A Dark Song of Blood (17 page)

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 fifteen. 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.

Afterwards, they sat in Bora's car to discuss matters.

“Even without racing to draw conclusions, Major, we have to admit it's odd that someone might be picnicking in a German-owned untenanted apartment, and in the same building where a death occurred.”

Bora watched Guidi pull out a nearly empty box of Serraglio, and quickly offered his Chesterfields instead. “It took me some time to obtain the keys from the head of Supply Services, too. He made me sign for them, and told me none of the apartments had been opened since mid-October. Let us suppose, for the sake of argument, that someone was squatting in 7B. Is there a connection to the death? And would a killer stalking his victim – in a
German-owned
building – leave evidence of his being there?”

“Not unless he had to leave in a hurry.” Having accepted the longer cigarette, Guidi placed it sideways in the box of Serraglio, for later use. “I'll have these scraps analyzed, and see if we can make some sense of them. I might be able to tell you more later.”

Bora lit his Chesterfield. “It may have nothing to do with anything, but the fellow from the Greek Front, it turns out, did not exactly fall on the field of honor. And if he went missing, it's because he deserted. I have it from unimpeachable sources in Berlin. Of course, no word on where he might have ended up, if he's even alive. Which is more than I can say for him had he fallen into our hands after his exploit.”

On the sidewalk, over the precise spot where Magda Reiner had fallen, a well-dressed young woman went by, holding a bouquet of evergreens. Neither man turned to look at her, but their eyes followed her even as they spoke. For Guidi, who'd walked in a haze since Francesca's kiss, all things were warped by his heightened interest in her. He glanced at Bora's hand on the steering wheel, at the wedding ring on it and what it meant, and the question came quickly and unchecked. “May I have your opinion on a completely different matter, Major?”

“Certainly.”

“What – that is, how much restraint would you advocate in a relationship?”

Bora was not surprised, or else guarded his surprise well. He put out the half-smoked cigarette. “That depends on the people involved. Are you both free to pursue it?”

“Possibly. I met her recently, but I know she's not married.”

“Well, the next question is, is she willing?”

“I think so.” Because Bora had an expression that Guidi read as mild curiosity at being chosen as an advisor, he felt he should add, “Knowing you've been married for years, Major...”

“I know how it is to grow up Catholic, too.”

“I assure you it's less a religious issue than one of confidence. I'm a shy man, as you may have noticed.” Guidi blushed as he said it, but as Bora kept straight-faced, with his thumb slowly turning the gold band around his finger, he went on. “She's aggressive but I can't tell whether she truly cares. She's fierce in some ways, and yet I know she has fragility also. We have spoken always superficially, but there's another dialogue happening between us at all times. I believe you know – motions, a turn of the face. I feel it without being able to give a name to it.”