A Mortal Terror (20 page)
“You’ve heard about Major Arnold then?”
“Me and every GI, Italian, and Brit within ten miles. The damn Krauts probably know by now.”
“Where are we going?”
“That’s top secret. You’ll know when you get there. Now hustle, goddammit.”
He was steamed, so I hustled out of sight. I waited for Kaz, who showed up twenty minutes later. I told him what Kearns had said and we beat feet to the jeep and made for Signora Salvalaggio’s. We grabbed our gear and said our good-byes. The signora promised to cook la Genovese for Kaz when he returned, and gave him a curtsy that wouldn’t have been out of place at the palace, a lifetime ago. She didn’t ask about the pearls, and I was glad, because I had no idea what we were going to do with them.
“What were you doing, back at the headquarters?” I asked Kaz as we drove to meet up with Kearns.
“Asking around, about the Fourteenth Carabinieri, the unit our friend Lieutenant Luca Amatori served with. I was curious, after the reaction of the officer in Acerra.”
“What did you find out?”
“The unit served primarily on the island of Rab, off the coast of Yugoslavia. As concentration camp guards.”
Anzio Beachhead
F
OR THE HUNDREDTH
time in this war, I sat in a jeep at a crossroads, watching a convoy of trucks crossing an intersection ahead of us. Worrying. Everyone was worried, about getting killed or wounded, about fear and what your buddies thought of you, about trench foot and the clap, about chickenshit officers and insane orders, about
Schu
-mines and what your girl back home would do when she heard you were alive but minus your private parts.
Everyone worried, everyone sat, everyone waited. But now I had a new worry. My kid brother. When Dad would get mad at Danny and me, he’d say that if he could put the two of us in a sack and shake it up good, he might end up with one son who was smart enough to stay out of trouble, and strong enough to get out of it when it came looking. Trouble was, Danny was a skinny kid, smart enough in class but just plain dumb anywhere between home and school. I was always stronger than most, but I used up all my smarts before I got to the schoolhouse door. We’d come home with our fair share of black eyes and pants torn at the knee, usually as a result of trouble Danny got into and I got him out of. Or in deeper, he claimed. I wondered if he had any idea how deep this trouble was.
I got tired of worrying and watched the scenery instead. On the left, a drainage ditch was filled with sluggish water, and beyond that a ruined farmhouse sat crumbling into the earth as weeds and vines worked their way through the masonry. On my side, an open field sloped gently away, down to a long green patch where water flowed, a real stream, not a ditch, maybe with frogs in the warm weather. Maybe fish. What did they fish for in Italian streams? I didn’t know, but the memory of springtime at the grassy edge of a stream came back to me, and I wanted to run through that field, feel the sun on my neck, scoop up fresh cool water and splash my face.
A line of pine trees ran up to the road, forming a neat border to the side of the field. In the field itself withered brown plants and faded grasses hung on, and occasional rock outcroppings provided a shape and contour that gave the land its own definition. This was a place that people knew well, perhaps by name, a natural field where sheep could graze, kids could play, and lovers could go for a walk. I spotted a flat limestone rock that would be great for a picnic, and a tall one that would be perfect for shade in the summer.
I wanted it to be summer. I wanted to be in the field, exploring it with the intensity of a child, the barely remembered sense of discovery and awe that a new place, a new object, a new sensation could bring. I closed my eyes and saw Danny and me running through a field much like this one, racing for the stream, splashing in the water and laughing without quite knowing why, or caring. It seemed, in that moment, that the field encompassed everything good, life at its best. Nature, youth, innocence. This field, and all the ones in my memory, held life.
