Beneath a Scarlet Sky

When they broke apart, they touched foreheads and entwined their hands. Pino said, “You know secrets that could get me killed, but I know so little about you.”


After several moments, Anna seemed to come to some kind of decision and touched her uniform above her heart. “I’ll tell you about one of my scars. An old one.”

Anna said her early childhood was magical. Her father, a commercial fisherman and native of Trieste, owned his own boat. Her mother was from Sicily, superstitious about everything, but a good mother, a loving mother. They had a nice home near the marina and good food on the table. Due to a series of miscarriages, Anna was an only child and doted on by her parents. She loved being in the kitchen with her mother. She loved being on the boat with her father, especially on her birthday.

“Papa and I would go out on the Adriatic before dawn,” Anna said. “We’d go west in the darkness several kilometers. Then he’d turn the boat around east and let me take the wheel. I’d drive the boat straight into the sunrise. I loved that.”

“How old were you?”

“Oh, maybe five the first time.”

On her ninth birthday, Anna and her father got up early. It was raining and windy, so there would be no voyage into the sunrise, but she wanted to go anyway.

“So we did,” she said, fell quiet, and then cleared her throat. “The storm got worse. A lot worse. My father put a life preserver on me. We were getting hit by waves, and we got turned broadside to them. A big one hit us hard enough to capsize the boat and throw us into the sea. I was rescued later in the day by other fishermen from Trieste. My father was never found.”

“Oh God,” Pino said. “That’s horrible.”

Anna nodded, tears slipping from her eyes and dripping on his chest. “My mother was worse, but she’s a scar for another time. I have to sleep. And you have to go.”

“Again?”

“Yes,” she said, smiled, and kissed him once more.

Though he desperately wanted to stay, Pino felt happy upon leaving Dolly’s apartment around 2:00 a.m. He hated seeing Anna’s face disappear as she closed the door, but he loved that she looked forward to seeing him again.

Downstairs, the lobby and the old crone’s stool were empty. He went outside and looked at the bullet holes in the Daimler, and wondered how they’d survived. He would go home and sleep, and in the morning he would find his uncle. He had much to tell.



The next morning, while Aunt Greta cut and toasted bread she’d stood hours in a ration line to buy, Uncle Albert took notes as Pino recounted all that had happened to him since they’d last spoken. He finished with the story of General Leyers getting drunk.

Uncle Albert sat there several moments, and then asked, “How many lorries and armored cars did you say are coming off the Fiat lines every day?”

“Seventy,” Pino said. “If it weren’t for the sabotage, they’d be making more.”

“That’s good to know,” he said, scribbling.

Aunt Greta put toast, butter, and a small jar of jam on the table.

“Butter and jam!” Uncle Albert said. “Wherever did you get that?”

“Everyone has their secrets,” she said, and smiled.

“Even General Leyers, it seems,” Uncle Albert said.

“Especially General Leyers,” Pino said. “Did you know he reports directly to Hitler? That he’s sat at the führer’s left hand in meetings?”

His uncle shook his head. “Leyers is far more powerful than we thought, which is why I’d love to see what he’s got in that valise.”

“But he’s always got it with him, or where it would be noticed missing.”

“He leaves clues, though. He spent the better part of a week dealing with strikes and sabotages, which says to me strikes and sabotage are working. Which says we need more sabotage in the factories. We’ll break the Nazis gear tooth by gear tooth.”

“The Germans are also having trouble paying,” Pino said. “Fiat is working on Hitler’s guarantee of payment, not cash.”

Uncle Albert studied Pino, thought about that. “Scarcity,” he said at last.

“What?” Aunt Greta said.

“The food lines are getting worse, aren’t they?”

She nodded. “Longer every day. For nearly everything.”

“It’s going to get much worse,” her husband said. “If the Nazis have no money to pay, their economy is starting to break down. They will start seizing more and more of our stores soon, and that will lead to more scarcity and more misery for everyone in Milan.”

“You think so?” Aunt Greta said, worrying her apron.

“It’s not necessarily a bad thing, scarcity, in the long run I mean. More misery, more pain, will mean more of us willing to fight until the last German is dead or driven from Italy.”



By the middle of October 1944, events were starting to prove Uncle Albert right.

Pino drove General Leyers’s new staff car, a Fiat four-door sedan, southeast from Milan one beautiful autumn morning. It was harvest time on the Po River valley floor. Men were taking scythes to grain and picking gardens, groves, and orchards. Leyers sat in the back of the Fiat, as was his custom, the valise open, reports in his lap.

Since they’d survived the strafing, Leyers had been more cordial to Pino, but he showed little of the empathy and openness he had that night. Then again, Pino hadn’t seen him take a drink since. He followed the general’s directions, and within an hour they arrived at a large meadow in the countryside. Fifty German lorries were parked there along with Panzer tanks, armored cars, and seven or eight hundred soldiers, a full battalion of them. Most were Organization Todt men, but they had a full company of SS soldiers behind them.

General Leyers exited the car, his face hard. At the sight of the general, the entire battalion came to attention. Leyers was met by a lieutenant colonel who led him to a stack of weapons crates. Leyers climbed up on the crates and began to speak rapidly and forcefully in German.

Pino was only catching the odd phrase or word, something about the Fatherland and the needs of brother Germans, but whatever he was saying certainly revved up the troops. They were upright, shoulders back, mesmerized by the general as he exhorted them.

General Leyers finished his speech, shouting something about Hitler, and then threw his arm up and out in the Nazi salute. “Sieg heil!” he roared.

“Sieg heil!” they thundered back at him.

Pino stood there, confused by the fear he felt growing inside him. What had Leyers said to them? What was happening?

Mark Sullivan's books