A Dark Song of Blood (35 page)

Leaning with his elbows on the counter, the colonel spoke nearly into his ear. “Have you not put your career and your life at risk for Guidi, who is nothing to you, just like your wife was nothing to you? Are you not sticking your neck out for a dead priest? It's time you joined your own.”

“No one is
my own
that I can tell.”

“Except for me.”

Bora heard the sentence slide into him, and was hurt by it in an unexpected, personal way. “Then prove it to me – you know as well as I do who is behind the cardinal's death. What will you do about it?”

Dollmann laughed a low gurgling laugh. “That's not a good move, Bora. Take the pawn back and place it somewhere else – I won't penalize you for it.” Then he was silent for a time, during which tension strained between them. People came and went to and from the counter, and to them they must have seemed only officers drinking after hours. But in the end Dollmann turned Bora around, grimly. “Listen to me. I speak to you from your shadow side – not quite your dark side, but the one that receives less light. I come closer to what you are seeking than any surrogate brother. Guidi is not your counterpart – I am. He is weak because he does not dare and is without passion, and so he cannot and will not be your friend. His heart is dull. But you and I, we are two of an intellectual kind, we play the
game well. We have played it since we met, and we could as easily as not have been enemies, but had too much in common. We have a kinship, and I claim it.”

“And what will come of it?”

Dollmann forced the address book into Bora's hand, and Bora saw there was a piece of paper in the middle of it. He pulled it with thumb and forefinger, carefully. He unfolded it and recognized it as an SS list of families due for arrest in the morning. By their surnames he knew they were Jews. “This is a restricted document!”

“It is.”

Bora swallowed. “What do you expect me to do, sleep over the knowledge of it?”

“No. I plan to make you uncomfortable.”

How well the trap worked. Bora was close enough to smell the steel of its hinge. He said, staring the SS in the face, “Colonel Dollmann, it may have been different for you, but in the past five years I tried to look at this ordeal as having the only redeeming quality of every war – that all issues are clear-cut in it, all allegiances beyond question. I had my doubts and God knows I dealt with them as best I could, but the awful moral choice won't go away. I don't need you coming here to remind me we're all hanging from its noose.”

“Nicely put. Would you care for a sambuca now?”

“God, no.”

Dollmann placed the piece of paper in Bora's pocket. With his back turned, while the major scribbled a few addresses on his calendar, she said, “There's
Tosca
with Maria Caniglia coming up at the opera. Will you join me?”

Bora gave back his address book, coldly. “Who is singing Cavaradossi?”

“Gigli, who else.”

“I'll come.”

29 APRIL 1944

On Saturday morning, Bora's secretary put away bundles of papers in the drawers of her desk, cleared her few things and asked General Westphal whether she could leave now.

“Don't you want to wait until the major comes back from Soratte? It'll be less than an hour now.”

She said she didn't. Westphal felt sorry for her, but let her go.

Professor Maiuli told Antonio Rau that he believed no progress had been made during the weeks of Latin lessons. At this speed, they'd still be at the second declension by
Ferragosto.
He had to apply himself, what the devil. It was almost like stealing, to take money for lessons that did not seem to penetrate, as he said, “past the auricular pavilion”. Rau apologized and promised to do better: it was a privilege coming here in any case, even if just to listen to one who knew Latin better than an ancient Roman. Besides, there might be a chance to intensify his study. With his mother who had been ill, and relatives come to crowd their house after the raid on Via Nomentana, he wondered whether he could impose himself for a couple of weeks. He was ready to pay a hundred lire per day and he'd be content to sleep on the sofa in the parlor.

Signora Carmela, who'd been listening, said that of course it was up to the professor, but she thought it would be more equitable to calculate a monthly rate and divide it in half. Rau acted insulted. It was out of the question.

“Do I really look like I can't afford it? Besides, I don't know how long I need to stay. Could be less than two weeks, but it could be more. It all depends on my relatives, you see, whether they find other accommodations or not. I have permission to relocate from the authorities.” If they didn't mind, Rau added, he'd bring along three or four suitcases from his parents. They contained nothing breakable and would fit under any bed.

