Once Night Falls Read online

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, organizations, places, events, and incidents are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.

  Text copyright © 2019 by Roland Merullo

  All rights reserved.

  No part of this book may be reproduced, or stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without express written permission of the publisher.

  Published by Lake Union Publishing, Seattle

  www.apub.com

  Amazon, the Amazon logo, and Lake Union Publishing are trademarks of Amazon.com, Inc., or its affiliates.

  ISBN-13: 9781542007429

  ISBN-10: 1542007429

  Cover design by Faceout Studio, Derek Thornton

  For Amanda, Alexandra, and Juliana with love

  CONTENTS

  START READING

  MAP

  AUTHOR'S NOTE

  One

  Two

  Three

  Four

  Five

  Six

  Seven

  Eight

  Nine

  Ten

  Eleven

  Twelve

  Thirteen

  Fourteen

  Fifteen

  Sixteen

  Seventeen

  Eighteen

  Nineteen

  Twenty

  Twenty-One

  Twenty-Two

  Twenty-Three

  Twenty-Four

  Twenty-Five

  Twenty-Six

  Twenty-Seven

  Twenty-Eight

  Twenty-Nine

  Thirty

  Thirty-One

  Thirty-Two

  Thirty-Three

  Thirty-Four

  Thirty-Five

  Thirty-Six

  Thirty-Seven

  Thirty-Eight

  Thirty-Nine

  Forty

  Forty-One

  Forty-Two

  Forty-Three

  Forty-Four

  Forty-Five

  Forty-Six

  Forty-Seven

  Forty-Eight

  Forty-Nine

  Fifty

  Fifty-One

  Fifty-Two

  Fifty-Three

  Fifty-Four

  Fifty-Five

  Fifty-Six

  Fifty-Seven

  Fifty-Eight

  Fifty-Nine

  Sixty

  Sixty-One

  Sixty-Two

  Sixty-Three

  Sixty-Four

  Sixty-Five

  Sixty-Six

  Sixty-Seven

  Sixty-Eight

  Sixty-Nine

  Seventy

  Seventy-One

  Seventy-Two

  Seventy-Three

  Seventy-Four

  Seventy-Five

  Seventy-Six

  Seventy-Seven

  Seventy-Eight

  Seventy-Nine

  Eighty

  Eighty-One

  Eighty-Two

  Eighty-Three

  Eighty-Four

  Eighty-Five

  Eighty-Six

  Eighty-Seven

  Eighty-Eight

  Eighty-Nine

  Ninety

  Ninety-One

  Ninety-Two

  Ninety-Three

  Ninety-Four

  Ninety-Five

  Ninety-Six

  Ninety-Seven

  Ninety-Eight

  Epilogue

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  Democracy is beautiful in theory;

  in practice it is a fallacy.

  You in America will see that some day.

  —Benito Mussolini

  Dictators ride to and fro

  upon tigers which they dare not dismount.

  And the tigers are getting hungry.

  —Winston Churchill

  AUTHOR’S NOTE

  In the summer of 2007, thanks to a generous book advance, my wife Amanda and I were able to take our two young daughters to Italy for six weeks. It was mainly a family vacation, but I was also doing the not-very-painful research for a travel memoir on golfing and eating that would be published the following spring. I had no idea that our time in Italy would lead, twelve years later, to the writing of a very different kind of book.

  That summer, we rented half a duplex in a community of five houses that shared a swimming pool and a spectacular view down across the roofs of a small town on Lake Como’s western shore. Amanda and the girls and I passed the sunny weeks swimming and eating, taking easy hikes, and making day trips to lakeside villages in search of restaurants and golf courses that would fit into the travel book. One afternoon, while the girls were playing with new friends, Amanda and I took a stroll along the unlined road that ran across the hillside in front of our house. We’d gone only a few hundred yards when we came upon an elegant stone residence, Villa Belmonte, that was set behind wrought iron gates and a copse of fruit trees. On a stone wall in front of the villa, we noticed a small plaque in the shape of a black cross:

