A Harvest of Secrets(69)
They crested the rise and started downhill, past the vines. Paolo was praying that they’d see Vittoria, because she was the one who should tell Enrico about the Signore, she was the only one who could really calm him when he was in a mood like this . . . and because Paolo was desperately hoping she hadn’t decided to abandon them, too, and that he could convince her to quickly put together a bit of food and a change of clothes, and leave with the rest of them.
As they neared the base of the slope—Paolo with the reins in his hands, Eleonora beside him, Antonio next to her, Enrico standing in the bed, practically talking into Paolo’s ear—he did see Vittoria. She’d come out from behind the smaller barn—the doors were open there—and was standing in the courtyard, watching them. She waited for them to pull to a stop at the doorway of the larger barn, Ottavio snorting and shaking his head, as if he, too, were upset at the change of plans.
The expression on Vittoria’s lovely face made Paolo feel that someone was using a pair of shears to cut his intestines to pieces.
He told Eleonora and Antonio to get ready. Just that, Preparativi. Not get ready to leave, just get ready. He didn’t want to have to explain to Enrico why they were leaving, and he was hoping against hope that Vittoria would join them. Eleonora hurried toward the manor house, Antonio pounded up the stairway of the barn, and Enrico, still talking, disappeared into the barn’s ground floor, headed for Antonina’s stable, Paolo guessed, a place that, along with the ravine, had become a kind of shrine for him now.
Paolo kept Ottavio hitched and tied the wagon just outside the barn door. Without a word, Vittoria went into the barn and brought out water for the trough and a handful of hay. Those errands done, they were left standing, facing each other, in front of the open doorway.
Vittoria was staring at him with great intensity. “I have something very difficult to ask you,” she began.
Paolo nodded, a dozen possibilities flying across his mind like birds that had been startled in a pasture. Was she going to ask him to stay and see to the grapes? To leave and take her and Enrico with him? To accompany her to Viareggio—a trip of at least three days—to confront the Signore?
But, after a terrible, two-second hesitation, she surprised him by pronouncing a sentence he would never forget: “I’ve been reading my mother’s journal.” And then, before he could react in any way, she added quietly, but with an intensity he’d never heard in her voice, “Tell me, are you Enrico’s real father?”
He stared back at her and could feel his whole body beginning to tremble, soles of his feet to scalp, mouth, hands, shoulders. A shaking man. All this time, he thought. All this time. He managed one word, “No”—she seemed to think he was lying—before they heard the awful sound of vehicles racing through the gate, then turned and saw them skidding to a halt in the courtyard dust. A German army truck—gray cab with the iron cross painted on it. And a military car with a familiar face showing through the windshield. Before either Paolo or Vittoria could move—and where could they have run?—the driver jumped out of the truck, another soldier climbed out of the passenger side. A third soldier, riding in the back, pulled three men there roughly to their feet—the deserters—and pushed them so hard that they jumped, handcuffed, off the back of the bed, stumbled, fell in the dirt, then staggered to their feet again. Hands behind their backs, faces bruised, blood on the clothes they’d been given during their stay at the vineyard, they looked like skeletons wrapped too tightly in battered skin.
At the same moment, out from behind the wheel of the jeep stepped the bespectacled captain, his perfectly pressed uniform making the trio of deserters look even more ragged, as if they were half-human, half-alive. He said something to his men in German and then switched to his pitiful Italian. “But we wait before shooting them. I have the business with the princess, and I want the others to listen.” Two quick steps, and he had hold of Vittoria by her ponytail and was dragging her toward the barn. Paolo lunged toward him, got as far as putting a hand on the captain’s shoulder before one of the soldiers struck him in the chest with the butt of his rifle and sent him flying over onto his back in the dirt. He got to his feet, clumsily, with an old man’s movements, barely able to take a breath. The soldiers pushed him and the three deserters back against the barn wall, then stood two meters away from them, rifles pointed.
One of the deserters beside him began muttering what sounded like a prayer, spoken through sobs. Paolo was frozen, wanting to run into the barn and pummel the Nazi captain, but frozen, coated in terror. Half a minute passed. His legs were shaking so forcefully he could barely stay on his feet. The German deserter beside him was praying, sobbing, the others with their backs against the wall. One of the soldiers stepped forward and pointed his bayonet at Paolo’s throat. The man was grinning. Five seconds passed. And then, from inside the barn came the most hideous sounds he had ever heard in his life. A piercing scream, then grunting noises. The deserter closest to him collapsed in the dirt.
Forty-One
Countless times since her first terrible encounter with the SS captain, Vittoria had imagined being assaulted by him. The vision had obsessed her, invaded her dreams, but in her imagination, the assault had always occurred in her bedroom, and she’d always pictured herself fighting him off, as she’d fought off Massimo. From the time she’d taken it from her father’s fingers, she’d carried the small, loaded pistol with her wherever she went—to the convent, to the dining table at breakfast, even into the bathroom. Somehow, though, from the moment the captain had stepped out of his jeep and come toward her, nothing happened the way she’d imagined. It was the speed that caught her most off guard. Tobias was upon her in two seconds. She felt him take hold of her hair and yank her backward, she sensed Paolo trying to help, saw him being struck, but the Nazi was pulling her violently into the barn, and she thought only of trying to stay on her feet. He dragged her across the dirt and threw her so roughly down in the straw of Antonina’s stall that all the breath went out of her. Another second and he was lowering himself on top of her. She did try to reach for the pistol then, tried to get her right hand into the pocket of her dress, but his weight was on her, his tobacco breath in her face, her dress already up over her knees, his left forearm pressing down against her right elbow. She fought, but she could tell how useless it was—he was so much stronger. She bit at his glasses and felt one lens crack between her teeth, but it only made him press down harder against her, tearing at the front of his pants now, spitting, grunting. Lips bleeding, she closed her eyes and started to pray, and at that moment she felt the captain’s whole body go suddenly rigid, and heard him let out the most horrible scream. And then a series of grunts as if he couldn’t catch his breath.