A Harvest of Secrets(61)

That was as far as he could go. Amazed at himself, he buried the rest of it, the most important part. All the laypeople he’d known and kept the secret from since those days, more than twenty years! Now, half-broken by the series of horrors he’d been living through, he’d chosen this person to hear it! His legs were trembling from the knees down.

“Who else have you ever told?”

“No one.”

“No one?”

Paolo’s hands were squeezed into fists. The package, held between his forearms, was shaking back and forth. The truth, the truth, the truth now. “I told the priest who used to be here, who left. Father Xavier. In confession.”

“And this priest? Costantino?”

“Yes, also in confession. He’s forbidden to tell anyone.”

A curt laugh. Antonio shifted his weight but kept his face forward and his mouth pressed into a grim line. “Costantino is no good,” he said quietly after a time.

“How, no good? He’s a priest!”

“He told someone. That someone must have told someone else—your Signore, maybe—who told someone else, who told me.”

“But . . . in confession! How could he?”

Another one-note laugh, mean as sickness, then a shake of the head. “And you, an old man,” Antonio said quietly. “To say something like that.”

“Yes, old, old, and a sinner! But I don’t understand. I don’t understand anything. Kill me, if you’re going to kill me, if you work for the Germans. Or if you think I do. Or if the Signore wants me dead. Let me start to pray, and then kill me.”

“The priest works for the Germans, not you. Not me. Not Eleonora. And your Signore cares about no one but himself. He’s a Nazi sympathizer, and always has been. A stupid devil.”

Paolo squeezed his eyebrows down, closed his eyes, tried to force his brain to function. “The priest?” he managed to say. “But if the priest works for the Germans, then Brindisi, the Signore’s friend . . . the man we killed—”

“You killed him. A good man. It was a mistake, a trick.”

“How? Who?” Paolo was slamming one fist down on the top of his thigh. The parcel was knocked sideways, and he barely caught it before it fell to the floor.

“You might be careful with that.”

“Tell me!”

“The priest works for the OVRA.”

“Mussolini’s police? The torturers? How do you know?”

“I know, that’s all. I have a very tall friend who figured all this out. And, as I hope I don’t need to tell you, the OVRA works with the Germans. Did you ever wonder why a brilliant Milanese priest was sent to serve the little church in Gracciano and its uneducated parishioners?”

“Sometimes, yes, I—”

“Your good priest was sent there, to that little place, for a reason. Your vineyard is on their bad list.”

“But why? But how can that be?”

“Perhaps because your Signora was friendly with the communists from Montepulciano, also on the bad list, some of them now dead. Your priest was sent here to spy, to see who was loyal to Il Duce, and who wasn’t.”

“A communist?! She wasn’t a communist! She told me she wasn’t. She cared about us, that’s all. She was the one rich person in my life who cared about us. And I talk to the Signore maybe one time in a year! Always about the wine, the grapes, the olives.”

Antonio spat to his left out the open window and turned his face forward again. “You live on the surface,” he said. “The grape vines, the hazelnut trees, the tomatoes, the peppers, the olives. Underneath that surface there are moles, mice, rats, worms, beetles, snakes. You try to be good. You do what you’re told. The moles and mice and rats and snakes don’t care about being good. They’re doing things you can’t see, chewing the roots of your goodness, eating holes in the walls of it.”

“Speak plainly to me,” Paolo demanded. “Where are we going? What are we doing? Who is bad and who is good?”

“Your priest was sent here to pretend to be a partigiano. And he’s very good at it. Very, very good.”

“How do you know this?”

“Because he made one mistake.”

“What mistake?”

Silence.

“Tell me!” Paolo demanded.

“This Brindisi was driving home in Montepulciano after visiting your Signore, his good friend. He took a side road because the main road had debris from the bombing. And who did he see coming out the back of the house where the SS stay?”

“Father Costantino?”

“Exactly. And he made the mistake of mentioning that to your Signore. Eleonora was serving them food. She heard him. Maybe your Signore mentioned it to the priest, possibly in passing, by accident, or maybe on purpose, who can say? Possibly he said, ‘Father, did you go to the SS house in Montepulciano?’ And the priest said, ‘No, of course not. Why do you ask, Umberto?’ And he said, ‘Because my friend Massimo said he saw you there. Were you giving confession?’ ‘No, no,’ the priest said, ‘I never went there, to the Nazis. Why would I go there, Umberto?’ But by the time of that conversation—if there was such a conversation—the priest already knew Massimo Brindisi had seen him—which would be dangerous for him—and so he’d already arranged to have the man killed, and he was happy to have you be the killer. The conversation with your Signore was only a confirmation, something that made him certain it should be done. You see now how things work?”