Pino handed them over. “What do I do?”
“Go home. Here, take this letter. Show it to any partisan who might stop you.”
Pino took the letter, folded it, and put it in his pocket. “Can I get a ride?”
“Sorry,” he said. “You’ll have to walk. Don’t worry, in ten or twenty minutes, it won’t be hard to see at all.”
“Do you know my brother, Mimo Lella?” Pino asked.
The guard laughed. “We all know that terror, and we’re happy he’s on our side.”
Despite their praise for Mimo, Pino walked to the gate feeling let down and cheated somehow. Why hadn’t he told Leyers he was a spy? Why hadn’t he asked what he was burning in those files? What was it? Evidence of slavery? And what were those papers he wanted to retrieve from Dolly’s apartment?
Did the papers matter? The partisans had the valise and at least some of the files Leyers had saved from the bonfires. And Pino would testify against him, tell the world what he’d seen General Leyers do.
When he exited the gate, Pino was on the southeast side of Milan in one of the most heavily bombed neighborhoods. In the darkness, he kicked things and stumbled and worried about falling into some crater in the wasteland before he could find his way home.
A rifle shot rang out not far away. And then another, followed by a burst of automatic gunfire and a grenade explosion. Pino crouched, feeling like he’d walked into a trap. He was about to turn around, try to find another way home, when in the distance he heard the Duomo’s smaller bells start to peal. Then the cathedral’s big bells and carillon joined, donging and tolling in the darkness.
Pino felt summoned, pulled toward the basilica. He got up and started toward the bells and the Duomo, not caring about the rifle shots that crackled in the streets around him. Other church bells began to peal, and soon it all sounded like Easter morning.
Then, without warning, and for the first time in nearly two years, streetlamps all around Milan flickered on and brightened, banishing the night and the city’s long misery in the shadows of war. Pino blinked at how bright the lamps were, and how they made Milan’s ruins and scars stand out scorched and livid.
But the lights were on! And the bells were ringing! Pino felt an enormous sense of relief. Was this it? Was it over? All those German units agreed not to fight. Correct? But the soldiers Mimo arrested had not laid down their guns without threat.
Gunfire and explosions went off to the northeast, toward the central train station and the Piccolo Theater, Fascist headquarters. He realized partisans and Fascists must be fighting for control of Milan. It was a civil war. Or perhaps there were Germans there as well, and it was a three-way battle.
In any case, Pino went west, looping toward the Duomo, away from the fighting. On street after street, the people of Milan were tearing down blackout curtains in the buildings that survived and letting more light flood out into the city. Whole families hung out their windows, cheering and calling for the Nazis to be driven into the sea. Many others were out in the streets, looking up at the lights as if they were a fantasy come true.
The elation was short-lived. Machine gun fire erupted from ten different directions. Pino could hear its rattle-and-pause near and far. He recalled the battle that had raged around the cemetery where Gabriella Rocha lay. The war isn’t over, he realized. Neither is the insurrection. The pacts made in Cardinal Schuster’s office were falling apart. By the pace of the fighting, Pino soon believed he was absolutely hearing three-way combat: partisans versus Nazis, and partisans against the Fascists.
When a grenade exploded in one of the adjacent streets, people began to scatter and run back into their homes. Pino bolted into an erratic, zigzagging run. When he reached Piazza Duomo, six German Panzer tanks still squatted around the perimeter of the square, their cannon barrels aiming outward. The cathedral’s floodlights were still on, illuminating the entire church, and the bells were still tolling, but otherwise the piazza was deserted. Pino swallowed and moved fast and diagonally across the open ground, praying no snipers were waiting on the upper floors of the buildings that framed the square.
He reached the corner of the cathedral without incident and walked on in the shadow of the great church, looking up and seeing how soot from the years of bombardment and fire had darkened the pale-pink marble facade. Pino wondered if the stains of war would ever leave Milan.
He thought of Anna then, and wondered whether she was settled into Dolly’s new place in Innsbruck, and sleeping. It comforted him to think of her like that, safe, warm, so elegant.
Pino smiled and moved quicker. In ten minutes he was outside his parents’ apartment building. He checked his pocket for his papers, climbed up the stairs, and pushed through the front door, expecting the SS sentries to be eyeing him. But there was no one on guard, and when the birdcage elevator rose past the fifth floor, the guards there were absent as well.
They’re gone! They’re all running!
He was genuinely happy as he dug out his keys and fit them into the lock. He pushed the door open to find a small party underway. His father had his violin on its stand, and he’d opened two bottles of fine Chianti, which sat on the living room table by two empty bottles. Michele was drunk and laughing by the fireplace with Mario, his cousin’s son, the pilot. And Aunt Greta? She was sitting on her husband’s lap smothering him with kisses.
Uncle Albert saw Pino, threw his arms up in victory, and cried, “Hey, you, Pino Lella! You come over here and give your uncle a hug!”
Pino burst out laughing and ran over to hug them all. He drank wine and listened to Uncle Albert’s dramatic recounting of the uprising in San Vittore Prison—how they’d overpowered the Fascist guards, opened up the cells, and released everyone.
“The best moment of my life, besides meeting Greta, was marching out the front gates of that prison,” Uncle Albert said, beaming. “The shackles were off. We were free. Milan is free!”
“Not quite yet,” Pino said. “I walked a long way through the city tonight. The pacts Cardinal Schuster made are being ignored. There’s fighting in pockets all over.”
Then he told them about Mimo and how he had faced down all those German soldiers single-handedly. His father was stunned. “Alone?”
“Completely,” Pino said, full of pride. “I think I have a lot of guts, Papa, but my little brother is something else.”