A Dark Song of Blood (3 page)

Then, before the Germans’ eyes, the airplanes widely parted and nosed up, their dull bellies giving way to the sheen of cockpits as they veered to rejoin each other to the east. Fire boomed in quick succession from an anti-aircraft post somewhere, aimlessly enough, but sufficient to divert the pilots from the attack. In the suddenly remade silence, Westphal calmly and distinctly blasphemed to himself.

Bora felt much the same, but chose to note the time on his pad. If either man was shaken, he did not show it. As the car started again, “Forget Frascati,” Westphal said. “Let’s go directly to Aprilia. I want to talk to some of the commanders. Who’s responsible there?”

“Colonel Holz.”

Colonel Holz, after uselessly appealing to Westphal, protested that his exhausted men had to remain on constant alert.

“I don’t think you have much choice,” Bora said.

“That’s all because the field marshal has an invasion mania,” Holz protested. “We’ve been watching the goddamn shore for three months, and the enemy hasn’t even crept up to the Garigliano River yet, twenty-five miles in all! What good are tired troops going to be?” And, because Bora was unsympathetic, he added, “Look, Major, I see you’ve been to Russia – you know how weary holding the line is.”

“It’s worse losing it.”

“Goddamn it, you’re not listening to me! I’m going directly to Kesselring after this!”

“You do that, Colonel.”

Holz had begun to turn away from Bora but changed his mind, and faced him again with a sharp half-turn on his
heels. “If Westphal ever leaves you behind, I’ll have your ass for this.”

Bora nearly lost his temper at the words. “As the colonel wishes.”

Much the same scene was repeated at Anzio and up the coast from it.

“They’re going to have their way,” Westphal grumbled as they rushed a lunch somewhere along the road back. “I won’t, but the field marshal will listen, I know.” He had a map laid open on the battered hood of the car, and munched on a sandwich as he looked at it.

Bora looked down, partly to conceal anger for the response they had met, partly because crippling pain had awakened in his left arm and he did not want Westphal to notice it. He said, watching him pencil circles over the map, “If need be, the Reclamation Land can be flooded.”

Westphal nodded, swallowing the last of his sandwich. “It’s the interior that will make a difference at this point.” Their glances met above the map. “How well do you know it?”

“I’ve been to Sora, Anagni – Tivoli I know well.” Bora spoke as Westphal pointed out the places. “Impregnable citadels for three thousand years. The monastery above Cassino, too – I wouldn’t want to have to take it.” Moving back on the map, the general’s forefinger drew a circle on the flat area immediately around Rome, and Bora shook his head. “The rest is mush.”

Westphal assented gloomily. He was pressing with his knuckle on the resort town of Lido, directly in line with Rome. “God forbid anything from happening there –
Il Duce
’s Imperial Way would deliver them into our lap in an hour’s time.”

“Would they land so far from the bulk of their forces?”

“With Americans, one doesn’t know what they would do.” The general folded the map and handed it to Bora. “Let’s go. I want to be at Soratte before any of the commanders get in touch with the field marshal.”

*

The new address, Guidi had to admit, was more convenient than the decentralized Via Merulana. Now from his doorstep on the elbow-shaped Via Paganini – if the public cars failed – he could manage the walk to his office on Via Del Boccaccio. The owners, Maiuli by name, were from Naples – a retired professor of Latin and his wife, a “remarkable hunchback”, as he described her. Given the southern penchant for superstition, Guidi suspected a less than disinterested affection on the part of the professor, who was an inveterate lotto player. He listened to the old couple, lost in the array of knick-knacks and plaster saints that crowded the parlor, inform him of the house rules.

“The bathroom is at the end of the hallway, and the maid comes to clean in the morning.”

“Dinner is at eight on the dot.”

“Overnight visitors are discouraged. This is a well-regulated house and we pride ourselves in keeping only selected guests.”

“... And no more than two at a time.”

“Who else is staying here?” Guidi asked.

