Excerpt from The Curse of Pietro Houdini by Derek B. Miller, plus links to reviews, author biography & more

Chapter One

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.

Excerpted from The Curse of Pietro Houdini by Derek B. Miller. Copyright © 2024 by Derek B. Miller. Excerpted by permission of Avid Reader Press. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.