Another shot outside the cemetery walls, then a fifth, and a sixth. Pino kept going. His head was swiveling as he looked everywhere, but he was seeing no one else inside the graveyard. Swinging wide so he couldn’t be seen through the gate from the road, Pino reached the row of tombs closest to the front entrance.
He used the binoculars to scan the open ground before the cemetery’s front wall, but again saw nothing. Backing up, he peered between the first row of gravestones and the second, and he saw Gabriella Rocha, or the suggestion of her really, fifteen centimeters beneath the snow. Pino made a beeline toward the shape. When the seventh and eighth shots rang outside the cemetery wall, he glanced at the front gate and was relieved to see no one there.
The daughter of Porzia’s best friend lay on her back, tucked up tight to the base of a large tomb that hid her from the gate and the road. He knelt by the snow-covered form, leaned over, and blew at the powdery snow, seeing it waft and clear from her face, which was lovely and ice blue. Gabriella’s eyes were shut. Her lips were curled in an almost contented smile, as if she’d heard a funny comment on her way to heaven. Pino blew more snow from her face and dark hair, noticing that blood had seeped into the ice crystals and formed a pale red halo beneath her head.
Grimacing, he lifted her head, found her neck stiff with rigor, but was able to make out where the bullet had gone through both sides of the back of her skull—hardly any damage, just two holes drained of blood on either side of where her spinal cord met her brain. Pino laid her back down and brushed the rest of the snow off her, remembering how much fun they’d had as kids and thinking that it was good she hadn’t suffered. Alive and frightened one moment, then dead and content before she could draw her next breath.
After spreading the sheets, Pino set the Walther on the tomb and rolled Gabriella onto the first sheet. As he tucked the fabric up around her, he started to think about how he was going to get her body over the back wall with no rope.
Pino turned to get the second sheet, but it no longer mattered. Three Fascist soldiers had come into the graveyard through the gate. They were aiming rifles at him forty meters away.
“Don’t shoot!” Pino yelled, going down on his knees and throwing his arms up. “I am not a partisan. I work for Major General Hans Leyers of the German High Command in Milan. He sent me to bring this girl’s body to her mother in Lecco.”
Two of the soldiers looked skeptical and bloodthirsty. The third started laughing as he moved toward Pino, gun up, and saying, “That’s the best partisan excuse I have ever heard, which is gonna make me blowing your head off a real shame.”
“Don’t do it,” Pino warned. “I have the documents to prove what I’m saying. Here, inside my coat.”
“We don’t give a shit about your forged documents,” the Black Shirt sneered.
He stopped ten meters from Pino, who said, “Do you want to explain to Il Duce why you shot me instead of letting me take care of this girl’s body?”
That seemed to give the Fascist pause. Then he sniggered. “Now you’re saying you’re friends with Mussolini?”
“Not a friend. I work for him as a translator when General Leyers visits. It’s all true. Just let me show you the papers, and you’ll see.”
“Why don’t we just check, Raphael?” another Black Shirt said, growing nervous.
Raphael hesitated and then motioned for the documents. Pino handed over his identity card from the Organization Todt, the signed letter from General Leyers, and a document of free passage signed by Benito Mussolini, president of the Salò Republic. It was the only thing Pino had stolen from Leyers’s valise.
“Put your guns down,” Raphael said at last.
“Thank you,” Pino said with relief.
“You’re lucky I didn’t just shoot you for being here,” Raphael said.
As Pino got up, Raphael said, “How come you’re not in the Salò army? How come you’re driving for a Nazi?”
“It’s complicated,” Pino said. “Signore? All I want is to take this girl’s body home to her mother, who is heartbroken, and waiting to bury her daughter.”
Raphael looked at him with some disdain, but said, “Go on, take her.”
Pino retrieved his pistol, holstered it, and then wrapped Gabriella with the second sheet. He dug in his coat pocket, got out the OT swastika armband, and put it on. Then he bent down and scooped up the corpse.
She wasn’t terribly heavy, but it took a couple of adjustments before Pino had her rolled firmly into his chest. With a nod, he walked back down the row of gravestones through the deep and falling snow, acutely aware of the Black Shirts watching him every step of the way.
When Pino exited the cemetery gate, a slat of sunlight broke through the clouds, shining on the charred bus to his left and making the snowflakes look as dazzling as jewels spiraling to earth. But as he started up the road heading toward the far rise, Pino wasn’t looking at the diamonds floating from the sky. His eyes darted left and right at the Black Shirts, who were using axes, saws, and knives to behead the partisan dead below their red scarves.
Fifteen, maybe twenty heads had already been stuck on fence posts facing the road. Many of their eyes were open and their faces were twisted in death’s agony. The weight of the dead girl in his arms felt suddenly unbearable under the dark and silent gaze of the bodiless men. Pino wanted to drop Gabriella, to leave her and run from the savagery that surrounded him. Instead, he set her down and rested on one knee with his head down, eyes closed, praying to God for the strength to go on.
“Romans used to do it,” Raphael said behind him.
Pino twisted to look up at the Fascist, aghast. “What?”
Raphael said, “Caesar would have the heads of his enemies lining the roads into Rome as fair warning of what happened if you crossed the emperor. I think it has the same effect now. Il Duce would be proud, I think. You?”
Pino blinked dully at the Black Shirt. “I don’t know. I’m just a driver.”
He picked Gabriella up again and started trudging up the snowy road, trying not to look at the mounting number of heads on bloodstained fence posts or the jerky, butcherous motions of the Fascists still working on the remaining dead.
Chapter Twenty-Four
Porzia’s best friend turned hysterical when Pino came to her door in Lecco with Gabriella’s body. He helped to lay her daughter out on a table where women in mourning clothes were waiting to prepare her for burial. Pino slipped out as they grieved her, didn’t wait for a word of thanks. He couldn’t stay around the dead or listen to the echoing pain of the living a moment longer.