Liar Moon

by Ben Pastor

  Near the kitchen door, she could now barely make out the voices of the men talking in the parlour. Her son had a soft voice as it was. Only a few of the words he spoke to the German were comprehensible to her, and as for the German, he was even more controlled in his speech. Signora Guidi was curious, but sat shelling peas with the offended dignity of the excluded.

  Bora was saying, “No, thank you, I’m in a hurry.”

  Having refused to take a seat, he stood rigidly by the set dining-room table, opposite a mirrored credenza. On the credenza sat the black-ribboned photograph of Guidi’s policeman father, with the date 1924 penned at the bottom, preceded by a cross.

  “That’s what De Rosa said, Guidi. And although he came under some pretence of secrecy, God knows why, he did not expressly forbid me to talk it over with others, so here I am.”

  Compared to Bora’s impeccable German uniform, Guidi grew aware of his shirt-sleeved frumpiness, perhaps because Bora seemed to be appraising him. He could feel the scrutiny of his own unprepossessing lankiness, his melancholy features drawn under the limp, swept-back wave of his sandy hair. Bora, on the other hand, looked like steel and leather and immaculate cuffs.

  Perhaps he ought to feel flattered by the visit. “Major,” Guidi said, “is it proven that Lisi’s death was not an accident, first of all?”

  “It seems so. His wife’s sports car has a sizeable dent in the front fender. De Rosa is convinced it resulted from her purposely running into Lisi’s wheelchair. As I said, it happened in the grounds of the victim’s country place. Unlikely that he was struck by a passing motorist.”

  Absent-mindedly Guidi nodded. From the kitchen wafted the odour of frying onions, so he went to shut the door. “Are they keeping the widow under surveillance?”

  “Virtually house arrest.”

  “In the country?”

  “No, she lives in Verona.” Without stepping forward, Bora handed over a slim folder tied with a rubber band. “These are the notes I took after De Rosa’s visit.”

  While Guidi read, Bora took off his cap and placed it under his left arm. Italian officials made little money, he knew. Dated furniture, old school books lovingly arranged on the shelf, a rug brushed threadbare. The punctilious modesty of this room spoke of the ever-losing struggle of the middle class to keep respectable. More importantly, it might speak of Guidi’s honesty.

  From the credenza’s mirror, unbidden, the stern clarity of his own eyes met Bora. The finely drawn paleness of the face his wife called handsome looked to him new and hard, as if Russia and pain had killed him and made him into another. He took a step aside to avoid his reflection.

  Guidi said, “We’ll need the physician’s report and autopsy.”

  “I requested them.”

  From where he faced now, Bora noticed how the photograph of Guidi’s father occupied the centre of an embroidered doily, between two vases filled with artificial flowers. A regular home altar, complete with lit taper. Memory of his younger brother’s death hit him squarely (Kursk, only a few months ago, the crash site in the field of sunflowers, blood lining the cockpit), so that Bora moodily looked down.

  “When the housemaid came out after hearing the noise, the victim had been thrown several paces from his wheelchair. According to De Rosa, Lisi had only enough strength left in his arm to trace a ‘C’ on the gravel, and then lost consciousness. He had already slipped into a coma when help came, and was dead in less than twenty-four hours’ time.”

  Guidi closed the folder. “I don’t see how this detail particularly relates to his wife.”

  “Her name is Clara.”

  “Ah. But even then, it all remains circumstantial. Were there problems in the Lisi marriage?”

  Bora stared at him. “They were living apart, and their separation had been unfriendly. Apparently there were still occasional violent arguments between them. Naturally the widow denies all accusations, and insists she had nothing to do with the matter, although she was reportedly unable to offer an alibi for the afternoon of the killing. Without an eyewitness, there’s no way of knowing whether she drove to the country on that day or not. Whoever killed Lisi, though, arrived and left again within a few minutes.”

  Noise from the kitchen intruded. Guidi stole a look to the door, embarrassed that his mother was banging pots and covers as a not-so-subtle hint that lunch was ready. Bora’s dark army crop moved imperceptibly in that direction.

  “Well, Major, I have to think about it—”

  Bora interrupted him.

