The Secret of Santa Vittoria (42 page)

“I always get just a little excited before we start,” he said. “You never know what you're going to get.”

“And how they're going to react.”

“Just don't send us any heroes,” Otto called to Bombolini. “It's boring, you know, these heroes.”

“They come in with their jaws sealed together like this,” Otto said. He was on his feet and he imitated the face and the posture of the hero. “They set their eyes like this and they spit at you with them.”

“Then we put the clamps on them and give them a little juice and all at once they want to talk,” Hans said.

“They want to lick you with their eyes.”

“It's very sad and boring, actually.”

“It's very disgusting, really.”

“I will send you such cowards,” Bombolini suddenly said, surprising even himself, “men who will tell you such lies, who will beg you and try to please you in so many ways, you won't know what is true and what is false.”

“The more they talk the more truth they reveal, even when they're lying,” Otto said.

Traub came up from the piazza on to the terrace and called in through the door.

“Here comes one,” he said. “We've got one coming across the piazza now.”

They went to the door of the Palace of the People and they looked out at what fate had delivered to them. He had come down the steep hill from High Town and paused for a moment at the edge of the piazza. When he saw the Germans he made no effort to avoid them, but instead went directly toward them.

“A martyr. It's one of the martyr types,” Hans said.

They watched the man say something to Corporal Heinsick and then he began to bring the man across the piazza to where they were.

“You lied to us,” one of the Germans said to Bombolini. “You sent us a hero.”

At the stairs up to the terrace Heinsick stopped and then pushed the prisoner up the stairs.

“He says he's glad to see us,” Heinsick said. “I told him
we
were glad to see
him.
”

It was Giuliano Copa, the former mayor of Santa Vittoria. When he saw Captain von Prum he made a Fascist salute. “Long live the Duce. Long live Hitler,” he said. “What took you so long?”

“Oh, God.
This
kind,” Hans said. “The loyal, true Fascist.” He turned to the others. “He was really for us all along, you see.
Now
he will tell you.”

They laughed at Copa. His eyes grew large with suspicion and with fear. Bombolini made an effort to stay in the shadows of the room. When he saw the interrogation tools Copa began to shout.

“I am a loyal Fascist,” Copa shouted. “I am a member in good standing of the party. There has been a mistake—”

“Quiet,”
Hans suddenly shouted at him. It was easy to understand then how Hans had been entrusted with the kind of work he did. “There is always a mistake,” he said to the rest. “Take off your clothes,” he shouted at Copa.

“I don't understand,” Copa said.

He was brave. He was still in command of his voice, and his body gave no outward sign of fear.

“You don't understand the words ‘Take off your clothes'?” Otto said. “Does this mean anything to you?” He seized the top of Copa's shirt and in one sudden motion ripped it from his body.

When Copa was naked they placed him on the narrow wooden table and they strapped him to it with the leather straps.

“What are you going to do to me?” Copa asked.

“If I were to answer that,” Otto said, in a quiet, gentle voice, “you wouldn't believe me.”

“And then you'd lose the chance of finding out for yourself,” Hans said. They smiled.

“You take their clothes off,” Otto was explaining, “because it makes them feel defenseless. If you put a naked soldier in the front he won't fight, but if you dress him he will fight until he dies. It's all been tried. It's all been tested.”

“You have it down to a science then,” von Prum said.

“Oh, yes, it's a science.”

“Do you hear that?” von Prum said to Bombolini. “This is a science. It's the difference between you and us.” Copa was praying aloud then.

They moved the magneto closer to the table, and when Otto tested it for the last time the little clips that would be attached to Copa jumped about like little frightened toads.

“You never let the client feel human, do you understand,” Hans said. “You always look at them as if they were roaches, and when they talk to you you never understand them. In this way they feel all alone.”

“Like turds. Most men feel like turds deep down, you know. Like something disgusting that was dropped into the world,” Otto said. “Those aren't my words. The psychologists, you understand.”

“Did you hear that?” von Prum said. “The psychologists. It's all been figured out.”

Otto was leaning over Copa then.

“We don't want to do this to your body. It will be more terrible than you know. At the moment it begins you will want to die. You will beg us to let you die. Sometimes they do die. He looked up at Captain von Prum. “The heart explodes in the chest. The brain is shattered; shocked to pieces, you understand.”

“You are getting an education, Captain,” Hans said.

“We don't want you to die, and you don't want to die.”

To Bombolini's horror he saw that Copa was nodding yes, yes to the German.

“Sometimes they tell us the truth before we ever touch them,” Hans said to von Prum.

“And you allow them to get up?”

“No.” Hans seemed disappointed in his student. “We burn them. We put them on Sparky. How else would we know?”

“Now,” Otto was saying. He began attaching the wires to different parts of Copa's body. He would press the clamps so the teeth were bared, and then he would allow it to close around the flesh of a toe or an ear lobe or the nipple of his breast, like a wicked little animal.

“We only want you to
feel
this pain so that you want to tell us the truth.”

“Yes, I want to tell you the truth. Now,” Copa said. “I'll tell you what you need to know.”

“Now, you see, we'll see if he is telling the truth,” Otto said. He looked up at the captain again with an embarrassed smile. “What was it we wanted to know.”

“About the wine. Where is the rest of the wine?”

He asked and Copa said that he didn't understand the question and that he didn't know what they were asking him.

“Now?” Hans said. “Now,” Otto said.

