Despite all the death he saw that morning, Pino knew something had changed in Milan overnight, some critical point had been reached and passed while he’d been partying and sleeping, because the streets near Porta Venezia were crowded and boisterous. Violins played. Accordions, too. People danced and hugged and laughed and cried. Pino felt as if the spirit of the party at the Hotel Diana had moved outside and seduced everyone celebrating the end of a long and terrible ordeal.
He entered the public gardens, taking a shortcut home. People were lying on the lawns, basking in the sun, having a good time. Pino looked ahead on the crowded path he was taking through the park and saw a familiar face coming his way. Wearing the uniform of the Free Italian Air Force, his cousin Mario was beaming, looking like he was having the time of his life.
“Eh, Pino!” he cried, and hugged him. “I am free! No more sitting in the apartment!”
“That’s so great,” Pino said. “Where are you going?”
“Anywhere, everywhere,” Mario said, glancing at his aviator’s watch, which gleamed in the sunlight. “I just want to walk and soak it all up, the joy in the city now that the Nazis and the Fascists are kaput. You know this feeling?”
Pino did know. So, it seemed, did almost everyone else in Milan that day.
“I’m going home to get some sleep,” Pino said. “Too much grappa last night.”
Mario laughed. “I should have been with you.”
“You would have had fun.”
“I’ll see you later.”
“You, too,” Pino said, and walked on.
He had gone no more than six meters when an argument broke out behind him.
“Fascista!” a man shouted. “Fascista!”
Pino turned and saw a small, stocky man standing in the path, aiming a revolver at Mario.
“No!” Mario cried. “I am a pilot for free—”
The pistol fired. The bullet blew out the back of Mario’s head. Pino’s cousin collapsed like a rag doll.
“He’s a Fascist! Death to all Fascists!” the man yelled, and shook his gun.
People began to scream and run.
Pino was so traumatized he didn’t know what to do or say, just stared at Mario’s body and the blood draining from his head. He started to dry-heave. But then the killer crouched over Mario and started working at his aviator’s wristwatch.
Anger boiled up inside Pino. He was about to attack, when his cousin’s murderer saw him standing there. “What are you looking at? Hey, he was talking to you. You a Fascist, too?”
Seeing him trying to aim, Pino spun and took off in a series of cuts and feints. The pistol barked behind him, hit one of the few trees left in the garden. Pino didn’t slow until he was far from the park, almost to San Babila. Only then did he allow himself to suffer what he’d just witnessed. All the water he’d guzzled came up, and he retched until his sides ached.
He walked on in a daze, taking a roundabout route toward home.
Mario was alive one second and gone the next. The randomness of his cousin’s death had him shaking and shivering as he walked through the hot streets. Was no one safe?
In the fashion district, people were outside celebrating, sitting on their front stoops, laughing and smoking, eating and drinking. He walked past the opera house and saw a crowd. He went to it, trying not to see Mario dying in his mind. Partisans had cordoned off the Hotel Regina, Gestapo headquarters.
“What’s going on?” Pino asked.
“They’re searching the place,” someone said.
Pino knew they weren’t going to find much of value in there. He’d seen it all burn. He’d seen General Leyers and Colonel Rauff burn so much paper it still baffled him. His mind sought refuge from the horror of his cousin’s death in questions about the things the Nazis had burned. What could have been in those documents? And what papers had they kept, and why?
He thought about Leyers two nights before. The general had asked to go back to Dolly’s before Pino arrested him, didn’t he? Something about getting papers he’d left there, and something else. He’d mentioned those papers at least twice.
Thinking that Leyers might have left something incriminating at Dolly’s apartment, he felt more alert, less devastated by Mario’s death.
Dolly’s was only a few blocks away on Via Dante. He’d go there before going home to tell his father about Mario. He’d find the papers and give them to Major Knebel. With what he could tell the American about Leyers, there had to be a story there. Pino and Knebel would tell the world about the general and his “forced laborers,” how he’d driven them to their deaths, Pharaoh’s slave master at work.
Twenty minutes later, Pino ran up the steps of Dolly’s apartment, into the lobby and past the crone, who blinked at him through her thick glasses. “Who’s there?”
“An old friend, Signora Plastino,” Pino said, and kept climbing.
When he reached Dolly’s door, it was busted in and hanging off its hinges. Suitcases and boxes had been slit open. Their contents were strewn about in the front hall.
Pino began to panic. “Anna? Dolly?”
He went to the kitchen, found the dishes smashed and cabinets emptied. He was shaking and thought he was going to be sick again when he reached Anna’s room and pushed the door open. The mattress had been pushed off the bed. Her drawers and closet were open and empty.
Then he noticed something sticking out from beneath the mattress. A leather strap. He crouched, lifted the mattress, and pulled. The tooled leather bag his uncle had given Anna on Christmas Eve came out. In his mind, he heard her say, I’ve never had so wonderful a present in my whole life. I’ll never let it go.
Where was she? Pino’s head began to pound. She left two, three days ago? What had happened? She never would have left the bag behind.
Then he realized who would know. Running back downstairs, Pino went to the crone, gasping. “What happened to Dolly’s apartment? Where is she? Where’s Anna, her maid?”
Through the thick lenses, the old woman’s blinking eyes looked twice their size when a cold, satisfied smile twisted her lips.
“They took the German whores last night,” she cackled. “You should have seen the things people took out of that den of perversion afterward. Unspeakable things.”
Pino felt disbelief turn to terror. “Where were they taken? Who took them?”
Signora Plastino squinted and then leaned forward, studying him.
Pino grabbed her roughly by the arm. “Where?”
The crone hissed, “I know you. You’re one of them!”
Pino let her go and stepped back.
“A Nazi!” she screamed. “He’s a Nazi! A Nazi, right here!”
Pino bolted out the front door as the old woman’s shrill voice carried behind him. “Stop him! He’s a traitor! A Nazi! A friend of the German whores!”