The Secret of Santa Vittoria (28 page)

Captain von Prum enjoyed the ride. He was glad to be moving and he was anxious to begin putting his ideas to the test.

“And so begins the first phase of the Bloodless Victory,” the captain said, and Sergeant Traub nodded.

“We can find a place for ourselves in history up there, Sergeant,” the captain said, and Traub nodded again. And a grave too, he thought.

When the convoy was a mile from the road—it is a cart track, really, made for oxen and carts by the feet of oxen and the wheels of carts—von Prum raised his arm and signaled, and they came to a stop under the shade of a beech tree that for some reason had been allowed to stand.

“We're early, we must wait,” the captain said.

To the left of the road were low hills, and the captain and the sergeant got out of the motorcycle and walked across to the hill and went up it and when they were near the top they were able to see our mountain and Santa Vittoria on the top of it. A few of the clouds that had frightened the city that morning were over the city then, and for a moment it would be thrown into shadows and then the cloud would pass and it would spring back into the brightness of the sun so that from a distance it looked very clean and sparkling and to some people, since it is so high up and remote from the world down around its feet, even mysterious.

“That's it,” Captain von Prum said. “That's your city.”

“It's like all the rest,” the sergeant said.

“Except it's
our
city.”

He had binoculars and they were good ones and he could see things all along the road and up the road and among the terraces and he could even make out the faces of people who were gathered about the Fat Gate.

“There are people going up the road, a whole group of them,” Sergeant Traub said. His eyesight was keener than the captain's, and he had been handed the glasses.

“Our welcoming committee.”

“If I knew the language that well I could read their lips,” Traub said.

“I'll tell you what they're talking about. About the weather and about the grapes and about wine. It is all they talk about.”

The sergeant had moved the glasses down the mountain and along the road and on the cart track, near where it turns off the River Road, around a corner from it, he could see some obstruction in the road.

“They've put something on the road, sir,” Sergeant Traub said.

“Is there anyone around it. Any sign of anyone?” Traub studied the area with the carefulness of a good soldier. There was no sign of any kind of life.

“It's a cart. Just a cart along the track.”

It caused von Prum to smile.

“What a splendid Italian gesture,” the captain said. “Obvious, childish, annoying and ineffective.”

They started back down the hill toward the River Road and the convoy.

*   *   *

The men they had seen on the mountain were Bombolini and Tufa and the others coming from the Roman cellar. They were halfway up the mountain then, and none of them had said a word. They were too tired then and too disappointed. They had come that far, they had come that close to succeeding, they had licked it and so they knew the taste of it, and now it was denied to them. All of the pieces had fitted into place except the last one, the main one, the doorway to the wine.

“Let's not tell the people,” Bombolini said. “It won't do them any good to know.”

“Tell them,” Tufa said. “They know everything else. They have a right to know.”

Fabio was forced to smile at hearing the ex-Fascist putting his trust in the people. When they reached The Rest, the place where everyone always stops on his way up the mountain, they stopped as much from habit as from desire and looked back down behind them into the valley.

“Now you want to quit and I won't let you quit,” Tufa said to them.

“Why do you tell us now?” someone asked him.

“Because I hope the shock of the wall has died in you,” Tufa said.

“The shock of the wall will never die in me,” Bombolini said.

“If the Germans don't look in the entrance on their way up, if the Germans don't look in the entrance tonight, if the Germans don't look in the cellar tomorrow the wall will be built.”

“Ah, yes,” Bombolini said. No one wanted to believe Tufa. It was too much to believe and too exhausting to hope. “The Germans won't look in the tunnel. They'll go right by the tunnel and not look in.” He turned on Tufa. “You yourself told us how thorough they were.”

But the false wall was coming down. Even from where they were on the mountain they could hear the first of the bricks being dropped into the great copper kettles that we use here to blend all the wines and ingredients that go into our vermouth. The kettles, the most valuable property in Santa Vittoria, had been brought down the mountain to be hidden behind the wall along with the wine, so that they wouldn't be taken too.

The problem with the wall had been the bricks. They were not new, they were very old bricks, but they were bricks that had been bleached by several hundred years of sun and leached by thousands of winter rains and scoured by winds too numerous to be considered. As Babbaluche had said, they stood out in the darkness of the rest of the back wall like a monk in a house of pleasure. Now they were being dyed. The credit for this belongs to Old Vines. The bricks were being dumped into the huge copper kettles which had been filled with several hundred bottles of our best red vermouth, a painful way to use good wine.

Bricks drink. They absorbed the wine, they drank it into their open pores, and they turned a deep, rich, dark red, as dark and rich as the wine itself. While the bricks drank, the bricklayers were painting the rest of the wall around the opening with the wine so that when the false wall rose again, the bricks would blend and belong to one another.

“It's as I said,” Old Vines said. “The wine will save the wine.”

They got up from The Rest and were started back up again when Tufa saw the cart along the cart track.

“What is that?” he said. “Who put that along the road?”

“A cart,” Bombolini said. “My cart to be exact. I allowed Fabio della Romagna and the Cavalcanti boy to put it there this morning.”

Tufa's face was annoyed and finally angry.

“As a gesture of defiance, you know,” Bombolini said.

“If that cart makes them late, do you know that it will make them angry?” Tufa said. “Do you know they like to be on time? Do you know they hurt people for things such as that?”

“It was only a gesture, a small thing,” Bombolini said.

“So was the answer that the man gave them at Rocca di Camera,” Tufa said.

“They asked him which direction the enemy was and he said, ‘Why, I thought the enemy was you,' and for that they shot his wife and they shot his children and they allowed him to live with his joke.”

“I could go down and move the cart,” Fabio said, but Tufa told him there wasn't time for that now, and that it was better that no one be near the cart when they came.