  BENITO MUSSOLINI

  28 APRILE 1945

  There was no information beyond the name and date, no mention of why the plaque had been set there. It didn’t look like the kind of notice you sometimes see in the US: George Washington slept in this house or Abraham Lincoln gave a speech in this auditorium. I knew Mussolini had been born hundreds of miles away, so the plaque couldn’t be marking his place of birth. And I knew—or thought I knew—that the dictator Italians once called il Duce, “the Leader,” had been executed in a square in Milan, Piazzale Loreto. There’s a famous photograph of his mutilated body and that of his mistress and three henchmen, hanging by their ankles above a gas station there.

  But when I went back to our rented house and did some research I discovered that, although the photo was accurate, my assumptions were not: Mussolini and his associates had been executed, not in Piazzale Loreto but in front of Villa Belmonte in the hamlet of Mezzegra in the hills above Lake Como. Their bodies had been brought to Milan to avenge a particularly gruesome killing of Italian partisans on that spot some eight months earlier.

  I had, of course, heard about the Italian partisans who’d helped defeat the Nazi occupiers in World War II, but only vaguely—so much more has been written about the French resistance. And I thought I’d known a fair amount about Mussolini’s rise to power and twenty-three-year rule over the nation where my father’s parents had been born. The plaque in front of Villa Belmonte piqued my interest, however. The more I read, the more fascinating the story seemed—especially the incredible events that followed Mussolini’s removal from power in July 1943.

  I grew up in an Italian-American enclave outside Boston, and I’ve been writing novels for forty years, so it was natural for my imagination to wrap itself around the struggle between good and evil in 1940s Italy. It seemed to me that the actual events offered the elements of a great story: heroism, treachery, secrecy, suffering, dignity, romance, and death—all set against the background of a country I’d come to love and the brutal war that tore it apart. Without Mussolini’s grand delusions, war might never have come to the bel paese or would have come in a very different form. The lives of tens of millions of ordinary men, women, and children were ended, ruined, or damaged by his egotism and embrace of violence, and especially by his sycophantic relationship with Hitler. This novel, circling around the dark historical truth of Mussolini’s fall from power, is intended to give a sense of the love, suffering, and courage of some of those ordinary people.

  Once Night Falls was begun years later on another trip to Italy, but written mainly in Western Massachusetts, where
we’ve lived for three decades. The story poured out of me quickly, as stories tend to do, but required extensive rewrites over a period of several years. I’m grateful for the helpful conversations and directions offered by Italian locals when we were staying at Lake Como, and I’m particularly indebted to five sources: Christopher Hibbert’s brilliant biography, Mussolini; David Kertzer’s Pulitzer Prize–winning account, The Pope and Mussolini; a historical compendium, World War II: A Day-by-Day History, edited by Peter Darman; another Pulitzer winner, Rick Atkinson’s amazingly detailed The Day of Battle; and Skorzeny’s Special Missions, a memoir by the incredibly courageous, diabolically skilled, and utterly loathsome German commando Otto Skorzeny.

  Within the confines of the narrative requirements of storytelling, with some compression of time, and with plenty of license for imagined characters and conversations, I have tried to be faithful to actual events. I wanted to capture a tiny portion of the enormous suffering and incredible bravery of that place and time, the battle between violence and grace, hatred and tolerance—a battle that continues, in various ways, in various parts of the world, to this day.

  One

  As dawn broke warm and clear over the hills west of Lake Como, Sarah Zinsi summoned her battered reserve of courage, stepped out of the cabin where she’d been hiding for weeks, and hiked up through the hardwood forest to a natural spring. At the bubbling pool there, she stripped off her clothes and began to bathe, enjoying the water’s cool shock and trying not to think about what would happen if a German patrol came upon her in that state. Unlikely, she thought. The ramshackle stone cabin had been unused for decades; the undergrowth this far up in the hills was dense and wild, what remained of the footpaths all but untraveled. Her lover, Luca Benedetto, had promised she’d be safe here, and he knew these hills better than anyone. Still, as she knelt beside the spring and washed herself, she couldn’t help but feel as vulnerable as a tiny woodland creature hunted by hawks and owls. By then—summer of 1943—the Nazi occupiers had draped a shroud of fear across Italy from the Alps in the north to the beaches of Sicily in the south. Bad enough, she thought, for men and Christians; so much worse for women and Jews.

