The Secret of Santa Vittoria (37 page)

“Now is the time to sleep and to sleep and to sleep. There's no more need for music. The party is over, you see.”

 

T
HE CITY
still slept when the Germans came, two cars of them, four Germans and four Italians in each car. The cars were unable to make it all of the way up the mountain and they were parked at The Rest and the men proceeded up the rest of the way on foot. The Germans walked ahead and the Italians trailed along behind them. The Germans were all officers and looked as if they ate a great deal of meat. The Italians were all civilians, dressed in little thin dark suits stained with wine and pasta and they looked as if they lived on field greens and pebbles. Word had gone up the Corso Cavour to Captain von Prum, and by the time they arrived at the Fat Gate the captain had already gotten dressed and gone down the steep street to meet them. Colonel Scheer made no response to his greeting.

“They say the wine is here,” the colonel said. He pointed to the Italians.

“With all respect, sir, they can say what they wish, but I am forced to stand on my statement,” Captain von Prum said.

“It cost them a lot of teeth to say that and to stand by it,” Colonel Scheer said, and he went across to one of the Italians and he forced open the man's mouth. His gums were torn and his teeth were gone. “We took them out one by one and he stayed with his story. I'm inclined to believe a man like that.”

There was nothing for the captain to say.

“So I decided I had better come and see for myself.” Scheer turned to the youngest and most intelligent-looking of the Italians. “Show the captain the papers, the documents,” he said.

At first the young man was shy with Captain von Prum, but as the papers began to tell the story of the wine he found courage in them and he grew excited by what the papers revealed. There were receipts from the cellars of wine wholesalers for years past listing the amount of wine received and stored and shipped. There were warehouse receipts showing bottle deliveries in the north of Italy, there were bills of lading and transportation orders and there were the books of the Cinzano people showing how many bottles had been received each year and how many stored and how many shipped and to where and how many sold. In every case they told the same story. In some years the amount of wine ran as low as 800,000 bottles but in good years it ran to a million bottles, and even more. Because of the war, since deliveries had not been made the season before, it was safe to assume, the Italian said, that well over a million bottles, perhaps 1,500,000 bottles, could be found in Santa Vittoria. Von Prum studied the papers as carefully as possible for some kind of weakness in them or at least an explanation, and finally he faced Colonel Scheer.

“There can be only one explanation,” he said. “The papers are a fraud.”

The Italian, who had grown arrogant now, answered for the colonel. “In order for these papers to be a fraud it would take hundreds of people to be involved in the deception. It would take people in the wineries, in the warehouses, in the railroads, in the Cinzano company.” They stopped the Italian at that point. It was apparent that he might have gone on for a long time. He was very convincing.

“Now they want to see the wine you have,” Scheer said; and they started up the Corso to the lane that turns off into the Cooperative Wine Cellar. Bombolini had been warned, and when they turned into the lane von Prum saw him and told him to come along in case questions would need to be answered. In the darkness of the cellar none of them could see the wine well at first, but when they could see the bottles the Italians began to smile at one another. Bombolini tried to catch their eyes and shake his head. As Italians perhaps they would rise to the moment against the Germans, but he knew it was hopeless. The sad little clerks were what are called Fascists for the Family, men who felt for their jobs a love no greater than their fear of hunger.

“It is what you would expect,” one of them said. Bombolini felt an urge to get out of the cellar then and begin to run, but he stayed where he was.

“There are two ways to put down wine,” one of them began. “Ah, well, we will show you.”

They knew their wine and how to handle it, and they began to put down the bottles in the tight way, and when they had finished several rows it was as clear as if someone had painted a picture of it, a picture of before and an after, that the cellar had been made to handle ten times the amount of wine that it now held.

“Do I need to go on, sir?” one of the Italians said.

“No, there is no more need to go on,” Colonel Scheer said, and he turned to Captain von Prum. “The question being then, Captain, what happened to the rest of the wine? Where is it? What have they done with it? How did they fool you?”

He turned to the young officers who were with him. “Get me a wop,” he said. “From the town.”

“There's one right here,” a lieutenant said.

“The mayor,” von Prum said.

“Who could be better than the mayor?” the colonel said. “Come over here.”

Bombolini was afraid and he tried not to show it. To his surprise, however, he found that he was not afraid for himself or what was about to happen to him, but only afraid that he might reveal something even against his wishes.

“We are not a cruel people,” the colonel was saying to him. He tried to listen to the words, but since he knew he would not be answering the questions he found it hard to listen. He was more interested in preparing himself for what was going to happen.

“So if you are honest and generous with us you will find that we are honest and generous with you. Now, then. Where is the wine?”

Bombolini held out both of his hands, palms upward. His eyes were as wide open as his mouth.

“This is our wine.”

Scheer raised his dark hard fist and struck the mayor in the mouth. “Where is the wine?”

When Bombolini held out his hands again the colonel hit his face once more, as hard as the first time, breaking his nose and breaking one tooth loose from the bridge of his mouth and causing him to fall on the stone floor of the wine cellar. The first blow had caused a lump the size of a pigeon's egg to form below Bombolini's eye, and the colonel touched it with the sandy tip of his boot.

“Now if you want to lose your eyesight to protect something that will be found out in the next few hours, I will oblige you with my boot,” the colonel said. He turned on von Prum. “Don't turn away,” he said. “Is this too crude for someone with such fine blood as yours?”

“It isn't that,” the captain said. “It's the failure of what I wanted to do here. We wanted to rule without violence.”

“Well your rule has been shit,” Colonel Scheer said. “What do you think of that? Do you think this is ineffective?” He slammed his hard fist into the palm of his other hand. “You would be surprised how well it works.”

“It wasn't the way I wanted to do it.”

