Table of Contents
About The Book
A vivid, thrilling, and moving World War II art-heist-adventure tale where enemies become heroes, allies become villains, and a child learns what it means to become an adult—that “has the ring of truth and the echo of myth…[deserving of] all the lucky readers who discover it” (The Wall Street Journal).
August, 1943. Fourteen-year-old Massimo is all alone. Newly orphaned and fleeing from Rome after surviving a bombing raid that killed his parents, Massimo is attacked by thugs and finds himself bloodied at the base of the Montecassino. It is there in the Benedictine abbey’s shadow that a charismatic and cryptic man calling himself Pietro Houdini, the self-proclaimed “Master Artist and confidante of the Vatican,” rescues Massimo and makes him an assistant in preserving the treasures that lay within the monastery walls.
But can Massimo believe what Pietro is saying, particularly when Massimo has secrets too? Who is this extraordinary man? When it becomes evident that Montecassino will soon become the front line in the war, Pietro Houdini and Massimo plan to smuggle three priceless Titian paintings to safety down the mountain. They are joined by a vivid cast of characters and together they will lie, cheat, steal, fight, kill, and sin their way through battlefields to survive, all while smuggling the Renaissance masterpieces and the bag full of ancient Greek gold they have rescued from the “safe keeping” of the Germans.
Heartfelt, powerfully engaging, and in the tradition of Anthony Doerr’s All the Light We Cannot See, this is a work of storytelling bravado: a thrilling action-packed art heist, an imaginative chronicle of forgotten history, and a poignant coming-of-age epic where a child navigates one of the most morally complex fronts of World War II and lives to tell the tale.
August, 1943. Fourteen-year-old Massimo is all alone. Newly orphaned and fleeing from Rome after surviving a bombing raid that killed his parents, Massimo is attacked by thugs and finds himself bloodied at the base of the Montecassino. It is there in the Benedictine abbey’s shadow that a charismatic and cryptic man calling himself Pietro Houdini, the self-proclaimed “Master Artist and confidante of the Vatican,” rescues Massimo and makes him an assistant in preserving the treasures that lay within the monastery walls.
But can Massimo believe what Pietro is saying, particularly when Massimo has secrets too? Who is this extraordinary man? When it becomes evident that Montecassino will soon become the front line in the war, Pietro Houdini and Massimo plan to smuggle three priceless Titian paintings to safety down the mountain. They are joined by a vivid cast of characters and together they will lie, cheat, steal, fight, kill, and sin their way through battlefields to survive, all while smuggling the Renaissance masterpieces and the bag full of ancient Greek gold they have rescued from the “safe keeping” of the Germans.
Heartfelt, powerfully engaging, and in the tradition of Anthony Doerr’s All the Light We Cannot See, this is a work of storytelling bravado: a thrilling action-packed art heist, an imaginative chronicle of forgotten history, and a poignant coming-of-age epic where a child navigates one of the most morally complex fronts of World War II and lives to tell the tale.
Excerpt
Chapter 1
PIETRO HOUDINI CLAIMED THAT LIFE clung to him like a curse and if he could escape it he would. His namesake—the Hungarian, the American, the Jew, the illusionist—died in 1926, a full seventeen years before Pietro and I met in the dirt by the side of the road in an Italian village beneath the long shadow of the abbey of Montecassino. I was bloodied and blue, lying in a gutter, and he was standing above me, white and glowing and pristine like a marble god.
In his late fifties, Pietro seemed immortal to me. He had a mane of long, thick white hair to his shoulders, a close beard, an angular face, and a muscular body.
He reached out his hand and I took it.
I had been in the gutter because I had been an orphan fleeing south from Rome after the bombings and I never stopped until a group of boys assaulted me, choked me, and left me for dead.
Pietro had been standing over me for reasons of his own, some of them soon to be announced and declared, others hidden and protected until the very end. He carried a brown suitcase and a canvas shoulder bag and, he said, was on his way through the town of Cassino and to the abbey itself to see the abbot after a long trip from Bologna. He had seen the boys kicking me and ran them off with a wave of his hand.
“Are you planning to stay there?” he’d asked me in a northern accent I found sophisticated and comforting. “Or are you going to get up?”
I could see that he was not a normal man. His clothes were not the drab browns of the countryside and his eyes were not the browns of most Italians. Instead his suit was white and his eyes were blue. His skin was not the pinkish hue of the northerners but had the bronze of people baked by the summer sun. The wrinkles around his eyes and on his forehead spoke more of wear than years and I felt his presence to be dramatic and theatrical and magnetic: as though my eyes couldn’t help but fall on him, and when they did—like being drawn to a performer under a spotlight onstage—I was unable to break away because of the promise of some inexplicable drama yet to come.
I was right about all of it.
PIETRO HOUDINI FOUND ME ON the fifth of August 1943. My parents had been nice and gentle people with roots up north and extended family in the south, some of whom I knew and liked. My mother’s sister lived in Naples with a second husband whose name I’d forgotten, and I had a younger cousin named Arturo I had met only twice. My father had taught finance and accounting at Sapienza University, and on the evening before I fled Rome, my mother and I met him near his office. The plan was to carry on to a party for some of their friends. I remember hearing the planes moments before we joined him in the wide piazza near the entrance to the school.
I had heard planes before and I was generally scared of them. There was a story passing through northern Italy at the time, a story that had come down to Rome. It was about a plane called Pippo. It was understood to be Allied and it was something to fear. It was not a normal plane. It was a supernatural one. A mystical plane. The fascist newspapers covered the stories about Pippo too. I still don’t know why. Nevertheless, those stories confirmed or created or re-created everything Italians feared most about the dark.
“Is that Pippo, Mamma?” I asked, inquiring after the mysterious plane that could only be heard and never seen.
“Probably,” she had answered, because—for all the anxiety Pippo created—Pippo never did anything. Pippo never showed up.
But it was not Pippo. It was not one plane—not the plane—but many. The Allies had come, not to liberate us from Mussolini’s tyranny and Hitler’s twisted alliance with us, but to bomb us.
I knew, in some manner, that the Americans were our enemies but I didn’t really believe it. Not until I saw it. Looking up, I saw the bomb doors open and the black cylinders fall out. I saw the explosions in the city not far from me and I… didn’t understand.
I knew what was happening. But I had never seen buildings fall or balls of fire in a city. I had never experienced the industrial force of hatred and revenge. I could not absorb the notion that my country, Italy, had wanted this. Had asked for this. That the timeless buildings were simply gone. That we (me, my mother, my father, the people I saw running) were guilty of something. I may not have been raised a proper Catholic but the core teachings were the very lifeblood of the Italian people and were therefore inescapable. I knew that we were punished for guilt, not for innocence.
A stray bomb—caught by the wind—landed at our feet in San Lorenzo, near the university. When the air raid sirens started, my parents had instinctively thrust me ahead toward a building with a bomb shelter in it, and I had run in that direction, assuming they were right behind me, but they had stopped to take the hands of an aging friend. A moment later they were all dead from falling rubble.
I ran back and dug for them through the debris.
I found them.
My mother’s butterfly clip. My father’s watch.
I RAN SOUTH FOLLOWING THE Via Merulana. I had no money or suitcase. I saw a truck full of people and they waved to me to join them. I had no idea then—how could I?—that Rome would be declared an open city only a month later and I would have been safer there than where I was headed.
My clothes were ripped and dusty and foul, so a woman on the truck gave me some of her son’s clothes out of pity. I put on a white shirt and waistcoat and cap.
When the truck finally stopped a hundred kilometers south with the last of the people who wanted to go that far, I stood by the side of the road near Frosinone and then continued walking. My aunt was in that direction and my dead parents were behind me. That created a line I followed.
I walked. I slept. I walked more. I stayed with kind people for days at a time. I got as far as the village of Cassino in early August before someone put his hands around my throat.
The cause of that fight and what they wanted doesn’t matter now. What matters is they didn’t get it, and soon after the skirmish was over, Pietro found me broken by the side of the road. It was a good thing he didn’t ask my name in that moment because, there in the filth and blood, I hadn’t decided on one yet. I had decided only that the old me was gone and so was my history.
The old me was an only child who was raised uneventfully in Rome to loving parents who shielded me from the wider politics of Mussolini’s Italy and the war all around us.
