"I can vouch for that," Harding said. "Do you need us for anything now, Major?"
"Not unless you want to watch a fortune in scrip go up in smoke."
"I'll be happy never to see another lira again," I said.
"Come on, boys," Harding said, leading us over to his jeep. In the passenger seat sat Sciafani, dressed in GI fatigues with a medic's bag in his lap.
"Enrico! What are you doing here?"
"I told Major Harding you would probably have been hit in the head again. Was I right?"
"And the arm," Kaz added helpfully.
"I think I reinjured my leg," Harry said, like a kid who didn't want to be left out.
"Patch 'em up," Harding said. Sciafani grinned and dug into his medical kit. "How about you, Lieutenant Kazimierz, any wounds?"
"I almost had my hand cut off, but I am quite fine, thank you."
I hadn't often seen Harding at a loss for words, but he looked at Kaz with a stunned expression, then regrouped.
"Glad to hear it. Boyle, any loose ends here?"
"We let Vito Genovese go," Kaz said flatly, as if he already regretted it.
"It's for the best, in the long run," Harding said, in a hesitant whisper. He didn't like it much himself.
"As long as these MPs don't stick too many thousand-lira notes up their sleeves, that should do it. Frank Howard, otherwise known as Box Hook back in the New York dockyards, must have been the primary contact with Vito. He could run everything out of the Signals Company."
"Who killed Rocko?" Harding asked.
"Don't know for sure. Probably not Vito, although he came to see Rocko that night. For that sort of dirty work, I'd bet it was Legs. Anyway, the whole song and dance about stealing the division payroll was a red herring. This was the real thing all along. Running off thousand-lira notes that no one knew about and laundering them through Mafia operations."
"Smart. Made us focus on the payroll and all the time they were planning on printing their own money," Harding said.
"Who is Charlotte?" Harry said, rubbing his chin.
"Had Howard been at the military government school at Charlottesville?" I asked.
"He had," Elliott said. "He took a course on civilian communications- maybe that was where he got the idea to link into the civilian phone lines. Since he didn't actually work for AMGOT, using Charlotte as a code name worked. Besides hinting at a female, if anyone overheard they might draw the conclusion it was someone from AMGOT, like me."
"It had us wondering, all right. Ow!"
I winced as Sciafani checked the lump on my head and cleaned the dried blood from my hair. Harding passed a canteen around and we all took thirsty gulps. I felt the water wash away the grit in my throat and ran my tongue over my teeth. Everything was so hot and dry here that the air was always filled with the fine dust kicked up from the ground. The simple act of walking stirred up the ground and sent tiny bits of Sicily into your body, coating your lungs, staying with you, no matter how hard you tried to wash it away.
A sharp pain pulled at my arm, and Sciafani smiled apologetically as he drew another stitch across the wound. The pain reminded me how lucky I was to be alive.
"There are a couple of loose ends, Major," I said. "There's a third body in that building, a Sicilian carabiniere. Renzo Giannini. He was with us, and Howard shot him. I don't want anybody thinking he was part of the Mob. He volunteered to help us out."
"I'll tell the local authorities," Harding said.
"And I probably got an MP in a lot of hot water. He was detailed to hold me back at the Signals Company. Corporal Mike Miecznikowski. Turned out he was a cop too, and we got to talking, and pretty soon he looked the other way. We didn't know about Elliott being with CID. Anything you can do?"
"Jesus Christ on a crutch, Boyle! Did you enlist your own police force today? MPs, Sicilian cops. What 's next?"
"Sorry, Major. But I do owe the guy."
"Well, I already let Nick go back to ONI without telling them about the blackmail attempt. Springing one more pal of yours who doesn't follow orders shouldn't set back the war effort too much."
The heat must have gotten to Sam Harding. Bending the rules twice in one day?
"There, you should be fine," Sciafani said. "Stitches out in a week, keep it clean. You are lucky you did not get hit on the head in the same spot as before."
"If I was really lucky, I wouldn't have gotten hit at all. My kind of luck seems to be limited to getting hit on the head in two different locations."
"Do you remember everything now?"
"Yes. I am no longer the most fortunate of men. I won't be discovering myself all over again."
"Good," Sciafani said as he unlaced Harry's boot. "As long as you are satisfied with what you found the first time."
I thought about that. Was I? Sciafani taped up Harry's ankle while Kaz watched. He held his left arm cradled in his right, the arm that had been under the blade. I saw that it trembled. His face was a mask of indifference, the scar down his cheek hiding the sadness in his eyes. I stood by him, casually draping my arm around his shoulder.
"Yes. I am."
CHAPTER THIRTY-NINE
The next morning, I watched a Sicilian dust cloud churned up by the twin engines of a C-47 transport as it took off from the Comiso airfield. The ground fell away and beneath me I saw the great buildup of Allied forces, the vision of the New World's might I had conjured for Don Calo made real. Acres of supplies. Aircraft lined up on the runway, bombers and fighters waiting for their next mission. Convoys snaking along the narrow roadways. Ships docked and disgorging men and machines. Destroyers cruising close to shore, cruisers off in the distance.
I wondered if the gold silk handkerchief was in Don Calo's pocket right now, and how many lives it might have saved, and for how long. As the plane banked to head for North Africa, I could see a thin line of land on the horizon, across the Strait of Messina. Mainland Italy. We still had a long, long way to go.
"Never been in a plane before," Big Mike said. He sat stiffly in the seat, as if moving his big body around might jar the aircraft off course.
"Neither have I," said Sciafani, watching his homeland slip away as the C-47 rose and flew through white, fluffy cumulus clouds.
Harding had sprung Big Mike and gotten him his corporal's stripes back. Officially, Harding had him assigned to his command to transport an Italian ex-POW to Tunisia. The best Harding could do for Sciafani was to get him a job with AMGOT as a doctor in an Italian POW camp there. It was the only way to get him out of Sicily and away from Don Calo, who could be counted on to keep his promise if their paths crossed. Sciafani wasn't happy about the POW camp, where he'd be only a step above a prisoner. But it beat a knife across his gullet, so he packed a medical kit and made the best of it.
"Perhaps I will visit you in Boston, Billy, after the war," he said. "Or you in Detroit, Mike."
"Sure," Big Mike said, kneading his thighs with his hands. "How much longer before we land?"
"Relax," I said. "It'll be a few hours."
A few hours. A few hours until I'd be on the same continent as Diana again. I was heading back to North Africa to give Uncle Ike a report on our contact with Don Calo, and everything that had followed from that. Harding had also ordered a full medical check for me, to make sure I was recovered from the whacks I'd taken and my amnesia. I didn't mind a few pokes and prods if it gave me an extra day or so with Diana. Harding had allowed Big Mike a couple of days before he had to deliver Sciafani to the POW camp, in case I could work anything out for Enrico. The States, or maybe England, but that was doubtful for any Italian outside of a POW cage. Still, for me it would mean a few days of doing relatively little. Sleeping in, eating regular chow, clean clothes, nobody shooting at me. It's the little things that make life bearable.