That told us all we needed to know. Flint hit him again, on the other cheekbone, then wiped his. 45 with a dishrag, and left. Under the floor, where the radio had been hidden, was the portrait of Il Duce.
The Pazzini family was hauled away in a truck, their little girl in tears at the sight of her father’s face. I felt bad for her. I felt bad for the little girls back in the States who’d be crying when they heard their fathers were dead, killed in a field outside Anzio. I felt bad all around.
“What will happen to them?” I asked Luca as he halfheartedly searched through the house.
“They will be sent back to Naples. A trial for the father, perhaps a displaced persons camp for the woman and children.”
“He must have been a die-hard Fascist.”
“Many of these people are. You know Mussolini settled this area with them. They hate you, and they hate us more for fighting with you.” He tossed a pile of books off a chair and sat.
“Must be hard,” I said, taking a chair myself.
“At first I looked forward to this assignment. I thought we would be bringing law and justice here. But instead, now that General Lucas is not moving inland, we have received orders to remove all civilians.”
“Everyone?”
“Yes. First we have to track down the remaining Fascist spies and make sure they do not escape. Then all nonessential civilians will be shipped back to Naples. The entire Anzio-Nettuno area, evacuated. For their safety, the general said. Because of the bombing.”
“He’s right, you know. Especially now that the Germans won’t have observers in our midst. The shelling is not going to be as accurate. Good news for us, bad news for civilians.”
“Yes, yes. But I did not expect to spend this war putting civilians in camps, for both sides, no less.”
“It’s not quite the same, Luca.”
“No, but neither is it combat, where a man can be tested. What shall I tell my children? That I helped run a concentration camp, then worked for a capitano who was corrupt, before evicting thousands of Italians from their homes?”
“What happened, Luca? On Rab?”
“You have to understand, when the camp was first set up, it was to house partisan prisoners. Tito’s Yugoslav Partisans fought us and the Germans everywhere. The Nazis and the Fascists treated the Yugoslavian people horribly, shooting civilians without provocation. It quickly descended into bloodthirsty reprisals. The decision was made to remove many of the local Croats and Slovenes and bring in Italians, to repopulate the area. So the camp expanded, with thousands of local civilians, whole families, brought in. Soon we had over fifteen thousand, living in tents. Many grew sick and starved. When the commander of our battalion complained, saying that this mistreatment only drove more people to support the partisans, conditions improved, somewhat.” He grew quiet, surveying the wreckage of the living room, one of many he must have seen in his strange career.
“But then?”
“Then the order came for all Yugoslavian Jews to be interned. About three thousand were brought into the camp.”
“To be killed?”
“No, no, not at all. We followed the orders of our government, but the army insisted that the Jews be well treated, not as a hostile force. They weren’t fighting us; they were only peaceful people who’d been swept up in this madness. So they were put in a separate part of the camp, and provided with what comfort we could give. My commander told me it was the only way to preserve a shred of honor. We had to obey the German commands and the orders from Il Duce, but we could at least do so with some dignity.”
“I didn’t know, Luca.”
“No, and not all camps were the same. In some, Jews were treated terribly. But on Rab, we did what little we could. We were sick of fighting the partisans and all the hatred. It felt good to do something halfway decent.”
“What happened?”
“After the fall of Mussolini, orders came from the government that the Jews were to be released. For their own safety, they could remain in the camp voluntarily under our protection. Several hundred left to join the partisans, and many others were taken to partisan-controlled territory. At this point, we had an uneasy truce with the Yugoslavs, and worried more about our former German allies.”
“All the Jews got out?” I knew this story wasn’t going to have a happy ending.
“No. There were two hundred elderly and sick left in the camp. My battalion was ordered back to Italy after the armistice, and I was in charge of a detachment, which was to close the camp. The last of the Slovene and Croat prisoners were released, and I was trying to find medical care for those Jews who could not travel.”
We sat in silence, and I could hear the low murmur of other Carabinieri in the yard and smell their cigarette smoke as they waited for Luca.
“There was none. No transport, no fuel. A German column approached the camp, several hundred men in armored vehicles. We were but a few dozen, with nothing more than rifles. I gave the order. We ran. We ran away, leaving two hundred innocents behind. The Germans took them. I heard later they were sent to a camp in Poland. I expect they are all dead, don’t you?”
“Yes, I do.” I didn’t expect they were dead, I knew it. From Zyklon B, probably in a place called Auschwitz. It had all been hard to believe when Diana told me Kurt Gerstein’s story in Switzerland, which seemed like another world, another time. But here it was, half a continent away. How large was this killing machine, that it would send an armored column to a little island in the Adriatic, and ship two hundred old and sick Jews to Poland? It made no sense. Of course, in a world where people were killed with assembly-line precision, nothing could make sense.
“Now you know my shame. I did nothing.”
“Once the Germans came, there was nothing you could do. Except die. And then you wouldn’t have been a witness. Believe me, I’m a cop, and sooner or later the law appreciates a good witness.”
“Perhaps. When the war is over, do you think anyone will care? The graveyards will be full. Who will want to hear the truth? Who will care?”
“The dead,” I said. I left Luca in the room staring at the wall. It wasn’t my job to absolve him. It wasn’t my job to explain that the methodical extermination of Jews and other undesirables could not be stopped by a single Carabiniere, that perhaps it was a small blessing that it was at least remembered. I began to feel the fervor with which Diana had told the story, her need to reveal the secret that burdened her.
I walked back to where the platoon was camped. Graves Registration wandered the field, carrying sacks of mattress covers, stacking the dead like cordwood. Medics treated the lightly wounded as the last of the ambulances trundled off over uneven ground to Hell’s Half Acre. The wind stiffened and I felt a cold chill rising from the damp earth.
“Billy, you won’t believe this,” Danny said as I approached the group. “The meat stew made it. It’s still warm. Have some, it’s not bad.” Danny had indeed passed over a threshold. On a field littered with the dead and injured, he still had his appetite, and celebrated what passed for the luck of the Irish at war: an intact pot of hot stew.
Father Dare ladled some into my mess tin, and I sat on a crate next to Danny. Everyone gathered around the pot and its feeble warmth. Charlie passed a bottle of wine, and it tasted good, sharp on my tongue, warm in my stomach. The living have to take what pleasures they can, from each other and whatever comes their way.
Phil Einsmann had a newspaper and was sharing pages around. “Only two weeks old,” he said. “The Chicago Tribune.”
“Says here Charlie Chaplin is demanding a Second Front now,” Flint read.
“They can give him this one,” Charlie said, and everyone laughed. Except him. He was serious.
“Coal miners are on strike for more money and decent working conditions,” Danny read from another section. “Sure feel bad for them, burrowing underground and all.” That got a laugh, and I drank some more wine, happy to be with Danny, happy to be alive.
I flipped through the paper as it was passed around. Nightclub owners in Miami were protesting having to close at midnight to conserve electricity. Business was good. In Michigan, thirteen legislators were arrested on bribery and corruption charges. Business was good there too, until you got caught.
I walked over to Einsmann, and gave him back the paper. “Phil, what do you know about what the Nazis are doing to the Jews?”
“What everybody knows, I guess. They take their property, send them to camps, shoot a lot of them.
