Below us, landing craft picked up Italian POWs while the lucky Sicilians among them trudged away in the opposite direction, toward their homes. As we sat in the jeep I remembered the odd note I'd been carrying around.
I gave it to Sciafani. "Does this mean anything to you?" I asked him.
"'To find happiness, you must twice pass through purgatory,'" he read. "Yes, I have heard this. Why?"
"It has something to do with where I was when Roberto found me, I think."
"Then you were some distance away, my friend," Sciafani said. "In Agrigento, perhaps 130 kilometers east of here."
I started to ask him how he'd reached that conclusion when two jeeps full of MPs raced down the road and braked in front of the tent where I'd been. They were in such a rush they didn't notice the vehicle park or the jeep. The two MPs who'd been eating K rations came out to meet them and they all looked at some papers while one MP pointed up the path I'd taken to the Italian aid station. They took off at a trot, an officer, his hand on the. 45 in his holster, leading the way. The MPs behind him carried Thompsons and carbines.
"Must be a dangerous war criminal up there," I said as I started the engine, put it in reverse, and backed up the road as quietly as I could. When I was out of their sight I turned hard and floored it, kicking gravel out from the rear tires and praying more reinforcements weren't headed for me.
"Yes, Lieutenant Boyle, if that is who you really are. Perhaps he is a very dangerous man."
Sciafani hung on as the jeep bounced over the ruts up to the junction with the main road. I didn't want to lose any time getting away from the MPs, and I wasn't slowing down enough to let him jump out.
Then I saw the truck blocking the road ahead. They'd sealed it off when they came to look for me. Two guys in nondescript khaki leaned against a Dodge WC-52 Weapons Carrier parked sideways across both lanes. On either side rocks and cacti blocked escape. I slowed and wondered if I could make it out of there on foot. We came closer, and I saw the two men more clearly. They were lounging against the truck as if they were casually waiting for someone who was late for an appointment. One of them was smoking and for a change no guns were pointed at me. It didn't make sense. Then it did. One of the men was Kaz. I pulled to a stop within a few feet of him and couldn't keep myself from smiling. He looked grim, which was unusual. The scar that split his face from the corner of one eye down to his chin didn't tend to make him look cheery, but his usual expression was carefree, or at worst nonchalant. I knew it was a pretense that pleased him, and that the look on his face now was a truer reflection of his heavy heart.
"Kaz," I said, leaning over the steering wheel. He was my friend, and I was glad to have met up with him. He was only person I could trust to believe me and not turn me in.
"Who is this?" Kaz pointed at Sciafani, his eyes still on me.
"I am Dottore Enrico Sciafani, late of the Italian Army. I have my parole papers."
" Lei e siciliano? " Kaz asked.
" Si, sono siciliano."
"All right, both of you in the back of the truck. Banville will take the jeep," Kaz said in sharp, clipped tones.
I had questions, plenty of them, but hearing the snarl of engines behind us I decided they could wait. Kaz took Sciafani by the elbow and hurried him along. The man he called Banville took my place at the wheel of the jeep, eyeing me strangely as we passed, but there was no time to wonder if I knew him. I thought I might, but it was like seeing somebody who resembled someone you knew, yet not closely enough for you to feel OK about clapping him on the shoulder and telling him it had been too long. Banville wore crumpled, faded British naval khakis and a weather-beaten white naval cap with threadbare gold braid. Unshaven, with a huge knife and a revolver on his belt, he looked piratical.
"Hurry," was all Kaz said as he hustled me into the back of the truck. Kaz was a slight guy, thin and reedy, and wore steel-rimmed spectacles that he really needed. But he wasn't afraid to use a pistol for close work, that much I remembered from North Africa. He'd gotten me out of a jam in Algiers. I recalled a Vichy French jailer tumbling down the stairs and Kaz strolling into the cell block with a ring of keys in one hand and a smoking Webley revolver in the other. He'd been smiling then, but today the expression on his scarred face was grim.
Canvas covered the rear of the truck, a small three-quarter-ton job that was handy for transporting weapons or a few men tightly packed. It was bigger than a jeep, but not by a lot. What it did have going for it was that no one could see me, and that Kaz had stashed gear, weapons, food, and water in the back. I lifted aside the canvas flap and saw Banville following us in the stolen jeep, far enough back not to be choked on our dust. Banville. That name was familiar. I did know him. A British sailor. From where?
As we rounded a curve I noted a group of tents with aerials thrusting toward the sky, protected from overhead view by camouflage netting stretched between palm trees. Wire ran up one tree and across the road. I wondered if Lieutenant Andrews-Rocko's pal-was in there, working on a German dialer, whatever the hell that was. And if he'd taken a walk down to Capo Soprano last night with a sharp knife. And Charlotte? The voice in Rocko's tent had mentioned a girl. What was a girl named Charlotte doing mixed up in this?
"They are friends of yours, these English?" Sciafani asked from the bench opposite, jolting me from my thoughts.
"Yeah, yeah, I know them. Kaz is Polish, though."
"Ah, the Poles," Sciafani said. "As unfortunate in their geography as we Sicilians. Destined to be overrun by armies from the east and west, just as the Greeks, Carthaginians, Romans, Moors, and Normans have conquered us. They have all come here, but only the siciliano remains."
I barely heard Sciafani's history lecture. I was remembering what I hadn't wanted to remember about Kaz. His scar. And Daphne Seaton, who had loved him and had been my friend. Daphne, who'd been murdered to keep her silent, a car explosion immolating her and ripping Kaz's face and heart. I remembered my resolve to keep Kaz busy, to keep him from blowing his brains out. Based on the look on his face I realized I hadn't been doing my job. Kaz liked to be amused, and he had often said that working with me made him interested in what tomorrow might bring. Now he didn't look much amused at the prospect of today, much less tomorrow.
Something else ate at my gut, but I couldn't tell what it was. I knew that I hadn't remembered everything yet. Daphne had been killed, Kaz badly injured, and when he'd returned to duty he'd become a killer who took chances with his life. I didn't want to think about what else there might be. I rested my head in my hands and tried to quiet the rage in my mind as the unfairness of Daphne's death and Kaz's loss overwhelmed all other thoughts.
Daphne and Banville. There was more, about them both. What?
"Lieutenant Boyle, are you weeping?" Sciafani asked.
I didn't realize I was until I looked down at the floorboards and saw tiny drops, fading in the heat and vanishing as quickly as they appeared.
CHAPTER TEN
We drove for nearly an hour, mostly at a crawl, in the midst of a convoy of trucks and tanks. I tied back the rear canvas flaps for some air, but loosely so they gave us shade and cover from prying eyes. We passed an artillery unit, the short barrels of their 75mm pack howitzers sticking out beneath camouflage netting. Dappled shade cut across the backs of the crewmen kneeling to fire and feed new shells into the smoking breech as each empty casing was rapidly cast aside. The roar of cannon fire was followed by dull crumps on a far hillside where brown dirt puffed into tiny explosions that looked harmless at this distance. But I knew there were small red-hot shards of metal flying through the air, rending flesh wherever they encountered it. Sciafani sat with his head in his hands, and I knew he too was thinking about the men on the ground, his comrades of yesterday, still suffering today. Perhaps he couldn't bear to watch, with his parole in his pocket and thoughts of safety, home, and a life to be lived vying with his sense of duty. The war had made it possible for me to think and believe entirely contradictory things. I knew I wanted nothing more than to go home, and yet I was willingly being carried to the front lines, the only place I would find what I was missing, what I needed to feel whole again, to understand what home really meant.