In Love and War (30 page)

The next morning, Esmond, Bruno, Elio and the British man, Creighton, set off towards the city in the bus. Bruno lets the heavy vehicle coast down the slope. There are now regular aerial drops of fuel from the Allies, but Bruno seems to enjoy sending the bus whistling down the mountainside with its engine off, spraying gravel over cliff-edges, dodging pot-holes and fallen rocks. The four of them are dressed in sand-coloured Wehrmacht
Feldbluse
and peaked caps. Esmond has a rifle slung across his midriff. Bruno sports two holsters, each holding a Walther PPK. Creighton is sitting beside Esmond at the back of the bus, polishing his revolver.

‘I’ll do the talking,’ he says.

‘My German’s pretty good,’ Esmond says.

‘You look fifteen. And the German doesn’t need to be good, it just needs to be authoritative.’

They continue in silence for a while. Esmond notices it feels strange to be speaking English.

‘So you’re SOE – what is that? Army? Secret Service?’

‘The less you know, young man,’ Creighton says, smiling softly, blue eyes darting out over the countryside. ‘We’ll have a good chinwag when the war’s over. We should get together with old Bailey in London. Have a sherbet or two.’

They take a circuitous route through the north of the city and into Le Cure until they come to the via dell’Agnolo. They park in front of the gates of Santa Verdiana, the former convent, now with a chain on the gate, glass shards cemented to the top of the walls, guards leaning on their guns in the courtyard.

‘Are we ready?’ Creighton says. The four men walk out of the bus and up to the gates. Bruno is carrying a silver-topped stick and raps on the wood. Elio, like Esmond, has a rifle cradled in his arms. A black door at the side opens and a white-bearded guard peers out at them.

‘
Dov è la Direttore?
’ Bruno barks. The guard ushers them through. They wait in the courtyard, listening to the sound of crockery in a kitchen somewhere, a woman singing on one of the prison’s upper floors. After a few minutes, a kindly-looking woman in a grey suit comes to meet them.

‘Can I help you?’ she says, taking in their uniforms.

‘
Sprechen sie Deutsch?
’ Creighton asks, giving a small and patronising smile.

The governor shakes her head doubtfully. ‘
Ein bißchen,
’ she offers up.

Creighton switches into Bavarian-tinted Italian. ‘We’re here for the political prisoners.’

‘Which ones?’

‘All of them,’ he says, flatly. ‘They’re being transferred to the SD holding cells at San Marco. We have a new female interrogator.’

The governor looks hesitantly from Creighton to Elio. Elio nods briskly. ‘
Auf einmal!
’ he shouts, shaking his rifle in the woman’s direction.

‘My colleague is lacking patience,’ Creighton says. ‘Do excuse him. We can of course bring our new interrogator here. We might see what she got from your other prisoners, make a day or two of it.’

‘That won’t be necessary. We have five politicals at the moment. Please wait here.’

A few minutes pass and then two women wander blinking into the yard, accompanied by a female guard with a truncheon. Soon after, Tosca walks out. She is limping and doesn’t meet Esmond’s eye when he looks towards her. Finally a pair of older women appear, accompanied by the governor.

‘These last two are Royalists. I’m not sure you’re interested in them.’

‘Oh, we’re interested in everyone,’ Creighton says, smiling. ‘But you should have one more.’ He reaches into his pocket and pulls out a piece of paper. ‘A certain Nella Ferrari. Ring any bells?’

She nods. ‘Oh yes, but she’s already gone. All of the Jews went last night. The Ferrari girl tried to protest and I must say her documents looked in order, but the men were very insistent.’

‘Were they Germans?’

‘No. Italian.
Centurione Carità
– perhaps you know him?’

Creighton smiles at her again. ‘We must improve our communication with our Italian comrades,’ he says, bowing. ‘You have been most helpful,
direttora
.’

They load the prisoners into the bus, first asking the guards to remove the handcuffs.