Scheer was angered by the statement. “You may think you're different, but you're one of us,” the colonel said. “You are a German. Don't you ever forget how many fists have been used on how many faces by men who haven't been afraid to use them to make fine people like yourself. We fought for that, and I am not ashamed of it. Those who can use the fist have a right to use the fist, they have a responsibility to use the fist if the fist can help the Fatherland. Who do you think you are?”

The colonel's anger and harshness and scorn were very difficult for the captain to take. He lowered his eyes at last and he looked at the floor not conscious of the mayor's body lying on it.

“Get him up and hit him,” Colonel Scheer said. Several of the soldiers lifted Bombolini to his feet.

“It isn't the hitting, Colonel. I can hit.” He surprised them by pulling back his arm and smashing his fist into Bombolini's face. He hit him on the swollen lump and it split on the impact like a grape between the fingers, and blood splattered from it.

“You have been baptized,” Scheer said. “Now you are one of us.” He was easier toward the captain now.

“I believe you now,” Captain von Prum said. “The wine is here. I am humiliated. Now I ask one thing of you.”

“Will you hit him again, good and hard? Would you knock an eye out?”

“Yes,” von Prum said.

“Then ask.”

“I want a chance to restore my honor in my own way,” the captain said. “I want to find the wine and bring it to you by myself.”

“And if you don't?”

“I'll find it.”

“I give you five days.”

Von Prum was overjoyed. “You will have your wine,” he said, “and if you don't I shall resign my commission.”

Scheer laughed at him then. “That's generous of you,” the colonel said. “If you don't, you'll find your ass on the eastern front—excuse my peasant manners, von Knoblesdorf. What kind of war do you think we're running here?”

They went outside then, and as von Prum wrote in his log that evening, he was surprised to find that the sun was out and it was still day.

“Five days, then,” Colonel Scheer said. “Do you know, I am a very generous man.”

“Now that I know the wine is here there's no question of its being found, but I am thankful to you, Colonel Scheer.”

The colonel put a hand on the captain's shoulder. “And if, on the fourth night, you still haven't found the wine, when it comes time for pulling out fingernails, you'll pull them out, and when it comes time for crushing testicles, you'll crush them, and if you have to kill, you'll kill.”

Von Prum said nothing. He gave the impression that he believed, but within himself he denied it, not because he couldn't do it, but because he wouldn't need to do it.

“You'll do it,” Colonel Scheer said, “because you're one of us and this is the way we do things. You will surprise yourself, von Prum.”

When they were gone Captain von Prum went back to the wine cellar. Some women were already washing the mayor's wounds.

“I had to do that, do you understand?” the captain said. “It was required of me, a matter of form.”

Bombolini was facing away from the captain toward the wall. He was in great pain, and yet he was pleased with himself. He had discovered that he wasn't afraid of the punishment and that he would say nothing despite the pain of it.

“It was unworthy of you,” Bombolini said.

“It was a matter of form,” the captain said.

The mayor turned toward the captain. His face was badly battered and, as von Prum later wrote, it was almost disgusting to have to contemplate.

“After all of the things you told me,” Bombolini said.

“I still believe them,” the captain said. “Now the wine will be found. I try to force no answer from you. I ask you as a reasonable man to save both of us effort and pain. Now that they are gone, where is the wine?”

Bombolini smiled at him, although it was painful to smile and the air that touched the broken tooth caused him to gasp aloud.

“There is no wine.”

To his surprise, the German found that his hand was opening and closing and that he wanted to smash Italo Bombolini's eye.

 

H
E WAS
confident, and his confidence passed to the men. Now that he had no doubt that the wine was in Santa Vittoria he had no doubt that it could be found.

“It is a matter of reason and logic and science,” Captain von Prum told them. “I want no force and no violence.”

The matter of violence had become important to him, because of the “Bloodless Victory,” which only the day before he had contemplated giving up, and because of the beliefs he had invested in it, and—something he wasn't prepared to consider then—because of Caterina Malatesta and the respect he wanted from her, and the love.

He wanted to find the wine easily and gently, he wished to find it wittily, to touch the right place, almost sadly and say, “The wine is here. I'm very sorry, it was a good effort but it wasn't quite enough. I'm truly sorry about it.”

Because he was certain of finding the wine, he had time on his side and instead of beginning the search at once, in a haphazard fashion, they sat down and constructed a detailed map of Santa Vittoria, which is still the best map ever made of our city, and they divided the city into sections and quarters and into logical geographical situations that would lend themselves to the hiding of one million bottles of wine. There were only five or six of these.

“It is a simple process of logical anticipation followed by logical elimination, which in the end will leave no other possibility except the place where the wine
must
be and, so,
will
be.” Von Prum put this down in his log and then, finding it good, read it to his men.

“Oh, we'll find it all right,” Corporal Heinsick said. “If
they
hid it, sir, then
we'll
find it.”

This was the true logic: that if the Italians had been smart enough to hide the wine, then it stood to reason that the Germans must be smart enough to find it.

The first “logical anticipation” was the Roman wine cellar, as the most obvious and convenient place to put the wine, and it was the first to be eliminated. Sergeant Traub told the other soldiers, “Even the wops are too smart to put their wine down there.” And they went on to the second anticipation, which was the Fat Wall around the city. It was a possibility that had to be checked, that the wall or some stretch of it had been hollowed out and was being used as a massive container for the wine. In the morning they began going over the wall almost brick by brick, striking the sides with their trench knives and bayonets, listening for that hollow sound that would tell them that the brick front was false and the wine was hiding behind it. By the middle of the morning they were still not halfway around the city. It is very hard to explain to someone who was not there on that day, how ironic the tapping on the bricks was to the people of the city.