  “What do you intend by ‘thinking’? That you haven’t decided whether you’ll collaborate with me, or that you need time before offering me suggestions?”

  “I need to think of a plan of action. I’ll phone you at the command post this evening.”

  Bora, who had scheduled an anti-partisan night raid and would not be at the post, nevertheless said it was fine.

  Over the occasional banging of pots, “We’re agreed, then.” Guidi rushed to say, “What I meant to pass on, Major, is that an escaped convict is at large between Lago and Sagràte.”

  Unexpectedly Bora smirked. “Why, thank you. We’ll lock our doors at night.”

  “He was diagnosed by Italian army physicians as criminally insane, and carries a marksman Carcano besides.”

  “6.5 or 7.35 mm calibre?”

  “8 mm.”

  Bora frowned. “Ah. Those made for the Russian campaign. They have a brutal recoil. Well, for us it’s just one more bullet to dodge, Guidi.”

  “I did my civic duty by informing the German authorities.”

  After a particularly syncopated rattle of cooking pots, the kitchen became peaceful again. Guidi breathed easily. “Did De Rosa tell you why they want to keep the murder a secret?”

  Bora openly grinned this time. “For the same reason why there are no more suicides in Fascist Italy, and people just happen to stumble on the tracks while there’s an oncoming train. Perhaps there are no murders in Fascist Italy, either. It seems Lisi was of some importance. A comrade of the first hour, in Mussolini’s words.” Bora swept his army cap from under his arm and put it on, taking a rigid step toward the door. “Colonel Habermehl recommended my name to the Republican Guard because of what he terms my part in solving other small matters. It’s only natural I should contact you, since you are the professional in the field.” He opened the door, through which a field-grey BMW was visible, with driver waiting at attention. “My apologies to your mother for delaying your holiday meal. Goodbye.”

  Guidi waited until the army car left the kerb before calling out to his mother. “He’s gone, Ma.” Because she did not answer, he opened the kitchen door and peered in. “He left.”

  His mother had taken her apron off and was wearing her good shoes. “Gone? Why didn’t you ask him to stay for lunch?”

  “I thought you didn’t want the likes of him in the house, Ma.”

  “Honestly, Sandro! Now God knows what he’s going to think about us Italians, that we didn’t even invite him to lunch.”

  The shot had been fired from a distance, but even so the shutterless window of the hut had been shattered. Bits and wedges of glass spread a kaleidoscope of reflections as Guidi leaned over to examine them. Through the empty window frame, from inside, one of his men handed him the deformed bullet he’d just pried out of the wall.

  It seemed the slug had missed the farmer’s head by a hair’s breath, and only because he’d happened to turn his face away from the raw wind while hauling wood. Now he nervously stood behind Guidi with hands driven deep in his pockets.

  “Happened yesterday while I was cutting firewood, Inspector,” he explained. “But I couldn’t walk back three miles to Sagràte to give you the news right away. See, here’s the axe as I left it. I just turn my face a moment, and the bullet flies right past me. First thing I think is, ‘It must be the goddamn Germans,’ because I’ve seen them patrolling the fields for the past week. Quick-like, I throw myself on the ground and wait a good ten minutes befo
re getting up again. No German shows up, and since it’s getting dark, I crawl indoors and wait wide awake until daytime. By this much, Inspector, it missed me! I haven’t been this scared since the Great War.”

  Guidi only half-listened. He fingered the bullet he’d slipped into his coat’s pocket, alongside the daily sandwich his mother had stuffed in there. By now the marksman could be anywhere. Unless, of course, he was even now framing his head in the rifle sight from behind a distant hedgerow. Automatically, Guidi hunched his shoulders. It was windy, all right, but dry and without any snow. Trails would be hard to follow.

  In order to calculate the direction of the shot, Guidi stood with his back to the hut and faced the pencil-thin poplars studding the edge of the farmland. Down there, Corporal Turco rummaged in the brushwood, bareheaded, with the fatalistic courage of the Sicilian race that centuries of oppression had inured to do what must be done in a near-stolid way.

  Guidi sniffed the odourless wind. The army dogs kept at the German command in Lago might come useful, he thought. Since Bora had not offered them, he had to be asked – if he was willing to spare the soldier who went with the dogs.

