A Harvest of Secrets(16)

“My father would turn them in.”

“Yes. If he knows.”

“I won’t tell him, is that what you’re asking? Of course I won’t. I can have Eleonora bring food out, if she knows.”

“She is the lover of one of them. She’s involved.”

“Eleonora?!”

He nodded.

“Then why are you telling me?”

“Because,” he said, and reached out to rest one hand on the head of the horse, as if to comfort, not Antonina, but himself. It seemed to her that he was biting down on what he really wanted to say, and she had an urge to step closer, take him by the shoulders, and tell him she needed to hear the truth, no secrets, no obsequiousness. “Because you are in a . . . position,” he said. “A position . . . to help.”

“How? With money? My father controls the money, not—”

“Two ways. First, you have the key to the storage room here,” he gestured toward one end of the building, “where your father keeps his hunting rifles and ammunition, some spare clothing. You have it, or you can get it and pass it to me. I could ask Eleonora to do it, but that would be making her into a thief, and so I won’t. The weapons will be borrowed and returned.”

“My father doesn’t use them anymore. Carlo used them. Carlo and Giuseppe and—”

“Yes, I know.”

Paolo turned his eyes away, then back. More hesitation. “There’s something else I have to ask of you. The man with the car, the guest—”

“Massimo Brindisi?”

Paolo nodded. “There is a need for him to visit here again.”

“For what reason?”

“I have been told that there is a need. Maybe your father could invite him? You could suggest it to him, but it would have to be done . . . with grace. Do you understand what I mean?”

She nodded, watching him. “There’s something else, Paolo, isn’t there?”

He glanced to the side as if in pain, then swung his rough face back so that he was looking directly at her. Something passed between them. She felt the skin on her arms lift and ripple, as if a cold breeze had skipped across it. “Speak, please.”

Old Paolo was pressing his lips tightly together, holding the words in his mouth. “There are two more things, Signorina. One, and then another. Two more.”

“Tell me.”

“Eleonora told me what happened . . . in the night. With . . . the, the friend of your father in your room. This Brindisi. Don’t be angry at her for telling me. She cares about you. I’m sorry, I would stop him if—”

“Paolo, speak freely with me.”

He nodded. “Yes. And, the other—I . . . There are German soldiers in the attic here,” he said suddenly. He lifted an arm above his head. “Boys. Very young. Deserters. I decided to let them stay here. Not long. I think . . . I . . . maybe . . . if . . .”

“And you trust them?”

“Sì, Signorina. I have a feeling from God that I should. They have pistols. They didn’t raise them against us, so I haven’t taken them away.”

“When did they come?”

“Tonight. Earlier.”

“And you fed them?”

“They were starving.”

“And it’s they who want the clothes, not the partisans?”

Paolo nodded, watching her intently.

“I’ll send the keys. And food. They’ll leave soon?”

“Soon, yes. Very soon, Signorina. I’ll try to send them to Father Costantino, in the village. He—”

“Works with the partisans, yes?”

“Uh . . . yes, Signorina. And now you know everything.”

Vittoria watched him and felt—how strange it was—on the edge of tears. At last, it seemed to her, one part of the wall between them had crumbled. At last, the truth was being spoken to her on this property. At last, she was something more than a princess in waiting.





Ten

On the morning after the German deserters appeared, the morning after his difficult conversation with the Signorina, Paolo awoke just at sunrise, his joints aching, and his mind caught in a sticky web of fear. His sleep had been broken into short stretches tormented by terrifying visions: Nazi jeeps racing into the courtyard, Allied bombs falling on the manor house and setting it afire. Lying awake in the darkness between dreams, he felt as though he were looking into the actual future.

He shook himself fully awake, stood up slowly on aching knees, and climbed the wooden ladder to the attic. There, tucked against the far wall, he found the three Germans sitting in a half circle. A bit of sunlight angled into the attic through openings around the edges of the small door they used for loading hay. Vittoria must have given Eleonora the key the night before, soon after they spoke, and Eleonora must have used it, because the soldiers were dressed in workers’ clothes that fit them poorly—the jackets, trousers, and shirts of the young men of the barn, who’d gone to war—and the Germans’ discarded uniforms lay folded in a neat pile on the plank floor beside them. Their boots were so badly worn and caked in mud that Paolo hoped they might be unidentifiable as German army boots. Maybe, as long as they didn’t speak, the men might pass for Italian workers. But, assuming they avoided capture here, and assuming he would soon send them away, where could they go? Toward what destination? Back to their mothers and girlfriends at home, where they’d be seen as traitors and cowards? To some imaginary place on the Continent that was untouched by war? He didn’t know if it was true, but he’d heard that Switzerland had remained neutral, so perhaps if the men could find their way to the Swiss border, and managed to sneak across, they could avoid starvation and survive. But Paolo guessed the Swiss border was five hundred kilometers away, and it would be fenced and guarded, he was sure. He felt a breeze of pity blow through his thoughts—a strange thing, because, until that moment, he’d always associated German soldiers with the purest evil. The Nazi occupation—growing by the week—had brought stories of rape and massacre, of inhuman torture of the innocent, and the Nazi soldiers he’d come across on his deliveries had strutted about like all-powerful demons, cold, superior, vicious. Now, for the first time—maybe because they were out of uniform, hungry, and terrified—he saw the three young men as human beings. Caught, like everyone else, in the bloody teeth of war.