Pino drove through the night back to Milan, elated at the thought that he might at long last get to meet an American. Or an entire army of them! Maybe after he and Anna were married they’d go to the United States like his cousin Licia Albanese did, bring his mother’s purses and Uncle Albert’s leather goods to New York, Chicago, and Los Angeles. He would make his own fortune there!
Pino felt a thrill go up his spine at that idea, and he caught a glimpse of a future unimaginable to him just a few moments before. The entire drive back he did not once think of the biblical-scale destruction he’d just witnessed. He thought about doing something good and profitable with his life, something con smania, and he couldn’t wait to tell Anna all about it.
The Gothic Line along the Senio River was breached later that night. By the following evening, there were Allied forces from New Zealand and India nearly five kilometers beyond Leyers’s broken defenses, with the German army retreating and re-forming to the north. On April 14, after another stunning bombardment, the US Fifth Army broke through the western wall of the Gothic Line and rolled north toward Bologna.
Every day brought news of more Allied advances. Pino listened to the BBC each night on Baka’s shortwave radio. He also spent almost every day driving Leyers from battlefront to battlefront, or along the escape routes, where they watched long German columns fleeing at a much slower pace than when they’d invaded Italy.
The Nazi war machine looked crippled to Pino. He could see it in the shimmying tanks losing their treads and the shell-shocked infantrymen walking behind teams of mules pulling cannons. Scores of German wounded lay in open lorries, exposed to the blistering hot sun. Pino hoped they’d die then and there.
Every two or three days, he and Leyers would return to the Brenner Pass. With the heat had come snowmelt, and a torrent of filthy ice water ran down the pass, undermining the culverts and the road. When they reached the end of the open route, slaves were ankle and shin deep in the frigid water, still working beside the steam shovels and the dump trucks. On April 17, the gray men were a mile from the Austrian border. One of them collapsed in the water. SS guards dragged him out and threw him to the side.
General Leyers seemed not to notice.
“Work them around the clock,” he told the captain in charge. “The entire Wehrmacht Tenth will be coming up this road inside a week.”
Chapter Twenty-Seven
Saturday, April 21, 1945
General Leyers stood off to one side as Organization Todt officers doused five large piles of documents with petrol in the yard outside the OT’s office in Turin. Leyers nodded to one officer, who lit and flicked a stick match. There was a loud whoosh, and flames seemed to gather and plume everywhere at once.
The general watched the papers burn with great interest. So did Pino.
What in them was so important that Leyers would leave Dolly’s bed at 3:00 a.m. to see them destroyed? And then to stand here, waiting to make sure they were all burned? Was there evidence in those papers that incriminated Leyers somehow? There had to be.
Before Pino could begin to think about that, General Leyers barked orders at the OT officers, and then turned to look at Pino.
“Padua,” he said.
Pino drove south and looped around Milan to Padua. On the way, he fought not to doze off with thoughts that the war was almost over. The Allies had broken through Leyers’s defenses in the Argenta gap. The Tenth Mountain Division of the US Army was closing on the Po River.
Leyers seemed to sense Pino’s fatigue, dug in his pockets, and came up with a vial. He spilled a small white pill in his hand and passed it to Pino. “Take it. Amphetamine. Keep you awake. Go ahead. I use them myself.”
Pino took the pill and soon felt wide-awake but irritable, and his head ached when they got to Padua, where the general oversaw another mass burning of OT documents. Afterward, they drove up the Brenner Pass yet again. Fewer than two hundred and fifty meters of snow now separated the Nazis from an open road into Austria, and Leyers was told they would break through within the next forty-eight hours.
On Sunday morning, April 22, Pino watched Leyers destroy OT documents in Verona. In the afternoon, the Brescia files went up in flames. At every stop, before each burning, the general carried his valise inside the OT offices and spent time looking through files before overseeing the burns. Leyers would not let Pino touch the valise, which was getting heavier with each stop. In the early evening, he saw OT documents in Bergamo burn before they returned to Leyers’s offices behind the Como stadium.
The following morning, Monday, April 23, General Leyers watched OT officers light a huge bonfire of files and documents on the stadium pitch. Leyers oversaw the feeding of that fire for several hours. Pino was allowed nowhere near the documents. He sat in the stands in the building heat, watching the Nazi records turn to smoke and floating ash.
When they returned to Milan later that afternoon, two SS Panzer units had sealed off the neighborhoods around the Duomo, and even Leyers was scrutinized before being allowed inside. At the Hotel Regina, Gestapo headquarters, Pino found out why. Colonel Walter Rauff was drunk, in a rage, and trying to burn anything with his name on it. But when the Gestapo chief saw Leyers he brightened and invited him into his office.
Leyers looked at Pino and said, “You’re done for the day, but I have a nine a.m. meeting. Pick me up at Dolly’s at eight forty-five.”
“Oui, mon général,” Pino said. “The car?”
“Take it with you.”
General Leyers followed Rauff inside. Pino hated that so many documents were disappearing. The proof of what the Nazis had done to Italy was vanishing, and there seemed little he could do but report it to the Allies. He parked the Fiat two blocks from his apartment building, left his armband on the seat—swastika up—and got past the lobby sentries once more.
Michele held a finger to his lips, and Aunt Greta shut the apartment door.
“Papa?” Pino said.
“We have a visitor,” his father said in a hushed tone. “My cousin’s son, Mario.”
Pino squinted. “Mario? I thought he was a fighter pilot?”
“I still am,” Mario said, stepping from the shadows. He was a short, square-shouldered man with a big smile. “I got shot down the other night, but parachuted out and made it here.”
“Mario will hide here until the war’s over,” Michele said.
“Your father and your aunt have been filling me in on your activities,” Mario said, clapping Pino on the back. “Takes a lot of guts.”
“Oh, I don’t know,” Pino said. “I think Mimo’s had a tougher time of it.”
“Nonsense,” Aunt Greta said before Pino put up his hands in surrender.
“I haven’t had a shower in three days,” he said. “And then I need to move the general’s car. Glad you’re alive, Mario.”
“You, too, Pino,” Mario said.