Alex Preston - In Love and War

A young lieutenant leaps out and begins to speak in heavy Italian, looking past them as he passes out handbills on yellow paper. ‘We inform you that this city has been declared a site of specific strategic importance and will be occupied by the forces of the Großdeutsches Reich indefinitely. All men between the ages of eighteen and forty-five should be ready to present themselves to the Stadtskommandatur within a day’s notice. Any resistance will be treated with the greatest severity. Please’ — a smile, thin — ‘enjoy your lunch.’

An hour later, Esmond is standing on the terrace at L’Ombrellino with Alessandro, who is looking at the town through George Keppel’s binoculars. The tanks have been arranged in formal lines in the Piazza della Signoria, the two Hummel guns on the Lungarno beside the Ponte Vecchio.

‘It looks like they’re basing themselves towards the station,’ Alessandro says. ‘All of the personnel carriers are heading that way. It’s only the tanks and artillery that are going to the centre of town. A show of force. Fuck!’

Elio is the first to arrive, his face flushed. He stands beside them on the terrace. An icy wind funnels down from the mountains. Ada comes to join them.

‘How many do you think are there?’

Alessandro puts down the binoculars and shakes his head. ‘Probably not that many, but they’re trying to make it look like a full-scale invasion. Twenty tanks, perhaps a thousand men.’

‘We can call on more than that, surely.’ She looks from Alessandro to Elio.

‘You forget’, Elio says, ‘the Fascists who’ll come crawling out of their holes. People like Carità, Koch — this is what they’ve been praying for.’

By early afternoon, they are all seated in the drawing room at L’Ombrellino. Esmond makes tea on the stove in the kitchen and brings it through to them. It is raining heavily, the city hidden under a grey wash. The Professor sits in a wing-back chair in front of the empty fireplace and blows on his tea, a standard lamp lit behind him.

‘Badoglio and the King have fled,’ he says. ‘They’re in Brindisi, well within Allied-held territory. But this alters everything. This is war, and on our doorstep.’

There is a murmur amongst the group. Esmond knows most of the men and women sitting around the dusty room. Bruno and Alessandro are there, of course, as are Antonio and Tosca. Bruno had gone from house to house on his bicycle, telling the news, ordering them up to L’Ombrellino. Maria Luigia sits on the divan next to Elio, chiding him for not eating enough. Gino Bartali is there in his cycling kit, peaked cap on his head. There is only one stranger in the room, in a shadowy corner, a wave of sculpted hair and bronzed skin and white teeth that flash whenever particular ironies are expressed. Esmond realises with surprise that this is Pretini, owner of the hair salon on the via Tornabuoni.

‘The Germans’, the Professor says, ‘have established headquarters in the Piazza San Marco, and taken over the university buildings towards Sanitissima Annunziata. There aren’t an enormous number yet, but enough to hurt us. And they’re well armed.’

‘What about the Allies?’ Alessandro asks. ‘Aren’t they supposed to be landing at Livorno? Weren’t they due to parachute into the countryside around Rome? Surely this is just a matter of a few days holing up here with Esmond and Ada until the Brits and Americans come and boot these fuckers out.’

The Professor shakes his head. ‘I spoke to the head of the Giustizia e Libertà cell in Milan, Ferruccio Parri. The Allies have been surprised at how quickly the Germans reinforced. They were expecting to sign the Armistice quickly, to be in Rome by early August, but Badoglio and the King dithered. The Allies are going to come up from the south, and it’s going to take time. We are in this for the long haul.’

‘So what now?’ It is Pretini who speaks, steepling his fingers and sitting back. He is wearing an expensive-looking worsted suit, well-polished ostrich loafers, a red bow-tie.

The Professor clears his throat. ‘The Germans have offered Italian soldiers a choice — they can either continue to fight alongside the Nazis or be sent to the camps. They’ll call up Florentine men in the next few days and offer them the same choice. So it’s a matter of hiding, fighting or — in all probability — dying.’

Bruno cuts in. ‘This villa is too close to the town. We can use it as a temporary base until we establish a permanent headquarters. Gino and I cycled up towards Monte Morello a few weeks ago. It’s wooded and there are caves, shepherds’ huts, plenty of routes into the mountains.’

The group continues to talk and plot well into the night. By the time Pretini drives off down the narrow lane after midnight, the plans are set. Antonio and Tosca are to go at once to Monte Morello. Bruno, Elio and Alessandro will take charge of rounding up fellow partisans in the city and driving them out to the new headquarters of the Resistance. Esmond and Ada will remain at L’Ombrellino until further notice, using the W/T to convey news from the city to the group in the hills.

The house feels empty when everyone has left. Esmond realises he’d grown used to having Alessandro there, a tough, confident presence on the floor below. Ada lies with her back to him and tugs his arms around her. ‘What are we going to do?’ he says.

‘What do you mean?’

‘With you two?’

‘I’m pregnant, I’m not disabled,’ she says, drawing herself out of his arms and turning to look at him in the dim light. ‘I want to — how do you say it? — rock the boat, not a cradle. I’m going to work for the Resistance until I go into labour. If the Germans are still here after I have the baby, I’ll give it to the nuns and carry on fighting.’

‘But what if something happens to you?’

She pauses, takes his hand, her voice gentler. ‘There’s too much what if? with you, darling. Who knows what’s going to happen? I trust my friends, I trust you, I trust that things are going to work themselves out. Now let’s sleep. There are big days ahead.’

Over the next weeks, they hardly leave the bedroom. They take turns at the W/T, sitting under the triptych, reading and repeating the instructions that come through before speaking them into the small silver microphone on the desk or tapping out endless streams of Morse. At first only Ada can do this, but eventually Esmond, although slow and checking his crib with every word, manages brief messages. Pretini, whose code name is Penna — the Feather — has another small radio in the back room of his salon. The partisan camp at Monte Morello has a more sophisticated transmitter that the Professor pilfered from the university’s physics department.

The Professor, who comes up to L’Ombrellino as often as he can, tells them of the Germans flooding into the city by road and rail. They have taken over the Excelsior, the Grand, the Savoy. They stand in khaki uniforms in the Piazza della Signoria armed with Mauser submachine-guns, Berettas and MAB 38s requisitioned from surrendered Italian troops. The Gestapo and SD have set up in the cells of the monastery attached to San Marco. The Professor says, with a dry chuckle, that SS Captain Alberti, head of the SD in Florence, has taken Savonarola’s cell for himself and sits beneath Fra Angelico’s gorgeous frescoes as he spins his web across the city.

Mussolini, shipped from one secret location to another by his Italian captors, is finally located by the Germans at Campo Imperatore high in the Abruzzo Apennines. It would — as the Professor tells Esmond and Ada over dinner — have been easy for them to walk through the gates and seize him, so poorly guarded was the old ski resort. Instead the Germans launched a paratrooper raid, with the dashing Otto Skorzeny crashing his glider into the mountainside above the hotel and overpowering the guards. Now Mussolini has been flown to Vienna, where he is photographed with Hitler. A week later, the Germans declare northern Italy the Italian Social Republic, led by Mussolini from its de facto capital at Salò on Lake Garda.