She loops the sheets over the bottom post of the railing and climbs over, squats down in an awkward pose. She loops the handle of her purse over her head, grabs tight to the two sheets together, and with her heart in her throat she hangs in midair, willing herself not to gasp or cry out.
Or fall.
She slides down to the balcony below, hands burning on the sheet. Silence. Either no one is home or they’re sound sleepers. The drag of the purse on her neck cuts off her blood and makes her woozy.
She hauls the sheets down after her and repeats her maneuver. This time her foot kicks a chair and she half falls in panic, landing hard, freezing, listening, waiting. This balcony’s door is open. She hears breathing from within.
Next balcony and there’s no problem but for her hands cramping and already starting to blister. The steam burn on the back of her hand feels as if the flesh must split open at any moment. The final drop takes her down to a balcony from which she can step off onto a concrete retaining wall.
And then she is on the street below the hotel. She looks up: getting back up there will not be easy. There may be no way back.
It’s not hard to find her way to the church, it’s all downhill and that intriguing dome is the tallest thing around. There’s a small plaza between the church and the beach. Empty. No, wait!
She strains to hear, flattened against a wall. No, it’s just wind.
Dammit, Rainy, don’t panic!
Finding the entrance to the church is harder than she’d expected, but find it she does, only to discover it is locked. This is strange, shouldn’t churches be open all the time for . . . well, whatever Christians did in their churches? She’s momentarily disheartened.
Do priests live at their churches? Of all the things she’s studied to prepare her, this question has never come up. Keeping to the shadows within shadows she follows the walls of the church until she finds a door in the building adjoining and connected to the church. It’s also locked, but this lock is smaller, small enough to . . . click! Yes! Who knew you really could pick a lock with a bent hairpin? For a moment she savors the small victory. She is surprised—pleasantly—to discover that the lock-picking course back at the Army Intelligence school was actually useful.
Noise! Boots on cobblestones, a patrol?
She ducks inside and closes the door behind her, stands there and listens as the boots—two men, she guesses—pass by. Now she looks around. It’s an entryway, an old black bike leaning against the wall, a narrow stairway leading up. Step by creaking step, she climbs, her silenced .22 in her hand and leveled.
At the top landing there are two rooms, one is a parlor practically stuffed with books, the other is a bedroom. Both doors are open, and there’s a small candle burning in a glass lantern in the parlor. She takes the lantern in one hand, her gun clamped under her chin, opens the bedroom door. Breathing. A snort and a mumbled snatch of indecipherable sleep-talk. A man asleep, a mop of iron gray hair on a small decorative pillow. A bottle of grappa beside the bed. A small glass.
She creeps up to the bed, points her gun at the man’s head, and says, “Father Patrizio?”
The breathing stops, a different snort, a sudden upward lurch that smacks his forehead against the silencer and a cry of surprise and pain.
She lets him focus, collect his wits, and push his hair aside before repeating, in Italian, “Father Patrizio?”
“Yes, yes, what is it . . .” He stops, staring at the gun.
“Please don’t cry out. I’ll put the gun away if you promise not to cry out.”
He nods. She shoves the heavy, long thing back into her bag.
“Who are you? What do you want?”
“I’ve been sent here to kill you.”
It’s an unusual introduction, but after some more confusion, they move to his parlor and he pours them each a small glass of some sweet wine. Rainy, with her usual efficiency, fills him in on the details.
“I don’t really understand your religion, but if a good Catholic can’t kill a priest, then surely sending someone else to do it is the same thing morally.”
“I doubt you wish to discuss theology, signorina. Or my parishioners’ sometimes strange notions of it.”
He’s old, maybe in his fifties, with an old, faded scar down one side of his face, deep-set eyes beneath a cliff of forehead. He’s tall for an Italian, maybe six feet. He’s wearing a white nightgown and should look ridiculous but does not.
“No,” Rainy agrees. “What I want to do is get to Rome without having to assassinate anyone.”
“It’s five hours by automobile. Depending of course on how many roadblocks the Fascists have up.”
