A Dark Song of Blood (13 page)

With Bora’s help, he had gathered a partial list of people who had attended the holiday party on the evening of her death. The German officers among them were off to Anzio or Cassino, and German civilians had already left Rome on 9 January. Guidi had since traced two Italian guests, from whom he learned that Merlo was not at the party. They had never heard Magda Reiner’s name, and couldn’t tell whether she was expected or not. Tonight, for an hour, he went through every detail of the bedroom. He knew he could not necessarily trust
the clues left behind by those who had preceded him in the search. Her dress – one button missing from it – and stockings lay on the armchair, as she had left them when preparing for bed, or readying to go out again. All he came up with were store receipts, a scrap of crumpled white paper wedged between the bedstead and the wall, and a handful of dust from under the bed. Cloth fibers were caught in the dust, a hair, fine ash-like impalpable bits, bread or cake crumbs, a bit of dark chocolate.

His skimpy file on
Ras
Merlo had grown steadily, mostly thanks to Danza’s knack for burrowing through papers and getting folks to gossip. It included dated reports of rough carousing in army brothels up near Vittorio Veneto back in 1917, a couple of serious injuries to political adversaries in his Matteotti period, and the frustrated, petty overbearing typical of local Party officials. Details that Guidi (but not Guidi alone) now so much associated with fascism. But the man seemed indeed honest when it came to money. As for his relationship to Magda, Bora had gotten out of her girlfriend that she’d come to work twice with bruises on her arms, and had taken to wearing a neck scarf lately. It was something, but not enough. Bruises are nameless. Having placed his flashlight on the bed table, Guidi stood in front of the window, tried its lock, opened and closed it, measured the two steps between the window and the bed. There was no escaping the conclusion. Why would the window be open on a late December night, if not to throw herself out?

On his way out, floor by floor, Guidi stopped by every locked door in the apartment building. No name tags, no tenants. What were the Germans storing in those empty spaces? He tried his key in several locks, without success. Through the soprano’s door on the ground floor, exceedingly loud sounds came from a radio. The news reported how the American 34th Division had been halted below the town of Cassino.

Bora heard the same news at Mount Soratte, where he spent the day with Kesselring and General Westphal. Dusk was spreading
over the city at his return, sheets and streaks of violet drawn across a clearing sky; he drove past the dark expanse of houses at high speed, bound for the mud-clogged Anzio front.

13 FEBRUARY 1944

In fact, Bora only made it as far as Aprilia. He’d managed to reach it by a miracle, along country lanes spared by shelling and bombs in the convulsion of craters, upheaved earth, trees splintered as they began to bud. Past a disused railway bed, at dawn he reached the station of Carroceto, where cannon fire was still being exchanged, but fighting had stopped enough for troops to crawl out of foxholes and gather the dead. A gray-faced, high-strung lieutenant showed him around and began to cry with exhaustion when Bora commanded him to sit down. American dead and English dead lined the streets on quilts of bloody mud, face up where they fell; medics looked like butchers. “Watch out, live wire!” someone yelled, and the gray-faced lieutenant was still sobbing with his face in his hands when Bora rode off in an army truck toward Aprilia.

Smoke hung in pallid layers over the town. All around lay disabled vehicles, dead mules, overturned carts, civilian dead pasted with dust and ashes, worn embankments, a geography of war Bora had learned by heart elsewhere, until he could move through it with a steady, heavy heart. Artillery fire came in fits from the direction of the sea, beyond fruit trees not even ten years old and zigzags of whitewashed orchard walls. Under the wraiths of smoke, Aprilia bore the name of its birth month and, like other towns in the Reclamation Land, showed its usual handful of factory-like brick buildings: city hall, church,
casa del fascio
, a few blocks of workers’ housing. Hard to tell what was what right now. Fitful artillery fire came and went.

The improvised field hospital, crammed with enemy casualties not yet interrogated, was Bora’s target of opportunity for
fact-finding. It occupied a two-floored square house of ugly bricks – the whole town was bricks and two-floored square houses – packed with beds and pallets among which an army surgeon moved wearily.

