Liar Moon (6 page)

At the foot of the tree Lola-Lola acknowledged the cooling trail discovered by her mate, but was still restless. The soldier could hardly hold her back. She started in a straight line, crossing a brownish cornfield where meagre stubs were all that remained of the harvest. Here she picked up speed until the men had to keep up with her by jogging.

“Now she’ll lead us where the other shoe was found,” Turco predicted.

Thus they came to the place where the swinging, leafless tops of the willows along the county road, at first pale like a distant haze, grew more distinct as the men drew closer. Here the river bent into a deep meander, nearly touching the verge. The water’s surface, lazy and even sluggish, was deceptive enough. Guidi had heard that deep mud and fast-moving currents lurked below.

Lola-Lola sniffed the spot where the first shoe had been found, wedged between two rocks. She sat on her haunch to be praised by the snub-nosed young soldier. Blitz came to sniff around after her, and sneezed.

“
Da. Da drüben.
” Taking Guidi by the sleeve, the German soldier pointed to the stretch of the road just ahead. Guidi understood he meant to show him the place where the German convoy had been ambushed in September. The first partisan hit had been aimed at Bora’s car, which led the convoy. “
Da drüben wurde der Major verwundet
.” With the edge of his right hand, the soldier made a chopping
motion on his left wrist, to make Guidi understand that Bora had been wounded here.

The wind awoke gloomy sounds in the willows and across the cornfields. Blitz perked up his ears, but Lola-Lola kept busy. Her greying chin quivered. She turned her tawny head against the wind, half-closing her eyes. She smelled the wind. Suddenly she started out again, without haste but assuredly, nose to the ground, while Blitz trotted festively after.

A long march followed across fields mowed so long ago as to seem fallow, beyond unkempt expanses of land and trails cancelled by time. Silently men followed animals, until they came so close to Lola-Lola’s goal that she let out a growling call. Blitz echoed her with a menacing howl. Turco, who had until now held his rifle underarm like a vengeful hunter, lowered it to take a better look.

 

In Verona, Bora said, “I don’t understand why you’re so irritated, De Rosa. If she’s telling tales, it’ll be easy to call her bluff, but the photograph is convincing enough.”

“I don’t believe any of it, Major. Soldiers all look alike. Until I see the priest’s marriage certificate, I won’t believe it.”

“That will be difficult to obtain. Our Lisi did not marry in church. As a good socialist – you knew he was an ardent socialist until the Great War, didn’t you? – he kept well away from religious encumbrances. But since there was a child on the way, why, as the golden-hearted fellow he was, he did consent to a civil marriage. The woman says the little girl died of meningitis within one year,
by which time Lisi had already cleared out. You heard the rest. He didn’t show up again until 1920, when he returned to live off her parents for a year. Other long absences followed, then came the March on Rome, the car accident, politics. For a girl from the backwoods in the Friuli borderland, who can’t read or write, it was easy to put up with abuse.”

De Rosa quivered like a dart waiting to be released. “And do you believe she just
happens
to be in Verona now that Lisi has been killed?”

Patiently Bora looked down at the Italian. “No. Not by chance. I believe someone told her to come.”

“But who? Who’d profit from alerting her?”

Bora controlled the hilarity he felt at De Rosa’s frustration. “I don’t know yet. But as you say in Italy, every tangle meets the comb sooner or later. We’ll just have to keep combing the right way.”

 

Out in the Sagràte fields, Guidi was the first to reach the place after the dogs.

A man lay supine in the ditch, his shoulders nearly encased in the freezing ground. Ice crystals created delicate spider webs in his bloody nostrils. His eyes, wide open and opaque, showed little of the irises, turned back under the upper lids. Stiffly the man’s elbows adhered to his hips in the tomb-like narrows of the ditch, though his forearms rose at an angle and his hands clawed upward like the legs of dead chickens on the butcher’s counter. A black stain on his chest marked the spot where life had been blasted out of him. Along his left cheek, bristling with unshaven beard, a dark jellied trickle formed a snaking path to his ear, which was filled with dry blood.

