A Dark Song of Blood (30 page)

“What about the ashes? Was someone burning papers in her bedroom or in the vacant apartment?”

“Well, somehow they migrated from one place to the next. Light as they are, they'd easily attach themselves to clothing or hair. The residue in 7B, at any rate, is more noticeable than in
the bedroom. So, in the forty-five minutes between her return home and her death, Magda Reiner was in a place to which she theoretically had no access – 7B – possibly met someone there, went back to her room and prepared for bed. Next, she was dropping four floors down to the sidewalk.”

“
He
was the one she was afraid of.”

“Likely, and someone she would not or could not speak about with her co-workers. We assume she'd met him before he killed her, but that's not necessarily true.”

“Shirker, partisan, German deserter, escaped prisoner, spy. For whom do you vote? It has to be one of those. And was it Sutor she argued with before her death, or the mysterious tenant?”

Even as the thought
Antonio Rau speaks German
went through him, Guidi blurted out, “If I have to vote, it's either a deserter or a spy. What's the name of the man who went missing in Greece?”

“Potwen, Wilfred. I can't see how he could have gotten here, but there's plenty I can't see at this moment.” Thinking of Hohmann, of Gemma Fonseca's refusal to see him, Bora started to unbuckle his belt, which – made heavy by the pistol holder – came undone quickly. He placed it across the back of a chair. “Have you noticed how in the file I retrieved from Caruso's office there is no mention of a search previous to ours?”

“Yes, but he might have
failed
to record it. I wouldn't draw any conclusions from that.”

“He might have said the truth about not having access to the Reiner apartment. We know he got Merlo's old glasses from Sciaba's store.”

“If you mean that Captain Sutor is a more likely candidate for a preventive search, I agree. He might have removed items of clothing or such from her closet. It doesn't seem as though anyone will be able to get out of him whether he did it, or why, and Sutor has other means at his disposal to get rid of people.”

It was the first oblique reference to the caves between them. Bora's hint at relaxation – the removal of his pistol – was at
once belied by his posture, and the phone ringing at that moment was a relief to both men. Bora eagerly picked up the receiver and listened to whatever was being said to him. “I have to go,” he said then, without explanation. Belt and pistol were taken up again.

Guidi readied to leave also. “Can we get together tomorrow? I'll be going through Magda's personal items again.”

“I don't know. Try me at the office.”

They came out of the hotel together. Across the street, a full moon lit the powerful intricacy of the gate shielding the Barberini Garden. Guidi, who had been lined up with the others against it, under SS guard, had to look away. He saw Bora glancing down the darkness of Via Rasella as he unlocked his car. Between those two landmarks, in that stretch of irrelevant pavement, any hope of friendship had been killed also.

“It's been nearly three weeks,” Guidi said.

Bora made no comment. But he did turn to Guidi, sketched in the dreary light from above. Much as he longed to ask for advice regarding Hohmann's death, the time was not right.

“It was Caruso who put your name on the list, not the SS.”

14 APRIL 1944

On a splendid spring mid-morning, Field Marshal Kesselring went to visit the Pope, with Westphal and Bora in tow. It was an extraordinary concession for military men, albeit in civilian clothes, to be allowed in the Vatican. On another occasion Bora would have felt privileged, but he'd been at Campoleone until the night before, a ghastly trip through the reality of no-man's-land. His left arm ached badly, stabbing pains radiating from the mutilation up to his shoulder. He was nervous about that afternoon's serological test, and perfunctorily going through the motions until the moment he was introduced to Patrick Atwater Murphy.

The diplomat was an energetic man of Borromeo's age, with a florid complexion and bright eyes. He laughed too easily, in Bora's reckoning, but so did most Americans he knew.

“That's an interesting name. Bora – a direct relation to Luther's wife?”

“We don't stress the likelihood.”

“So, of all names, your parents called you Martin, eh?”

Bora looked Murphy in the eye, feeling his own youth and loneliness as an injustice in the face of this man's glib ease.
He lies in bed with her and doesn't want her children. What a waste.
“Only because I was born on Martinmas.”

They engaged in as pleasant a brief chatter as the occasion permitted, with Murphy commenting in his Boston drawl on his return to the boredom of a city where “every public
pahk
is an excuse for heathen rubble”, and what they called a “swell steak” tried a man's healthy appetite. “Thank God ‘Cahdinal' Borromeo is such a good sport and tourist guide. If it weren't for him, my wife'd be dragging me from cultural pillar to operatic post. So, anyway. What do
you
do in real life, Major Martin Bora?”

How much we have in common, she and I.
Coolly, Bora said, “I don't go posting religious theses on cathedral doors.”

At the hospital, Bora did not expect to meet Treib, the weary-faced army surgeon from Aprilia, who – having recognized him from his office – came to greet him in the hallway.

“So,” he said, “you made it back in one piece, Major. Yes, we retreated from there too, surviving POWs and all. It's good to be in a place where I can have enough cotton to make tampons out of. See
this?
” He acknowledged a bullet scar on his hand. “They almost took me and two medics prisoner near Albano.”

“You don't say. Who was it?”

“Partisans, I suppose – no uniforms anyhow. We got away by the skin of our teeth, and two lightly wounded Americans managed to scramble off with them. How's your leg?”

“Fine. I'm here for a different reason.” Bora kept straight-faced. “I need a Wassermann test.”

Treib looked at him in the same manner. “Was the first blood work negative?”

“Yes.”

“Well, let's go.”

Afterwards the surgeon brought the results to the waiting room, where Bora had been sitting and pacing around for an hour. “Congratulations. The Wassermann is also negative. We'll repeat it in two weeks to make damn sure. It seems you haven't gotten anything else, either. Very lucky, the women are ridden. May I remind you to use caution if you frequent prostitutes?”

