Once Night Falls by Roland Merullo

Author:Roland Merullo [Merullo, Roland]
Language: eng
Format: epub, azw3
Published: 2019-12-01T05:00:00+00:00

Forty-Four

Luca arrived in Dubino not long before the sun dropped behind the western hills. It wasn’t exactly the typical market hour—in fact, most of the stalls were empty. All that remained of the day’s activity were a few farmers packing up their boxes, a few stems and leaves in the gutter, and two smashed, rotten plums on the cobblestones. Nothing edible could be seen. The stubborn old donkey and the military traffic had made him late, very late in fact, but he was here now. He suspected there would still be people looking for food—hunger knew no clock—so he simply pulled the cart up in front of the row of stalls, tied the reins to a post there, and waited for customers. He didn’t have to wait long.

Among those who came to peruse Masso’s offerings were the usual array of kerchiefed women, their faces painted in various shades of pain. Luca recognized these expressions from seeing them on his own mother’s face. A husband on the Russian front. A son or sons in Albania or Greece. Or buried not far away. There were those, of course, women and men both, who consoled themselves with the notion that Italy was fighting a great war of liberation, that Mussolini had been sent from God to bring order and prosperity to the bel paese. But his own mother had never been one of those. Luca didn’t see a lot of triumphant patriotism on the faces of these women, either.

A few children stopped by as well, sent from home, clutching lire notes or ration cards in their small hands and staring up at his chalky eye with innocent faces. He charged them half price, always.

The rest of his clients included a young priest, a carabinieri officer, and one German soldier, bespectacled and quiet, who actually paid for his three apricots and actually said thank you—a miracle.

And then, at last, when Luca had sold the best of his produce, along came a very old woman walking with a cane and wearing a blue shawl on the warm evening. She paid with coins—one bunch of fennel was the purchase—and said not a word to him. It was the blue shawl that mattered. A signal: the barn meeting was still safe. He could tie up the donkey in the usual place; make his way into the hills in darkness, going by moonlight, taking a crooked route; do his business; and return in time to sleep at the inn, then steer the donkey and cart back to Mezzegra in the morning. Just the sight of her made an acrid sweat form in his armpits. One: he did not have the money the trio was expecting. Two: if Scutarro was, in fact, a spy, he might be bringing along SS friends or Fascist police who would arrest him. Three: if Scutarro wasn’t a spy, if Masso was playing a trick, if the old man was actually working for the other side and bitter about the killed Fascist, then he would never see Sarah again.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.