Liar Moon (17 page)

Bora paid attention to colours and textures, noting how the same light appeared tender on one surface and crude, cruel on another. Indifferent on farm walls or where it lit up the frozen squares of sheets hung to dry, it turned into a fat, happy light on round objects, meagre and dour on angular ones. Light knotted narrow bands in between trees, but lay lavish and exacting like enamel on their branches facing east.

Russian colours, Russian season. Bora remembered writing to his wife about the light in Russia, sending her sketches that according to his mother she had not yet had time to unwrap. In the yawning blue beyond the fleece of clouds, the dark of the moon stood out like a ghostly circle, barely bluer than the sky. No liar moon, this one. It resembled a communion wafer to be held on one’s tongue until it melts.

The cars stopped in a windless lot by the road, and Bora got out to meet Guidi. Patting the woolly heads of his German shepherds, Bora gave clipped instructions to their handler. Then he said, “Tell me all you know about the convict, Guidi.”

“Other than that he was being transferred from one jail to another when he escaped? Well, he was an infantryman, and on furlough from Albania for shell shock at the time he knifed his mother to death over an unshined pair of boots. There’s no telling where he got the gun and ammunition, but from what I showed you, he did.”

Bora nodded. Quickly he pulled a leather glove onto his right hand with the help of his teeth before saying, “I will be honest with you, Guidi. If my men and I happen to surprise him, we’ll deliver him to you gladly. If he fires at us, we’ll gun him down.”

“I expected you to say that.”

“Only so that you know.”

Like fleece growing tighter, the sparse clouds overhead were closing in to create a compact layer, soon to seal over the rising sun. A dry sprinkle of snow came down to powder the dogs’ backs. Wherever sunlight still peered through, the flakes glittered like bits of foil. Bora, who was still running a fever, appreciated the cold air. He started across the field ahead of Guidi, and though his knee ached sharply, he kept pace.

When Guidi caught up, Bora said, “There was a prisoner of war while I was in Russia – I never knew his name or patronymic, but we called him ‘Valenki’ because of the winter boots he wore. He wasn’t what you call a ‘well man’. And, like your convict, he had a fascination with footwear. Instead of moping around and begging like
his companions – you haven’t seen begging until you’ve seen Russian prisoners of war do it, Guidi, it makes you sick instead of angry – he’d squat by the fence of the compound and look at the soldiers go by. Soldiers and refugees, because at that time we were still advancing rapidly. Well, Valenki stared at everyone’s feet, and in all seriousness predicted who would die before long. The other prisoners laughed at him, and so did those among us who spoke Russian.”

Flanked by Turco, Guidi watched his step on the stony, snow-covered terrain.

“Do you speak Russian too, Major?” Turco asked admiringly.

“Yes. But I never laughed at Valenki
.
”

It galled Guidi that Turco was warming to Bora. “Well, there’s no need for foreign explanation here. The fugitive needs a pair of shoes, kills for them, and discards them if they don’t fit.”

“My soldier was still wearing his boots.”

Guidi didn’t want to say the
carabinieri
had happened on the body immediately after the killing, and kept mum.

“Shoes or no shoes,” Corporal Turco intervened from behind the foul little cloud of his cigarette smoke, “this girl” (he used the Sicilian word
picciotta
, nodding toward Lola-Lola) “will take us straight to that
lazzu di furca
.”

Bora turned to him. “Fine weather for tracking, eh, Turco?”

The Sicilian seemed flattered by the familiar address. Despite his protestations to Guidi against the Germans, he now looked at Bora with respect, vigorously assenting. “Why, sir, that’s a fact. Does
vossia
… Does the major hunt?”

“Not animals.”

Talking, they had reached the place where they would part ways, on the side of a narrow irrigation ditch stopped by ice. Through Bora’s binoculars it appeared like a scar in the snowy earth, rimmed here and there by dry stalks of furze tall as a man and ruddy like rusted metal.

Bora passed the binoculars to Guidi. “
Pyrej
, the Russians call that plant. If you’re really hungry you can make bread out of its flour.” He glanced around at the cheerless countryside. “I see plenty of things one could live on, if one had to.”

