A Dark Song of Blood Read online

  “Shouldn’t General Foa be transferred back, too?”

  “He won’t be, so don’t ask.”

  Sutor was not at Via Tasso. It was Kappler who received Bora, and – having read the request for transfer – promised he would look into it. “If there are no specific political charges against him, Sciaba can be transferred, probably as early as the end of the month.” He invited Bora to sit across the desk from him. “Didn’t I tell you he was not with us? Sit down, don’t be in a hurry. Tell me, what do you think about the attempt on the Fascist vice-secretary two weeks ago?”

  Bora sat. “That if he persists in celebrating the Party saints he’ll get more of it.”

  “Yes. I told him in no uncertain terms that this is no time for parades, but he doesn’t want to hear that. Has other shindigs planned for the tenth and the twenty-third.” Pointing to his own collar, Kappler asked, “When did you get one of those?”

  Even without looking, Bora knew he meant the Knight’s Cross with Oak Leaves. “Stalingrad and Kursk. The Oak Leaves caught up with me last week.”

  “Garish but telling. It helps to compensate you for past sufferings, and now they’ll make postcards with your portrait for children to swap.”

  “On Monday, Field Marshal Kesselring visited our command.” Bora spoke in as neutral a tone as he could, eyes leveled at Kappler. “He believes the fate of officers like Foa to be a key to the loyalty of what Italian troops are left in the north.”

  “Really? Has he talked it over with SS General Wolff?”

  “It’s on the field marshal’s agenda. After all, Foa readily collaborated with German authorities. His arrest was only due to unwillingness to reveal the whereabouts of other officers.”

  Kappler had been listening coolly, but now had a troubled laugh. “The other officers are precisely those who refuse to serve alongside you and me.”

  “I’d just as well do without them.”

  “So, you’ve come to see Foa. Who told you he’s here?”

  “No one, actually.” Bora looked away from Kappler for the first time when an ambulance passed outside with siren blaring. “Is he?”

  Kappler did not say. He was fingering an ashtray with quick strokes, muscles contracting on his narrow jaw. The ashtray was an antique dish. “You’ll have to come back for him.”

  Across the paper-strewn surface of the desk, Bora looked at the hands around the unpainted, frail dish. Shoulders relaxed, breathing relaxed, he was doing better than Kappler at the game of disguised control. “I would, except that I am to try to convince Foa to accede to your demands, and report to the field marshal tomorrow morning.”

  Kappler’s hands left the ashtray. “Well, then. You’ll see him as he is. He’s a troublemaker. You dealt with troublemakers in Russia.”

  “I also heard he made a scene at the state prison and must be kept in isolation. I quite understand, Colonel.”

  Bora had never met Foa, but had seen photographs of his sharp-featured face, with a shock of white hair swept back over the forehead. What he made out in the cramped room upstairs from Kappler’s office – unspeakably stifling and foul – was a skull emerging from the thin skin of the cheekbones, strangely drawn and empty. The eyes alone were alive in it, round and deep and awake and following the visitor’s motion toward the mat in a corner.

  “General Foa, I come from Field Marshal Kesselring.”

  Foa neither moved nor acknowledged him. Only his eyes flicked about Bora’s uniform. He sat crumpled against the corner of the room, as if one wall were not sufficient to hold up the broken lassitude of his frame. When his sight adapted to the twilight of the room, Bora made out dried bloodstains on the man’s shirt and the front of his trousers. Blood drops and small sprays of it had dried on the wall as well. Bloody feces and urine from pain-induced incontinence had been released in the corner least visible from the door in an absurd attempt at privacy.

  Bora took a step forward, startled when Foa mumbled, “And who the hell are you?”

  “My name is Bora.” He leaned over. “I spoke to you over the telephone in January, about a Republican song.” The inane stupidity of words broke his thoughts like strings of beads that rolled off and were lost.

  “So, you’re the army hard nose I yelled at over the phone.” When Foa stretched his lips in what Bora was unnerved to recognize as a smile, his swollen gums and missing teeth showed; his tongue, too, was black, like a strange sick muscle grown in his mouth. A gray, caked growth of beard matted the old man’s chin; at the corners of his lips nested dry blood clots.