“An art student by the name of Lippi.” Professor Maiuli hastened to say, “You’ll have a chance to become acquainted before long.”

“Will either of you or that gentleman mind if I smoke?”

Donna Carmela made a face. “We’d rather you didn’t, but I suppose that a cigarette after dinner will not kill anyone.”

Once in his room, Guidi sat on the bed, staring at the lurid lithograph of St Gennaro’s execution hanging above it. It was a beheading in full colors, especially unwelcome as he’d just viewed the photos of Fräulein Reiner after the fall. Guidi planned to ask Bora about her again, since she was apparently well known among the officers. For now, he avoided making conjectures, waiting for clues to roll out of a well-rehearsed nowhere, as they often did. After making sure his door was locked, he reached for the lithograph, took it off the nail and slipped it under the bed face down, where it’d stay until the maid came in the morning to clean.

11 JANUARY 1944

In the morning, as he was preparing for his first meeting with the head of Rome police, Guidi cut his chin while shaving in his room. Remembering he’d seen a bottle of alcohol in the bathroom, he walked down the hallway in that direction, with a handkerchief pressed to his jaw. Just as he reached the door, a young woman walked up from behind and took hold of the handle.

“Sorry, I’ve got to use it first.”

Guidi was surprised, but automatically stepped back. He was standing a few feet away when she came out. “By the way, what’s happened to you?” she asked.

Guidi told her.

“Oh, I thought you had a toothache.” So, this was the art student, whom he’d assumed to be a man. In her mid-twenties, Guidi judged, excessively thin. Clothes hung loosely on her. Still, her face was fine and luminous, and she had beautiful dark eyes. “Are you the policeman?”

“I’m Inspector Sandro Guidi.”

“And I’m Francesca Lippi. Pleased to meet you.” Heading for her room, she added, “I use the bathroom a lot, ’cause I’m pregnant.”

The newly arrived head of police, Pietro Caruso, looked myopic. On his long head, graying hair sat brushed in a tamed bristle. He was already occupying his desk at the
Questura Centrale
, a post he was due to take over officially in a few weeks.

“Do you know what my name means?” he asked Guidi, whose credentials lay before him. “It means
apprentice in a sulphur mine.
That’s what it means.”

Guidi failed to understand why the subject was introduced, if not to enhance the achievements of the man facing him. He was anxious to be given the Reiner folder, but Caruso’s second question had no more bearing on the issue than the first.

“Where did you attend school?”

“Urbino.”

“The boarding school or the reformatory?” Caruso seemed amused by his own joke. “No, seriously – the Piarist Fathers, eh? Good. And then?”

“The university there.”

“How could you afford it?”

“I had a bursary to attend. My father was awarded a gold medal posthumously, and the educational opportunity came with it.” Anticipating Caruso’s next question, Guidi explained, “He was killed in the line of duty at Licata in ’24.”

“Was he
carabinieri
or police?”

“Police.”

“That’s good. Any foreign languages?”

“Four years of school French.”

“People should learn German, these days.”

Guidi did not know what to say to that, so he said nothing.

“Well, we’ll have to do with what we have,” Caruso grumbled. With his nose on the paper, he read through Guidi’s file. “It says here you have worked with Germans before.”

“Well, in a manner of speaking, not really —”

“Did you get along?”

“I got along.”

Caruso stared at him from above his glasses. “Before we get into the Reiner case, let me see your Party card.”

Guidi took it out, and handed it across the desk.

Cardinal Giovanni Borromeo, better known to his many friends as Nino, had not – despite his saintly ancestry – started out as a priest. He had once been prominent in the useless young society of Rome, when the city was newly a capital to the unified kingdom of Italy. You could travel it then as an archipelago where hotels stood out like islands of elegance and decadent living in the sea of streets being just then widened and modernized. Borromeo had frequented the racecourse and the theater, had “loved much” as he himself admitted, and had
been much loved. “But God loved me best of all,” he would unfailingly add these days. “He knew. He knew all along, and when He got me, He wouldn’t let go. He’s the last of my lovers. Of course,” he would conclude, “keeping in mind that God is neither male nor female.”