Guidi scanned the edge of the field and the hills beyond it. He found Bora’s superficiality unbearable in light of his
other
involvements, his
other
duties. A cold-blooded killer seeking justice against a cold-blooded killer. How did he justify deportations to his arrogant self-righteousness as faithful husband and honourable soldier? Even Russia was a pretext to show his ability to handle things. Claretta’s survival must not register on the scale of what mattered to Martin Bora.

Soon they had come to the irrigation ditch, where Guidi and Bora synchronized their watches. “You keep to the flat land,” Bora said, “and we’ll edge the hills. We will spread out in a semicircle and join again with you here at eleven hundred hours. If you hear firing, don’t come. You needn’t trouble yourself with what else we may be doing in these parts.”

An hour later Bora and his men reached a clearing at the foot of the northern hills, where a ledge overgrown with brushwood formed a small recess that offered a shelter from the wind. Snow had been falling steadily for the past thirty minutes, and the northerly scattered
it in gusts of powdery consistency. The white sprinkle adhered to dead leaves and trunks and the men’s winter uniforms.

Against the rock wall of the recess, traces of a fire built from twigs and small branches were rapidly being covered by snow. Nagel took a stick, poked the fire with it and felt the stick with his bare hand.

“Still warm,
Herr Major
.”

Bora could see how young trees at the top of the ledge had been snapped to provide fuel.

“And the fire’s so small, sir, it doesn’t look like there was more than one man. Slept or sat here overnight.”

“Yes. Whoever it was, he moved out all right, but he could still be near by.”

Cautiously the soldiers started up the incline. Looking back at the fields, past an undulating curtain of thin snow, the houses of Sagràte were haphazardly sprinkled like pebbles along the road. Bora could no longer see Guidi and his men, because a sparse growth of trees intervened. No doubt the dogs had started after a trail, and if they hadn’t come here directly, it meant the fugitive was elsewhere.

Bora climbed ahead of the patrol. His boots found firm footing at times, at times they slipped, and he had to resist the urge to hold out his left hand for support. But being outdoors was invigorating to him. The cold earth smelled clean and good under his steps.

What did Guidi understand? The Russian winter had nearly killed him, but it was summertime Russia that frightened his soul. If he just closed his eyes, the sinister triangle of the airplane rudder rose like a dead fin out of the sea of sunflowers in bloom. The snow was gone, the
task at hand, gone. Those immensely tall and unbending stalks rose up, thick as a man’s arm and hairy with a razor-sharp bristle, through which he struggled in his nightmares. He fought and wrestled against them, his strength against theirs, squeezing among them until he could not breathe. Tirelessly he drove himself through until he made it to the airplane.

“More tracks,
Herr Major
.”

Nagel’s words startled him, so that Bora stumbled and had to reach for the closest branch in order to keep standing in the snowdrift.
It’s the fever
, he thought, and,
Thank God it is wintertime.

Perhaps because of his flimsier clothing, Guidi had less appreciation for the cutting wind riding the flat land. The snowfall was thickening, and soon they might have to interrupt the search. Even Lola-Lola ran about distracted by the weather, not to speak of Blitz’s wanderings. Guidi’s shoes had grown uncomfortable, and his feet stiff and numb in them. Bora and his soldiers had disappeared in the distance. Another hour and fifteen minutes had to pass before the rendezvous at the ditch; the ditch itself was invisible as the plain grew white and uniform before and behind Guidi’s men.

Ahead of his group marched Turco, shoulders rounded, rifle slung muzzle down the way his Mafia cousins carried them. Calling out to the dogs, the snub-nosed German soldier followed his own trail; three other men advanced in a broken line. Snow stuck to the front of their clothes as they went.

Despite the weather, the policeman in front of Guidi hummed in his low, off-key voice. Cavuto, of course, judging by the fragments of words floating from him.

“Come, there’s a trail in the forest / I’m the only one who knows of it / D’you want to know it too…”

Then Turco called out. “
Accura!
Inspector, somebody’s been through here!” He had reached the edge of a wooded patch, and pointed to footprints that the canopy of trees, bare though they were, kept from being filled quickly.

“They’re not German boots, are they?”

“No, there are no hobnails.”

