Chapter 18
Amy stepped back into the street. She hoped she’d done the right thing leaving the necklace at the shop.
She wasn’t like her brother Jack, who’d happily leave his passport and phone with some guy he’d met in a bar.
Maybe she was too cautious, the village didn’t seem like a hotbed of crime, and Stella seemed lovely.
She couldn’t believe they’d been chatting for the best part of half an hour.
The rest of the morning passed by in a flash and by the time she decided to search out some lunch it was a quarter to two.
For such a small place it was amazing how she’d managed to walk round in circles, getting lost in the maze of streets.
It was the layering of the village she couldn’t quite get her head around.
It seemed so odd to find front doors half-hidden beneath the steps to the neighbouring property and doorways that seemed to lead into rocky walls.
Sometimes she’d see a house that looked poky and dark, only to round a corner and realise the views from its upper windows looked out upon hills.
She’d stopped to admire an old lantern, a painted saint in a tiny shrine, a flight of steps with a potted plant on every tread.
It was easy to see how her grandpa would have fallen in love with the place but the message on the reverse of the postcard told her there was something more.
The bar she’d gone to with Leo that morning was surprisingly quiet, it seemed the local folk had disappeared indoors.
She found a spare table and picked up the menu.
She wasn’t too sure what was in a torta verde but when the waitress wandered out she ordered it anyway and asked for a glass of white wine.
Drinking at lunchtime was probably on Fernanda’s list of sins, but the old lady wasn’t likely to spot her, she was bound to be at home snoozing in her armchair.
There only seemed to be one member of staff looking after both the bar and the gelateria counter but Amy had time to kill.
She lingered over her lunch, trying and failing to identify which dark, leafy green vegetables were encased in the golden pastry and ended her meal with an espresso, toying with the cup and saucer long after she’d finished the teeny drink.
She glanced at her phone, it was now almost three.
She didn’t want to waste away the afternoon and she’d already made a plan.
She hadn’t visited the church of Sant’ Agata yet.
Grandpa had been a believer; if he’d come to this village he must have gone inside.
Amy wasn’t likely to find a connection to him in the church but it would be nice to walk in his footsteps.
She paid and left, cutting through the passageway.
The main piazza stood deserted in the afternoon sun, the only signs of life a girl of about nine or ten riding her pink bicycle around and around.
Perhaps she’d sneaked outside whilst the rest of her family were having their siesta.
Amy approached the church. She gave the panelled wooden door a push but it remained resolutely closed.
A small notice she hadn’t spotted before stated the opening times: 8–12, 4. 30–8. Another hour and a half to wait.
‘Salve!’
She turned at the man’s voice. He was dressed in a black cassock, a silver crucifix dangling low.
A round, friendly face smiled at her from beneath a crop of short curly hair.
Chubby cheeks and a small mouth gave him the look of a cherub.
If it hadn’t been for the lines around his eyes she might have put him at twenty-two or three, but he was probably nearer thirty.
She’d always thought of priests as white haired, wise and old, not young like this one.
‘Oh, umm, salve!’
‘You wish to enter the church?’
‘Yes, but it looks like I need to come back later.’
‘Wait.’ He put a finger to his lips. Almost on cue, the church bells began to chime. He laughed. ‘Now it is three. Let us go inside.’
‘But it says four thirty.’ She gestured to the notice.
‘The Lord is available twenty-four hours a day.’ He smiled, reached into his pocket and pulled out a great key.
He unlocked the door and ushered her into the vestibule. Ahead of her lay another hefty wooden door.
‘Attenzione!’ He pointed out a small step.
The church was even bigger than it looked from the outside, the ceiling so high she couldn’t imagine how anyone had managed to paint the faded frescoes.
‘Welcome to our glorious church.’
‘Che bella!’ She tried out a couple of words of Italian, feeling her cheeks burn at her clumsy pronunciation.
He smiled. ‘You must look around in peace but afterwards I hope that you can help me.’
‘Me?’
‘I have a decision to make and you will be…’ He rubbed the fingers of his left hand together, searching for the word. ‘Unbiased. Now, please enjoy our church, signorina…’
‘Amy.’