“I don’t seem to have a car. Just a gun,” Rainy says.
“I . . . that is to say, the parish, owns a small truck. I use it to visit outlying parishioners. The sun will be up in . . .” He checks a wall clock. “Three hours. Confession starts an hour later.”
“If they don’t see me by eight, they’ll check my room.”
“That may be enough. I’ll miss confession, but I’ll leave a note that I was called away to see a sick parishioner.”
“Just like that you’re going to help me? And believe me?”
The old priest laughs for the first time, a booming sound quickly stifled. “Young lady, I’m a priest, I have been lied to more times and by more people than I could possibly count. I know, um . . . there’s an American word . . . something to do with bulls.”
“Bullshit?” she says in English. “Um, sorry, I shouldn’t—”
“Exactly! I know bullshit when I hear it. If your story is this bullshit, then it is very good bullshit. And I don’t like to comment on a woman’s appearance, but you seem to be somewhat the worse for wear.”
Twenty minutes later they are in a minuscule vehicle that might be called a truck, but which manages to be even smaller than Tomaso’s truck. Thirty-five minutes later they are waved through their first roadblock by a sleepy guard who nods at Father Patrizio’s collar, crosses himself, and accepts a quick blessing. A second roadblock is tougher. But a third, just as they enter Rome, is not even manned. The guards can be seen drinking coffee in the cold, acid light of a bar.
“I leave you here,” Father Patrizio says as he pulls over on a side street. “Just ahead is Saint Peter’s. If you have the opportunity, you should see it.” Seeing her arch look, he laughs and adds, “Even Jews are allowed inside. I promise the floor will not open and plunge you into hell. And it is really quite spectacular.”
She shakes his hand. “Thanks for the ride, Father.”
“Thank you for not killing me,” he says. “I will pray for you.”
For some reason that starts the tears filling her eyes as she tumbles out onto the morning streets of Rome.
Rome! One of the three great Axis capitals. The second heart of darkness in Europe. She has a map, a tourist map, but Roman streets bear only a vague relationship to maps, and it takes her until 11:30 before she reaches the Swedish Embassy and gives the guard there the name of the man she is to meet.
The Salerno artillery emplacements are in her pocket. She has only to hand the paper over and then . . .
And then?
And then, she has no idea.
24
FRANGIE MARR—SICILY AND PORTSMOUTH, UK
Am I hurt?
She sees through one eye, but as if through a sheer lace curtain, everything fuzzy, details all blurred.
She can hear, but only the low tones, the vibrations of loud voices, the deepest notes of explosions.
Sky overhead. Blue.
Shapes moving around her. Green.
Pain comes from everywhere at once; it has no specific location, it’s everywhere and everything.
Am I dying?
She knows she’s moving but realizes she’s not the one doing the moving. She’s being carried. She’s on a stretcher, a stretcher that crushes her between two rifles.
She raises her head to try and see what has happened but he
r head won’t move and the very thought of trying it again is exhausting. Everything is exhausting.
Lord, don’t let me . . .
She feels pressure on her eye, her one working eye, her left. The pressure is firm but restrained. Something wet. Something that stings.
She pries open that left eye and sees the face of the nurse, Lieutenant Tremayne. Tremayne is cleaning the blood from her eye.
Tremayne’s gaze meets hers. Tremayne is saying something, and Frangie can hear it if she strains her attention, tries to focus, watches her lips move . . . move . . .
Sleep.
Awake again.
Sleep.
Awake and now she sees Dr. Frame.
“Listen, Marr, I’ve eased off the morphine so I can explain things to you. The pain will come back, so try and understand me.” He’s speaking patiently, slowly, like to a child. “You took a grenade. Friendly fire, from the look of the shrapnel. Someone must have dropped it. You have a compound fracture of the right femur. That’s what will cause the most pain. You also have a perforated lung, perforated right kidney, burst right eardrum, contused right eye, and you can only count to nine on your fingers—you lost a ring finger, but on the right hand, so you can still wear a wedding ring someday.”