When Guidi joined him, Turco had stepped further into the woods. Guidi followed him, after ordering Cavuto to stand ready to cover them. Cavuto nodded, oddly singing down to a hum. “Down there among the trees / Woven with blooming boughs / There’s a sweet simple nest / Just as your heart desires…”

He’s scared, and sings to calm his nerves
, Guidi thought.
Or else he thinks that singing of hidden trails will reassure the partisans if they’re on the lookout.

“It’s one man’s footprints, Inspector.”

“Stop moving around, Turco, you’re confusing things. Where do they go, can you tell?”

The Sicilian kept an intent, puzzled face to the ground. “Here and there, looks like. Like he was pacing back and forth or something. He stopped here, and then took a few more steps. I can’t tell, Inspector, but he had shoes on.”

“It’s only been snowing hard for the past hour, so we’re pretty close to him. Keep your eyes open, men. God willing, we’re wrapping this up today.”

The dogs had suddenly become single-minded again. Lola-Lola pawed at the trace, and Blitz squirmed with enthusiasm. Following them, Guidi and his group walked the depth of the wooded patch and then began edging
it again, eventually coming into the open, where snow circled hard against them.

The song had got into Guidi’s head, reeling like a noxious fly.

“It seems like a wonder / The woods and the moon / Passionate tales they tell…”

Here footprints were being obliterated rapidly, though the dogs were not mistaken now and strained to reach the rise in the land that heralded the hills.

“Come, there’s a trail in the forest / I’m the only one who knows of it / D’you want to…”

A rifle shot cracked among them, whipping down from the incline. The bullet went past Turco and grazed the arm of one of his companions. Echoes rolled after it from the piedmont.

“Get down!” Guidi shouted.

Another shot came, and then in quick succession three more, from a different angle. Guidi recognized these as from the Germans’ semi-automatic weapons. More echoes slapped the hills, growing fainter. Nothing followed this time.

“
Marasantissima
, they must have got him!” Turco rose from the snow, clumsy like a calf when he’s first born. “Either that, or he’s run off.”

The two groups met on the wooded hillside, which Guidi’s men reached by climbing, and the Germans by following the length of the ridge.

“We found blood,” Guidi informed Bora. “There’s a good amount of it some fifty yards on that side, and the snow is very disturbed. You can see there are drops and
trickles here, and here. The dogs are going crazy.” As he spoke, Guidi realized that Bora was ordering to call the dogs back. “Why did you do that, Major?”

“We put at least two bullets in him, possibly three. I guarantee you, he’s not going far.” With his boot Bora smoothed the bloodstains on the snow into a pink mash. “He won’t live until morning.”

“Until morning? Do you mean you’re not continuing the search now?”

“Don’t speak nonsense, Guidi. This is no terrain to go rummaging through unless there’s a damn good reason. I’m not risking my men’s lives to run after a murderer. We gave you a hand, and now we’re going back to Lago. If you want my advice, you’ll get out of the hills before the shots bring the partisans out. They know German rifles when they hear them.” And because Guidi was visibly frustrated by the proposal, Bora added, “I wouldn’t have given the order to shoot had he not opened fire. We had caught sight of him and were following at a distance, when apparently he saw your group and opened fire. I told you we’d shoot.”

“I’m staying until we find him, Major.”

“I’m not.”

Within minutes the Germans had left the hills and were walking back to the road. The snow, which for a time had subsided, was starting again to blow white and blinding and nearly horizontal as the wind carried it. It would, before long, cover the blood.

 

On Wednesday, 8 December, an air raid struck Verona.

Each in his office, Guidi and Bora witnessed the eastward passage of impossibly high formations of Allied
bombers plough the sky in long furrows of vapour. Before long the rumble of anti-aircraft guns reverberated, a deep and dark hammering of the air that shook the window panes at Lago and Sagràte. Frightened birds scattered from the riverside. Bora’s Iron Cross tinkled against the mirror where it hung by its black-red-white ribbon. And during the return flight there was a dogfight between American planes escorting the B-17s and German or Italian fighters, high above the ridge of the northern hills. Guidi could not tell them apart, but Bora recognized the Mustangs’ rat-like profiles, and the Messerschmitts’ squared, slim cockpits.