The perspective of fourteen hundred lire spoke black-market
meat and cheese to the conservative Maiulis. And everything about the agreement told them not to inform Guidi for now.

30 APRIL 1944

At eight o'clock in the morning, on a Sunday when the Piazza Vescovio hospital was unusually quiet, Captain Treib told him, “You're back in business. Your last Wassermann test is OK.”

That he should say so made Bora smile, not only because of what it meant, but for the informal concession to American talk. “Let's go to my office,” Treib was adding now. “There's something else I want to discuss with you.” And once seated behind the metal desk, he came to the point. “How often are you in pain? Every day?”

It'd be no use hiding things from him. “Nearly every day,” Bora said.

“It's not going to get better, you ought to know. I'm sure they told you up north, and they might even have tried to fix things. You'll have to have it opened again.”

For a moment it was like sitting in front of the Italian surgeon, five months earlier. Bora lit himself a cigarette. “I can't afford time in a hospital.”

“The question is, can you afford being ill on the job?” Treib kept calm watery eyes on him, leaning with his chair against the drab gray wall of the room. “When this is over you're going back to your regiment, I'm sure – I've seen you under the bombs at Aprilia. The diplomatic interlude has been for recuperation.” He lowered his eyes from Bora's stare. “So, what's the story of this pain? Are you one of those whom luck made feel immortal?”

Bora smirked. “Two years in Russia, including being caught by, and escaping from the Red Army, with hardly a scratch. It was difficult to accept that the same invulnerable body should be injured on a useless Italian country road.”

“And now?”

“Now I ask myself whether a man in pain acts as he would in normal circumstances, or reacts to his own suffering, projecting it. Is well-being a prerequisite to restraint?” Bora half-smiled. “I maintain balance, but at what cost, I don't know. My wife tells me I'm stoic. I'm not. I just put things off. I refuse them. If I say there's no pain, by God, there's no pain.”

“But there is.”

“There is. And it's true that what I want is field duty. That's where life is real.”

“Only because the opposite is so real.” Treib lifted his own hand, scarred by the partisan bullet near Albano. “As I found out two months ago.”

Glad to change subject, Bora stalled the talk of surgery. “So, what about the prisoners who got away when you were waylaid?”

“Well, they got away. They were two of the wounded we originally caught at Salerno, one of them for the second time.”

“Wounded twice?”

“No. Captured twice.” Treib's smile did not relieve the weariness of his eyes. “But he managed to escape twice, so we're even. Even with a bullet in his thigh, he jumped like a rabbit over a maze of hedges and was gone.”

“You do run when they're after you.” And he was thinking of Stalingrad, of his own close escape, but said nothing more about it. Spain, Poland, the Ukraine – years of chasing and being chased. Putting out the cigarette after an extended last draft, he asked, “Off the top of your head, what can you tell me about diabetic coma?”

Treib acted as if he didn't know Bora was stalling. “Do you mean diabetic or hypoglycemic coma? There's a difference.”

“I wouldn't know.”

“Well, the second turns up when blood sugar falls below 0.7, with the appearance of the first symptoms – weakness, sweating, nervousness, mydriasis or dilated pupils. By the time you get to 0.3, you get loss of consciousness and coma. The first is occasioned by insufficient insulin. Some of the signs include
dry skin, typical acetonic breath, contracted pupils. Untreated – and sometimes even treated – they both lead to death. Come, Bora, what will it be? I'm willing to work on your arm and put you out in two days. You won't be able to wear the prosthesis at once, but you'll be on your way to feeling better.”

“If I get a weekend off, you can have me. So, if you administer insulin in excess, you could induce a hypoglycemic coma?”

“You could. Regarding surgery, take a few days off – it's all lost anyway, can't you see?”

