Connors looked down at the empty machine gun in Gaspare’s hands and then up at the boy’s battered eyes. “You hit anybody with that yet?” he asked, smiling.
Gaspare shook his head and smiled back. “No,” he said. “Unless you count the statues in the square.”
“He’s getting better,” Claudio said. “At least now he’s aiming the gun away from us and at the Nazis.”
Connors handed one of his machine guns to Gaspare. “Here’s a fresh one,” he said.
“The last of the soldiers are hidden behind the fountain,” Gennaro said, peering through the thinning smoke.
“You stay here and cover Vincenzo and Angela if they start to head that way,” Connors said. “I’m going to circle around and see if I can make a move on them without getting spotted.”
“Don’t worry, American,” Gaspare said, gripping the machine gun. “I’ll shoot them if you do.”
“That’s sort of what I was counting on,” Connors said, before disappearing around the bend of the building.
Vincenzo and Angela were huddled against the sides of two lumpy mattresses, their rifles wedged between the iron slants of the beds. Vincenzo, his knees bent and curled, watched as Angela wiped the brow of a sallow-faced boy. “Grazie, signorina,” the boy whispered.
“Per niente,” Angela said, looking down at him with warm, sad eyes.
“What does he have?” Vincenzo asked, checking to make sure the bottled IV continued to drip into the boy’s arm.
“He’s tubercular,” she said, lowering her voice, her face masked by the lines of smoke coming at her from the hospital fire on the streets above. “They all are. It’s a long and painful way to die. My brother died from it last year. They kept him in the same ward as these children. We had no money to get him medicine or anything to help with his pain. All that was left for my family to do was sit by his side and watch. Those weeks killed my mother as much as any bomb.”
Vincenzo looked up at the remains of the burning hospital and shook his head, one hand gripping the side of the mattress. “Even if your family did have the money, the Blackshirts would have taken it from them,” he said. “Before the Nazis, we were surrounded by thieves. Now, we’re surrounded by murderers.”
“You’re wrong,” the boy in the bed managed to say, struggling to lift his head, his sunken eyes staring straight at Vincenzo. “You’re surrounded by friends.”
Vincenzo looked over at the boy, touched by the generosity of his words and the strength it took to say them. He moved up closer to the side of the bed, inches from the boy’s sweat-streaked face and kissed him gently on the forehead. The boy smiled and then rested a bony white hand on top of Vincenzo’s, its touch cold despite the heat of the day.
The bullet ended their shared silent moment.
It landed between the beds, whizzing past Vincenzo and causing him to fall on top of the boy’s frail frame for support. Vincenzo reached for his rifle, turned and stood next to Angela. It was Angela who caught the moving gleam of the rifle scope, bouncing off the rays of the sun. “Sniper!” she shouted, lifting her rifle above Vincenzo’s head and shooting toward the rooftop to her left.
“We have to move the beds,” Vincenzo ordered.
“We can’t move them all.” She emptied her rifle and reached into her back pockets for more shells.
Vincenzo left his rifle and a case of shells by her feet. “You keep shooting,” he told her. “You need to keep his head down. I’ll move the beds into the piazza. I just need to get close enough for our boys to see me. Then we’ll have enough hands to move the children to the museum.”
“What about the soldiers by the fountain?” Angela asked, spraying the rooftop with gunfire.
“We leave them to the American,” Vincenzo said, starting to pull three of the beds. “He’ll be in position before I can even get to the center of the square.”
Angela braced her back against one of the beds, firing her rifle at the sniper, exposed to any open shot the Nazi could take. “Leave me,” Vincenzo said. “Find some cover and keep that soldier’s head down. I’ll make sure the children are safe.”
From the other end of the square, Connors had worked his way to the shaded side of a shuttered printing shop, the two Nazis behind the fountain less than thirty feet away. He glanced past the fountain and saw the three boys holding their position, exchanging heavy fire with the Nazis. Off to the right, he watched as Vincenzo struggled with the twelve beds, pushing them forward, Angela flat down on the ground behind him, shooting up at a German sniper. It was a miracle that none of the kids in the beds had been shot yet, and Connors knew that miracles didn’t last very long in a firefight.
