She was almost to their building when strong arms wrapped around her from behind and dragged her back. When she cried out, a hand clamped around her mouth as she was pinned between a man’s chest and an alcove wall.
“Eva, shhh! Be still.” It was Angelo. The relief was almost as great as the despair as she turned and wilted against him.
“Grazie a Dio!” he cried, and pressed his sandpaper cheek against hers before pulling away so he could cradle her face in his hands. Angelo had failed to shave, a testament to the kind of morning it had been, and his blue eyes were wild beneath the unruly black curls drooping dejectedly over his brow. Their eyes clung, gratitude and relief giving way to a baser need, a need for affirmation, even celebration, and suddenly his mouth was on hers, kissing her fiercely, desperately verifying that she was indeed safe, present, and accounted for.
Eva froze beneath the onslaught, but only for a heartbeat. Her hands rose to his face, her mouth opened beneath his, and in those few stolen moments, there was euphoric frenzy. Lips, teeth, and tongues that tasted truth and reaffirmed life. The dam broke, and there was only unbridled feeling, stripped of duty and civility, of pretense and propriety. There were no lies between them, no space.
But the suspension of time could only last so long. Eva pulled back, gasping for breath, and with oxygen came remembrance.
“Angelo, the SS are coming,” Eva cried, hands gripping, lips pleading. “I have to warn my uncle.”
Angelo still held her face in his hands, his relief and lust slower to dissipate, and he forced his gaze from Eva’s lush mouth to meet her pleading eyes. She immediately began to shake her head, refusing the dreadful compassion she saw in his face.
“I know. I know, Eva. The SS are everywhere. All over the city, they are rounding up Jews.”
“Oh, no. No, Angelo. Oh, please, no.”
“I went to the apartment, Eva. I went there first. When the nuns said you never came home last night, I thought you must have been caught. I thought I was too late. I thought they’d taken you too.” His breath caught and he swallowed back the black nausea, the horror of that moment so fresh he could still taste it.
Eva closed her eyes, as if closing her eyes would protect her from what he knew.
“Maybe they were warned. Maybe they left before the SS arrived,” Eva said hopefully, her lips trembling around the words.
“They’re gone, cara,” he said gently, unable to keep the truth from her. “I saw the truck. I saw the truck drive away, Eva. I saw your uncle climb in. I think he must have been the last. And he saw me.”
Eva’s legs wobbled, and Angelo was there, wrapping his arms around her, bracing her as her tears began to flow and her strength left her.
“Where did they take them?” she cried, the wail only a whisper against the wall of his chest.
“I don’t know. But we will find out. We will find out, Eva.”
He smoothed her hair with a trembling hand and kept her locked in his embrace. It was several long moments before either of them had the ability to say more, stricken into silence, as if a meteor were jetting toward them, promising certain annihilation, and no matter where they turned, where they hid, the results would be the same. So they stood, waiting for the world to end, wrapped in each other’s arms, breathing, unable to process thoughts into words. But after a time, brain function returned, and with it, a terrible realization.
“The gold. All that gold that was gathered . . . the gold they insisted upon. It was a lie, wasn’t it? They wanted to make us think we were safe,” Eva said.
Angelo stepped back so he could meet her gaze. Then he cursed angrily, one of the American words he’d taught her to say more than a decade ago. He dropped his arms from around her and gripped his hair, repeating the ugly word over and over. His eyes were bright with outrage. “Yes. It was all a lie. They are pulling our strings, watching us dance.”
The Jews apprehended in the daylong Roman roundup were transported to the Italian Military College and held there, under armed guard. People had gathered outside, a substantial crowd—curious bystanders and horrified neighbors who had witnessed the arrests, gawking and gossiping as people are inclined to do. They watched as truck after truck unloaded terrified prisoners into the college courtyard, SS guards pushing and shoving them with shouts and directions that almost no one understood. Twelve hundred Jews, more than half of them women and children, many of them in their pajamas without food or blankets, were told they were being sent to labor camps in the east. Eva’s uncle, aunt, and cousins were among them.
The Pope could have looked out of his window and seen the crowds, the military college a mere six hundred feet from Vatican City. Angelo even hoped that the Pope might intercede. After all, he’d known about the gold, even offering to make up the difference if the fifty kilograms wasn’t raised. And these were mostly Roman Jews, protected by Italian law. But there was no Italian law anymore. There was only the Führer’s law. And the Führer wanted all Jews deported. The Führer wanted Judenrein—a world clean of Jews.
