A Dark Song of Blood (33 page)

Every word counts. I can’t make a mistake.
“Why should I lie, Captain?”

“Let me ask General Westphal about it.”

“The general is on the line with Berlin. Of course if the matter is urgent, I will alert him at once.” Bora took the short breath of one preparing to lift a weight or sustain a physical
blow. “I don’t understand your apparent insistence on my being in Rome last night, Captain Sutor. I don’t recall any function I should have attended.”

Sutor hung up, never having given the reason for his call.

According to his instructions, Bora’s hotel room had not been touched. When he returned to it that evening, in a cool mind he separated the clothes that needed washing or ironing; the rest he replaced in drawers and wardrobe. Books and magazines found their way back onto shelf and bedstand, small objects – cufflinks, medals – were gathered again in their boxes. He wanted to know what was missing. Thoroughly he went through the papers tossed out of the trunk, dividing them into piles: photographs, sheet music, manuals, sketches.

It was obvious that his address book was no longer in the bed-stand drawer (the prophylactics were still there), but he hoped it had been thrown somewhere in the scattering. It had not. He went as far as emptying the drawers again to make sure, looked behind the radiator, the bed, in the bathroom – nothing. To make things worse, the power failed again. He sat in the dark, chewing on the powerless need to make somebody physically pay for it.

26 APRIL 1944

There was a tender spring rain outside when Bora and Guidi met at the police station over the noon hour on Wednesday. The roofs shone like mirrors under the veil of water, and on the west side of the room the windows were tearful.

Bora made such a valiant show of ease, he was sure Guidi was taken in. After listening to the inspector’s report on his interview with Hannah Kund, he made a note of the date and place where the new key had been made. Then he said, “Well, I have news, too. You’ll never imagine who came to see me at the office this morning. His gummy head polished
like sealskin, it was Merlo himself. Officially, it was to invite General Westphal to a performance of
I Pescatori di Perle
, but I knew what it was about. I let him talk. He knows his opera, I can tell you that. He never recognized me from the Pirandello play, but has heard from someone within the Rome police that Pietro Caruso is after him. Knows I’m your counterpart in the investigation, knows about
you.
Clearly Caruso has his enemies, and this is really amusing, because now it’s all up in the air.”

Guidi grumbled. “It’s hardly amusing at all, Major. What did you tell him?”

“Ah, that’s the
good
part. I don’t often relish my position as an aide, but the perception of power that comes with it is exhilarating. I told him that I – I left you out of it, since you haven’t any power – had proof he was at the scene of Magda Reiner’s death. I told him he’s suspected of having pushed her out her bedroom window, adding that his rough treatment of prostitutes is also common knowledge.”

You haven’t any power.
Guidi didn’t think for a moment that Bora was protecting him and was offended.

Bora ignored him, smiling, with his shoulders to the window. Ominous as it was for him that the intruders in his room might be after the suicide note and had to content themselves with his address book, he maintained a demeanor so congenial as to sound convincing to his own ears. “He was taken aback, Guidi. Had no idea Caruso is trying to pin murder on him. Claims he’d been adamant about Party accounts at the National Confederation of Fascist Unions and has made enemies. He assumed they’d try to turn the tables on him in matters of money, but not this. Describes himself as a good husband who would never want this to reach his wife’s ears. ‘She must be deaf, then,’ I told him. Guidi, I was enjoying myself. When it was over – and it took him the better part of two hours to spill it out – I felt so ambivalent about him, I’m telling you now that he might be the killer after all. According to him, Magda Reiner threw herself
at him at the 30 October party, besieged him with phone calls until he would agree to a rendezvous. Wore no undergarments on that occasion and nature took its course. No woman had ever done that for him, and he was understandably flattered.
Loved
her, he says, like a high-school student.”

“What utter nonsense, Major!”

