A Dark Song of Blood (22 page)

“Fine.” Guidi left his desk and walked to the window. To the left, he could see the steps leading to Via dei Giardini.
In the moist spring sky, the first swallows flew like shuttles on a loom.

At Centocelle, the combination of badges on the Air Force uniforms was too much like his brother’s for Bora to look at it. He listened with his eyes low to the pilots’ requests for labor to repair the runways and took notes.

At eleven thirty one of Guidi’s colleagues left for the movie house down the street to watch a foreign film. “It’s cheaper than lunch, and there’s nothing good to eat anyway.”

At noon Westphal grumbled to Bora that they should close
Il Giornale d’Italia.
“That’s what happens when you have a founder who’s half Jewish and half English! ‘Obstinate defense of the Gothic Line’, eh? I want you to call the editor and ask him who wrote that.”

The
Mostra della Rivoluzione Fascista
had until recently had its seat in the Palace of Exhibitions on Via Nazionale, the long stretch connecting Diocletian’s Baths to Trajan’s Market. Bora went there directly at one o’clock, noticing the security checks at every intersection.

Militia Guards lined the steps in their black uniforms. Inside there were already several guests. All were inevitably treated to talk of past glories, for want of present ones, and Bora was just grateful that he hadn’t had to attend the official swearing in of Pietro Caruso at the Ministry of Corporations. And he fared better than those who had after that ceremony overindulged in food and wine at the Excelsior. He tried to attend tedious functions on an empty stomach, and – having limited his lunch with Westphal to a mouthful – from long practice of political rallies could hold yawns in by nothing more than a quick swallowing.

The two o’clock speaker, worse luck, was a one-legged elder whose nobility of sentiments was affected by slurred Southern speech and unbearable long-windedness.

“Jesus, this is boring,” someone whispered behind him. The cramming of similes, hyperboles and quotations continued for
more than an hour, by which time Bora followed nothing of what was being said. Left wrist in hand, he had assumed a lock-kneed immobility that allowed him to think of something else entirely. As always when he was under tension or stress, his left arm ached dully, a warning of pain that might unpredictably rise high from the severed muscles and nerves. Before him drifted thoughts of the trip to Soratte and of Mrs Murphy, and of the kind of pain a man with a leg amputated at the groin must have gone through.

“I wish somebody would pull the crutches from under his armpits.” This time Bora recognized Sutor’s voice behind him. He looked back to see if Dollmann was here also, but he wasn’t. Sutor whispered, “What the hell is the old prick saying? Someone ought to cram a foot in his mouth.” But they all had to endure the speech to the end, and clap, too.

Afterwards, Bora was about to leave when Sutor told him of a party at the German embassy in Villa Wolkonsky.

“If it’s tonight, I can’t.”

“It’s tomorrow night, and it’s the aftermath that counts.”

“I have no objection. Where’s the
aftermath
?”

“At Lola’s house, in the country, and it’s an all-night affair because of the curfew.”

Lola was Sutor’s present lover, Bora knew. “How do I get there?”

Sutor gave him directions. “Nineteen hundred hours, sharp. There’ll be intellectuals and movie people, and you can count on several of the women being high.” He grinned. “By morning they won’t know what got into them, or who.”

They had drawn close to one of the windows, talking. Both were alerted to the shaking of glass panes by four distinct, close explosions. By habit, Bora checked the time: three thirty-five. His first thought was that the anti-aircraft was firing at enemy planes. A disorderly flight of pigeons rose from the Ministry of Interior garden. Sutor crowded him to watch. “What happened?” By this time the militiamen were in turmoil, looking
over to their right and grasping their rifles. “Something’s been blown up back of us!” Sutor shouted, and withdrew precipitously from the window. Before everyone else, both officers rushed from the hall, Sutor to find a telephone and Bora out of the building, where the militiamen spoke agitated nonsense.

