“It doesn’t make sense to me, either, Duce, but the field marshal has a far greater military mind than mine. I am but an engineer.”
The phone rang. Mussolini grabbed it, listened, and said, “Rachele?”
The dictator pulled his head off the receiver, wincing while his wife’s voice came screaming out into the room with remarkable clarity. “The partisans! They’re sending me poems, Benito! One line says over and over again, ‘We will take you all to Piazzale Loreto!’ They blame me, they blame you, and they blame your bitch of a mistress! For that she’s going to die!”
The dictator smashed the phone down in its cradle, looking shaken, and then stared at Pino for an indication of how much he’d heard. Pino swallowed and became fascinated by the stitchwork in the rug.
Leyers said, “Duce, I have a busy schedule.”
“Preparing your retreat?” Mussolini sneered. “Your run toward the Brenner Pass?”
“The Gothic Line still holds.”
“I hear it has holes in it,” Il Duce said, and drained his wine. “Tell me, General, is it true that Hitler is building a last redoubt? Somewhere underground in the German Alps, where he will retreat with his most loyal followers?”
“One hears many such stories. But I have no direct knowledge of that one.”
“If there is, will there be a place in that underground fortress for me?”
“I can’t speak for the führer, Duce.”
“That’s not what I hear,” Mussolini said. “But at the very least, maybe you can speak for Albert Speer. Surely Hitler’s architect would know if there was such a place.”
“I’ll ask the Reich Minister the next time we speak, Duce.”
“I’ll need a room for two,” the dictator said, and poured himself more wine.
“Duly noted,” the general said. “And now I must leave. I have a meeting in Turin.”
Mussolini looked ready to argue, but the phone rang. He winced, picked it up. Leyers turned to go. As Pino started to follow, he heard Mussolini say, “Claretta? Did you shut the gate?” There was a pause before Il Duce roared, “Rachele’s there? Get your guard to get her off the gate before she hurts herself!”
They heard more shouting as they walked off the terrace and down the stairs.
Back in the Fiat, General Leyers shook his head and said, “Why do I always feel like I have been to a madhouse when I leave this place?”
“Il Duce says many strange things,” Pino said.
“How he led a country is beyond me,” Leyers said. “But they say the train system ran like German clockwork when he was in full power.”
“Is there an underground fortress in the Alps?” Pino asked.
“Only a lunatic would believe in something like that.”
Pino wanted to remind the general that Adolf Hitler wasn’t exactly stable, but he thought better of it and they drove on.
Shortly after sunset on Tuesday, October 31, 1944, General Leyers told Pino to drive him to the train station in the city of Monza, about fifteen kilometers northeast of Milan. Pino was exhausted. They’d been on the road almost constantly, and he wanted to sleep and to see Anna. They’d barely had ten minutes together since the night of the strafing.
But Pino followed orders and turned the Fiat north. The second full moon of the month—the true blue moon—rose, casting a pale light that made the countryside look like dark turquoise. When they reached the Monza station, and the general climbed out, Organization Todt sentries locked at attention. They were Italians, young men like Pino, trying to survive the war.
“Tell them I’m here to oversee a transfer in the yard,” General Leyers said.
Pino did, and they nodded and gestured to the far end of the platform.
A small lorry pulled up. Two OT soldiers and four men in shabby gray clothes got out. They had patches on their chests. Three said “OST”; the fourth said “P.”
“Wait here, Vorarbeiter,” General Leyers told Pino in a cordial tone. “I won’t be long, no more than an hour, and then we can get that well-needed sleep and see our lady friends. Okay?”
Feeling punchy, Pino smiled and nodded. He wanted to lie down on one of the benches and go to sleep right then. But watching Leyers take a flashlight from one of the soldiers and lead the way toward the far end of the platform, he came alert.
The general didn’t have the valise with him!
It was in the Fiat out in front of the station. An hour, no more, Leyers had said. But that was plenty enough time to go through the valise, wasn’t it? Uncle Albert had never gotten him the camera he said he’d look into. But Pino had the general’s camera, loaded with what he knew to be a fresh roll of film. Leyers insisted on keeping the camera in the car so he could take pictures of sites for possible artillery installations. And when the general did take pictures, he always removed the film and replaced it with a new roll, even if it wasn’t full.
Pino decided that if he came across something that looked important, he’d photograph the papers, take the film, and replace it with another fresh roll from the glove compartment.
He’d taken two steps toward the Fiat when something beyond fatigue bothered him, something about the way Leyers had walked off just then, leading the four slaves and the two OT soldiers. He couldn’t put his finger on it, but he wondered what Leyers might be transferring by the light of the full moon. And why didn’t the general want him to see the transfer? That was odd. Where Leyers went, Pino usually went as well.
A train whistled not far away. Torn in two directions, Pino went with his gut and padded off toward the end of the platform where Leyers had disappeared. By the time he’d jumped down into the yard and walked well away from the station without seeing the general or the others with him, a freight train came rumbling into the station and squealed to a stop.
Pino scrambled under one of the train’s boxcars and crawled over the tracks. When he reached the other side, he heard voices. Peering out from under the train and to his right, he saw the two OT soldiers silhouetted by the general’s flashlight. They were coming Pino’s way.
Pino pressed himself tight to the wheels of the boxcar and watched the soldiers go by. He looked out and to his right again and made out Leyers standing with his back to him about sixty meters away. The general was watching the four gray men. They had formed a line and were moving objects from a boxcar that was part of the freight train to a lone boxcar on the adjacent track. The objects weren’t very big, but the slaves had to put their entire bodies into holding and moving the heavy loads.
If Pino couldn’t tell his uncle what he’d seen in Leyers’s valise, he at least wanted to be able to tell him what the general was transferring after dark, and why he was personally overseeing the slaves doing the work.