‘They won’t try anything with us,’ Creighton says, winking.

Only when they’re sure that they aren’t being followed does Bruno turn northwards towards the mountains. Esmond sits stunned as they make their way through the suburbs and out into the wide fields of the plain. Everyone is silent apart from the two Royalist ladies who chatter busily in the back. Tosca reaches over and puts a small hand on Esmond’s shoulder. When they reach the clearing, they get out and stand disconsolately on the grass. Creighton comes and puts his arm around Esmond.

‘I’m awfully sorry, old chap,’ he says. ‘Let me get on the blower and see if I can find out what happened.’

Ten minutes later and Esmond is sitting, sobbing silently. He holds his revolver in his hand, flicking the safety catch on and off, breathing unsteadily. Tosca is leaning against Antonio, her eyes bright with tears. Elio and Bruno are awkwardly silent. Creighton shakes his head.

‘There’s simply nothing we can do. The train is already in the Salò Republic. It’s out of our reach. Listen, mate,’ he says, putting his arm around Esmond’s shoulder again, ‘she’s got a sporting chance, she really does. There’s six months of this war left, if that. She’s in good health. The Germans are losing heart. I’d back her, you know.’

Now that Ada is gone, she is everywhere, her name hymning in his mind. He yokes the thud of his heart to those two syllables:
A-da, A-da, A-da.
He sleeps in her sleeping bag, deep dreamful sleeps, the painting of Mary Magdalene beside him. He lives like a pilgrim, barely listens to the news, doesn’t want to know what is happening at Monte Cassino, in the Pacific, in Britain, is
scarcely aware of preparations for the invasion of Europe. Ada is all the points of the compass for him, all the map of the world, all the war. In saying her name, he draws up a hard and secret energy, and he fights as if she were there, at his shoulder, urging him on. He plants bombs on the railway lines alone now, riding down on the Moto Guzzi and coming back with a steady expression. Every explosion is like an offering. He and Bruno kill two German guards they find lying smoking in a field not far from the turning up towards Monte Morello. It is easier than killing Gobbi, he realises. This time he pities the men, but his mind is too full to dwell on them.

He is silhouetted against a pale dawn sky, cresting a hill on the motorbike. The saddlebags are plump with explosives, a Sten gun stiffens his back. He’s wearing a long leather jacket and silver goggles. He passes before a dark row of cypresses, through an olive grove, is obscured by a crumbling Roman wall and then emerges, a wind-whipped cigarillo in his teeth. He knows the goat-tracks of these hills as he once knew the streets of Cambridge, of Shrewsbury, of Florence. At night, before sleeping, he rehearses his route, laying the tracks over the swell of hills like a lattice, then growling the Moto Guzzi towards its destination: an arms silo; an aerodrome; a railway line.

Dawn still hasn’t broken over the mountains when he comes into the village of Sant’Ellero. Pine trees line the road as he freewheels the motorbike down the hill and parks in a lay-by. The station crouches below him, further down is the Arno, which is narrower, faster-flowing here by its source. The Florence–Rome railway line meanders like the river, unexpected tributaries shooting off. He lifts the saddlebags from the bike and scrambles down to the tracks.

Creighton has supplied him with blocks of plastic explosives, small and wrapped in brown paper. He looks up the tracks
towards the station, where an elderly woman is sweeping dust into desultory clouds. The hillsides around are thickly wooded. Even though the sun is now rising above the high mountains in the east, he is still in shadow. He darts to the rails, presses the packages of explosives like nougat into hollows he digs out of the stones beneath and around the tracks. He checks the connections and plays out the fuse, concealing himself in the dark shade of a pine tree a little further up the hill.

He looks at his watch. The train is late. He lights a cigarette and stares up through the branches to the blue air above. Sometimes, in the moments of calm, he is seized by a lightness of spirit that feels almost crude without Ada beside him. He can hear birdsong, the plash and spatter of the rocky Arno, and now, in the distance, the whispering rattle of the approaching train. He carefully stubs out his cigarette and gives a last glance up to the sky.

