The Fallen Read Online Free

she heard the door close and Maria’s footsteps fade down the stairwell, then she picked up the photograph of her family again. Cheerless faces stared back at her. She found it difficult to remember what it had been like with all of them living together in the small apartment. That time seemed now as if it hadn’t really existed; it hovered in her thoughts like scenes from a film watched long ago, vague and disconnected. She let the tip of her finger linger on her mother’s greying image. Luisa wished that she had smiled for the photographer.
    In a street running parallel to Piazza Francese, soldiers dug through the rubble of a collapsed apartment block. The American military police had cordoned off the roadway on either side of the bombed-out building and a striped wooden barrier announced the area temporarily off limits. Two MPs in green rubberized rain ponchos that reached down to their knees stood guard at the barricade. A few yards behind them, on the opposite side of the blockade, a row of bodies was laid out on the rain-slicked pavement, covered haphazardly with grey woollen army blankets.
    Standing off to the side, Greaves found himself counting the feet that poked out from beneath the rain-splattered blankets: thirteen dead so far. There would be more. The German bombardments were as indiscriminate as the Allied bombardments had been before them, and those unlucky enough to find themselves living in the vicinity of the shipyards, the warehouse district, or the central rail station often paid the dearest price. And recovery operations like the one now under way could go on for days. First the rubble would be searched by hand, electric torches would be shone into crevices and voids, intermittent calls for quiet would go out so that ears could be turned to the ground to listen for movement, for cries of help. When this search was halted, the engineers would be brought in with their heavy machinery to clear the foundation—or perhaps the engineers wouldn’t be called upon, and the site would be left as it was and the stink of the buried corpses would fill the street.
    A commotion started at a nearby café, where a small crowd had gathered on the terrace. Women cried and beat their breasts. In the wreckage, another body had been found. There was a glimpse of pale blue through the grime: a nightgown, perhaps, or a housedress. Two soldiers who had been clearing the rubble moved slowly, wary of losing their footing on the slippery debris. They carried the body roughly between them, one with his hands locked around the knees, the other holding tightly to the wrists. The woman’s head, the long dark hair damp and matted with plaster dust, sagged loose and lifeless between them. When the soldiers reached the pavement, they placed the body on a stretcher and carried it along the street, where it was added to the blanketed dead.
    “What a fucken mess,” said the MP nearest to Greaves.
    Together they looked back to the café. The crowd had begun to shift. It ventured into the street, milling now between the terrace andthe barricade. The sound of their grief, a steady keening, had a peculiar otherworldly quality that unsettled the MP.
    Greaves picked out the young man. He stood alone from the crowd, rain-soaked, the singed fabric of his grubby white shirt pasted to his skin.
    “Do you think there will be trouble?” Greaves said.
    The MP nodded. “I know there will be. Always is when we got something like this.”
    “What will you do?”
    “The usual,” the MP said, the resignation in his voice heightened by a Texan drawl. “Crack a few of ’em on the head and hope for the best.”
    Greaves shrugged. “Can you blame them? For being so angry, I mean.”
    The American looked at him. He was slimly built, with the wide-open face of a boy fresh from the farm, soft and slightly bemused. “Mister,” he said, “I don’t blame nobody for nothing. Not anymore. Not after the things I seen.”
    Greaves turned again to the