I opened my eyes. Above, a bird glided high across the sky, circling the field. A hawk. No, it was a falcon, a peregrine falcon. As he turned, the sun lit his blue-gray wings, a dead giveaway. A hunter on any continent. A flutter caught my eye, far beneath the soaring falcon, and I knew if I saw it, he saw it even more clearly. He tucked in his wings and dropped in a fast, steep dive, heading straight for a blackbird lazily making for the trees, about ten feet off the ground. The falcon hit the blackbird, hard, claws outstretched and wings wide, braking before the momentum brought them both to ground. A flash of dark feathers, and it was all over. The falcon carried his limp prey to the flat rock, set it down, and began to rip the bird apart. The falcon paused and gazed in my direction. Maybe he was worried we were a threat. Maybe he was telling me to get a grip, or reminding me that the field was death as well as life.
As the column moved through the intersection, I did not look back.
T
HE ROAD WAS
ours the rest of the way, two hours straight to the Naples docks. The column snaked through the narrow streets leading to the waterfront. On each corner, Italians sold bottles of wine, fruit, and anything else GIs would fork over cash or cigarettes for.
“Major,” I said, leaning forward as the driver weaved the jeep between crates of supplies and lines of American and British soldiers. “Can you tell us now where we’re headed?”
“Not until we board ship. It’s all top secret, not to be revealed until we are sequestered from the civilian population. We can’t take a chance on Fascist spies getting word to the Germans.”
“Okay,” I said. Next to me, Kaz shrugged. We could wait. The traffic stalled, and we bought some oranges from a skinny young girl doling them out from a burlap sack. Following her was a short, pudgy guy with a thick black mustache, selling postcards. He held a stack in his grimy hands, fanning them out for all to see.
“Naples harbor, Anzio. Good-a luck, boys. Nice-a women in Anzio. Post-a cards, Anzio, Nettuno here.” He kept up his singsong pitch. Army security, you gotta love it.
“Anzio. That’s about a hundred miles north of the German lines, Major,” I said.
“Yeah, well, I guess the cat’s out of the bag already. We ship out in the morning, hit the beach the following day. Anzio and Nettuno are two seafront villages about a mile apart. The idea is to get behind the Germans and cut off their supplies from Rome. Something along those lines.”
“Something?” Kaz said.
“We’ll talk when we’re on board,” Kearns said. He seemed to be in a bad mood. Maybe it was finding out our target was common knowledge, or the vagueness of the battle plan, or the fear that a colonel and a general would get their necks snapped. None of these things made me happy either.
As we entered the harbor, MPs waved trucks to their unloading areas, and after a quick check of Major Kearns’s orders, we were directed to the main wharf where Liberty ships and landing craft of all types were lined up, taking on men and the machinery of war.
“Here’s our ship,” Major Kearns said. “The USS
Biscayne
, command vessel for the invasion. You’ll be traveling with the brass. General Lucas is on board.”
“And a number of colonels and other generals, no doubt,” Kaz said.
“Yep, so keep your eyes peeled and don’t get in the way.”
We followed him up the gangplank and a swabbie showed us where to stash our gear. Kaz and I had a cabin about the size of a janitor’s closet with two double bunks. Plenty of room, as long as the four guys didn’t all get out of their bunks at once.
Up on deck, we gazed out over the five-inch guns on the bow and watched the parade of troops boarding vessels all along the waterfront. LSTs had beached themselves beyond the wharf, their bow doors dropped onto flat rocks where GIs used to sunbathe and fishermen had dried their nets. Now, Sherman tanks backed in, their engines growling as they slowly made their way onboard. Shouts and curses drifted up from the ships as the traffic jammed up on the docks.
“What do you know about Anzio?” I asked Kaz.
“In ancient times it was called Antium. Both Nero and Caligula were born there. Actually, that is where Nero was when Rome burned and he famously played his lyre. He had a summer palace in Antium, and Rome is only forty miles away; the sky must have glowed with the flames. I hope we shall get to see the palace ruins.”
“I bet there will be plenty of ruins. Just not all two thousand years old. What about Caligula? Wasn’t he the crazy one?”
“A bloodthirsty killer, a megalomaniac, yes. But Nero was no prize either. He had his own mother killed for plotting against him.”
“Both sons of Anzio,” I said.