“No.” It was the last thing Bora wanted to hear and he cut the surgeon short. “Not up north. There's a year's worth of fighting in the mountainside.”

“Well, all right, a year's worth, maybe. Do you want to go through it on morphine?”

Bora looked away. This, too, he'd heard before.

Capturing the moment, Treib set the chair straight. He looked at his calendar. “I'll meet you here Saturday after next at five o'clock. Eat nothing that day. Bring a change and your shaving kit. And a book to read, maybe.”

“I want to be out within twenty-four hours.”

“I'll kick you out as soon as I'm sure you won't have a secondary hemorrhage.”

1 MAY 1944

By Monday, fires could be seen burning from the high points of the city in the not-so-distant hills, down the plain to Velletri and even in the east toward Tivoli. From the relative quiet of Mount Soratte, Kesselring listened to Bora enumerating the historical treasures of the small towns north of Rome, saying now and then, “I'll do what I can,” or, “This is the last war when art or archictecture or anything of that sort will be spared.” They were at the end of a briefing and the field marshal was indulgent toward his insistence on details. “You give me all these
annoying reminders, Martin, while I have such comparatively good news for you. Effective this month anti-partisan guerrilla activity in Italy will fall under my command, and under the control of army officers in the field. It's true that we'll still be a hybrid – my head and the Supreme SS Chief's on one neck – but partisan reconnaissance will be up to those as yourself.”

“What about Rome?”

“It's still up to Kappler's men in Rome.”

Guidi found it contemptible that the Romans were ecstatic at General Maelzer's late distribution of staple foods. Hammering of air raids all around the city gave the spring day an echo of storms to come. The only piece of good luck he could think of had come in unlikely form: the visit of a militiaman, who reported having been in the neighborhood when “the German girl had been killed”. It was the first direct reference to murder Guidi had heard from a witness of sorts. And though he had no doubt that this was the very man Merlo had sent spying on Captain Sutor, potentially conclusive information had come from the meeting.

Sitting with his back to the window (he didn't care to see the walls of the houses across the street, scarred by bullets after the bomb had exploded nearly six weeks before), he reread his notes. Sutor had in fact accompanied Magda Reiner home, but had not left at once. He'd spent at least fifteen minutes inside, and then emerged again at about seven fifteen or seven twenty. Magda was with him and they were apparently arguing. Sutor had entered his car, and sat in it while she presumably returned to her apartment. But then Sutor had gone back inside.
And he'd stayed inside.
In the commotion that followed in the street after the death, the militiaman could not tell when the SS had left the apartment building. But he was sure he'd been inside when Magda met her end.

Guidi was tempted to call Bora, but thought better of it. Why give him one more chance to take over and twist things
his way?
No, this piece of information is mine. I am the policeman. This goes neither to Caruso nor to Bora.

That evening he was looking forward to a bit of self-congratulation in the borrowed peace of Via Paganini when he met the sight of Antonio Rau, ensconced in the Maiulis' parlor. Rau showed himself curt, even rude. When Guidi tried to convince him to walk outside and discuss matters at once, he refused. “What's there to discuss? I pay the rent same as you do.”

Dinner was richer than usual but dismal in mood. The Maiulis munched their food like unobtrusive mice, linking eyes with one another. Francesca and Rau chatted in forced tones of levity, and when Rau came up with some Latin ditty to rouse the professor from his sulks, Guidi had had enough. He left the table and went into his room.

Face up on the bed, he looked at the humidity stain on the ceiling, one of which he had for the past four months identified as a frog-like creature, tongue extended. So, that's how it was. This was the
friend
Francesca had been trying to accommodate, and Rau's coming posed an even more immediate threat to the household. Surely the SS kept an eye on the whereabouts of their translators. His absences from the city and now his move to another address might be noticed; however, he'd obtained permission to relocate. The little he had eaten came bitterly to Guidi's throat as he thought of being dragged into this game when he'd been the one the Germans had nearly killed at the caves. But Francesca was right. It had come after all to choosing allegiances.