The Secret of Santa Vittoria (17 page)

“We don't intend to be heroes here. We don't want or need any heroes. We intend to do something a little better. We intend to survive. Thank you, Fabio, and now you get some rest.”

He tried to answer the goodnight, but he could not force his lips to say the words. The only words in his head then were the ones of Petrarch he had memorized at the academy.

Valor against fell wrath

Will take up arms; and then be the fight quickly sped.

For sure the ancient worth that

In Italians stirs the heart, is not dead.

It was midnight. It had been a long day. He was tired. He had come back to save Angela, and they had no desire to save their women. So be it. They wanted to accommodate themselves to the Germans. So be it. The day hadn't been all wasted. There was Gabriele, his lover. What was it she had said—someday you'll make someone a good lover. If he hadn't been concentrating so hard on the bicycle he probably could have shown her a thing or two. At last now he knew where his destiny rested. Up in the mountains.

And just then, since it was twelve o'clock, the cork clapper began to ping against the metal of the bell, weak and thin and colorless.

“Oh, God, what a people we are,” Fabio said aloud.

 

S
ERGEANT
Traub looked down in the Via San Sebastiano and shook his head. “It's not very much equipment, sir,” he said.

“It's what the colonel would authorize,” Captain von Prum said. “It's enough for our needs.”

In the street below them, parked up against the walls of the houses across the way, was one small truck capable of holding four soldiers in the back and two in the front. They would have to find a way to fit two more in. Behind the truck was a motorcycle with a sidecar that appeared to have been used in the First World War. Behind the truck, as an afterthought, trailed a small, battered 20-millimeter dual-purpose gun which had been designed for use against tanks and airplanes and people and which now was used mainly to frighten street mobs.

“In Russia they would have authorized us three times as much,” the sergeant said.

“But this isn't Russia, is it, and these aren't Russians, are they?” von Prum said.

The soldiers nodded and one said, in a low voice, “And thank God for that.”

“And we aren't going up there to wage war.”

“That suits me,” Traub said. The captain looked at him closely. It was possible that the sergeant had lost his nerve in Russia, although his record showed that he had been a man of not just ordinary courage but unusual courage. The officer and his sergeant were still in the process of feeling one another out.

“What do you think of the Italians?” von Prum asked, in a very offhand manner. It was, however, a crucial question to him. He had chosen all of these men because of their understanding of Italian and it had been part of his reasoning that a man doesn't learn another man's language in order to despise him.

“They're all right,” Traub said. “They're people. People tend to be people if you let them be,” the sergeant said. “They want their supper like I do.”

“And you,” von Prum said to Corporal Heinsick. “What about you?”

The corporal had been cleaning his equipment and his back was to Captain von Prum. The captain could see that he had hairs on the back of his neck like the bristles on the back of a boar. He had been cleaning a bayonet and it was cleaned and he slapped the blade against his knee and slid it into the scabbard with one harsh movement. There was violence in the man, a reservoir of anger, but it also seemed to be controlled. Von Prum had been worried about him.

“The wop is all right,” he said. “In some ways I like the wop. I just have no respect for them.”

One of the other soldiers nodded openly then.

“That's the word for it, sir—no respect. I saw them at Smolensk. They went charging across the field on the attack and then the Russkies stopped and held and turned around, and you should have seen those sons of bitches come. Excuse me, sir.”

“I've been in barracks before.”

“Those bright-green uniforms and those crazy hats with the feathers! You never saw anything like it.”

“They were fast though. You have to admit that,” Heinsick said. “You could have formed a fine Olympic squad from that bunch. I can live with them, I just got no respect for them.”

When the others nodded, the captain was well pleased. It was what he had wanted to hear.

“I am not one given to generalizations,” he told them, “but there are certain truths about certain peoples that simple observation will bear out every time.”

And he told them what these were. The average Italian, he told them, had no stomach for battle. It was not so much a matter of courage as much as having nothing worth dying for.

“What man chooses to die for decay and corruption?”

They all nodded.

“A basic observation, then, is that the Italian,
when given the chance,
will at every turn choose to manipulate and bargain and make deals to protect what he has rather than fight for what he has.”

“They fought up at Castelgrande last night, sir,” Traub said, in a voice as respectful as he could make it. “They had five or six dead up there.”

“And you missed four words I said, Sergeant,” Captain von Prum said. “What were they?” When the sergeant was unable to answer the captain said them. “
When given the chance.
Do you understand now? Captain Moltke marched into Castelgrande and began to take things without even asking for them. There was nothing for the people to do but to fight. That's going to be the difference with us. We aren't going to take, they're going to give.”

It was a secondary part of the captain's theory that the Italian, even when he could get something in a straight and direct manner, wanted to get it by conniving for it. For a time, he said, this can produce results, or seem to produce results, but in the end, because the Italian lacks self-discipline, when conniving is pitted against a direct but disciplined opponent, conniving comes apart.

“In one last word, then, every Italian scheme contains the seeds of its own destruction, the Italian himself.”

He wasn't sure that the men understood, but he knew they were impressed by his talk.

“They had fifty men at Castelgrande, sir,” Traub said.

“And we have eight,” von Prum said. “And eight is all we will need. But I want no man to go with me who has no confidence in me or in my approach.”

They backed him with shouts of approval. He was moved to smile then.

“This is the difference between them and us,” he told them. And they smiled. “Ours will be a bloodless victory,” Captain von Prum said, and he knew at once that this was the title of the report he would write.

