Beneath a Scarlet Sky

“I can’t tell. He has a face like granite most of the time. But he would know. He told me himself he started working for Hitler by building cannons.”


“Baka is coming in the morning,” his father said. “Write down what you want London to know, Pino. I’ll have him send it along with the other transmissions.”

Pino took paper and pen and scratched his report out. Aunt Greta wrote down the words of treason he’d overheard.

At last Pino yawned, checked his watch. It was almost nine. “I have to report to the general, get my orders for tomorrow.”

“Will you be back home tonight?”

“I don’t think so, Papa.”

“Be careful,” Michele said. “You wouldn’t have heard those generals talking treason if the war wasn’t close to being over for good.”

Pino nodded, went for his overcoat, saying, “I haven’t asked about Uncle Albert. You saw him this morning in San Vittore, yes? How is he?”

“He’s lost weight, which isn’t a bad thing,” Aunt Greta said, smiling wanly. “And they haven’t broken him, though they’ve tried. He knows many of the other prisoners, so it helps. They protect one another.”

“He won’t be in there much longer,” Pino said.

Indeed, as he walked through the streets back toward Dolly’s apartment building, Pino’s sense of the time that remained between now and the end of the war was small, much smaller than time after the end of the war, which felt infinitely long, and filled with Anna.

Thoughts of a limitless future with her buoyed Pino to Dolly’s door. To his relief, Anna answered, smiling, no longer sick, and very happy to see him.

“The general and Dolly have gone out,” Anna said, letting him in.

She closed the door and fell into his arms.



Later, in Anna’s bed, their singing bodies glistened with sweat and love.

“I missed you,” Anna said.

“You’re all I think about,” Pino said. “Is it bad that when I’m supposed to be spying on General Leyers, or trying to memorize where we’ve been, and what we’ve seen, I’m instead thinking of you?”

“It’s not bad at all,” Anna said. “It’s sweet.”

“I mean it. When we’re apart, I feel like all the music stops.”

Anna gazed at him. “You’re a special person, Pino Lella.”

“No, not really.”

“You are,” she insisted, running her finger on his chest. “You’re courageous. You’re funny. And you’re beautiful to look at.”

Pino laughed, embarrassed. “Beautiful? Not handsome?”

“You are handsome,” Anna said, caressing his cheek now. “But you are so full of love for me, it beams from you, makes me feel beautiful, which makes you beautiful to me.”

“Then beautiful we are,” he said, and nuzzled her closer.

Pino told Anna about his sense that everything that would happen from now until the war’s end would someday seem very short, while time after the war seemed to stretch out toward an invisible horizon.

“We can do anything we want,” Pino said. “Life is limitless.”

“We can chase happiness, live passionately?”

“Is that really all you want? To chase happiness, and live passionately?”

“Can you imagine any other way to do it?”

“No,” he said, kissing Anna and loving her all the more. “I guess I really can’t.”





Chapter Twenty-Six


General Leyers and Pino were on the move again almost constantly the following two weeks. Leyers went twice to Switzerland after visits to the train yard in Como, not Monza, which caused Pino to think that the general had had the boxcar with the gold moved. Apart from those trips to Lugano, Leyers spent the majority of his time inspecting the state of roads and train lines running north.

Pino didn’t understand why, and it wasn’t his place to ask, but when they drove to the Brenner Pass road on March 15, the general’s intentions were laid plain. The train tracks up through the pass to Austria had been bombed repeatedly. Service had been interrupted in both directions, and gray men were toiling to repair the line.

The Brenner Pass road went through a snowpack that still ran all the way down to the valley floor. The higher they drove, the higher the snowbanks flanking them became, until it seemed they were in a roofless tunnel of gritty white. They came around a bend that gave them a stunning view of the vast Brenner drainage.

“Stop,” Leyers said, and climbed out with his binoculars.

Pino didn’t need binoculars. He could see the road ahead and a mob of gray men like a single enslaved organism that dug, chopped, and shoveled the snow that blocked the way to the top of the Brenner Pass, and Austria.

They’re a long way from the border, Pino thought, and gazed higher. There had to be ten or twelve meters of snow up there. And those dark smudges way up, back toward Austria, looked like avalanche tracks. Below those smudges, there could be fifteen meters of snowpack and debris across the road.

Leyers must have made a similar assessment. When they drove far enough to get to the Waffen-SS troops overseeing the slaves, the general climbed out and lit into the man in charge, a major by his insignia. They had a shouting match, and for a moment Pino thought they were going to come to blows.

When General Leyers returned to the car, he remained in a fury.

“At the rate they’re moving, we’ll never get the hell out of Italy,” he said. “I need lorries, backhoes, and bulldozers. Real machines. Or it’s impossible.”

“Mon général?” Pino said.

“Shut up and drive, Vorarbeiter!”

Pino knew better than to press the general, and kept silent, thinking about what Leyers had just said and finally understanding what they’d been doing recently.

General Leyers had been put in charge of the escape route. The Germans had to have one to retreat. The train tracks were busted. So the Brenner Pass road was the only sure way out, and it was blocked. Other passes led to Switzerland, but the Swiss had stopped allowing German trains or convoys through their borders in the past few days.

As of now, Pino thought happily, the Nazis are trapped.



That night, Pino wrote out a message for Baka describing the huge snow barrier between Italy and Austria. He said the partisans or Allies needed to start bombing the snowy ridges above the road to cause more avalanches.

Five days later, he and Leyers returned to the Brenner. Pino was secretly pleased when the general turned apoplectic over news that Allied bombs had set off huge slides that blocked the road with walls of snow.

With every hour that passed, Leyers grew more erratic, talkative one moment, silent and sullen the next. The general spent six days in Switzerland toward the end of March, which allowed Pino almost unlimited time with Anna and made him wonder why Leyers hadn’t moved Dolly to Lugano or even Geneva.

Mark Sullivan's books