Street Boys (12 page)

26

LA STAZIONE CENTRALE, PIAZZA GARIBALDI, NAPLES
SEPTEMBER 27, 1943

The glare of the bright orange sun mixed with the thick plumes of white smoke, leftover evidence of the predawn damage, as Naples woke to a new day. The squinting eyes of the city’s survivors began to emerge from the cavernous railroad tunnels that led into and out of the city. The youngest of the children took the lead, running across empty tracks, kicking a soccer ball back and forth, heading toward the main terminals. Soap and clean water were at a premium, making the trickling fountains of the central station a prime gathering place for the tunnel dwellers. Breakfast had long ago become a forgotten meal; the best that could be expected was a small tin of weak coffee and a hard chunk of stale bread. Fresh eggs were a commodity and were fed to those in the group most in need of nutrition. Hunger was now an accepted part of their daily way of life, mingling comfortably alongside the filth and ravaged conditions of a city long past the point of hope.

Connors had parked his jeep under a tree, a short distance from the tunnels and clear of the aerial assault. He slept curled in the backseat, his pith helmet flat over his face, his rifle within easy reach. The mastiff was stretched out on the ground next to the jeep, one large paw covering his brow. The sound of thin soles running over hard ground caused them both to stir awake. Connors lifted his helmet and stared up at Maldini, the morning sun blocking out half the older man’s face. Maldini was short of breath, his face and neck coated with sweat. “What is it?” Connors said, sitting up in the backseat.

“There’s a ship,” Maldini said. “You can see it from the port or from the top of the tunnels. It’s heading toward the piers.”

“Ours or theirs?” Connors asked. He jumped from the back of the jeep, reached for his binoculars and followed Maldini up the side of a steep hill.

“It was too far out for me to see which flag it flew,” Maldini said. “But I know it’s not Italian. Any ships we have are underwater.”

Connors reached the top of the hill and perched himself over the side of a damaged stone wall, lying on his chest, elbows digging into dark dirt, staring through the binoculars out toward the horizon. “It’s not a ship, it’s a Nazi tanker,” Connors said, moving his head slowly from left to right. “You can tell by the design. She’s running pretty slow, which means she’s loaded. I figure she’s about a day out of port, maybe a little longer.”

“Loaded with what?”

Connors rested his binoculars on the ground and looked up at Maldini. “Fuel,” he said in a low voice. “Tank fuel most likely. Those leaflets the kids got were right. The Nazis are coming back. They’re coming back for the fuel.”

“How can you be sure?” Maldini asked.

“They’re not wind-up toys,” Connors said, getting to his feet. “Between my guys and the Brits, we got the Panzers spread out pretty thin. They’re gonna need all that tanker can hold to get them back up north to Rome.”

“The fuel belongs to them,” Maldini said. “They can take it and do what they want with it. But the leaflets also said they would destroy what’s left of the city. Will that happen, too?”

Connors stared at Maldini and didn’t answer. He slowly brushed past him and headed back down the hill toward his jeep.

Vincenzo, Franco, Fabrizio and Gaspare made up one team. Pepe, Dante, Claudio and Angela made up the other. Another boy, Angelo, a fourteen-year-old with an awkward gait and an easy smile, functioned as the referee. They were playing in the large cobblestone square just across from the main railroad terminal, morning sun at their backs, relishing in the joys of their national game.

“Do you know in America, they play football with their hands?” Fabrizio said, bouncing a soccer ball off his right knee and passing it to Franco. “With a ball that looks like an egg and with pads on their shoulders and legs.”

“How can you play that way?” Angela said, stepping forward to block Fabrizio’s forward progress.

“It’s a different game,” Vincenzo said, moving down the right side, dodging past Claudio and waiting for a leg pass. “I don’t know why they call it football, because it isn’t. The only time they use their feet is to start the game.”

“It’s nice to know there’s at least one thing the Americans can never beat us at,” Gaspare said.

Vincenzo aimed a floater pass up toward Franco, who quickly booted it to Fabrizio. They stood back and watched as Fabrizio did a spin move, lunged to his left, the ball a blur as it veered from one foot to the other, and then skidded to a stop in the center of the square. He kept his eyes on the open space designated as the goal markers and lofted a soft shot above Dante’s outstretched arms for the game’s first score. Fabrizio raised his hands and fell to his knees, his small head tilted toward the cloudless sky, a beaming smile spread across his face.

