“In the town itself,” Tony replied.
“That seems next to impossible, Tony,” Max said. “Why, they’ll find it in a minute in town—even if you should find some way to get all that paraphernalia in without being caught.”
“I know it sounds out of the question,” Tony agreed. “But there must be some place we can set it up without being located. Now, if my uncle’s still around—”
“How are you going to find that out?” Vince asked.
“Go to town and ask,” Tony replied. “Isn’t that right, Dick?”
“Yes, that’s right,” Dick replied. “I don’t know about getting the radio into town, but we’ve got to go down there, some of us, and find out what’s what. That uncle of yours, Tony—we might as well assume he’s not there. So many people have been evacuated. What did he do there, anyway?”
“That’s one reason I think he might still be there,” Tony said. “For quite a few years, he’s been caretaker at the Villa Rolta. Right on the edge of town, the villa is—a big place about a thousand years old, backing up against the steep hill at the northern end of town. Belonged to the Rolta family ever since the twelfth century, though none of them have been around for quite a while. It’s been sort of a Museum for a long time now, and Uncle Tomaso has been caretaker. He’s an old duck and I don’t think he’d move. He’d stick there at the villa no matter what happened.”
“Well, maybe so,” Dick said. “It would be lucky if he were still around. We’ve got to find that out. And we’ve got to make contact with somebody else there if he isn’t around. That’s a ticklish job. The first man we talk to might be a friend of the Germans.”
“We’ll just listen first,” Tony said. “You can tell, after a little while, by the way people talk.”
“But what kind of listening can a bunch of American soldiers in uniform do?” Vince asked.