Pino hesitated, but then looked through the binoculars, seeing troops of the Brazilian Expeditionary Force charge across open ground at the base of the mountain’s southwest flank. The first line of attacking soldiers was forty meters out from the base when a man stepped on a land mine and was blown apart in a haze of dirt, smoke, and blood. Another soldier stepped on a mine, and then a third before the battlefield came under withering German machine gun fire from above, pinning them down.
But Allied cannons and mortars continued to pound the fortress. By midmorning, there were breaches in the walls on both sides of the castle, and the Brazilians kept coming, waves of them that finally crossed the minefield, made the base of Monte Castello, and started a deadly climb that would last for hours.
General Leyers and Pino stood there in the cold the entire time, watching the Tenth Mountain Division conquer Della Toraccia and, in hand-to-hand combat, the Brazilians take Monte Castello around five that afternoon. The mountainside was cratered when the Allied cannons stopped. The castle lay in smoking ruins. The Germans were in full retreat.
General Leyers said, “I am beaten here, and Bologna will be lost in a matter of days. Take me back to Milan.”
The general sat in silence the entire ride back, head down, scribbling on a pad of paper and rifling through documents in his valise until they pulled to the curb outside Dolly’s building.
Pino carried his valise, following Leyers past the old crone in the lobby and up the stairs. General Leyers knocked at the apartment door. Pino was surprised when Dolly answered, dressed in a black wool dress that fit her snugly.
Her eyes were rheumy, as if she’d been drinking. Her cigarette smoldering as she teetered on high heels, she said, “How wonderful of you to come home, General.” Then she looked at Pino. “I’m afraid Anna is not feeling well. A stomach bug of some sort. Best to stay away.”
“Best for all of us to stay away, then,” General Leyers said, backing up. “I can’t afford to be sick. Not now. I’ll sleep elsewhere tonight.”
“No,” Dolly said. “I want you here.”
“Not tonight,” Leyers said coldly, pivoted, and left with Dolly shouting angrily after him.
Pino dropped the general at German headquarters under orders to return at 7:00 a.m.
He left the car at the motor pool and trudged toward home, seeing in his mind’s eye the carnage and destruction he’d witnessed that day. How many men had he seen die from his safe vantage point? Hundreds?
The sheer brutality of it ate at him. He hated war. He hated the Germans for starting it. For what? Putting your boot on another man’s head and stealing him blind, until someone with a bigger boot comes along to kick you out of the way? As far as Pino was concerned, wars were about murder and thievery. One army killed to steal the hill; then another killed to steal it back.
He knew he should be happy to see the Nazis defeated and retreating, but he just felt hollow and alone. He desperately wanted to see Anna. But he couldn’t, and that suddenly made him want to weep. He choked back his emotions, forced his mind to put a wall around his memories of the battle.
That wall held as he showed his documents to the sentries in the lobby of his apartment building, and when he rode the birdcage past the Waffen-SS soldiers on the fifth floor, and as he dug in his pocket for his keys. When he opened the apartment door, he thought he’d step inside an empty apartment, fall to the floor, and let it all go.
But Aunt Greta was there already, collapsed in his father’s arms. When she saw Pino, she broke into deeper sobs.
Michele’s lower lip quivered when he said, “Colonel Rauff’s men came to the shop this afternoon. They ransacked the place and arrested your uncle. He’s been taken to the Hotel Regina.”
“On what charges?” Pino asked, shutting the door.
“Being part of the resistance,” Aunt Greta wept. “Being a spy, and you know what the Gestapo does to spies.”
Michele’s jaw began to tremble, and tears dripped down his cheeks. “You hear her, Pino? What they’ll do to Albert? What they’ll do to you if he cracks and tells them about you?”
“Uncle Albert won’t say a thing.”
“What if he does?” Michele demanded. “They’ll come for you, too.”
“Papa—”
“I want you to run, Pino. Steal your general’s car, go to the Swiss border in uniform with your passport. I’ll give you enough money. You can live in Lugano, wait for the war to end.”
“No, Papa,” Pino said. “I won’t do that.”
“You’ll do as I say!”
“I’m eighteen!” Pino shouted. “I can do what I please.”
He said this with such strength and resolve that his father was taken aback, and Pino felt bad for having shouted. It had just burst out of him.
Shaking, trying to calm down, Pino said, “Papa, I’m sorry, but I’ve sat out too much of the war already. I won’t run now. Not while the radio still works and the war goes on. Until then, I’m at General Leyers’s side. I’m sorry, but that’s the way it has to be.”
Ten days later, on the afternoon of March 2, 1945, Pino stood by General Leyers’s Fiat, studying the exterior of a villa in the hills east of Lake Garda and wondering what was happening inside.
Seven other cars were parked there as well. Two of the drivers wore the uniforms of the Waffen-SS, and one the Wehrmacht. The rest were in plain clothes. Under Leyers’s orders, so was Pino. For the most part, Pino ignored the other drivers and continued to watch the house with intense fascination because he’d recognized two of the German officers who’d followed General Leyers inside nearly twenty minutes before.
They were General Wolff, head of the SS in Italy, and Field Marshal Heinrich Von Vietinghoff, who’d recently replaced Kesselring as commander of all German forces in Italy.
Why is Vietinghoff here? And Wolff? What are they all up to?
These questions went round and round in Pino’s head until he couldn’t take it anymore. He got out of the Fiat into the lightly falling snow and moved off toward a hedgerow of ornamental cedar trees that flanked the parking area. He stopped and took a piss in case any of the other drivers were watching, and then pushed through the cedars and disappeared.
Using the hedge for cover, Pino got to the villa’s north wall, where he crouched and slunk along, pausing beneath windows to listen, and then rising up to peek through.
From below the third window he heard shouting. One voice roared out, “Was du redest ist Verrat! Ich werde an einer solchen Diskussion nicht teilnehmen!”
Pino didn’t quite understand. But he did hear the sound of a room door slamming. Someone was leaving. General Leyers?
He bolted back down the side of the villa and to the cedar hedge. He ran down the length of it, peering through breaks, seeing Field Marshal Vietinghoff storm from the villa. His driver leaped from his car, opened the door to the backseat, and they soon drove off.
Pino had a moment of indecision. Should he go back to the window, try to hear more? Or should he go back to the car and wait, not risk his luck?
Leyers came out the front door and made the decision for him. Pino eased out through the hedge and jogged to meet him, trying to remember what Vietinghoff had shouted before leaving.