by Ben Pastor
“But who? Who’d profit from alerting her?”
Bora controlled the hilarity he felt at De Rosa’s frustration. “I don’t know yet. But as you say in Italy, every tangle meets the comb sooner or later. We’ll just have to keep combing the right way.”
Out in the Sagràte fields, Guidi was the first to reach the place after the dogs.
A man lay supine in the ditch, his shoulders nearly encased in the freezing ground. Ice crystals created delicate spider webs in his bloody nostrils. His eyes, wide open and opaque, showed little of the irises, turned back under the upper lids. Stiffly the man’s elbows adhered to his hips in the tomb-like narrows of the ditch, though his forearms rose at an angle and his hands clawed upward like the legs of dead chickens on the butcher’s counter. A black stain on his chest marked the spot where life had been blasted out of him. Along his left cheek, bristling with unshaven beard, a dark jellied trickle formed a snaking path to his ear, which was filled with dry blood.
The dead man had no shoes on. Stiff in the cloudy, icy water of the ditch, his feet stuck up covered only by army socks of an indefinable colour. The big toe of his left foot peeked from a hole in the wool. A miserable mixture of Italian and German army clothing covered the entire body. Whether a partisan or deserter, the corpse had no visible weapons on or near him.
Guidi ordered the body to be lifted out of the ditch and searched thoroughly.
Turco came up with a piece of mould-blue dry bread, parsimoniously nibbled all around. He showed it to Guidi.
“Wanted to make it last, Inspector.”
“What else is there?”
Turco kept rummaging. “Nothing.”
Guidi ordered the men to search for weapons in the area, though he expected to find none.
“He’s not the man we’re after, that’s all. The description doesn’t even come close. God knows who he is, but I bet the shoes we found were his. The convict probably took them from him after killing him.”
Turco assented. “Well, he’s been dead a few days. Santi diavuluni, but why would anyone?…”
“If I knew, I’d tell you, Turco.”
Guidi was annoyed by Blitz’s persistent smelling and pawing of the dead man, and stepped away. These were the times when he grew tired of his sad profession, and became unwilling to talk. Behind him the sun had nearly completed its low arc, and had escaped a long bank of clouds enough to draw enormously long shadows under everything that stood. Guidi’s shadow reached well past the edge of the field, and the shadows of the corn stubble formed a bluish forest on the bare lay of the land.
“Let’s go back to Sagràte,” he ordered the group. “I have other things to do before dark.”
After the ostentation of Lisi’s funeral, Verona’s poor side appeared to Bora as something from another world. Darkened by curfew, tenement houses packed tightly beyond the railroad tracks formed a tall maze he had to enter, park in and walk through.
It took him some time to find the midwife’s address. Even so, the leprous front of the multi-storeyed house was so dismal, he double-checked his note in the unsteady glint of his lighter. It was here, and no mistake. Bora walked in, closed the door behind him, found the light switch. He looked up the malodorous stairwell, at the ten ramps of steep, worn stairs leading to the fifth floor, and started his climb.
The late Italian supper-time lent smells and sounds to the house. Behind the flimsy front doors, at every landing different voices flowed to Bora. Children whimpering or old people’s complaints – each sound, unhappy or irate, mingled with the stench of cabbage soup, latrines and stoves that didn’t work properly. Sometimes you climb to hell.
Bora had to pause at the third floor, because of the wrenching pain in his left knee. Leaning against the banister, he held his breath to regain control. And if he closed his eyes, the smells and voices could be Spain, or Poland, or Russia, any of the sad places where he’d brought war in the last seven years of his life.
But the pain was Italy, here and now.
“Watch out,” the surgeon had warned him (he, too, using the un-Fascistic lei), asking that he return to the hospital before Saturday. “It’s become infected twice already, do you really want to end up lame? We must get the rest of the shrapnel out of your knee.”
The unlit fifth floor seemed as far as the moon.
When Bora limped up the last step, only by the dim glare of the light bulb below could he judge there was a short hallway ahead of him. The lighter was needed again to read name tags, and even so Bora went the wrong way, judging by the stench of stale urine that wafted to him from the end door.