Connors jumped out into the open and drew the attention of the two soldiers. He fired and hit one, grazing his shoulder, and ran toward the other, bullets nipping at the dirt around his feet. He threw himself to the ground, rolled and came up on one knee, his machine gun pouring rounds at them both. He stopped when he saw one fall back into the empty fountain and the other flat on his face.
Claudio, Gennaro and Gaspare lowered their guns and with smiles as bright as morning walked out into the open square. Claudio and Gennaro were the first to see Vincenzo and ran to him, grabbing the reins on six of the beds and pulling them forward. Gaspare waved toward Connors who was running toward the boy, his eyes on Angela and the sniper on the roof. “Stay down, Gaspare!” he shouted. “Stay the hell down!”
“I did as you told me, American,” the boy said, pumped with pride. “I held the gun and aimed it at the soldiers.”
Connors was ten feet away when the shot rang out.
The bullet went through Gaspare’s back and opened a small hole in his chest, the boy’s smile still holding, a frozen glaze crossing his eyes. A line of blood formed in the corner of his mouth and his legs began to weaken. Connors caught him just as he was about to fall. “I’m sorry, American.” Gaspare looked up at the soldier who held him gently and rocked him back and forth. “I wanted you to be proud of me.”
“I am proud of you, kid,” Connors said.
“Would I have become a good soldier?” Gaspare asked, closing his eyes to the sun, the circle of blood around his chest growing larger.
“You already are,” Connors told him. “You’re the platoon leader.”
Gaspare managed a feeble salute and lowered his head, the boy’s long war at an end.
Connors held him tight, his forehead on top of the boy’s thick hair, his quiet tears mixing with the pool of blood forming at his waist. He looked up when he saw Vincenzo, Gennaro and Claudio pull up by his side with the dozen beds, each one of them in silent mourning as they stared down at the body of their friend. “Stay with him for a while,” Connors said, resting the boy gently on the cobblestones. “I’ll be right back.”
Connors raced down the center of the square, nodding toward Angela, his machine gun aimed and firing at the rooftop. “Take my gun,” he told the girl. “I’m going to smoke him out. When I do, you take him out.”
The street girl clutched the machine gun, checked the clip and aimed it at her target. Connors unclipped two grenades and tossed them on opposite sides of the roof. The sniper stood when he saw the grenades land, casting a quick glance down at Connors and Angela. “He’s yours,” Connors whispered.
Angela emptied the clip into the sniper’s chest. She ignored the two grenade blasts and kept squeezing the machine gun’s trigger, the empty clicks the only sounds now heard in the silent, dusty square.
Connors walked with Gaspare’s body cradled in his arms, an angry Vincenzo by his side. “We don’t have time for this, American,” he said. “We have to get the kids to the museum before this entire square is surrounded by even more Nazis.”
“Then get them there,” Connors said, walking at a racer’s pace. “I don’t remember asking for your help.”
“I want to see my friend buried as much as you do,” Vincenzo said, trying to soften his tone. “But it’s too dangerous a risk to take. You should
know that better than any one of us.”
Connors stopped and turned to face Vincenzo. Claudio, Gennaro and Angela were several feet behind them, struggling with both the beds and their emotions. “He died like a soldier and he’s going to be buried like one,” he said. “And I don’t know shit. If I did, there wouldn’t be so many people dying around me.”
“The Nazis will be here soon and they will kill these children and us along with them. Gaspare wouldn’t want that to happen and you can’t let it.”
“Then get the hell out of my way and let me bury him,” Connors said.
They buried him in a shallow grave in a grassy patch under the shadows of the museum and several rows of pine trees. Vincenzo, Claudio, Gennaro, Angela and Connors stood around the fresh grave, hands at their sides, their heads bowed, gurneys with the children in a tight circle around them. “One of you should say a prayer for him,” Connors whispered.
