Street Boys (2 page)

Vincenzo lifted his head, his face rich with tears and sorrow, and looked to the sky, searching through morning mist for the faces he loved. He let out a series of loud screams, his hands held tight, pounding at the ground around him. No one heard. No one saw. No one came. He was a lost boy now, adrift without a home or a family to fill it. He was a victim of the war, joining the ranks of so many Italians who had been stripped of all they held close to their hearts. He was still only a child, but now he would be forced to set aside such thoughts, to think and fend like a man, responsible to no one other than himself. And he was in pain; sharp, agonizing jolts jarred his every movement. At that moment, empty of all feeling, ripped away from all that he loved, the boy wanted nothing more than to die. Instead, Vincenzo faced the long and grueling process of burying his family.

“You want a marker for the graves?” his friend Franco asked. Franco was fourteen, with a muscular frame, crisp dark eyes and a thick head of hair that he hated to have cut, long locks ruffled by the slightest wind.

The boy shook his head. “I’m the only one who needs to know where they are,” he said.

“I’m sorry, Vincenzo,” Franco said. “They did not deserve to die like this.”

Vincenzo stared at the graves and nodded. “No one does,” he said.

“Maybe if they had left along with the others,” Franco said. He stood next to Vincenzo, his right foot resting against a crumpled stone wall that had once been the older boy’s home. “Left when the Germans told them to leave. Maybe today they would still be alive.”

“My mother said that if we were to die, we had earned the right to die in our own city,” Vincenzo said.

“You heard the soldiers with the bullhorns,” Franco said. “You read the leaflets they dropped. They’re coming back. This time with tanks and many more soldiers. They’re not going to stop until they destroy all of it.”

“I heard them,” Vincenzo said. “And I believe them. What they can’t have, they want no one else to have.”

“These graves we made won’t last very long,” Franco said. “The bombs will see to that.”

Vincenzo looked past Franco and out across the smoke and ruin of Naples. “The bombs can’t hurt them anymore,” he said.

BOOK
ONE

. . . We are but warriors for the working day.

—
H
ENRY
V
W
ILLIAM
S
HAKESPEARE

1

45TH THUNDERBIRD INFANTRY DIVISION HEADQUARTERS SALERNO, ITALY. SEPTEMBER 25, 1943

Captain Edward Anders leaned under the warm shade of a fig tree, a lit Lucky Strike hanging from his lips, and stared down at the beachhead below. His troops had been in the first wave of the attack to capture a city whose name he had never heard before the war. It took the combined forces of American and British troops nine days to advance past the beach and up the side of the sloping mountain where he now stood, smoking the last cigarette in his pack. Behind him, a command post had been set up inside a long series of brown tents. Inside the main tent, there were 3,500 sets of dog tags scattered in four wooden boxes, waiting to be mailed Stateside for eventual delivery to the relatives of the men who had been lost in a fight for sand and rock. Anders stared at the mountains above him, up toward Cassino, then back down toward the city of Naples, and knew there was still a lot of hard fighting left.

“Hey, Cap,” a voice behind him said. “Word is you want to see me.”

“It was more like an order,” Captain Anders said. “But let’s not stand on formalities.”

Captain Anders turned to look at Corporal Steve Connors as he stood at attention and held his salute, the Gulf of Salerno at his back. Anders brushed away the salute. “From what I’ve seen, you have as little patience for that shit as I do. Which probably means neither one of us is going to get far in this army.”

“I just want to get far enough to go home, Cap,” Connors said.

“Will Naples do you in the meantime?” Anders asked.

“What’s in Naples?”

“Most likely nothing. From the reports I’ve seen, the city’s already nothing more than a ghost town.”

“But still, you want me to go,” Connors said.

He removed his helmet and wiped the sweat from his brow with the sleeve of his uniform. Steve Connors was twenty-five years old, a college graduate and second-year law student from Covington, Kentucky. He was just shy of six feet tall with a middleweight fighter’s rugged build, topped by thick strands of dark hair, brown eyes and a wide smile that balanced out a hard edge. He had fought under Anders’s command for fourteen months, pounding and slashing his way from one blood-drenched beachhead to the next, always the first in line, always the first to fire. He had a street fighter’s instincts for battle and survival and was, as far as Captain Ed Anders was concerned, the best soldier for the task at hand.