The old me had been studious and had a few close friends at school, but had never been especially popular or admired.
The old me was comfortable in the company of adults and liked to listen and pretend I understood everything happening around me even when the topics turned to matters far beyond my comprehension.
That me had been happy because I had been sheltered from what would later cause me the greatest pain.
However:
That other me had been weak and I wanted to be strong. The other me was vulnerable and I wanted to be a warrior. The other me had been taught that being weak and vulnerable was a product of my birth and that it could never change because I was born inferior and lacked the creativity and courage for greatness.
That was the person I was committed to leaving behind in the gutter as my parents had been left in the rubble below.
I was a newborn without a name; a child who matured on the spot.
He was big but he was not a threatening presence. He sounded educated, which to me meant safe.
“Who are you under all that?” he asked.
“Just a boy,” I said.
What he said next—I think—was maschio. It means “manly” or “masculine.” I suppose he was speaking to himself. Perhaps he was being sarcastic. I don’t know. Through my ringing ears, though, I heard “Massimo.” Or was it the other way around? Did he say “massimo” and I nervously heard “maschio”? Either way, what I said aloud was “Massimo.”
He reached down and pulled me up and repeated: “Massimo.”
Did he name me or did I name myself? Regardless, the transformation was nearly complete.
My face was as soft as a baby’s, my shoulders slender. My eyes too big. But now my name was maximum, the top, the peak; all to describe a half-dead child with snot running down a broken nose and blood mixing with the salt of tears.
“Just a boy?” he asked.
“Yes,” I said.
“All right, Massimo,” he said, looking me over. “I am Pietro Houdini. Chemist. Painter. Scholar. Master artist and confidant of the Vatican.” He looked up the mountain at the abbey for emphasis or affirmation. Its walls were white and reflected the sun. It was a vibrant thing as though the light came from inside it. “I have time. I will take you home.”
“No!” I yelled.
This confused him. I could see by the way he flinched that he misunderstood. He thought I’d felt threatened by him, like he might be a new attacker. But I was never afraid of Pietro Houdini. It was the word “home” that had terrified me. I would never go back to Rome. Rome was haunted by death and I needed to go south. To go away.
“You already decided not to stay here. So… where?” he asked.
“Naples,” I said.
“Naples,” he repeated as if to confirm my order at a café. “Where are your parents?”
I didn’t answer.
After a long-enough time for him to understand the words not spoken he said, “So… Naples.”
“Yes. I will go there or I will die,” I explained.
He nodded his understanding, not at the value of my words but at the intractability of my ideas, my determination, and this new encounter that he could not explain but could also not ignore.
He responded gently: “Whether you are going to Naples or not, my friend, you are not going now. The Allies have won the battle for North Africa. Now they are fighting in Sicily. They are coming for Naples. Racing them is not a good idea. One should never be anywhere near soldiers fresh from combat, my young Massimo.”
He stood there with his arms crossed over his chest and his eyes looking to heaven for intervention or guidance or—at the very least—to ensure there was a witness.
“You are alone?”
I didn’t answer that either. The word “yes” was not available because of its finality.
Pietro Houdini stood silently and stared at me, asking a question I couldn’t hear. It was hot and his body was perfectly still. His mind, I felt, was building a plan as big as a cathedral.
When the plan was finished he said, “Okay. You will come with me. You will not understand this but the monks of Montecassino have requested my presence to help protect one of the greatest repositories of art in Western civilization. War is bad for culture, as it happens. That place, up there, is one thousand, four hundred, and fourteen years old. It is a fortress filled with wonders. They tore down the temple of Apollo to erect it. He was the god of war. I suspect he remains angry. I also suspect that the abbey has a very good wine cellar that is poorly guarded and shamefully catalogued, all of which is to my great benefit. If one needs to stay out of sight and wait for a dark moment to pass, there are worse places than a fortified wine cellar on a mountaintop. Believe me, I’ve checked.
“So,” he continued. “You and I share the same problem and the same destination, which is why the abbey is the only solution for the moment. If you come with me there are conditions. So listen. No talking when we get there. Talking is for me. You listen or else pretend to listen. You will be doing a great deal of listening and pretending to listen. Now… fix your cap, Massimo. You’ll want to tuck that hair in and then get it cut. Secrets and lies are illusions and one must commit to the illusion if it is to work! This is why I am called Houdini.”
He started off and I followed him. Bruised, limp, weak. For the next two hours I dragged myself up a five-hundred-meter mountain without ever asking—without even wondering—why he wanted me to come. Following Pietro Houdini seemed the most natural act in the world.
THE WHITE BEAST AND ITS walls came into view through the trees like a mirage—ancient and foreboding—and then disappeared.
“The foundations were raised in 529 AD,” Pietro said, sensing but overintellectualizing my curiosity. “That was the same year the Christian emperor Justinian closed Plato’s Academy in Athens by defunding it, thereby ensuring the downfall of what they considered pagan philosophy. Symbolically, my young Massimo, the intellectual life of the West shifted from the academy to the cloisters. To right there. It wouldn’t return to the academy until the pagans found their voices again in the Renaissance, all without my help! Up there,” he added, “is where St. Benedict wrote his Rule and monastic life began. Every monk you’ve ever seen got his ideas about how to live from an old document written right up there. Its significance to the Christian mind can’t be overstated. We are going to call it home for a little while. It is an island in a rising sea of despair. You may think you’ve seen hard times, but harder still are coming. Math does not lie.”
I was intimidated and awed when I arrived at the top. From the bottom the abbey had looked like a toy, a dollhouse. But when I was standing beside it the walls were as heavy and thick as those of a castle. The windows were small and there was only one way inside, through an archway with the word “PAX” inscribed at the top.
PEACE.
It looked more like a threat or a command than a prayer.
Peace… or else.
My father—perhaps as a joke, because fathers lie to their children for humor—had led me to believe that voices live inside rock. When I was little, maybe six, he took me to the Pantheon in Rome. Inside was the domed roof with the hole in the top where the rain had been pouring in since 128 AD (long before Montecassino was built). When you stand beneath that dome, toward the sides, you can hear whispers. They come from all over the room, but when I was a child I did not believe they came from the other people. I was certain—and my father confirmed it—that the words came from the rocks, and they spoke in Latin and Greek and Hebrew and other ancient and exciting languages because it was not the rocks speaking but instead the remembered words spoken in there by the dead. Rocks did not speak, but instead retained the sounds, the very vibrations, of every word spoken in their presence. Somehow, when forces aligned, those words were released and if you listened carefully you could hear the conversations of the dead. “Not ghosts,” my father said. “The past. Which is far more interesting.”
To me, Montecassino was made of the same rock. Standing there, however, I sensed more: Unlike the Pantheon, which was a dead place and a museum and a tourist attraction, this monastery was no relic, no ruin. It was alive. Words were being spoken in those languages even now, and so many more. Inside the rock were the stories of fifteen hundred years; stories that were not trapped in the cloisters but had already broken free long ago to change the world. Outside the entrance I could feel the pulse of the world thumping beneath the floors and I could already hear the whisperings of the crypts.
In Cassino, I had had no idea any of this was up here: a fortress in the clouds. For someone who wanted to hide as I did, there was perhaps no better place.
When we entered the compound through the archway, the scorching sun reflected off the sandstone, making the air shimmer and become heavy. Through the archways to my left I saw the brown and green of the valley dotted by the small villages below. Around me there were monks, like back in Rome.
“I’m thirsty,” I said to Pietro, hiding the rest of my concerns.
“I know.”
“I need to pee.”
“We will get water in and out of you soon.”
“I have to go now,” I said.
“We will now meet the abbot,” he said with my emphasis. “He is very old. Old enough to have shrunk. There will be an exchange of papers and blessings. Your relief will be that much greater when all is done.” He turned to me, looking serious. “Again: be quiet and, no matter what I say, you contradict nothing or there will be no food, water, or toilet for you.”
The old man arrived a few minutes later dressed in the black robes of the other monks. He must have been eighty years old. Two other monks flanked him, their hands clasped inside their long sleeves.
