Curse of Pietro Houdini

by Derek B. Miller

Genres: Action & Adventure; World War II

Synopsis

From the Dagger Award–winning author of Norwegian by Night comes 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—for fans of All the Light We Cannot See.

August, 1943. Fourteen-year-old Massimo is all alone. Newly orphaned and fleeing from Rome after surviving the American 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 brings him up the mountain to serve as his 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 execute a plan to smuggle three priceless Titian paintings to safety down the mountain. They are joined by a nurse concealing a nefarious past, a café owner turned murderer, a wounded but chipper German soldier, and a pair of lovers along with their injured mule, Ferrari. 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 City of Thieves by David Benioff, The Curse of Pietro Houdini is a work of storytelling bravado: a thrilling action-packed adventure heist, an imaginative chronicle of forgotten history, and a philosophical coming-of-age epic where a child navigates one of the most enigmatic and morally complex fronts of World War II and lives to tell the tale.

Release date: January 16, 2024

Publisher: Avid Reader Press / Simon & Schuster

Print pages: 352

Sample

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?”