“They blasted the Excelsior!” they told Bora, who got into the car and urged the driver down Via Quattro Fontane to Via Veneto. His car careened past the unstrung troops of the security checks, beyond the American Church and the block of the Ministry of War. Here it became clear to Bora that neither the Excelsior nor the Flora nor Ministry of Corporations had been targeted. Dark smoke was coming out of Via Rasella at the Hotel d’Italia end of it, where a bus lay on its side and people were crawling from it. Bora ordered the driver to bear left and approach the street from the opposite side by the parallel Via dei Giardini.

Even as he left the car, a burst of machine-gun fire filled the steps leading to Via Del Boccaccio. Blindly Bora fired back. From here he could not see the top of Via Rasella. Midway up the incline, rags of smoke obscured the explosion area. A red froth of blood and sewage water ran down from it, and against that slippery waste Bora climbed to the screaming gate of hell.

The blasted pavement resembled a slaughterhouse. Gore splashed on the walls of houses seven and eight feet high, torn pieces of human bodies emptied themselves on the cobblestones. Men crawled screaming in their blood. The cries, smell and sights briefly overwhelmed him in an agonizing flashback. It was the continued shooting that kept Bora in control.

“Block the west end!” Bora ordered some dazed soldiers who were spinning around and firing at windows. Shouldering past them, he entered one of the houses at random. Before the terrified tenants, he grabbed a phone and sent word to Soratte that an SS battalion had just been decimated near Via Veneto.

When he stepped back into the street, Maelzer and Dollmann had joined in from the Excelsior. Maelzer was drunk,
ranting for revenge. Medics knelt in the blood and called for stretchers.

Sutor had also come. He stood blankly, rooted to the spot where a man’s intestines had bowled out onto the pavement. “Help me out,” Bora said, unbuckling his belt. “I can’t do it with one hand.” Together they tied a soldier’s leg, blown off at the knee. Their sleeves and cuffs and the hems of their tunics became drenched with blood, shreds of flesh stuck to their fingers. Hunching over, Sutor had barely time to turn away before starting to vomit. Bora thought it cowardly, though only an empty stomach kept him from doing the same. He overheard Maelzer’s hysteria and Dollmann trying to speak sense to him. Army and SS were pouring into the street. They forced their way into the houses scarred by the blasts. Loud crying and shouts soon came from the houses as well.

“Get some more medics!” Bora heard himself shouting. “Block the goddamn streets!”

Dollmann rudely turned him around, and Bora could see he was exasperated. “Try to speak to that Maelzer windbag instead, or the whole block goes up in the air. There are engineers coming at his orders with enough charges to do it.”

Bora came close to panic. “What can I tell him that you haven’t,
Standartenführer
?” But he went to the place where Maelzer mopped his face, exhausted with screaming at the German Consul. All it took was for Bora to address him and he reverted to his ranting until saliva sprayed all around him. “Don’t you tell me what Kesselring ought to know and not know, Major!” and upon Bora’s insistence, “Shut up, I’m telling you! If you don’t shut up I’ll have you sent to the Russian front!”

“I’ve been there.”

The rashness of his answer struck Bora only after uttering it, but Dollmann stepped in to deflect Maelzer’s anger with a timely objection of his own.

Confusion reached an extreme. The engineers had come. Bodies were moved to the sidewalk, sometimes piecemeal, while
crowds of detainees were herded with hands clasped behind their heads to Via Quattro Fontane, and lined against the gates of Palazzo Barberini. The last to arrive at Via Rasella, with a face of chilly composure, was Lieutenant Colonel Kappler.

At a quarter past five Bora was back at the Flora, where he spoke by telephone with Westphal. The general, just arrived at Soratte, glumly informed him that orders had already been received from Hitler’s headquarters at Rastenburg. “He’s asking fifty to one,” he said. “How many died?”

“Twenty-five at least. Several were badly injured and will probably die overnight. It could be thirty and more.”

“It comes to fifteen hundred hostages. Too much, Bora. Too much. Were any of the attackers caught?”

Bora removed his tunic, and was in his shirt. The blood-spattered cloth was wringing wet with perspiration and clung to him. “Unless they were grabbed among the local tenants, I doubt it. It was bedlam and no one cordoned off the streets for ten minutes or so. I’m sure it was TNT, yes, at least twenty kilos’ worth. It damaged the walls badly, and there must have been some other charges also, hand-thrown. Clearly several people were involved. They must have been at the corners of the streets perpendicular to Via Rasella, where they could get away quickly.”

