Free The Golden Hour by Margaret Wurtele

guys up here.”
    When he got to the bread, he handed one loaf to the Fox. They tore into them with gusto, tearing off piece after piece, stuffing them in their mouths and swallowing them without chewing.
    “Okay.” Halfway through his loaf, Giorgio stood back and surveyed the meager piles. “Giovanna, this is a great start, but we’ve got to help you understand what we’re dealing with here. Sit down.”
    I perched on the base of one of the columns and leaned back against it, looking up at the two of them. They continued standing, pacing back and forth. Giorgio did most of the talking. Now and then the Fox, who I noticed had a slight limp, would add a few words of emphasis or correction.
    There were fifteen men in their loosely affiliated band. Most of them were local, men from western Tuscany, from villages not too far from Lucca, who were known to one another vaguely or were friends of friends. Some were soldiers who, like Giorgio, had deserted from the Italian army. Some were recent recruits; others were older, veterans of battles in Northern Africa, Sicily, or even Russia, who had refused to continue fighting under German occupation. There were civilians, anti-Fascists, who were too old or too young to serve, who had joined with this group to do what they could to fight the Blackshirts, harass the Germans, and pave the way for Allied victory.
    “There are groups all over northern Italy,” he went on. “Some are really organized, almost like military units, according to the ranks they held in the army. They’ve got good guns and regular supplies. Others are looser, like ours.”
    “How do the organized ones get their supplies?” I wondered whether I could learn from their techniques.
    “They’ve got good walkie-talkies and radios, and so they get regular signaled parachute drops from Allied planes.”
That explains some of those low-flying planes,
I thought,
the ones that don’t seem to be bombers.
    “Where are you living?” I asked.
    Giorgio looked at the Fox. “We can’t tell you exactly where, but we’re based in one of the old
carbonari
camps. Remember how Tonino and his cronies would go off for a few weeks every year?”
    A couple of years earlier I was in the village one afternoon and saw Tonino return from one of these outings. He was helping to pull a two-wheeled wagon piled high with gunnysacks of charcoal. He and the other guys had been wearing the same clothes for two or three weeks, and their shirts and pants, their hands and faces, were covered in a thick layer of black charcoal dust.
    Charcoal making—before modern briquettes came along—was one of our local traditions. A group of villagers would leave their families and hike up into the thickly wooded hills. They cut sticks and small branches with a razor-sharp cutting tool, stacking them high in a tepee-shaped pile. Then they covered the whole thing with a layer of dirt to keep out the air and set the wood on fire. It smoldered, maybe for a week or more, while they worked on building new piles. Eventually, they would remove the layers of dirt and find the sticks underneath transformed into charcoal. We used it for cooking and exported it too.
    “Those guys left campsites like the one we’re using. It’s near a stream and flat. And the good news for us is that it’s completely inaccessible to motor vehicles.”
    “So do you cook?” I asked.
    “We can,” he answered. “And that’s what I was coming to. We don’t have any way to chill fresh food, so what we really need is more dried beans and pasta, hard cheese, onions, salami—eveneggs—things that keep for a while. And the bread is great if you can get it.” He popped the last of his crust in his mouth and grinned.
    “The problem is this.” I turned my back to them, because I didn’t want to disappoint them in any way. “I can’t carry very much, Giorgio. And I can’t really get away during the week. What I need is a place closer to home where I can add the supplies