The Secret of Santa Vittoria by Robert Crichton Page A

die, Bombolini found he could go no further. His leg muscles had become like strands of wet pasta. They trembled and quivered, the strength had gone, he hung from the ropes on the pipe like a quarter of beef in the market place.
    What happened to Fabio then must be seen at least as having the hand of God behind it. He was coming back up the pipe to put Bombolini’s feet back on the spikes to keep him from being squeezed to death by the ropes when the grappa flask that he was carrying clinked against the pipe. He had forgotten about it, since Fabio doesn’t think in terms of alcohol; but at the moment when he needed it, at a time truly of desperation, something caused the bottle to strike the metal.
    The grappa they distill here is strong. It can be used in a cigarette lighter or in a blowtorch. On a cold day it is like carrying around a bottle of live coals or putting a stove in your pocket. Fabio took the flask from his shirt and reached up, and because Bombolini was now too tired even to drink, Fabio began pouring little surprises of grappa down his throat.
    The effect of the brandy was immediate. From the piazza they could see Bombolini’s vacant glazed stare pass from his face. His color, which had passed through purple into a whiteness like the whiteness of the dead, began to return to him. When Fabio got his feet back onto the spikes Bombolini was able to keep them there and the boy could feel muscles in the legs once more.
    â€œGive me the bottle,” Bombolini said.
    He began to pour the grappa down his own throat, steady strong swallows now, perhaps one a minute, an ounce or more each swallow and in five or six minutes the flask of grappa was emptied and he hurled it down into the piazza. He had drunk ten ounces of grappa in less than ten minutes.
    â€œWe’re going down,” Bombolini shouted to Fabio. There was a great cheer from the people in the piazza.
    â€œTake off the ropes.”
    Fabio shook his head. Then Bombolini began to work the ropes off himself, and when they were loose he threw them to the people and began to start down. He was slow, but he also was steady and careful, the foot feeling for the next spike, finding it, the whole body balanced correctly before the step and then the step itself.
    â€œThirty-four, thirty-four, thirty-four.”
    Another step.
    â€œThirty-three, thirty-three, thirty-three.”
    They could hear it all the way up the Corso Mussolini, they could hear it through the barred doors and the stones of the Leaders’ Mansion. They could hear it from every corner of the Piazza of the People, although they didn’t know what it meant then.
    â€œIt’s starting again,” Dr. Bara said in the cellar. “They’re getting ready to come again. It’s stronger now.”
    Dr. Bara had no fear for himself. It was his belief that the people would be too selfish to harm their only doctor. “You had better have a plan,” he said.
    â€œI have a plan,” Vittorini said. He said it so vigorously that the feathers rustled and it was reassuring. “I will make him take our surrender. It is now a matter of timing,” the old soldier said. “Timing is all.”
    â€œAnd don’t allow ourselves to forget one thing,” Dr. Bara said. “The Italian soldier is a master at the art of surrender.”
    It made them feel better, all of them, and the feeling lasted until they heard a noise, the noise, one so strong that they felt it, the loudest noise almost certainly ever heard until then in Santa Vittoria.
    *   *   *
    He had gotten down, by himself, to the last spike on the pipe and then his feet had touched the stones of the Piazza Mussolini. At that moment there was a great cheer and he had fallen forward and they caught him before he hit the stones and began to carry him, to shove him actually, through the mass of the people in the piazza toward his cart. They put him up on a great solid