Nothing came to me and I tried not to think about it too hard. That was the best way to remember. Let it roll over in your mind a few times, my dad used to say. Your mind is busy all day, he'd told me, so don't expect too much of it. It's got a lot to handle, so let the problem roll around in there for a while, and maybe your subconscious will earn its keep. It doesn't have anything else to do.
My dad said a lot of things. Some of them made great sense, and some were just to have something to say. Others I wasn't sure about. This was one of those, but I had to give it a try. So I thought about something else.
The note. The note about purgatory and happiness really bothered me. It matched a message Nick had been given for his Mafia contact, a code of sorts that only a Sicilian would understand. A Sicilian from around Agrigento. That little village of Cammarata was no more than twenty miles north of here. Nick wouldn't have needed to keep it written down, so how had that piece of paper gotten into Rocko's hands? More important, how had the message itself been communicated? The only people besides Nick who would have possessed this information were in North Africa, unless you counted the Mafia contact who had passed it on in the first place. Which was interesting, since the mafiusu were in the mountains and Rocko would have been stationed at the beachhead. I couldn't figure that out either, so I took my father's advice again and let my subconscious work on it.
Late in the afternoon we climbed a steep hill, the donkey clip-clopping up switchbacks slowly. Salvatore and Sciafani both got out of the cart to lighten the load. Lucky me, I got to stay buried under the almonds. We pulled off the road, and Salvatore unhitched the donkey to let him feed on the grass.
Sciafani lowered the rear of the cart. "We are almost to Agrigento.
Look."
I got out, thankfully for the last time. I brushed almonds from my clothes and tried to straighten up. As I did, I saw Agrigento, the setting sun hitting its walls, turning them to gold as shadows reached like greedy fingers across the rooftops. It was a beautiful city set high on the next hillside, a small valley of green split by a wide stream beneath it. I could hear church bells chiming the hour.
Salvatore closed up the cart as he and Sciafani exchanged words. I shook his hand, said Grazie, and smiled. He gave me a little salute and then went to tend to his donkey.
"We should wait until dark before we enter the city," Sciafani said.
"Salvatore must go to his relatives now. It is too dangerous for him to take us further."
"Where should we-" Sciafani stared at something over my shoulder, and I turned to see what he was looking at. A cloud of dust kicked up from the road down in the valley, and the sound of an engine downshifting painfully and straining up the hill toward us echoed from below. He grabbed my arm and pulled me behind a line of thick shrubs. We flattened ourselves and waited. Salvatore held on to the donkey as he stood in the open, his shotgun hung carelessly from his shoulder, his lethal speed hidden by a posture of peasant lethargy.
An ancient truck heaved itself up over the crest of the hill. It had no military markings but was crammed full of khaki-clad soldiers standing in the back and on the running boards, hanging onto the truck, grasping short Italian carbines.
"Fascist militia, MVSN," Sciafani said in whisper, even though at this distance, with all the noise the truck was making, he could have yelled it.
The truck stopped as soon as the road leveled out, and the soldiers burst into activity, handing down cases of ammo from the back of the truck, and lifting out a heavy machine gun and tripod. An officer, his dress uniform complete with the official Fascist black shirt, stepped from the passenger seat and scanned the horizon with binoculars. He looked east, to the left of the city, which I judged to be due south of us. "We must be making a move," I said, my voice a whisper now that the truck was silent. I imagined GIs advancing up that hill into machine-gun fire.
Then I thought about Sciafani. Fascists or no, these were his countrymen. There was still no "we" between us, no matter how friendly he'd been. I wondered if he would want to stay with them, to tend their wounded, if it came to that. I wondered if he was tempted to turn me in. I glanced at him but his expression gave nothing away. For the first time, I felt a shiver of mistrust. Sciafani had been a willing traveling partner at first, but after the encounter with Vito Genovese and Legs, something had changed. Was it seeing the German shoot Signor Ciccolo? Perhaps. But there was something mysterious about the story of Sciafani being adopted, especially after all the talk about trusting only blood relatives. I realized he was here for his own reasons. They coincided with mine for now, but I needed to pay attention and be alert to any change.
The Blackshirt pointed at Salvatore and yelled. Two soldiers marched over, waving their hands for him to leave. He argued with them, gesturing from his cart to Agrigento, probably complaining about not getting to the market. They shook their heads, and he resignedly hitched up the donkey, complaining the whole time. He did a good job of maintaining their focus on him as he moved away, keeping up a stream of Italian that sounded like insults mixed with bewilderment. As he passed our hiding place he winked.
We watched the militiamen set up the machine-gun emplacement. There were about twenty of them. They dug foxholes on either side of the road and a firing pit protected by sandbags for the machine gun. Off in the distance, to the east, a dark plume of smoke appeared. The officer turned his binoculars on to it, then got into the truck and took off, back down the hill. For reinforcements maybe.
"Are these Fascists good fighters?" I asked Sciafani. I was hoping they were nothing more than local militia who might skedaddle for home as soon as the first shots sounded.
"I have seen a battalion of Blackshirts attack British tanks with hand grenades," he said. "I have seen others cower in their holes. Some Fascist units are very well trained, others less so. Most of the Blackshirts here are not from Sicily."
"So they'll probably fight?"
"It is a good position. I would say yes, they will fight."
"We should get out of here." I stated the obvious while looking to our rear.
"That will be difficult," Sciafani said. He was right. While we had cover between us and the militia, there was nothing but bare rocky ground behind us. Once we left the shrubs, we'd be in the open long enough for them to spot us, either going down the hill or back the way we had come.
"We have to stay put until it gets dark," I said.
"Yes, and pray one of them does not walk over here to see a man and his horse," Sciafani said. He had the basic idea, so I didn't correct him.
We waited. The truck came back and more men got out. The truck was towing a 20mm antiaircraft gun, and the crew hustled to unhook it and set it up. As if to taunt them, a single aircraft zoomed out of the western sky, the sun at its back. I couldn't raise my head high enough to identify it, but the machine gun gave it a few ineffective bursts before it climbed out of sight. They moved the 20mm gun to the side of the road opposite the machine gun so their positions formed a semicircle, facing east. We'd have to move around to the right and hope there wasn't another unit doing the same thing on the other side of the hill. We waited some more, listening to the sound of digging and idle chatter that could have come from enlisted men in any army. Nervous laughter, jokes, complaints about the hard ground, bad food, and indifferent officers. I'd been in the army a little more than a year and already the rhythm of daily life in camp or at the front had become part of me. It was easy to recognize the sounds soldiers made, their ability to show contempt for the service while at the same time quietly demonstrating their bond to each other. The tone and tempo of the words didn't sound any different in Italian, and it almost made me homesick for life in a GI camp.