“Cotton Tail” wound down. Benny Goodman’s “Roll ’Em” began with a boogie-woogie beat that wound up into a clarinet solo. Pino jumped up off the bed, kicked off his shoes, and started dancing, seeing himself with beautiful Anna doing a crazy Lindy Hop—no war, no Nazis, only music, and food, and wine, and love.
Then he realized how loud the music was, turned it down, and stopped dancing. He didn’t want to bring his father upstairs for another argument about music. Michele despised jazz. The week before, he caught Pino practicing Meade Lux Lewis’s boogie tune “Low Down Dog” on the family Steinway, and it was as though he’d desecrated a saint.
Pino took a shower and changed clothes. Several minutes after the cathedral bells tolled 6:00 p.m., Pino crawled back on the bed and looked out the open window. With the thunder clouds a memory, familiar sounds echoed up from the streets of San Babila. The last shops were closing. The wealthy and fashionable of Milan hurried toward home. He could hear their animated voices as one, a chorus of the street—women laughing at some small joy, children crying at some minor tragedy, men arguing over nothing but the sheer Italian love of verbal battle and mock outrage.
Pino startled at the apartment bell ringing downstairs. He heard voices bidding hellos and welcomes. He glanced at the clock. It was 6:15 p.m. The movie started at seven, and it was a long walk to the theater and Anna.
Pino had one leg out the window and was feeling for a ledge that led to a fire escape when he heard a sharp laugh behind him.
“She won’t be there,” Mimo said.
“Of course she will,” Pino said, making it out the window.
It was a solid nine meters to the ground, and the ledge was not very wide. He had to smear his back to the wall and shuffle sideways to another window that he climbed through to gain access to a back staircase. A minute later, though, he was on the ground, outside, and moving.
The cinema’s marquee was unlit due to the new blackout rules. But Pino’s heart swelled when he saw the names of Fred Astaire and Rita Hayworth on the poster. He loved Hollywood musicals, especially those with swing music. And he’d had dreams about Rita Hayworth that . . . well . . .
Pino bought two tickets. As other patrons filed into the theater, he stood searching the street and sidewalks for Anna. He waited until he started to suffer the empty, devastating knowledge that she was not coming.
“I told you,” Mimo said, sliding up beside him.
Pino wanted to be angry but couldn’t. Deep down, he loved his younger brother’s guts and bullishness, his brains and street smarts. He handed Mimo a ticket.
The boys went inside and found seats.
“Pino?” Mimo said quietly. “When did you start to grow? Fifteen?”
Pino fought a smile. His brother was always fretting that he was so short.
“Not until I was sixteen, really.”
“But it could be earlier?”
“Could be.”
The houselights went down and a Fascist propaganda newsreel began. Pino was still depressed by Anna’s standing him up when Il Duce appeared on the screen. Dressed the part of the commanding general in a medal-strewn jacket with waist belt, tunic, breeches, and gleaming black knee-high riding boots, Benito Mussolini walked with one of his field commanders on a bluff above the Ligurian Sea.
The narrator said the Italian dictator was inspecting fortifications. On-screen, Il Duce’s hands were clasped behind his back as he walked. The emperor’s chin pointed at the horizon. His back was arched. His chest puffed toward the sky.
“He looks like a little rooster,” Pino said.
“Shhhh!” Mimo whispered. “Not so loud.”
“Why? Every time you see him, he looks like he wants to go, ‘Cock-a-doodle-doo.’”
His brother sniggered while the newsreel went on to boast of Italy’s defenses and of Mussolini’s growing stature on the world stage. It was pure propaganda. Pino listened to the BBC every night. He knew what he was watching wasn’t true, and he was happy when the newsreel ended and the movie began.
Pino was soon swept up in the film’s comic plot and loving every scene where Hayworth danced with Astaire.
“Rita,” Pino said with a sigh after a series of spiral moves had swept Hayworth’s dress about her legs like a matador’s cape. “She’s so elegant, just like Anna.”
Mimo’s face screwed up. “She stood you up.”
“But she was so beautiful,” Pino whispered.
An air raid siren wailed. People began to yell and jump up from their seats.
The screen froze in close-up on Astaire and Hayworth dancing cheek to cheek, their lips and smiles to the panicking crowd.
As the film melted up on the screen, antiaircraft guns cracked outside the theater, and the first unseen Allied bombers cleared their bays, releasing an overture of fire and destruction that played down on Milan.
Chapter Three
Screaming, the audience stampeded and charged the theater doors. Pino and Mimo were terrified and stuck in the surging mob when, with a deafening roar, a bomb exploded and blew out the theater’s back wall, hurling chunks of debris that ripped the screen to shreds. The lights died.
Something hit Pino hard on the cheek, gashed him open. He felt the wound pulsing and blood dripping over his jaw. In shock now more than in a panic, he choked on smoke and dust and fought his way forward. Grit got in his eyes and up his nostrils, which burned as he and Mimo made their way from the theater, bent over and hacking.
Outside, the sirens wailed on and the bombs kept falling, still far from the crescendo. Fires raged in buildings up and down the street from the theater. Antiaircraft guns rattled. Tracer rounds scrawled red arcs across the sky. Their loads blew so brightly that Pino could see the silhouettes of the Lancaster bombers above him, wingtip to wingtip in a V-formation, like so many dark geese migrating in the night.
More bombs fell with a collective sound like buzzing hornets that erupted one after the other, sending plumes of flame and oily smoke into the sky. Several went off so close to the fleeing Lella boys that they felt the blast waves pound through them and almost lost their balance.
“Where are we going, Pino?” Mimo cried.
For a moment he was too frightened to think, but then said, “The Duomo.”
Pino led his brother toward the only thing in Milan lit by anything but fire. In the distance, the spotlights made the cathedral look unearthly, almost heaven-sent. As they ran, the hornets in the sky and the explosions dwindled and stopped. No more bombers. No more cannon fire.
Just sirens and people crying and shouting. A desperate father dug through brick rubble with a lantern in his hand. His wife wept nearby, hanging on to her dead son. Other crying people with lanterns were gathered around a girl who’d lost her arm and died there in the streets, her eyes glazed open.
Pino had never seen dead people before, and began to cry himself. Nothing will ever be the same. The teenager could feel that as plain as the hornets still buzzing and the explosions still ringing in his ears. Nothing will ever be the same.
At last they were alongside the Duomo itself. There were no bomb craters here by the cathedral. No rubble. No fire. It was as if the attack had never happened but for the wailing grief in the distance.
Pino smiled weakly. “Cardinal Schuster’s plan worked.”