But no, they strode past with barely a glance—high black boots, black belts, black-lidded gray hats, and evil, narrowed eyes that showed, it seemed to Giuseppe, both the old superiority and a new wariness.
A few blocks away, in the direction of Piazza Dante, Giuseppe heard two quick rattles of what sounded like machine-gun fire. A faulty engine, it might have been. Or another killing.
At the corner of Via Materdei, he came upon a man sitting on the sidewalk with his back against the wall of a building that no longer had any glass in its windows. The man’s left leg, blown off below the knee, was stretched out in front of him, the stump wrapped in a bloodstained scrap of undershirt. Gaunt, unwashed, obviously starving, the man raised a hand without even looking up.
Giuseppe reached into his pocket. One coin there. He leaned down and without a word handed it over.
Seven
Colonel Scholl found it hard to believe that flying into Naples had been rendered impossible. For most of the past year, after being transferred from Rieti, he’d been stationed at Gestapo headquarters in Rome, filing reports, taking part in interrogations, supervising an antiaircraft battalion, dying of boredom. There had been some raids on that city, true, but the main airport, Roma Pratica, had consistently remained open, and the damage done by the supposedly brilliant English—and then American—pilots and navigators had been limited mainly to civilian targets, as if they didn’t like the Italians, either, and preferred to fly the safer routes and kill the dark little men, women, and children, rather than risking German antiaircraft fire around the airport and important military installations.
After being wounded in Narvik (rifle bullet to the outside of his right thigh), he’d been brought back to Berlin to recover, then sent to Rieti in central Italy to oversee operations there: manage the antiaircraft squads and four companies of Italian soldiers, track down and execute the few partisans they could find, keep the local people cowed and obedient. Scholl had spent almost two full years in the landlocked industrial hub, and during that time, he’d developed a deep disdain for the Italians, a sentiment he made no effort to hide. Just the opposite, in fact: in Rieti, he’d found that, military men and civilians alike, the more roughly the Italians were treated, the better they behaved. Not that their performance ever rose to the level of any German or Austrian soldier he’d trained with. On Sicily, for instance, where the Allies had staged a mistake-ridden landing two months ago, reports filed by combatants there indicated that some Italian companies had surrendered en masse at the first glimpse of Allied forces. Simply dropped their arms and walked, singing songs, toward the beachheads. Singing songs! It was impossible to imagine any German warrior doing such a thing.
And then, of course, once Mussolini was deposed, the Italian king and his generals had (a) agreed to an armistice with the Allies, and (b) kept it secret for the better part of a week! Armistice was hardly the word. Surrender was more like it. Surrender, or, even better, betrayal.
Worst of all, it seemed that, especially since the betrayal, the Italian preference for indolence had infected some of the Reich’s own forces. Immediately after his meeting with Field Marshal Kesselring, Scholl had requested a folder of informative briefs—everything he needed to know about the city of Naples. It took him fifteen minutes to pack his bag, but two full hours for the briefs to be delivered to his office—two hours! When they finally arrived, they contained reports of sporadic uprisings and small acts of resistance in Naples. Resistance—another fine word. Resistance to what? The very troops who had been defending them!
And what kind of resistance could there have been? Once the betrayal had been made public, half the Italian Army disappeared into the hills. Uniforms and equipment abandoned, whole companies dissolved into thin air. So who was resisting? The local pizza maker? The whorish women? The schoolgirls?
He tapped the tip of a finger on the top of his desk, pressed his teeth together. He’d seen bits of resistance in his Rieti posting and knew exactly how to quell them: one German dead meant a hundred Italians dead. Lined up in the street, shot like beasts. There was nothing complicated about it. He fit the folder into his bag and carried it out into the sticky Roman air.
As promised, Kesselring had given him a staff car, and also assigned him four armored vehicles and six motorcycles to make the trip to Naples, a distance of 226.2 kilometers, most of a day’s ride. These vehicles weren’t for his protection—the terrain separating the two cities was, as Kesselring had said, securely in German hands—but rather to demonstrate to the Neapolitans that a new overseer had arrived, a kind of local king to replace their half-size Emmanuel, who’d run away, south, after signing the surrender. Fled to Bari, fearing for his life. What kind of leader did such a thing?
Lieutenant Renzik was behind the wheel of the jeep. Young, nice-looking in a girlish way, sitting at attention. The plan was for them to travel in the jeep for most of the distance, then the convoy would stop, Scholl would get out, and enter the city in more impressive fashion.
Through the streets of Rome they went, passing one church after the next—how poorly these people had been protected by their Jesus!—and then onto the main road. Renzik kept silent, eyes straight ahead, both large hands gripping the wheel. Highway A1 ran alongside the sea for a time, with mountainous terrain to the left, and then slid inland along a flat plain with the mountains now to their right. Halfway to Naples, it occurred to Scholl—an unpleasant thought—that there might be another reason behind the new assignment. Instead of an honor, as he’d first assumed, perhaps it was a veiled punishment. During his time in Rieti, certain personal matters had come to light. A habit, a preference, an amusement he should long ago have abandoned. First, there had been the transfer to Rome, and now one farther south. So perhaps he’d been assigned to Naples, that much closer to the fighting, not because he was of particular value to the Führer’s forces, but for exactly the opposite reason.
The thought upset him. Even in the midst of it, though, he couldn’t keep from turning and looking at Renzik—young and healthy, a perfect specimen. Married, it seemed, judging by the ring. But who knew the inner workings of men, their dark precincts, their secret desires? War, with its constant proximity to death and long absences, was famous for straining marriage vows to the point of breaking. “Wife at home?” Scholl asked him.
Renzik turned his blue-green eyes from the road and nodded. Sadly, perhaps.
“Missing you?”
Another nod.
“Let’s hope we can get home soon and the two of you will have a fine victory celebration! A week of doing nothing but wrestling in the sheets!”
A third nod. No spark of excitement there, as if the man—sleepy-eyed, soft-faced—had long ago given up the dream.
Scholl turned forward, the bad thoughts assailing him again. From two directions. A kind of body hunger on the one side, urgent, pressing, whispering. And guilt on the other, mixed with the sour taste of regret. He would banish them both, bring a strict discipline to his own behavior and to the people of Naples . . . and happily destroy the place, if the order came. The fate of an entire city—a million people—in his hands. He felt capable, optimistic, already making plans. The hungry ones were so easy to control.