“We need guns, not food,” she said sternly.
“From the look of you, you’re in dire need of both.” She was even thinner than when he last saw her. He broke open the mozzarella and held some out. “Try some.”
She ate a little. “It’s not very good,” she complained. But she ate some more. “It’s a bit stale,” she added. “And not very well made. Thin and watery. Not like proper mozzarella from Campania.”
“It’s the best I could find.”
“You shouldn’t have wasted your money.” She ate a bit more. “After the war, I’ll need to find a replacement for Pupetta. It takes years to make a decent milker, you know. This cheese probably came from some decrepit old ox.”
There was only a very small bit left, so he broke it in two and tried some. Perhaps it wasn’t as fresh and full of flavor as hers had been, but it still filled his mouth with the sweet, creamy tang of wet pastures, dense with lush grass and herbs.
“And it’s small,” she added, finishing off the last bit. “Trust a Roman to sell you an undersized mozzarella. I hope you didn’t pay more than a few lire for it.”
James, who had paid all the contents of his wallet for the cheese, shook his head.
They sat together for a long time, his arm protectively around her shoulders.
“James,” she said with a sigh, “there’s something I need to tell you.”
“I know about Alberto. Marisa already explained.”
“But you still came?” she said, surprised. “You’d be forgiven for wanting nothing more to do with me.”
“It isn’t like that anymore, though, is it? This war’s made everything different. We’re going to have to rethink everything now—decide for ourselves what’s right and what’s wrong.”
She nodded. “The people here say we have to rid ourselves of bourgeois hypocrisy.”
“Well,” he said thoughtfully, “that’s maybe taking it a bit far. You don’t have to be bourgeois to be a hypocrite. And you don’t have to get rid of one to get rid of the other.”
“Dear James,” she said. “Always so rational.”
There was a long pause. He wondered what she was thinking. She said, “There’s something you need to understand, though. Things are different for me now. Coming here—fighting—seeing what’s been happening—it’s made me look at things in a different way. Here, I’m a communist first, and a soldier second, and a woman—well, probably not even third: Being a woman comes way down the list.”
“But you won’t always be a soldier.”
“I think perhaps I’ll always be a communist now. And that means being a soldier, in a way. Who do you think is going to put it all back together, after the war is finally over and you people go back to where you came from? Someone’s got to stop people like Alberto from doing what they like with this country.”
“Ah,” he said. “Do I take it you still think England isn’t the place for you?”
“I can’t leave Italy. Not after this. Not after what the people here have been through. I’m sorry, James.”
“That’s interesting,” he said. “Because I won’t be going back to England either. Or at least, not for any longer than it takes me to demob and get myself back over here.”
She looked at him, unsure that he really meant it.
“I want to stay in Italy,” he said gently. “With you, if you’ll have me. Without you, if you won’t. A person can’t choose where he’s born. But he can choose where he spends his life, and I want to spend mine here.”
There was a problem with the supplies that Jumbo and James had brought. The crates contained rifles and pistols for small-scale actions, whereas what the partisans required if they were to take on the might of the retreating German army were Sten guns, grenades and semiautomatics.
“We’ve been asking for these weapons for months,” Dino explained, his face dark with anger. “How can you have got it so wrong?”
“It’s just an administrative cock-up,” Jumbo soothed him. “Probably someone else somewhere is complaining about an unwanted delivery of Stens. I’ll get onto HQ and order up what you need. In the meantime, there’s plenty of planning to be getting on with.”
The leaders of the other partisan forces in the area were called to a meeting, at which Jumbo produced a map and, with James as translator, explained what each section was to do. There were questions, but no dissent. The partisans’military discipline was absolute. In addition, James saw, Jumbo was good at this. He had the ability to see the coming battle in physical terms, as a combination of weaponry and geography: moving that group toward that piece of high ground, which would provide cover for a different section taking that river…
The only muttering came from Dino, who pointed out again that the plans depended on his group of partisans having enough heavy guns to stop the Germans in their tracks.
“Exactly,” Jumbo said. “And heavy guns we shall have. They’ll be dropped by plane long before the Germans get here.”
The German retreat coincided with a heat wave. Even here in the hills the heat was oppressive, and many of the partisans went bare-chested apart from their red neckerchiefs. Some of the women partisans wore men’s vests in lieu of shirts. James noted, though, that they never seemed to have any trouble with the men. They were all kept busy with preparations.
Fire trenches were dug, and here James was able to give advice based on his experiences at Anzio. A few of the men grumbled when he insisted that some of the trenches be dug ten feet deep, with tree trunks and sandbags for extra reinforcement in the roofs. They simply could not conceive of the explosive power of a German ’88. Despite the grumbling, however, the digging always got done in the end. Dino made sure of that.
Dino himself, though, was still fretting about the delivery of the big guns. “We can dig the emplacements,” he told Jumbo, “but when will we get the weapons to put in them?”
“Soon,” Jumbo assured him. “HQ will make sure that we have them in plenty of time.”
Privately, though, he was becoming rather anxious himself. “I’m hearing some very odd stuff on the radio,” he confided to James. “Apparently we’ve just withdrawn seven divisions from Italy to open up a new front in the Med.”
“But that makes no sense at all,” James said. “Why let them outnumber us, just when they’re almost finished?”
“It beats me too,” Jumbo admitted. “I’m just hoping—well, that someone hasn’t decided to make things more difficult for the Italians.”
“Why would anyone do that?” James asked. Then he was suddenly struck by a thought. “Actually, I already know the answer to that.”
“What is it?”
“Jumbo, I think we need to get the commanders together. We need to tell them why those big guns they’re waiting for might never arrive.”
“When I was in Naples,” James explained, “I saw a document. A top-secret document. At the time I didn’t understand why it was secret—it was just an assessment of what the political situation in Italy was likely to be after the war.”
He paused, gathering his thoughts. Dino, Jumbo and the partisan section leaders waited for him to continue.
“Basically, it said that amongst the Italians the most organized and disciplined political group are the partisans. The writer thought that after the war the king would abdicate, and the communists would take power. He wasn’t very happy about this—he foresaw a communist super-state stretching from Moscow to Milan, as he put it.”
“So?” Dino asked. “This is hardly a secret.”
“The report wasn’t just an assessment,” James said. “It was an action plan.”
There was a long silence while the partisans digested this. “You’re saying that we are being betrayed,” Dino said at last.