A Dark Song of Blood (26 page)

“You shouldn’t be showing your face here after yesterday!” He was a very young and angry man, red-eyed with crying or fatigue or both, and the only way Bora knew he had not been one of the executioners was that his breath didn’t smell of alcohol.

“Do me the favor,” Bora elbowed him to step onto the sidewalk. Being held back by the sleeve infuriated him. He pushed back the SS and found himself grabbed again. Sutor watched from the church steps. Relatives of the dead soldiers, flown in from the Tyrol, were looking on also. Bora shouldered the lieutenant hard, and couldn’t have kept from creating an incident had Dollmann not appeared with his sarcastic face like a keel pointed to the disturbance.

“Ah, Bora,” he said from the steps, raising a glove in hand. “Are you coming in?”

Grudgingly the lieutenant stepped back. Bora joined the colonel, who preceded him inside.

“I’m starting to think you lost your paw by getting too close to the lard jar, Major, like the cat in the Italian proverb.”

“If that’s the case, you know it is human lard this cat has gotten too close to.”

“Sh, sh. Don’t you become impertinent. I have my troubles as it is. You look awful.”

“Colonel, you have no idea.”

“I heard Kappler’s report. It’s best left alone. Where did you take Guidi?”

Bora told him. Dollmann nodded. “Stay in Rome. I’ll go fetch him. After all, we met at the party, so he shouldn’t be alarmed by the uniform.”

During the service Bora wished he could crumple somewhere out of sheer emotional weariness. He stood apart from the SS, who formed a hurt and bloodshot-eyed cluster of their own. It was impossible to let his guard down when he expected to be provoked again at the end of the ceremony. His grief was of compounded losses, personal and shared. All pains and deaths were mirrors of it; there was no end to them. The thought of mangled bodies in the coffins, the thought of how the butchered piles in the caves must look now was overwhelming. In the presence of those who had done the killing, a chill went through him as of his own death.

But outside there was no incident. The SS merely went their way, and he to his office.

Back from Soratte, Westphal dismissed him early. Bora drove to his hotel, where he slept until eight in the evening. At this time he brushed his teeth, shaved, put on a fresh uniform and went downstairs to get drunk.

As for Guidi, he arrived at his doorstep on foot, since Dollmann had discreetly left him at the corner. As chance would have it, no one was in the apartment. Guidi walked to his room and lay in bed. Without thinking, his mind a forced blank, as though a piece had been taken out of it in self-defense: the hours elapsed between his arrest and the moment he had come to in Bora’s car, parked in the dark stillness of the death-bearing night.

He slept for hours, as he had done in the country villa to which Bora had driven him. Only in the middle of the night
did he awaken, still numb enough not to feel hunger, or thirst, or other physiological stimuli, his whole system jealously shut down. In the obscure shapelessness of the room, what he’d replied to Dollmann’s warning floated back to him, but recalled as if someone else had acted the part. “Do you expect me not to talk?” The SS colonel had not flinched. “I expect you to pay your debt to the living. The dead don’t give a damn about you or me or what’s been done.” Then Guidi slept again.

In the morning, news of his return traveled fast. Within moments there were tenants at all doors, a crowd in the Maiulis’ parlor that risked toppling the saints from under their glass domes. Questions poured like water from a faucet, and in the flow Guidi said nothing other than he had been detained by mistake after the
accident
they had all heard about. Everyone wanted to congratulate him. Only Francesca, out with friends, was not there. Words jumbled on words. “They say the Pope asked the SS not to do it,” and, “The doorkeeper thinks her cousin was killed with them.” Pompilia Marasca came insufferably close, breast thrust under his nose. “Have you heard what happened to other prisoners? The Germans took them and tied them inside a Roman tomb and buried them alive, hundreds of them!”

