A Harvest of Secrets(70)

She felt something sharp against her belly, warm liquid there. She opened her eyes to see the captain’s face contorted in agony, and, behind him, Enrico backing away, hands made into fists and pressed against his eye sockets.

She was able to slide halfway out from under the captain. He was gasping, spitting blood, grunting. She heard Rico let out a wail and only then saw the shaft of the pitchfork sticking out of the Nazi’s back. He was struggling to stand, on all fours, impaled, blood leaking out past the protruding tips of the three sharp tines. Holding on to the wall of the stable with one hand, he managed to get to his feet, and was reaching around behind himself with one hand to try and take hold of the pitchfork. He gave up, turned, grunting for breath, dripping blood, and took four wobbly, drunken steps out into the sunlight.

Enrico rushed over and wrapped her so tightly in his arms that he nearly knocked the breath out of her again. “Vita! Vita! Vita!” he kept saying, sobbing, soaking the side of her neck with tears. “Vita, I—I—I . . .” From just outside the barn, she heard a rattle of gunshots, and she wrenched her face toward the door, expecting to see Paolo and the deserters on the ground, and expecting, any second, to die in her brother’s arms.





Forty-Two

Paolo heard the scream, then the grunting noises—sounds a boar might make after it was shot—and he was torn exactly in two, leaning like a man wearing concrete shoes. He had risked one step, the bayonet centimeters from his throat, when he was stopped perfectly still by the sight of the German officer, glasses gone, face contorted, knees bending out crookedly to each side as he staggered from the barn. The man had barely made it into the courtyard when he fell straight forward on his face, a pitchfork—one of their own pitchforks—sticking up out of his back and wobbling like a tomato stake in a storm.

His men had turned, had started to move toward him, when Paolo heard a tiny sound above and behind him, a squeak of hinges, as familiar as the creak of the wagon wheels. He didn’t have time to look up at the small attic loading window before there was a burst of shots, impossibly loud, and the three Nazi soldiers were falling backward and sideways in bizarre contortions. Rifles thrown into the air, chests, necks, and faces erupting in fountains of red. They fell to the ground, two of them twitching and groaning, one completely still.

Paolo looked straight up and behind him and saw, at first, only the barrel of the automatica, then Antonio’s hands and arms, then the bottom of his jaw and his huge nose.

And then, as if in a dream, he watched Vittoria step out of the wide doorway, unsteady on her feet, straw in her hair, dress torn and stained at the front. Alive. Enrico was bent over double just behind her, weeping.

The officer was writhing on his face in the dirt, the pitchfork handle wobbling crazily. As Paolo watched, still frozen, Vittoria took three steps toward the man, put the small pistol to the back of his skull, and fired. Once. The officer’s head disappeared in an explosion of flesh and bone.





Forty-Three

Carlo awoke at sunset, angry at himself for sleeping that long, and, in the twilight, made it as far as a stream he knew. It was more a narrow river than a stream, spotted with deep, cool pools where he’d fished and swum with Giuseppe and Gianluca, both of them at war now. Il Sussurratore, they called it, the Whisperer, for the sound it made as it lost some of its force in summer. He drank handful after handful of water, crept back into the trees, crouched there and made sure of his bearings while there was still enough light. Across the river stood an expanse of harvested wheat field, and then a wide, gentle slope covered with the DellaMonicas’ hazelnut trees, planted in perfect rows. There was still that hill to climb—he could eat some nuts, at least, to give him strength—then more woods, then their own wheat field, and then a last rise, from the top of which he’d be able to see the manor house and the barn. Five kilometers, no more.

But as full darkness fell, the moon already high, he was struck by a deluge of bad thoughts. He would arrive back at the barn looking as filthy and ragged as a rabid fox. Enrico and Paolo would welcome him, Umberto would let him go back to work. Most likely the Germans and OVRA wouldn’t come to the vineyard looking for him, not for a time, at least. But what would Vittoria think when she saw him? What if he ended up spending the rest of his life working the grapes while she lived in the manor house, married to another man?

He stripped off his clothes—the worn-out shoes, the too-short Sicilian work pants and rope belt, the shirt with one torn, bloody sleeve—and washed himself in the cold river. He tore off a piece of the hem of the shirt and tried to fashion some kind of covering for his eye, but it didn’t work, and after trying it different ways, he threw the scrap of cloth angrily aside.

The bad thoughts had full hold of him then. Facing Vittoria, he felt, facing what might await him at the vineyard, would require more courage than climbing out of the foxhole beside Pierluigi. All this way he’d come, all these things he’d survived, and now, this close to the dream that had sustained him, he wasn’t sure he could summon the will to start walking again.

He’d rest then, gather himself, start for the vineyard at first light.





Forty-Four

Vittoria would recall those moments in the barn and the courtyard only in broken-up flashes. Still photos, framed and set in a line on some interior side table, they would haunt her, to one degree or another, for the rest of her time on earth. It was one thing to feel the clinging fingers of guilt every time she thought about the role she’d played in Massimo’s death, but something else entirely to have squeezed the trigger and blown Tobias’s skull into bloody pieces. It was something else entirely to feel the savagery in her when she did that, the fury, the desire to eliminate him from the earth. She’d dropped the pistol immediately, almost as if she wanted to go back to her other self; it landed in a puddle of bloody sand and gravel. She was aware of Enrico—heroic, marvelous Enrico—sobbing violently, clasping her right arm in both his strong hands; she’d have bruises there for a week. He was half hiding behind her right shoulder, as if he worried the Nazi would rise from the dead and seek revenge, or as if he, too, were shying away from the person who’d wielded the pitchfork, that other part of him, like that other part of her—vicious, murderous—planted, watered, and harvested by war.