Pino held her tighter, marveling at how right it all felt, as if cellos had joined the violin, like a missing part of him had been found and made more by her touch, the taste of her lips, and the gentle kindness in her eyes. He wanted nothing more than to hold her as long as God would let him. They kissed a third time. Pino nuzzled her neck, which seemed to please her.
“I want to know all about you,” he murmured. “Where you come from and—”
Anna drew back a bit. “I told you. Trieste.”
“What were you like as a little girl?”
“Strange.”
“No.”
“My mother said so.”
“What was she like?”
Anna put her finger across Pino’s lips, gazed into his eyes, and said, “Someone very wise once told me that by opening our hearts, revealing our scars, we are made human and flawed and whole.”
He felt his brows knit. “Okay?”
“I’m not ready to reveal my scars to you. I don’t want you to see me human and flawed and whole. I want this . . . us . . . to be a fantasy we can share, a diversion from the war.”
Pino reached out to stroke her face. “A beautiful fantasy, a wonderful diversion.”
Anna kissed him a fourth time. Pino thought he heard a woodwind join the strings vibrating in his chest, and his mind and body were reduced to one thing, to the music of Anna-Marta and nothing more.
Chapter Nineteen
When General Leyers and Dolly returned from dinner, Pino sat on the front hall bench, beaming.
“Have you been sitting there two hours?” Leyers asked.
Amused and drunk, Dolly eyed Pino. “That would be a tragedy for Anna.”
Pino blushed and looked away from Dolly, who chuckled and sashayed past him.
“You can go, Vorarbeiter,” Leyers said. “Drop the Daimler at the pool, and be back here at oh six hundred hours.”
“Oui, mon général.”
Driving the Daimler through the streets as the curfew approached, Pino couldn’t help thinking that he had just had the best evening of his life at the tail end of the worst day of his life. He’d experienced every emotion possible in a span of twelve hours, from horror to grief to kissing Anna. She was almost six years older, it was true, but he didn’t care in the least. If anything, it made her more magnetic.
As Pino walked back to the Lellas’ apartment on Corso Matteotti after leaving the staff car at the motor pool, his mind once again lurched between the emotions of seeing Tullio die and the music he’d felt kissing Anna. Riding the birdcage elevator past the Nazi sentries, he thought, God giveth, and God taketh away. Sometimes in the same day.
Unless he was up playing music with a group of friends, Pino’s father usually went to bed early, so Pino opened the front door to the apartment, expecting a light to be left on for him and the place quiet. But the lights were blazing behind the blackout curtains, and on the floor were suitcases he recognized.
“Mimo!” he cried softly. “Mimo, are you here?”
His brother came out from the kitchen, grinning as he ran over and grabbed Pino in a bear hug. His little brother might have grown an inch, but he’d certainly filled out in the fifteen weeks since Pino left Casa Alpina. Pino could feel the thick cables of muscle in Mimo’s arms and back.
“Great to see you, Pino,” Mimo said. “Really great.”
“What are you doing here?”
Mimo lowered his voice. “I told Papa that I wanted to come home for a short while, but the truth is, as much good as we were doing at Casa Alpina, I couldn’t take it anymore, being up there hiding while the real fighting was going on down here.”
“What are you gonna do? Join the partisans?”
“Yes.”
“You’re too young. Papa won’t let you.”
“Papa won’t know unless you tell him.”
Pino studied his brother, marveling at his audacity. Just fifteen years old, he seemed to fear nothing, throwing himself into every situation without a shred of doubt. But joining a guerilla group to fight the Nazis could be tempting fate.
He watched the blood drain from Mimo’s face before his brother pointed a shaky finger at the red band and the swastika sticking from his pocket and said, “What is that?”
“Oh,” Pino said. “It’s part of my uniform, but it’s not what you think.”
“How isn’t it what I think?” Mimo said angrily, backing up to take in the entire uniform. “Are you fighting for the Nazis, Pino?”
“Fighting? No,” he said. “I’m a driver. That’s it.”
“For the Germans.”
“Yes.”
Mimo looked like he wanted to spit. “Why aren’t you fighting for the resistance, for Italy?”
Pino hesitated, and then said, “Because I would have to desert, which would make me a deserter. The Nazis are shooting deserters these days, or hadn’t you heard?”
“So you’re telling me that you’re a Nazi, a traitor to Italy?”
“It’s not so black and white.”
“Sure it is,” Mimo said, shouting at him.
“It was Uncle Albert and Mama’s idea,” Pino shouted back. “They wanted to save me from the Russian front, so I joined this thing—the OT, the Organization Todt. They build things. I just drive an officer around, waiting for the war to be over.”
“Quiet!” their father said, coming into the room. “The sentries downstairs will hear you!”
“Is it true, Papa?” Mimo said in a forced whisper. “Pino wears a Nazi uniform to ride out the war while other people step up and free Italy?”
“I wouldn’t put it like that,” Michele said. “But, yes, your mother, Uncle Albert, and I thought it best.”
That didn’t mollify his second son. Mimo sneered at his older brother. “Who would have thought it? Pino Lella, taking the coward’s way out.”
Pino hit Mimo so hard, and so fast, he broke his brother’s nose, and dropped him to the floor. “You have no idea what you’re talking about,” Pino said. “None at all.”
“Stop it!” Michele said, getting between them. “Don’t hit him again!”
Mimo looked at the blood in his hand, and then at Pino with contempt. “Go ahead and try to beat me down, my Nazi brother. It’s the only thing you Germans know how to do.”
Pino wanted to bash his brother’s face in while telling him about the things he’d seen and done already in the name of Italy. But he couldn’t.
“Believe what you want to believe,” Pino said, and walked away.
“Kraut,” Mimo called after him. “Adolf’s little boy’s gonna be safe and sound?”
Shaking, Pino shut his bedroom door and locked it. He stripped, got into bed, and set the alarm on his clock. He turned off the light, felt his bruised knuckles, and lay there, thinking that life had swung hard against him again. Was this what God wanted for him? To lose a hero, find love, and endure his brother’s scorn, all in one day?
For the third night in a row, the whirlwind of his mind finally slowed on memories of Anna, and he drifted to sleep.