  “Sir.” Bora crouched by the mat. “I must speak to you.”

  “If you think I’m telling you anything, go back the way you came.” Still, Foa did not move. It was a horrible immobility in life, if this was life, in the stench of body glued to bloody cloth. Bora could not suffer that crushed inertia, and extended his hand to lift the prisoner, rearrange him, help him sit up.

  “Don’t touch me,” Foa growled, and his eyes were terrible and imperious, alive in the dead face.

  Bora drew back. Somehow he had to deny his own past suffering in order to accept this, shamed that the undefiled flowing cleanness of blood once issued from him had nothing to do with this extracting of matter from the flesh by torture, hideous as a profanation of form, impure. It revolted and condemned him by association, and both men knew so. Whatever sentence he built next was flimsy to his own ears, and to it Foa said no. Not listening to himself, Bora continued to speak anyway, angry at his senses for crowding him with sight and smell and the dreadful imminence of death. “General, I beg you to give us leave to help you. This is an untenable outrage, it must not continue —”

  “Give me a smoke.”

  Bora had to make his hand firm enough to place a cigarette in the prisoner’s mouth and light it, lowering his face not to stare. “I urge you to reconsider, General.”

  “Leave me alone.”

  “A man of your age —”

  The fierce bloodshot eyes riveted themselves on him. “Of my age, of my age! I was a colonel when you hadn’t yet grown hair between your legs. Leave me alone. If you must kill me, kill me, and get it over with. There’s nothing I want to tell you, or Kesselring or Kappler. Nothing. Nothing. Nothing.”

  “Give me enough to help you.”

  “Help me? This is my country. None of you belong here, not you, not the Americans. I spit on your help. Tell Kesselring that.”

  “I will tell him what I see fit, General Foa.”

  “Then go to hell with the rest of them.”

  Bora stood up slowly. That he could not bring himself to leave proved nothing other than a mortified sense of shame. He turned away because he knew Foa’s eyes were on him, and he had nothing to cover his shame. “I cannot go without some assurance from you.”

  “So that you won’t be troubled, maybe?” Foa did move a hand, weakly. “No. I need to piss, lift me up.”

  Bora did so. By the elbow he raised him and supported him to his feet, had to all but carry him to the corner where he held him up forcibly as Foa fumbled to undo his trousers. He meant to avert his head, but the flow was stark blood and Foa passed out, crumpling so that Bora nearly lost hold of him and had to gather him up in his arms to take him, half-dragging him back to the mat.

  At his exit from the room he learned that Kappler had left for the day. It was just as well, because all his safeguards of discretion had blown, and a wrangle now would compromise what he planned to do next. When the massive door opened at the bottom of the stairs, the fresh bracing air of the street welcomed him and Bora gulped it in deep drafts. Across the street, his car waited, driver at attention next to it; his pasty boyish face seemed nearly blank after seeing Foa’s injuries and ordure. Bora ordered him to return to headquarters alone.

  He walked under the pelting rain, avoiding the safety of wide streets and squares; he kept away from the mighty churches beached on wet strands of cobblestones, walking where Germans did not, thinking of what he should tell Kesse
lring that could if it pleased God conceivably fit.

  That evening, he happened to call Guidi while the police station was in turmoil over the shooting of a German courier at Via 23 Marzo. Bora, who had not yet heard about it, recalled the sound of the ambulance in Kappler’s office, and how the colonel had left the building in haste. He asked if there was a description of the killer.

  “Some children were playing in the street. We’re questioning them now.” Guidi did not add that a woman had been seen hurrying off with the soldier’s briefcase.

  Bora was gone from the telephone for a couple of minutes, presumably to brief Westphal; at his return he told Guidi of his visit to Regina Coeli.

  “Major, can you guarantee Sciaba’s availability in case of a trial?”

  “I cannot even guarantee that I won’t be shot as I walk down the street. What makes you think I can guarantee anything in this damned city?”

  Guidi knew when to let go of a subject. “I’m meeting Captain Sutor tomorrow afternoon,” he said, “and will be in touch with you afterwards.”