Finally he knocked on the right door. The noise of a chair scraping the floor followed, but the tenant was tardy in answering.
“Who’s there?”
Bora didn’t know what to say.
“Öffnen Sie.” He decided to identify himself as a German.
At once came the clatter of the lock, and the door opened.
The sun had long set, and it was pitch dark when Guidi arrived in Verona. In the blackout, the streets seemed all the same to him. He found himself passing twice under the vast medieval arches of the castle’s raised escape route, and twice down the elegant shopping district. By the time he reached Clara Lisi’s street behind the Corso, not one but two plain-clothes men watched her flat. Only after much insistence did Guidi convince them to allow him to visit her at this late hour.
She wasn’t expecting visitors. It was the first thing she told him, pulling back the ringlets from her face. “That’s why you see me like this, Inspector.”
But to Guidi her lounging blouse and pantaloons appeared elegant all the same. It was rather the lack of make-up that surprised him. Without powder and rouge, Claretta’s face was far from unattractive. Just different. The astonished look of her blue eyes had a nearly childish emptiness under the thinned eyebrows. Guidi couldn’t help wondering what Bora might say about this face.
“Good heavens.” Walking ahead of him to the parlour, Claretta kept fussing with the ringlets on her temples. “I must be a perfect horror.”
“On the contrary, you look very well.”
“Thank you for coming to visit.” She invited him to sit on the sofa. “Tea? Real coffee?”
“No, thanks.”
On the magenta carpet, the Pomeranian slept in a furry ball on the cover of a movie magazine. In the compote at the centre of the coffee table, the golden wrappers of consumed Talmone chocolates stood out among untouched candy pieces. Claretta picked them up swiftly. “I wasn’t expecting visitors,” she repeated. “And I shouldn’t be eating any of these. They’re bad for the figure.”
After they sat down, closer to each other than the first time, she said nothing else. Hands limp in her lap, she seemed to wait for a message from him. But Guidi couldn’t think of a real reason why he’d come, other than to see her again. He whipped a pack of cigarettes out of his pocket.
She promptly accepted one. “How nice of you. I finished mine earlier today. They do not let me out, you know.”
Gallantly Guidi offered, “You may keep them.” He’d bought Tre Stelle cigarettes in anticipation of coming to see her, a small luxury for one who always rolled his own.
“Is the German major coming also?”
Her mention of Bora made Guidi stiffen. “No. Why do you ask?”
“Because I don’t think he likes me.”
“The major has no interest in liking people.” Guidi made up the statement, unsure that it wouldn’t actually justify Bora’s behaviour in her eyes.
Claretta’s eyelids stayed low. “I see. In any case, neither you nor the major can help me now.”
“How are they treating you?”
“Not badly. They do not let me out, that’s all. The baby suffers most from it, because he loves taking walks.”
She meant the dog, but Guidi found the sentence artificial, somehow hollow. There was stupidity in it, but in the way stupidity is varnish rather than substance, lacquered on with careful strokes. Women
protected themselves that way. He’d seen prostitutes caught in the act, playing dumb, and – worlds away from them – his own mother using that same empty stare. Unlike Bora, he could forgive the ruse. Claretta was telling him, “It doesn’t matter to anyone who the culprit really is.” A line drew itself between the shaven ridges of her eyebrows. “If they don’t find anyone else to pin the murder on, they’ll have me to pay for it. And no one will care.”
Having little encouragement to offer, Guidi leaned over. “The investigation has barely started.” He spoke with trite optimism. “It hasn’t even started, really. It takes time.” How useless words were, when girls sat close by and smelled sweet. Still, he said, “If at least you could give us a clue, a name, anything suggesting a possible assassin – we’d start working on it right away.”