“Ironic that we are pursuing a killer, perhaps a madman, to that very place.”
“Is he a madman? It seems he has a plan, of sorts. The playing cards, plus the murder of Inzerillo, pushing Cole to suicide. These aren’t sudden or random. They’re deliberate, linked in some way we can’t yet understand.”
“Billy, we don’t know for certain that Inzerillo’s killer is the same man.”
“It’s a good bet. His joint was frequented by the Third Platoon, Landry was mixed up with some girl there, and we have conflicting stories about damage done. Somebody’s hiding something, and I think that has something to do with Inzerillo being silenced. What I don’t see anywhere is a motive. For any of this.”
“Caligula was a madman, but he managed to run an empire. Being insane doesn’t mean one is out of control. It is another way of seeing the world.”
“So our guy has his own set of rules?”
“Yes, rules that make sense to him. Perhaps he views us as out of step with reality.”
“Being in the army, it would be hard to keep to your own rules, your personal sense of reality.”
“It is difficult, maintaining individuality in such a large organization that demands obedience and discipline.”
“Yeah, it’s hard enough for guys like us,” I said. I felt I had the thread of an idea, but didn’t know how to put it into words. “But our Caligula, he’d have a real hard time of it, wouldn’t he?”
“Are you getting at his motive?”
“Maybe. I’ve been trying to think of the usual motives. Greed, passion, revenge. But what if it’s beyond that? Something we can’t imagine, but that he desperately needs to cover up?”
“That would mean the victims all knew something. Something that got them killed.”
“A lieutenant, a captain, a major, a pimp, and a sergeant. What did they have in common, and what did they know?”
“Perhaps we should be asking which colonel and which general have something in common with them,” Kaz said.
“We’re not going to get a senior officer to admit knowing a pimp. And Captain Galante wasn’t really part of Landry’s Third Platoon crowd.”
“But Landry and Galante were connected. They knew each other from before Galante was transferred to the hospital at Caserta. Sergeant Cole was transferred to Caserta courtesy of Captain Galante.”
“I can see some connection there,” I said. “But I don’t see how it all hangs together, and where it’s going. I keep thinking we have to go back to the beginning, that there’s something we got wrong from the start.”
“Like what?” Kaz asked.
“Wish I knew, buddy, wish I knew.” We stood in silence, feet up on the rail, watching the activity on the wharf. It was a nice day, maybe mid-fifties, a hazy sky and calm waters. A good day for watching a parade. A bad day for solving mysteries.
“Look,” said Kaz, as he pointed to a column of blue uniforms advancing along the wharf. Carabinieri. About a hundred, maybe more, marching in good order, packs on their backs and rifles slung over their shoulders. They halted before the Liberty ship next to us and began to file aboard, their boots clanging against the metal gangplank. Lieutenant Luca Amatori brought up the rear, giving his boss, Captain Trevisi, a snappy salute before he followed his men up. It was hard to make out at that distance, but I got the impression Trevisi was as glad to stay on shore as Luca was to leave him there. At the top of the gangplank, Trevisi saluted again, and leaned on the deck, just as we were doing, watching the massive preparations.
“I didn’t have a chance to ask you about Luca and the concentration camp,” I said. “What did you find out?”
“I spoke to a friend on the staff of British Army Intelligence, a fellow Pole. He had a file on Lieutenant Amatori. Our friend Luca was posted to the island of Rab, in the Adriatic, off the coast of Yugoslavia. The Fourteenth Carabinieri Battalion was charged with guarding a concentration camp there, mainly for Yugoslav civilians suspected of partisan activities. Mostly Slovenes and Croatians, often entire families if they were thought to have helped the partisans.”
“He did say something about partisan activities,” I said, reluctant to change my opinion about the likable Luca.
“Yes, but the Italian and German anti-partisan sweeps were particularly brutal, and more than a thousand died of starvation in the camp itself. It held more than fifteen thousand prisoners, many housed only in tents, even in winter. Men, women, and children, including about three thousand Jews.”