Pietro said something in Latin, or what I assumed was Latin because it wasn’t Italian and it involved monks. The abbot responded in kind. Pietro handed the abbot a letter, which had been sealed. The monk opened it and read it immediately. It looked very official and had many stamps. When the abbot nodded, Pietro introduced me in Italian as Massimo (no family name) and then christened me a second time that day by giving me a title: assistente del maestro di restauro e conservazione—assistant to the master of art restoration and conservation. This is how I was introduced to the monks—a teenager, my eyes black and swollen, two blue handprints around my neck. One by one they shook my thin hand and welcomed me to this house of God with not a question asked.
Such were the times:
Assistente.
Maestro.
I thought it was a joke but the monks accepted it, and after my needs were met and I was fed, I was led to a room where I then slept for more than twelve hours.
Maestro Houdini kept his other promise and put me to work the next day, rising at seven in the morning, long after the first prayers by the monks.
SO BEGAN A PERIOD OF peace and healing and exploration.
But also delay.
ON THE VERY FIRST DAY Pietro came into my room and saw that I was fed, washed, and rested, he said, “Stay here. You will have work to do soon enough. Before that I must prepare my tools and establish my authority and presence here so whatever I choose to do later will not be questioned. Magic, my young friend, is all about preparation. And illusion is about drama. More on this another time. Now I must go.”
Five minutes after he left, so did I. Who wouldn’t?
There was no map of the monastery. No guide. It was not a shape that one can easily describe and its layout lacked the symmetry one expects to find in a great cathedral. No, this was a place unlike any other place. As I snuck out of my room and ventured into the halls and corridors, archives and basilica, along the outer walls, and deep into the labyrinths below—some of vaulted gray stone and dust and others of mosaics of blues and golds—I came to imagine the place as a mighty ship.
Unfortunately, the only mighty ship I knew by name was the Titanic.
Imagine a ship on a sea of green grass at the highest point of a mountain with nothing else surrounding it. From its decks one could see all around without obstruction; the village of Cassino below, the road that snaked its way up and down, the fields and flowers outside, the tiny goat paths leading to further mysteries in the hills and forests beyond.
The ship itself was made of white stone except the lower parts of the walls where the foundations flared outward like a fortress and the glimmering abbey above gave way to ten million stones below. The roof was made of reddish and orange tiles, even the basilica in the middle and toward the prow. The two exceptions were the green domes: one above the church and the other near the outer walls.
On either side of the nave—all safe within the walls—were two cloisters with green parks in the middle and archways that led to walkways around them. At the entrance to the basilica itself was a massive stone patio with a fountain in the middle. Leaving it behind, I would walk under the porticos and come to the top of the enormous staircase; a staircase as wide as the church itself that went down toward the back of the ship, passed between the statues of St. Benedict on one side and his sister, Scholastica, on the other, passed the fountain from which the monks still drew water, to my favorite outside spot: the archways that looked westward and over the rolling hills that masked any sign of human life.
It was not the outer walls of the monastery, however, that liked to talk. It was the interior walls. It was the walls of the museum that no one frequented but me, and the archive rooms with the tens of thousands of papers and books and manuscripts and scrolls. It was the dark corners where secrets had been exchanged over the millennia, and where everything undocumented and hidden had produced their force.
The voices grew louder the deeper I went.
There were stairs. Too many to mention. I would open a wooden door and find stairs. I would see a wrought iron gate and behind it were stairs. There were stairs behind bookcases like in the old stories of haunted houses and there were stairs going down into places too dark to visit.
On that first day I covered as much ground as a child could and it was a miracle I even found the surface again. Over the months to follow, the abbey of Montecassino would become the building—the structure—I knew best in the world, better than my school in Rome. Better than the halls of the university where I would explore, bored, waiting for my father to emerge from one overwrought meeting or another.
“ARE YOU READY?” PIETRO ASKED me in the morning.
“For what?”
“Work. Perhaps you’ve heard of it?”
“What work?”
“You are the assistente del maestro di restauro e conservazione. Or have you forgotten already?”
“You were serious?”
“As far as you are aware, we are here to protect and safeguard the art of Montecassino from the challenges posed by the war around us. The rumbling. The pollution. The unforeseen.”
“How?” I asked.
“I’ll worry about that.”
“I want to go to Naples,” I said, though after four days in the peace and excitement of the monastery I was no longer so sure.
“No one’s stopping you. But your timing is poor. Is someone waiting for you?”
I admitted they were not but I had people there.
“Are you certain they are there?”
I admitted I was not. But where else would they be?
The obvious answer—dead—eluded me then.
“I suggest you wait for the right moment,” he said to me.
“When is that?”
“Moments present themselves. That’s what makes them moments.”
I didn’t understand and the blankness on my face must have been readable because he responded to my silence: “The ancient Greeks had two words for time. One was ‘chronos.’ That was like… time passing. Minutes and hours and such. The other was ‘kairos.’ That meant the right or opportune moment, like the perfect instant to loose an arrow. Today we have lost that distinction but the Greeks were right, as usual. Put your trust in kairos, not chronos, Massimo. There really are opportune moments if you open yourself to seeing them. Now: I see from your shirt that you’ve had breakfast. So… if you’re not leaving immediately, we can go be productive, yes?”
PIETRO HOUDINI CLAIMED THAT LIFE clung to him like a curse and if he could escape it he would. His namesake—the Hungarian, the American, the Jew, the illusionist—died in 1926, a full seventeen years before Pietro and I met in the dirt by the side of the road in an Italian village beneath the long shadow of the abbey of Montecassino. I was bloodied and blue, lying in a gutter, and he was standing above me, white and glowing and pristine like a marble god.
In his late fifties, Pietro seemed immortal to me. He had a mane of long, thick white hair to his shoulders, a close beard, an angular face, and a muscular body.
He reached out his hand and I took it.
I had been in the gutter because I had been an orphan fleeing south from Rome after the bombings and I never stopped until a group of boys assaulted me, choked me, and left me for dead.
Pietro had been standing over me for reasons of his own, some of them soon to be announced and declared, others hidden and protected until the very end. He carried a brown suitcase and a canvas shoulder bag and, he said, was on his way through the town of Cassino and to the abbey itself to see the abbot after a long trip from Bologna. He had seen the boys kicking me and ran them off with a wave of his hand.
“Are you planning to stay there?” he’d asked me in a northern accent I found sophisticated and comforting. “Or are you going to get up?”
I could see that he was not a normal man. His clothes were not the drab browns of the countryside and his eyes were not the browns of most Italians. Instead his suit was white and his eyes were blue. His skin was not the pinkish hue of the northerners but had the bronze of people baked by the summer sun. The wrinkles around his eyes and on his forehead spoke more of wear than years and I felt his presence to be dramatic and theatrical and magnetic: as though my eyes couldn’t help but fall on him, and when they did—like being drawn to a performer under a spotlight onstage—I was unable to break away because of the promise of some inexplicable drama yet to come.
I was right about all of it.
PIETRO HOUDINI FOUND ME ON the fifth of August 1943. My parents had been nice and gentle people with roots up north and extended family in the south, some of whom I knew and liked. My mother’s sister lived in Naples with a second husband whose name I’d forgotten, and I had a younger cousin named Arturo I had met only twice. My father had taught finance and accounting at Sapienza University, and on the evening before I fled Rome, my mother and I met him near his office. The plan was to carry on to a party for some of their friends. I remember hearing the planes moments before we joined him in the wide piazza near the entrance to the school.
I had heard planes before and I was generally scared of them. There was a story passing through northern Italy at the time, a story that had come down to Rome. It was about a plane called Pippo. It was understood to be Allied and it was something to fear. It was not a normal plane. It was a supernatural one. A mystical plane. The fascist newspapers covered the stories about Pippo too. I still don’t know why. Nevertheless, those stories confirmed or created or re-created everything Italians feared most about the dark.
“Is that Pippo, Mamma?” I asked, inquiring after the mysterious plane that could only be heard and never seen.
“Probably,” she had answered, because—for all the anxiety Pippo created—Pippo never did anything. Pippo never showed up.
But it was not Pippo. It was not one plane—not the plane—but many. The Allies had come, not to liberate us from Mussolini’s tyranny and Hitler’s twisted alliance with us, but to bomb us.
I knew, in some manner, that the Americans were our enemies but I didn’t really believe it. Not until I saw it. Looking up, I saw the bomb doors open and the black cylinders fall out. I saw the explosions in the city not far from me and I… didn’t understand.
