My Father's House

Sunday 19th December 1943

10.49 p.m.

119 hours and 11 minutes before the mission

Grunting, sullen, in spumes of leaden smoke, the black Daimler with diplomatic number plate noses onto Via Diciannove, beads of sleet fizzling on its hood. A single opal streetlight glints at its own reflection in an ebbing, scummy puddle where a drain has overflowed. Pulsing in the irregular blink of a café’s broken neon sign, the words ‘MORTE AL FASCISMO’ daubed across a shutter.

Scarlet.

Emerald.

White.

Delia Kiernan is forty, a diplomat’s wife. Doctors have ordered her not to smoke. She is smoking.

A week before Christmas, she’s a thousand miles from home. Sweat sticks her skirt to the backs of her stockings as she pushes the stubborn gear stick into first.

The man on the rear seat groans in stifled pain, tearing at the swastikas on his epaulettes.

The heavy engine grumbles. Blood throbs in her temples. On the dashboard, a scribbled map of how to get to the hospital using only the quieter streets is ready to be screwed up and tossed if she encounters an SS patrol but the darkness is making the pencil marks difficult to read and whatever hand wrote them was unsteady. She flicks on her cigarette lighter; a whiff of fuel inflames his moans.

Swerving into Via Ventuno, the Daimler clips a dustbin, upending it. What spills out gives a scuttle and makes for the gutter but is ravaged by a tornado of cadaverous dogs bolting as one from gloomed doorways.

Squawking brakes, jouncing over ramps, undercarriage racketing into potholes, fishtailing, oversteering, boards thudding, jinking over machine-gunned cobbles, into a street where wet leaves have made a rink of the paving stones.

Whimpers from the man. Pleadings to hurry.

Down a side street. Alongside the university purged and burned by the invaders. Its soccer pitch netless, strangled with weeds, the pit meant for a swimming pool yawning up at the moon and five hundred shattered windows. She remembers the bonfire of blackboards, seeing its photograph in the newspaper the morning of her daughter’s eighteenth birthday. Past the many-eyed, murderous hulk of the Colosseum like the skeleton of a washed-ashore kraken.

Across the piazza, gargoyles leer from a church’s gloomy facade. She flashes her headlights twice.

The bell tolls eleven. She feels it in her teeth. Wind harangues the chained-up tables and chairs outside a café, wheezing through the arrow-tipped railings.

A black-clad man hurries across from the porch, damp raincoat clinging, abandoning his turned-inside-out umbrella to the gust as he scrambles into the passenger seat of the ponderous, boat-like car, trilby dripping.

As she pulls away, he takes out a notebook, commences scribbling with a pencil.

‘What do you think you’re doing?’

‘Thinking,’ he says.

Pulling a naggin of brandy from his pocket, he offers it to the groaning passenger who has tugged off one of his leather gloves and jammed it into his own mouth.

The man shakes his head, scared eyes rolling.

‘For pity’s sake, let him alone,’ she says. ‘Give it here.’

‘You’re driving.’

‘Give it here this minute. Or you’re walking.’

An eternity at the junction of Via Quattordici and Piazza Settanta as a battle-scarred Panzer rattles past, turret in slow-revolve as though bored.

‘What does it mean for the mission?’ she asks. ‘If he’s gravely ill?