Silver Stars (Front Lines 2)

Her stolen black dress is in tatters. The collar is so saturated by both fresh and dried blood that it looks as if the fabric is rusting.

“Again, Hans.” The Gestapo officer has a soft voice, an insinuating, regretful, but slightly bored voice.

Hans is a big brute in a sweat-stained uniform, which he has covered with a long, white butcher’s apron. It protects his uniform from the flying sprays of blood that are an occupational hazard for Hans. He wears leather gloves to spare his knuckles, and he wears a fat gold and emerald ring, a ring that looks as if it was looted from a rich dandy’s home. Hans has shoved the ring down over his gloved pinkie. He’s an expert at the backhanded blow that will bring the emerald into contact with flesh. But this is a less artful, more brutal blow, a punch, a clenched fist not to her face but to the side of her neck. It snaps her head sideways and sends waves of pain into her shoulder and rocketing up through her brain.

For a while she is lost, wandering on the dreamlike border between nightmare reality and eerie, unsettling visions. She has tried to focus her thoughts on a single happy moment, her date at the Stork Club with Halev. But that memory has become fragmented, so she can no longer summon long passages of happy conversation and now can only hold on to snatches, moments, and then only for a few seconds at a time.

“Let’s begin again.”

“My name is Rainy Schiller,” she says, her voice whistling slightly through broken teeth. “Serial number—”

The slap is almost perfunctory this time. The Gestapo man has accepted that her name is Rainy Schiller. That she is from New York. That she is an American soldier. And he has memorized her serial number.

He has not accepted her lie that she is in Italy solely to meet an Italian Resistance member named Xavier Cugat. In fact, Xavier Cugat is a bandleader known for his Cuban rhythms. It’s not even an Italian name, but it was the first Latinate name Rainy had come up with. She’d thought of giving them Tomaso’s or Cisco’s name, but that sort of cleverness could turn around and bite her.

The Gestapo agent, Heinrich Berman, remains convinced she knows more, and after weeks of interrogation, freezing cells, little food, and no sanitation, Rainy would happily tell him everything, anything . . . if she can be sure the Allies have landed in Salerno. Once the landing is secure, her secret is of no value.

If she can confess, she will be taken to the grim courtyard she can see from her cell, and like so many she has seen over the course of these terrible weeks, she will be placed against a wall, have a lit cigarette placed in her mouth, and be shot.

She is afraid to die, but death is preferable to this. Her body is one massive bruise. Her face is bruised, cut, and swollen so she is barely recognizable. She is filthy and stinks so vilely that Berman keeps the window open at all times to allow fresh air. Her dress and underthings are matted with dried vomit, piss, feces, and menstrual blood as well as the blood of beatings. She had just started her period when she was captured. It is this fact alone that saved her from being raped as a sort of Gestapo “welcome.” And now she is far too vile an object for that particular indignity.

On a few occasions she has heard distant explosions and has begun to hope that it might be approaching Allied artillery, but it could just as easily be bombs. In the early days of captivity, she had applied her intelligent mind to the task of seeking escape, but her cell door is thick wood, and the bars on the tiny, dirty window are strong and firmly fixed in stone. That window is at her head level when she stands on tiptoes, and it is placed directly beneath and behind the stake where the condemned are tied. Her view is of the feet of the doomed, and the three or four black-uniformed SS riflemen beyond. Again and again she has seen the condemned dragged in, often barely able to stand. Time and again she has seen the execution squad line up, cigarette smoke rising from faces sullen with drink. Time and again she has heard the orders snapped out, seen the rifles rise, heard the crash, seen the feet splay sideways, seen a body slump. Watched blood run down like rain across the glass.

After the first beatings she knows escape is a pipe dream. She can only walk in a shuffle, and even the simplest thoughts require all her energy. Her focus drifts. Her thoughts splinter and go off in tangents before petering out in futility.

Her best future now is death: bullets are quick. She has come to envy the dying.

At first she had tried to keep their spirits up, crying out, “Be strong!” in Italian, as most of those executed now are Italian partisans. But that bravado is miles beyond her now. That Rainy is gone. That Rainy has been beaten, leaving only this filthy, despicable, weak creature.

“How did you come to be in Italy?” Berman asks in his bored voice.

“Parachute,” she says, and flinches, awaiting the blow that arrives instantly.

“Who was your contact?”

Some time later she is aware of being dragged, limp as a doll, and pushed to fall against the stone wall of her cell and slide, delirious, to the floor.

Some unmeasurable time later, when she reluctantly leaves the realm of swirling nightmare and returns to her worse-than-nightmare reality, she senses a change in the air. At first she has no idea how she knows something is different. The effort to focus takes all her energy, and she drifts in and out of full consciousness. She hears a gunshot. It makes her frown. It’s not right. Wrong sound. Wrong direction.

She hears a yell in Italian, No, no, no, no. Mercy! I have a family! The cry is cut short by a gunshot, then in quick succession, a second shot.

Cell doors are opening and not slamming shut. Too many feet in the corridor.

Slowly the truth comes to her: they’re shooting prisoners in their cells.

A cell door opens, quite close by. The man in the cell next to hers yells and curses in a language Rainy does not recognize.

Bang. And a second gunshot immediately after. Bang.

One in the heart, one in the head.

The key rattles in her own door.

I’m going to die.

I’m going to die right now.

Right now.