“It might just be a ghost town with two of our men in it,” Anders said. “We had a handful of G.I.s helping the Italian resistance—or whatever the hell was left of it. Most of them slipped out before the evacuation. Two didn’t. They could be dead. They could be hiding. They could be back in the States for all I know. But we’ve got to find out.”

“I go in alone?” Connors asked.

“You’d like that, wouldn’t you?” Anders said.

“Very much, sir.”

“I’d like a bowl of my wife’s white bean soup,” Anders said. “But that’s not going to happen, either. You’ll be part of a three-man team. You go in, as quiet as you can, check out the city and see if you can find our guys.”

“Who else is on the team, sir?”

“If our soldiers are still in there, they might be hurt. So you’ll take one of the medics, Willis. And then another good rifle to cover your back. That’ll be Scott Taylor.”

Connors winced at the sound of Taylor’s name. “Every man out here has a rifle, sir,” he said. “Not just Taylor.”

“But not every man’s going,” Anders said, raising his voice. “Taylor is. I know you two rub each other the hard way, but this ain’t the senior prom. If it gets tight, he’s somebody good to have on your side. Neither one of you has to like it. You just have to do it.”

“Yes, sir,” Connors said. “Anything else I need to know?”

“Not a damn thing.” Anders reached into the front flap of the younger soldier’s shirt and pulled a loose cigarette from his open pack. “Just radio back what you see. We’ll do the rest.”

“And if we don’t find our men?” Connors asked. “What then, Cap?”

“Enjoy your stay in Naples,” Captain Anders said as he turned and headed back up to his command post.

2

16TH PANZER DIVISION HEADQUARTERS
FIFTEEN MILES OUTSIDE OF ROME, ITALY. SEPTEMBER 25, 1943

The eighty Mark IV tanks sat in long silent rows. German soldiers were scattered about, searching out shade and a cool place to doze. Colonel Rudolph Von Klaus stood in the open pit of his tank and stared at the note in his hands. The words on the paper had been passed down directly from Adolf Hitler himself. They were as simple and direct as any order he had received in his twenty-five-year military career. “Allow no stone in Naples to stand” was all it said.

To a precise and proud officer, the order read as nothing more than a complete waste—of a city once bold and beautiful, of a Panzer division that had fought too hard for too long to be reduced to a mop-up unit, and of time, of which there was precious little left before this wretched war would reach its ruinous conclusion. Naples had already been contained, its streets emptied. Aerial bombings had destroyed any buildings that could possibly be of future use to the enemy. It was a mission of madness. Just one more foolish request springing from the unhinged mind of a leader he found lacking in military logic.

Von Klaus folded the order into sections and shoved it into his pant pocket. He gazed around at his troops and took some comfort from the fact that as inane as the order was, its simplicity would at least guarantee that he would not have to leave behind any more of his men, lying dead or wounded on a battlefield. After the Naples mission, Von Klaus was scheduled to head back home, to a wife he had not seen in two years, a daughter who would now be eight and a son too young to remember the last time his father cradled him in his arms. Von Klaus was only forty-six years old, but felt decades past that. Nothing, he believed, aged a man more than having to face the reality of inevitable defeat.

“The tanks are repaired and fueled, sir.” The young soldier stood several feet across from Von Klaus, half-hidden by the shadows of dangling tree limbs. He looked to be months removed from his teenage years.

“Good,” Von Klaus said. “And the mules have been fed as well?”

“Yes, sir,” the soldier said. “Earlier this morning.”

“Check on them again tomorrow,” Von Klaus told him. “Until then, enjoy this warm Italian sun.”

“Sir, if I may, some of the men were wondering when we would be moving on,” the soldier said.

“Do you have a girl back home that you care about, Kunnalt?” Von Klaus asked him.

“Yes, sir,” Kunnalt said, surprised at the question. “We plan to marry once the war is over.”