Angelo and Eva had wound their way back to the Church of the Sacred Heart, gathering information on their way. Angelo knew everyone, and everyone knew the young father. He gave comfort and instructions as they went, sending people scrambling for this or that, listening patiently, acting quickly. He was a natural leader and a good priest. It suited him. Eva stayed with him, and no one seemed to think it odd or unseemly that they were together. War made a mockery of convention.
When they arrived at the church, Angelo had deposited her firmly in a basement room recently vacated by a janitor killed during the air raids that had left portions of the city in rubble. He’d been running through the streets, terrified. They’d found him shoeless and minus an arm, sitting against the church doors, seeking sanctuary he wouldn’t find. The entrance was still lightly stained with his blood, and his rooms weren’t much more hospitable. A mattress on an old spring frame, an oddly ornate yet faded Victorian-era chair, and behind a small partition, a little sink, a cracked oval mirror mounted on a bare joist, and a toilet.
“You will be safe here, for now. The bedding is clean. The bathroom too. We knew we would need the space before long. I will tell Suora Elena you are here. She, or one of the other sisters, will bring you something to eat. I don’t want to bring you back to the convent until I know for sure they weren’t visited during the roundup.”
“Almost no one knows who I am. No one, Angelo. I don’t need to hide here. I could come with you to where they are holding my family. I speak German! Maybe I can help in some way.”
“No. You have to stay far away from all of that. All it would take is someone pointing you out, recognizing you, and you would be inside the college with the others. All it takes is one, Eva. One person telling the wrong person. And I may not be able to save you.”
She started to follow him out of the basement room. “Maybe we can find a back entrance, an unlocked door. Maybe we can get my family out. There has—”
“No!” Angelo’s roar was so enraged, so full of fury, that Eva stopped midsentence and stared at his livid face. Her eyes immediately filled with frustrated tears, but Angelo pushed her back, as deep into the minuscule space as he could get her, pressing her against the back wall, his arms braced on either side of her head.
“No, Eva. You avoided arrest twice today. Twice. God smiles on you, Eva, in so many ways, but I won’t let you do this. I will go. I will do everything I can to save as many as I can. But if you insist on coming, I will tie you to that bed. I will tie you up, and neither of us will leave this room.”
“You act as if you aren’t in any danger!” Eva put her hands on his chest and pushed him back, angry because he was angry. “But I know better. Priests have been tortured, shot, hung from bridges, shipped off in trains loaded with the Jews they’ve tried to help. In fact, non-Jewish Italians caught helping Jews are sometimes worse off than the Jews themselves.”
“The only thing that matters to me, the only thing in this whole world that truly scares me, is something happening to you. Do you know that? I think I could face anything, endure anything, if I knew for sure you were safe and well. I cannot serve the way I need to serve, I can’t be the kind of priest I need to be, and be full of fear. My faith is being drowned by my fear for you. You aren’t the only one who has lost their family. Your family is my family, Eva. I’ve lost them too! And I can’t lose you. Please. Please, Eva. If you have any feelings for me at all, you will stay here until I come back for you. You will let me do what I need to do, knowing you are out of harm’s way. Please.”
Eva could only nod, shocked at his vehemence, touched by his sentiments. She sat down on the thin mattress and nodded once more.
“I will wait. But you have to come back here. No matter what happens, no matter how late it is. You have to come back, Angelo.”
Eva lost her battle with sleep, making the hours of waiting easier to endure. She wrapped the thin blanket around her shoulders and pulled her knees into her chest, pretending that she was an oyster in a shell, a maker of glass, and nothing more. She fell asleep to the drip and creak of the basement walls, a prayer on her lips and the echo of cries and gunshots from the morning still haunting her thoughts.
When she awoke she was afraid, caught in her old dream, the one with the crowded darkness and the need to escape, to jump, though jumping was almost as terrifying as staying put. She opened her eyes, trying to convince herself that the darkness was empty and she was stationary. No one grabbed at her clothes and pulled at her legs. The light that flickered was not from moonlight penetrating the cracks in her consciousness. It was an oil lamp, turned down so low it glimmered without lighting the space around it.
“Angelo?”
The wick was lengthened, the flame danced, and the light grew, casting a glow over Angelo in the odd Victorian chair, sitting in the dark like he didn’t want to wake her.
She sat up and reached for the water Suora Elena had brought her. There was bread too, and she split it in half and brought it to Angelo, insisting that he eat. He relented and they ate in silence, the bread doing little to fill the empty dread in both their bellies. When they finished, Eva made him drink. Then she crouched in front of him and peered up into his face.