I knew what was happening. But I had never seen buildings fall or balls of fire in a city. I had never experienced the industrial force of hatred and revenge. I could not absorb the notion that my country, Italy, had wanted this. Had asked for this. That the timeless buildings were simply gone. That we (me, my mother, my father, the people I saw running) were guilty of something. I may not have been raised a proper Catholic but the core teachings were the very lifeblood of the Italian people and were therefore inescapable. I knew that we were punished for guilt, not for innocence.
A stray bomb—caught by the wind—landed at our feet in San Lorenzo, near the university. When the air raid sirens started, my parents had instinctively thrust me ahead toward a building with a bomb shelter in it, and I had run in that direction, assuming they were right behind me, but they had stopped to take the hands of an aging friend. A moment later they were all dead from falling rubble.
I ran back and dug for them through the debris.
I found them.
My mother’s butterfly clip. My father’s watch.
I RAN SOUTH FOLLOWING THE Via Merulana. I had no money or suitcase. I saw a truck full of people and they waved to me to join them. I had no idea then—how could I?—that Rome would be declared an open city only a month later and I would have been safer there than where I was headed.
My clothes were ripped and dusty and foul, so a woman on the truck gave me some of her son’s clothes out of pity. I put on a white shirt and waistcoat and cap.
When the truck finally stopped a hundred kilometers south with the last of the people who wanted to go that far, I stood by the side of the road near Frosinone and then continued walking. My aunt was in that direction and my dead parents were behind me. That created a line I followed.
I walked. I slept. I walked more. I stayed with kind people for days at a time. I got as far as the village of Cassino in early August before someone put his hands around my throat.
The cause of that fight and what they wanted doesn’t matter now. What matters is they didn’t get it, and soon after the skirmish was over, Pietro found me broken by the side of the road. It was a good thing he didn’t ask my name in that moment because, there in the filth and blood, I hadn’t decided on one yet. I had decided only that the old me was gone and so was my history.
The old me was an only child who was raised uneventfully in Rome to loving parents who shielded me from the wider politics of Mussolini’s Italy and the war all around us.
The old me had been studious and had a few close friends at school, but had never been especially popular or admired.
The old me was comfortable in the company of adults and liked to listen and pretend I understood everything happening around me even when the topics turned to matters far beyond my comprehension.
That me had been happy because I had been sheltered from what would later cause me the greatest pain.
However:
That other me had been weak and I wanted to be strong. The other me was vulnerable and I wanted to be a warrior. The other me had been taught that being weak and vulnerable was a product of my birth and that it could never change because I was born inferior and lacked the creativity and courage for greatness.
That was the person I was committed to leaving behind in the gutter as my parents had been left in the rubble below.
I was a newborn without a name; a child who matured on the spot.
He was big but he was not a threatening presence. He sounded educated, which to me meant safe.
“Who are you under all that?” he asked.
“Just a boy,” I said.
What he said next—I think—was maschio. It means “manly” or “masculine.” I suppose he was speaking to himself. Perhaps he was being sarcastic. I don’t know. Through my ringing ears, though, I heard “Massimo.” Or was it the other way around? Did he say “massimo” and I nervously heard “maschio”? Either way, what I said aloud was “Massimo.”
He reached down and pulled me up and repeated: “Massimo.”
Did he name me or did I name myself? Regardless, the transformation was nearly complete.
My face was as soft as a baby’s, my shoulders slender. My eyes too big. But now my name was maximum, the top, the peak; all to describe a half-dead child with snot running down a broken nose and blood mixing with the salt of tears.
“Just a boy?” he asked.
“Yes,” I said.
“All right, Massimo,” he said, looking me over. “I am Pietro Houdini. Chemist. Painter. Scholar. Master artist and confidant of the Vatican.” He looked up the mountain at the abbey for emphasis or affirmation. Its walls were white and reflected the sun. It was a vibrant thing as though the light came from inside it. “I have time. I will take you home.”
“No!” I yelled.
This confused him. I could see by the way he flinched that he misunderstood. He thought I’d felt threatened by him, like he might be a new attacker. But I was never afraid of Pietro Houdini. It was the word “home” that had terrified me. I would never go back to Rome. Rome was haunted by death and I needed to go south. To go away.
“You already decided not to stay here. So… where?” he asked.
“Naples,” I said.
“Naples,” he repeated as if to confirm my order at a café. “Where are your parents?”
I didn’t answer.
After a long-enough time for him to understand the words not spoken he said, “So… Naples.”
“Yes. I will go there or I will die,” I explained.
He nodded his understanding, not at the value of my words but at the intractability of my ideas, my determination, and this new encounter that he could not explain but could also not ignore.
He responded gently: “Whether you are going to Naples or not, my friend, you are not going now. The Allies have won the battle for North Africa. Now they are fighting in Sicily. They are coming for Naples. Racing them is not a good idea. One should never be anywhere near soldiers fresh from combat, my young Massimo.”
He stood there with his arms crossed over his chest and his eyes looking to heaven for intervention or guidance or—at the very least—to ensure there was a witness.
“You are alone?”
I didn’t answer that either. The word “yes” was not available because of its finality.
Pietro Houdini stood silently and stared at me, asking a question I couldn’t hear. It was hot and his body was perfectly still. His mind, I felt, was building a plan as big as a cathedral.
When the plan was finished he said, “Okay. You will come with me. You will not understand this but the monks of Montecassino have requested my presence to help protect one of the greatest repositories of art in Western civilization. War is bad for culture, as it happens. That place, up there, is one thousand, four hundred, and fourteen years old. It is a fortress filled with wonders. They tore down the temple of Apollo to erect it. He was the god of war. I suspect he remains angry. I also suspect that the abbey has a very good wine cellar that is poorly guarded and shamefully catalogued, all of which is to my great benefit. If one needs to stay out of sight and wait for a dark moment to pass, there are worse places than a fortified wine cellar on a mountaintop. Believe me, I’ve checked.
“So,” he continued. “You and I share the same problem and the same destination, which is why the abbey is the only solution for the moment. If you come with me there are conditions. So listen. No talking when we get there. Talking is for me. You listen or else pretend to listen. You will be doing a great deal of listening and pretending to listen. Now… fix your cap, Massimo. You’ll want to tuck that hair in and then get it cut. Secrets and lies are illusions and one must commit to the illusion if it is to work! This is why I am called Houdini.”
He started off and I followed him. Bruised, limp, weak. For the next two hours I dragged myself up a five-hundred-meter mountain without ever asking—without even wondering—why he wanted me to come. Following Pietro Houdini seemed the most natural act in the world.
THE WHITE BEAST AND ITS walls came into view through the trees like a mirage—ancient and foreboding—and then disappeared.
“The foundations were raised in 529 AD,” Pietro said, sensing but overintellectualizing my curiosity. “That was the same year the Christian emperor Justinian closed Plato’s Academy in Athens by defunding it, thereby ensuring the downfall of what they considered pagan philosophy. Symbolically, my young Massimo, the intellectual life of the West shifted from the academy to the cloisters. To right there. It wouldn’t return to the academy until the pagans found their voices again in the Renaissance, all without my help! Up there,” he added, “is where St. Benedict wrote his Rule and monastic life began. Every monk you’ve ever seen got his ideas about how to live from an old document written right up there. Its significance to the Christian mind can’t be overstated. We are going to call it home for a little while. It is an island in a rising sea of despair. You may think you’ve seen hard times, but harder still are coming. Math does not lie.”
I was intimidated and awed when I arrived at the top. From the bottom the abbey had looked like a toy, a dollhouse. But when I was standing beside it the walls were as heavy and thick as those of a castle. The windows were small and there was only one way inside, through an archway with the word “PAX” inscribed at the top.
PEACE.
It looked more like a threat or a command than a prayer.
Peace… or else.
My father—perhaps as a joke, because fathers lie to their children for humor—had led me to believe that voices live inside rock. When I was little, maybe six, he took me to the Pantheon in Rome. Inside was the domed roof with the hole in the top where the rain had been pouring in since 128 AD (long before Montecassino was built). When you stand beneath that dome, toward the sides, you can hear whispers. They come from all over the room, but when I was a child I did not believe they came from the other people. I was certain—and my father confirmed it—that the words came from the rocks, and they spoke in Latin and Greek and Hebrew and other ancient and exciting languages because it was not the rocks speaking but instead the remembered words spoken in there by the dead. Rocks did not speak, but instead retained the sounds, the very vibrations, of every word spoken in their presence. Somehow, when forces aligned, those words were released and if you listened carefully you could hear the conversations of the dead. “Not ghosts,” my father said. “The past. Which is far more interesting.”
