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As far as Marco knew, Fio never told anyone the story he’d told her, of that day over the Adriatic, with those murderous huns. She was a good girl, was Fio. Much smarter than Marco. Marco liked smart women, and most especially liked women smarter than he was, which was why he married Gina. And even Gina, he never told.
Gina, though, was very smart. She could probably put the pieces together, more or less. Marco, for his part, tried not to worry her—tried to save his long skyward stares and quiet sighs for solitary moments. Because the other truth, the truth that pulled him back from that longing, was that he loved Gina terribly, loved her with the pathetic and smoldering desperation of an old man who knows when a woman is out of his league.
For a while it was wonderful. But it had a strange edge to it, life did, as though Gina expected him to one day bore of her and their life together and return to airborne gallantry. This never happened; Marco loved his new and quieter life, and eventually Gina came to believe him when he said so. They were happy.
He still machine-gunned the occasional pirate out of the skies to stay sharp and keep himself in fuel and parts, but the fascists were only getting noisier, and Marco didn’t want to get anyone else in trouble, particularly Fio or Gina. So for the most part, he kept his head down.
And then Fio went and got herself in trouble anyway.
Having driven a purposefully circuitous route through the night from Milan to Genoa, they stood at the far end of the docks in the port of Genoa, Marco and Gina, watching the tramp steamer being nudged into place by a hardy tugboat. Decades of navigating over the Adriatic had given Marco an instinct for the geography of the coastline, which did not transfer to the Mediterranean. This made him uneasy. This among many things.
Gina held his arm. They had traveled mostly in silence, for it was a dangerous night and there was little to say. Neither of them were of the disposition to offer meaningless reassurances to the other.
“We’ve finally made it,” said Gina.
“Not yet,” said Marco. “Careful, you’ll curse our luck.”
Gina smiled a sad smile. “I’ve always wanted to see New York.”
Marco grunted.
“I wonder how bad the war’s going to be.”
Marco exhaled smoke. “Bad. Worse than last time.”
“Mm.” There were faint shouts of the dockworkers as the steamer drew near to the mooring. “I wonder…” Gina trailed off.
“You wonder?”
“I wonder if we’ll ever be able to come back.”
This would have been the time for a meaningless reassurance, but Marco knew she’d see right through him. “I don’t know,” he finally said.
“I’ll miss the hotel. I’ll miss everything.” Her voice finally broke. Marco held her very tightly.
With the dawn’s reluctant arrival, the sea was revealed as choppy and restless and the color of steel. It was just the sort of day—barely a “day”, too, still being an ungodly predawn hour that was an affront to man and beast alike (and therefore Marco considered himself twice-aggrieved)—just the sort of day that made Marco loathe the notion of sea-travel.
And now they were going to be traveling on the sea for quite a long time. Thanks to Fio, Marco grumbled to himself, though he knew the day would have come sooner or later, Fio or no.
“What did you do to tweak the Fascist’s noses so badly, eh?” Marco asked Fio, as they stood on the docks, watching his plane being hoisted (wings detached and tucked alongside the fuselage) aboard the steamer.
“Oh, you know, the usual,” said Fio with a dismissive hand gesture. “They wanted me to build them warplanes, and I told them to go pound sand.”
“Isn’t that going to come down on the heads of all those nice ladies at your workshop?”
Fio giggled, suddenly delighted. “Hah—nope! You’ll love what I did…” Her eyes were alight with mirth, lips pursed in stifled amusement. Marco felt a rise of avuncular sentiment in his chest as Fio told the tale—getting sentimental in my old age—but he kept it to himself and listened.
“—So then I went around the neighborhood, and hurled the bricks with all those absurd threats written on them through the grannies’ windows! Oh, you ought to have seen it—they really hammed up their fear of mean old boss-lady Fio, threatening them if they dared to cooperate with the nice Fascists! Hee hee hee…” Fio cackled at her own wit.