Guidi tried to swallow, and could not. He flung his arms to get free of her and the other well-wishers and went coughing out of the parlor as one about to smother. After hacking and spitting in the handkerchief by his bed he was again able to breathe, but did not rejoin the company. He found a cowardly comfort in staring at the mirror until his face became a blur: the face nondescript, featureless, of one who – of hundreds – had been chosen to live.

26 MARCH 1944

When Bora began to sit up in bed, the room reeled upside down around him. The corners formed a see-saw where the
light from the window was blinding, even though it was early in the morning. He lay back on his elbows, trying to steady his vision if not the rest of the world.

It was his room, at least, whatever had happened meanwhile. The last thing he remembered was ordering English gin, and plenty of it. He sat up finally, though he had to shield his eyes from the brightness of the room. Perceptions bobbed up to the surface like buoys that have been forcibly kept below, popping out and floating. He remembered nothing, really.

It was not his habit sleeping naked, but he was. And there was perfume in the room, in the pillow. A nauseous head-splitting pain laid him flat on his back again. Cheap perfume. And something on the mattress pricked his shoulder blade. He held up a woman’s hairpin. His eyes opened wide and he looked at the ceiling swing back and forth for a while. He didn’t have the slightest idea of whom he had brought to bed last night. For once he had not kept wise control. For the third time he hoisted himself on his elbows. Looking around he saw there was no evidence of his using a prophylactic, and he thought he must have really been drunk, then. He reached into the drawer at the right of the bed where was a sealed packet of them – as if he couldn’t tell already by the state of the bed that he had used none.

It was one thing sitting at the edge of the bed with his feet on the floor, and another getting up from that position to reach the bathroom door. The doors were no steadier than the walls. Bora managed to lean over the bathtub and pour a bath. There was water, and it was hot. He sat in it to soak. He knew he’d start worrying as soon as his head cleared enough to remind him that this was no place and no time to have intercourse without protection.

Cardinal Hohmann was livid and looked dead with his eyes closed, unwilling to listen to what Bora told him. Never had such as this been done. Never. In the shadow of Peter’s and Paul’s
grave, no less. He was dismissed. Dismissed, dismissed. There was no message for General Westphal, and he was dismissed.

Bora, still nursing his hangover, was not about to be dismissed. “May I point out to Your Eminence that seven Italian civilians were killed along with our soldiers, some of them children? One boy was cut in half by the explosion.”

“Do not sicken me, Major. As if you cared. This is how you observe your open city status.”

“It doesn’t mean we’re to be bowled down without redress, Your Eminence.”

“Ten to one? You call it
redress
?” Hohmann’s eyes opened behind the spectacles, and it was as if sharp bits of metal were boring holes out from his devastated old face.

“All we want is for
L’Osservatore
to present a balanced statement toward the army.”

Hohmann closed his eyes again. The splendid sunshine only carved hollows in his countenance this morning. “Dollmann has already been here to ask.”

“Dollmann is SS. It’s because the army wishes to distance itself from what has happened that we must have assurance there will be no overt criticism of us in your press. Hard feelings breed unadvisable actions, and these breed hard measures.”

“None of your sophistry, Major Bora. Come out with it – what do you offer in exchange?”

“We will pull some troops out by Wednesday,” Bora said through his teeth.

“What kind of troops – the non-essentials?”

“Everybody is essential now.”

“How many?” Bora presented a typewritten piece of paper and Hohmann read. “So, do you also get involved in blackmail these days, Major Bora?”

“We must do what we must do, both of us. Do I have Your Eminence’s word?”

Disgustedly Hohmann set the paper on his lap. “All you have is a heartsick old German’s word. It is disgraceful for
you to be here, and for me to listen to you. I hoped better of my students.” When Bora clicked his heels, Hohmann sighed deeply from his sparrow-like chest. “Tell me, what was your dissertation, in the end?”

“
Latin Averroism and the Inquisition.
”

“And your position on the non-eternity of the world?”

“I agree with Aquinas, Your Eminence –
Sola fide tenetur.
”

“It isn’t all we manage to hold on to by faith alone, Major.” Hohmann waved him away. “You disappoint me more than I can tell.”