The dead man had no shoes on. Stiff in the cloudy, icy water of the ditch, his feet stuck up covered only by army socks of an indefinable colour. The big toe of his left foot peeked from a hole in the wool. A miserable mixture of Italian and German army clothing covered the entire body. Whether a partisan or deserter, the corpse had no visible weapons on or near him.

Guidi ordered the body to be lifted out of the ditch and searched thoroughly.

Turco came up with a piece of mould-blue dry bread, parsimoniously nibbled all around. He showed it to Guidi.

“Wanted to make it last, Inspector.”

“What else is there?”

Turco kept rummaging. “Nothing.”

Guidi ordered the men to search for weapons in the area, though he expected to find none.

“He’s not the man we’re after, that’s all. The description doesn’t even come close. God knows who he is, but I bet the shoes we found were his. The convict probably took them from him after killing him.”

Turco assented. “Well, he’s been dead a few days.
Santi diavuluni
, but why would anyone?…”

“If I knew, I’d tell you, Turco.”

Guidi was annoyed by Blitz’s persistent smelling and pawing of the dead man, and stepped away. These were the times when he grew tired of his sad profession, and became unwilling to talk. Behind him the sun had nearly completed its low arc, and had escaped a long bank of clouds enough to draw enormously long shadows under everything that stood. Guidi’s shadow reached well past the edge of the field, and the shadows of the corn stubble formed a bluish forest on the bare lay of the land.

“Let’s go back to Sagràte,” he ordered the group. “I have other things to do before dark.”

 

After the ostentation of Lisi’s funeral, Verona’s poor side appeared to Bora as something from another world. Darkened by curfew, tenement houses packed tightly beyond the railroad tracks formed a tall maze he had to enter, park in and walk through.

It took him some time to find the midwife’s address. Even so, the leprous front of the multi-storeyed house was so dismal, he double-checked his note in the unsteady glint of his lighter. It was here, and no mistake. Bora walked in, closed the door behind him, found the light switch. He looked up the malodorous stairwell, at the ten ramps of steep, worn stairs leading to the fifth floor, and started his climb.

The late Italian supper-time lent smells and sounds to the house. Behind the flimsy front doors, at every landing different voices flowed to Bora. Children whimpering or old people’s complaints – each sound, unhappy or irate, mingled with the stench of cabbage soup, latrines and stoves that didn’t work properly. Sometimes you
climb
to hell.

Bora had to pause at the third floor, because of the wrenching pain in his left knee. Leaning against the banister, he held his breath to regain control. And if he closed his eyes, the smells and voices could be Spain, or Poland, or Russia, any of the sad places where he’d brought war in the last seven years of his life.

But the pain was Italy, here and now.

“Watch out,” the surgeon had warned him (he, too, using the un-Fascistic
lei
), asking that he return to the hospital before Saturday. “It’s become infected twice
already, do you really want to end up lame? We must get the rest of the shrapnel out of your knee.”

The unlit fifth floor seemed as far as the moon.

When Bora limped up the last step, only by the dim glare of the light bulb below could he judge there was a short hallway ahead of him. The lighter was needed again to read name tags, and even so Bora went the wrong way, judging by the stench of stale urine that wafted to him from the end door.

Finally he knocked on the right door. The noise of a chair scraping the floor followed, but the tenant was tardy in answering.

“Who’s there?”

Bora didn’t know what to say.

“
Öffnen Sie
.” He decided to identify himself as a German.

At once came the clatter of the lock, and the door opened.

 

The sun had long set, and it was pitch dark when Guidi arrived in Verona. In the blackout, the streets seemed all the same to him. He found himself passing twice under the vast medieval arches of the castle’s raised escape route, and twice down the elegant shopping district. By the time he reached Clara Lisi’s street behind the Corso, not one but two plain-clothes men watched her flat. Only after much insistence did Guidi convince them to allow him to visit her at this late hour.

She wasn’t expecting visitors. It was the first thing she told him, pulling back the ringlets from her face. “That’s why you see me like this, Inspector.”