  He could see Turco’s stout figure emerging from behind the line of poplars and starting back. The urgency of his heavy step made Guidi hope he’d recovered the bullet casing, but it was a far larger object that Turco carried in his hand. Guidi walked up to meet him.

  “Another shoe, Inspector,” Turco announced, holding the find aloft.

  Guidi nodded. “It matches the one we have, all right.”

  “What in the world is stu lazzu di furca doing, dropping shoes as he goes along? It don’t make any sense, Inspector.”

  “It certainly doesn’t.”

  Following Turco and his handlebar moustache, Guidi examined the area where the shoe had been found. Invisible from the hut, beyond the row of poplars ran a deep irrigation ditch, which a man could easily straddle. Ice was already forming on its banks of yellow grass.

  “Not on the ground, Inspector,” Turco pointed out. “Up there.” And he showed the fork of a lonesome mulberry tree behind the poplars. “The shoe was wedged in there, as if the madman had been sitting in the tree at some point.”

  “He might have fired at the farmer from up there, too.”

  The first shoe had been found nearly two miles away, stuck between two rocks along an overgrown country track. The anchoring of it had seemed significant to Guidi at the time, and now this. “I don’t think he lost the shoes,” he told Turco. “He left them behind for some reason.”

  “For us to catch him?”

  Guidi lifted his shoulders in a shrug, his usual response to uncertainty. “He lets us know he’s been there, that’s all.”

  Bora was not at the Lago army post when Guidi called. Lieutenant Wenzel, Bora’s second-in-command, understood no Italian. He kept a freckled, unfriendly young face squared at him and would not volunteer any information. When Guidi gave him a scribbled message for the major, he took it and without a word walked to place it on Bora’s desk.

  On his way out Guidi paused to listen to the threatening growls of dogs from the small fenced yard behind the building. There Bora kept his German shepherds, he knew. A soldier was trimming willow bushes on the side of the command post.

  Guidi was careful not to stare, but he noticed that the army BMW parked on the street had a clear bullet hole through its windshield. Dirt was packed in dry clumps around the tyres and under the bumper, as if it had been run off the road. Guidi’s quiet observation was cut short by a soldier who eased him away with a whisked motion of his rifle stock.

  Bora contacted Guidi only on Tuesday, when he agreed to meet with him within the hour in downtown Verona.

  “The dogs, you may have for one day,” he said as they shook hands on the city sidewalk. “If your fugitive is still around Lago or Sagràte, they’ll find him. As for the shot to my windshield, since you ask, I would be glad to ascribe it to your lunatic. But I’m afraid he has nothing to do with it.” This was as close as Bora got to mentioning the partisans. “No one was hurt, but the windshield is going to be damned hard to replace.”

  In the nine weeks they’d known each other, Guidi had never seen Bora embarrassed or at a loss for words. Not even when he’d come to introduce himself formally on the fateful 8th of September – the day when the King’s government armistice with the Allies precipitated a German takeover of Italy. Curiously, the major’s first visit had been to Monsignor Lai, head of the local parish, where he’d spent twice as much time as he would at the police station. Less than twelve hours later, a partisan grenade launcher had struck Bora’s car while on patrol. They’d met again two weeks after that, when against medical advice Bora had left the hospital, looking like death. Since then they’d spoken occasionally, as their respective positions required. And Guidi still wondered why one as decorated as Bora should be assigned to such an unimportant place in the Venetian plain.

  As they stood across the street from the downtown flat where Lisi’s widow lived, Guidi felt a provincial’s discomfort with the bustling elegance of the neighbourhood. Even a thousand days into the War, rows of canopied store fronts and chic restaurants lent colour to the pale baroque façades of the buildings. The elegant Green Market Square, Lords’ Square, the Roman gate known as Porta Borsari were all a stone’s throw from where he and Bora stood. But Bora looked perfectly at ease, as he probably would even if Romeo and Juliet were to walk by him to reclaim their city.

  Guidi had the unwarranted but distinct impression that he and Bora could never like each other. Whether or not it mattered, he felt self-conscious, because Bora was observant but revealed little about himself. Other than that he attended mass frequently during the week, Guidi had heard he was upper class, Scottish on his mother’s side. And married, judging by the wedding ring he wore on his right hand.

