A Harvest of Secrets(28)

But Paolo knew it wasn’t the barn, and, though their planes were passing overhead more and more often now, he knew it wasn’t the Allies, either. For a moment he wanted to order Marcellina and the others to keep working, but that would have given everything away. And it was too late, in any case: the children had already started sprinting toward the top of the hill so they could see where the smoke was coming from, and their mothers were hurrying after them. He was left there with Gennaro Asolutto—who sat quietly in the wagon, a loop of rosary beads in his gnarled fingers—and with the most horrible feeling he’d ever known. When you kill another person, you kill a part of yourself, Gennaro had said. Your soul bears a stain afterward. Forever.

Slowly, as if holding a heavy sack of hazelnuts on his spine, Paolo climbed up onto the bench seat, rapped the reins once on Ottavio’s hindquarters, and brought the half-loaded wagon as far as the top of the hill. From there, they had a clear view down over the vine-covered slope. Asolutto let out a grunt, as if he’d been punched in the belly. Paolo felt as though he was about to vomit. Beyond the manor house, just past the wrought iron gate at the vineyard’s boundary, a few tongues of flame and a billowing column of smoke marked what was left of the beautiful macchina. Only its skeleton remained—the tires and interior on fire, pieces of the roof and doors and sparkling bits of glass scattered in the weeds to either side of the road. Father Costantino had said it wouldn’t happen until the bomb was thoroughly heated, wouldn’t happen until the car was far from the property. Perhaps, Paolo thought, in his haste and fear, on his back in the dirt in the middle of the night, he’d attached the explosive incorrectly. Or perhaps God had wanted him to see what he’d done, so the deed would haunt him forever.

“Una cosa,” Asolutto muttered. A thing.

Paolo couldn’t turn his eyes away. The children had sprinted downhill as far as the vegetable plot, then stopped and were standing there, arms at their sides. The women, holding up their long skirts and hurrying behind, were screaming for them to get no closer. The Signore and both house girls, Eleonora and Cinzia, had come outside onto the patio, the Signore still as a tree trunk, the girls with their hands to their mouths, weeping. Paolo looked for Vittoria, and for a moment was afraid she’d been in the car, too. But then she stepped onto the patio, staring with the others at the burning wreckage, and he saw her turn and look at the children, then at the mothers, and then lift her eyes up farther, to the top of the hill, searching, he knew, for him. Paolo forced himself not to look away. Before that moment, even with all the sins he’d committed in his life, venial and mortal, he’d never felt so horribly soiled. Now, not only had he killed a man—murdered him—but, and this was so much worse, he’d involved this pure young woman in the murder, made her an accomplice. She’d never see him the same way again, perhaps even feel guilty enough to tell her father who it was that had convinced her to encourage his friend to visit. She, herself, would be tainted for the rest of her life. For a few seconds, before Vittoria whirled around and hurried back into the manor house, Paolo tried to tell himself that the Signore’s powerful, fearless friend had been an evil man—why else would the priest have given such an order? And look what the man had tried to do to Vittoria in the night! But it didn’t work. A blanket of guilt had been draped over him now: nothing could justify such a sin.

Beside him, Gennaro Asolutto spat into the weeds, started to say something, then pressed his lips tightly together.





Seventeen

Vittoria left the others on the patio and climbed the stairs to her room. The two windows there faced in the opposite direction from the smoking ruin—out over the courtyard, the vegetable garden, and the vines. But, looking through one of them, she could still see the women with their children, and, farther up, Old Paolo and Gennaro Asolutto in the wagon. She was glad her brother had wandered off early that morning, as he liked to do, and was probably exploring the fields and woods that led toward Cortona and the central mountains. He could go like that, alone, for the whole of a day, always finding his way home for the evening meal. Although it was sometimes difficult for him to explain the encounters, Enrico had told her many times that, in the high forests and meadows there, he met with witches and spirits. They talk to me about God, Vita, he’d say. They show me where the walnuts and berries are, so I don’t get hungry in my belly.

She stepped away from the window and lay on her bed, eyes open. Automobiles didn’t simply blow up by themselves, she knew that. She understood what she’d done—felt it in the very core of her spirit—and knew what Paolo, or someone he worked with, had done, too. The partigiani getting their revenge. She wondered if her father would connect her to the killing, and, while she did feel the dark weight of guilt in her bones, she felt something else, too, in equal measure. Tobias, the disgusting SS officer, was at the center of this “something else.” Before her trip to Montepulciano, evil had been an abstraction to her. She’d heard about Mussolini’s Blackshirts torturing his opponents, and about the kidnapping and killing of Matteotti, the one member of Parliament who’d stood up to him; the alignment with Hitler; all kinds of Nazi atrocities. And she’d believed those things were real, of course. And yet, she saw now that the life she lived, the fine wine and servants, the leisurely days and luscious meals, had been like a soft fur coat protecting her from the horrors of the war. She knew—the death of her own mother had shown her—that there was suffering and pain in life. But until the Nazi had grabbed her leg as if she were an animal, she’d been protected from that at some level, in some way.