The Penny Bangle (31 page)

They finally arrived at a stone house, in a very bad state of repair. It was the kind of summer residence a wealthy Italian family would have used before the war. Well concealed by firs and evergreens, it was a perfect hideout.

As they and their captors reached what was left of a garden, a tall man and some shorter, stocky ones came running from the house. They all carried rifles, and looked as if they’d use them.

‘She says he’s British,’ said the leader of their captors, indicating Robert. ‘He looks like a Sicilian village idiot to me.’

‘A jolly good afternoon to you, old boy,’ the tall man said to Robert, in a deliberate parody of English. ‘Everything tickety-boo back home in good old Blighty, then?’

‘No, not particularly,’ said Robert, shrugging. ‘Please may I put my hands down now?’ he added, in stumbling Italian. ‘I’d like to scratch my nose.’

The group Robert and Sofia had joined was made up of Italian soldiers who didn’t want to end up in German POW camps, and who had wisely hung on to their weapons.

‘It was either become a partisan or join the Fascists,’ one of them explained to Robert, adding that their main objective was to pin down any German troops who were still occupying the region, while waiting for the Allies to break through and end the war.

‘Up here in the mountains, we can look down on them and pick them off,’ he added, grinning. ‘That’s when we have some ammunition, obviously.’

Marcello, their undisputed leader, was older than the others. He said he was a Communist who had been in prison before the war, but had escaped after the armistice.

He was delighted to welcome Robert to the band. A British army officer, skilled in explosives, a trained killer and a seasoned fighting man, he’d always be an asset.

But he wasn’t keen to have Sofia in the group, and told her to go home. ‘My men will see you safely down the mountains,’ he continued, adding that he never liked using women. They were not only unreliable, but if they were captured by the Germans or Militia, women always broke down under torture.

‘If you’re taken by the Fascists, and handed over to Black Brigade, you’d squeal like a pig,’ he told Sofia.

‘I would not!’ replied Sofia, stung. ‘Give me a job to do, and you’ll find I can be as brave as any man, and I – ’

‘You’ll never survive a winter in the mountains,’ Marcello interrupted tersely. ‘You’ll get sick from cold and hunger, and your nerves will trouble you. Go home now, while it’s still possible.’

‘I will not go home,’ replied Sofia. ‘The Englishman and I – ’

‘I need her to translate for me,’ said Robert.

‘You don’t,’ Marcello told him. ‘You understood what we just said.’

‘We came together, and we stay together,’ insisted Robert firmly.

Marcello scowled, and muttered something rude about the arrogant British soldier and his bossy, chatterbox
puttana
, which Robert knew meant whore.

‘Thank you,’ said Sofia, as Marcello stumped away. ‘I’ll prove to you I’m up to it.’

‘You better had, Sofia,’ said Robert grimly. ‘Otherwise, we’ll both be shot – or worse.’

Marcello told them he’d soon be giving them a job to do, reminding them if they got caught, they would be on their own.

‘If you’re interrogated, and if you betray this group of partisans, other partisans will find you and they’ll kill you slowly – that’s if the Germans haven’t shot you first. So either way,’ Marcello said, ‘get caught, and you’re both dead.’

The job was pinching whatever they could in the way of weapons and ammunition from a shepherd’s hut that was currently being used for storage by the Germans, on a road a few miles down the mountain.

They had to kill the sentries, too.

The place had been reconnoitred, said Marcello. Most days, there were just two guards, one a surly-looking veteran, and one a skinny kid, a recent conscript by the look of him.

‘No,’ said Marcello, ‘you can’t have any weapons. If you start a firefight, half an hour later this whole mountain will be alive with Germans, and they’ll find this house.’

‘I won’t do this unarmed,’ said Robert firmly.

‘You can have a knife each, but that’s all,’ Marcello told him. ‘So make sure you kill the Germans, yes?’

‘It’s a test,’ Sofia said in English, and she trembled.

‘One we’d better pass,’ said Robert. ‘I expect you wish you’d gone back home?’

Sofia didn’t reply.

Robert and Sofia had soon learned the art of moving silently through any kind of landscape. On the morning of their test, they took some hessian sacks, they scrambled down the narrow mountain paths, and then they wriggled on their stomachs through the undergrowth which had not been cleared since the Germans had arrived, and so was dense with laurel, broom and brambles, making perfect cover.

Italian peasant farmers were fanatical about clearing grass and weeds from the terraces where they grew their crops, because the undergrowth was such a fire risk in the summer. But since the Germans had occupied the country and made life impossible for many of the farmers, had burned some villages and evacuated many others, the weeds grew where they pleased.

At first Sofia and Robert did very well, getting close enough to hear the German sentries talking. Robert signalled to Sofia to move back a little, so they’d be out of earshot.

‘I’ll go and throw some stones at them or something, to distract them,’ said Sofia. ‘You get inside and grab whatever you can, and then we’ll run away.’

‘I don’t think that would work,’ said Robert. ‘We’ll end up getting shot. Look, here’s what I suggest. You speak some German. So you go a bit further down the hillside, and then get on the road.’

‘What do I do next?’

‘You walk back up, and when you pass the hut you stop, you smile, you say hello.’

‘You must be joking!’

‘No, I’m deadly serious.’

‘You hope those men will shoot me?’

‘I hope those men will want you.’

Then Robert turned Sofia’s collar down, straightened the neckline of her grubby blouse, and pushed her long, dark hair back from her brow.