  “Do what you want.”

  Until half past nine, Bora worked at a complete record of Foa’s military achievements, to pad Kesselring’s case with General Wolff. He seldom had headaches, but tonight tension cramped his shoulders and neck until it felt like a rod driven at the base of his nape and knots tightening all around it.

  His secretary prepared to leave. She poured herself out from behind the desk like a liquid, taut and long-legged in the closely fitting uniform. Bora watched her approach the desk – which she did every night, to ask for orders and permission to retire – hands folded in front of her.

  “Good night,” he said. Eyes back on his papers, still his peripheral vision showed him her hands, like a white stain on the dark of the skirt. There was a thin scent in her; Bora knew it by now and it was somehow familiar, a part of the office. Her nails were clipped closely but well rounded; at the grazing light of the table lamp a delicate sparse fuzz was visible on her wrists.

  Bora looked up. Her cool face was in the shade of the lamp, utterly poised. There was safety in the quiet of features. Not friendliness or support: safety.

  As for her, she kept on him the controlled glance of a woman who is not invited to come further. The major seemed very young tonight, battered like a wall that stands tougher because of it, but unsafe to her. “Will there be anything else, sir?”

  Bora read in her face words and motions, and it was like a brief drunkenness trying to work its way through him, thick and quiet. Her hands were safely folded on the nest of the hips, bare of rings. Bora felt the heat of the lamp on his face, gentle but on, and pain coiled down from his neck, down his spine. He pulled back on the chair and she sensed the avoidance of his mind, not his body. Motionless, she feared losing him quickly and irretrievably for this hour. Already arousal in him became something else, was something else. His eyes traveled back to the papers before him. “No, thank you. Good night.”

  At the Maiulis, meanwhile, “No, no, Inspector. She’s been home all day with a sore throat, poor thing.” Unaware of Guidi’s relief at her words, Signora Carmela served him supper. “I wonder why she didn’t tell us she got married – we could have given her a little gift or something.”

  “Married? What do you mean?”

  “Well, how else could she be expecting a baby? Go and ask her how she feels.”

  Guidi said no. He did not want to see Francesca after last night, when she had shrugged off his questions about Rau. “I owed him money, and paid it back. So what?” At his insistence, she had risen from the armchair, and impulsively kissed him on the mouth. Which was very much an answer, but not the answer.

  4

  2 MARCH 1944

  At Mount Soratte, Bora was disappointed to find that SS General Wolff had already come and was closeted with Kesselring. He was forced to leave his documentation without a chance to further Foa’s cause. Back in Rome on Thursday morning, he was summoned to the Propaganda Fide Palace, where the unusual coalition of Cardinals Hohmann and Borromeo gave him an earful about the overnight bomb damage to the Vatican’s inner courts and railway station.

  “Is it your doing?” Hohmann asked with a teacher’s pointed stare.

  Bora tried not to resent the question. “Why would we bomb the Vatican City? Piazza Bologna was bombed the other night – definitely not our doing. It shook us rudely on that side of town, Your Eminence.”

  “An open city ought to be free of military occupation, Major.”

  “Not by definition. By definition, it merely has to be demilitarized.”

  “And I suppose your uniform does not denote military character.”

  “It depends whether one considers ‘character’ as a distinctive trait or inherent quality.”

  “So, as long as you’re in Rome you subscribe to your accidental rather than metaphysical militarism. A soldier on the outside only, eh?”

  “I am not involved in offensive actions, Your Eminence.”

  “Only if you speciously narrow your definition of offense.”

  Borromeo intervened. “Speaking of Scholastic definitions, Major Bora, why don’t you come and view the books we salvaged from the ruins of the Bishop’s palace at Frascati?” Quickly he led the officer to the next room. “Are you out of your senses, trying to equivocate with Hohmann? He’ll make field-gray mincemeat out of any rationalization your army can think of. He’s exasperated at what happened today at the labor prison.”

  Bora politely freed himself. “I don’t have enough details to discuss the incident.”