  In the midst of her bath, she heard a rustle in the leaves, the snap of a twig, what sounded like footsteps. She went absolutely still, suddenly aware of every square centimeter of bare skin. She couldn’t bring herself to turn and look. She waited, barely breathing, a minute, two minutes, frozen in place, until there was only the cloak of mountain silence again in the trees around her. Un animale, she told herself. Un cinghiale. A wild boar foraging for truffles.

  She resumed her bath, cleaning the dirt and sweat from her feet, legs, and belly, using a scrap of yellow soap and one of the old towels Luca had brought her. She leaned over and splashed water on her breasts and face, washed her long chestnut hair as best she could. He would come see her today or tonight; she had that to look forward to. She had news for him. She wondered how he’d receive it.

  Two

  A hot day, even for Rome. In the Villa Torlonia, beside marble columns and beneath a sparkling chandelier, Benito Mussolini lunched on milk and fruit with his wife, Rachele. Il Duce frowned and fussed over the meal—bland foods were all his doctors allowed him these days—and did battle with an army of annoying thoughts, a series of regrets that assaulted him from every direction. He tried to concentrate on the food, to ignore the cramps and spasms in his intestines, but the regrets persisted, coming at him again and again, like attacking battalions, in waves. It seemed to him that he’d stayed married too long, stayed in power too long, that years ago he should have fled to Switzerland or Austria with Claretta Petacci, his young mistress, and lived a life of ease there, a life worthy of the sacrifices he’d made for Fascism and for his country. He should be riding horses, playing tennis, writing his memoirs, flying his plane across the Alps to one ski resort or another, an idol, a hero, a modern-day Roman god.

  Instead, he was stuck in this government palace, in this marriage, and the nation he’d sewn together purely by the strength of his own will was unraveling. He blinked four times, quickly, and glared across the elegantly set table. Rachele’s face—the straight nose and wide-set eyes, a face once attractive but now creased and worn by time—was pinched up into an anxious mask. During the course of their midday meal, she’d been saying the same thing over and over again: “Non andare. Non andare. Non andare, Benito!” Don’t go. Don’t go. Don’t go, Benito! And now, as he watched, trying to will her to be silent, she practically wailed: “I don’t trust this king, Benito. I’ve never trusted him. I never liked him. I had a dream last night that he took out a machine gun and shot you. Here.” She pointed to her own chest. “Don’t go, Benito. Please!”

  But Vittorio Emanuele III—a pitifully small and hopelessly mild-mannered royal—inspired no fear in Mussolini. Not two weeks ago, the king had assured him of his loyalty and friendship, and at these regular Sunday meetings, he was unfailingly deferential, soft-spoken, and weak. Half a man.

  Il Duce turned his eyes to the floor-to-ceiling windows and out at the white-hot afternoon. Fear was, to him, an alien emotion. For weeks, he’d been hearing warnings of a swelling dissatisfaction in parts of the Italian state. Regular as the sunrise, Rachele reported rumors of a coup d’état. His daughter, the countess Edda Ciano, said that her well-connected friends were talking revolution and that even her husband, Galeazzo, was complaining that Mussolini was driving the nation to ruin. Almost on a daily basis, aides claimed that this group or that—liberals, traitors, socialists, communists, his own supporters—were conspiring to replace him. Mussolini shrugged, stifled an urge to laugh. He’d survived combat in the trenches of World War I, decades of vicious political infighting, three assassination attempts. None of these people could touch him.