Connors pulled the jeep into the square and inched up slowly toward where the kids were playing. “Look how simple the world would be if left to children,” Maldini said, pointing at the ongoing game. “A ball, some boys and a sunny day. Nothing more is needed.”

Connors sat in the jeep and followed the action for several minutes. His mind was on the tanker. If it was close, so were the Nazi tanks, which meant the roads out of Naples would be a danger to travel across. The safer move might now be to keep the boys in the city and hidden, than out and running as a group. But that, too, came packed with many risks, the least of which was the near impossible task of keeping more than two hundred children clear of Nazi eyes. Connors looked away from the game and watched as Nunzia walked toward the jeep, two cups in her hands. “I thought you both could use some morning coffee,” she said, handing them each a cup. “I hope you like it without sugar, Connors. Since we don’t have any.”

“This is fine, thanks,” Connors said, taking one cup and passing the other to Maldini. The older man looked at the soldier, reached for his coffee and smiled. “I see you’ve met my daughter,” he said to him.

Connors sipped his coffee and nodded. “We talked about religion,” he said.

Connors stepped out of the jeep and walked closer toward the game. Nunzia and Maldini followed behind, both feeling relaxed and at ease in his company. Angela and Vincenzo glanced up, indifferent to their impending arrival, focusing their attention on the give and take of a soccer match.

“Do you play football?” Maldini asked him.

“Apparently not,” Connors said, drinking the last of the bitter coffee.

He stopped short and followed the soccer ball bouncing along the cobblestones. He stared at the chipped stones, the feet of the children running hard across their damaged surface. Connors tossed his cup to the ground and ran toward the kids. “Stop moving!” he shouted. “All of you, stop! Stay still!”

Vincenzo kicked the ball to Franco and turned to look at Connors. “Keep playing,” he told them. “Just ignore what he says.”

Connors ran closer to the group, reaching for the pistol clipped to his holster. “I said stay still, dammit!” he screamed.

“What we do and what we don’t do are none of your business, American,” Vincenzo said, running down the center of the piazza, angling for Fabrizio’s return pass. “Let us just play our game.”

Connors pulled his gun from the holster, aimed it toward the sky and fired off two rounds. The shots brought all action to a halt. Angela and the boys, breathing heavily from the steady running, turned and stared at him. Fabrizio held the ball with his foot, frozen in place. Nunzia and Maldini stood next to the soldier, both curious and frightened by his behavior.

“You’re playing it on a mine field,” Connors said.

Connors was on his knees, his hands filled with a small mound of pebbles. He threw one pebble at a time against the cobblestones, watching intently as they landed. “What are you doing?” Vincenzo asked him, lines of sweat streaking his face.

Connors spoke in a calm, soothing voice, eyes focused on the cobblestones. “Mines are laid down in patterns,” he said. “Circular or up and down. Once you figure out the pattern, you at least can tell where they are.”

“Is that hard?” Franco asked from across the piazza.

“That’s the easy part,” Connors said.

Connors tossed four more pebbles onto the piazza ground before he heard the clanging sound he needed. The noise came just to the left of Dante’s foot, the boy swallowing hard, not knowing what to think or feel. “There’s one,” Connors said.

He crouched down and tossed out a half dozen more pebbles, all of them close to where Dante stood. The air was summer warm and the singular breeze humid and stilted. There was no sound other than that of rock against steel. Connors stood as soon as a pebble had found its second target, this time close to Angela. “I’ll dig that one out,” he told the group as he stepped gingerly around them. “Then work my way across until I can dig up enough of them to get you out.”

“Is that part hard?” Franco asked, panic seeping into his voice.

“Yes,” Connors said.

A large number of boys had gathered in the piazza, mingling alongside Nunzia and Maldini. “Keep everyone as far back as you can,” Connors said to Nunzia, catching her eye for a brief second. “Just in case.”

Connors leaned down on the cobblestones, his face inches from the partially buried mine. Vincenzo crawled up alongside him, a small knife in his hand. “I’m starting to think that none of you really does understand English,” Connors said.

“You’re going to need help,” Vincenzo said. “It may as well be from me.”

Connors glared at the boy and then looked down at the knife in his hand. “I’ll lift off the cobblestones,” he said. “You scrape the dust away from the edges. But stay away from the top or bottom of the mine. And be gentle. It doesn’t take much to set them off.”

Vincenzo inched closer toward the stones, wiped his hand across the front of his shirt and then began to clear away the dirt around the mine, watching as the soldier rested the broken cobblestones off to the side. “We’ll need a place to keep them,” Connors said. “Away from the Germans and away from the kids.”

