A Dark Song of Blood (8 page)

Bora brought his right hand close to the she-wolf's mouth, fingers extended as if to feed her. “She rules in the end.”

“
Caput mundi.
Head of the world.” Dollmann rocked on the balls of his feet, watching him. In civilian clothes and a bow tie, he had the groomed appearance of a British professor rather than an SS. In the lonely room of the museum, he said in English, “Kappler is not the one to watch out for. Sutor is.”

28 JANUARY 1944

On Friday, Guidi waited for Francesca in front of the stationery store. If she was surprised, she said nothing, not even when he tipped his hat and began walking alongside her.

“Look,” he said, “I don't know if I should be doing you this favor, but it's been twice already that I heard you go out at night.”

Her scarf was coming undone, and when he reached for it, she pulled back. “So?” She wrapped the woolen cloth around her shoulders, hardly a protection against the bitter wind. “You're going to arrest me for breaking a dumb six-to-five curfew?
Mamma mia
, you must come from the moon!” And when Guidi began to answer, she squared her narrow face at him. “If I go to see my boyfriend, I'm not about to stop 'cause you say so.”

Guidi had no reason to be disappointed by her words. Still he said, tartly, “It's because of sabotage that the Germans just took two more hours out of our day. It isn't just the Italian police keeping an eye on things. See him during the day.”

“As if I don't have to work during the day. Besides, he's married.” She grinned, but it was an uncovering of lips as animals have, and there was no humor in it. It was for a moment as if her skull were showing through the skin, marring her beauty.

Guidi found himself bluffing; quoting empty police talk, because in the end there was no arguing the point. “I'm warning you. Find another way to meet him, or I'll have to turn you in. I know where you're
really
going.”

“I bet you don't.” She tried, slowly, but was less sure of herself.

“I followed you,” he lied. “What will it be?”

Her lips were pale with cold, chapped. She turned away from the wind, wary or discouraged or just unhappy. Not helpless, but unhappy. “All right,” she said, making Guidi wait for the next words. “I'll quit seeing him at night.”

Guidi could have left now. Instead, he continued to walk at her side to the tramway stop. There, because she was trembling,
he undid his overcoat and put it on her shoulders. Francesca did not react; looking away from him, she seemed already a resentful prisoner, whose friendship might now be impossible for him to gain.

Later that day, at the office, Danza made little of things. “There's a mess of people holed up all over the place, Inspector. Anybody could be meeting anybody. Folks came out of the woodwork in the past months, and went back into it twice in number. Jews, monarchists, dissenters, you name it. Deserters by the score, writers, officers from the Royal Carabineers – all watching out for you, me, the Germans, the Fascists. What can we do about it? Either we play political police or we ignore the whole. She sees her boyfriend at night? If that's what she does, good for her. If that's not it, then...”

“No,” Guidi said. “I think that's it.” And it weighed on him that he might be twisting the law for a woman, as he had risked doing up north only a month ago.

Danza offered cautious support. “So, ignore it. Since the Americans landed a week ago, we've had assassination attempts, slashed tires, gas depots blown up, and the Germans are taking things in their own hands. With all due respect, I couldn't care less about a girl that cats around.”

At his return home, the last person Guidi wanted to meet in the stairwell was Pompilia Marasca. He tried to avoid her, but she managed to keep him there by blocking the stairs.

“A nice fright, you men gave me,” she said. “After I came to the other night I was ill for hours and hours, just thinking there might be fighting in the streets.”

Guidi shrugged. “Who knows. There may not be.”

“Women like myself have to be very careful, you see. I'm all nerves. Since my husband passed away, all nerves – nothing else. What you see is nothing but nerves.”

Her nerves were well hidden under the padding of breast and hips, Guidi thought. He faced her, with an ear to the other noises in the house – voices, steps, the halting whimper
of the child upstairs. Francesca was just then coming in from the street. She walked by, indifferent to both, bound for the Maiulis' door. Pompilia's cherry lips tightened. “She should be with her nose up in the air, the shameless hussy. Who does she think she is? She's even
showing
!”