“Then go and find a large rock, sit down and write her a letter,” Von Klaus said. “Make it a long one and take your time doing it. I’m in no rush to leave. The empty buildings of Naples will wait for us.”

3

LUNGOMARE, NAPLES
LATE NIGHT
SEPTEMBER 25, 1943

Two hundred boys and girls were spread out around a large fire, the flames licking the thick, crusty wood, sending sparks and smoke into the starlit sky. Their clothes were dirty and shredded at the sleeves and cuffs, shoes held together by cardboard and string. All their memories had been scarred by the frightful cries of war and the loss that always followed. The youngest members of the group, between five and seven years old, stood with their backs to the others, tossing small pebbles into the oil-soaked Bay of Naples. The rest, their tired faces filled with hunger and sadness, the glow from the fire illuminating their plight, huddled around Vincenzo and Franco. They were children without a future, marked for an unknown destiny.

Vincenzo stepped closer to the fire and glanced up at the sky, enjoying the rare evening silence. He looked down and smiled at two small boys, Giancarlo and Antonio, playing quietly by the edge of the pier, their thin legs dangling several feet above the water below. He glanced past them at a girl slowly making her way toward him, squeezing past a cluster of boys standing idle and silent. She was tall, about fifteen, with rich brown hair rolled up and buried under a cap two sizes too large. Her tan face was marred by streaks of soot and dirt. She stepped between Vincenzo and the two boys, her arms by her side, an angry look to her soft eyes.

“Where do we go from here?” she asked.

“The hills,” Vincenzo said with a slight shrug. “It seems the safest place. At least for now.”

“And after that?” she asked in a voice younger than her years.

“What’s your name?” Vincenzo asked, the flames from the fire warming his face.

“Angela,” she said. “I lived in Forcella with my family. Now I live there alone.”

Forcella was the roughest neighborhood in Naples, a tight space of only a few blocks that historically had been the breeding ground for thieves and killers and the prime recruitment territory for the Camorra, the Neapolitan Mafia. “Forcella?” Vincenzo said to her. “Not even a Nazi would be brave enough to set foot on those streets.”

“Especially after dark,” Franco said, laughing.

“But they did,” Angela said, lowering her eyes for a brief moment.

“What do you want me to do?” Vincenzo said. “Where do you think we should go? Look around you. This is all that’s left of us.”

“So we run,” she said, words laced with sarcasm. “Like always.”

Vincenzo stepped closer to her, his face red from both the fire and his rising anger. “There is nothing else to do,” he said. “You can help us with some of the little ones. A lot of them are too sick to walk.”

Angela glared at Vincenzo for several moments, lowered her head and then turned back into the mouth of the crowd.

Vincenzo walked in silence around the edges of the fire, the sounds of the crackling wood mixing with the murmurs of the gathered teens. They were all children forced to bear the burden of adults, surviving on the barest essentials, living like cornered animals in need of shelter and a home. They had been scattered throughout the city, gutter rats in soiled clothing, enduring the daily thrashings of a war started by strangers in uniforms who spoke of worlds to conquer.

They had been born under the reign of Benito Mussolini and his fascist regime. As the United States suffered through the pangs of a Great Depression, Italy lived under the warmth of economic prosperity. Its fields were flush with crops and its factories filled to capacity with products that brought the country headfirst into the modern age. Now, the fields were burned and barren, the factories bombed and bare. Where there was once hope, there now rested only hunger. Where once visions of great victories filled Italian hearts, there was now nothing more than the somber acceptance of a humiliating defeat.

“Naples has always been ruled by outsiders,” Vincenzo said, stopping alongside Franco and tossing two more planks of old wood onto the fire. “We’ve always been someone’s prisoner. But in all that time, the people have never surrendered the streets without a fight. This war, against this enemy, would be the first time that has ever happened.”

“Who are we to stop it?” Franco said, staring into his friend’s eyes.

Vincenzo stood in front of the flames, his shirt and arms stained with sweat, light gray smoke filling his lungs. He then turned and walked away, disappearing into the darkness of the Neapolitan night.

