Street Boys by Lorenzo Carcaterra

Author:Lorenzo Carcaterra [Carcaterra, Lorenzo]
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
ISBN: 9780345461803
Publisher: Random House Publishing Group
Published: 2002-08-19T12:00:00+00:00

9

PIAZZA TRIESTE E TRENTO

The room was on the second floor, the blinds drawn, a candle in the corner burned down to a low wick. Franco lay in the small bed, a thin sheet covering him to the waist, his eyes fluttered shut, a blood-soaked bandage wrapped around his wounded shoulder. He heard the floorboards creak and opened his eyes. “Vincenzo,” he said. “Sei tu?”

The footsteps came closer and Franco could make out the image of a boy about his height and weight sulking toward his side of the bed. The boy sat on the edge of the spring mattress, the small of his back against Franco’s feet, resting a warm hand on top of the sheet.

“Who are you?” Franco asked, able to catch glimpses of the boy’s face in between tiny flickers of the candle flame.

“My name’s Carlo,” the boy said in a thick, harsh voice that Franco did not recognize. “And I can be a friend to you.”

“How did you find me?” Franco asked, wiping drops of fever sweat from his brow. “No one knows about this place.”

“It wasn’t hard,” Carlo said. “Nothing is if you know who to ask and where to look.”

Franco lifted himself higher in the bed, wincing at the sharp pain in his shoulder. The large, jagged wound had been slow to heal with medication being hard to come by and painkillers nonexistent. Connors had yanked the shank out and Nunzia had cleansed the cut, pulling out as many splinters as she could with a hot pair of tweezers. She then rubbed a boiled lemon and ground pepper paste on the edges of the wound and sealed it with a mixture of penicillin and hot wax before wrapping it with the boiled strands of a torn dress. Franco was running a high fever and his lower limbs were cold to the touch. He reached for the glass that was on the end table, next to the candle, and drank down the last drops of wine.

“You can start telling me what you want,” Franco said. “I’m not going anywhere for a few hours.”

“I want to help you and your friends fight the Nazis,” Carlo said. “Nothing more than that. I have a small group up in the hills that will come join me. We’re all very good and you’re going to need all the good people you can find.”

“Why are you waiting until now to help us?” Franco asked, still suspicious, trying to place both the face and the choppy sounds of the boy’s harsh dialect.

Carlo slid down the edge of the bed, closer to Franco, leaning across the sweaty sheets with a smile, exposing a mouthful of neglected teeth. “We followed what you all were doing, but from a distance. We wanted to make sure it was going to turn out to be more than just loud talk in empty piazzas. And we didn’t think you wanted any help from kids like us.”

“You’re from the children’s prison,” Franco said, a hint of recognition taking shape in his fever-fogged mind.

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