“Giuseppe’s making a map,” Lucia went on, very quietly, trying, for the twentieth time, to change her father’s opinion of the man she loved, to describe his courage, his determination, his goodness, his grief over the recent murder of both parents. “It shows every district. German headquarters, Italian arms warehouses, the places the Nazis sleep. There’s a book where he works, in the Archives. It shows the layout of the rooms and offices, the entrances, the stairways. When he’s not doing that, he walks the whole city for hours and hours, making mental notes about the number of soldiers he sees in various locations, how many are guarding the arms depots, and so on. He thinks it might help the Allies when they come, if he can find a way to get them the information. If he’s caught, the Nazis will kill him.”
“If he’s caught,” her father said after another few steps, “he’ll wish for them to kill him.”
When they reached the door of the basement apartment where he now lived, a basso on Via Serapide, her father put a hand on her arm, a rare touch, a signal to wait, a sign that she should not dare to step into his territory. He went down a single step, unlocked and shoved open the squealing metal door, and disappeared. When he came back to her, he was holding a package wrapped in butcher’s paper and tied in string. “Take it,” he said, handing it over. “In a week, come back. The port. Same time.”
And then he was hurrying away from her toward a steep set of neighborhood stairs, as if the thought of an embrace, a kiss, even a single moment of tenderness, terrified him more than any Nazi colonel. His walk—brisk, bowlegged, arms swinging—shouted, Leave me alone!
Lucia stood there, watching him until he was out of sight, then she walked for half an hour up Via Toledo, toward the center of Naples, crossed Piazza Dante, and, instead of going straight to work, went and sat in a back part of the Duomo for a few minutes. There was liturgical singing in one of the side altars and, in front of her, beneath the spectacular marble sculpture of Mary surrounded by angels, an old priest saying Mass to fifteen people, his words echoing against the high stone ceiling like the murmuring of the dead. She thought of the arguments she and her father had endured—why did she have such a temper?!—all the times she’d been ashamed of him for the way he earned his money . . . even when that money was paying for her food, her schooling, her clothes. She’d confessed it more than once, the ingratitude, the adolescent feistiness. She had prayed, scores of times, for him to suddenly turn into the warm father of her imagination. When the war came, she’d hoped it might change him, soften him. Now she knew how foolish that was: war softened no one.
After a time—no one else in the rear pews—she loosened the string of the package and lifted the paper to either side. Six small dusty potatoes in a cardboard box, four one-lira notes, a very small bar of soap, and two condoms—American, it seemed—in their silvery packets. The condoms felt sinful there, in church, and brought tears to her eyes. On the one hand, it was a sweet gift, thoughtful, respectful, even tender. Giuseppe would be glad. On the other, the message seemed to be: Don’t do what I did. Don’t bring into this world a child you do not want.
Six
Having fed his uncle from their tiny supply of food, and having helped him downstairs so he could sit in the sun of the Naples morning, Giuseppe DiPietra started off on foot toward the National Archives. These days, he wasn’t required to be there at any specific time; no one checked on his comings and goings. His boss, Riccardo Filangieri, had moved the most precious historical documents to a villa twenty-five kilometers from the city center in order to protect them from the bombing raids, and he now spent all his workdays there. Giuseppe wasn’t doing his actual job in any case, and Filangieri probably knew that.
As he often did now on this morning walk, Giuseppe was thinking of his mother and father, murdered in cold blood along with twenty of their neighbors. For hours at a time now, he couldn’t get the images out of his mind—bodies strewn like mutilated rag dolls across the steps of the Ministry of Health, faces twisted in the terror and agony of death, the fingers of his mother’s left hand clutching the cloth at her husband’s shoulder, the pools of bright-red blood, edges drying in the sun. Night and day the images haunted him, and they fed a slow-burning fire of hatred. It was everything he could do not to let the fire burst into a roaring blaze and consume him, not to attack every Nazi soldier he saw and beat them to a bloody pulp.
His street, Via Telesino, was choked with mountains of rubble, as if a sloppy Neapolitan stonemason had piled truckloads of material there and was preparing, next day, to rebuild his ravaged city. Although the bombs of the most recent raids had fallen several kilometers to the east—in Capodichino, near the airport, he guessed—the air even here tasted of dust and smelled of smoke. From inside one of the buildings, he could hear a child wailing, not the usual frustrated cry, but a wartime wailing, filled with unbearable anguish and confusion, not really childlike at all. For almost three years, from November of 1940 until two weeks ago, the Allies had targeted Naples with their raids. First the British at night, then the Americans during the day. Not only military installations—the port, the airfields, the armories—but shops, theaters, residential neighborhoods. Six-hundred-year-old churches obliterated. Ordinary people strafed on the sidewalk. And then, suddenly, the bombings had stopped, and there was no explanation until the secret armistice was made public, five days after it had been signed.
Everyone knew the Allies had landed troops on Sicily, everyone knew they were fighting their way up the peninsula, everyone knew the Nazi choke hold on Italy was loosening. But no one could be sure it wouldn’t tighten again, or how much suffering people would have to endure before liberation came . . . if it came at all.
Now that Mussolini had been deposed, and King Vittorio Emanuele III had signed an armistice with the Allies, the Germans, long a presence in Axis Italy, had taken over more and more of what had once been called “law enforcement duties,” and turned from barely tolerated occupiers to vicious fiends. Bad as the Fascists had been, they were nothing compared to these new rulers. Now there were mass public executions, Gestapo torture cells, Jews and former Italian military men being sent north to the work camps. And all that on top of terrible hunger, cases of typhus and malaria, and wartime shortages of everything from salt to soap.
It seemed to Giuseppe that he could hear the death rattle of the Neapolitans’ patience. Of late, there had been several small acts of rebellion in the poorer neighborhoods—Nazi soldiers attacked, military vehicles damaged—and one protest at the university that the Germans had disrupted by using tanks and machine guns. Five killed. Five more killed! Each death made the wound of his parents’ murders bleed all over again. But he could sense something in the air, almost as if there were about to be an eruption of Vesuvius, the temperamental mountain that hovered over all of them like a fierce god. A pressure, a hot fury, he could sense it. He wondered where it would lead.
Officially, his work was to curate the documents in the National Archives, to aid scholars in their research. He’d been there almost six years, and some months a small salary still trickled down to him through the labyrinthine corridors of Italian bureaucracy. Unofficially, secretly, since two days after the murder of his parents, he’d been occupied with a different kind of work. If the pair of German officers walking past him now in the other direction, one of them arcing a huge load of spittle onto a pyramid of stone and dust, had any idea of that, he’d be taken into custody within the minute.