Silver Stars (Front Lines #2)(90)

“Have you learned anything about those days?” she breaks in, seeing an opportunity to get away from radical politics.

“About Greenwood?” He frowns and seems to be looking in her eyes for the answer to a question. “What do you know of it?”

“Only what everyone knows, I suppose,” Frangie says.

“Mother hasn’t ever . . .” He lets it hang.

Frangie has a squirming feeling of discomfort. “She doesn’t talk to me about it. I know she was there at the time, and Daddy was up in Chicago visiting his sister.”

Harder has stood all through his long, fervent political survey, but now he sits on a moss-coated log so he’s at eye level with her. “Haven’t you ever wondered about it?”

“I’ve wondered, but . . . she’s always seemed like she didn’t want to talk about it.”

“I’m not surprised. She had a very bad time of it. She won’t talk, but others have, down through the years. I fought many a schoolyard skirmish because of it.”

“But . . . but because of what?”

“My God, you really don’t know.”

“I don’t . . . I don’t even know what you’re talking about.”

His face is serious now, grim even. His gaze meets hers and won’t release her, and the back of her neck tingles.

“Have you never wondered why I look like this?” he asks, almost pleading.

“Look like what?”

“My skin. My nose. My hair. My eyes.”

She stares at him, and the tingling spreads from the nape of her neck down over her shoulders and up her cheeks.

“Good lord, little Frangie, my sweet sister. Do I look like Father? Do I look even a little bit like Father?”

Frangie’s head is moving slowly, side to side in negation, in denial, in a preemptive, protective reaction to what she senses coming. She doesn’t want what’s coming. She begins moving to the music, trying to focus on the Robert Johnson song Willie is now playing.

Woke this mornin’ feelin’ round for my shoes,



But you know by that, I got these old walkin’ blues.



But Harder has never been one to read subtle cues. His voice is relentless, cold, determined to tell it all. “They caught hold of Mother. She was newly married, just seventeen at the time, and they caught hold of her as she was fetching groceries.”

“What do you . . .” But she can’t say more, her throat is swelling shut, her heart pounding like a great bass drum keeping a funereal time. Because all at once, she knows.

“She was raped, Frangie. Many times, by many white men.”

“Jesus, no.”

“She was close to death for weeks.”

“No, no, Jesus no, Jesus no,” Frangie pleads, imploring Harder through a screen of tears.

Harder takes her hand but his expression is remote. “Did you think Father kicked me out for my politics alone? No, although he has a fool’s unthinking rejection of the party. No, Knee-high, every time he looks at me he knows. My face is a constant reminder that I am not his son.”





29

RAINY SCHULTERMAN—GESTAPO HEADQUARTERS, NAPLES, ITALY

The slap is backhanded. The ring cuts her cheek, a new cut to join the dozens already there, some partly scabbed over, others fresh and oozing blood.

Her ankles are tied to the feet of the chair. Her hands are tied behind the chair back. Her left eye is swollen closed. Blood clogs both nostrils so she can only breathe through her mouth.

Her stolen black dress is in tatters. The collar is so saturated by both fresh and dried blood that it looks as if the fabric is rusting.

“Again, Hans.” The Gestapo officer has a soft voice, an insinuating, regretful, but slightly bored voice.

Hans is a big brute in a sweat-stained uniform, which he has covered with a long, white butcher’s apron. It protects his uniform from the flying sprays of blood that are an occupational hazard for Hans. He wears leather gloves to spare his knuckles, and he wears a fat gold and emerald ring, a ring that looks as if it was looted from a rich dandy’s home. Hans has shoved the ring down over his gloved pinkie. He’s an expert at the backhanded blow that will bring the emerald into contact with flesh. But this is a less artful, more brutal blow, a punch, a clenched fist not to her face but to the side of her neck. It snaps her head sideways and sends waves of pain into her shoulder and rocketing up through her brain.

For a while she is lost, wandering on the dreamlike border between nightmare reality and eerie, unsettling visions. She has tried to focus her thoughts on a single happy moment, her date at the Stork Club with Halev. But that memory has become fragmented, so she can no longer summon long passages of happy conversation and now can only hold on to snatches, moments, and then only for a few seconds at a time.

“Let’s begin again.”

“My name is Rainy Schiller,” she says, her voice whistling slightly through broken teeth. “Serial number—”

The slap is almost perfunctory this time. The Gestapo man has accepted that her name is Rainy Schiller. That she is from New York. That she is an American soldier. And he has memorized her serial number.

He has not accepted her lie that she is in Italy solely to meet an Italian Resistance member named Xavier Cugat. In fact, Xavier Cugat is a bandleader known for his Cuban rhythms. It’s not even an Italian name, but it was the first Latinate name Rainy had come up with. She’d thought of giving them Tomaso’s or Cisco’s name, but that sort of cleverness could turn around and bite her.