To me, Montecassino was made of the same rock. Standing there, however, I sensed more: Unlike the Pantheon, which was a dead place and a museum and a tourist attraction, this monastery was no relic, no ruin. It was alive. Words were being spoken in those languages even now, and so many more. Inside the rock were the stories of fifteen hundred years; stories that were not trapped in the cloisters but had already broken free long ago to change the world. Outside the entrance I could feel the pulse of the world thumping beneath the floors and I could already hear the whisperings of the crypts.
In Cassino, I had had no idea any of this was up here: a fortress in the clouds. For someone who wanted to hide as I did, there was perhaps no better place.
When we entered the compound through the archway, the scorching sun reflected off the sandstone, making the air shimmer and become heavy. Through the archways to my left I saw the brown and green of the valley dotted by the small villages below. Around me there were monks, like back in Rome.
“I’m thirsty,” I said to Pietro, hiding the rest of my concerns.
“I know.”
“I need to pee.”
“We will get water in and out of you soon.”
“I have to go now,” I said.
“We will now meet the abbot,” he said with my emphasis. “He is very old. Old enough to have shrunk. There will be an exchange of papers and blessings. Your relief will be that much greater when all is done.” He turned to me, looking serious. “Again: be quiet and, no matter what I say, you contradict nothing or there will be no food, water, or toilet for you.”
The old man arrived a few minutes later dressed in the black robes of the other monks. He must have been eighty years old. Two other monks flanked him, their hands clasped inside their long sleeves.
Pietro said something in Latin, or what I assumed was Latin because it wasn’t Italian and it involved monks. The abbot responded in kind. Pietro handed the abbot a letter, which had been sealed. The monk opened it and read it immediately. It looked very official and had many stamps. When the abbot nodded, Pietro introduced me in Italian as Massimo (no family name) and then christened me a second time that day by giving me a title: assistente del maestro di restauro e conservazione—assistant to the master of art restoration and conservation. This is how I was introduced to the monks—a teenager, my eyes black and swollen, two blue handprints around my neck. One by one they shook my thin hand and welcomed me to this house of God with not a question asked.
Such were the times:
Assistente.
Maestro.
I thought it was a joke but the monks accepted it, and after my needs were met and I was fed, I was led to a room where I then slept for more than twelve hours.
Maestro Houdini kept his other promise and put me to work the next day, rising at seven in the morning, long after the first prayers by the monks.
SO BEGAN A PERIOD OF peace and healing and exploration.
But also delay.
ON THE VERY FIRST DAY Pietro came into my room and saw that I was fed, washed, and rested, he said, “Stay here. You will have work to do soon enough. Before that I must prepare my tools and establish my authority and presence here so whatever I choose to do later will not be questioned. Magic, my young friend, is all about preparation. And illusion is about drama. More on this another time. Now I must go.”
Five minutes after he left, so did I. Who wouldn’t?
There was no map of the monastery. No guide. It was not a shape that one can easily describe and its layout lacked the symmetry one expects to find in a great cathedral. No, this was a place unlike any other place. As I snuck out of my room and ventured into the halls and corridors, archives and basilica, along the outer walls, and deep into the labyrinths below—some of vaulted gray stone and dust and others of mosaics of blues and golds—I came to imagine the place as a mighty ship.
Unfortunately, the only mighty ship I knew by name was the Titanic.
Imagine a ship on a sea of green grass at the highest point of a mountain with nothing else surrounding it. From its decks one could see all around without obstruction; the village of Cassino below, the road that snaked its way up and down, the fields and flowers outside, the tiny goat paths leading to further mysteries in the hills and forests beyond.
The ship itself was made of white stone except the lower parts of the walls where the foundations flared outward like a fortress and the glimmering abbey above gave way to ten million stones below. The roof was made of reddish and orange tiles, even the basilica in the middle and toward the prow. The two exceptions were the green domes: one above the church and the other near the outer walls.
On either side of the nave—all safe within the walls—were two cloisters with green parks in the middle and archways that led to walkways around them. At the entrance to the basilica itself was a massive stone patio with a fountain in the middle. Leaving it behind, I would walk under the porticos and come to the top of the enormous staircase; a staircase as wide as the church itself that went down toward the back of the ship, passed between the statues of St. Benedict on one side and his sister, Scholastica, on the other, passed the fountain from which the monks still drew water, to my favorite outside spot: the archways that looked westward and over the rolling hills that masked any sign of human life.
It was not the outer walls of the monastery, however, that liked to talk. It was the interior walls. It was the walls of the museum that no one frequented but me, and the archive rooms with the tens of thousands of papers and books and manuscripts and scrolls. It was the dark corners where secrets had been exchanged over the millennia, and where everything undocumented and hidden had produced their force.
The voices grew louder the deeper I went.
There were stairs. Too many to mention. I would open a wooden door and find stairs. I would see a wrought iron gate and behind it were stairs. There were stairs behind bookcases like in the old stories of haunted houses and there were stairs going down into places too dark to visit.
On that first day I covered as much ground as a child could and it was a miracle I even found the surface again. Over the months to follow, the abbey of Montecassino would become the building—the structure—I knew best in the world, better than my school in Rome. Better than the halls of the university where I would explore, bored, waiting for my father to emerge from one overwrought meeting or another.
“ARE YOU READY?” PIETRO ASKED me in the morning.
“For what?”
“Work. Perhaps you’ve heard of it?”
“What work?”
“You are the assistente del maestro di restauro e conservazione. Or have you forgotten already?”
“You were serious?”
“As far as you are aware, we are here to protect and safeguard the art of Montecassino from the challenges posed by the war around us. The rumbling. The pollution. The unforeseen.”
“How?” I asked.
“I’ll worry about that.”
“I want to go to Naples,” I said, though after four days in the peace and excitement of the monastery I was no longer so sure.
“No one’s stopping you. But your timing is poor. Is someone waiting for you?”
I admitted they were not but I had people there.
“Are you certain they are there?”
I admitted I was not. But where else would they be?
The obvious answer—dead—eluded me then.
“I suggest you wait for the right moment,” he said to me.
“When is that?”
“Moments present themselves. That’s what makes them moments.”
I didn’t understand and the blankness on my face must have been readable because he responded to my silence: “The ancient Greeks had two words for time. One was ‘chronos.’ That was like… time passing. Minutes and hours and such. The other was ‘kairos.’ That meant the right or opportune moment, like the perfect instant to loose an arrow. Today we have lost that distinction but the Greeks were right, as usual. Put your trust in kairos, not chronos, Massimo. There really are opportune moments if you open yourself to seeing them. Now: I see from your shirt that you’ve had breakfast. So… if you’re not leaving immediately, we can go be productive, yes?”
Reading Group Guide
It is 1943—World War II is raging across much of Europe, and a fourteen-year-old, who claims his name is Massimo, is found alone on the streets of Rome. Here, Massimo meets Pietro Houdini, an older, mysterious man who is traveling alone, and together they venture to the Abbey of Montecassino, where they seek safety. In these gorgeous, centuries-old halls, Massimo and Pietro live with the monks and develop a plan to try to save Renaissance paintings from falling into the clutches of Nazis. In an unexpected turn of events, their mission becomes one of not just saving paintings, but also of saving themselves and the unlikely friends they make along the way. The Curse of Pietro Houdini is at once a work of historical fiction, a coming-of-age story, a love letter to art and culture, and an adventure packed with hope and humor.
Questions for Discussion
1. In the book’s first sentence, the narrator says that “Pietro Houdini claimed that life clung to him like a curse and if he could escape it he would.” Then, in the final sentence of the book, the narrator claims that “I am the curse of Pietro Houdini.” What do you think the narrator means by this, and what throughout the book and the relationship between Pietro and the narrator support this claim?
2. Why did the narrator cling to Pietro, and how do the trauma/events of Pietro’s past draw him into such a close relationship with the narrator?
3. What was your initial reaction when Pietro shared that, in order to hide the Tiziano paintings from the Nazis, he would paint over them? How does this relate to the theme of beauty growing out of change and destruction?