“I don't,” Bora said dryly.

Treib's bleary eyes traveled to Bora's wedding ring. “Well, who was she?”

“Probably a whore from the hotel. If I haven't paid her she'll show up, and I'll know. It was the night after the
trouble
at the caves, I wasn't thinking. And I'm no longer married,” Bora felt he should add. “But I do want to be able to reproduce in the near future.”

“Would you care to take a look at some infected blood?”

“No, thank you.”

“It's really interesting how the little devils whip around.”

“I get your point, Captain.”

7

16 APRIL 1944

“I felt I should apologize for refusing to see you. The last few days have been very difficult, and I am still trying to shield our mother from hearing what happened to Marina.”

Gemma Fonseca resembled her sister in age and looks. Fair, gray-eyed. The quiet elegance of her house – a deco interior of lacquered smooth lines – was much like her person, but there was a lack of sparkle in both, and a nun-like severity to the turn of her face as she invited him to enter. “I should have known from the note on your card that you might have good intentions. How may I assist you?”

Bora removed his cap, which the maid came to take with a curtsey. He related his distress at the events, though it was such a resplendent Sunday morning, everything inside and outside of him demanded happier things. “My respect for the cardinal brings me here,” he concluded. “You could say he was my spiritual father, so it's particularly painful for me to face his death, and your sister's.”

Framed by the clean angles of the parlor's door, for a time she looked at him, as if wondering how much she could share with him. On her cheeks, a delicate, nearly fragile skin stretched taut over the bones, and her wrists were also thin, blue-veined. The left eye was slightly off, looking outwardly only enough as to make her stare oddly fixed, as that of an icon. Her figure seemed strung up by some force of will or
pride. “I appreciate your condolences. Marina and I were very close.”

Her tension was such that Bora found himself hoping she would take a seat and relax. “Lack of a thorough post-mortem will not make things easier,” he said cautiously, going through his own process of assessment. Gemma Fonseca was visibly tempted to take a seat, but did not.

“Why so?”

“Because its absence will clinch the apparent motive for the deaths.”

Instantly, she gained a desperate, nearly wild look on her unadorned face. Her hand sought the sofa, and on a corner of it she sat, only the rigidity of her shoulders maintaining a semblance of control. She began to weep without lowering her head, hands knotted in her lap.

“I so much hoped you would say that, Major. I am so grateful you said it.”

If nuns cry, they cry like her. Like a sky that rains and cleanses itself.
Bora sat facing her. He was not embarrassed by her reaction because it had no anger and no noise. “My expectation is that you might offer me clues contrary to what seems, and I do not believe is.”

“I don't know that I can. Until today I have been putting the authorities off, but I will have to answer their questions sooner or later.”

Bora had the suicide note in his pocket, but said nothing about it, rather, “I wonder if you could favor me with a sample of your sister's handwriting.”

Whatever she thought of the request, without questioning it she reached for a sleek silver box on the tea table, and from it handed a pale blue envelope to Bora. “This had been mailed Friday morning, and arrived the morning after Marina died.”

It was the same fine cotton fiber stationery of the suicide note, and – even after a cursory examination of the contents, a thoughtful, innocuous family letter – undoubtedly written
by the same hand. Whether Bora's profound disappointment was apparent or not, Gemma Fonseca finally prompted him. “Will you tell me the reason for your request, Major?”

“By your leave, not now.” The tall capitals, rounded loops, the slight downward slant of the lines were familiar to him, as he'd learned from brooding over the note in days past. Nonetheless, Bora asked, “May I keep it?”

“If you wish. You see there's no reference to a crisis of any kind. Although we never lived more than fifty miles apart from each other, Marina and I exchanged letters every week. It was a habit we picked up as adolescents and kept ever since, even during her marriage.”

Dollmann is right, and so Borromeo. I should reconcile myself to it.
Bora sat, looking beyond Gemma's mournful figure, toward a gleaming doorway of aluminum and glass. “Did you keep all the letters?”

“I did, Major. But in anticipation of the police's securing them, I have already disposed of several, for no other reason than they are private and were never meant for eyes other than my own. You might as well know this.”

Bora did not often feel defeated. At this moment, though, it was as if everyone in this sordid affair – Hohmann, Borromeo, the sisters – had betrayed him, and nothing and no one could be trusted. Gemma Fonseca might have read through his disgust this time.

“I was tempted to destroy all, much as I treasure them. Had I not received your visit today, I probably would have.”

Yes, and no one would have been the wiser for it.
Bora spoke automatically now, only because he'd after all come here on an errand. “Should you wish to find out more about me, my references are Cardinal Giovanni Borromeo, Ambassador Weizsäcker and Countess Maria Ascanio, who knows me best of all.” It was his turn to set limits to the meeting, and he stood to indicate that he was ready to go.

Gemma Fonseca extended her had toward him from where
she sat, a small gesture of controlled despair, which came in no way close to touching him. “Please, Major. Do not go in haste. Let me tell you how good Marina really was.”

17 APRIL 1944

On Monday, the working-class Quadraro district, which Bora and Westphal had crossed in January on their way to the coast, sat under a cloudy sky. In the unseasonable warmth, the Fascist militiamen sweated in their black cheviot shirts. The SS had already changed into summer uniforms, but perspired even more. It took them hours to round up seven hundred and fifty men in reprisal for the death of two militiamen. A red-faced Sutor confronted a crowd of loud women, many holding small children in their arms. Their bawling recriminations no doubt annoyed him, but Bora knew that seeing his Mercedes parked a few steps away had to be the greatest irritant. So he stood by with an unlit cigarette in his mouth, monitoring the progress of the operation for General Westphal.