“I know a place,” Maldini said, standing over both Connors and Vincenzo.

Connors stared at the hovering shadow and shook his head. “Might as well get a parade going,” he said.

“Where?” Vincenzo asked.

“In Parco Virgiliano,” Maldini said. “You’ve all run and played on the grounds there. There are hundreds of pine trees spread around the property. It would be easy to transport the mines and keep them there out of sight.”

“Have you or any of your friends ever transported a mine?” Connors asked, raising his voice above the early morning din. His only greeting was silence and bowed heads. “Did you spend a lot of time after school digging them up and moving them to a park?”

“We never had to before,” Vincenzo said, welled-up anger filtering through his voice. “Now we do.”

“How?” Maldini asked.

“By cart,” Vincenzo said.

Vincenzo looked down at Connors’s right hand, the one that was now reaching for the base of the mine and saw the tremble, the twitching up to his wrist. “Is it nerves that makes that happen?” he asked.

“No,” Connors said with a wry smile. “And it’s not coffee, either. It’s fear.”

“Look behind you,” Maldini told them, pointing to the determined faces of the silent boys of Naples. There were close to two hundred now jamming the piazza, each eager for Vincenzo and the American to complete their task. “You cannot fail them.”

“If I make a mistake, we’ll all die,” Connors said, his voice dry and hoarse from the heat and the dirt. “Just thought it was something I should mention.”

“Don’t worry about who lives or who dies,” Maldini said. “Worry about yourself and what you need to do. If you can do that, then no one needs to die. At least not on this morning.”

Vincenzo took a deep breath and made the sign of the cross. He watched Connors place both his hands under the base, his fingers searching with great care for any trip wire or mechanism. “It feels clean,” he said. “The wire’s buried right under the lid.”

“What else is left to do?” Vincenzo asked.

“Nothing,” Connors said, “except lift it out.”

“Should we say a prayer first?” Vincenzo asked.

“A silent one,” Maldini said. “But if the Lord above doesn’t know by now we need his help, I doubt he ever will.”

Connors gripped the base of the mine, shut his eyes and gave the mine a tug, lifting it out of the ground. He heard nothing but silence. He rested his head on the ground and took a deep breath. “
Grazia a Dio,
” he heard Vincenzo whisper.

Vincenzo and Maldini helped Connors to his feet, the mine clutched against the soldier’s chest, a warm breeze helping to dry the sweat on their faces. “How many of these you think are planted?” Connors asked them.

“Three, four hundred maybe,” Vincenzo said. “They put them everywhere they could think of.”

“So can we,” Connors said.

“Dig them up and use against the Nazis?” Vincenzo asked.

“If you really want a shot at them,” Connors said. “You take everything they gave you and use it against them.”

The gathering of boys had stepped in closer to their circle, eager to see what had been accomplished. “Show them what you’ve done,” Maldini encouraged. “Both of you.”

Connors and Vincenzo took three steps forward and, with great care, raised the mine up, holding it aloft as if it were a soccer trophy. The group raised their arms in unison and, for the first time in many summers, the sound of cheers engulfed the city of Naples.

27

PIAZZA DEI MARTIRI, NAPLES
SEPTEMBER 27, 1943

Connors wheeled the jeep past Via dei Mille and made a sharp right turn at Via Chiaia, heading for the high end of the city, hoping to get a gauge on how far away the Nazi tanks were. He stopped in front of the Monument to the Martyrs, its base taken up by the hulking stone statues of four large lions, each blanketed by the warm rays of a late-morning sun. He glanced over at Nunzia, sitting casually in the front seat, hands folded across her lap, her beauty given an extra highlight by the evaporating mists. “I’ve never seen a city like this before,” he said, staring with respectful wonder at the vast sixteenth-century marble archways. “Even with all the hits, all the buildings destroyed, it’s still the most beautiful place I’ll ever see.”

“It’s a stubborn city,” Nunzia said, shielding her eyes and glancing over at him. “Like its people.”

“Stubborn I can understand,” Connors said. “People from my home town run in that same direction. They’re nice folks, friendly for the most part, but you can only push them so far.”

“It was much different here before the war,” Nunzia said. “Every morning, I would hear my
nonna
sing her old songs while she hung out the wash, my mother singing along with her from the kitchen. Our small house was filled with the smells of fresh coffee and baked bread, and through the open windows you could hear children cry and laugh, adults shout and argue. Now all we hear is silence and all we smell is the dust from the bombs.”

“You think you’ll stay here after the war?” Connors asked.