It was the first comment that interested Guidi. “Showing what?” he said stolidly.

“Haven't you noticed? My God, you men never notice anything. Even the Maiulis, who are the least informed in the world, wonder whether there's anything amiss with the young lady. Amiss, indeed! I should say there is. Things one wouldn't believe! Pay attention, next time – it's still early, but it's showing all right. Since she came, she hasn't spoken ten words to me, and I've been in this house going on three years now. Well, what can you expect from the likes of her?”

Guidi drove his hands into his coat pockets. “I don't know what you mean.”

“Her mother's a Jewish you-know-what, and as for her father – he's a bishop or something. That's how she got to go to school and all that. People heard her brag about it.”

With his fingertips, Guidi savored the fleece-lined space of his pockets, where Francesca's chafed hands had burrowed as they waited for the tramway. “Sorry you got a scare,” he said. “Let's hope nothing happens around here.”

“Nothing? Why, just before you came home there was a big blast at Piazza Verdi.”

Guidi didn't bother to say he'd been stopped by a German patrol while he drove past the Mint, and despite his documents the intolerant gendarmes had dragged him out of the car before allowing him to continue.

Pompilia pouted with open hands held up to her face. “See how pale I am? I almost passed out. When you're all nerves, it's a constant struggle just to keep your sanity.”

29 JANUARY 1944

Bora and Guidi didn't meet again until late on Saturday, in front of the Hotel d'Italia, only a street-length away from Guidi's
Pubblica Sicurezza
office, at the other end of Via Rasella. The hotel faced the imposing gate of Villa Barberini, its scrolling metalwork appearing out of the dark and fading quickly as the dimmed headlights of passing German vehicles struck it.

“Let's go to my room,” Bora said. “I was able to trace one of Magda's colleagues – you might be interested in what she had to say.”

Minutes later, taking advantage of the fact that power was on, Guidi took notes on the narrow desk by Bora's window. A photo of his wife – it was the same woman whose portrait the major had at work, in any case – sat on the desk, with a small snapshot of a German pilot tucked in one corner and a dried edelweiss on the other side.

“Wouldn't she tell you whom Magda was afraid of, Major?”

“She doesn't know. What's for sure is that Magda didn't want friends over, and no longer asked for rides from the embassy. She was drinking more, and ‘acting strange', whatever that means. You understand, my informant is the girl who was reassigned after the famous party. She says that everyone was drunk, their kissing was just a lark, and Magda got to keep her job because she had a boyfriend in the SS.”

“Any idea who that might be?”

“Not yet. But I can tell you who else lives at her address.”

Guidi flipped through his notebook. “Ground floor, a retired soprano, deaf and senile, never goes out. Third floor, three German officers, no longer there. Correct?”

“Correct. The officers are elsewhere now,” (Bora meant Anzio, Guidi knew) “but they have an alibi and witnesses. They were celebrating at their place, one floor down from Magda's apartment. The rest of the building is untenanted and used for storage by the embassy.”

“Well, whoever had a key to her apartment searched it professionally before we got there. I doubt it was the killer, so – whether they were destroying evidence or merely removing potentially embarrassing clues, the investigation has been impaired from the start. Magda dated Merlo, she dated an SS, she was afraid of somebody. As of today, Merlo is the only one we can place near her house on the night she died, and I must tell you, Major Bora, that the chief of police is convinced of his guilt.”

“Maybe the chief of police is right. Or maybe he doesn't like Merlo. I hear that unlike his corrupt colleagues at Braschi Palace, Merlo is true blue when it comes to graft.”

For some time, neither of them spoke. Bora sat in the armchair at the foot of the bed, his eyes fixed on his wife's photograph. Following his stare, Guidi, too, observed the image again. An athletic blonde with a discontented air, elegantly coiffed, holding a dog by the leash on some smart city street.

“Her name is Benedikta,” Bora said.

“Very handsome.”

