The man leaned his face closer, and now there was an obvious lunacy in the eyes, and something else, a particular breed of evil Giuseppe couldn’t name. “And you’re not in uniform. Why?”
Giuseppe thought he heard something behind the stack, and wondered if Lucia—who sometimes exhibited an explosive temper—was going to step out and hit the German over the head with one of her shoes. Giuseppe had a terrible urge to spit into the haughty face. He wanted to answer the question this way: Because, years ago, my uncle convinced a friend in a certain office to certify my work as being of critical national importance so I wouldn’t have to serve in the army of the madman Mussolini! which was the truth. But what he actually said was, “Health problems.”
“What kind?”
“Epilepsy. I sometimes have fits.”
The German ran his eyes over Giuseppe’s face, as if searching for signs of the illness, then said, “Senza senso!” Nonsense! In the man’s mouth, the words became “Tensa tensu!” He took hold of Giuseppe’s left biceps and squeezed. “You’re strong. If you can’t fight for us, you can work for us, epilepsy or no!”
The German didn’t release his arm, but—and this was strange—when the soldier squeezed his biceps, all fear seemed to drain out of Giuseppe. He was strong. As a boy, he’d worked with his stonemason father, hours and hours carrying stone and shoveling mortar. He was still on the thin side, not tall, but, even though he’d lost weight, his arms, shoulders, and back were thick with muscle. He knew he could have picked up the German like a tree branch and broken him in half against the bookshelves, but, of course, that would have been suicide. The man had a pistol in his holster, a knife on his other hip. And an entire sadistic army behind him.
Without letting go, the German walked Giuseppe backward toward the desk. From this angle, the map was invisible, but if they went a little farther—two more steps—they’d see it there on the floor. A hand-drawn map of Naples’s neighborhoods on a rolled sheet of light-brown paper, three-quarters finished, but already with two arms depots clearly marked, one in a schoolhouse in Vomero, the other in a small armory next to Santa Lucia. The existence of that map was a certain death sentence, but what place could be safer, he’d thought, than the basement of the National Archives? Why would any Nazi soldier venture here? Now he cursed himself for his carelessness.
Instead of going around behind the desk, the German stopped in front of it. Still holding Giuseppe’s arm for balance, he lifted one leg and kicked at a half dozen books in bookends there. They tumbled onto the floor. The captain scraped the sole of his right boot down twice against the desk’s front edge.
Giuseppe saw the moist brown substance on the metal. The smell was stronger.
“Italian horseshit,” the German said, releasing him. And then, over his shoulder as he turned and limped away, “Epilepsy or no, you’ll be sent to the Fatherland and you’ll work for us.”
Giuseppe listened to the boots in the stairwell, glanced to the left to make eye contact with the half-hidden Lucia, then crumpled up a piece of newsprint and began to clean.
Eleven
Lucia waited until she heard the German’s boots reach the street level, then she went and stood at the base of the stairwell and listened to be sure. A pause, as if the man were looking around for someone else to torment. The sound of the heavy front door banging open and closed. She returned to the desk and helped clean up and set the books back in place. Together they traced the steps to the stairwell, but the trail of manure thinned out and disappeared there. It wasn’t exactly the kind of lunch hour she’d had in mind when she’d left work and walked over to the Archives.
“I’m surprised there are any horses left on the streets, with the hunger,” she said.
Giuseppe nodded, not looking at her.
They tossed the soiled newsprint into a wastebasket, and Giuseppe carried the basket to the base of the steps and told her, “I’ll take it when I go.”
Lucia reached up on her toes, kissed him, and held him tight against her. She could feel the humiliation. Hard enough for the man she loved that, in a city of Camorristi, street toughs, and wizened fishermen, he was an intellectual. So much worse to be orphaned and then bullied by a sadistic occupier. It often seemed to her that Giuseppe didn’t understand that precisely what attracted her to him was his intellect and sensitivity, the fact that he wasn’t a fisherman, or a fighter, or a black-marketeer like her father. The fact that he preferred playing the piano and studying English to machismo posing on the street corners, that he loved words and artwork, not knives and fists and stealing. He was man enough for her, more than man enough, without puffing up his chest like a rooster or pummeling someone’s face to prove his power. But holding him against her now, she could feel that the moment with the Nazi officer had reawakened the doubts he had about himself.
She knew how to chase them away.
In the days when the government could afford it, there had been a night watchman in the building. At the rear of the basement level was a storage room with a cot, a sink, and a rust-stained, seatless toilet. Not the most romantic place for a tryst, but, since she rented a tiny ground-floor apartment with a curious landlady above, and he lived with his uncle, it was their only hope of privacy these days.
She led Giuseppe there by the hand, stopping on the way to pick up her canvas handbag. “My father gave me some gifts today,” she said. “Let me show you.”
Twelve
As the column of military vehicles sped south toward Naples, Colonel Scholl chewed absentmindedly on a piece of sausage and read over a copy of the manifesto he’d sent by telegraph to the Italian officials there. The tone was exactly right. The key was to be ruthless, unyielding, to set the rules in place and back them up with merciless force. The Italians were a weak people—overly emotional, cowardly, too fond of the sense pleasures. And as they’d recently proven, all too ready to flip sides, to betray, to run.
Lieutenant Renzik shouted over the noise of the motor, “I was stationed in Naples for a while. You’ll be staying in the Hotel Parco, Herr Colonel. A fine place. Close to the water. Should I take you there or to the office where you’ll work, the former Amministrazione?”
“The office,” Scholl answered, keeping his eyes away from the handsome face, holding his gaze forward. “This isn’t the time for rest.”
Field Marshal Kesselring had said the goal was to “subdue” the city, and that it might very well prove necessary to destroy it once it had been subdued. On the long, tedious trip south, Scholl found himself imagining the different ways that task might be accomplished: squads of soldiers lighting fires in residential sections; the artillery brigade established at Capodimonte, one of the city’s high points, raining down barrage after barrage of 150-mm shells from their Nebelwerfer 41s; a fleet of tanks rolling through the main avenues, firing into the foundations of famous museums and churches; before-and-after photos taken, to be shown later, at high-level meetings in Berlin. The beauty of it, the power: to be in charge of wiping an entire three-thousand-year-old city off the map. How many colonels, even how many generals in history had ever been given such an honor?