“Then be funny. Or flattering. Or both.”
Pino thought he’d been funny and flattering to Anna, but maybe not enough. Then he thought of something else. “So where did Colonel Rauff go today?”
Tullio’s affable demeanor evaporated. He grabbed Pino hard by the upper arm and hissed, “We don’t talk about people like Rauff in places like this. Understand?”
Pino was upset and humiliated at his friend’s reaction, but before he could reply, Tullio’s date reappeared. She slid up alongside Tullio, whispered something in his ear.
Tullio laughed, let go of Pino, and said, “Sure, sweet thing. We can do that.”
Tullio shifted his attention back to Pino. “I’d probably wait until your face doesn’t look like a split sausage before you go around being all funny and listening.”
Pino cocked his head, smiled uncertainly, and then gritted his teeth when the stitches tugged in his cheek. He watched Tullio and his date leave, thinking once again how much he wanted to be like him. Everything about the guy was perfect, elegant. Good guy. Great dresser. Better friend. Genuine laugh. And yet, Tullio was mysterious enough to be following around a Gestapo colonel.
It hurt to chew, but Pino was so hungry he piled a second plate. While he did, he heard three of his parents’ musician friends talking, two men and the violinist.
“There are more Nazis in Milan every day,” said the heavier-set man, who played the French horn at La Scala.
“Worse,” the percussionist said. “The Waffen-SS.”
The violinist said, “My husband says there are rumors of pogroms being planned. Rabbi Zolli is telling our friends in Rome to flee. We’re thinking of going to Portugal.”
“When?” the percussionist asked.
“Sooner than later.”
“Pino, it’s time for bed,” his mother said sharply.
Pino took the plate with him up to his room. Sitting on his bed while eating, he thought about what he’d just overheard. He knew that the three musicians were Jewish, and he knew Hitler and the Nazis hated the Jews, though he really didn’t understand why. His parents had lots of Jewish friends, mostly musicians or people in the fashion business. All in all, Pino thought Jews were smart, funny, and kind. But what was a pogrom? And why would a rabbi tell all the Jews in Rome to run?
He finished eating, looked at his bandage again, and then got into bed. With the light off, he drew back the curtains and looked out into the darkness. Here, in San Babila, there were no fires, nothing to suggest the devastation he’d witnessed. He tried not to think of Anna, but when he rested his head on his pillow and closed his eyes, snippets of their encounter circled in his head along with the image of Fred Astaire frozen cheek to cheek with Rita Hayworth. And the explosion of the theater’s back wall. And the armless dead girl.
He couldn’t sleep. He couldn’t forget any of it. He finally turned on the radio, fiddled with the dial, and found a station playing a violin piece he recognized because his father was always trying to play it: Niccolo Paganini’s Caprice no. 24 in A Minor.
Pino lay there in the dark, listening to the frenetic pace of the violin playing, and felt the wild mood swings of the piece as if they were his own. When it was over, he was wrung out and empty of thought. At long last, the boy slept.
Around one o’clock the next afternoon, Pino went to find Carletto. He rode the trams, seeing some neighborhoods in smoking ruins and others untouched. The randomness of what had been destroyed and what had survived bothered him nearly as much as the destruction itself.
He got off the trolley at Piazzale Loreto, a large traffic rotary with a city park at its center and thriving shops and businesses around its perimeter. He looked across the rotary at Via Andrea Costa, seeing war elephants in his mind. Hannibal had driven armored elephants over the Alps and down that road on his way to conquer Rome twenty-one centuries before. Pino’s father said that all conquering armies had come into Milan on that route ever since.
He passed an Esso petrol station with an iron girder system that rose three meters above the pumps and tanks. Diagonally across the rotary from the petrol station, he saw the white-and-green awning of Beltramini’s Fresh Fruits and Vegetables.
Beltramini’s was open for business. No damage that he could see.
Carletto’s father was outside, weighing fruit. Pino grinned and quickened his pace.
“Don’t worry. We have bomb-proof secret gardens out by the Po,” Mr. Beltramini was saying to an older woman as Pino approached. “And because of this, Beltramini’s will always have the best produce in Milan.”
“I don’t believe you, but I love that you make me laugh,” she said.
“Love and laughter,” Mr. Beltramini said. “They are always the best medicine, even on a day like today.”
The woman was still smiling as she walked away. A short, plump bear of a man, Carletto’s father noticed Pino and turned even more delighted.
“Pino Lella! Where have you been? Where is your mother?”
“At home,” Pino said, shaking his hand.
“Bless her.” Mr. Beltramini peered up at him. “You’re not going to grow any more, are you?”
Pino smiled and shrugged. “I don’t know.”
“You do, you’ll start walking into tree branches.” He pointed at the bandage on Pino’s cheek. “Oh, I see you already did.”
“I got bombed.”
Mr. Beltramini’s state of perpetual bemusement evaporated. “No. Is this true?”
Pino told him the whole story, from the time he climbed out his window, until he got back home and found everybody playing music and having a good time.
“I think they were smart,” Mr. Beltramini said. “If a bomb’s coming at you, it’s coming at you. You can’t go around worrying about it. Just go on doing what you love, and go on enjoying your life. Am I right?”
“I guess so. Is Carletto here?”
Mr. Beltramini gestured over his shoulder. “Working inside.”
Pino started toward the shop door.
“Pino,” Mr. Beltramini called after him.
He looked back, seeing concern on the fruit vendor’s face. “Yes?”
“You and Carletto, you take care of each other, right? Like brothers, right?”
“Always, Mr. B.”
The fruitmonger brightened. “You’re a good boy. A good friend.”
Pino went inside the shop and found Carletto lugging sacks of dates.
“You been out?” Pino said. “Seen what happened?”
Carletto shook his head. “I’ve been working. You’ve heard of that, right?”
“I’ve heard stories about it, so I came to see for myself.”
Carletto didn’t think that was funny. He hoisted another sack of dried fruit onto his shoulder and started down a wooden ladder and through a hole in the floor.
“She didn’t show up,” Pino said. “Anna.”
Carletto looked up from the dirt-floored basement. “You were out last night?”
Pino smiled. “I almost got blown up when the bombs hit the theater.”