A Harvest of Secrets(34)

“Why would I do such a horrible thing!”

“Because perhaps he shows the interest on you, like I do, the interest on a beautiful young woman. The sex interest. And came into your room in the night and caused you to screaming for help. Perhaps his sex interest makes you disgusted.”

“And then I did what?” Vittoria said, her voice rising and cracking and echoing out into the foyer. “Found a bomb in our house and put it inside his car in the middle of the night? Or mined the road leading to the city? Turned suddenly into a murderer? An expert with explosives!”

The captain was peering at her, burning his eyes into her. He reached across the small distance and put his hands on her knees. Vittoria flinched and pulled herself back against the sofa, but his hands followed her, crept upward a bit. “You are having the problem when men touching you, I think,” the captain said.

The second his hand touched the cloth of her dress, Vittoria’s courageous act abandoned her. She couldn’t speak.

“You know, of course,” the man went on quietly, “that I could taking you into the bedroom upstairs and do whatever I am wanting with you. Now. This minute. Have my men doing whatever they wanting. You know this, yes? Who is going to stop us, your father? The old man in the barn? The idiot?”

From the neck down, her body had turned to stone.

The captain held his hands on her for a long minute, then squeezed once with his fingertips, released her, and leaned back. “But your father was been kind to us, and perhaps even support our presence here. Who knows? Who can say about Italians?”

She watched him, heard voices outside the door. Paolo’s calm voice. Her brother’s, not calm at all.

“Plus.” The captain reached for his hat, and flicked the piece of straw onto the floor with one finger. There was a loud commotion now on the front steps. She could hear Enrico’s high-pitched wailing. He was calling her name again and again. Vita! Vita! Vita! “What I wanting to do with you,” the captain said, grinning, “what I imagining to do, I can do anytime. Anytime that I want. We can be here for years, drinking your father’s wine, and there are many women now for us for the time. Women come to us of their own reason, to show their gratefulness.”

To have something to eat, Vittoria thought, and very nearly said it.

“So for now, stay here in your peaceful wine palace with the idiot and the old man. But, if we know that you have anything to do on the death of our friend, or that you are helping to our enemies in any way—any way—then you find yourself in our house in Montepulciano, in the upstairs room, begging us to kill you. Begging us. You understand?”

She could manage only a frozen nod.

“Good,” he said, sliding the chair backward without standing up.

For a moment, her legs wouldn’t support her. She heard “Vita, Vitaaaa!” from the front porch, and Enrico’s voice gave her the strength to stand. The captain reached across and tapped the side of her face, once, lightly, with the back of his hand, as one might tap a disobedient child.

Then, in a blur, he was gone, there was the sound of engines beyond the windows, and Enrico had burst into the room, wrapped his arms around her, and pushed her back down onto the couch. “They hurt me, Vita. He killed Antonina, Vita. They made her dead! I’m going to kill him the way he killed Antonina. I will. I’m going to, when he comes to the barn again.”

“He won’t come again, Rico. I’m sure he won’t.”

“We have to take her now, Vita. Paolo said so. To the place. The . . . the . . . we have to take Antonina, can you help, can you?”





Twenty-One

When the two Nazi vehicles had driven out of the courtyard, and the wailing and weeping in the barn had settled into an undercurrent of miserable murmurs and sobs, Paolo’s mind cleared enough for him to realize that something had to be done with Antonina’s body. They couldn’t leave it in the stable to be swarmed by flies and gnawed by rodents. After thinking about it for a few minutes, he sent young Gaetano to a nearby estate to ask for help. It was a decision he made with reluctance, because the workers there—on the six-hundred-hectare hazelnut and semolina plantation owned by another noble family, the DellaMonicas—would be as tired as he was after a day of labor, and soon to sit down to their evening meal. But there was a thousand-kilogram dead horse in the barn and less than two hours left of daylight, and for centuries there had been an understanding among the workers of various estates that there were times when one group or the other would need assistance with a difficult job, repayment guaranteed.

Within half an hour, Gaetano returned with six of the ablest workers from the DellaMonica property—four men too old for military service, and two strong young women. While he waited, Paolo had tied the sturdiest canvas tarpaulin he could find to the back of the wagon and fed Ottavio a handful of hay. Enrico had returned from the manor house, and Paolo tried to gently peel him away from where he sat: in the stable with Antonina’s bloody neck across his lap.

Tugging, half lifting, using lengths of wood as levers, the six visitors and Paolo, Enrico, Gaetano, Marcellina, and Costanza were able to pull and push and slide Antonina’s corpse onto the canvas sheet. Paolo driving, the others walking alongside, they slowly dragged the dead animal out of the barn. There was no question of trying to bury or butcher her: it would have taken a day to dig and then refill a grave so large, and Enrico, already so upset, would have been pushed to the edge of sanity by seeing his beloved horse cut into pieces. The only reasonable option was to drag Antonina to the ravine along the flattest route they could find, and somehow slide her down into it. So they went along, Paolo guiding the horse, the heavily loaded tarpaulin scraping across the dirt, Enrico wailing, and the others marching somberly behind as if in a funeral procession for a human being.