Fifteen days later, a Waffen-SS soldier lashed a team of six mules dragging two heavy cannons up a steep, arid mountainside. The whip laid open the flanks of the mules, and they brayed in pain and fear, dug in their hooves, and kicked up a dust cloud as they climbed toward the heights of the Apennine Mountains north of the town of Arezzo in central Italy.
“Get around them and be quick about it, Vorarbeiter,” General Leyers said, looking up from his work in the backseat. “I’ve got cement pouring.”
“Oui, mon général,” Pino said, pulling around the mules and accelerating. He yawned, and yawned again, feeling so tired he could have lain right down in the mud and slept.
The pace at which Leyers worked and traveled was stupefying. In the days after the executions in the Piazalle Loreto, he and Pino were on the road fourteen, fifteen, sometimes sixteen hours a day. Leyers liked to travel at night when possible, with slit canvas blinders over the headlights. Pino had to concentrate for hours on end keeping the Daimler on the road with only slivers of light to navigate by.
When he passed the poor mules, it was past two in the afternoon, and he’d been driving since long before dawn. He was further irritated by the fact that the constant movement had hardly left him a moment to be alone with Anna since they’d kissed in the kitchen. He couldn’t stop thinking about her, how it had felt when she was in his arms, her lips against his. He yawned but smiled at that happy thought.
“Up there,” General Leyers said, pointing through the windshield into rugged, dry terrain.
Pino drove the Daimler until big rocks and boulders blocked the way.
“We’ll walk from here,” Leyers said.
Pino got out and opened the back door. The general exited and said, “Bring your notebook and pen.”
Pino glanced at the valise in the backseat. He’d had the duplicate key for more than a week now, courtesy of some friend of Uncle Albert’s, but he’d had no chance to try it. He got the notebook and pen from under the map in the glove compartment.
They climbed up through rocks and friable stones that slid around their feet before they reached the top. They were afforded a view looking over a valley framed by two long, connected ridges that on the map looked like a crab’s open claw. To the south, there was a wide plain divided into farms and vineyards. To the north, and high on the crab’s inner claw, an army of men worked in ungodly heat.
Leyers walked resolutely up the ridge toward them. Pino trailed the general, stunned at the sheer number of men up and down the side of the mountain, so many they looked like ants with their hill split open, teeming and crawling all over one another.
The closer they got, the ants turned human, and broken, and gray. Fifteen thousand slaves, maybe more, were mixing, transporting, and pouring cement for machine gun nests and artillery platforms. They were digging and setting tank traps across the valley floor. They were running barbed wire across the flanks of the slopes and using pickaxes and shovels to burrow out places for the German infantry to use as cover.
Every group of slaves had a Waffen-SS soldier who goaded them to work harder. Pino heard screaming and saw slaves beaten and whipped. Those who collapsed in the heat were dragged away by other slaves and left to fend for themselves, lying on rocks, dying in the beating sun.
It seemed to Pino a scene as old as time, an update on the pharaohs who enslaved generations of men to build their tombs. Leyers stopped at an overlook. He gazed down upon the vast companies of conquered men at his disposal and, at least by his facial expression, seemed unmoved by their plight.
Pharaoh’s slave master, Pino thought.
That was what Antonio, the partisan fighter from Turin, had called Leyers.
The slave master himself.
New hatred for General Leyers boiled up from deep in Pino’s gut. It was incomprehensible to him that a man who’d fought against something as barbaric as the decimation at San Vittore Prison could in turn rule an army of slaves without so much as a twitch of inner conflict or a tic of self-loathing. But nothing showed on Leyers’s face as he watched bulldozers piling tree trunks and boulders on the steep mountainsides.
The general glanced at Pino, then pointed below them. “As the Allied soldiers attack, these obstacles will turn them straight into our machine guns.”
Pino nodded with feigned enthusiasm. “Oui, mon général.”
They walked through a girdle of interconnected machine gun nests and cannon installations, Pino following Leyers and taking notes. The longer they walked, and the more they saw, the more curt and agitated the general became.
“Write this down,” he said. “The cement is inferior in many places. Likely sabotage from Italian suppliers. Upper valley is not fully hardened for battle. Inform Kesselring I need ten thousand more laborers.”
Ten thousand slaves, Pino thought in disgust as he wrote. And they mean nothing to him.
The general then attended a meeting with high-ranking OT and German army officers, and Pino could hear him shouting and threatening inside a command bunker. When the meeting broke up, he saw the officers shouting at their subordinates, who shouted at the men under their authority. It was like watching a wave build until it reached the Waffen-SS soldiers, who hurled the weight of Leyers’s demands on the shoulders of the slaves, lashing them, kicking them, driving them by any means necessary to work harder and faster. The implications were clear to Pino. The Germans expected the Allies here sooner than later.
General Leyers watched until he seemed satisfied with the renewed pace of the work, then said to Pino, “We’re done here.”
They walked back along the mountainside. The general would pause every now and then to observe some work-in-progress. Otherwise, he kept on marching like some unstoppable machine. Did he have a heart? Pino wondered. A soul?
They were near the path that led back to the Daimler when Pino saw a crew of seven men in gray digging and swinging pickaxes, breaking rock and shale under the watchful eye of the SS. Some of them had a ravaged and mad look about them, like a rabid dog he’d once seen.
The closest slave to Pino was uphill from the others, digging weakly. He stopped, put his hands on the end of the handle like a man who’d had enough. One of the SS soldiers started screaming at him and marching across the hill.
The slave looked away and saw Pino standing there, looking down at him. His skin had turned the color of tobacco juice from the sun, and his beard was wilder than Pino remembered it. He’d also lost too much weight. But Pino swore he was looking at Antonio, the slave he’d given water to back in the tunnel the first day he’d driven for Leyers. Their gazes locked, and Pino felt both pity and shame before the SS soldier clubbed the side of the slave’s head with the butt of his rifle. He dropped and rolled down the steep embankment.
“Vorarbeiter!”
Pino startled and looked over his shoulder. General Leyers was standing about fifty meters from him, glaring back at him.
With one last glance at the now unmoving slave, Pino broke into a trot toward the general, thinking that Leyers was responsible. The general hadn’t ordered the man struck down, but in his mind, Leyers was responsible nonetheless.