Bora’s request for a meeting did not surprise him. He knew Cardinal Hohmann well enough to be in competition with him – a friendly competition but one nonetheless; and he appreciated that the German aide wisely tried to take advantage of it. Still a young man as cardinals go, he figured as fifty-five in his passport, though he was a couple of years older than that. Tall and elegantly built, he spoke Latin with the same heavy Roman accent he put into his Italian speech, and the unaffected ease of one who doesn’t have to prove himself.

He’d first met Bora at a papal audience for German officers during Hitler’s visit in 1938, and they had fallen in to talking about church music and the organs in Roman churches. Today Bora found him at his house office in Via Giulia, sitting at his desk with a pile of newspapers to his right and empty cups of coffee lining the windowsill. The first thing he wanted to know was how the interview with Hohmann had gone, and despite Bora’s reserve, he gleaned what the results had been by the very fact that the officer was appealing to him.

“Don’t resort to my common sense because I have none,” he lightly told Bora. “I’m not German.” When Bora accepted the invitation to sit, and took place on a skinny sofa padded with red brocade, Borromeo smirked. “And I’d rather you just called me ‘Cardinal’. Let’s leave the ‘Eminence’ to those who’d like to be Pope.” He listened to what Bora had to say, frowning now and then but mostly looking outside of the window, over the well-trimmed oleanders of his balcony, still green in the crisp winter wind. “So, why should I answer differently from Hohmann?” he said then. “You ask us to accept that you cannot, or
will not
curb the excesses of the Fascist administration in Rome.”

“I believe I’m telling the cardinal nothing new if I assure him that the German Army is not pleased with any interim government.”

“You’d rather have the city to yourselves?”

“We’d rather have no interference from PAI and what else remains of Fascist police units.”

“That’s neither here nor there. We expect you to curb the zeal of the Blackshirts left in town – even though I’m a Fascist of sorts myself. The Church was Fascist long before
Il Duce
planned his ‘March on Rome’. We marched on it in AD 64 with Peter and Paul at the lead.” Borromeo rang a bell on his desk. At the timid appearance of a cleric on the threshold, he merely gestured. Shortly thereafter, a tray with a coffee urn and cups was brought in. “I don’t trust people who don’t like espresso.” He ensured that Bora should accept the drink. “Your ambassador gets along with us – why shouldn’t the army?”

“The army is not involved in politics, Cardinal.”

“But the SS is. The Gestapo is. What you’re telling me is that you Germans will not curb any excesses by our police forces, or yours.”

Bora finished his coffee and put the cup away. “The cardinal could help by making sure that no police excesses are required.” He had never smiled during the interview, and now grew a little testy. “By
Rome underground
we mean more than the catacombs, and the Church seems to have a part in all of it.”

“This you wouldn’t dare tell Hohmann. It’s impudent!”

“And true.”

Borromeo crossed his legs, with some impatience lifting his robe to free them. “On Sunday, there’s a concert at the Evangelical Church on Via Toscana. Hammerschmidt music – if you attend, I’ll give you an answer.” He shrugged at Bora’s puzzled look. “Oh, yes, I go to Protestant services, now and then. Not dressed like this, of course. But it’s good to know what the competition is up to, especially if there’s good music to be had.”

At Bora’s return from his errand, Westphal said, “Damn these priests! It takes them forever to make up their mind, and all we want is for them to take back an impossible request.”

Bora was handing him some snapshots of Ciano’s execution, which the general glimpsed briefly. “Damn him, too.”

“Should we allow publication of them?”

“You’ll have to phone Gestapo Colonel Herbert Kappler to find out. Might just as well, since you’re bound to run into him.”

Bora obeyed.

In his bleak office on Via Tasso, lowering the receiver, Kappler turned to Captain Sutor, who sat with a disinterested slump across from him. “I just spoke to Westphal’s aide – who is he?”