“Vorarbeiter Lella, Pino Lella,” he said with none of the earlier stammering.

Dolly seemed unimpressed, and called out, “Anna? Do you have the general’s coffee ready?”

“Coming, Dolly,” Anna yelled back.

The maid and General Leyers converged on the short hallway at the same time. Pino snapped to attention, saluted, his eyes darting to Anna as she came over to him, her smell all around him as she held out a thermos. He looked at her hands and fingers, how perfect they were, how—

“Take the thermos,” Anna whispered.

Pino startled, and took it.

“And the general’s valise,” she muttered.

Pino flushed and awkwardly bowed to Leyers, then picked up the large leather valise, which felt full.

“Where is the car?” the general asked in French.

“Out front, mon général,” Pino replied.

Dolly said something to the general in German; he nodded and replied.

Then Leyers fixed his eyes on Pino and snarled, “What are you doing there, staring at me like a Dummkopf? Take my bag to the car. Backseat. Center. I’ll be down soon.”

Flustered, Pino said, “Oui, mon général. Backseat center.”

Before leaving, he dared a last glance at Anna and was discouraged to see that she was looking at him as if he had mental problems. He left the apartment and lugged the general’s valise down the stairs, trying to remember the last time he’d thought of Anna. Five, six months ago? The truth was he’d stopped believing he’d ever see her again, and now here she was.

Anna was all he could think about as he passed the blinking old crone in the lobby and went outside. The maid’s smell. Her smile. Her laugh.

Anna, Pino thought. What a beautiful name. Rolls right off the tongue.

Did General Leyers always spend the nights with Dolly? He desperately hoped so. Or was it an unusual thing? Once a week or something? He desperately hoped not.

Then Pino realized he’d better focus if he wanted to see Anna again. He had to be the perfect driver, he decided, one that Leyers would never dismiss.

He reached the Daimler. It was only then, as he was lifting the valise into the backseat, that he thought about what might be inside. He almost tried to open it right there, but then realized that foot traffic was building and there were German soldiers about.

Pino set the briefcase down, shut the door, and came around to the driver’s side of the staff car, so he could see back toward the apartment building. He opened the rear door and moved the valise closer. He looked at the hasp, which had a keyhole. He looked up at the fourth floor, wondering how long it took the general to eat.

Less time with every second, Pino thought, and tried the hasp. Locked.

He looked up at the fourth-floor window and thought he saw the drapes flutter as if someone had let them go. Pino shut the back door. A few moments later, the door to Dolly’s building opened. General Leyers exited. Pino sprinted around the car and opened the other side.

The Nazis’ Plenipotentiary General for War Production barely gave him a glance before climbing in next to his case. Leyers immediately checked the hasp.

Pino shut the door behind the general, his heart hammering. What if he’d been looking inside the valise when the Nazi came out? That thought made his heart hammer all the more as he slid behind the wheel and looked in the rearview mirror. Leyers had set his peaked hat aside and was digging out a thin silver chain from beneath his collar. There was a key on it.

“Where are we going, mon général?” Pino asked.

“Don’t talk unless spoken to,” Leyers said sharply, using the key to unlock his case. “Are we clear, Vorarbeiter?”

“Oui, mon général,” Pino said. “Very clear.”

“Can you read a map?”

“Yes.”

“Good, then. Drive on toward Como. When you cross out of Milan, stop and drop my flags. Store them in the glove compartment. In the meantime, be quiet. I have to concentrate.”

After they were moving, General Leyers put on reading glasses and began intently working on a thick stack of papers in his lap. Yesterday at Albanese Luggage and this morning at Dolly Stottlemeyer’s, Pino had been too flustered to look at Leyers in any great detail. Now he drove and kept taking glances at the general, really studying the man.

Pino figured Leyers was in his midfifties. Powerfully built, especially through the shoulders, the general had a bull neck that strained against his crisp white shirt and jacket. His forehead, broader than most, was defined by receding salt-and-pepper hair slicked back and glistening with pomade. His thick, dark brows seemed to throw shadows across his eyes as he scanned reports, scribbled on them, and then set them aside in a separate pile on the backseat.

Leyers’s concentration seemed total. In the time it took for Pino to drive the Daimler out of Milan proper, he never once saw him raise his head off the work before him. Even when Pino stopped to take down the general’s flags, Leyers stayed on task. He had a blueprint spread out across his lap and was studying it when Pino said, “Como, mon général.”

Leyers adjusted his glasses. “The stadium. Around back.”

A few minutes later, Pino drove along the long west side of the football stadium on Viale Giuseppe Sinigaglia. Seeing the staff car, four armed guards at an entrance snapped to attention.

“Park it in the shade,” General Leyers said. “Wait with the car.”

“Oui, mon général.”

Pino parked, shot out of the car, and had the back door open in seconds. Leyers seemed not to notice, got out with his valise, and walked by Pino as if he did not exist. Leyers treated the guards the same way as he disappeared inside the stadium.

It was early in the day, and already the August heat was building. Pino could smell Lake Como on the other side of the stadium, and he longed to go down and look up the western arm toward the Alps and Casa Alpina. He wondered how Father Re was, and Mimo.

He thought about his mother, and what her latest purse designs might look like, and whether she knew what had happened to him. He felt melancholy, realized he missed Porzia, especially the way she charged into everything in her life. Nothing had ever frightened his mother, as far as he knew, until the bombing had started. Since then, she and Cicci had been living in Rapallo, listening to the war on the radio, and praying for it all to be over.

It was passive, hiding out, and for that Pino was glad he wasn’t with her. He was not hiding out. He was a spy at the heart of Nazi power in Italy. A thrill went through him, and for the first time, he really thought about being a spy, not espionage as a boy’s game but as an act of war.