BLOODLESS VICTORY

A technique for the conservation of manpower and equipment during the confiscation of enemy assets

A report on the occupation of the city of Santa Vittoria under command of Sepp von Prum, Capt., Inf.

He even took time to write it down while the men were still standing about him.

“The only red I expect to see is the red of their wine,” Captain von Prum told them.

*   *   *

When Fabio had gone and the bell had rung for the last time that night, Bombolini went back across the piazza, but all of the men had gone home. He turned toward the People's Palace and then turned away because, although he was tired, he knew he couldn't sleep then. He decided to walk through the city. He liked to walk through the city at night, because he thought of it then as his city and of the people as his people. They could sleep, because they knew he carried their burdens on his back. It was the price the leader paid and one he was happy to pay.

He walked down past the Memorial Glade, and it was sad to look at the trees. During the other great war the people had planted one beech tree in a little plot of land for each man who had gone away to the war. Each tree carried the soldier's name and a little picture of him. There was a belief that as long as the tree lived the soldier would live. But then people who had grievances against another family would sneak into the grove at night and cut down that family's tree, or at least take off a limb in the hope that a member of the family would lose a leg or an arm at least.

He went back up the Corso Cavour, because he knew he could sleep, and went inside the Palace of the People and to his room. Before going to sleep, however, he stopped at Roberto's doorway.

“Do you think the Germans will come here?” he said.

Roberto was annoyed. It was three o'clock in the morning.

“I don't know. I don't know about those things. I was in the air forces.”

“There's nothing for them here.”

Roberto nodded. “Only your wine,” he said, and he was sorry to be disrespectful, but he closed his eyes and fell back to sleep.

“There's no road up here at all,” Bombolini said. But the sound of Roberto's breathing told him that his argument was being wasted.

“I'm sorry. Sometimes I get to be a bore,” he said, and he went to his room and to bed.

When he woke again the sun still had not risen and so he knew he could not have slept for more than an hour at the most. Something had been troubling him and he found a candle and a flint to light it with and began going through
the
book.

“Men are apt to deceive themselves in great things while being scrupulous about the small ones.”

He felt a cold hand rest on his heart and begin to squeeze it. He put the book over his heart as if that might stop it. He knew what the words meant. It was only that morning that Babbaluche had said to him, “We lie about the truth, that's what ruins us here. And do you know why we lie about the truth? Not because we like to, but because we are scared to death of it. If we looked the truth in the eye nine out of ten of us would run to the graveyard and demand to be buried at once.”

He got up then and walked by Roberto's room and was going to wake him but decided against it, even though it was Roberto who had seen the truth.

Man sees what he sees and hears what he hears, he thought, and the few who don't are generally considered to be mad. He went downstairs and out into the Piazza of the People where one of the madmen was already in the piazza, on his knees by the fountain, screaming at him, Bombolini. “You son of a bitch,” he was screaming. “Do something. Do it now.” It was Old Vines.

Bombolini trotted across the rough stones. “Get up now,” he said. “I know. There's no sense in terrifying the people before we have a plan.”

Others had heard, however, the ones who get up in darkness before the sun even, and they were coming across the piazza.

“Tell them the truth,” Old Vines shouted. “Don't lie to us.” He got up from his feet then, his face as red as any wine he had ever aged, and turned to them. “The Germans are coming,” he shouted, “and they're going to take our wine.”

To the south there is an old Roman city that was buried in the ash of a volcano. Although no one here has ever seen it, people say that in this city there are figures of people who are locked forever in the ash at the moment of their doing. Those who were about to eat will forever be a spoon's length away from eating and those just reaching for the wine will never taste it. It was this way in the piazza in Santa Vittoria that morning. When people heard the words, they recognized them as the truth at once and they seemed, for a time at least, to be turned into stone and to be so stiff that if they moved they would crack and fall into pieces on the stones.

Bombolini was the first to move. He turned away and started back toward the Palace of the People.

“They're going to come and take our wine,” Old Vines screamed.

The mayor continued to walk away from them as if he didn't hear.

“What are you going to do?” someone shouted.

“What can we do?”

Bombolini closed the door behind him and locked it and went up the stairs and woke Roberto.

“You have to help me now. Don't let anyone in. I must rest. I must go to sleep,” Bombolini said. “It's all that I can do.”

*   *   *

Traub was one who rose with the sun. It was a habit that had begun on the family farm and continued with him into the army. He believed it was a sin to be down when the sun was up. “The early sun is gold in the mouth,” his mother said to him. “Yes, the bed is a thief,” his father would say.

He was worried. In two day's time they would be going up a mountain into an unknown city with one officer and two non-coms and six privates, all of them limited-duty soldiers because of previous wounds. He waited for an hour and finally knocked on Captain von Prum's door.

“I want to put a reconnaisance up in Santa Vittoria this afternoon, sir,” Traub called through the door. He could hear that the captain was up but he wasn't asked into the room because in the German army it wasn't considered good for morale and discipline for soldiers to see their officers in their underwear.

“No,” Captain von Prum said.

“But the book says, sir,” Traub said.

“I'm not interested in the book. This is not a military problem. It's a psychological problem. Do you understand that word?”

The sergeant said that he did.

“I want to make the strongest possible first impression on these people. If we arrive there with nine men it will impress them. These people lay great store on first impressions.”

“But, sir, if there's a road block…”

Von Prum opened the door of the room and looked at his sergeant.

“The German army has not yet become a debating society,” von Prum said.

Von Prum smiled, because the words had the same effect on the sergeant that they had had on himself the night before when Colonel Scheer shouted them at him. The colonel had had second thoughts about the wisdom of the bloodless victory.