All day Bora had smelled and recognized the odors of battle, and walking into the hospital dismayed him with the realization that he’d missed them: sweetish, intimate, sour and hard, the odors of wounded and dead flesh, painful and offensive but a part of him for so long that even their offensiveness was welcome. The surgeon – a Captain Treib, bleary-eyed, with some days’ worth of blond growth on his face – stared at the Polish and Russian campaign ribbons on Bora’s chest, and let him do the rounds of the crowded floor. Artillery fire, coming from somewhere westward (Bora knew where: the flat and muddy stretches reclaimed and planted forcibly, Mussolini’s claim to greatness) had started up again full force. A closer blast caused the incongruously ornate ceiling lamps to swing; windowpanes rattled, plaster crumbled and fell. An amputee from across the room said in English, “My God,” and then cried out the words again at the top of his voice. Bora turned to look at him.

And at that moment, even as he straightened from leaning over an American’s bedside, a direct hit reached the corner of the building. Space, time, words seemed to explode. A metal basin came flying, smashed into a shelf, glass and iodine and phenol erupted all around. Pieces of masonry, tiles and stones jettisoned downwards, one of the lamps dropped with an armful of plaster and wires attached to it, the windows were obscured by the roof crashing down in sheets. Through their shattered panes a fury of debris burst in. Dust, glass, metal bits shot inside, rubble cascaded from the upper floor in heaps that clogged the stairs and blocked the door. A fretful high-pitched howl screamed into a second explosion, and the shock wave rocked and broke through the debris of the stairwell. Choking clouds of smoke and pulverized plaster flew into the room with it. The ceiling caved in from the center out.

This time Bora was thrown back against the wall, pinned to it by a rage of collapsing lumber. Through the wreckage, he saw flames leaping high from the truck parked outside the blasted window and a storm of plaster dust circling the room, where the one lamp still hanging swung like a censer in its own smoke. He tried to free himself and couldn’t, to stretch enough to reach for the half-crushed bed and couldn’t. Steadying his breathing was all he could do, guarding nausea was all he was able to do. Fear had no place in this. It was physical revulsion at being caught, his neurotic body response of the Stalingrad days, where the hopelessness of having no way out made him throw up before action, as if his animal shell had to empty itself to claim autonomy from starvation and defeat. He knew it well and it threatened to rack him out of control even as he stood there, the nape of his neck driven against the wall to keep check on himself and his breathing.

Other explosions followed, with the banging and cracking of things that break and trundle and fall in. Bora found enough room to slide down and crouch on the floor with his back to the wall, so tightly in control now; even panic was preferable to this being crammed inside by discipline, possessed by it and unable to let go.

“Oh my God!” the voice was crying from the ravage of the room.

Billows of dust rose and fell, obscuring even the closest object. In the extremity of his tension Bora was hardly aware of pain in his left leg, but when he groped for his knee, his hand met blood. The warm stickiness had had time to soak the cloth and leather of his breeches. His left boot was already filled with it. Pain was slow in coming, traveling through his stunned body. Bora wondered how he could have not noticed, though he had, his breathing had been affected by it. He fingered the blood and smelled it, that private touch and odor of self, frightening and known. Cold sweat beaded over him as in his Russian days, but fear did not follow. His mind neither elaborated nor anticipated things, so that each moment was its own disastrous self, bearable in its brevity, done with, and what came next was what came next.

It’d have been better had you died
, his wife had said. And long ago – long ago, it seemed to him now, as far back as Poland, and her first silence – his heart had told him that she was out of love with him.

Airplanes were tearing overhead. Bora recognized the sound of mid-range bombers, deadly accurate. All around, bombs came down in clusters, devoured each other’s echo until one felt no obstacle of skull or flesh between the wracking noise and one’s brain, and the din grew beyond hearing. With a bone-cracking effort Bora reached for the bed through the lumber, and grasped the frantic hand of the man lying there.

Bora’s cool-faced secretary looked uninterestedly at Guidi. “The major is not in, and is not expected to be in today. He left no message for any civilian.”

Guidi took her dryness and accented Italian in his stride. “Has he set aside a packet for me?”