“I’m not done. As Fräulein Kund told you, one afternoon he ran into Sutor in the lobby of the Reiner apartment, and did not buy the tale Magda told him – that Sutor was there for Hannah Kund. Had a militiaman spy on Sutor’s movements after hours and was aware he visited her. Says he never heard of Emilio or Willi, but by the third week in December, his love had turned to hatred, like Othello’s for Desdemona – his own words.”

“But of course, he swears he didn’t kill her.”

“Quite the opposite, he won’t swear either way.” Bora glanced down in the street, still speaking in a good-natured voice. “You can be sure I pressured him, but he’s quite more defiant than I’d have given him credit for. Challenged me to prove he killed her. Didn’t threaten me, because he knows better. As for you, Guidi, after I told him you would not blindly accept Caruso’s indictment of him, Merlo said he expects you to do your duty as an honest functionary. And added
you
’ll never be able to prove he did it.”

“That remains to be seen. What about the glasses?”

“As poor Sciaba said, he’d returned them to the store. Claims that the case – which is interesting – disappeared from his office at the beginning of February, and that he doesn’t know how either object ended up in her apartment.”

“Naturally he’d claim
that.
And does he admit to having seen the body?”

“He does.”

Guidi clammed up. It vexed him that Caruso had given him to believe Merlo was too powerful to be trifled with, and had thrown his own weight around when the provincial policeman
had not toed the line. What Bora said was true, he had no power. But it remained to be seen whether he couldn’t prove Merlo’s guilt.

“I tried to reach the Reiner elders,” Bora tried to mollify him. “No success thus far, as their house was bombed and they moved in with friends. As soon as they’re tracked down, however, I’ll ask more questions about our Greek-Front Wilfred, the 1936 affair and any present liaisons the girl might have gotten into. Unless of course she fell in love with a partisan in hiding, and we’re back to square one.”

Guidi did not notice how punctilious Bora’s pretense of levity was. His mind went back to Antonio Rau, whose movements in Rome before his coming to Via Paganini for Latin lessons were shadowy. He was not especially tall, but would the clothes Magda had bought fit him otherwise?

27 APRIL 1944

Cardinal Borromeo distanced himself from people by refusing audiences and making them sit through long waiting periods indoors, and by other but no less successful methods out of doors. This time he gave an appointment to Bora at the Ara Coeli shrine by the Capitol Hill. There was a measure of malice in it, since Bora’s leg injury made the vertiginous climb of one hundred and twenty-two steps a reminder of a bodily as well as moral need for humility. Borromeo watched him, standing on the slab of an ancient scholar who had mortified himself by choosing burial in a much-trafficked threshold. “You’re not panting,” was the first thing he said.

“I hope not, Cardinal. Give me six months and I’ll be running the distance up.”

“In six months you won’t be in Rome.”

“‘Man proposes and God disposes,’ Cardinal. Miracles happen.”

“Do you really believe that?” Borromeo preceded him into the church, cool in comparison with the dazzling warmth of its threshold. “In miracles, I mean.”

“Well, they’re a tenet of the Church.”

“So’s the Virgin Birth, and you and I know it’s physically nonsense.”

“I won’t discuss theology with my betters.”

“But you discussed philosophy with Hohmann.”

“I know philosophy.”

Dressed in a plain black cassock, Borromeo seemed very long, a string bean of a man. Negligently he kneeled facing the main altar and signed himself before taking a place in the first pew. From a rich leather folder he extracted a coverless journal, which Bora recognized with a start to be in Hohmann’s handwriting. “I believe this is what you were after when you came the other day, and I wouldn’t see you.” He allowed Bora to follow a paragraph or two with his eyes, then replaced the journal in the folder. “If it is, here is how things stand. Number one, I will not give it to you. Hohmann’s secretary, who is not as dull as he seems, took it home when the cardinal failed to stop by his residence after meeting Marina Fonseca, as perhaps he’d been instructed to do in such cases. It is now in Vatican hands, never to emerge again if we can help it. Number two, this encounter will have never taken place. You must deny it if need be even in the confessional.”

Bora lifted his eyes to the opulent ceiling of gilded wood and stuccoes, as if to find inspiration there. “Why would the cardinal’s journal be of such interest to me?”

