Chapter 26
Sperlonga. Present day.
“Your father was not a Fascist, Little. This is the first thing I need you to know. He was never really about politics, and he was also a child during the war. Remember the stories I told you about the hunger, my mother coming home with a carrot, your father coming home with food and saying he stole that food from the German trucks? I think even more than the hunger it was the fear of the hunger, the looming of it. Everywhere you looked back then, there were tragedies, and it was a slippery slope. People lived in fear of that moment, that turning of precarious luck to doom. When he was about nine years old, Enrico provided information to the Fascist Party in Rome in return for food for our family. He told them that a man who had a shop nearby, a man nam
