These days, Mussolini’s UMPA, his civil defense organization, was making use of Naples’s underground tunnels and caves for bomb shelters, and, during the worst of the raids, it wasn’t uncommon for whole families to spend weeks in those shelters without seeing the sun. Showers had been set up, makeshift toilets arranged; in some of the shelters he’d seen, there were even working kitchens powered by an ingenious arrangement of wires and batteries.
The space he entered now was secret, of course. The UMPA and OVRA wouldn’t know about it and likely wouldn’t venture down here even if they did. Mussolini had done everything humanly possible to eliminate the Camorra, the Cosa Nostra, and the ’Ndrangheta, but like some kind of slippery, many-legged underwater creature, speared, hooked, slithering through nets, the various underworld organizations—Neapolitan, Sicilian, and Calabrian—had stubbornly survived, fed by wartime necessity and disorganization, and Italy’s ancient tradition of putting local loyalty above any kind of national interest.
In the center of a circular cavern with a rough-hewn ceiling, a table had been set up, a single bulb hanging over it, and four short, round stools evenly spaced around it. At the table sat Zozo and his two lieutenants, the Dell’Acqua brothers, Vito and Ubaldo. Every adult in the city knew who they were. Merciless executioners and two of the stupidest men Aldo had ever encountered. They were good at two things: taking orders and taking human life, and over the years he’d done everything possible to keep his distance from them. As he stepped out of the tunnel and into the circular space, Aldo felt their eyes on him and realized he’d arrived a few minutes late. Zozo Forni had been kept waiting. Not good. And the presence of the Dell’Acquas was a bad sign. Without the tiniest twinge of conscience, they could kill him here, cut his body into pieces, and carry it out in a box to be thrown from a fishing boat into the sea, or buried beneath one of the thousands of piles of rubble that dotted the city now like freckles on a face. Lucia would think he’d abandoned her, and would possibly starve. His life, worthless as it was, would end like an animal’s life: no grave, no stone, no explanation, no funeral in one of Naples’s many churches. Nothing.
He decided to face his fate with as much dignity as he could summon, not to beg, not to quiver, and, hopeless as it would be in any case, not to try to run.
Zozo gestured for him to sit on one of the stools. In front of him was a plate with olives and cheese, beside it a glass of red wine. A last meal.
“Eat something. Drink,” Zozo commanded, the scar on his neck making small jumps as he spoke. Aldo obeyed. Under the weight of the three sets of eyes, he was struggling to think of what he might have done wrong. For fourteen years, he’d overseen the theft of goods from the freighters that docked in Naples’s busy port. “Our tax,” Zozo’s brother, Giovanni, had called the larceny. At night, and sometimes even in daylight, the dockworkers would siphon off boxes of American liquor or German beer or British batteries, or soap or cloth or shoes that were either arriving from abroad or being sent there. He’d been told that somewhere around 5 percent of the goods was a fair tax, enough to make a healthy profit but not enough to anger the Fascist police, who—themselves the recipients of bribes—expected a certain amount of Camorra bounty to be taken, but wouldn’t stand for the wholesale disruption of legal trade. Aldo had been instructed to keep the dockworkers in line by using a mixture of payment, favors, and fear, and over the years he’d become an expert at striking that balance, allowing them, in turn, to take their percentage. From time to time, one of them would have to be roughed up for stealing too much, or kicked off the dock entirely.
In the years leading up to the war, he’d done a good job—Giovanni himself had told him so more than once—but then, November 1940, the bombings had started. The port—from which soldiers and military equipment were being sent to the Libyan front—was a prime target. Soon the waters were littered with sunken ships, the docks and nearby roadways pocked with craters. Workers killed. Power and sewer lines destroyed. Trade brought almost to a standstill. Lately, the Germans didn’t seem to want even fishing boats to set out to sea, as if the old fishermen with their wrinkled skin and scarred hands might be spies paid by Churchill or Roosevelt, or as if they could ferry the entire population of Naples over to Capri or across the Atlantic to New York. This most recent stage of the war had all but suffocated Aldo’s livelihood. Giovanni Forni had given him small jobs—carrying cash to a contact behind the train station, buying horsemeat on the black market and delivering it to certain favored cafés, once, traveling by donkey-drawn cart to the Capodichino Airport at midnight, meeting some Roman stranger there, a silent man with an enormous white mustache, and accompanying him to the San Cristoforo Hotel. He’d become a charity case, his management skills put to the side.
Then, along with nineteen others, Giovanni had been grabbed from a restaurant, at random, and executed by the Nazis in revenge for the ambush and killing of one of their men. Aldo mourned him, of course, and worried there would be no more work, none at all. Through old contacts, people who owed him a favor, he managed to scrounge bits of food and other essentials, half of which he passed on to his daughter. But he was basically adrift, without a patron, powerless, and as hungry as everybody else.
He finished the last olive, the last sip of wine, and raised his eyes to the men for whom he’d become a liability. He contributed nothing now. He had secrets they wouldn’t want others to know. He had a daughter who worked in the government offices alongside the Italian Fascists, supervised by the new Nazi overlords. None of it was good.
“Allora,” Zozo began. “So . . . are you happy working for us, Signor Pastone?”
Aldo hid one trembling hand beneath the table. “Yes, yes, of course. For all these years, I—”
Zozo didn’t seem to be listening, so Aldo stopped in midsentence. Maybe the question had been a trick. Maybe whether Signor Pastone was happy or not didn’t matter at all.
“As of two weeks ago, the bombs stopped falling. Can you guess why?”
Aldo shrugged, swung his eyes to the brothers with their thick black brows, and then back to Zozo’s fat cheeks and large ears.
“No guesses?”
“Maybe the Americans have run short of fuel for the planes. They’re waiting to be resupplied, through Sicily. Or they’re setting up their bases there, now that—”
He stopped again. Zozo’s lips had stretched into a smile. The smile said, You are as stupid as the Dell’Acquas.
Aldo watched him, waited. He was pretending to be unconcerned, but already mounting a defense. He’d mention the things Zozo’s brother had said, the compliments. He’d say how flexible he was, that he had other talents, that he’d always been loyal, that, over the years, he’d brought in a great deal of money.
Zozo belched quietly, and the smile disappeared. “Mussolini is gone. The king signed an armistice. We’re fighting alongside the Allies now.”
“I knew . . . about the armistice. We thought it meant the war was over. Even the Germans thought so for a day.”
Zozo looked away. The light bulb suddenly went out, throwing them into darkness. Aldo clenched his hands into tight fists. The other three men laughed, and in ten seconds, the bulb flashed back to life. Vito Dell’Acqua, the taller of the two, perhaps slightly more stupid, spoke up, and Aldo shifted his eyes there. “The boss has a job for you. If you want it.”