Hero on a Bicycle (8 page)

Things only got worse as the day wore on. It became obvious that it was useless for either Constanza or Paolo to avoid all contact with their guests in the cellar. When the two men woke, at about noon, Paolo kept guard in the deserted yard and tried to stop Guido from barking while they slipped out to wash themselves under the cold tap. Maria was refusing point-blank to have anything to do with them, so it was Constanza who took them their food.

The two young men, sitting crouched on their mattresses in the semidark, were bored as well as scared, and desperate for company. Even in that dim light, the sight of Constanza did a lot to improve their morale, and they tried hard to detain her as they ate.

Constanza’s English was good. Now she wished it were better. But she was able to discover that the young, fair-haired Englishman was Flight Lieutenant David Graham, a Royal Air Force pilot whose Spitfire had been shot down near Monte Cassino. After bailing out with only minor injuries, he had been treated in a German military hospital and then transferred to a prisoner-of-war camp near Bologna. His companion was Sergeant Joe Zolinski of the First Canadian Division. He had been captured when he had run into a column of German panzers during some heavy fighting around Pontecorvo and had ended up in the same prisoner-of-war camp. Like his English comrade, he still bore the marks of exhaustion. He was tall and deeply sunburned and would have had an athletic build if the months of captivity had not taken their toll. Constanza had a swift impression of light gray eyes set in a haggard, unshaven young face. He broke into a wide grin. “They treated us OK, more or less,” he said. “The food was pretty terrible, but the boredom was worse — caged up all the time with nothing to look at but barbed wire. David and I were in the same hut. We played a hell of a lot of chess — he’s not much good at it, but I’m worse.”

“You can say that again,” said David.

“It was when the rumor got out that we were going to be moved north to another camp in Germany that I got seriously scared. Well, we all did — but I’m half Jewish. Never bothered me before. Why should it? My dad died when I was a kid, and my mom’s French-Canadian, so I was brought up a Catholic, like her. But it’s the Jewish last name that registers with these Fascists. Even if you go to Mass every Sunday, they still get suspicious.”

“Camps in Germany are a lot tougher,” added David. “So we knew if we wanted to escape, it was now or never.”

“How did you manage it?” asked Constanza.

“It was the Partisans who helped spring us,” Joe told her. “They’ve got contacts, those boys. I got a message inside a bread roll. Don’t ask me how they got it in there. It told me they could get two of our guys out, me and one other, so I picked David. Seems like I’m fated to be stuck with him.” They exchanged comradely grins in the dark.

“They told us to act normal and be on the alert,” Joe went on. “Mostly we were kept in the camp, only allowed in the exercise yard at certain times. But sometimes some of us were taken out on working parties. Repairing roads, that sort of stuff — under guard, of course. So we were out digging ditches on a stretch of road near a field of corn, and there was this scarecrow stuck up there — old raggedy coat, battered hat, straw hair, and all. Except it wasn’t a scarecrow. There was a guy inside who started firing at us with a rifle. Just a few shots — missed us, of course, since he wasn’t trying to hit us, but it sure grabbed the attention of our guards. They were yelling at each other in German and firing back, and in all the commotion, this other guy appeared out of nowhere and got us away. We ran like hell up a path behind an olive grove and into the woods before they noticed we were gone. The guy in the scarecrow managed to get away, too — can’t think how he did it. They seem to know how to kind of melt into the landscape.”

“They took us on foot through the mountains, and we’ve been hiding out with them until they arranged to bring us here,” David told her. “It was hard, being with the Partisans. They’re a pretty tough lot. There’s a guy in charge — the one who contacted you — but they’re not all buddies or in total agreement with each other. Far from it. There’s a lot of tension between them. Some of them hate the Communists, the Reds. But they are holding together, at least until our chaps liberate Florence.”

“Which will be soon?” asked Constanza.

Joe shrugged. “Who knows for sure? I guess so. I sure want to be back with my outfit before it happens, though.”

F
or Rosemary, sitting upstairs in her room, the day was dragging by interminably. She was attempting to relieve the tension by writing to her mother — a letter that she knew was extremely unlikely ever to arrive. Postal communication between Italy and England, two countries at war, was totally unreliable.

“We are all well here and managing to avoid food shortages somehow,” she wrote. “I do hope it’s the same for you, Mummy, and you’re not getting too exhausted with all the work you’re doing for the war effort.”

She paused.

Why am I writing this kind of bracing, optimistic stuff when I know she’ll probably never read it?
she thought.
Mind you, I never did tell her anything about what’s really happening to me, anyway.

The old prewar England she remembered was becoming a kind of faraway edifice of her own memories, and her mother was rapidly becoming part of it.

When her father had died, in 1938, it had been one of the great sadnesses of Rosemary’s life, a loss from which she would never fully recover. She had seen so little of him in the years since her marriage. There had been visits to London with the children, of course, mostly without Franco, who had been too busy to accompany them. Her father had been deeply worried about the rise of Fascism in Europe and the inevitability of another war. For his generation, having witnessed the carnage in the trenches during the First World War, it was an unthinkable dread. She had watched his old sociable optimism turn to gloomy introspection and his health decline as a result. And when he had died suddenly of a heart attack, she had not been there.