Marco did not share her amusement. “What’re you, stupid? You’ll be a criminal for sure, now! If they ever catch you they’ll—”
At this, Gina hushed him. “She would’ve been an enemy of the state either way, Marco.”
Fio’s eyes widened in pleasure. “Yes! See, Gina understands. This way nobody loses—I’m already a criminal, and the girls got to pretend I was horrible to them without worrying about actually selling me out! Perfect!”
“Sure, perfect except for the part where you’ve got an entire government out to get you,” said Marco. Fio was always too cavalier about such things.
“As though you’ve never done anything just to bother the Fascists!” said Gina.
“That is not the same thing!”
Fio and Gina both laughed, because it was the same thing—it was exactly the same thing, except that Marco had always found it easier to value the lives of others.
His own life, though, was cheap, and he treated it cheaply. He didn’t see what was so hard to understand about this. Once a pig, always a pig.
Getting the plane aboard the steamer had been a dicey business (in the dark, and the rain), and even after it was tied down and tarped, Marco stood by it, not really ready to turn his back on the old girl. He smoked a cigarette as Fio smirked at him—she found his unease adorable, evidently.
“Hold on,” said Marco suddenly. “Why don’t you have a plane to load? Weren’t you working on that new—”
Fio shrugged. “There wasn’t time. And anyway it wasn’t finished, and those hamfisted goons won’t be able to do anything useful with it. They wanted me, after all, not the plane.”
Marco grunted.
“Besides, the drawings are all in my trunk. Curtiss said he’d help me build another one in the States.”
Marco grunted again. He still didn’t like Curtiss. The cocky American, with his chin and his maddening and undeniable talent as a pilot.
Just because Curtiss was saving all their lives it didn’t make him any less insufferable. In point of fact it was the opposite, but Fio found their ongoing rivalry a source of constant amusement.
Fio laughed at all sorts of things that Marco did not find the least bit funny.
Marco—obviously—had never been prone to motion sickness, but some perverse quality of the rocking and pitching of their boat in the middling-heavy seas of the north Atlantic made him terribly ill, and Gina nursed him through it with saintly patience as he grumbled and cursed and vomited up every bite of the slop that came out of the galley. It seemed a dark joke, the Crimson Pig laid low with seasickness, but neither Gina nor Fio made sport of him for this, a mercy for which he was grateful.
He knew they would have laughed, though, to hear how the grinding misery of the days of seasickness along with the snarl of injustice and violence and war they were fleeing had made Marco wonder if it was worth all of this—if his life in particular was really worth trying to preserve. Maybe better to let the Fascists catch him. Let them put him up against a wall and finally have done with it. They wanted him more than Fio, anyway. He would close his eyes in front of the firing squad and think of Ferrarin and that river of planes, and the quiet, and the all-suffusing peace.
Marco would let himself long for it in brief, vivid moments. And then he would look up, and see Gina’s worried eyes as she dabbed his brow, and he knew he could not leave her.
They steamed into New York harbor. There was Liberty, big and green as you please. And the city! Enormous and loud. Just the kind of place you’d expect a lout like Curtiss to hail from. But they were safe from fascists and U-boats here, and with that safety a great weight was lifted.
Marco’s appetite returned immediately, and the enormous breakfast to which Curtiss insisted upon treating them was a high point of Marco’s life.
“Nothing finer than a diner, I always say!” said Curtiss, more full of genuine good cheer than Marco’d ever seen him.
“Stop ruining your own charm, Mr. Curtiss,” said Gina.
Curtiss deflated visibly. “Ah, Yes. Er.” He took a sip of coffee and looked askance for a moment. “Point is, I’m so glad you’re here. You’ve arrived at the perfect time. America needs planes—” he looked to Fio, then to Marco, “—and pilots. And we don’t have enough of either.”
Marco scowled, and out of the corner of his eye he could see Gina’s look of distaste, as well. Good. “I’m not flying in an army again.”