Frangie says, “Mmm?”
“You will probably live, Marr, and if you live you may be all right.”
“She’ll be fine,” Tremayne murmurs, not approving of the doctor’s bluntness.
“She’s a medic, she deserves to understand,” Dr. Frame says. “You’re being evacuated either back to North Africa or to England.”
“Mmm. Eh?”
And suddenly, as if waking from a dream to find your body has been set afire, Frangie feels a wave of pain—a sickening, mind-spinning wave of pain—and she knows it’s only the beginning.
The doctor sees her face twisting with pain. “Okay, that’s enough for now, Marr. Nurse?”
Frangie does not feel the jab of the needle. She does feel the way the wave of pain slows and crashes and dribbles down to become nothing but bubbles and bubbles and . . .
She’s in a bed, not a cot. There are sheets beneath her fingertips. Something strange about her hand. Something strange.
It’s dark, but the dark of lights turned down low, not the dark of night. Above her a bulb burns dimly behind a glass shade protected by a wire cage.
She turns her head. Exquisite pain stabs her temples, rockets around her head, and spreads in echoes through her body. A deeper, more compelling pain rises from her leg to dwarf the headache.
She sees beds in a row with hers, how many she can’t tell. A hospital? A horn reverberates, a far-off, melancholy sound. A nautical sound. Is the slight rolling motion just her imagination? Is it a symptom?
No, she’s on a ship. She’s being evacuated. That simple logical deduction is immensely reassuring: her brain still works. It’s confused, it’s drugged, but it still works.
“Where?” Her first complete word. She can hear that it’s an actual word, not a moan.
A man’s face swims into view. Not a black face, but dark, maybe an Indian, like from India, she isn’t quite . . . She refocuses. It’s not a quick or automatic process, she has to think about it, to focus.
Yes, a dark but not African face.
“Well, hello, young miss.”
“Hello.” A second word.
“How are you feeling?”
“Hurts.”
“Yes, I suppose it does.” There is a fruitiness to his English, a musicality. “Now, listen to me. Can you hear me, love?” He covers one ear and then the next as he speaks. “Do you hear equally well through both ears?”
She shakes her head, a mistake that brings back the stabbing pain. “Right not as good.”
An entire sentence!
“But you do hear through the right ear?”
“Yes but ringing.”
“That should go away in time.”
Frangie notices a bag of whole blood hanging. The nurse follows her gaze. “You have just come from surgery. You lost some blood; we are replacing it.”
“Hot. I’m hot.”
“You have a fever, love. There was some sepsis, which would have been arrested earlier, perhaps, had your people not wasted twenty-four hours before evacuating you.”
“What?”
“There was only the field station for blacks. It took some time to find a ship willing to admit you to their sick bay. But you are now aboard a Royal Navy ship, bound for Blighty, so all’s well, eh?”
“Can I have some water?”
“Not just yet, I’m afraid, your fluids will be through IV for now. But here, you can take this chip of ice.”
The ice chip is a tiny bit of heaven. She savors it as it melts on her tongue.
“The surgeons were able to get most of the shrapnel out of you. Not all, but most. Your leg has been set.”
He goes on for a while, but with the ice chip gone Frangie has time to focus on one very important thing that drives away all other thoughts.
I’m alive!
The voyage takes seven days. Frangie has very little awareness of passing time because now the great danger to her is the fever spreading from a tiny piece of shrapnel that ripped through her intestines. What she knows of the voyage is a drugged dream, a fantasy whirl of white-clad doctors and nurses, light and dark. Sometimes she sees only ghosts. Sometimes she is not on the ship at all, but back home with her mother and father and Obal, and Harder’s there too. Sometimes all she sees is red.
There are the sounds of bells, the constant thrum of engines, rubber-soled shoes squeaking on painted steel, murmured conversation.
And the pain. And the burning.
Eyes open.
Frangie sits up. The pain in her head is still there, but it no longer stabs at her. The pain in her leg is deep and gnawing, but it no longer threatens to overwhelm her.