She gave him an annoyed look. Under the military cap her hair was accurately combed in two rolls on her temples, shiny as if cast in metal. “Guidi, you said?” She extricated her shapely, silk-sheathed legs from under the desk and stepped into Bora’s office. Guidi heard her shuffle some papers, and return empty-handed. “I’m sorry, there’s nothing.”

Guidi took a deep breath. “There ought to be a bundle of letters.”

She had again sat at her desk, with a pretended air of absorption, placing a blank sheet in the typewriter. “Letters? Then you should have said you were seeking letters.” From a drawer she took out a sealed manila envelope, marked
Briefe
in Bora’s handwriting. Without wasting time in further conversation, she gave it to him and began typing.

Inside the envelope were the translations of Magda’s letters, and a note from Bora which Guidi chose not to read before leaving the building. Nervous after the early-morning air raid on the railway across the Tiber, the Germans were rude and
inquisitive, and Guidi especially disliked the Gestapo uniforms gloomily staining the hallways.

Bora had written down the first names of two men mentioned in Magda’s recent correspondence. One, Emilio, was Italian and “very young, now out of town.” The other was German, still in Rome, and his name was Egon, a captain in the SS.

I believe it’s Captain Sutor, but don’t know how useful my mediation with him would be
, the note concluded.
If needed I will put you in touch with him. Should things not work out in the next couple of days, get in touch with SS Colonel Eugene Dollmann, whose phone number my secretary is instructed to give you.

Guidi read through the lines that Bora had at the time of writing entertained at least some doubts about returning from wherever he was about to go.

14 FEBRUARY 1944

The heads of fat, brown-faced sunflowers rose and fell in waves over the black earth, swinging back and forth on endless stems. Deep sky, whitewashed farmhouses under roofs like trimmed haircuts of straw. Birds and airplanes stitching the sky like wounds, hands parting the shafts and hairy leaves, and no one stopping him. A yellow laughter of light seemed to run through the sunflowers even as they bent and fell over to uncover more sky and earth – they cheered and clapped with their bearded leaves. They billowed and tried to overwhelm him in black and yellow on the way, but there was no stopping Bora from what he would find.

The fin of the tail rudder stood, stark and green, high against the sky.

If only the sunflowers would close again and trap him as one who wants to drown. But they rose and fell away, and no one stopping him, no one stopping him.

“In God’s name, Bora, are you alive?”

Bora had to stare at the man shaking him before he recognized General Westphal at his bedside. He had no idea of where he was, though obviously Westphal had found his way there. The general kept shaking him. “I’ve been knocking on your goddamn door for ten minutes, and finally got the concierge to open with a skeleton key. I thought you had given up your damn ghost! When did you get back, and what in God’s name...? There’s blood all over!”

With much effort Bora pulled himself up against the headboard. He felt empty and nauseous, but was starting to remember. “No time to change,” he apologized, “I know I’m late,” and other words that were nonsense even to himself.

When he tried to get off the bed, Westphal prevented him. “Don’t get up, you fool,” he said, and to someone on the threshold, invisible to Bora, “Get a physician right away.”

16 FEBRUARY 1944

In Guidi’s reckoning, the “boy” Professor Maiuli had started coaching in Latin was well past high school age. He was likely a university student, since classes were not running these days. Home early by coincidence, after crossing Rau on the stairs Guidi asked the professor, “How did he avoid the draft? It’s remarkable that the Germans haven’t taken him as forced labor.”

Maiuli touched his chest. “Bad lungs. You needn’t worry about Antonio, Inspector. I saw his university papers – all’s in order. He lives with his parents near St Lawrence’s.”

“A fine place to get bombed. And he comes clear across town to be coached?”

“He heard how good the professor is,” Signora Carmela spoke up. “There’s nothing strange about that.”

Francesca had stayed home with a headache, though she hardly looked in pain. With an undefinable little smile she’d been listening to the exchange. “He has a beautiful profile,” she
said. And when Guidi turned his attention to her, she added, “Well? He does.” She filled her mouth with a piece of bread and put her coat on. “I’m going to see my mother. Don’t any of you wait up for me.”