The information is never certain. He relies on messages from mouth to mouth, passed behind menus in noisy restaurants, or in snatched conversations in the lanes of Milan or Turin, through the bars of a gaol at night. The messages are written on slips of paper and sewn into the lining of jackets, or swallowed and fastidiously retrieved, or dropped from moving cars. In the fading echoes of these whispers it is suggested that a certain person, or group of persons, will be in a particular place at a particular time. And he must go and kill them there.

Thus in theory, Creighton had told him, in the second and third carriages of the train now coming towards him are eighteen members of the SS
Einsatzgruppen
– the death brigade that would be responsible for rounding up the remaining pockets of resistance in Florence, shepherding the last Jews, gypsies and Communists into the slatted wagons at Santa Maria Novella, executing any who stood in their way. A decent target, Esmond thinks.

He can see the train coming around the bend towards the station. His view of the carriages telescopes as the track uncurves and he is left with only a front-on picture of the locomotive, the driver dimly visible in the cab. The woman has stopped sweeping and is leaning on her broom, exchanging a few words with the driver through the steam. The train lets out a whistle and begins to pull away from the station and towards him. Esmond flicks open his IMCO and lights the fuse, which hisses its snaking path down towards the tracks. He scurries further up and raises a pair of field glasses to his eyes. The high wheeze of the engine as it gathers speed. A sudden, incongruous burst of birdsong as the sun breaks over the nearest hills and illuminates the valley. Almost, almost, the train is there.

The locomotive passes over the nest of explosives. The first carriage, in the windows of which he sees two young men in fedoras, smoking, a woman at her knitting. The second carriage, which is empty. The third. Not eighteen, but five slate-suited German officers. Their carriage passes over the explosives. He’s misjudged the length of the fuse, or the damp air has snuffed out the flame. He pulls out his revolver and takes aim. Now the fourth and penultimate carriage, also empty, rolls over the brown packages of nitroglycerine. Nothing. He raises his revolver, closes one eye, aims at the brown packages. A crack, a split-second of vacuumed air and everything stops, then with a roar like a living beast the tracks rear up from the earth.

A wave passes along the train’s long steel spine and the carriages buck from the rails, forming a jagged W before the locomotive plunges down the hill and into the Arno. It comes to rest in the roiled water, steam still rising from the engine. The woman on the station platform has dropped her broom, raising her hands to her mouth. The birds have stopped singing. He doesn’t wait to see who – if anyone – crawls from the capsized
train. He doesn’t think of the driver, or the woman, or the young men in the first carriage. Or passengers who may or may not have been in the last. He gets back on his motorbike and lights a cigarillo, pulls the goggles down over his eyes and takes off up the hill, a hard knot of satisfaction in his chest.

Esmond feels his energy grow until he can barely sleep, and sits all night in the cool moistness of the cave thinking of Ada, recalling their moments of love. He pictures her in the studio, frowning over a desk of knobs and dials; he sees her in their bed at L’Ombrellino, Tatters tummy-up beside her, afternoon light slanting into her hair; then he sees her broken, sees her fighting, calls to his mind that last look between them, the little shake of the head. These memories tie a wire around his heart. Tosca and Antonio look at him as if he were a stranger now, Bruno and Elio struggle to keep up.

Maria Luigia is captured in a building on the Piazza Vittorio Emanuele on the 13th of May. The radio is discovered and destroyed. Less than a month later she is murdered by a firing squad in the yard of the Murate prison. Her body is returned to her cousins in the country and Esmond goes with Elio, who is undone, to stand in one corner of the graveyard of Porte Sante, in the shadow of a row of cypresses, and look across as her coffin is lowered into the earth. Her family wring and crumple on the cusp of the grave; the priest a magpie, hopping nervously, aware of the shadowy figures watching, some friendly, some not. Esmond and Elio leave quickly, before the end, by scrambling over the cemetery wall, down the steps in front of San Miniato al Monte, and into the waiting Bianchi. When they get back to the cave, Elio goes to
sit in front of the paintings. For all of them now, this has become a place of retreat. They can sense the end of things – disaster, victory, resolution – and they contemplate the two saints, together into the night, a sense of shared purpose stringing between them.