“You would, maybe. The major couldn’t care less.” Claretta took in a greedy draught from the cigarette, so that her cheeks sank in. They sat facing one another, and when she crossed her legs the tip of her pink slipper grazed Guidi’s calf. But that was all the blandishment he was to receive. “I haven’t the faintest idea of who might have killed Vittorio. I told you. He had at least two bachelor flats in Verona, and spent entire days and nights there. I expect he used them to receive friends and associates, not to mention women. All I know, Inspector, is that after making me unhappy in life, he’s making me desperate in death. Besides, do you really think anyone would believe me, even if I pointed fingers?”
“I would believe you,” Guidi said warmly, louder than he’d planned.
At the foot of the sofa the Pomeranian awoke with a start. Frantically he leaped into Claretta’s lap, snarling at Guidi. Claretta petted him, uselessly trying to smile.
After leaving her flat, Guidi drove to Fascist headquarters, where he reread the dossier and the few papers Lisi had left behind. The originals were still in Bora’s possession, presumably at the German post in Lago. These were copies, and only because De Rosa had not been in had Guidi been able to secure them.
But De Rosa was not long in arriving at the archive room, skulls and rods and gloomy uniform.
“Does Major Bora know that you’re here on your own, Guidi? He didn’t mention you would be coming.”
Guidi didn’t trouble himself with looking up from the papers. “Yes, he knows.”
“And when did you inform him?”
“Last night.”
De Rosa sneered. “We’ll see. I will telephone the major and ask to speak to him directly.”
“It’s not necessary,” Guidi hastened to say. “I mean, what need is there to call?”
“Let us say that if you’re telling the truth you have nothing to worry about. I’m going to call from my office.”
Guidi had carefully kept from Bora his intention to visit Claretta. He anxiously awaited De Rosa’s return, ready to justify himself or to argue. But it was apparent from De Rosa’s expression that he had got no satisfaction.
“The major isn’t in,” he grumbled. “They don’t know when he’ll be back. I regret I can’t kick you out of here as I’d like to. But I’m keeping an eye on you. Trust me, Guidi. I’ll sit here and keep a hawk’s eye on you.”
“Please yourself. Considering that this dossier ought to be with the police or the carabinieri, you are hardly in the position to point out irregularities.”
Bora was then walking out of the tenement house. He breathed the cold night air fully, to cleanse himself somehow from the oppression of the visit.
He wanted to think, I’m a childless man, what’s any of this to me? But talk of abortion and death by abortion unnerved the soldier in him, because of the fragility of a soldier’s life.
The BMW was parked at the end of the street. Walking stiffly toward it, Bora welcomed the darkness and the cold around him, as if they were a dense liquid in which he had to sink in order to escape. From the darkness he looked up at the sky above the street, reduced to a star-studded belt stretching between the eaves. The moon had waned into a worn sickle, but its blade shone exceedingly bright at the edge of a roof. It was the same unemotional, clear moon he’d seen from the balcony of his parents’ elegant town house in Leipzig, or through his brother’s telescope up in Trakehnen. And, later, from the mortal vastness of Russia. Liar moon, he thought. A liar moon. Bora sighed, feeling lonely. He was a soldier, and a childless man.
Unexpectedly, a dance of flashlights criss-crossed at the end of the street.
“Who goes there?” German voices called out.
Bora stepped up and showed his pass. The soldiers snapped to attention, saluted with a clatter of heels. The leading non-com, who was a grey-haired man, escorted him to his car. “Herr Major,” he said concernedly, “these aren’t the times to walk around alone.”
Bora thanked him, and started the engine.
Back in Lago at about midnight, he was too tired to sleep. He sat up to read, and then wrote a long letter to his wife. No mail had come from her in two months. Since the incident, in fact, when Habermehl had sent her a telegram with the news of his wounding.
Bora had last seen Benedikta during a furlough from the Russian front, a few hours in the unmade bed of the Prague hotel where she’d come to meet him like a lover. Hurriedly, because there was no time, they’d undressed each other behind the barely shut door, in a frenzy to touch each other’s bodies. The scented wetness of her thighs, he could have died kissing, each hollow and mound, shaven bare or blond. But, as always, talk had sunk into motion, hard muscles and searching hands had been words and sentences between them, and once more there’d been no time to give intellectual shape to love. She remained unknown as an island, the surge and heave of the sheets like surf around her, bringing him to her and yet surrounding her in ultimate safety and unknowableness. So he had her body, each sweet fold of it memorized and surely to be with him at the moment of his death, but her mind eluded him and he stayed hungry and frustrated for that part of love. And, even as they possessed one another physically, death was in the room, kept at bay by lovemaking alone.