“I’ll go wherever my papa goes,” Nunzia said, shaking her head slowly. “It’s difficult to plan past the next few hours. And even then, there seems no point. You, at least, have a place to go back to, a home that you know and remember. None of us here have that. All that remains is what’s left of our city.”

“What do you want to do?” he asked, removing his helmet and wiping at the thin line of sweat forming across his forehead. “You know, if you could pick something to work at, what would it be?”

She shrugged her thin shoulders, a degree of shyness creeping into her otherwise determined veneer. “I love children,” she said. “Love to be around them, hear them laugh, argue, shed tears when they can’t get their way. Would be nice to spend my days listening to those sounds. It might help take the place of all the other sounds I’ve had to hear these past few years.”

“You’d be good at that,” Connors told her, a warm smile on his face. “I’d let you work with my kids any day of the week.”

“You have children?” she asked, a surprised tone to her voice.

“I should have said, if and when I have them,” Connors said with a quick shake of his head. “No, I don’t have any kids or a wife or for that matter anyone close to one.”

“What will you do?” she asked. “When you get back to your home?”

“I was going to be a lawyer before this started,” he said. “Now, I don’t really know. It’s going to be hard to look at words in a law book after you’ve seen what a war does to those laws.”

“You don’t look much like a lawyer,” she said, shaking her head in a teasing way. “Not the kind I’ve seen, anyway.”

“What kind is that?”

“You have an honest face,” Nunzia said, shifting her weight and looking at Connors with eyes that caused him to blush. “Most of the lawyers that prowled around Naples while Mussolini was in power did not.”

“I wouldn’t make much of a lawyer, anyway,” Connors said with a shrug. “Honest face or not. Truth is, I don’t really know what I’m going to do if I make it back home. I haven’t thought past having a couple of beers and going to a baseball game.”

“It sounds like a good place to start,” Nunzia said.

Connors looked up and saw a boy standing across from his windshield, a small shearing knife clutched in the palm of his right hand. He had on a pair of worn black shorts, no shirt and no shoes. He was rail thin, with hazel eyes and a head full of floppy light brown hair. He trembled where he stood, his soot-stained feet digging into the parched dirt. He held the point of the knife out, his arm stretched and aimed at Connors.

“
Cose e, piccino?
” Nunzia asked him.

“
Devo pagare per quello che a fatto
,” the boy said, his teeth clenched, frail body matted in sweat.

“
E cosa a fatto?
” Nunzia asked, leaning one leg out of the jeep.

“
Mi a mattzatto la mamma
,” the boy said, tears starting to fall down the sides of his face.

“What’s he saying?” Connors asked Nunzia, her face now a blanket of sadness.

“His mother was killed,” she said, her eyes on the boy. “He thinks you did it. He just sees a soldier in uniform. He’s too young to know the difference between a Nazi and an American.”

“And he wants to get even,” Connors said. “So would I.”

“
Questo signor non a mattzatto a nessuno
,” Nunzia said, stepping out of the jeep and walking toward the boy. “
E venuto per ci aiutare
.”

Connors jumped out of the jeep and saw the fear rise in the boy’s eyes. He kept his hands at his side as he moved. He stopped when he was inches away from the dull blade of the knife, looking directly into the boy’s smeared face. He raised his hand slowly and rested it on the boy’s arm, giving it a gentle squeeze. With his other hand, Connors moved aside the boy’s wet hair and brushed away the dirt and tears. He bent down on both knees and was eye-level with the boy, each staring at the other. Behind them, Nunzia clasped her hands across her mouth and stifled an urge to cry. Connors moved his hands away from the boy and left them back at his side, his eyes moist, locked onto the small, pained face in front of him. The boy, still trembling, his nose running and his cheeks flushed red and glowing, dropped the knife and let it fall to the dirt by his feet. Connors stayed on his knees, the air around him still and silent, allowing the moment to decide the next move. He heard Nunzia sob openly, while he held his own in check. All that mattered now was the shivering boy in front of him, who only moments earlier had been willing to kill in order to relieve the burden of his pain.

The boy took a slow, careful step forward. Then, after a slight pause, another. He was now inches away from Connors, close enough to smell the stale sweat and rumpled odor of his uniform. The boy took a quick glance at the Thunderbird patch on the sleeve of Connors’s shirt and then rushed forward, his arms wrapped around the soldier’s neck, his head buried in his chest. Connors reached out and held the boy close to him, letting him cry and wail, letting the suffering and longing he was much too young to endure rush to the surface.