Beneath a Scarlet Sky

He picked up the wine bottle and poured himself another glass, feeling deliriously good. Had Anna been by his side celebrating the insurrection with his family, he would have felt near perfect. Pino wondered when he’d see her again, when he’d hear from her. He checked the phone and to his surprise found it working. But his father said they’d received no calls before his arrival.

Long after midnight, glowing and woozy with wine, Pino crawled into his bed. Through the open window he heard the growl of the Panzer tanks starting up, and then their treads clanking across the cobblestones, moving away to the northeast. He dozed before hearing explosions and automatic rifles in the direction the tanks had taken.

All through the night, the sounds of battle in Milan rose and fell like one chorus after another, each voice singing of conflict, each song reaching a crescendo, and then ebbing off to echoes and strains. Pino wrapped his head in his pillow and finally slept deeply and full of dreams: of that disgusted look General Leyers had given him walking away, of snipers shooting down on him as he ran through the city, but mostly of Anna and their last night together, how magical and powerful it had been, how perfect and God given.



Pino awoke on Thursday, April 26, and looked at his clock.

Ten a.m.? When was the last time he’d slept that long? He didn’t know, but it felt delicious. Then he smelled bacon cooking. Bacon? Where had that come from?

When he’d dressed and reached the kitchen, he found his father setting crisp bacon on a plate and gesturing to a bowl full of fresh eggs Mario was holding.

“A partisan friend of your uncle Albert just brought these,” Michele said. “Albert’s out in the hall talking to him. And I’m using the last of the espresso I had hidden in the closet.”

Uncle Albert came in. He looked very hungover and a little concerned.

“Pino, you are needed for your English,” he said. “They want you to go to the Hotel Diana, and ask for a man named Knebel.”

“Who’s Knebel?”

“An American. That’s all I know.”

Another American? The second in two days!

“Okay,” he said, looking longingly at the bacon frying, the eggs, and the coffee brewing. “But do I have to go now?”

“After you eat,” his father said.

Mario the aviator cooked Pino scrambled eggs, and he wolfed them down along with the bacon and a double espresso. Pino couldn’t remember when he’d last had such a feast at breakfast, and then he did—at Casa Alpina. He thought about Father Re, wondered how he and Brother Bormio were getting on. The next chance he had, he’d take Anna up to Motta to meet the priest and to ask him to marry them.

That thought made him happy and confident in a way he’d never felt before. It must have shown, because Uncle Albert came over as Pino was cleaning dishes, and said in a whisper, “You’re standing there grinning like a fool and staring off, which means you’re in love.”

Pino laughed. “Maybe.”

“The young lady there, who helped you with the radio?”

“Anna. The one who loves your work.”

“Does your father know? Your mother?”

“They’ve never met. Soon, though.”

Uncle Albert patted Pino on the back. “To be young and in love. Isn’t it remarkable that something like that can happen in the middle of a war? It says something about the inherent goodness of life, despite all the evil we’ve seen.”

Pino adored his uncle. There was an awful lot going on in that man’s head.

“I should go now,” Pino said, wiping his hands dry. “Meet Signor Knebel.”



Pino left the apartment building and headed toward the Hotel Diana on Viale Piave, not far from the telephone exchange and Piazzale Loreto. Within two blocks he saw a body, a man, facedown in the gutter, a bullet wound to the back of his head. He saw the second and third corpses five blocks from the apartment: a man and a woman in their nightclothes, as if they’d been dragged from their beds. The farther he walked the more dead he saw, almost all head shot, almost all lying facedown in the gutter in the building heat.

Pino was horrified and sickened. By the time he reached the Hotel Diana he’d counted seventy corpses rotting in the sun. Sporadic shooting continued to the north of his route. Someone said the partisans had encircled a large number of Black Shirts trying to escape Milan. The Fascists were fighting to the death.

Pino tugged on the front doors to the Hotel Diana and found them locked. He knocked, waited, and got no response. Going around the back, he tried a door and got it open. He entered an empty kitchen that smelled of recently cooked meat. One set of padded swinging doors on the other side of the kitchen led to a dark, empty restaurant, and the other to a dimly lit ballroom.

Pushing the ballroom door open, Pino called out, “Hello?”

Hearing the metal friction of a rifle action loading, Pino threw his hands up.

“Drop da gun,” a man demanded.

“I have no gun,” Pino said, hearing the shake in his voice.

“Who are ya?”

“Pino Lella. I was told to come here to see an American named Knebel.”

He heard a hoarse laugh before a big lanky man wearing a US Army uniform stepped from the shadows. He had a broad nose, a receding hairline, and a wide smile.

“Lower the gun, Corporal Daloia,” he said. “This one’s got an invitation.”

Corporal Daloia, a short beefy soldier from Boston, lowered the gun.

The bigger American walked over to Pino and stuck out his hand. “Major Frank Knebel, US Fifth Army. I flak for the Fifth, do some writing for Stars and Stripes, and dabble in psychological operations.”

Pino didn’t understand half of what he’d said, but nodded. “You just got here, Major Knebel?”

“Last night,” Knebel said. “Came in ahead of the Tenth Mountain Division with this advance scout group to get an early sense of the city for my dispatches. So tell me what’s going on out there, Pino. What’d you see coming over?”

“There are dead people lying in the gutters from revenge killings, and the Nazis and Fascists are trying to get out,” Pino said. “The partisans are shooting at all of them. But the lights went on last night for the first time in years, and there were no bombers, and for a little while it felt like the war was really over.”

“I like that,” Knebel said, pulling out a notebook. “Vivid. Say it again.”

Pino did, and the major wrote it all down. “I’ll call you a partisan fighter, okay?”

“Okay,” Pino said, liking the sound of that. “How else can I help?”

“I need an interpreter, heard you spoke English, and here you are.”

“Who told you I spoke English?”

“Tweety Bird,” Knebel said. “You know the score. The point is, I need help. Are you game to give a hand to an American in need, Pino?”

Pino liked the major’s accent. He liked everything about him. “Sure.”

“Attaboy,” Knebel said, putting his hand on Pino’s shoulder and continuing on like they were longtime conspirators. “Now, for today, I really need two things from you. First, get me inside that telephone exchange so I can make some calls and file a few stories.”

Pino nodded. “I can do that. What else?”

Knebel smiled toothily. “Can you find us some wine? Whiskey? Maybe girls and music?”

Mark Sullivan's books