Beneath a Scarlet Sky



It was past dark when Pino came through the door to Uncle Albert’s sewing room.

“I saw bad things today,” Pino said, emotional again. “I heard them, too.”

“Tell me,” Uncle Albert said.

Pino did the best he could, describing the scene with Leyers and the way the SS soldier had killed Antonio for taking a break.

“They’re all butchers, the SS,” Uncle Albert said, looking up from his notes. “Because of the reprisal edict, there are stories of atrocities every day now. At Sant’Anna di Stazzema, SS troops machine-gunned, tortured, and burned five hundred and sixty innocents. At Casaglia, they shot down a priest on his altar and three old people during Mass. They took the other hundred and forty-seven parishioners into the church graveyard and opened fire with machine guns.”

“What?” Pino said, stunned.

Aunt Greta said, “It goes on. Just the other day, in Bardine di San Terenzo, more than fifty young Italian men, like you, Pino, were strangled with barbed wire and hung from trees.”

Pino loathed them all, every single Nazi. “They have to be stopped.”

“There are more joining the fight against them every day,” Uncle Albert said. “Which is why your information is so important. Could you show me on a map where you were?”

“I’ve already done it,” Pino said, pulling out the general’s map from the glove compartment.

Unfolding it on one of the cutting tables, he showed his uncle the light pencil marks he’d made to indicate the rough placement of the artillery, machine gun nests, armories, and ammo dumps he’d seen during the day. He pointed out where Leyers had piled the debris so the Allies would alter course into machine gun fire.

“In this whole area, Leyers said the concrete is inferior, weak,” Pino said, gesturing to the map. “Leyers was very concerned about it. The Allies should bomb here first, take it out before they ever attack on the ground.”

“Smart,” Uncle Albert said, taking notes on the longitude and latitude of the area. “I’ll pass it along. By the way, that tunnel you visited with Leyers, when you first saw the slaves? It was destroyed yesterday. Partisans waited until there were just Germans inside and then dynamited both ends.”

That made Pino feel better. He actually was making a difference.

“It would sure help if I could get into that valise,” Pino said.

His uncle said, “You’re right. In the meantime, we’ll see about getting you a small camera.”

Pino liked that idea. “Who knows I’m a spy?”

“You, me, and your aunt.”

And Anna, he thought, but said, “Not the Allies? The partisans?”

“They only know you by the code name I gave you.”

Pino liked that idea even more. “Really? What’s my code name?”

“Observer,” Uncle Albert replied. “As in ‘Observer notes machine gun nests at such and such position.’ And ‘Observer notes troop supplies heading south.’ It’s deliberately bland. That way, if the Germans ever intercepted the reports, they’d have no clue to your identity.”

“Observer,” Pino said. “Plain and to the point.”

“Exactly my thought,” Uncle Albert said, standing up from the map. “You can fold the map up now, but I’d erase those pencil marks first.”



Pino did so and left a short time later. Hungry and tired, he started toward home at first, but he hadn’t seen Anna in days, and he walked to Dolly’s apartment building instead.

As soon as he got there, he wondered why he’d come. It was almost curfew. And he couldn’t just go up, knock on the door, and ask to see her, could he? The general had ordered him to go home and to sleep.

He was about to leave when he remembered Anna saying that there was a back stairway just beyond her room off the kitchen. He went around the building, thankful for the moon overhead, and picked his way to where he figured Anna’s room and window were, three stories above him. Would she be in there? Or still cleaning dishes and washing Dolly’s clothes?

Picking up a small handful of pebbles, he leaned back and threw them all at once, figuring she was either in there or not. Ten seconds went by, then another ten. He was about to leave when he heard a window sash go up.

“Anna!” he called softly.

“Pino?” she called softly back.

“Let me in the back way.”

“The general and Dolly are still here,” she said, doubt in her voice.

“We’ll be quiet.”

There was a long pause, and then she said, “Give me a minute.”

After she’d opened the utility door, they crept up the back stairs, Anna in the lead, stopping every few steps to listen. At last they reached her bedroom.

“I’m hungry,” Pino whispered.

She opened her door, pushed him inside, and whispered back, “I’ll find you something to eat, but you must stay here, and be quiet.”

She was back soon with leftovers from a ham hock and a fried noodle dish that was the general’s favorite. He ate it all by the light of a single candle Anna had burning. She sat on the bed, drank wine, and watched him eat.

“That makes my tummy happy,” he said when he’d finished.

“Good,” Anna said. “I’m a student of happiness, you know. It’s all I really want—happiness, every day for the rest of my life. Sometimes happiness comes to us. But usually you have to seek it out. I read that somewhere.”

“And that’s all you want? Happiness?”

“What could be better?”

“How do you find happiness?”

Anna paused, then said, “You start by looking right around you for the blessings you have. When you find them, be grateful.”

“Father Re says the same thing,” Pino said. “He says to give thanks for every day, no matter how flawed. And to have faith in God and a better tomorrow.”

Anna smiled. “The first part’s right. I don’t know about the second.”

“Why?”

“I’ve been disappointed too many times when it comes to better tomorrows,” she said, and then kissed him. He took her in his arms and kissed her back.

Then they heard arguing through the walls—Leyers and Dolly.

“What are they fighting about?” Pino whispered.

“What they always fight about. His wife back in Berlin. And now, Pino, you have to go.”

“Really?”

“Go on now,” she said. Then she kissed him and smiled.



On September 1, 1944, the British Eighth Army punctured the weaker sections of the Gothic Line on the crab-claw ridges north of Arezzo, and then turned east toward the Adriatic Coast. The fighting turned vicious, some of the most intense of the war in Italy after Monte Cassino and Anzio. The Allies rained more than a million mortar and cannon rounds on all the fortifications that separated them from the coastal city of Rimini.

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