She looks at herself, at her torso and legs. Two legs! One on each side. That’s good.
Hands? Yes. But one is bandaged and there’s a gap in that bandage where her right-hand ring finger should be.
With stiff and awkward fingers she pulls aside the blanket covering her. She’s dressed in loose pajamas that bulge here and there from the bandages beneath.
“Good morning, pet.” It’s a different nurse, a woman this time, also a brown face, but perhaps from some other part of the far-flung British Empire. The nurse whips out a thermometer, sticks it under Frangie’s tongue, takes her wrist, and counts pulse beats against her watch. The nurse pulls out the thermometer and holds it for Frangie to see. “Ninety-nine point four, and that is a very good thing. The fever has broken, and we may hope it does not return.”
“Can I have water?”
“Orderly? Water, please. We’ll be sending you ashore soon.”
Frangie gulps the water, the sweet, clean, beautiful, luscious water.
If I live a thousand years, no water will ever be sweeter.
“Where ashore? Where are we?”
“We are lying at anchor off Portsmouth. England. As soon as there’s a place at the mole, we’ll go in and offload you all.”
“Thank you.” The nurse nods and starts to move away, but Frangie grabs her hand, wincing at the pain of stiff, unused muscles. “Really. Thank you. Thank everyone.”
Tears fill Frangie’s eyes and now it’s emotion not pain that swells through her, sadness and relief and gratitude. Emotions she can’t even name. Just . . . just . . .
I’m alive.
I’m alive!
Interstitial
107TH EVAC HOSPITAL, WÜRZBURG, GERMANY—APRIL 1945
They tell me yesterday was Hitler’s birthday. And here I forgot to even send him a card.
You know, it’s funny, I think the folks at home have almost forgotten about old Adolf already. They showed us a newsreel and a movie earlier tonight. The movie was Meet Me in St. Louis, which of course led various wits in the audience to yell out to Judy Garland that the
y’d meet her anywhere so long as it wasn’t Germany.
The newsreel was a lot of triumphant talk, pictures of long lines of German prisoners, burned-out German cities, the Stars and Stripes waving over German rubble, stirring images of Shermans and Mustangs and B-17s all heading toward Berlin.
But everyone knows it’s the Russians who will take Berlin. And everyone dreads being shipped off as soon as they’re well to invade Japan. Can’t the Japs just quit? Don’t they see we’re tired of killing?
But I’m getting ahead of myself. Sicily was a bump in the road, a nasty little bump, but one that came with wine, cheese, and juice-dripping melons, so there was that at least. And although it was hot and dusty, the Eye-ties had about given up. The Krauts fought hard and well—they always do—and in the end the bickering American and British generals let the bastards escape to Italy before we could crush them like insects. The Krauts escaped North Africa, and then they escaped Sicily. They’re clever at escaping, but they won’t escape the Russkies.
The 119th didn’t do much fighting in the latter part of Sicily, and of course the whole shooting match was over within six weeks, start to finish. Rio was made corporal and was not happy about it. Stick got three beautiful stripes and was now Sergeant Sticklin and took over the squad. Sergeant Cole got an extra stripe and took over as platoon sergeant when O’Malley broke his spine falling drunk off a bluff. The handsome Lieutenant Vanderpool became Captain Vanderpool and, much to the regret of every female (with the possible exception of Cat Preeling), was shipped off to take some advanced training.
Meanwhile there was the dull routine of garrison duty for the platoon, first in a proper town and then in a remote mountain village. With the fighting over, uniforms had to be proper, boots spit-shined, ties knotted just so. But everyone got three hots and a cot, and it beat getting shot at.
Mussolini, that strutting fool, was overthrown by his own people. There was a celebration—we all managed to find something alcoholic to mark the occasion. And for about a day we had the illusion that the whole thing might be over pretty quick. But the Krauts swept down through the boot, pushed aside the few Italian Resistance fighters, and effectively made Italy far more dangerous than it had been when it was only ill-equipped, half-starved, and completely despondent Italians.