  True, things had not gone well of late: there had been strikes in the factories of the north and rumors of partisan fighters in the mountains there; three nights ago, the Fascist Grand Council, full of doubters and betrayers (including his own son-in-law!), had met for the first time in years and, by a small majority, made a vote of no confidence in their leader. No confidence! Based on what? Yes, the Allies had staged a landing in southern Sicily and made modest advances there; yes, Hitler was sending more and more troops and armament to secure the peninsula, because the Italians, he believed, had no fight in them. For weeks now, the Führer had been pressing him to allow German control over all military actions in Italy, something Mussolini would never sanction.

  No confidence! What none of them, not even Rachele, seemed to understand was that the leader of the Italian people still had an enormous amount of fight in him, could still charm or intimidate the king, and was still confident that the Allies—inferior soldiers led by madmen—would soon be chased back into the sea. His Claretta saw what Rachele did not: he was one of history’s great men, the founder of Fascism, of a new way of life—and history had shown again and again that great men always faced great difficulties.

  He swallowed a last sip of water, wiped the silk napkin across his lips, and abruptly stood up from the table. Rachele stood, too, and approached him. He signaled to the waiting Boratto to bring the car around; he let Rachele reach up and kiss him near the side of his mouth. He squared his shoulders, strode across the gleaming tile, out the door, past the impressive columns, down the wide front steps. Another few seconds, one last round of this “Don’t go, Benito! Don’t go, please!” sung from the doorway like a funeral dirge, and he was sitting in the back of his car, uncomfortable in a blue business suit (worn only so as not to intimidate the king!), instead of his customary military uniform. As the car began to move, he raised a hand to Rachele and then turned his face away and stared at the palm trees and lush gardens that lined the drive. He could feel drops of sweat at the back of his neck—merely the heat of the day. Everything would be fine. After this visit with the king—brief, a formality, nothing more than their regular exchange of views—life would return to normal. He’d have
Boratto take him over to Palazzo Venezia; he’d sit behind his desk in the map room, make his decisions, give his orders, summon Claretta to visit for an hour or so, begin to repair the damage the Council had done. He had information on every one of its members—a secret mistress, an illicit Swiss bank account, an addiction, a bit of theft from the national coffers. A twisted arm, a threat, a word or two in a series of private meetings and the absurd no confidence vote would certainly be reversed.

  Still, as they left the grounds of the Torlonia and glided along the nearly empty Via Salaria, past the broken columns of the Forum, past the Colosseum—monuments to the greatness of the empire—and then past the quiet facades of apartments and churches, the fusillade of regret and doubt erupted again. It seemed to him for a moment that he might be the most hated man in all of Italy. Not two years earlier, he’d stood on the balcony of the Palazzo with his chest thrust out, medals shimmering, and a hundred thousand of his countrymen had been screaming, cheering, raising the Roman salute. What had gone wrong in that short period of time? What demon of bad luck had taken hold of him? How could he shake it loose?

  Three

  For Federico Maniscalco, archbishop of Milan, there had always been something soothing about Vatican City. It was the home of his spiritual heart, the seat of his faith, an entire small nation devoted to prayer and good works.

  Now, however, as he walked through its gardens and went past the Pontifical Academy of Sciences en route to a meeting that made sweat form on the palms of both hands, he realized that the war had complicated his feelings, even about this sacred place. Since Mussolini’s alliance with Hitler, Pope Pius XII had clung stubbornly to a posture of strict neutrality. On the one hand, this policy made it politically more difficult for the Nazis—a strong and growing presence up and down the peninsula—to consider an occupation of Vatican City (a move that wouldn’t help them much, militarily, and would enrage many Italian Catholics). On the other hand, the pope’s stance had done nothing to aid the millions—Jews, mainly, but many Christians, too—who were being tormented, rounded up, and perhaps killed all across Europe. In his heart of hearts, Maniscalco found the pope’s posture less than Christlike, a moral failure, though, of course, he could never say such a thing from the pulpit.