“I thought you didn’t believe in prayer,” Vincenzo said in a sarcastic tone.
“I don’t,” Connors snapped back. “But he did.”
Vincenzo looked over at Claudio and nodded. The children, including the sick ones in the beds, blessed themselves, folded their hands and closed their eyes, listening as the street boy sang the haunting words of the “Ave Maria,” his voice filling the square with the echoes of his young and powerful sound.
22
PIAZZA MATTEOTTI
Nunzia sat at the small table in the kitchen of the first-floor apartment, a glass of red wine cupped between her hands. Connors sat across from her, loading an ammo clip into his rifle, still simmering from the events of the day. Nunzia studied his face, the unspoken resolve masking the innate sadness at the tragedy that engulfed him, clutching him in its horrid embrace. “None of this is new to us,” she said in her customary soft tones. “We’ve lived with death for too many years, all of us, young and old. Every one of us that you meet has had to bury or leave behind someone we love. It’s as much a part of our lives as this glass of wine.”
“It’s not new to me either.” Connors looked up from his gun and gazed into her eyes. “I’ve seen my share of dying since I put on this uniform, a lot more than most. And it helps to put some steel inside your heart. But that’s one soldier against another and, while you never like it, you learn to deal with it. I can’t think of anything that gears a man up to stomach what they were going to do in that hospital to those kids. Or for watching an innocent boy, who had no kind of business being in a war, die in front of you. Once you see all that, I don’t know how you shake it.”
“There are many who can’t,” Nunzia said.
“You can’t think about it,” he said, “and you can’t bury it. Those are hard rules to follow. I don’t know if I have the kind of courage you need to keep moving and not lose hope. The boys have it, so does Angela and your dad. And so do you.”
“We’ve made it hard for you just to be a soldier,” Nunzia said, reaching a hand out to touch the top of his. “You’ve come to mean a lot to us and I think we’ve come to mean a great deal to you. That makes your job much more difficult. It’s easier if you go into a fight not caring about the people who are involved.”
Connors wrapped his fingers around her hand and leaned across the table, his face inches from hers. He pulled Nunzia gently toward him and kissed her under the flickering glow of the dwindling candle. She returned the kiss with a fevered passion and they slid slowly to the wooden floor, their arms wrapped tightly around one another, bodies brushing against the sides of the shaky old table. “There’s a small cot in the back of the room,” she whispered.
Connors covered her face with his hands, gently stroking her cheeks and neck, and nodded. They stood and walked together in silence into the dark emptiness of the room, leaving their guns at rest on the table behind them. They fell on the bed, Connors cradling her in his arms, their weight creasing the sides of the dusty feather mattress, their bodies entwined, the love that was inside both of them free to escape.
23
45TH THUNDERBIRD DIVISION HEADQUARTERS
SALERNO
The young soldier stood at attention, nervous eyes scanning the cramped tent filled with maps, chairs and crumpled papers. He was a relatively fresh recruit, on loan to the 45th to help ease the burden of the heavy losses they had sustained in the beach invasion of Salerno. He had been given little time to acclimate himself to the easy ways of a division that emphasized action over formality. There was no one soldier in Salerno who epitomized that attitude better than the commanding officer who sat across from him.
Captain Anders cast aside his briefing books and looked up from the poker table, a cigar jammed into a corner of his mouth. “All right,” he said impatiently. “Let’s hear it.”
“One of the locals has brought in a pigeon, sir,” the soldier said, trying not to stumble over any of the words. “Actually two of them.”
“What’s he want me to do?” Anders asked, confused. “Eat them?”
“No, sir,” the soldier said. “They were carrier pigeons and the messages they were delivering are written in English.”
“Did he give you the messages?”
“Yes, sir.”
