The priest sighed and sat stiffly near them.
He pointed at Corrado and said: “He calls me Babbo, dad, because he’s not very religious.” His expression was more sympathetic now. “I see how much you fear for your son. What happened?”
Corrado moved away, checking on his men.
“I was out working when the Germans picked me up for one of their damned slave-labor details. I didn’t intend— I… found myself fighting even though it was the last thing I wanted. My son was out with his friend Pietro, playing, as he does every day since their school was closed. That was when Corrado’s men grabbed my wife too, but my son wasn’t home. I’m grateful, they may have saved her, but now I want to find Franco and they won’t let me go.”
“My name is Father Tranelli. I will have a word with Corrado. He’s a good man, but he feels responsible for his fighters, and he cannot separate his hate for Germans from his responsibilities. But you saw what the Germans use against us…”
“What are they, Father?” The tremble in Giovanni’s voice betrayed how haunted he was by the horror.
“They are men who have the ability to turn into wolves. You must remember the legends? The Middle Ages were full of sightings, convictions, and executions of so-called wolf-men. Mothers still terrify their unruly children with tales of the uomo-lupo, the wolf-man, or the lupo mannaro — the werewolf. We have always had the legends, especially in the hill villages. But after the Germans became our occupiers and the war seemed already lost, they brought in the Werwolf Division as a rear guard. You know the damned Nazis, they like all that occult stuff. Nobody paid any more attention than to anything else they do. They have already a reputation for shooting civilians and imprisoning anyone they deem dangerous. But as Corrado will tell you, partisan units began coming into contact with groups of these wolves. First our fighters found their sentries killed, torn apart and disemboweled. Men on lonely outposts were killed by mysterious animals. But then the attacks became brazen, and now sometimes several werewolves will attack a patrol or even a safehouse.”
“But why can’t you kill them?” Giovanni slapped his hand on the table. “I saw your men shoot them at point-blank range and yet the wolves survived and still reached them.”
“Werewolves are magical beings, young man. I have no other explanation. They are of the devil, perhaps. They cannot be killed by normal means.”
“Then if there are many of them, we’ll all die…”
“These monsters are vulnerable to one thing. You saw yourself. They are averse to silver. Any weapon made of silver will have an effect on them, and bullets cast from pure silver can kill them. It acts like liquid fire inside their bodies. We have dispatched quite a few, recently. And tonight. But we are still susceptible to their attacks.”
“Why not make silver bullets by the thousands then?”
“My friend, because there is not so much silver to go around. The people used it for money in the early days of the war, when they needed to buy food for their families. Whatever they hoarded is not nearly enough. We use whatever we can get, but we have to make it count. Whenever new people join us, we ask for their silver. It is still not enough.”
“How can you still have your faith after seeing… after seeing that?”
“Who says I still have faith?” The priest rubbed his tired features with a claw-like hand. “Well, I do, even if it’s not like before. I know things have changed in my mind. But I’m a Jesuit, and I can persevere through anything, as Jesus himself was able to do.”
Corrado had returned and heard the last part. “Have you told him yet? The worst part?”
“No, but I will now.” He sighed a long sigh and Giovanni thought he heard the rasp of disease coming from him. “We learned that it’s much better to be killed by the beasts than merely bitten. A man bitten but not killed will inevitably turn into a monster on the next full moon.”
Father Tranelli shook his head. His brown eyes were watery.
“Dio mio.” Giovanni crossed himself. Startled, he realized he hadn’t done so in years. “This is why even the corpses were… stabbed and…”
“God forgive us, yes. Beheaded. We believe it’s the only way to make sure.”
Giovanni was reminded of what Corrado had said. “You spoke of the weapon. It was the blade? Something about the Vatican?”
Tranelli glared at Corrado for a second. “I was in Rome a year ago,” he said, finally nodding and rubbing his thinning hair, “but originally I’m from a small village about fifty kilometers from here. It… it was a village. Now it’s a butcher shop that has been closed a long time. The people there, they were my family and my flock, and this damned Werwolf Division went there and slaughtered all of them because of one shot a boy took at a German soldier. These hellish things, they were let loose in the town square and by the time they were finished, there were thirty-eight butchered corpses. It was worse than what they usually do, line people up and shoot them. This time they… they hunted them down and tore them to pieces, all for the sake of vengeance. When I heard, it was too late to save anyone from my family. The people I grew up with. Everyone was gone. All I could do was pray over what was left of their corpses, and hire men from the next town to dig a long line of graves. It was all I could do, you see?” His skin seemed feverish. The priest clawed through his thinning hair again, a habit by now. “But it wasn’t all I could do. I made a visit to the Vatican library. The Prefect is a friend of mine, and he has the keys to the secret archives which almost no one is allowed to see.”
He paused again. “Corrado, do you have wine?”
“No more for you, Babbo,” said the wiry partisan leader. “I need you almost sober.”
Tranelli licked his dry lips. The priest seemed used up, dried out.
“Va` bene, figlio mio.”
“You were saying,” Giovanni prodded. “About the materials stored in the secret archives.”
Father Tranelli hunched over the rough table. “Yes, there are many secrets in the catacombs below the Vatican,” he whispered, perhaps afraid the Germans would hear. Perhaps afraid something else would hear. “You see, the archives are located beneath a modern building, but there is an area at the rear of the newer section where walls were breached and the archives now include a long portion of the maze that makes up the fabled Roman catacombs. This area is under lock and key and watched over by armed guards, for the Vatican has acquired many books and other items in its history about which the world would be amazed and surprised to learn.”
Like an omen, air raid sirens started their frightening wail. Tranelli closed his mouth. Moments later the rumble of Allied engines reached them just before the rattle of anti-aircraft batteries and the rolling thunder of bomb drops.
Tranelli shrugged. “And so it continues. Where was I? Ah yes, the silver weapons. When I spoke to my friend, the Prefect of the Archives, and we discussed these cursed wolves and their aversion to silver, he showed me an old book — medieval, at the least — in which a mystic theorized that silver was a symbol of purity from time immemorial. And, as we all know, thirty silver coins were the payment Judas received for his betrayal of Christ.
“But the Prefect went even further than that, my young friend. You see, he told me that another book on his secret shelves contained the description of a pair of weapons fashioned from relics of the crucifixion. Someone was charged with smelting the thirty coins and using the silver to plate two daggers fashioned from a metal spear-point. It was no simple spear, however, but the spear of Longinus, the centurion who inflicted the fatal wound on Christ while he languished on the cross. Normally death comes to the crucified by asphyxiation. The Roman soldier later realized his spear had been blessed by its contact with the holy flesh and repented, even though his act had been merciful.”