‘Bite your lips to make them red,’ he added, ‘and pinch a little colour into your cheeks. Okay, I think you’ll do. So off you go and flirt as if your life depended on it, which of course it might.’

‘You will be covering me?’

‘Of course I will. Sofia – ’

‘Yes?’

‘Good luck.’

Ten minutes later, Robert saw Sofia come sauntering up the road towards the German sentries, who walked into the road to block her way.

She smiled, and wished them both good morning.

One of the guards was middle-aged, a thick-set, bull-necked corporal. Scowling at Sofia, he asked for her identity card.

She handed it to him.

As he was checking it, Sofia preened and flirted with the other guard, a slight, blond teenaged boy, who giggled, blushed and answered back.

As Robert watched, he wished he had insisted on a firearm. The Germans were both armed with submachine-guns, but he had just a knife.

He was supposed to kill them both. Or, at any rate, he didn’t expect Sofia to kill them, so he’d have to do it. But one was just a child. He really didn’t want to kill a child. The older man was doomed, he’d had his life. But it seemed so wicked to kill a child.

Then he thought of what could happen to Sofia in a German prison, or in an interrogation centre run by the Militia, and he shuddered. He didn’t dare mess this up.

He watched Sofia talking, flirting, tossing her damson-coloured hair, and finally she took the young blond lad into the hut. The older man stood moodily outside, smoking a cigarette and stamping – waiting for his turn, presumably.

Robert waited for a couple of minutes, and then he made a move. Silent as a snake, he crept up on the guard outside, and then he clapped his hand over his mouth. He jerked the German soldier’s head right back, and snapped his neck.

He drew his knife and slid into the hut, hoping it would be light enough to see what he was doing – of course he didn’t want to stab Sofia by mistake, and if she was entangled with the boy …

He found her standing by the body of the boy, whose chest was dark with blood and whose blue eyes were open wide.

‘You killed him!’ he exclaimed, amazed.

‘Yes.’ Sofia was shaking. ‘I didn’t want to do it! But I felt I had to kill him, otherwise Marcello – Robert, I feel sick.’

Robert pulled her into his embrace. ‘There’s going to be more killing,’ he whispered, as he held her close and stroked her hair, as he felt her shuddering against him with both cold and dread. ‘Perhaps Marcello is right – you should go home.’

‘I’m not going home!’ Sofia dashed some tears from her eyes. ‘But there are bound to be reprisals,’ she told Robert, as she looked at the dead boy. ‘Two Germans dead – that’s probably going to be two dozen or more Italian lives, and if they find our house – ’

‘If they do, we’ll need some weapons, won’t we, so we can defend ourselves?’

They took as much as they could carry – guns and bullets, three kinds of grenade and leather belts of ammunition – and slogged back up the mountain, weighted down like donkeys with sacks upon their backs.

‘Machine guns!’ cried Marcello, when he saw their loot. ‘That’s excellent, well done!’ He glanced up from examining them and grinned. ‘Get any ammunition?’

‘Of course we got some ammunition,’ said Sofia, glowering at him. ‘What use would a machine gun be, without some rounds of ammunition?’

‘We’ll mount one on that sharp bend in the road a hundred metres from the hut, and then we should be able to attack the German convoys as they come up to man their big defences.’ Now, Marcello was almost dancing in delight. ‘Robert, you can get on with that tomorrow. Get the range right, and we can start to give the bastards hell.’

‘I thought you didn’t want us starting any firefights,’ muttered Robert, but only to himself.

‘By the way,’ went on Marcello, ‘did you get a radio? Did you see any boots? We’re running short of boots.’

‘No,’ said Robert, who had carried almost his own weight of weaponry back up mountain tracks. ‘You didn’t say you wanted any radios or boots. I’ll do my best next time.’

‘I’m sure you will.’ Marcello grinned again. ‘Well done, the pair of you, the black witch and the mountain lion.’

Sofia beamed, kissed Robert on the cheek. ‘Yes, well done us,’ she said.

‘As for reprisals,’ said Marcello grimly, while they were having supper, ‘there’ll always be reprisals when a German soldier dies. If a German has a heart attack while he’s having his morning crap, or as he screws some Fascist whore, there’ll be reprisals.’

Later, they heard a village in the valley had been burned, and three people shot. Robert felt guilty, and Sofia cried.

Robert wished he could get a message home, but he knew it was too dangerous even to attempt it, and unlike some other groups of partisans, they had no radio.

Marcello used young lads as couriers, and they took his messages down the mountain. But anyone caught carrying a letter written in English would have been interrogated, tortured, and probably put to death. It wasn’t worth the risk.

He told himself that Cassie would have faith, that even if she’d been told he had gone missing, or even that he’d died, she would believe he was alive.

What was she doing now, he wondered, as he cleaned a rifle and then reloaded it. He hoped she wasn’t as cold as he was on this freezing winter night.

Cassie was sitting in Daisy Denham’s warm, luxurious kitchen, busy making plans for Charton Minster.

The more she had considered it, the better it had seemed suited to what Daisy had in mind, and in the end she’d written to Daisy, asking what
she
thought.

A place where undernourished, wan-faced children could spend a week or two enjoying lots of sunshine and fresh air, running along a beach or even learning how to swim – the Minster would be perfect, wouldn’t it? As for staff – there must be local women who’d like part time jobs?

‘What a clever little sparrow,’ Daisy said, as Cassie finished talking, or rather as she paused for breath, because she had a whole lot more to say.