Curtiss laughed. “Of course not! You and me, Mister Pig, we’re gonna teach our boys how to fly like we do. And you, Fio, you’re gonna build ‘em some planes.”
The was an awkward, stony silence.
“Er, that is… I hope you will.”
They traveled constantly. For a few weeks they’d been at a US Army air field in someplace called “Yuma, Arizona,” an absurd little town in a corner of the vast deserts of the American southwest. Gina appeared enchanted by the novelty of the place, but every time he flew and got a proper view of the endless brown, Marco found himself baffled as to why anyone would live here, for any reason. He thought of Fio, building planes up in Buffalo, NY. They’d read her letters together, Marco and Gina, and marveled at the pictures she sent of the Buffalo winter. “So much snow!” Gina laughed. Marco just shook his head and said the same thing he always said: “This country…!”
After a year and more of flying it, Marco had become unavoidably fond of the agile little Boeing-Stearman Model 75 trainer. It was a quick little devil of a biplane, and after dozens of mock dogfights against Curtiss, he’d developed a thorough appreciation for its flight characteristics. The extra seat (it was a trainer, after all) meant, too, that every so often he could convince the supply officer to look the other way, and he’d fuel up for a Sunday flight with Gina, which had become one of the great joys in his life. Her flushed cheeks and exhilarated smile after they landed almost made him forget both the war and his terrible longing to be free of it.
Indeed, more than he cared to admit, such moments were all he lived for.
And now here he was, mindlessly flying through another scissors maneuver with Curtiss to show this week’s batch of cadets how it was done—rolling left, then right, balancing the Stearman right on the edge of a stall as he tried to scrub off airspeed and get on Curtiss’s tail. But he wasn’t really there; his mind was on Gina and her laugh and maybe they could finally manage to get up to the Grand Canyon, as Major Wilson had told him it was well worth the trip—
and then—
Curtiss’s plane was right there—
and there was a horrible torquing shudder and the air was moving all wrong. Marco’s nerves went hot with adrenaline fire, then immediately cooled as decades of piloting experience took over. They were spinning, and the vector was wrong, so the first thing was to try to constrain the spinning axes—the yaw spin was bad, but he still had the rudder, so maybe… Marco was vaguely aware of the cadet shouting something at him, but it wasn’t important—
and then everything was quiet and the desert was gone. Marco smelled the salt spray mixed with the engine oil, the sense-memories of flying just above the wave-tops of the Adriatic, and then it was very quiet—
Yes, please
Let me go
I’ve waited so long
—and now the desert sun was back, and the speckled brown landscape loomed close, and Marco pulled back on the stick, some chilly pilot-instinct in the back of his mind noting that even if they crashed here, it was quite a feat to have regained control after the collision and ensuing spin.
But no, they weren’t going to make it.
The curving path of the little Stearman 75 as it struggled to pull out of the dive drew near to tangency with the desert floor, but the load on the damaged wing was too great, and it cracked free with a sudden lurch, and then there was a vicious impact and a spray of sand and everything was dark.
In the hospital they came to tell Marco he was a hero. The young cadet doffed his cap and gee-thanks-mistered him, and the cadet’s visibly pregnant wife, overcome with gratitude, rushed to Marco’s bedside and thanked him for saving “daddy’s” life.
Marco didn’t remember what he said in response to her, or indeed to anyone else (and there were many) who exclaimed at his putative heroism. He only remembered Gina’s quiet relief, and the traces of worry that lingered at the corner of her eyes.
Somehow, she knew. Somehow, she knew where he wanted to go, and how badly.
Months later, Marco and Gina finally did make it to the Grand Canyon, once his broken legs and cracked ribs healed enough to allow travel. The expression of delight and astonishment on Gina’s face as they took the vast sight in was, Marco decided, worth living for. And again, he realized he could not leave her.
The war ended, and Marco and Gina prepared to return to the Italian coast of the Adriatic Sea.