News of the fall of Rome reaches them in early June. The front is so close that Esmond fancies, lying in the cave at night, that he can feel the breath of English soldiers on his skin, the rumble of their marching feet in the rocks beneath. Soon afterwards, Pretini is released by Carità. The Professor brings him up the mountain to see them. The hairdresser’s face is unrecognisable, his mouth a twisted empty snarl without its teeth. He has lost an eye and the socket weeps yellowish fluid. His nose is flattened against his face. He tells them, calmly and clearly, about his time in the anonymous-looking building on the via Bolognese, of walls lined in spikes, the carefully reconstructed version of the
strappado
– a medieval torture device – the cat’s paws and crocodile shears and whips and thumbscrews. He tells them of Carità applying electric shocks to his gums, to his ears, to his genitals, while Father Idelfonso played Schubert’s Unfinished Symphony on the piano to drown out his screams. He tells them of the mock executions where a gun was placed against his temple and the trigger pulled, and how each time he was sure it was loaded, and the peace that came with that. Two Serbians that were captured by Carità have also been returned alive; blind, castrated, their tongues cut out, but alive. Bruno drives them to the nuns at Prato where Morandi, his doctor friend, does his best to make them human again.

The mention of Morandi brings Ada closer. He remembers the doctor’s words –
She gave birth, you know
. He thinks of the child that never was, the life that might have been. How much would he have loved that baby, knowing that half of it was her? That evening, alone, he sits in front of the paintings, very
close, so that he can see their ancient crazing, and rearranges the bright, broken pieces of memory, the chaos of vague possibilities that was their child. Someone said – St Augustine, he thinks – that memory is a place of palaces and caverns. His is only caverns now.

One night he sits in the dirt at the mouth of the cave with Creighton. They no longer light fires. Only the glow of his cigarillo, Creighton’s pipe which breathes tender red threads in its bowl. There are regular patrols – German and Fascist – whose searchlights sweep across the hillsides. The sound of dogs, shouts in the still air, engines toiling up rocky inclines. Esmond can tell that they’re getting closer.

‘Destroy yourself,’ Creighton says, tapping his pipe and relighting it, ‘that’s how you become a better soldier. It’s unnatural, I’m sure. Young chap like you, you feel like you’re the centre of the bloody world. But the story of your life isn’t about you any more – it’s about us. The Resistance, the GAP, the Allies. In war, individuals disappear – it’s a group experience. It’s why the Russians are so bloody good at it. Submit yourself to the collective will. Learn to think of yourself as a pawn, you see?’

Esmond lets a smoky breath out into the night. Somewhere, high above, a wolf. ‘I see it differently,’ he says, directing a cool glance at the Englishman. ‘We’re all individuals now. Now more than ever. My story – me and Ada, everything that happened – it’s simple enough, really. The war is a million such stories stacked on top of each other, entwining, competing. You find the right story, you find the truth, the war’s secret centre.’

The drone of aircraft. Creighton looks up. ‘Brits,’ he says. ‘We bomb at night.’

They smoke in silence until the planes have gone. With a nod, Creighton stands, taps out his pipe and disappears into the cave.
Esmond sits for a while longer, listening to the wolves and, further off, gunfire, explosions. Finally he goes into the dark interior, lies down next to Mary Magdalene and sleeps.

Time gathers to a bright point. Everything is in flux. Esmond, Bruno and Elio now barely pause for breath; they come back to the hills only to pick up supplies, reload their guns. Esmond feels a kind of joy each time they head down into the city, calm in the knowledge that each journey may be the last, and bring him closer to her.