4

A HIGHWAY ROAD, TWENTY-FIVE MILES OUTSIDE OF SALERNO
SEPTEMBER 26, 1943

Steve Connors shifted gears on the jeep and eased it gently past a large hole in the dirt road and onto a long patch of brown grass. He killed the engine, grabbed a newspaper off the passenger seat and stepped out of the jeep. He lit a cigarette as he walked and folded a four-week-old edition of the
Cincinnati Enquirer
over to the sports section. He scanned past the headlines, searching for the baseball standings and the box scores.

“Why we stopping?” Scott Taylor asked, sitting in the front seat of the jeep. Taylor was twenty-four, a year younger than Connors. He was tall and muscular with short blond hair and pale skin that was quick to redden under the Italian sun, a high school football star back in his hometown of Pittsburgh. The two had known each other since basic training and shared a mutual respect for their respective battle skills and a dislike toward one another for almost everything else.

Connors flopped down under the shade of an old fig tree, leaning his head against its rugged bark. “Germans mine everything,” he said. “A road leading into Naples is one they wouldn’t miss. Which means we have to drive on grass. Which means before I start, I need a break.”

“I don’t need convincing,” Willis, the medic, said, jumping out of the backseat of the jeep and walking toward Connors and the shade. Willis was still a teenager, even though he tried to act older. He was the only child of a single mother who worked as a schoolteacher back in Davenport, Iowa. Willis was slight, had thin brown hair and walked with a farmer’s gait. He was a good medic and never panicked under the rush of battle. “Besides, you can only ride in these jeeps for so long. Makes your whole body numb.”

“I’ll wait here,” Taylor said, stretching his legs out and lighting a cigarette.

“That’s a good idea, Taylor,” Connors said, his eyes still shut. “I’d hate to have some sheepherder come along and drive off with the jeep.”

Connors tipped his helmet down across his face and allowed his mind to drift back to the many lazy afternoons he had spent across the river from Covington, sitting in the cheap seats at Crosley Field. With a youthful and still innocent exuberance, Connors would cheer the Cincinnati Reds to victory, savoring the win even more if it was brought about by the exploits of his favorite player, first baseman Frank McCormick.

Connors didn’t have much nostalgia for home, other than the normal longing for family and familiar faces and places. But not even the brutal events of a war could diminish his love for baseball. He longed for a game that was at once so simple yet so strict with its traditions and its rules. He loved the finality that embraced the two teams at the completion of nine innings, only to see each one grasp a new beginning with the start of the very next game. He lifted his helmet and gazed out at his surroundings, craters and rubble dotting a landscape once rich with vineyards and villas, and knew that such simplicity never could be applied to the much harsher rules of war.

After each Reds home game, Connors and a small pack of friends would drive over to Bob’s Restaurant, a twelve-mile run off the flat-road highway connecting Cincinnati to Cleveland, and order up a tableful of onion-smeared cheeseburgers and a platter of gravy fries, the entire greasy meal washed down with long-neck bottles of root beer and cream soda. Those days seemed so far removed from him now, distant memories from an orderly world.

The months he had spent in Europe, fighting battles in places he used to read about in schoolbooks and novels, had changed both his outlook on life and the direction he envisioned for his future. If America had been able to steer itself clear of war, Connors would have finished off his years of law school, settled down with a local girl and carved out a life as a tax attorney working for a Cincinnati firm, walking a similar life path as his father. And, much like his father, Steve Connors knew he would have lived out his days a happy man. But now, after all that he had seen and all that he had done as a soldier, he realized he would never be able to accept such a set-in-stone existence. He wasn’t quite sure what his new course would turn out to be or what events would enable him to give it shape and substance, and for now he didn’t feel any urgent need to know. For the moment, Connors was content with the knowledge that he had not only survived the rugged call of battle but thrived under its constant, daily pressure.

None of his combat moments, he honestly believed, required bravery or defiant acts of courage, and none contributed to his abilities as a soldier. He simply was a young man incapable of accepting defeat from anyone, at any time, and that is what helped fuel his desire not only to fight but to survive. It was a character trait that had followed him from early childhood and one he had never taken the time to notice. Especially since his unwillingness to concede a loss usually occurred over such unimportant events as a Little League baseball game, friendly nights of poker or a drag race in a remodified Chevy down dusty Graves Road outside Batavia, Ohio. But in war, such a trait looms large enough to gain attention and change the course of a man’s life.

