Beneath a Scarlet Sky

“I can’t see,” General Leyers said.

“Non, mon général,” Pino said.

Leyers paused, looked out the window, and said, “Can you climb?”

A minute later, Pino stepped off the top of the petrol pump and pulled himself up onto one of the low girders. He held tight to an iron post and a second girder at head height.

“Can you see?” General Leyers asked from below, standing by the staff car.

“Oui, mon général.” Pino had a clear, unobstructed view over the heads of the fifteen hundred people now in the piazza. The lorries were still there, flaps closed.

“Help me up there,” Leyers said.

Pino looked down, saw the general had already climbed onto one of the pumps, his hand outstretched. Pino helped hoist him up. Leyers hung on to the overhead cross girder while Pino hugged the post.

In the distance, the Duomo’s bells rang the hour nine times. The Black Shirt commander from the prison yard climbed down from the cab of the nearby lorry. The Fascist disappeared from Pino’s view behind the other lorry, the one holding the prisoners.

Soon the fifteen began to stream out, one by one, going to the wall to the right of the fruit stand, shoulder to shoulder, facing toward the crowd, which was growing uneasy. Tullio was the seventh man out. By then, Pino knew in his gut what was about to happen, if not how, and he had to wrap his arms around the steel post to keep from falling.

The empty lorry pulled away. The crowd gave it room, and the transport vehicle was soon gone onto the rotary. Hooded Black Shirt gunmen poured out the back of the other transport, and then it was driven away as well. Armed with machine pistols, the Fascist commandos lined up no more than fifteen meters from the prisoners.

A Black Shirt shouted, “Every time a Communist partisan kills a German soldier or a soldier of the Salò army, there will be swift punishment with no mercy.”

The piazza fell quiet but for murmurs of disbelief.

One of the prisoners began shouting at the Fascists and the firing squad.

It was Tullio.

“You cowards!” Tullio roared at them. “You traitors! You do the Nazis’ dirty work and hide your faces. You’re all a bunch of—”

The machine pistols opened up, cutting Tullio down first. Pino’s friend danced backward with the bullet impacts and then sprawled slack on the sidewalk.





Chapter Eighteen


Pino screamed and screamed into the crook of his arm as the shooting went on and more men fell. The crowd went mad, crying in horror and stampeding to get away from the machine gunners who sprayed the walls of Piazzale Loreto with blood and gore that dripped and pooled around the fifteen martyrs long after the gunfire had stopped.

Eyes closed, Pino slid down and straddled the lower girder, hearing the screams in Piazzale Loreto as if they were far away and muffled. The world doesn’t work like this, he tried to tell himself. The world is not sick and evil like this.

He remembered Father Re summoning him to a higher cause, and then found himself reciting the Hail Mary, the prayer for the dead and the dying. He’d gotten to the last line, “Holy Mary, Mother of God, pray for us sinners, now and at the hour of our—”

“Vorarbeiter! God damn it!” General Leyers shouted. “Do you hear me?”

In a daze, Pino looked around and up at the Nazi, who was still standing on the girder, his face stony and cold.

“Get down,” Leyers said. “We’re leaving.”

Pino’s first thought was to pull the general’s feet out from under him, have him fall on his back on concrete from more than four meters up. Then he’d jump down and strangle him with his bare hands just to make sure. Leyers had let this atrocity happen. He’d stood by when— “I said get down.”

Feeling like a part of his mind had been permanently burned, he did so. Leyers climbed down after him and got into the back of the Daimler. Pino shut his door and slid behind the wheel.

“Where to, mon général?” Pino asked numbly.

“Did you know one of them?” Leyers asked. “I heard you screaming.”

Pino hesitated, his eyes welling with tears. “No,” he said finally. “I’ve just never seen anything like that before.”

The general studied him in the rearview mirror a moment before saying, “Go. There’s nothing more to be done here.”

The other German staff car was already turning around, heading for the checkpoint, when Pino started the Daimler. The rear window of the second staff car was down. He could see Colonel Rauff looking out at them. Pino wanted to floor the accelerator and T-bone the Gestapo chief’s car. Rauff’s vehicle would be no match for the Daimler. Maybe he’d even kill Rauff, make the world an infinitely better place.

General Leyers said, “Wait until they’ve gone ahead.”

Pino watched Colonel Rauff disappear into the city before he started the Daimler.

“Where to, mon général?” he said again, unable to stop seeing Tullio rage against his executioners before dancing on the bullets that killed him.

“Hotel Regina,” Leyers said.

Pino started in that direction. “If I may, mon général, what will happen to the bodies?”

“They’ll lie there until dark, when their relatives can claim them.”

“All day?”

“Colonel Rauff wants the rest of Milan, especially the partisans, to see what happens when German soldiers are killed,” Leyers said as they left the checkpoint. “The savage idiots. Don’t they see this will just increase the number of Italians who want to kill German soldiers? You, Vorarbeiter, do you want to kill Germans? Do you want to kill me?”

Pino was shocked by the question, and he wondered if the man could read his mind. But he shook his head, said, “Non, mon général. I want to live in peace and prosperity like anyone.”

The Nazi’s Plenipotentiary for War Production fell silent and pensive while Pino drove back to Gestapo headquarters. Leyers got out and said, “You have three hours.”



Pino dreaded the task ahead, but he left the Daimler and tore off his swastika armband. He went to the new purse store, but the girl who worked there said his father had gone over to Albanese Luggage.

When Pino entered the leather goods shop, Michele, Uncle Albert, and Aunt Greta were the only ones inside.

His uncle saw him, rushed out from behind the counter. “Where the hell have you been? We’ve been worried sick!”

“You didn’t come home,” his father said. “Oh, thank God you’re back.”

Aunt Greta took one look at Pino and said, “What’s happened?”

For a few moments, Pino couldn’t say a word. Then he fought back tears as he said, “The Nazis and the Fascists, they did a decimation at San Vittore in retaliation for the bombing. They counted off every tenth man until they got fifteen. Then they took them to the Piazzale Loreto and machine-gunned them to death. I saw . . .” He broke down. “Tullio was one of them.”

Uncle Albert and his father looked gut-shot.

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