Just come back to us, amore.
He had met Sally there, seen his first child born there, too. His little Cecilia. Watching them wave good-bye was the hardest damned thing Dominic had ever had to do.
But Dominic knew what it felt like to be the target of prejudice, and besides, he had an important mission. He wasn’t about to duck away from doing his part. Dominic had been following the headlines in the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette with his morning coffee for some three years now. The Nazis had stolen personal property and raped the countryside of Europe. They had murdered hundreds of thousands of innocent people, most of them for nothing more than being Jewish. For two years, the newspapers had been reporting on the many thousands corralled in death camps across Germany, Austria, Poland. More than a million in Poland alone, he had read. Dominic couldn’t understand how anyone could stand by and do nothing. The Americans should have acted long before now, Dominic thought, and he knew many of his fellow soldiers felt the same.
Even though saying good-bye to his wife and daughter was the hardest thing Dominic could imagine, all the same, he and all the men around him were committed to face the enemy, to shut down Hitler’s machine. And now, finally, after months of training, they were ready to land on the beach. Ready to set things right in the world again.
Let’s do this thing, he thought, trying to still his trembling fingers.
A sudden wave caught the landing craft; a jarring bump and a splash of icy spray on Dominic’s face brought him back to the present. His medal was gone, even the photographs of Sally and little Cecilia taken from him, but he had to believe that God was with him regardless. Wasn’t he?
The dog tags jingled against his chest as he shifted his weight, trying to relieve his numb feet. The twin plates of metal held only the most basic information: Bonelli, Dominic A. Social Security number. Blood type O. Catholic. Just the essence of him, stripped of the details that made him human.
This was how the army saw him. A number. Cannon fodder. One of thousands of faceless men in colorless uniforms, packed like cattle into the claustrophobic landing craft. Dominic found himself twisting and untwisting the chain of his dog tags, rubbing them together. His hands felt empty again. Idleness before a mad rush.
At home, his hands had never been still. When he wasn’t shoveling coal in the mines below Pittsburgh, he was rocking his baby girl and singing to her in his rough voice; sometimes nonsense ditties he invented on the fly, sometimes old Sicilian songs his nonna had taught him but no one understood anymore.
Cecilia hadn’t cared. She had loved them all, cooing as she stretched her chubby hands toward his face. And when Cecilia was asleep and the house was filled with the sound of opera turned down low on the radio, he’d grasp a charcoal stick and sit sketching as Sally washed the dishes. He often thought of doing a landscape or a still life, but every night he ended up sketching the perfect lines of her hair, the curves of her body. The newest, a swelling of her belly filled with the promise of a second child. He kept looking up at her as he drew, but he knew it wasn’t necessary; Sally was imprinted into his mind’s eye, indelibly stamped into the fabric of his soul.
Especially her smile. It had captured his heart on an afternoon three years ago when he’d been walking up the hill toward home after work in the mines. He had spotted her in her parents’ garden orchard, picking apples. It wasn’t easy to win Sally’s heart. At first, she had refused to be impressed by his silly banter, refused to fall for his nagging, refused to be captured. She fussed at him and told him to get lost, but Dominic detected a smile beneath the sass. Dominic’s grandfather advised him that persistence would always win, and he was right. Dominic kept stopping at the corner on his way home until one day, she finally shared an apple freshly picked from the tree.
The fierce cry of his commanding officer brought Dominic back to reality. As the men around him scrambled to ready themselves for landing, Dominic’s heart fell through his boots. He looked up and saw the gray expanse of Omaha Beach thrown open before them; the mist and the drizzle enfolded it in wispy shrouds that hid the sinister enemy he knew must be lying in wait behind the dunes. He dropped his dog tags and laced his shaking fingers together to mask their tremor. The distant pop-pop of rifles somewhere was already making his heart beat faster; he knew that each of those soft cracks was the sound of death coming for one of the men on the beach.
“God help us,” gasped the soldier beside him. He saw the boy’s hands trembling, his bolt-action rifle shaking between his fingers.
His commander’s voice rang out again. “We’re off, boys!”
Operation Neptune.
Dominic watched his commander’s face, his lips moving, but the looming shadow and deafening roar of a plane engine drowned the rest of his words.
Dominic unlocked his fingers and grasped the barrel of his rifle. Beyond the rim of the boat, the beach was a mass of disembarking men and gunfire. It didn’t look like an organized assault; to Dominic, it looked like chaos. Already, muzzle flashes lit up the mist.
Dominic watched the hinged ramp of the landing craft creak open, then suddenly, it crashed down, a rush of cold water hissing inside. A desperate war cry tore from the throats of the entire platoon. Shoulder to shoulder, they rushed forward.
7
Leonardo
Florence, Italy
April 1482
THE BEST DESIGN FOR A BATTLESHIP, I THINK, IS ONE WITH a ramp that lowers from the mouth of the boat. A sort of landing craft. A boat with a hinged ramp that might open upon landing, spilling soldiers onto the ground to take their enemies by surprise.
Like most inspired ideas, it comes to me in the middle of the night. I barely have time to sketch it on paper before jogging across the bridge to the walled sculpture garden inside the palace of the Medici.
Now, I watch Lorenzo il Magnifico run the palm of his hand over his stubbled cheek, the thin line of his mouth tight and contemplating as his knowing, intelligent eyes scan my torn page. My lord must appreciate how such a craft might serve useful against the Pisans. Surely, for all their supposed prowess at sea, they have not come up with such a design.
I do not want to sound ungrateful, for I count myself lucky to have the favor of His Lordship’s attention at all. But I no longer hold on to any hope that Il Magnifico will give me a commission for a war machine. He will not save me a place at his table. He will not pay me a stipend or even grant me a commission. Permission to sketch ancient statuary in the peace of his garden is all I have earned after years of trying. At this point, all I can hope for is a word from His Lordship that might find me a patron far away from here.
“Yes,” Il Magnifico tells me, putting the parchment back in my hand. “I see how a warship with this ramp design might be advantageous. But not in Milan. How would you convey the value of this idea to a man born in Lombardy, a man who rules a vast, landlocked spread of flat wheat fields and rice paddies as far as the eye can see?”
He has a point. After all, Ludovico Sforza, the one they call the Moor, has seized control of the court of Milan without the slightest need for a boat. All he has done is poach his enemies—his own relations—one by one. He even pushed out the young boy-duke’s own mother and her closest, most trusted political and military advisers. And now, Ludovico Sforza is Regent of Milan—a duke in practice if not in name.