‘Father Filippo. I will leave you to contemplate. Perhaps start with this picture; it is very beautiful, I think.’
He pointed to a classic Madonna and Child, Mary’s face pale and serene, the infant’s remarkably long legs dangling below his white dress.
The proportions were rather odd but Filippo was right, it was beautiful.
Amy turned to say so but he had moved away, sitting head down in one of the pews, silently praying.
Amy moved around the church, conscious of the silence.
In front of a painting of Sant’ Agata a row of candle-shaped bulbs stood next to a metal money box.
Amy dropped in a fifty-cent piece; one light flickered.
She closed her eyes for a few seconds, thinking of Grandpa Lance.
When she opened them the priest was standing in front of the altar, gazing at the cross with a look of wonder as though he were seeing it for the first time.
She waited for him to turn around before she spoke.
‘You said I might be able to help you.’
‘Oh, yes. It is a small question but a rather long story… Of course, if you are in a hurry…’
‘No hurry,’ Amy said.
‘Good. We have a ceremony in the village next week, a special service to commemorate the life of one of our young men. He fell in 1944 but it is only now that we are able to lay his body – well, his bones – to rest.’
‘Where has he been?’
‘Lying peacefully under the soil, a good few kilometres from here. A man from Paris purchased an abandoned rustico, dreaming of a retirement making wine. A wealthy man, with time for leisure, he spoke to the right people and got permission to dig out a swimming pool. It was a shock when his workmen found a skeleton, and when they saw the bullet hole in the back of the skull, the police were called. It was a crime, of course, but one from long ago. When the story spread, we knew he must have been a local man to be found in a place like that. Only someone from the village would have known the old mule path up through those woods. He must have thought he’d got away. And then…’ The priest crossed himself.
‘Who was he?’
‘Of course, at first we did not know, but once we knew the skeleton dated to the war years, people began to come forward with their stories, hoping for answers. Old Signora Togliatti whose family owned the little alimentari, for example. She had a teenage brother who was sent to the Russian front, missing presumed dead. More than eighty years later she hoped that somehow it would prove to be him so that she might find some closure.’
‘How sad. And this man, you now know who he was?’
‘Pietro Parodi, dead at barely twenty-one. He had been one of Mussolini’s soldiers.
At first he was proud and happy to fight for Italy but when Mussolini was overthrown and Italy surrendered, he was one of many cheering.
Perhaps it seems strange to celebrate the humiliation of the country whose uniform you wore.
But ordinary people had become weary, sick of the war.
Il Duce – Mussolini to you – was no longer invincible, he had showed that by his foolish adventures in Ethiopia and by dragging us into Hitler’s war.
Many wanted peace with the Allies whatever the price, but the Germans turned on us, installing Mussolini as a figurehead for their puppet government in the North.
He insisted those fit and able present themselves to fight on for fascist Italy but thousands like Pietro refused.
‘Some joined partisan bands up in the hills but others lay low in their village homes. Pietro joined the local communist party, so I am told. Loyalties were divided but in a place like this we still had to live together. The butcher had a picture of Mussolini on the wall right up until the end but who could afford to starve themselves or their families? And those here who supported the fascists did not want to betray their neighbours’ sons like Pietro, whatever their politics.
Then one day the Germans came.’ The priest’s voice tailed off. He gazed back at the altar.
‘What happened?’ Amy said quietly.
‘They called it a rastrellamento, it means a sweeping up. Their soldiers stormed through the village looking for partisan fighters and deserters. Pietro’s sister told me she urged her brother to flee.
Her family thought he had got away; they made excuses to themselves for why they never heard from him again.
But others…’ The priest shook his head. ‘Something terrible happened here. Something that makes men lose their faith or cling to God, our only hope amidst the horror.’
Amy waited, she couldn’t imagine terrible things happening in such a peaceful pretty place.
‘Have you seen our village hall?’ Filippo continued.
‘That was built where a row of cottages once stood, burnt to the ground, their inhabitants with them. Others were dragged from their homes and shot in the square across from this church, against the far wall. Seventeen people died that day, the youngest victim a boy of thirteen. They had information that he acted as a messenger for a partisan gang up in the hills.’