CHAPTER 2What was sporadic gunfire now intensified. We were pinned down behind a huge chestnut tree in front of the shot-up bakery. The dead and the dying were all around us. Michelangelo kept trying to get me to make a run for it, but I refused to budge. The woman in the long raincoat dodged bullets to get to us. She was breathless, her eyes liquid. “They’re murderers,” she barked.
We ducked our heads, limped and scrambled to the safety of the bakery doorway.
I took a good look at the woman in the raincoat. Her nerve surprised me. She seemed too soft and too delicate to be fighting anybody.
“They killed her mother,” Michelangelo said to her. “And she won’t leave. We don’t have enough guns. Enough bullets.”
The woman, who was maybe in her twenties, said she knew. That’s why she came ba