They went up in silence after that. There were some people among the vines on the terraces and a few were working, but a great many of them had fallen asleep in the shade beneath the leaves.

“We should wake them up,” someone said.

“No, let them sleep. It will only confirm what they already think of us,” Tufa said, “that we're a bunch of lazy bastards.”

When they neared the Fat Gate some of the people came down the track to meet them.

“How's the wall? How does it look? Is it all grown up?” they asked.

Bombolini looked at Tufa and Tufa stared back at him.

“It still grows. They're still working on the wall.”

The people were astonished and frightened by what they heard.

“But they said…”

Bombolini shook his head.

“No,” he said. “They were wrong. The wall still grows.” It made him sad to say that. “I wish we had Mazzola back,” he said to Pietrosanto.

“I wish we had Copa,” Pietrosanto said. Although they had not done much work in recent years both Copa and Mazzola had once been the very best men in Santa Vittoria with stone and brick.

“You did what you had to do?” Bombolini said to Pietrosanto.

“Yes. The problem is solved. The Band is all taken care of.”

Bombolini put his hands over his ears. “Don't tell me,” he said. “I don't want to hear about it.” He looked at Pietrosanto with a new respect, however. “Was it terrible? Did you find it hard to do?”

“No, it wasn't hard to do,” Pietrosanto said, and then he stopped very suddenly, almost locked in motion, as if he had come face to face with an invisible barrier.

“Did you hear it?” he asked. “Do you hear it now? Quiet,” he shouted.

The people by the Fat Gate and the people around them and they themselves were quiet, and then they heard, all the way down the valley, not just one whistle but many of them, high and thin and reedy, across the valley and up the mountain, as high and clear as the cry of a wild bird.

They were coming.

They were moving on the River Road, they were rushing along the Mad River, they were looking for the turn to the cart track that leads to the foot of our mountain, they were taking the turn and coming into the valley.

Bombolini had run up the Corso Cavour for several hundred feet when he heard the reed whistles, but then he turned around and started back down the street until he found Tufa.

“Tufa?” he said. “What shall I wear?”

“Wear what you have on,” Tufa said. “Be yourself.”

“What should I say to them?”

“Nothing. Answer what they ask you.”

“But how do I act? I don't know how to act.”

“Like yourself,” Tufa said.

“But I don't know how I act.”

Tufa started up the Corso and Bombolini, since Tufa was walking swiftly, was forced to trot behind him.

“Tufa?” he called after him. “
You
know what to say.
You
know how to act.”

Tufa continued to move away from him.

“I want you to be the one to meet him,” Bombolini called to him. “I want you to take command. I'm not enough.”

Tufa stopped then.

“I'm not the mayor of Santa Vittoria, you're the mayor—the Captain of the People. Isn't that what they call you?”

Bombolini nodded. Still they could hear the fine sharp notes of the whistles blowing and blowing.

“The people chose you, Bombolini, not Tufa,” he said. And then he said something remarkable, which Bombolini never forgot and didn't understand. “You'll make a much better mayor than I could ever make.”

He was tired. The running had winded him and he could only walk now and do that slowly.

“They're coming, eh, Bombolini?” someone in a doorway said. He didn't turn to look.

“Yes, they're coming.”

“There's nowhere to run to now, eh?”

“No, there's nowhere to run.”

“All we can do now is stand here and wait.”

“It's all we can do,” Bombolini said.

 

W
HEN THERE WERE
ten minutes less than an hour left, since Captain von Prum had estimated it would take them fifty minutes to cross the valley and go up the mountain, he struck the flat of his hand against the sidecar, making a hollow
boom,
and raised his hand and shouted “Forward,” and the convoy moved out of the shade of the beech tree and onto the River Road. It is difficult to see the track that turns off to Santa Vittoria, since it dips down off the road so suddenly, but Sergeant Traub saw it in time and turned off the road a little faster than he would have liked, steeply down, and at the first turn in the track, far sooner than he had expected it to be, was the cart, and he was forced to apply his brakes so sharply that von Prum was almost thrown out of the sidecar and the truck behind them came close to hitting them.

Traub got off the seat to examine the cart. “I never saw one like it before,” he said. He spun one of the heavy iron-rimmed wheels. “Oak,” he said. “Like iron. It's as heavy as a tank.”

“Can we get around it? Can we lift it off?”

Traub told the captain no.

“Can you hit it with one shot?”

“I can hit anything with one shot if it isn't shooting back at me,” the sergeant said.

“I'm sure they're all looking from the town,” von Prum said. “This will be a lesson.”

They unhitched the light dual-purpose gun from the back of the truck and they ran it up onto the edge of the River Road to give Traub aiming room. He was careful about it, a little longer than von Prum would have wished, but he made the first shot good. It hit near the heart of the cart and it split the oak grain and a shower of splinters flew out. He hit it again and again after that, until it came apart and looked naked and disgraceful in the sand. They lifted the pieces up then and threw them alongside the track, and it was the death of Bombolini's Sicilian cart.

“It's been a long time,” Traub said. He was proud of his work. “I like the way it jumps when it cuts loose.”

The road was dusty, and when they had gone perhaps a half mile more across the valley they stopped to clean the dust from their eyes and mouths and to put on glasses. The truck behind them was buried in a cloud of fine white chalk.

“They should pay for things like that,” Traub said. He motioned back toward the cart. He had liked the feeling of the gun and the smell of oil and the powder and the hot metal under his hands and the feeling of satisfaction he had felt when the shell had entered the oak and split it apart.

“It's like with a puppy, sir. You aren't cruel, but you make them pay for their annoyances.”

A kind of reasoned ruthlessness, the captain thought. An enlightened ruthlessness. A civilized ruthlessness. He wrote that down later.

“You want to hit something else?” the captain asked.