4. Early in the book, the narrator is terrified of “Pippo,” but learns that Pippo is more a symbol of fear than anything tangible at all. What do the fear of Pippo and the realization of what Pippo is (or isn’t) reveal about the narrator and their journey?
5. We never find out about the narrator’s life between the war and the contemporary moment—why do you think the author chose to leave this out?
6. Pietro, the narrator, and Ada are among the characters who chose to change their names. In what way is the changing of names connected to the act of painting over paintings?
7. In a conversation with the narrator, Pietro claims that he’s “not making a case for Nazis,” that he is “only reminding you that individuals can and often do defy . . . orders, defy cultural expectations.” With this in mind, does reading this novel change the way you think about World War II and how you consider the Allies and the Axis powers? Does the author present one side as good and one as bad?
8. The cast of characters that Pietro and the narrator encounter is such a varied, surprising group. While being unexpected, however, the group demonstrates many forms of love and the goodness of humanity despite their differences and desperation. Was there any particular scene or relationship that moved you the most, and why?
9. Ada and Harald’s relationship is perhaps the most unlikely relationship in the story. How does their friendship point to the larger theme of partnership, growth, and collaboration in the midst of crisis?
10. Polar bears are widely considered to be symbols of patience and resilience, given their survival in a threatening climate. Do you think the orso polare fits this description?
11. In the latter half of the book, Eva witnesses a sexual encounter between Eva and Dino (page 269). It’s Eva’s first time witnessing the power of a sexual intimacy. What do you think of Eva’s response to the encounter, and why do you think the author had her witness it at this particular point in the book (not long before the narrator says goodbye to both Eva and Massimo)?
12. In what ways is this a coming-of-age story? Reflect on Massimo’s transition to Eva, to the first-person narrator, and all of their experiences with violence, sex, tragedy.
13. Why do you think the author chose to end the book in the first person, with the now unnamed protagonist narrating?
14. How does the humor, Pietro’s dialogue in particular, amplify the themes of both hope and despair that echo throughout the book?
Activities for Enrichment
1. Consider the value of alter egos and code names. Have you ever given yourself a nickname or created another version of yourself in your mind? What were the circumstances that led you to do this? Discuss this with the group.
2. As a group, look at images of the three Tiziano paintings that Pietro and the narrator saved. Look closely at the details and discuss why you think the author chose to feature these paintings in particular.
3. Write a short reflection about yourself in the third person, then write a similar reflection in the first person. Share with the group and discuss the experience—what does it feel like to consider your lived experience through the lens of an outsider, and how does that vary from the first person?
Questions for the Author
1. The author’s note (the protagonist’s), states “I am now certain . . . that we are a part of something larger; something mystical and beyond the realm of human understanding that impinges on our stories and our lives.” As the author of this text, having construed this story from a blend of history, research, and imagination, what does this mean to you?
I think we’re all wondering if there’s More, with a capital M. And I think we’re wondering it because in some very fundamental way, this life is not believable. To be this aware, this conscious, this beautiful, this intelligent, this empathetic and connected to everything around us and then . . . it just stops? That is the essence of the anxiety of being human.
When we wonder if there’s More, I act generally carries within it a sense of possibility that is optimistic. If there is More, it will give us meaning and clarity. Questions will be answered, and everything worthy will somehow continue even if in ways we can’t imagine.
And yet.
The quote from above goes on and the thought is not complete without it. “But I also know that being part of something larger does not mean we are part of something good; something just, fair, or virtuous. I cannot reconcile these truths. What it means to me—what it means for me—is there is no bottom when we fall into tragedy.”
What if we are part of something larger, something mystical, something that can explain ourselves to ourselves and make us believe this unbelievable life but the something is not good? Is not optimistic? I wonder this because like Jung I see the coincidence and feel the synchronicity that is almost tangible and beyond the statistical range of possible, and yet I see too the horror. Like the narrator, I cannot reconcile it. But I also won’t ignore it.
2. Language plays an important role in this story—Pietro describes English as “flat and listless,” French as making “claims to beauty,” and German as “a language of time.” Why was it important to you to make language so prominent, almost like a character in itself?
Thought and language are as intertwined as time and gravity, and like time and gravity according to Einstein, thought and language may not even be separable because they may not be two distinct things. Attention to the form and substance of language is to give honor and due to ideas themselves. A story—any story well told—has care for the telling. Aristotle wrote Rhetoric because he knew this, and we’ve learned it since and continue to relearn it. Language is the means by which we think and draw distinctions, and reason, and wonder. Consider: When a person dies, we ask where they have gone. But when a device runs out of electricity, we say it stopped. We don’t ask where it has gone. The very language we use to wonder directs what answers might be available to us. The story is about people who think differently, and so better hearing the language and songs that carry their thoughts can help us to feel their reasons more deeply. Plus, I like it and it amuses me and I’m the first and probably last reader.
3. You live abroad, have traveled a great deal, and have even worked in international relations. How has your own relationship with language affected your writing?
Living away from my native language and the culture that uses it—America—has alienated me from living language and it’s a problem. I wonder sometimes if I write historical fiction in part to remove myself from the struggle—and likely failure—to properly convey the here and now, especially among younger people.
4. There were many sites in World War II where bombs destroyed precious works of art and cultural artifacts (for example, Dresden, Magdeburg, and the Kyivan Cave Monastery). What led you to choose Montecassino as a major setting in this story?
I wrote a science fiction called Radio Life. It was a post-apocalyptic story about a civilization on the rise—long after the fall. It was a story in some kind of dialogue with a 1959 science fiction book called A Canticle for Leibowitz, which won the Hugo and the Nebula. Walter Miller Jr., the author and no relation, wrote about an abbey after the “flame deluge” that was committed to the collection and preservation of knowledge long after all the libraries had been burned and the books destroyed. Miller was an airman in World War II who bombed the Abbey of Montecassino. Even after writing Radio Life I knew I wasn’t done with Montecassino. And the more I probed into the history, the more I knew I needed to write a book that was set there.
5. You are, yourself, the descendent of immigrants. Did this effect how you wrote this story and how you portrayed Ava’s character in particular?
Well . . . sort of. My family is Jewish, and we came from the Pale of Settlement in the late 1800s and early 1900s with other waves of immigrants. My family settled in New England and became New Englanders. We’ve been Americans for some five generations, and my family is buried in its soil. The immigrant experience is not part of my life, but being in dialogue with the past is.
6. How did you approach the research process while writing this book?
My usual approach is to read very broadly and reconnoiter without intent for a while. I come to learn by indwelling, and I get a sense for the place, the time, the mood, the conversations, the emotions, the spirit of the thing. In that process I begin to form questions and an agenda develops. It usually as something to do with a timeline and what happened where within it. In this case it was the summer of 1943 to the summer of 1944 in the lower half of Italy and especially at the Abbey and along the German’s winter line. At that point I learn the personalities and characters and central tensions of the period that can be dramatized and within which a story can be crafted. Once I know my story (because research does not produce a story), I can then learn purposefully and make sure my story has both richness and integrity. I always learn amazing stuff along the way, some of which simply has to be shoehorned into the story no matter what.
7. Was it difficult at all to include so much humor in a story that features so much war and destruction?
Strangely, no. Life goes on. People are who they are to the bitter end. The more absurd the world becomes, the funnier it is to certain kinds of people. And if those people are smart, and can see the absurdity and make their own lives better—and those around them better—through humor and observation and interpretation, then they will and therefore I will as their writer, or perhaps stenographer. I can’t help but notice how nuts things are, and if you’re coming along with me on a journey, you won’t be able to avoid it either.
8. The switch to the first person, toward the end of the book, is powerful and unexpected. Is this something you always knew you would do, or was this added in a later draft of the story?
I started in the first person, switched the third person limited for Massimo, then to third person limited for Ava, then back to the first person for the narrator again. So there were three switches, which is some literary jujitsu because it works best if no one really notices, and it hasn’t come up much in the reviews. I started in the first person because I had never written a book in the first person, and after the “author’s note” I wanted to keep on like that. But eventually I found it boring and confining so I decided to switch mid-course. The Gestapo scene created a moment to do that, and I tried it and it felt smooth so I continued like that. When we introduce Ava there was a chance to both break the story—with the new character—but also maintain narrative continuity by pressing on with the third person (which was “caused” by terror, and the situation was still terrifying, so it all lined up). The choice to return to the first person was a powerful moment, but I did see it coming because I wanted to complete the story arc while respecting her growth. That seemed a perfect way to land the point.