Once war had been declared against Britain, Rosemary, living in Florence and married to an Italian, could have little contact with her English mother, though she guessed that she would be surviving widowhood with her characteristic brisk energy. War work would provide her with an ideal opportunity to overcome her grief. When the bombing had begun in earnest, Rosemary had pictured her mother channeling all her formidable organizational skills into helping to evacuate London children and running canteens for servicemen and servicewomen and hostels for bombed-out families.

The rare letters that had gotten through from her had been full of buoyant enthusiasm. Her mother’s only complaint was that the deafening nightly barrage from the big anti-aircraft guns on Primrose Hill was robbing her of a decent night’s sleep.

If only I could be more like her,
thought Rosemary.
I’d give anything to be so single-minded.

Her own position in Florence demanded a different kind of bravery, though. It was a lonely life of waiting, keeping a low profile, and trying to protect her children. And it was all falling apart. She seemed to have lost control altogether, and all she could think was that she had put her family in mortal danger.

She buried her face in her hands.
Oh, Franco,
she thought,
if only you were here.

Paolo, meanwhile, was hanging around the house in a state of high excitement, finding it impossible to settle down to anything. He just wanted the action to start. The trip to Florence was planned for just after dark, when, with luck, there would not be too many military police patrols around. His stomach turned over with fear every time he thought about what he had agreed to do. But there was no going back now. He had checked his bicycle three times already that morning, and he was ready. At last he was going to get some action, a real man’s job. Helping Allied servicemen escape was really something special, something he could tell his father about when he came home, even if he could never let on about it to his friends.

He hovered in the hall at the top of the cellar stairs. Why was Constanza taking so long down there? What were they talking about? He wondered if he should go down and join them but then thought better of it. Perhaps he should keep a low profile for the moment.

Constanza finally appeared, carrying two empty plates.

“You’ve been gone a long time,” said Paolo. “Are they OK? What have they been telling you about themselves?”

But Constanza, he could see, was in one of her maddeningly uncommunicative moods.

“Not much,” was all she would say. “One’s Canadian army and the other’s RAF. I really don’t know much more than that.”

But Paolo was pretty sure that she did and that she was just as full of suppressed excitement as he was.

“Didn’t they tell you —?” he began, but stopped short. Somebody was moving in the living room.

Then a voice called, “Hello? Anyone at home?”

Hilaria!
They exchanged horrified looks. She had come in unannounced through the French doors and was wandering nosily around. She strolled into the hall to join them, immaculately dressed as usual in a crisp linen suit.

“Only me,” she said brightly. “I hope it’s all right, my barging in like this. I had to get out for a bit — it’s so boring at home, so I just thought I’d drop by to see what you’re doing. I wondered if perhaps we could listen to some of your records, Constanza. But if you’re busy . . .”

“No, not at all,” said Constanza.

Hilaria glanced sharply at the two plates Constanza was carrying, then at the cellar door. Paolo saw to his horror that it had been left half open. Constanza caught his eye. She reached back with her foot and kicked the door shut, but she was a split second too late. Hilaria laughed.

“So, since when have you and Paolo taken to eating your lunch in the cellar?” she said.

“Oh, we’ve just been helping Maria do a bit of cleaning up down there. It’s so full of junk.”

“Fascinating! I just adore junk. You never know what treasures you’re going to find. Food as well, it seems. You must let me nose around there sometime.”

“Sure, but not in that white suit, Hilaria,” said Constanza, thinking quickly. “It’s terribly dusty down there. Let’s go up to my room.”

But Hilaria seemed in no hurry to leave the hall and began wandering around, idly picking things up and putting them down again.

“It’s chaos at home,” she said. “Too depressing for words! Packing cases everywhere. Mamma and Papà don’t feel safe in Florence any longer, and we’re planning to go to Lake Como, if we can manage to get there. But Aldo doesn’t want to leave. He’s got all sorts of deals going with the German administration here, and he’s worried he’ll miss out on the money they owe him. He’s such a good businessman, you know. I don’t really want to leave either, to be honest. Mamma says there’s only room for one suitcase each in the car, and that means leaving most of my clothes behind. Can you imagine having to choose what to take! It’s too awful.”

“I can’t believe that you’ll be very popular here when the Allies arrive,” said Paolo.

“You don’t know anything about it,” said Hilaria coolly, “so don’t pretend that you do.”

“Oh, come on upstairs,” Constanza put in quickly.

They were halfway up the first flight when they heard a muffled noise from the cellar. Hilaria paused and looked back.

“It sounds as if Maria could use some help down there,” she said. But at that moment, Maria herself bustled into the hallway from the kitchen, making it plain that if anyone was down there in the cellar, it wasn’t her.

H
ilaria stayed for nearly two hours. Paolo hardly knew how they got through her highly unwelcome visit. Reluctantly, he had to admire the cool way Constanza dealt with the situation. She had managed somehow to laugh off Hilaria’s curiosity about what had gone bump in the cellar, saying that they must have piled up so much junk that it had toppled over and —
oh, dear!
— they would probably have to start cleaning up again later. Fortunately, it was Hilaria’s unwillingness to get her white suit dirty that finally made her lose interest.