Beneath a Scarlet Sky

Anna had gone hysterical, her cries wracking through her body. Pino didn’t know what to do. He wanted to go crazy, fight, scream at the partisans to let Anna go. But he kept freezing at the image of the crone, and how she’d recognized him and called him a Nazi and a traitor. And he had no letter. They could just as well throw Pino up there against the wall, too.

The partisan leader drew his pistol and fired it into the air to quiet the crowd. Anna wrenched up with fear and fell back against the wall, shaking and sobbing.

The partisan leader yelled, “The charges against these eight are treason, collaboration, whoring, and profiting from the Nazi and Salò occupation of Milan. Their just punishment is death. Long live the new Republic of Italy!”

The crowd cheered lustily. Pino couldn’t take it. His eyes burned with tears, and he began to lash out in frustration, throwing his elbows and kicking with his knees until he’d fought to the very front of the mob.

A partisan saw him coming and stuck his rifle barrel against his chest.

“I had a letter, but I can’t find it,” Pino said, patting at his pockets. “I am with the resistance. There’s been a mistake.”

The partisan barely looked at him. “I don’t know you. Where’s the letter?”

“It was in my pocket last night, but I . . . There was a party and . . . ,” Pino said. “Please, just let me talk to your commander.”

“Not without something that says he should be talking to you.”

“We needed to eat!” cried a woman’s voice. Pino looked over the partisan’s shoulder and saw the first woman on the rope line pleading, “We needed to eat and to live. Is that too much?”

Down the line, seeming resigned to her fate, Dolly shook back her hair and tried to lift her chin but did not succeed.

“Ready?” the commander said.

Anna started screaming, “No! I’m not a whore! I’m not a collaborator! I’m a maid. That’s all I am. Someone, please believe me. I’m just a maid. Dolly, tell them. Dolly? Tell them!”

Dolly didn’t seem to hear her. She was staring at the guns rising to the shoulders of the execution squad.

“My God!” Anna wailed. “Someone tell them I’m just a maid!”

“Aim.”

Pino’s mouth opened. He looked at the fighter, who was studying him, suspicious now. Pino willed his diaphragm to tense and yell out that it was true, that she was innocent, that this was all a mistake and—

“Fire!”

The rifle shots rang out like cymbals and kettledrums.

Anna-Marta took a bullet to her heart.

She bucked up at the impact, looking surprised before seeming to gaze toward Pino, as if her spirit had sensed him there and called out for him in that last moment before she crumpled back against the wall, and died in the dust.





Chapter Thirty


Watching Anna’s body twitch while a bloom of blood unfolded across her bosom, Pino felt his heart breach and flush out all love, all joy, all music.

The crowd around him bellowed and jeered its approval while he just stood there, hunch shouldered, whimpering at the agony that possessed him, so powerful it almost made him think it couldn’t be real, that his beloved was not lying there in a pool of blood, that he’d not watched her take the bullet, that he’d not watched life flee her in a blink, that he’d not heard her begging him to save her.

The crowd around him started pushing the other way, leaving now that the show was over. Pino stayed where he was, gazing over at Anna’s corpse sprawled against the bottom of the wall and seeing her dull stare like an accusation of betrayal.

“Move away now,” the partisan said to him. “It’s over.”

“No,” Pino said. “I—”

“Move, if you know what’s good for you,” the soldier said.

With one long last shuddering look at Anna, Pino turned and trudged off with the last of the crowd. He went through the gate and across the drawbridge, unable to grasp what had just happened. It felt like he had been shot in the chest, and only now was he beginning to sense the true pain to come. But then a realization came battering down upon his shoulders and threatened to destroy him. He hadn’t stood up for Anna. He had not died for her love the way great and tragic men did in lasting stories and librettos.

Pino’s brain burned with failure. His heart soured with self-loathing.

I’m a coward, he thought in darkest despair, and wondered why he’d been sentenced to such hell. In the roundabout in front of the castle, it all became too much. Pino felt dizzy, and then sick. He stumbled to the dry fountain. He retched and retched again, knowing that he was weeping as well, and that people were watching him.

When Pino finally stood, coughing, spitting, and wiping his eyes, a guy on the other side of the fountain said, “You knew one of them, didn’t you?”

Pino saw suspicion and the threat of violence in the man’s expression. Part of Pino wanted to admit his love for Anna and have a noble end to it all. But then the man started to walk toward him, quickening his pace, and then jabbing his finger at Pino.

“Someone grab that guy!” he shouted.



The primitive instinct to survive took over, and Pino took off, sprinting diagonally away from the fountain toward Via Beltrami. Shouts went up. One man tried to tackle Pino, but Pino threw a fist that drove the man to the pavement. Running pell-mell, knowing people were chasing him, he noticed men trying to cut in at him from the side.

Pino threw an elbow into one man’s face, kneed another in the groin, and dodged through cars onto Via Giuseppe Pozzone. He jumped up on and over the hood of one before cutting off onto Via Rovello, where he leaped across a water-filled bomb crater and put distance between him and his pursuers. When he glanced back at the corner of Via San Tomaso, he saw six men still chasing him and still yelling, “He’s a traitor! Collaborator! Stop him!”

But those streets were Pino’s backyard. He sped into a higher gear, taking a right on Via Broletto and a left on Via Del Bossi. There was a knot of people ahead in Piazza Della Scala. Pino feared getting past them and through the Galleria before the calls of “traitor” caught up to him.

Diagonally across the street, in the wall of the great opera house, a door was open. He ran over and through it into a hallway, moving beyond the shadows into a wedge of blackness. Pino stopped there, sure he couldn’t be seen from outside, watching and waiting until the six men sprinted past, heading toward the piazza. Gasping for breath in the darkness, he stayed there, wanting to make sure he’d lost them.



Deeper inside La Scala, a tenor began to sing, running scales.

Pino turned and accidentally kicked something metal. It clattered enough that he looked to the doorway and saw the man from the fountain, who was peering in from the sidewalk.

Mark Sullivan's books