down or seemed much interested in him.
It took him until late afternoon to maneuver through the city toward an address in the southeastern quadrant of Milan. The farther he got from the city center, the more devastation he saw. Pino rode and pushed his bike through blistered, charred streets of desolation and want. He came to a bomb crater, slowed, and stopped at the edge of it. It had rained the night before. Filthy water lingered in the bottom of the crater, giving off a putrid stench. Children laughed. Four or five of them, black with filth, were climbing and playing on the skeleton of a burned-out structure.
Were they here? Did they feel the bombs? See the fires? Do they have parents? Or are they street urchins? Where do they live? Here?
Seeing the children living in the destruction upset him, but he pressed on, following the directions Tullio had given him. Pino crossed out of the burned area into a neighborhood that had lost fewer buildings. It put him in mind of a busted piano, with some keys broken, some gone, and some still standing yellow and red against a blackened background.
He found two apartment buildings side by side. As Tullio had instructed, he entered the right one, which teemed with life. Sooty kids roamed the halls. The doors to many of the apartments were open, the rooms packed with people who looked battered by life. A record was playing in one, an aria from Madama Butterfly that he realized was being performed by his cousin Licia.
“Who you looking for?” said one filthy boy.
“Sixteen-B,” Pino said.
The boy’s chin retreated. He pointed down the hall.
At Pino’s knock, the door opened slightly on the chain.
A man said in thickly accented Italian, “What?”
“Tullio sent me, Baka,” Pino said.
“He is alive?”
“He was two hours ago.”
That seemed to satisfy the man. He undid the chain and opened the door just wide enough to allow Pino inside a studio apartment. Baka was Slavic, short, powerfully built, with thick black hair, heavy brows, a flattened nose, and massive arms and shoulders. Pino towered over him, but he still felt intimidated in his presence.
Baka studied him a moment, then said, “You bring something or no?”
Pino dug the envelope out of his pants, and handed it to him. Baka took it without comment and walked away.
“You want water?” he asked. “It is there. Drink and you go. Make it back before curfew.”
Pino was parched by the long ride and took a few gulps before he looked around and understood who and what Baka was. A tan leather suitcase with heavy-duty buckles and straps lay open on the narrow bed. The interior of the suitcase had been custom designed with padded cutouts that held a compact shortwave radio, a hand generator, two antennas, and tools and replacement crystals.
Pino gestured at the radio. “Who do you talk to on it?”
“London,” he grunted as he read the papers. “Brand-new. We just got it three days ago. The old one died, and we were silent for the two weeks.”
“How long have you been here?”
“Parachuted in sixteen weeks ago outside the city and walked in.”