Free Warburg in Rome by James Carroll Page B

awaited them. She had followed, moving through the night along the simple road, understanding that all she had to do was keep going downhill. She arrived in Trieste at dawn, just after the trap was sprung, and Carlo’s contingent of thirty Partisans had captured the entire militia barracks while its fighters were still asleep. Marguerite came upon the scene at the great piazza on the water’s edge just as the gunfire began. The shots echoed off the proud neoclassical palaces that lined three sides of the square, a vestige of the city’s Habsburg grandeur, though by now many of the buildings were in ruins. Assuming a battle, she crouched, moving forward slowly toward the noise.
    But she was wrong. There was no battle. As she stepped out of the shadowy arcades, it was readily apparent who was who, because the men of Carlo’s brigade were dressed, as always, in dark peasant gear and the red kerchiefs that were the sole gesture of a uniform, donned just before action commenced so they could recognize one another. Their prisoners, though, were as they had been when asleep—men mostly in their underwear, sleeveless shirts, tattered white drawers, bare feet. Those who were clothed wore the black shirts of the Ustashe—that red-and-white-checkered crest for a shoulder patch. Dozens of prisoners, unresisting, were surrounded by rifle brandishers. They lay face-down on the cobblestones or knelt with their hands clasped above their heads.
    Marguerite did not understand what she was seeing, and at first could take in only the sound. The Partisans, her comrades, were firing their weapons unopposed, short machine-gun bursts, single gunshots in quick succession. Red-kerchiefed brigade members were dragging bodies to the water’s edge and throwing them into the harbor. Then Marguerite saw the familiar figure with rampant red hair and beard. Carlo was moving slowly through the knot of prisoners, placing the snout of his pistol at one head after another and firing. Carlo was the group commander. This was his operation. His victims were, to him, the villains of Sisak. “I am stopping it,” he had said to her on the hill above the racecourse. “That is what I am doing.” A massacre.
     
    The Quirinal girl refused to open her eyes. Marguerite coaxed her with soft words, to no avail. Sweat poured off the girl’s face, and Marguerite recognized the fever. “Come, my sweet,” she said, and scooped the child up. She was perhaps eleven or twelve, weighed next to nothing. She mounted no resistance, was conscious, but was wholly indifferent to her own condition. Marguerite carried her to the medical tent, where equipment, pristine white cloths, gray woolen blankets, and bottles of various fluids were just being unboxed. A nursing sister was in charge, and she welcomed Marguerite. The sister took the girl into her arms, saying, “Now we begin. One child at a time.”
     
    Carlo looked up from the man he had just executed, turned, and saw her. Their eyes locked for the briefest moment. Oddly, he lifted his pistol and aimed it at her. Then he threw his head back and laughed. She turned and ran into the alley from which she’d come.
    I fly unto Thee —the verse she’d habitually prayed while running within the walled garden of her childhood home in privileged Parioli. But the Trieste air was wet and murky, this was a quayside slum, and she was no girl at play. She tripped and fell. She got up, running. The alley narrowed. At a fork, she went right. She saw her father’s face, then the wreckage of his automobile, which she had never seen and never stopped seeing. Papà! Papà!
    Marguerite’s task in life had been to draw her treasonous parents back from the fires of hell by being good. And so she was. Essential to being good was the recitation of her prayer: I fly unto Thee . . . in Thy mercy hear and answer me . As she fled now, recitation was automatic, yet she knew the prayer was as useless as the magic word of her dreams.
    When Carlo