He made a movement with his finger on the magneto, a very slight movement with the brass handle, and at that same moment Copa came flying up from the wooden table against the leather straps as if the straps must cut him apart and during this same instant he opened his mouth and after what seemed a long passing of time, a little lifetime of time, he released from the depths of himself a scream so terrible in its fear and agony and horror and worst of all, disbelief, that both von Prum and Bombolini found themselves shouting aloud in some kind of cry of recognition of the human animal.

 

T
HERE ARE
people here, since this is a history, who want a description of every action that took place in that room that morning, so none of it will ever be forgotten, an accounting of every burn and every scream, a listing of every tooth destroyed and nail ripped out, but it isn't needed or even desired, because as Bombolini told us later, he who saw all of it, when the assault on the flesh reaches the point where death approaches, all of it becomes the same.

Toward the end, it is deadening to everyone involved and, as the Germans say, in some ways even boring (if that sounds possible), because all the torture, no matter how administered, becomes the same and all the torturers are the same and all the tortured become the same man—so many shrieks, so many sobs, so many wishes to die, so much blood, so much urine, so much excrement, so much courage and so much cowardice—and finally it even took an effort for Bombolini to remember which of the men he had grown old with was lying strapped there to the wooden plank.

When they were through with Giuliano Copa (because there was no way to revive him) it was the turn of Mazzola, another of The Band. A few minutes before, Pietro Pietrosanto and Vittorini had released Mazzola from the cellar in High Town, and he went down, as he thought, to meet with Copa in the Piazza of the People. In the name of justice he should not have been allowed to see Copa's body lying against the wall before it was his turn to be put on the table, because it should be each man's right not to know the extent of what will happen to him until it happens. It is enough to say that so hysterical did Mazzola become—and Mazzola was no coward—that when they put the metal clamps down inside his throat and he had bitten off the end of his tongue when the electricity was applied to him, Mazzola had actually said “Thank you” to the soldiers. It was during this time that Bombolini found that he was crying for the people who had been his enemies.

He had tried to tell himself that what was happening to these men was only what they deserved, that in one sense true justice was being carried out and that they had brought upon themselves what they were receiving and that it was right and that it was the will of God or else God would not allow it to take place. But even as he convinced himself, he knew that what he was saying was a lie, because he knew that what was happening to Copa and Mazzola should never happen to any man and there was no reason in the world that could justify it.

For much of it Captain von Prum managed to stay apart from the suffering in the room. What was being done was not being done by himself. But before they turned to the old baker Francucci they went back to Copa once more, because Copa had regained consciousness.

“This is the time to get them,” Hans said. “If there is anything to get. I only do this because you insist the wine is here.”

“The wine is here,” the captain said. But he found himself wishing that they would go on to someone else who would break more easily rather than return to the wreckage of the man Copa.

“Sometimes a child with a pair of squeezers can extract a confession when a man reaches this state,” Otto said. “You let them cool, and when you come back, before you say a word, they are talking.”

After that they did things with the blowtorch on Copa's body that cannot be written down. After the torch they cooled him with water. He was still conscious and they put the funnel in his mouth so that it went far down his throat and they bent his neck back and brought him to the point of drowning.

“He's too brave,” Captain von Prum said. “My God, some people are too brave for their own good.” He did something unlike himself. He went to the table where Copa was drowning and began to shout at him. “What are you doing to yourself? You have no right to be this brave.” He turned to Bombolini. “In the name of God, Bombolini, tell him to tell us.”

Bombolini could only hold his hands palms upward and turn away. “Do you think if there was anything to tell you that I wouldn't have told you now?”

With the wires that brought Mazzola surging up against the leather straps, turning the voltage higher and higher, placing the clamps in places they had never tried before, in ways and combinations that are not believable and which we have come not to believe, they brought Mazzola up to the doorway of his death.

“Do you still insist there is wine?” Hans said.

“There is wine,” von Prum said.

So they began to treat Francucci. We have since learned how valuable it is, in a situation like this, to be a coward, and perhaps it is a good way to go through the world. By honestly being a coward, how many things a man is spared and how little is expected of him. Before they could ever make Francucci feel what they wanted him to feel he had fainted, several times. They threw Francucci along the wall with the others. Although he suffered very little, Francucci was the most convincing of all.

“If there was wine this one would have told us,” Otto said.

“Exactly where and how much and how we could get to it and could he lead us,” Hans said.

They took off their aprons and rubber gloves; they were damp with sweat and they were tired. One of them looked at Captain von Prum.

“Either there is no wine or we have failed.”

“And we have never failed.”

“What is there for lunch?”

“And we have never missed our lunch.”

“However, you are entitled to five and you will get five.”

“I want my five,” Captain von Prum said.

“You have an appetite for this,” Otto said. “But five is the limit. We never go beyond it. This isn't the only work we do today. We go on to a place called Scarafaggio.”

“I
know
the wine is here.”

“All right,” Otto said. “You're going to
get
your five.”

The two young soldiers glanced at one another, and it was meant to be seen by the captain. It was a form of controlled contempt that was fitting for anyone who was not himself a member of the SS police.

It was during the time that they ate that Bombolini learned that the Red Flames, who had been held in the cellar with The Band, had gotten out and were on their way down from High Town into the Piazza of the People. There was Fabio and Cavalcanti the Goat and the young sons of Guido Pietrosanto and Tommaso Casamassima.

“There's no dessert, eh?” Hans said.

“All right,” Otto said. He got up and washed his hands in a bowl of water. “This will be our dessert then.”

Bombolini was unable to turn and look at them.

“I suppose you two are also members of the Fascist Party. Would you like to show me your cards and medals first?”

“I am a citizen of the Italian nation,” Fabio said.

Bombolini felt his heart try to break with blood.

“Take off your clothes,” Hans shouted.