9. When writing the scene in which Massimo and Ava say goodbye to the narrator, did you think at all about trauma and the effects of trauma on identity, the coping skill of creating alternate identities for survival?
That’s all I was thinking about.
10. What inspired you to make Pietro Houdini such a witty, bold, mysterious, and comical character? Do you feel that humor was necessary in supporting/communicating this story?
I think humor is necessary to convey most stories because—like music—it goes right to our hearts. Tragedy does that too but in expected ways. If a parent loses a child, we know what to expect, we brace for it, and we encounter in ways that remind of the truths of life. Comedy, however, only functions by being expected. I don’t know how to tell an unexpected story without some measure of comedy. They seem to fit together. As for Pietro, I like opinionated characters who make decisions, and if they have a mind for innovation, creativity, and irreverence than so does my story. I really liked Pietro Houdini.
11. Ferrari is the only animal heavily featured in the story, and he has a special relationship with the narrator. What inspired you to include a mule in Pietro and the narrator’s unlikely war family?
Ferrari just showed up with Dino and Lucia. I had no idea he was coming, and when he did appear I didn’t know his name until Dino introduced him, and when I heard it I loved it. Ferrari the limping mule? His personality evolved in every scene he was in. And in the end he carried young Europa away to safety instead of toward Crete and became the hero to us all. What a mule!
Questions for Discussion
1. In the book’s first sentence, the narrator says that “Pietro Houdini claimed that life clung to him like a curse and if he could escape it he would.” Then, in the final sentence of the book, the narrator claims that “I am the curse of Pietro Houdini.” What do you think the narrator means by this, and what throughout the book and the relationship between Pietro and the narrator support this claim?
2. Why did the narrator cling to Pietro, and how do the trauma/events of Pietro’s past draw him into such a close relationship with the narrator?
3. What was your initial reaction when Pietro shared that, in order to hide the Tiziano paintings from the Nazis, he would paint over them? How does this relate to the theme of beauty growing out of change and destruction?
4. Early in the book, the narrator is terrified of “Pippo,” but learns that Pippo is more a symbol of fear than anything tangible at all. What do the fear of Pippo and the realization of what Pippo is (or isn’t) reveal about the narrator and their journey?
5. We never find out about the narrator’s life between the war and the contemporary moment—why do you think the author chose to leave this out?
6. Pietro, the narrator, and Ada are among the characters who chose to change their names. In what way is the changing of names connected to the act of painting over paintings?
7. In a conversation with the narrator, Pietro claims that he’s “not making a case for Nazis,” that he is “only reminding you that individuals can and often do defy . . . orders, defy cultural expectations.” With this in mind, does reading this novel change the way you think about World War II and how you consider the Allies and the Axis powers? Does the author present one side as good and one as bad?
8. The cast of characters that Pietro and the narrator encounter is such a varied, surprising group. While being unexpected, however, the group demonstrates many forms of love and the goodness of humanity despite their differences and desperation. Was there any particular scene or relationship that moved you the most, and why?
9. Ada and Harald’s relationship is perhaps the most unlikely relationship in the story. How does their friendship point to the larger theme of partnership, growth, and collaboration in the midst of crisis?
10. Polar bears are widely considered to be symbols of patience and resilience, given their survival in a threatening climate. Do you think the orso polare fits this description?
11. In the latter half of the book, Eva witnesses a sexual encounter between Eva and Dino (page 269). It’s Eva’s first time witnessing the power of a sexual intimacy. What do you think of Eva’s response to the encounter, and why do you think the author had her witness it at this particular point in the book (not long before the narrator says goodbye to both Eva and Massimo)?
12. In what ways is this a coming-of-age story? Reflect on Massimo’s transition to Eva, to the first-person narrator, and all of their experiences with violence, sex, tragedy.
13. Why do you think the author chose to end the book in the first person, with the now unnamed protagonist narrating?
14. How does the humor, Pietro’s dialogue in particular, amplify the themes of both hope and despair that echo throughout the book?
Activities for Enrichment
1. Consider the value of alter egos and code names. Have you ever given yourself a nickname or created another version of yourself in your mind? What were the circumstances that led you to do this? Discuss this with the group.
2. As a group, look at images of the three Tiziano paintings that Pietro and the narrator saved. Look closely at the details and discuss why you think the author chose to feature these paintings in particular.
3. Write a short reflection about yourself in the third person, then write a similar reflection in the first person. Share with the group and discuss the experience—what does it feel like to consider your lived experience through the lens of an outsider, and how does that vary from the first person?
Questions for the Author
1. The author’s note (the protagonist’s), states “I am now certain . . . that we are a part of something larger; something mystical and beyond the realm of human understanding that impinges on our stories and our lives.” As the author of this text, having construed this story from a blend of history, research, and imagination, what does this mean to you?
I think we’re all wondering if there’s More, with a capital M. And I think we’re wondering it because in some very fundamental way, this life is not believable. To be this aware, this conscious, this beautiful, this intelligent, this empathetic and connected to everything around us and then . . . it just stops? That is the essence of the anxiety of being human.
When we wonder if there’s More, I act generally carries within it a sense of possibility that is optimistic. If there is More, it will give us meaning and clarity. Questions will be answered, and everything worthy will somehow continue even if in ways we can’t imagine.
And yet.
The quote from above goes on and the thought is not complete without it. “But I also know that being part of something larger does not mean we are part of something good; something just, fair, or virtuous. I cannot reconcile these truths. What it means to me—what it means for me—is there is no bottom when we fall into tragedy.”
What if we are part of something larger, something mystical, something that can explain ourselves to ourselves and make us believe this unbelievable life but the something is not good? Is not optimistic? I wonder this because like Jung I see the coincidence and feel the synchronicity that is almost tangible and beyond the statistical range of possible, and yet I see too the horror. Like the narrator, I cannot reconcile it. But I also won’t ignore it.
2. Language plays an important role in this story—Pietro describes English as “flat and listless,” French as making “claims to beauty,” and German as “a language of time.” Why was it important to you to make language so prominent, almost like a character in itself?
Thought and language are as intertwined as time and gravity, and like time and gravity according to Einstein, thought and language may not even be separable because they may not be two distinct things. Attention to the form and substance of language is to give honor and due to ideas themselves. A story—any story well told—has care for the telling. Aristotle wrote Rhetoric because he knew this, and we’ve learned it since and continue to relearn it. Language is the means by which we think and draw distinctions, and reason, and wonder. Consider: When a person dies, we ask where they have gone. But when a device runs out of electricity, we say it stopped. We don’t ask where it has gone. The very language we use to wonder directs what answers might be available to us. The story is about people who think differently, and so better hearing the language and songs that carry their thoughts can help us to feel their reasons more deeply. Plus, I like it and it amuses me and I’m the first and probably last reader.
3. You live abroad, have traveled a great deal, and have even worked in international relations. How has your own relationship with language affected your writing?
Living away from my native language and the culture that uses it—America—has alienated me from living language and it’s a problem. I wonder sometimes if I write historical fiction in part to remove myself from the struggle—and likely failure—to properly convey the here and now, especially among younger people.
4. There were many sites in World War II where bombs destroyed precious works of art and cultural artifacts (for example, Dresden, Magdeburg, and the Kyivan Cave Monastery). What led you to choose Montecassino as a major setting in this story?
I wrote a science fiction called Radio Life. It was a post-apocalyptic story about a civilization on the rise—long after the fall. It was a story in some kind of dialogue with a 1959 science fiction book called A Canticle for Leibowitz, which won the Hugo and the Nebula. Walter Miller Jr., the author and no relation, wrote about an abbey after the “flame deluge” that was committed to the collection and preservation of knowledge long after all the libraries had been burned and the books destroyed. Miller was an airman in World War II who bombed the Abbey of Montecassino. Even after writing Radio Life I knew I wasn’t done with Montecassino. And the more I probed into the history, the more I knew I needed to write a book that was set there.
5. You are, yourself, the descendent of immigrants. Did this effect how you wrote this story and how you portrayed Ava’s character in particular?
