Silver Stars (Front Lines #2)(78)
They had summoned help, and in the end she’d been half carried, half dragged to a church and given over to the care of hard-faced but kind nuns. A day earlier and they would have found her raving in English as the fever twisted her mind into pretzels of illogic. But with clean water and bites of bread and cheese, she had managed to stick to Italian.
It wasn’t Italian that would fool a local but for the fact that Italian has so many dialects and regional accents. She told the nuns she was from the Venezia area. That she had come south to visit her dead husband’s commanding officer in Rome, but that he had turned her out without so much as a glass of wine or a hundred lire.
The nuns believed her, or pretended to. The nuns had fed her and bathed her and washed her filthy mourning weeds.
She had concealed her guns—the silenced .22 and the gun that had chafed her thighs so cruelly—in the cave. She had transferred her suicide pill to her stolen dress and it had, to her amazement, survived a thorough washing. And she still had money, concealed in the false bottom of the purse she had kept.
With her strength recovered, Rainy had stayed with the good sisters until the reverend mother had suggested that she should register with local authorities to avoid any problems arising.
Rainy had taken this as a sign that it was time to move on. In the night she took bread and cheese, several tins of sardines, and two bottles of wine, then she left two thousand lire—which she believed to be about twenty dollars—pinned with a note that said simply, grazie, and snuck away.
She retrieved her weapons and walked up into the hills outside Genazzano, looking for and eventually finding an abandoned stone house that leaned back against a thirty-foot escarpment. The back wall of the house was the cliff face, rock and dirt. She could easily see why the house had been abandoned—there was a two-foot hole in the roof where a slab of stone had fallen from the escarpment. The rock still sat there like an odd artwork in the single room. The hole in the roof at least let in sunlight, which was pleasant until the autumn rains started, and then the entire room could be flooded an inch or more deep.
Not pleasant, not in the least, but better than the alternative. And surely the Allied landing would come soon.
As she walks into town, Rainy keeps her head down and avoids eye contact with other people on the street. Genazzano is a small, hilltop village of no great distinction, cobbled streets, faded apartments and homes, with few shops beyond the necessary. The limestone walls still bear the iconography of the now-deposed Mussolini—portraits, slogans, exhortations—but these had all now been defaced. Mussolini no longer ruled Italy, the German army did.
Though Rainy avoids contact or conversation her presence is of course known to the locals. Strange women with “Venetian” accents simply don’t appear and take over abandoned properties in small towns and go unnoticed. But small towns have a habit of secrecy, especially when it comes to the police, and with the police now lacking all authority she feels she might be safe, at least from that direction.
Rainy enters the bakery, the panificio. She waits her turn behind two other women, nods to the baker’s clerk, who says, “Signora?”
“Pane, per favore.”
There is only one type of bread currently available—a foot-long, flattened dome made of equal parts wheat and sawdust—and no one is allowed to buy more than one. But the formalities must be observed, and she must state her preference as though she has a choice. Rainy takes her loaf of still-warm bread and crosses the narrow street to the drogheria, the grocer. It is a small, dark shop with few shelves and even fewer things to be found on those shelves. She gathers a can of sardines, a packet of dried beans, pasta, a can of tomatoes, and a single garlic bulb. She is running low on cash and is very careful to husband it, but the grocer has been keeping his customers alive on credit so he is always happy to see her and her lira notes.
Since arriving in Italy, the land of fabled foods, Rainy has lost twelve pounds between the fever, her constant hunger, and the exercise of walking to and from town, as well as her optimistic and probably doomed effort to revive a long-neglected garden. She is thin but not weak. If anything, Rainy has hardened—there are few better exercises than climbing hills.
And she has perhaps hardened in mind as well, or at least deepened. Long, long days and nights with no one to talk to, no books, newspapers, or radio have forced her to think more deeply about many things: the war, God, her family, Halev, her future.
She is contemplating college as she climbs the long slope back to her borrowed home, shifting the net bag from hand to hand every now and again. The pistol, retrieved from the cave, is still strapped to her leg and she’s quite used to it now, would feel naked without it.
Back at her temporary abode, Rainy uses the rusted knife with a broken-off tip she’d found in a drawer to cut off a hunk of bread. She slices a wedge of cheese, considers the sardines, and decides to save them for later. Instead she piles the cheese and a half dozen olives on her slab of bread, sticks an opened bottle of red wine under her arm, and goes outside to eat atop a stone wall beside the well. The weather is fine, just a bit chilly but sunny and very clear.
A bite of cheese. A bite of bread. An olive. A swig of wine.
“Life could be worse,” Rainy says. She has long since stopped worrying about talking to herself, though for safety’s sake she talks to herself in Italian.
“It will be worse soon,” she answers herself, taking on a glum tone. “You’re down to three thousand, four hundred and seventy lire.” Perhaps thirty-five dollars in round numbers, and the prices are rising as the shortages worsen and as the authorities have ceased to show much actual authority against price gouging and profiteering.