“She is, thank you. I haven't seen her in a year.” Bora fumbled with cigarettes and lighter, with uncharacteristic clumsiness. “She'll be here on Thursday, with a Red Cross train.”
As you surely know
, his stepfather had wired,
your wife is coming on the third.
Why he should have known was more than Bora could tell. He put a cigarette in his mouth, in what Guidi was beginning to recognize as an antidote for embarrassment, or shyness. “Care to smoke?”

“Yes, please.”

“Good. Here. I do, too.” With a quick puff of smoke Bora started his cigarette. “You know, I could have been transferred to a German hospital, back in September, but I didn't want to jeopardize my assignment. They did a good job in Verona, I think. The hand could not be saved regardless. I knew that.”

“You seem to be doing fine.”

“Oh, I do.” Bora smirked. “You should have seen me this morning. All four tires of my car were slashed. Have you ever
tried to change a tire with one hand? Well, I changed four, by myself. I manage, I manage.” Carefully, though he sat facing it, Bora avoided the mirror on the opposite wall. “I spent weeks learning how to do and undo my breeches, put my shirt on and button it, place the metal band of my watch on the finial of a chair so I can slip it on my right arm, all in record time. I can get dressed now more quickly than I did with both hands. I shave, drive, type, do push-ups and shoot a rifle as before. And yet, strictly speaking I can no longer even wash my
hands
, or clap, or hold someone. Playing the piano is also finished, which sometimes I think is the most difficult to take.” He smoked for a time, encouraged by Guidi's silence. “Of course that's not true. The most difficult thing is facing my wife on Thursday.”

Guidi had to wonder what the matter really was. “Doesn't she know?”

“She knows. We last spoke by phone in October.”

“I'm sure she's dying to see you.”

“I hope so.” Bora smiled in a self-conscious way. “Anyway, she obviously meant to surprise me. Only because of my stepfather's wire did I find out. She'll stay eight days. I'll be at work, of course, but thank God I'll have the nights with her. I don't need to tell you how unbearably physical it becomes after a year's separation.”

Just then, the lights went out. Growing from a plaintive whine, the wail of sirens began to rise in pitch across the dark. Guidi heard himself saying, “An air raid here? I thought Rome was an open city,” and Bora replying dryly, “Yes, well. Bombs go awry, too.”

“What are we supposed to do?”

No rustle of movement came with Bora's answer. “There's a shelter in the basement of the hotel. In case of a direct hit, you can choose between being blown up outright or being buried under these many stories of rubble.”

“I'll take my chances here if it's all the same with you.”

“It is. I'm staying.”

Outside the door there was a scramble of people groping their way downstairs. Guidi's mouth went dry. In the absolute darkness, the rising and falling wail was a ghost of sound let loose over the city.
I hope Francesca is safe
, he thought, unexpectedly.
I don't care with whom – just safe.

The flame of Bora's lighter flickered. “Another cigarette?”

“Not now.”

Off and on the reviving tip of flame pointed Bora out to Guidi in the moments that followed – long moments, drawn and flattened into strips of time, during which Guidi simply tried to find out whether he was afraid or just nervous. To be sure, the possibility of death made him feel acutely lonely; as if suddenly no rules applied, and all life were vulnerable. If Bora was pondering the unfairness of dying on the eve of his wife's arrival, all that showed were the slow glimmering arcs drawn by his cigarette as he took extended draughts from it. Guidi sat back, chasing thoughts from his mind, so that he would not be attached to anything when the explosions rolled in from one periphery or another.

But the explosions were slow in coming. In the odd silence, Bora said, “I don't know why it's taking them so long.” Then Guidi heard him move impatiently toward the window, feel around for the lock and throw it open. The crisp night air flooded in. Searchlights scanned the sky, here and there sweeping the bottom of clouds and becoming diffused or reflecting from them. No sound of engines, no anti-aircraft, not even from the beleaguered neighborhood of Castro Pretorio. The only artillery booming at slow intervals was Anzio's way.