Connors rested the sports section on his legs and looked out at the silent countryside. The area between Rome and Naples had been shelled hard, destroying most of the standing structures and turning Mussolini’s modern roadways into a graveyard for busted tires and broken axles. Yet despite all the damage, the region still retained the core of its stunning beauty and hard-to-resist charm. It was a stubborn land, much like the people who had lived off it. He lit a fresh cigarette, rubbed at the back of his neck and stared over at Willis, stretched out under the tree across from his. He glanced over at Taylor, stubbornly stewing in the front of the jeep, the sun turning his cheeks and forehead the color of beets, and shook his head.

In many ways, Connors feared for his future back home in America more than he feared any battle he would face here in Europe. He was a less complicated man living in Covington. There, he had understood his place and his standing, all the pieces of his life evenly and conveniently sorted and wrapped. But all that had changed, starting in those first weeks at basic, going right up to the final bullet he had fired during last week’s taking of the Salerno beachhead.

It often startled him to discover how calm he was in the midst of battle, how in check his emotions stayed and how he was able to rein in his fear and use its energy to his advantage, even as all around him the faces of the familiar fell dead. He thrived on the confrontation with the enemy and seemed impenetrable to their vicious and steady assault. No one in Covington would ever have envisioned him to be the soldier he had turned out to be. Back home he was the guy who was always quick with a sharp answer, ready and eager to make light of any situation. On European soil, he proved to be even quicker with a rifle, finding peace in the hard moments of a tense fight. He knew he would never find such peace back home, sitting in a quiet corner of a tax attorney’s office. He wondered if all that would change for him yet again, once he got back Stateside and lived among the surroundings he had always called his own. Part of him hoped so.

And, strangely, part of him didn’t.

The dog’s growl forced open his eyes.

Connors turned his head and saw a cream-colored bullmastiff standing a few feet to his left, its thick jowls curled in anger, a wide blotch of blood staining its massive left hind leg. He stared at the dog for several seconds, trying to decide if it was looking for a fight or just on a break from one. He lowered a hand off his leg and stretched out his fingers, reaching for a pack of Necco wafers wedged in the center of his K rations. The dog caught the hand motion and took two steps forward, heavy paws digging into the soft, dark dirt. Connors pulled the wafers from his pack and tossed them toward the dog, watching as the animal’s eyes shifted away from him and toward the food. He sniffed at the wafers, small lines of foam forming at the edges of his jaw, and then raised his right front paw and kicked the package back under the shade of the tree. Connors slapped his hand against the dirt and laughed. “I can’t even get a starving dog to eat this shit,” he muttered.

Willis turned his head and looked over his shoulder at the dog. “Cars in my town ain’t as big as that dog,” he said.

“He’s as scared as he is big,” Connors said. “So if you’re going to move, do it slow.”

He heard the rifle click and turned to see Taylor standing in the front seat of the jeep, his weapon pointed down at the dog. “So long as that dog stays in place, you do the same,” Connors told him.

“We’re here to find two soldiers,” Taylor said. “I didn’t hear anything about any dog.”

“Pull that trigger and you’re going to have to deal with me.”

Connors stood and, with one hand held out, fingers curled inward, took several slow steps toward the mastiff. The dog lifted his head and crouched down even more, his growl holding steady. “I’m gonna check your wound,” Connors said in a soft voice. “See how bad it is and if there’s anything I can do about it.” The dog began to sniff at his knuckles. “All I ask is you don’t take a chunk of my ass.”

The dog licked at Connors’s hand, the snout of his nose rubbing against the side of the soldier’s leg. He gently patted the dog’s massive neck, searching for a collar. “Looks like you’re out here on your own,” he said. “Like us.”

Connors squatted down and looked at the wound. The bleeding had slowed, but the cut was still open and raw. “He looks like he might need some stitches,” Connors said to Willis. “You up for that?”

