A Dark Song of Blood (16 page)

He and the Maiulis were readying for an unusually luxurious
breakfast when Francesca returned, soaked and pale with cold. She stopped by the kitchen door, crying out, “White bread? Great!” Ignoring the elders, she singled out Guidi, who sat with a piece of bread in his mouth. “Just the time to change,” she said, “and I'll join you.” Moments later she was back in her nightgown, a breach of decorum in the well-run house. “I hope you don't mind if I make myself comfortable.” She stood by the table to cut herself a slice of bread. Through the corner of his eye Guidi caught the old people's dismay at seeing the swell under the loose flannel cloth. The professor's face had an apoplectic tinge when she merrily said, “Well, and good morning to you all, too! Did the cat eat your tongue?”

1 MARCH 1944

It was still pouring ten days later when Bora drove across the Tiber to the “New Prisons” of Regina Coeli, like a dam of bricks facing the bridge straight on. He'd been away from Rome for a week, visiting the troops engaged in the attempted retaking of Anzio, sitting with them at Cisterna and other threatened inland posts, interrogating prisoners of officer rank, and generally seeking danger. Life at headquarters was “getting to him,” he'd calmly told Westphal, and Westphal had cut him loose for a week.

Now he walked into the prison with a permit signed by Maelzer. Aldo Sciaba, it turned out, was detained in the German-controlled Third Wing, where Bora also expected to find General Foa. He did not, but Sciaba was taken out of his cell to meet him in a bare windowless room. He listened without a word while Bora explained his reason for being here. When handed the case containing Merlo's glasses, he took them out and studied them.

“Well?” Bora urged him. “Are they your work?”

“Yes, they are.”

Bora dismissed the Italian guard. “Tell me more.”

“Can you get me out of here if I tell you?”

“No. What I can do is arrange for your wife to visit you.”

“And have her arrested too?”

“Why? She's not Jewish.”

Sciaba was a short, patient-looking man with a waxy complexion to which the long prison stay had given gray undertones. “No, no.” He waved a tired hand. “Let's leave her out of this. Just let her know I'm alive.” For the next minute or so, Sciaba turned the glasses this way and that, looked through them, lifted them to the faint electric bulb. “These aren't anything His Excellency could use today,” he concluded. “They're the pair I fitted for him two years ago. His eyesight was never good, but lately it has grown worse. I had to refit him frequently. He wouldn't carry these around. Where did you find them?”

Bora chose not to answer. “When did you fit him last?”

“In October, before they brought me here. He might still be wearing the last pair I sold him, though it's been about six months.”

“Is it your policy to take back used glasses?”

“Yes, sir, it is. These were in my store. That's why I wondered where you found them.”

“I did not find them. And that's all I want for now.”

Seeing that Bora was about to leave, Sciaba spoke up. “Please tell my wife not to worry about me. Tell her they treat me decently, and all that.”

Bora nodded, safely inscrutable under the shade of his visor.

“I mean, I was born an Italian citizen. That must count for something, right?”

Bora took the glasses back. He returned them to their case, slipped it into his breast pocket and took a step toward the door. Before knocking to be let out, he pulled from the cuff of his left sleeve a tightly folded piece of paper. His hand met the prisoner's only for the time necessary to effect the exchange. “From your wife,” he said.

Back in his office, Bora gave his secretary the afternoon off, and called Dollmann's work number. The colonel would not give him an answer. Rather, he asked, “Why must you find out where Foa is, Major Bora?”

“Because one Cavallero ‘suicide' is enough.”

“And what would you know about that?”

“Only that Italian generals who refuse to cooperate don't shoot themselves in the right temple twice, especially if they're left-handed.”

“From what I hear, Foa is alive.” Dollmann dragged his words, clearly unwilling to give out the information by phone. “I cannot tell you where he is. I think you ought to adhere to your sightseeing schedule and visit the
Domus Faustae
instead.”

The receiver was clicked down, but Bora had caught the clue in Dollmann's advice. The Latin name of the Lateran basilica undoubtedly pointed at Kappler's jail on nearby Via Tasso.

He stopped by Westphal's office on his way out. “The only reason I'm letting you go,” Westphal warned him, “is that I don't like the idea of SS informants turning in army officers, not that I give a damn about Foa. If you do see him, you are to convince him to talk. As for the rest, all you'll get from me is a signed request to transfer the optician to the Italian section of the state prison. And that's purely for pragmatic reasons relating to the Reiner case.”

“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 Kesselring that could if it pleased God conceivably
fit
.