But to Guidi her lounging blouse and pantaloons appeared elegant all the same. It was rather the lack of
make-up that surprised him. Without powder and rouge, Claretta’s face was far from unattractive. Just different. The astonished look of her blue eyes had a nearly childish emptiness under the thinned eyebrows. Guidi couldn’t help wondering what Bora might say about this face.

“Good heavens.” Walking ahead of him to the parlour, Claretta kept fussing with the ringlets on her temples. “I must be a perfect horror.”

“On the contrary, you look very well.”

“Thank you for coming to visit.” She invited him to sit on the sofa. “Tea? Real coffee?”

“No, thanks.”

On the magenta carpet, the Pomeranian slept in a furry ball on the cover of a movie magazine. In the compote at the centre of the coffee table, the golden wrappers of consumed
Talmone
chocolates stood out among untouched candy pieces. Claretta picked them up swiftly. “I wasn’t expecting visitors,” she repeated. “And I shouldn’t be eating any of these. They’re bad for the figure.”

After they sat down, closer to each other than the first time, she said nothing else. Hands limp in her lap, she seemed to wait for a message from him. But Guidi couldn’t think of a real reason why he’d come, other than to see her again. He whipped a pack of cigarettes out of his pocket.

She promptly accepted one. “How nice of you. I finished mine earlier today. They do not let me out, you know.”

Gallantly Guidi offered, “You may keep them.” He’d bought
Tre Stelle
cigarettes in anticipation of coming to see her, a small luxury for one who always rolled his own.

“Is the German major coming also?”

Her mention of Bora made Guidi stiffen. “No. Why do you ask?”

“Because I don’t think he likes me.”

“The major has no interest in liking people.” Guidi made up the statement, unsure that it wouldn’t actually justify Bora’s behaviour in her eyes.

Claretta’s eyelids stayed low. “I see. In any case, neither you nor the major can help me now.”

“How are they treating you?”

“Not badly. They do not let me out, that’s all. The baby suffers most from it, because he loves taking walks.”

She meant the dog, but Guidi found the sentence artificial, somehow hollow. There was stupidity in it, but in the way stupidity is varnish rather than substance, lacquered on with careful strokes. Women protected themselves that way. He’d seen prostitutes caught in the act, playing dumb, and – worlds away from them – his own mother using that same empty stare. Unlike Bora, he could forgive the ruse. Claretta was telling him, “It doesn’t matter to anyone who the culprit really is.” A line drew itself between the shaven ridges of her eyebrows. “If they don’t find anyone else to pin the murder on, they’ll have
me
to pay for it. And no one will care.”

Having little encouragement to offer, Guidi leaned over. “The investigation has barely started.” He spoke with trite optimism. “It hasn’t even started, really. It takes time.” How useless words were, when girls sat close by and smelled sweet. Still, he said, “If at least you could give us a clue, a name, anything suggesting a possible assassin – we’d start working on it right away.”

“
You
would, maybe. The major couldn’t care less.” Claretta took in a greedy draught from the cigarette, so that her cheeks sank in. They sat facing one another, and when she crossed her legs the tip of her pink slipper
grazed Guidi’s calf. But that was all the blandishment he was to receive. “I haven’t the faintest idea of who might have killed Vittorio. I told you. He had at least two bachelor flats in Verona, and spent entire days and nights there. I expect he used them to receive friends and associates, not to mention women. All I know, Inspector, is that after making me unhappy in life, he’s making me desperate in death. Besides, do you really think anyone would believe me, even if I pointed fingers?”

“I would believe you,” Guidi said warmly, louder than he’d planned.

At the foot of the sofa the Pomeranian awoke with a start. Frantically he leaped into Claretta’s lap, snarling at Guidi. Claretta petted him, uselessly trying to smile.

After leaving her flat, Guidi drove to Fascist headquarters, where he reread the dossier and the few papers Lisi had left behind. The originals were still in Bora’s possession, presumably at the German post in Lago. These were copies, and only because De Rosa had not been in had Guidi been able to secure them.

But De Rosa was not long in arriving at the archive room, skulls and rods and gloomy uniform.

“Does Major Bora know that you’re here on your own, Guidi? He didn’t mention you would be coming.”