Westphal went silent at the other end, or else was speaking to someone with his hand on the mouthpiece. “Has General Maelzer calmed down?” he asked then.

“Somewhat.”

“Who else is with you?”

“Colonel Dollmann stepped in a moment ago.”

“Try to talk to him.”

Dollmann stood on the threshold, his narrow, ugly face blotched and weary. “You’ll have enough to fill the rest of your diary with this.” He valiantly tried to make light of things.

“Colonel, you must agree that this will be most unfortunately army business, whether or not it was an SS unit that was targeted. So far we’ve had politicians, diplomats and SS
giving recommendations, and it should be our own General Mackensen’s decision.”

“It will be General Wolff’s, I’m thinking. But I agree.”

Bora had not expected the quick assent and was disarmed by it. “What weight will Mackensen carry in the decision-making, then?”

“Don’t know.”

“The field marshal is due back to Soratte at seven. If you must contact Germany, I hope you will delay until his return.”

“I’m going to the embassy now, Bora. You realize there will be a reprisal.”

“I understand, Colonel.”

Eyes closed, Dollmann inhaled deeply. Bora was self-conscious of his sweat and bloody smell, but Dollmann filled his nostrils with it. “Do you?” he was saying. “
I
don’t.” The colonel dragged his fine hands over the red blotches on his cheeks. “It was done to make us react, and if Kappler doesn’t see through it, we deserve whatever trouble will follow. As for you, Major, if you really wanted to make Maelzer angry you should have answered that there’s no Russian front left to send you to.” After a moment in which they looked at one another, listening to telephones ring throughout the building at long, lugubrious intervals, he rapped Bora’s shoulder with his knuckles. “Now comes the killing time. God help us all.”

Signora Carmela expected Guidi to come through the front door. It was Francesca instead, breathless, wide-eyed, who rushed past the parlor to her room.

“Are you all right, dear?” With cautious small steps the old woman approached Francesca’s room and looked in.

Doubled over on the bed, Francesca was sobbing. Signora Carmela made out that German soldiers had followed her for a stretch of the way and nearly caught her. They had lost her only when she had turned into Via Paganini and stepped into a doorway.

“Why would they follow you, poor lamb? A young woman with a baby on the way!”

Francesca went from tears to laughter at the words, a frightful voiceless laugh that stiffened her into rigidity. Signora Carmela couldn’t get her to stop. Scared, she called her husband in.

“Her nerves are shot,” he gravely said. “This requires
Aurum.
” In the Maiuli house the aromatic liqueur was the ultimate resource, and what there was of it in a bottle was jealously kept under lock and key. Now the professor poured a generous dose in a glass his wife held before Francesca. “This is so unlike her, the poor girl. Now we’ll get the doctor to come.”

Francesca gulped down the drink. “No.” She coughed. “No, doctor. Nobody. I’m not home for anybody. No one, no calls. Nobody, do you understand? Not even my mother. Something went on downtown, the Germans are berserk.”

“Goodness.” Signora Carmela wheezed. “And Inspector Guidi hasn’t come home either.” She drew away from Francesca, who was regaining her self-control and angrily wiped the tears off her face. “Where could he be, do you think?”

“Don’t ask me where he is.” Shivering, Francesca kicked her shoes off. “I’m tired, I want to sleep.” And even as the old couple stood there, she climbed into her bed and covered herself, turning her back to them.

Shortly after seven that evening, Bora called Guidi to confront him about the shots fired from the police station. There was no answer there, so he tried Via Paganini. Timidly Signora Carmela picked up the phone. Bora’s Italian reassured her, and – assuming he was a friend – she shared her worry about the inspector, who hadn’t come home from work.

“Did he say he might be late?”

“On the contrary. It was his turn to buy bread and he’s always been good about that. He’s a thoughtful man and wouldn’t let us go without bread for supper.”

Bora hung up with a queasy feeling.