  Just now Bora was congenially surveying the windshield of his parked BMW, as if the hole in it were a conversation piece. “Why do you look at me that way, Guidi? Rifle shots are my business, and these days it’s easier to replace a German major than a German windshield.”

  “I was actually thinking about Lisi’s widow, and what we ought to ask her.”

  “Well, she lives right there.” Bora’s gloved hand pointed at the corner of one of the parallel streets feeding into the Corso on one side, and into the avenue leading to the medieval centre on the other. Clara Lisi’s wrought-iron balcony occupied the entire second floor of the building. “There, where you see oleanders still in bloom. But we’re half an hour early, so – come.”

  Taking from the car the leather briefcase Guidi had seldom seen him without, Bora instructed the driver to park further down the street, and with his quick limp started toward a nearby café.

  Guidi was still looking at Clara’s doorstep, where a plain-clothes man stood guard.

  “Yes, he does smack of police.” Jovially Bora read his mind.

  The café had gleaming windows (free of ugly tape and supports despite the air raids), waiters in white frocks and the delightful, unforgettable aroma of real coffee. Guidi could not help asking himself what it would cost to order anything here.

  “My treat, of course,” Bora was saying. “I don’t like waiting in the street.” With a soldier’s unspoken prudence, not lost on Guidi, he chose a table from which he could keep an eye on the entrance. There he sat, oblivious to the customers’ furtive looks at his uniform. “By the by, Guidi, I went to see the widow’s car at the city garage. It certainly has a bad dent, which could have been caused by collision with metallic framework such as the invalid’s chair. The angle and height of the damage are about right, too. You are of course welcome to inspect it yourself.” With a nod Bora called the waiter. “I can also add something to the information I gave you on Sunday.”

  After they ordered – Guidi would have the luxury of a cappuccino, Bora black coffee – Bora took out a typewritten sheet from his briefcase. “You wanted to know how Lisi lost the use of his le
gs. According to my sources it happened during the Fascist March on Rome twenty-one years ago. The accident was unrelated to politics, it was a car wreck on the way to the capital, but it attracted Mussolini’s interest and was much publicized at the time. Got Lisi started in active politics, in fact.”

  “Really.” Guidi noticed that in his courteous and indifferent manner Bora referred to Mussolini by name and not by title, as he’d not once but twice spoken of “Hitler” and not the Führer. And he addressed Guidi with lei, not the regime-imposed voi. It would seem strange, except that other subtle traits were combining to make him wonder about the German’s political orthodoxy. Watch out, he told himself. Maybe he does it on purpose to gauge my loyalty. “It was a good career choice for Lisi,” he observed. “He’s done well for himself ever since.”

  “Bloody well, indeed.” Bora sipped coffee, keeping uncommunicative eyes on the few people at the surrounding tables. Guidi felt sure this unafraid wariness clung to him at all times, with perhaps other concerns he chose not to share.

  Scanning Bora’s notes, he asked, “Were there any children from the marriage?”

  “No, but not for the reasons you might surmise.” Bora put down the demitasse. He grinned an unkind boyish grin, but it was a veneer on his circumspection. “The old man was insatiable in that regard. ‘The Blackshirt Satyr’ they called him in Verona. It seems he liked them all, but servant girls were his speciality.”

  “You don’t say.” Letting the excellent drink make slow, warm inroads into his system, Guidi found he rather enjoyed being treated. “Traditionally a good reason why the neglected wife should consider doing him in.”

  “I’m not so sure. I doubt that she didn’t know his habits. She was his secretary prior to their marriage five years ago.”

  “How old is she?”

  “Twenty-eight. Thirty years his junior.”

  Guidi balanced the cup in his hand, inhaling the pleasurable warm scent from it. More and more, Bora’s light-hearted talk appeared to belie rising tension, only detectable by the contrast between words and an increased stiffness of neck and shoulders. With a glance Guidi tried to communicate that he was aware of the alarm, but Bora did not acknowledge him, so he gave up the effort. “Is the woman good-looking, Major?”