Marco’s plane went back to Milan with Fio to be reassembled, and Marco and Gina made for the coast to see if there would be anything left to salvage.
The devastation they saw as they drove across the countryside was ubiquitous and awful. They had been warned, of course, but it was different to see. Marco steeled himself for the worst when they finally managed to hire a boat to take them out, and out of the corner of his eye he glimpsed the hard set of Gina’s jaw, and knew that she was doing the same.
We should be happy to be here at all, Marco thought. This sentimentality over what was surely now a pile of rubble on a rock in the bay was pointless. But he was sentimental, too, of course.
And then, a miracle. Gina’s breath caught as they came near enough to be certain: The gross structure of the place, at least, was intact. It had not been bombed. It survived.
They surveyed the gutted, rubble-strewn interior. The walls and roof were there, yes, but that was all.
“We’ll open in a week,” she said, and Marco knew better than to argue.
The Hotel Adriano rapidly became a favorite of the Allied officers who found themselves stationed in the area during those early postwar days. Once word got around that with enough wine the grizzled civilian gentleman who haunted the hotel’s bar could be persuaded to tell some truly excellent stories of the short but glorious era of Adriatic air piracy, Marco became something of a legend among the airmen. Curtiss visited often, seemingly solely to embarrass Marco with grandiose and shamelessly embellished tales of aerial derring-do performed for the benefit of whoever would listen.
Over the years, a few of the pilots he’d trained in America sought him out. One such fellow looked him dead in the eye late one night after they were both well into their cups. “I took what you taught me, sir, and I shot down a Zero lining up for a kamikaze.” He clasp Marco’s shoulder and only swayed a little. “You as good as saved those men’s lives yourself.”
Marco smiled a nervous smile. He wanted to punch whoever first thought to put a gun on an airplane.
Gina got sick.
It started when she lost her appetite. She went to see the local doctor, and she’d been so powerfully healthy her whole life that it didn’t even cross Marco’s mind to be worried. But she came back quiet and worried.
There were a few agonizing days of tests at the hospital.
She had a few months, the doctors finally said. The cancer was aggressive.
Marco called Fio, who canceled all of her appointments for the week and helicoptered in from Milan immediately. It was Gina, and not Marco, who talked Fio out of deploying whatever it took of her considerable fortune (Piccolo Aeronautics was very successful) to transport Gina for better treatment.
There in the quiet little hospital room, Gina only smiled. “No, no. I don’t want to leave home again. And anyway, I’m an old woman. I’ve had a good life.” She paused, then looked over to Marco. “Take me back to the Adriano, would you?”
Marco was careful never to let Gina see him cry.
The funeral came, and it was an enormous affair. Old pirates and airmen came from hundreds of miles away. The church teemed with grieving rogues. Men who’d calmly rode thousands of horsepower through the most pitched dogfights in history wept openly.
Marco left quietly after, intending to return to the Adriano alone. Fio—always one step ahead of him—intercepted him around the back of the church.
“Where’re you going?” There was a note of some unvoiced worry in her question.
“Back to the Adriano,” he said. “Lot of old-timers going to come by tomorrow, you know. Have to make sure it’s ready.”
Fio fixed him in her steely gaze for a long, uncomfortable moment. Marco noticed a touch of white beginning to frost her flaming red hair at the temples. “All right,” she said at length. “I will see you tomorrow,” she said, enunciating the words very firmly.
Marco nodded and grunted.
Then she rushed at him and embraced him and cried fat tears, and she was seventeen again. “Oh, Porco!” she sobbed.
Marco did return to the Hotel Adriano. His plane was fine and red and full of fuel, and when he climbed into it, he tasted the salt-spray and listened to the raucous music of the engine, and in that perfect moment when the hull pulled free of the water, the plane’s wake changed from a churning line to the faintest brushstroke across the sea’s surface. As Marco gained altitude the world below became distant and faded, vanishing beneath the white.