A Harvest of Secrets(3)
It was the flimsiest of acts, but what was Eleonora to do, challenge him? The nineteen-year-old serving girl challenging the middle-aged industrialist, a man who practically owned every judge in northern Italy? And what was she, herself, to do, Vittoria thought, further damage the tattered relationship with her father by accusing his best friend, her own godfather, of attempted rape, when she wasn’t really sure why he’d come to her room, what his intentions had been? Massimo would act shocked, gravely offended. Her father would stare at her for a few seconds, then shake his head. More female craziness. More disappointment in the daughter he’d raised to take her place in the family dynasty. Vittoria didn’t look very much like him, didn’t share his political views, and it seemed to her on some days that, beyond the fact that they were sheltered by the same roof, nothing at all linked them.
When Massimo left her room, still muttering his wine-soaked excuses, she closed the door and wrestled an armchair over to block it. She’d skipped breakfast and Mass this morning, claiming a headache. But her father had sent Eleonora to insist she join them for the midday meal, and Vittoria had obediently gone downstairs and taken the chair to his left, facing Massimo across the wide table, smelling his cologne even from this distance, glancing at the thin red scratch mark on the left side of his neck. Had she overreacted? Had Massimo been about to tell her something so important and shocking that he had to be drunk to say it, and had to be out of her father’s hearing? Starting to show gray at his temples, but handsome in his own fashion, the man was going on now about the possible invasion, though he had no son in the army of Mussolini, and, she guessed, if Italy fell, he stood to lose only that part of his fortune he hadn’t been able to transfer to Swiss banks.
“Between Il Duce’s army and the German forces, I don’t think the Allies have a chance of taking Italy.”
“They took Egypt,” Vittoria couldn’t keep herself from saying. “They took Libya.”
Her father glared at her. Massimo smiled indulgently, mysteriously. “True,” he said, lifting his fork as if to begin eating, then looking up at her from beneath his unruly black brows, “but only because the Axis supply chains were stretched thin. I’m sure you understand that, my beautiful Vittoria. Plus, defending one’s homeland is the equivalent of defending one’s property. It’s—”
“Or one’s body,” she said.
Another indulgent smile. Was he a rapist? Innocent? A loving family friend who’d wanted only a private conversation? “Yes, of course. Exactly. Which is why I feel confident in eventual victory. Totally confident.”
“In a Nazi victory, you mean.”
“Enough, Vittoria,” her father said. His cheeks were trembling. Arrabbiato, she thought—the masculine adjective—and she lowered her eyes and began to eat.
“She’s exactly like her mother,” Vittoria heard her father say, as if he were apologizing. “The same politics. A palace radical.”
“Yes, and Celeste was also beautiful,” Massimo noted. “I still sense her wondrous spirit during every moment I spend in this house.”
Vittoria looked up and saw him smiling at her. Such a confusing man! Full of praise for Il Duce when he spoke with her father, and yet best friends with her mother, who’d despised Mussolini with every fiber of her being. The two of them would sit together on the patio, conversing quietly and intently over coffee, and when Vittoria approached, they’d look up at her and smile and start talking about the weather, the vines, the price of bread in local markets, in a way that made her feel she’d interrupted something neither she nor her father was supposed to hear.
She tried to concentrate on the delicious meal. The two men went back and forth, piling one agreement upon the next, as if taking turns polishing each other’s shoes.
Il Duce’s generals will prevail.
Yes, of course they will.
The Americani will never be allowed to make landing on Italian soil.
Never. It isn’t possible.
And if they do, they’ll lose a million men.
Yes, yes, exactly, and be unable to fight their way this far up the peninsula.
Terrifying as it was to have German soldiers and military vehicles everywhere, shameful as it was to see Mussolini acting the part of Hitler’s younger brother—sending troops to foreign lands as if it were he, not the deranged führer, who commanded a fearsome war machine—her father and his friend had made their accommodations. Powerful men themselves, they shared an idolatry of power, seemed to see it as the defining trait of true masculinity. Praise for Mussolini decorated their every conversation—over a game of chess, at a meal, during a walk in the flower gardens. And so far, at least, they’d found ways to placate the Nazis. In her father’s case, regular deliveries of fine wine to the SS headquarters in Montepulciano had been enough to convince the Germans to let the grapes be grown and harvested, and the wine sold to those places of business that had managed to remain open during the war. Massimo Brindisi, not a public a supporter of Il Duce like her father, had a different kind of leverage: his factories, a bit farther north, were essential to the Axis war effort. The threat of starvation, the violence of Mussolini’s Blackshirts and OVRA, and the worry about Nazi retaliation were enough to keep his workers from striking, as they’d done at times leading up to the war years. Profit drove both men, she thought. Profit, luxury, power. Those were their gods, and that was the twisted view of life that had caused her mother to grow ill and die at age forty-nine, Vittoria was certain of it.