Bora left through the ornate door, without looking back.

Crossing the waiting room of the cardinal’s residence, flooded by the brilliant Roman morning, with a swell of the heart he recognized Mrs Murphy standing there. She was dressed in black, and Bora caught himself impractically hoping she might have somehow become a widow meanwhile; but she was simply in the required attire for a papal reception. She saw him and nodded in reply to his salute. Bora was still turned toward her as he stepped past the threshold. Here he ran down a group of Japanese nuns waiting to see Hohmann, to whom he profusely apologized though they did not understand a word he said.

27 MARCH 1944

Guidi returned to work on Monday to find that three of his men had been arrested by the German Army. “Do you mean the SS?” he questioned Danza. “No, army. Major Bora led them.” Instantly on the phone, Guidi reached Bora. Any expression of gratitude was so buried in him by disgust and hatred that all he did say pertained to his men’s release.

Bora’s coldness, in return, was like well water. “On the day of the attack, gunfire came from your police station. My car was struck by it.”

“The men were confused, like everyone else.”

Bora said something in German to someone, curtly. Then, “I spit on your men. It’s you I must know about.”

“What do you want me to say?” Guidi chewed on bitterness. “I would not intentionally fire on you, Major. Now let my men go.”

“Let them go? They’re on their way to Germany.” And Bora put the receiver down.

28 MARCH 1944

As Guidi prepared to leave for work on Tuesday, Francesca asked him, “Where have you really been?”

She had taken the excuse of a sunny morning to wait for him just outside the door. In the awkwardness of her figure she resembled a beautiful boy to whom a strange load is tied. Guidi wished to feel less for her, because she felt nothing for him, and he knew. But she was asking him, her face keen and undeceived. And since Guidi said nothing, she invited him to walk, and down toward Piazza Verdi, where Guidi would board the tram, they went slowly. “I just found out from friends. How did you get away?”

“I can’t tell you.”

She took his left wrist in hand. “They cut you loose or did you cut yourself loose?”

Guidi pulled the cuff of his shirt back over the gash Bora had caused in severing the rope. “No thanks to any of yours. As far as I can tell they managed not only to kill some forty people, but got nearly ten times as many butchered as a result.”

“You’re wrong. You’re dead wrong. It shows you understand nothing about fighting the Germans. How do you know what works and what doesn’t?” When a man crossed their path from the other direction they both went quiet, and Francesca turned around to see if he was looking at them. “What works is killing
more
Germans, not less.”

“Then I hope next time whoever is responsible will show his face afterwards to get shot.”

“What for? As if the Germans would be satisfied with one or two people!”

Guidi had no more desire to lie than he did to explain the confusion of feelings inside him. “Look, I’ve been in your room while you were out. I found close to eighteen thousand lire in it, and I must know where they come from and what you plan to do with them. The neighbors are talking: all we need is a false step and the Maiulis might end up dead for it.”

They were in the square now, and the sun-filled facade of the Mint shone like the backdrop of a gigantic theater. Francesca stopped, hands on her belly. “You, or I, or the Maiulis, mean nothing compared to what’s at stake. I told you before, either you turn me in, or you shut up about it. As for you, how do I know the Germans didn’t plant you among the prisoners to make them talk?”

“Don’t speak nonsense.” Guidi felt bile in his throat at the thought of Caruso, who had sent him a typed card of congratulations for escaping
a most unfortunate mishap, of which we have been officiously informed by the Germanic Ally.

“You can always turn me in to your crippled German friend. The extra weight would help me hang, wouldn’t it?” Francesca spoke in a low, taunting voice, and but for the ugly bulge between them, she’d never been so beautiful.

“Stop it, Francesca.”

“Well, you can’t have it both ways. Now that you say you know about me, you’re either a part of it, or you’ve got to turn us in.”

Guidi’s words came out of him unrehearsed. “I’ll have it neither way. I’m moving out.”