Well . . . sort of. My family is Jewish, and we came from the Pale of Settlement in the late 1800s and early 1900s with other waves of immigrants. My family settled in New England and became New Englanders. We’ve been Americans for some five generations, and my family is buried in its soil. The immigrant experience is not part of my life, but being in dialogue with the past is.
6. How did you approach the research process while writing this book?
My usual approach is to read very broadly and reconnoiter without intent for a while. I come to learn by indwelling, and I get a sense for the place, the time, the mood, the conversations, the emotions, the spirit of the thing. In that process I begin to form questions and an agenda develops. It usually as something to do with a timeline and what happened where within it. In this case it was the summer of 1943 to the summer of 1944 in the lower half of Italy and especially at the Abbey and along the German’s winter line. At that point I learn the personalities and characters and central tensions of the period that can be dramatized and within which a story can be crafted. Once I know my story (because research does not produce a story), I can then learn purposefully and make sure my story has both richness and integrity. I always learn amazing stuff along the way, some of which simply has to be shoehorned into the story no matter what.
7. Was it difficult at all to include so much humor in a story that features so much war and destruction?
Strangely, no. Life goes on. People are who they are to the bitter end. The more absurd the world becomes, the funnier it is to certain kinds of people. And if those people are smart, and can see the absurdity and make their own lives better—and those around them better—through humor and observation and interpretation, then they will and therefore I will as their writer, or perhaps stenographer. I can’t help but notice how nuts things are, and if you’re coming along with me on a journey, you won’t be able to avoid it either.
8. The switch to the first person, toward the end of the book, is powerful and unexpected. Is this something you always knew you would do, or was this added in a later draft of the story?
I started in the first person, switched the third person limited for Massimo, then to third person limited for Ava, then back to the first person for the narrator again. So there were three switches, which is some literary jujitsu because it works best if no one really notices, and it hasn’t come up much in the reviews. I started in the first person because I had never written a book in the first person, and after the “author’s note” I wanted to keep on like that. But eventually I found it boring and confining so I decided to switch mid-course. The Gestapo scene created a moment to do that, and I tried it and it felt smooth so I continued like that. When we introduce Ava there was a chance to both break the story—with the new character—but also maintain narrative continuity by pressing on with the third person (which was “caused” by terror, and the situation was still terrifying, so it all lined up). The choice to return to the first person was a powerful moment, but I did see it coming because I wanted to complete the story arc while respecting her growth. That seemed a perfect way to land the point.
9. When writing the scene in which Massimo and Ava say goodbye to the narrator, did you think at all about trauma and the effects of trauma on identity, the coping skill of creating alternate identities for survival?
That’s all I was thinking about.
10. What inspired you to make Pietro Houdini such a witty, bold, mysterious, and comical character? Do you feel that humor was necessary in supporting/communicating this story?
I think humor is necessary to convey most stories because—like music—it goes right to our hearts. Tragedy does that too but in expected ways. If a parent loses a child, we know what to expect, we brace for it, and we encounter in ways that remind of the truths of life. Comedy, however, only functions by being expected. I don’t know how to tell an unexpected story without some measure of comedy. They seem to fit together. As for Pietro, I like opinionated characters who make decisions, and if they have a mind for innovation, creativity, and irreverence than so does my story. I really liked Pietro Houdini.
11. Ferrari is the only animal heavily featured in the story, and he has a special relationship with the narrator. What inspired you to include a mule in Pietro and the narrator’s unlikely war family?
Ferrari just showed up with Dino and Lucia. I had no idea he was coming, and when he did appear I didn’t know his name until Dino introduced him, and when I heard it I loved it. Ferrari the limping mule? His personality evolved in every scene he was in. And in the end he carried young Europa away to safety instead of toward Crete and became the hero to us all. What a mule!
About The Author
Derek B. Miller
Derek B. Miller is the author of six previous novels: Norwegian by Night, The Girl in Green, American by Day, Radio Life, Quiet Time, and How to Find Your Way in the Dark. His work has been shortlisted for many awards, with Norwegian by Night winning the CWA John Creasey Dagger Award for best first crime novel, among others. How to Find Your Way in the Dark was a finalist for the National Jewish Book Award and a New York Times best mystery of 2021. A Boston native, Miller lives in Spain with his family.
Product Details
- Publisher: Avid Reader Press/Simon & Schuster (January 28, 2025)
- Length: 400 pages
- ISBN13: 9781668020890
Raves and Reviews
“[An] urgent work that slyly honors authors both ancient and modern. . . Mr. Miller’s book has the ring of truth and the echo of myth, and it deserves all the lucky readers who discover it.” —Tom Nolon, The Wall Street Journal
“The Curse of Pietro Houdini boasts a little bit of everything—a truly fascinating setting; rich, quirky characters; tragedy, suspense, warmth and humor. Derek B. Miller has shown the range of his talents in six previous novels, but this may be his masterpiece. . . An epic novel that manages to convey an extraordinary yet realistic story encapsulating the horrors of war. . . Many readers, in fact, may be reminded of Anthony Doerr’s beloved World War II novel, All the Light We Cannot See.” —BookPage *starred review*
"Miller. . . is a splendid storyteller. . . the novel works equally well as wartime tale, heist thriller, coming-of-age story, and sweeping history and art lesson. . . A brilliantly imagined World War II saga." —Kirkus *starred review*
“A wonderful novel, full of heart and humor and stunning characters. Derek B. Miller’s prose is deeply compelling, and he layers in quite a bit of detail to make it all the more realistic. For fans of historical fiction, this is a great read. It’s exciting, but never strays too far away from a historical character drama, and is a unique perspective on the back half of World War II. . . Certainly one of my top reads from this year. Those who pick it up will have a great time with it.” —The Colorado Sun
"Unflinchingly illuminates the traumas that World War II inflicted on civilians in Italy and presents the durability of love and the costs of war. . . Miller's straightforward and incisive writing and compelling, complex characters make the book worthwhile. Devastatingly sharp descriptions of the landscape augment the narrative. Ideal for historical-fiction fans who want insight on Italian civilians surviving World War II." —Library Journal
“[A] brilliantly imagined work of fiction. . . Entertaining and compelling, this extremely well-written and fast-paced novel uses many factual events as a background. Readers will enjoy the book’s history and drama, as well as Miller’s captivating cast of characters.” —BookReporter.com
“Sometimes you read a book so astonishingly good you can’t stop thinking about it. . . The Curse of Pietro Houdini is one of those rare books. War, art, violence, beauty, survival and a heroic mule, this story is so good.” —The Southern Bookseller Review
“Cinematic. . . The cast of characters resembles a modern version of Chaucer’s band of pilgrims—the boy, the art restorer who saves him, a nun, a cafe owner and murderer, a wounded German soldier and an injured mule named Ferrari.” —Hadassah Magazine
"Epic." —The Washington Post
"Derek B. Miller delivers an irresistible story of defiance." —The Christian Science Monitor
“Top-notch historical fiction. . . Part buddy adventure, part coming-of-age story, part action-adventure tale . . . it's at times laugh-out-loud funny and at others heartbreakingly tragic (and occasionally it's both at the same time—a neat trick for any author to pull off). . . Miller's writing, too, is gorgeous, vividly describing moments of beauty amid the horror. . . In short, The Curse of Pietro Houdini checks all the boxes for truly great historical fiction: authentic, likable characters, exquisite writing, engrossing plot, and absorbing historical detail. . . This is a must-read for fans of World War II fiction, particularly those who've enjoyed novels like All the Light We Cannot See and City of Thieves. Highly recommended.” —BookBrowse
“Filled with architectural and artistic detail and garnished with historical and philosophical notions culled from the classics and Renaissance thinking, this rich tale sails through violence and cruelty to emerge in redemption and a kind of justice the protagonist cannot anticipate at the beginning. It is a compelling story and it is written with craftsmanlike skill which will certainly keep the reader’s interest and the pages turning.” —Reading the West
“Full of wit and wisdom. . . The underlying subtle wit to Miller’s writing always leaves me with an inner smile for reasons I can’t quite explain, but it probably has to do with his indelible characters and how they manage to eke out the light in the dark times they wrestle with. I’ll follow that story into any genre.” —Audible
“A man bent on saving art from Nazi pillagers changes the life of an orphaned Italian teen in the appealing latest from Miller. . . [The] historical adventure is worth the price of admission.” —Publishers Weekly
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