“My dear Major, I am a bit older and worldlier than you are, with all that my little kingdom is not of this earth. I keep myself informed. Hohmann kept a journal at the university. You have
friends
in common – you are his spiritual heir. There is no reason to keep from you what he initiated. What he initiated, you must continue.”

“And what would that be, Cardinal?”

With a condescending smile Borromeo laid the folder in his lap and rested his hands on it. “Now, then, Major, do not ask the obvious.”

Bora felt exposed, just one step below vulnerability. “Why don’t you give the charge to Colonel Dollmann?”

“Because he has a hard time keeping things to himself. Besides, you are Hohmann’s great admirer, he who defends his honor in death. What is it, Major Bora, are you getting cold feet as the Americans draw near?”

“It isn’t the Americans who worry me.”

“I see.” Borromeo studied him. “Since surely you agonized over it, be informed that Hohmann was asexual like an old capon, and Marina Fonseca the frustrated widow of an impenitent sinner, a typical case of
vagina dentata.
I was her confessor, you can take my word for it. Now, what are your conditions to continue Hohmann’s work? I am ready to negotiate.”

At this point of his bachelorhood, even a
vagina dentata
sounded fleetingly attractive. Sullenly Bora held his hand out. “Two. The first is, let me have the journal.”

“Sorry, I don’t intend to let anyone have it. I’m already bending the law in the Jesuit style. It’s written in Italian, as you see, and be content that it refers not so cryptically to individuals identified as
Vento, Bennato
and
Pontica.
”

What learned but hopelessly transparent covers for
Bora, Eugene
Dollmann, and
Marina
Fonseca. It seemed to Bora that danger had entered the holy space and crammed it full of shadows. He’d run away if he could, wanting none of this. So he said, “I will do nothing before being granted to read this text at leisure. Nothing. Not even show an interest.” And when Borromeo, after a dry silence, seemed to waver, he prompted him, “When and where? I’ll give you my second condition then.”

The cardinal stood to leave, without bothering to cross himself before the main altar this time. “Tomorrow evening at the infirmary of Santo Spirito. At seven o’clock. You’ll be interested to know that Mrs Murphy volunteers there,” he added
with a smile entirely out of place. “It will give you a chance to practice your excellent English.”

Once at the foot of the stairway, Bora was about to enter his car when he recognized Dollmann at one of the tables of a café across the street. The colonel lifted a cup of espresso in a toast. “This city is getting smaller and smaller, Bora! Fancy seeing you here. Are you skipping lunch for church these days?”

8

28 APRIL 1944

The evening sky was turning above the tangles of wisterias, filling the Roman gardens with deeply scented grape-like clusters. The heavy perfume, breathed elsewhere, brought to mind days and images of other days, words heard and said to others, a different world of which Bora no longer was a part, because that world had altogether gone.

At the Santo Spirito infirmary, Borromeo was nowhere to be found, likely to avoid hearing Bora’s second condition. A plump nun handed him a sealed envelope. In it, an unsigned and typewritten message read,
Ask for Mrs Murphy. She knows nothing, but has the folder for you.

Not knowing what to think of the arrangement, but less disappointed now by the cardinal’s absence, he did ask for her, and was waiting in the hallway when a young woman’s voice reached him from a double door. “You realize you shouldn’t be here in uniform.”

Bora recognized the singing American speech and turned on his heel. Mrs Murphy stood a few steps away, holding a tray of bloodstained bandages.

“You’re right,” he admitted. “I’m sorry – I come directly from work.”

Had she been less beautiful. Unhappily Bora looked at her, and she at him.

“What are you doing here, Major Bora?”

“I’m here at Cardinal Borromeo’s prompting.”

“Very well.” She handed the tray to a gliding little nun, stepped into a doorway for a moment, and came out of it with a sealed manila envelope, which she stretched to him without coming close. “As I understand, you are to return this within three hours at the latest. You may sit in there. And please have Sister inform me when you’re done.”