  “Peace of angels, Major! What is there to discuss when a poor woman is shot for asking to see her husband?” The books were kept in crates inside a small laboratory, where the cardinal preceded Bora. “You will be pleased to know that a surviving eighteenth-century set is from your family firm at Leipzig, complete with your Fidem Servavi motto. Cardinal York knew good commentaries on Aquinas when he saw them.”

  “Ours were not as good as Grotius’,” Bora replied. He doubted Borromeo had taken him aside just to separate him from Hohmann, and his forced geniality disturbed him.

  “I must agree that your critical edition of Spinoza was much better.”

  They began leafing through the venerable pages, with Bora less interested in the survey than in Borromeo’s reason for not speaking his mind. “So, the annulment has gone through,” he prompted at last.

  “Yes, it has.”

  Bora put away the book. “It’s amazing how five years are quickly disposed of.”

  “The Church ties and loosens as it judges proper, Major.”

  By the noon hour, the Roman sky was again thick with the roar of airplanes bombing the outskirts, likely the railyards to the east. Thundering from the western quarters indicated that ammunition dumps might be the primary target. Flak artillery boomed now and then in response, as if unconvinced of its effectiveness. For all that, Bora was unruffled when Guidi met him in front of Magda Reiner’s house.

  “Sorry for being late, Major. The street is blocked.”

  “You’re not late, I’m early. Here are the keys to the vacant apartments. Should we go up?”

  There was no power, so they had to climb the stairs. Because of Bora’s limp, Guidi preceded him to the first landing. He said, “We are at an impasse, Major. Merlo’s glasses surfaced from a requisitioned store only when I did not seem quick enough in pursuing the official lead. Is Caruso doing it to harm Merlo, or to protect someone else?”

  When Bora joined him by the door, and leaned forward to fit the key into the lock, for the first time Guidi noticed a gray hair here and there in his dark crop. “When you find out, you’ll likely be relieved of the case. But is Caruso the only one who’d have an interest in muddying the waters?”

  The door opened on an entirely dark, small waiting room. Guidi went in first, with his flashlight. “Well, Captain Sutor comes to mind. He drove her home that evening, and says he left her at the door no later than seven fiftee
n. But I did find a witness – an African police officer – who remembers seeing a car with a German license plate parked by the curb at least until seven forty. So, theoretically, Sutor might have been still around when Magda died.”

  Except for the waiting room, each room in the apartment was packed with boxes nearly to the ceiling. Guidi heard Bora rummage around at the glare of his own flashlight, and say, “You assume that was Sutor’s car. Remember there was a party in the house that night, attended by Germans. And Sutor volunteered to talk to you. He insisted on it.”

  “He knows I can’t check his alibi if I wanted to, Major. The fact remains that both he and Merlo were in the area. Evidence might have been removed by the SS as much as by Dr Caruso’s office. Say, can you tell what’s in these boxes?” Guidi asked, and Bora showed blank ledgers, reams of typewriter paper, blank envelopes. “Is someone covering for Sutor or just protecting his innocence, and doing the opposite for Merlo? No tests for alcohol or other substances were run on the victim, so we don’t know whether Magda was drunk or drugged, let alone suicidal. I’d be reconciled to continuing to investigate and ask questions for which there are no answers, but I’m being pressured to conclude.”

  “If you want, I’ll come down on Caruso.”

  “And the SS, too, who may be behind him?”

  Bora replaced the office supplies in their boxes without answering. They went from room to room, and from one uninhabited apartment to the next, and everywhere stacks of boxed, unused paper items, enough to serve a century of bureaucracy. In the last apartment – 7B – they found more of the same, but from the kitchen Bora called, “What’s this? Shine some more light in here, Guidi.”

  Guidi complied. The combined beams of the flashlights revealed what Bora seemed to have stepped on: crumbs and crusts of bread, a desiccated and brown apple core. The floor space was small, no more than a six-by-four-feet clearing among boxes, which Guidi explored on his knees. They’d been careful not to open the windows, but now the inspector walked to the stacks obstructing the kitchen window, took them down and opened the shutters. Little more evidence appeared – ash residue bearing the imprint of a shoe’s tread, lint from a blanket – but Guidi studied it, then gathered everything according to its kind in the envelopes Bora held out to him.