Silver Stars (Front Lines 2)

Meanwhile there was the dull routine of garrison duty for the platoon, first in a proper town and then in a remote mountain village. With the fighting over, uniforms had to be proper, boots spit-shined, ties knotted just so. But everyone got three hots and a cot, and it beat getting shot at.

Mussolini, that strutting fool, was overthrown by his own people. There was a celebration—we all managed to find something alcoholic to mark the occasion. And for about a day we had the illusion that the whole thing might be over pretty quick. But the Krauts swept down through the boot, pushed aside the few Italian Resistance fighters, and effectively made Italy far more dangerous than it had been when it was only ill-equipped, half-starved, and completely despondent Italians.

Rio got her first Purple Heart.

Frangie Marr spent those weeks enduring two more operations to pull out the last bits of shrapnel. She got a Purple Heart too.

And Rainy Schulterman? After narrowly avoiding arrest by an eager patrol, she made her way to a picturesque little town outside Rome to await the invasion.

We were all awaiting the invasion, and somehow we had convinced ourselves Italy would be easy.

Easy.

I want to put my fist through a wall just thinking of it. And it is with a sense of mounting dread that I tell myself to stop stalling and get on with telling that story. We are perhaps halfway through my long tale of war and woe, but there were laughs and fun too.

Yes, there was fun sometimes. Even in Italy.

Two more lines before I reach the bottom of this sheet of paper. The letters are getting sketchy, and I’ll need to change the ribbon in the typewriter.

And then, Gentle Reader, I will tell you about Italy.

Bloody, goddamned Italy.

PART III

OPERATION AVALANCHE

THE INVASION OF ITALY

25

RAINY SCHULTERMAN—GENAZZANO, ITALY

Rainy is dressed all in black, just another young Italian war widow walking the two miles to the nearest market, string bag at the ready to carry bread and wine and olives and maybe a small piece of fish. There is a food shortage in Italy and it is growing worse; there is no shortage of women in mourning in Italy. The older ones were still in mourning from the last war; the younger ones mourn soldiers lost in this war. Italy has much experience with mourning.

Rainy had stolen the clothing months earlier from a drying line on the outskirts of Rome, just outside the Porta Maggiore, a double arch of stone that long ago—very long ago—had formed a gate in the Aurelian walls on the eastern edge of the ancient city. It had been worth the risk taking the clothing—people didn’t look at women in mourning, they were all but invisible.

She had walked out of Rome in her purloined outfit and, after two days spent walking and hiding at night in barns or sheds, she had at last collapsed, exhausted, in a weed-grown cavern cut long ago into the hillside just beneath a vertical rise precariously topped with three- and four-story apartment houses. And there she lay for three days as a fever made her teeth chatter and her body ache. Lay there without food, the only water coming from a trickle down mossy stone walls that she had to crawl to and lick. On the fourth day, as the fever began to break, while Rainy was too weak to even crawl to water, a boy and girl, brother and sister, found her.

They had summoned help, and in the end she’d been half carried, half dragged to a church and given over to the care of hard-faced but kind nuns. A day earlier and they would have found her raving in English as the fever twisted her mind into pretzels of illogic. But with clean water and bites of bread and cheese, she had managed to stick to Italian.

It wasn’t Italian that would fool a local but for the fact that Italian has so many dialects and regional accents. She told the nuns she was from the Venezia area. That she had come south to visit her dead husband’s commanding officer in Rome, but that he had turned her out without so much as a glass of wine or a hundred lire.

The nuns believed her, or pretended to. The nuns had fed her and bathed her and washed her filthy mourning weeds.

She had concealed her guns—the silenced .22 and the gun that had chafed her thighs so cruelly—in the cave. She had transferred her suicide pill to her stolen dress and it had, to her amazement, survived a thorough washing. And she still had money, concealed in the false bottom of the purse she had kept.

With her strength recovered, Rainy had stayed with the good sisters until the reverend mother had suggested that she should register with local authorities to avoid any problems arising.

Rainy had taken this as a sign that it was time to move on. In the night she took bread and cheese, several tins of sardines, and two bottles of wine, then she left two thousand lire—which she believed to be about twenty dollars—pinned with a note that said simply, grazie, and snuck away.

She retrieved her weapons and walked up into the hills outside Genazzano, looking for and eventually finding an abandoned stone house that leaned back against a thirty-foot escarpment. The back wall of the house was the cliff face, rock and dirt. She could easily see why the house had been abandoned—there was a two-foot hole in the roof where a slab of stone had fallen from the escarpment. The rock still sat there like an odd artwork in the single room. The hole in the roof at least let in sunlight, which was pleasant until the autumn rains started, and then the entire room could be flooded an inch or more deep.

Not pleasant, not in the least, but better than the alternative. And surely the Allied landing would come soon.

As she walks into town, Rainy keeps her head down and avoids eye contact with other people on the street. Genazzano is a small, hilltop village of no great distinction, cobbled streets, faded apartments and homes, with few shops beyond the necessary. The limestone walls still bear the iconography of the now-deposed Mussolini—portraits, slogans, exhortations—but these had all now been defaced. Mussolini no longer ruled Italy, the German army did.

Though Rainy avoids contact or conversation her presence is of course known to the locals. Strange women with “Venetian” accents simply don’t appear and take over abandoned properties in small towns and go unnoticed. But small towns have a habit of secrecy, especially when it comes to the police, and with the police now lacking all authority she feels she might be safe, at least from that direction.