The soldier flipped open the front of his shirt and pulled out two rolled-up slivers of white paper. He handed them to Captain Anders, who snatched the sheets from him in mid-reach, unfurled the papers and read them both. When he looked up again, there was a wide smile across the captain’s face.
“When did these come in?” he asked, jamming the sheets into his pants pocket and reaching for a pack of matches.
“Early this morning. It took the man a few hours to get anybody to listen to him, and then awhile longer for the unit to figure out who in command should get them.”
“He still around?” Anders asked. “The man with the pigeons?”
“Yes, sir. He’s down the hill a ways, waiting for me to return.”
“And he’s still got the birds with him?”
“Yes, sir. He asked if it was okay to feed them and give them some water while I was up here with you. I told him I didn’t think it would be a problem.”
“He can give them a steam bath and a shave if that’s what they need,” Anders said. “Just so long as they’re ready to fly back out again in about ten minutes.”
Anders sat down at the table and tore off two slips of paper from the bottom of a yellow legal pad. He slowly printed out a long series of words on each and rolled them up like cigarettes. He looked up and handed the papers to the young soldier. “Have him strap these on those pigeons,” Anders told him. “And tell him to make sure they find their way back to Naples before dark.”
“Do you want me to go with him to make sure he does as told, sir?” the soldier asked as he put the papers in his shirt pocket.
“The man went to a lot of trouble to find us,” Anders answered, “when the easy thing could have been to stay home with the birds and toss the messages out. I think that’s earned him a little trust. Don’t you?”
“Yes, sir. I do.”
“Then let’s get it done,” Anders ordered. “And before you go down to him, patch me through to air command.”
“Yes, sir.”
Anders stared at the young soldier as he saluted and left the tent. He put a match to his unlit cigar and took several deep puffs, filling the tight quarters with the gray smoke and pungent smell of Italian tobacco. He looked down at the map spread out across the table, small wooden stick figures serving as point markers, and flicked down the one that stood positioned over Naples. “We might end up taking that damn city without even seeing it,” he whispered to himself. “And it would serve those Nazi bastards right. They can’t let a Thunderbird come into a town and not expect him to give them more than a handful of trouble.”
24
STAZIONE ZOOLOGICA E ACQUARIO
Eric Tippler lowered his high-powered rifle and stared down from the tower perch at a group of street boys as they turned a corner and walked i
n his direction. He pulled a white cotton handkerchief from his back pocket and wiped the dust from his glasses. He then raised the rifle, steadied it against the stone embankment and turned to the soldier next to him. “Pick one,” he said.
Hans Zimmler stood behind Tippler, arms folded across his chest, one side of his head resting against the cool stone. “Tall one on the far right,” he said.
“Head or heart?” Tippler asked.
“Make it more interesting than that,” Zimmler said. “Arm first, then leg, then head.”
Tippler looked away from the square and up at Zimmler. “It can’t be done,” he said. “Two shots are the most I can get off. The others will drag him away before I can get to a third.”
“I’ll make it worth it for you,” Zimmler said. “I’ll double our bet. Two cigarettes instead of the one.”
Tippler leaned down farther, all but his head and arms resting on the hard rock floor, peering through his scope, targeting the hit. “Make it three,” he said. “One for each shot I take.”
Zimmler pulled three cigarettes from his shirt pocket and rested them next to the barrel of Tippler’s rifle. “They’re yours if the boy dies.”
Tippler stiffened his body, from the neck down still as a statue, curled his finger around the trigger and squeezed off the first round. “Leg first,” he muttered.
From his perch, Zimmler watched the street boy fall to the ground, both hands grasped around his kneecap. Two of the boys reached out for him, their arms stuffed under his, rushing to drag him to the safety of a brick archway. Tippler’s second shot was fired less than one second later, bullet landing at the base of the wounded boy’s shoulder and sending him reeling backwards, its force tossing one of the other boys face forward into the brown dirt of the square. “Last shot for the gold,” the Nazi said as he pulled the trigger on the third and fatal bullet.