Willis walked on hands and knees toward the mastiff, stopping at eye level across from the wound. “Don’t see how I can botch it up any worse than I do on you guys,” he said.

The mastiff turned his massive head and stared at Connors. “You’re just going to have to trust us,” he said to the dog. “Same as we’re doing with you.”

Connors turned to Willis. “What do you need?” he asked.

“Get me some water from out of that stream,” Willis said.

Connors walked over to a small stream, pith helmet in his right hand. He lowered the helmet into the still waters and brought it back to the surface, thin lines slipping down its sides and onto his wrists. He came up behind the dog, still holding his place, and kneeled in front of the wound, pith helmet cradled between his legs. “Okay,” he said to Willis. “Now what?”

“I’ll get my pack and bring back the supplies I need,” Willis said. “You run water over the cut. Do it about two or three times if you have to, just enough to wash off the dried blood. Then I’m going to dab at it with some wet gauze, clean up the area around the wound. Then I’ll either tape him up or stitch him.”

“You ever have a dog, Willis?” Connors asked, watching the mastiff flinch as the water fell down the sides of his wound, turning the dirt around his back paws into small puddles of red soil.

“Grew up on a farm,” Willis said. “Don’t think there was an animal we
didn’t
have. How about you?”

“Always wanted one,” Connors said. “But my folks didn’t need another mouth to feed.”

Connors made four trips to the meadow and back, clearing enough blood away for Willis to get a good look at the cut. “He took a hit of shrapnel,” the medic said. “Nothing too heavy, just enough to slice him. I’ll put some medicine on it and then bandage it up. And if he can stop chasing rabbits for a few days, he should be good as new.”

Connors stood in front of the dog, watching Willis work on his wounds, his back to Taylor’s rifle. “What was the plan?” he asked Taylor. “Shoot me and then the dog?”

“Only if I had to,” Taylor said. “And believe me, I wouldn’t lose much sleep over either of you.”

“He for real?” Willis asked, gazing over Connors’s shoulder at Taylor.

“We run into trouble, we’ll be glad he’s with us,” Connors said. “The rest of the time he’s like having a rotting tooth.”

Connors watched Willis work on the mastiff’s wound for the better part of the next hour. He was careful not to hurt the animal, dabbing at the cut, never pushing or prodding. He ripped open a powder pack and poured its contents over the cut, patting the thicker parts into the open edge with a palm full of wadded-up Waldorf toilet paper. Then he triple-wrapped thin slabs of gauze around the edges of the cut and tied them into place under the dog’s stomach. For his part, the dog never barked nor growled, content to let the young stranger go about his business. The overhead sun was hot and bright, the branches of the trees wilting under its steady gaze.

When he was finished, Willis paused to wipe his forehead and take a long drink from his canteen. He passed a hand across his mouth and looked over at the dog. “He’s probably thirsty, too,” he said to Connors.

Connors nodded, bent down and patted the dog’s head. “I suppose we could be rubes and have you drink from the stream over there, but you’ve been pretty good about all this, so some fresh water isn’t all that much to ask in return.” Connors bent down, cupped his hand, poured canteen water into it and held it up to the mastiff’s mouth. He smiled as the dog lapped up four handfuls, the large tongue slurping his fingers dry each time. “Okay, bud,” Connors said, capping his canteen. “That’ll do you until your next fight.”

Connors walked back toward the tree, folded his newspaper and shoved it into his pack, picked up his gear and rifle and then headed for the parked jeep. He turned to look at the dog, the animal’s eyes aware of his every move. Willis stood across from him, his gear already on his back. Behind them, Taylor, his rifle at ease, sat back down in the front of the jeep, wiping the sweat from his face and neck with a white cloth. “You be good,” Connors said to the dog. “If you see any Germans, bite them.”

Connors and Willis walked together toward the jeep, the dog following slowly behind them. “Thanks for doing that,” he said to Willis.

“He’s the first patient I’ve had since I’ve been out here who hasn’t bitched and moaned about my medical abilities,” Willis said.

“You two ready?” Taylor asked. “Or do you want to see if any birds need their wings mended?”