Vast sections of the city looked macabre. Scorched fragments of buildings still stood in the rubble and the bomb debris, looking to Pino like so many jagged black-and-white teeth gnashing at a sky that almost constantly threw snow, as if God were doing everything in his power to blot out the scars of war.
The people of Milan suffered for God’s cold effort. With Leyers’s looting of supplies, heating oil was scarce and allocated to German installations. People began cutting down the city’s magnificent old trees for firewood. Campfire smoke belched from ruins and standing buildings alike. Tree stumps flanked Milan’s famous shaded streets. Many of the parks were attacked and denuded. Anything that would burn was burned. The air in some neighborhoods turned as foul as a coal stove.
General Leyers rarely stopped moving in the first half of January, which meant Pino rarely stopped moving. Again and again they made the snowy, dangerous drive to the Gothic Line, making sure the troops suffering in the cold would get their rations.
Leyers, however, seemed indifferent to the average Italian’s misery. He stopped all pretense of paying the Italians for what they made or provided for the German war effort. If there was something the general needed, he ordered it commandeered. In Pino’s eyes, Leyers returned to that reptilian state in which he’d first met him. Cold, ruthless, efficient, he was an engineer tasked with a job and hell-bent on getting it done.
One frigid afternoon in the middle of January, the general ordered Pino to drive him to the Monza train station, where he made his valise heavier before asking to be taken to the Swiss border above Lugano.
Leyers was gone for five hours this time. When he climbed from the sedan that brought him back to the frontier, he carried the valise as if it weighed twice what it had leaving Italy, and he seemed to stumble in the path he took across the border to the Fiat.
“Mon général?” Pino said after Leyers had climbed into the backseat with the valise. “Where now?”
“It doesn’t matter,” Leyers said. He smelled of liquor. “The war’s over.”
Pino sat there, stunned, unsure he’d heard him correctly.
“The war’s over?”
“It might as well be,” the general said in disgust. “We’re in economic collapse, on the run militarily, and the ungodly things done for Hitler are about to be uncovered. Take me to Dolly’s.”
Pino got the Fiat turned around and running downhill while trying to dope out what the general had just said. He understood what an economic collapse was. He also knew from his uncle that the Nazis were in retreat after the Ardennes Offensive in eastern France during the Battle of the Bulge and that Budapest was about to fall.
The ungodly things done for Hitler. What did that mean? The Jews? The slaves? The atrocities? Pino wanted to ask Leyers what he meant, but feared what might happen if he did.
Sipping steadily from a liquor flask, the general sat in silence the entire ride back to Milan. As they were closing on the center of the city, something piqued his interest, and he told Pino to slow. He seemed fixated on the buildings still standing, peering up at them as if they held secrets.
At Dolly’s, Leyers slurred, “I need time to think, to plan, Vorarbeiter. Drop the car at the motor pool. Consider yourself on leave until Monday at oh-eight hundred hours.”
“Monday,” Pino said. “Oui, mon général.”
Before he could get out to open the rear door, Leyers lurched out and across the sidewalk to Dolly’s apartment building and disappeared inside with nothing in his hand. He’d forgotten . . . Pino twisted around and looked over the seat. The valise was there, right on the floor.
After stopping at home to change clothes, Pino drove straight to Uncle Albert’s. He parked, got out the valise, which was lighter than he expected. Looking through the leather shop’s window and seeing Aunt Greta waiting on two German officers, he went around the back and knocked on the sewing room door.
A worker opened it, stared at him, and said, “Where is your uniform today?”
“I have the day off,” Pino said, feeling unpleasantly scrutinized as he walked past her. “Can you tell my uncle I’ll be upstairs in the kitchen?”
She nodded, but not happily.
When Uncle Albert arrived, something seemed to be hanging heavy about him.
“Are you all right?” Pino asked.
“How did you come in?”
Pino told him.
“Did you see anyone watching the store?”
“No, but then again, I wasn’t looking. Do you think . . . ?”
His uncle was nodding. “Gestapo. We have to back off, slow down, fade into the shadows if we can.”
Gestapo? Had they seen him get out of General Leyers’s staff car with the valise?
Suddenly the threat of discovery felt as real as it ever had. Was the Gestapo onto Uncle Albert? Were they onto a spy inside the German High Command? He flashed on Tullio raging at his executioners and wondered if he’d have that kind of courage if he were discovered and put against the wall.
Half-expecting Gestapo agents to come bursting through the door, Pino quickly described General Leyers’s trip into Switzerland, how he came back drunk and said the war was over, and how he’d walked away from his valise.
“Open it,” Uncle Albert said. “I’ll get your aunt to translate.”
When his uncle left, Pino dug out the key they’d made from the wax mold, said a silent prayer, and then slipped it into the first lock. He had to jigger with it before it gave. The second lock turned more easily.
Coming into her kitchen, Aunt Greta looked pale and uncertain when she saw the folders Pino had removed from the valise.
“I almost don’t want to look,” she said, but flipped the top file open and started scanning the pages inside as Uncle Albert returned. “These are fortification plans on the Gothic Line. Whole sections. Get the camera.”
Uncle Albert hustled off to retrieve the camera, and they started photographing pages and recording positions on the maps that they deemed valuable to the Allies. One file detailed train timetables going to and from Italy into Austria. Others described munitions and their locations.
At the bottom, they found an incomplete, handwritten note from Leyers addressed to General Karl Wolff, the head of the SS in Italy. The note made the case for the war’s being lost, citing the rapidly dwindling industrial base, the Allied advance before the snows came, and Hitler’s refusal to listen to his combat generals.
“‘We must face the fact that we cannot go on much longer,’” Aunt Greta said, reading. “‘If we do, there will be nothing left of us or the Fatherland.’ That’s it. No signature. He’s not done with it yet.”
Uncle Albert thought, and said, “A dangerous thing to put down in writing. I’ll make note of it, and tell Baka to send it in the morning.”
The radio operator, posing as a carpenter at work on cabinets and bookcases in the Lellas’ apartment, had been transmitting to the Allies over the piggyback radio connection every day since Christmas. So far it had worked like a charm.