In his loneliness he’d hoped – expected, even – that she would become pregnant, but the card just arrived from his mother made it clear it had not happened.
“She’s too active, Martin. Riding or in the pool from morning till night, every day. When you return for good you’ll calm her down. The babies will come.”
Bora couldn’t get out of his mind the crude, defensive words he’d heard from the midwife in the squalid tenement room. They were the only thing in the way of unrestrained arousal now. And the soldier’s anguished need to leave something of himself before another accident, before anything else happened, rushed at him again, like rising blood. “Dikta, let’s make a baby as soon as I get back,” he wrote as a postscript to his letter. But then he crumpled the sheet and threw it away.
I don’t want to find out. I don’t want to be told, no.
As for Guidi, he returned to Sagràte at one thirty in the morning. It had started to snow in squalls of icy pellets across the bare countryside, and it was very cold.
Two hours later, Bora and his men went out on patrol.
3
In the morning the temperature had risen a few degrees. Although a rabid northerly kept up its strength, the snow patches on the fields had melted. Only on the shady side of the streets, powdery white handfuls lingered, but they wouldn’t last. In the western sky a consumptive moon looked like the ghost of a pruning knife.
A block away from the Sagràte police command, German soldiers were alighting from a half-track in front of the local post, usually manned by just three men and a sergeant, and occasionally by Wenzel. All answered to Bora in Lago. Guidi recognized the red-haired, lanky Lieutenant Wenzel as the first man out of the half-track. Clearly the Germans had been scouting the hilly piedmont overnight, seeking out partisans in the woods. Shots had rung out for hours. Lining up to enter the Sagràte post, the ten or so soldiers looked for all the world like hungry young farmers, clumsy and rosy-cheeked. Guidi understood
that Bora was in the army vehicle that had just pulled in, by the zeal with which Wenzel came to open the car door. But the vehicle only halted for a moment, before continuing on its way to the police command.
Bora was pale with weariness when he walked in from Guidi’s doorstep. “I hope you have some coffee ready,” he said in lieu of a greeting.
“Turco!” Guidi called out. “Prepare a strong cup for the major.” Stepping back, he let Bora in. “Instead of drinking coffee, why don’t you get some sleep?”
Bora waved his right hand to dismiss the comment. Without waiting for an invitation he walked into Guidi’s office and sat in a chair by the window. After Guidi followed, Bora had taken off his camouflage jacket, and was nestling three hand grenades in the folds of the cloth, right on the floor. “Left over,” Bora explained. In the bald morning light he stretched, sat down again. “Holy Christ, what time is it?”
“Eight fifteen.”
“Ah, good. I thought it was later than that. My watch stopped.” Like many Germans Guidi had seen, despite the darkness of his hair Bora was fair-complected, and only when he turned to the light could one see the blond stubble on his face. “Have you continued working on the Lisi affair?”
Guidi kept mum about last night. “Yes.”
“So have I.” Bora yawned into his cupped right hand. “But I don’t have time to discuss it now.” Turco brought the coffee. There was enough chicory in the grains to dilute the stimulating effect of the drink. Its bitterness, on the other hand, would have woken up the dead. Bora gulped it down. “How did it go with the dogs?”
Guidi told him of the shoeless body.
Bora listened leaning back on the chair, with a relaxed air rare in him. He said nothing until Guidi pointed out on the wall map the place where the dead man had been found. Then he reached over to dig out of the army jacket a box of matches, a pipe, a shell casing and a few Italian coins. He went to place everything on Guidi’s desk, and returned to his seat. “We ran into a corpse, too.” Whether Guidi’s surprise tickled him or not, Bora allowed himself a smirk. “I know what you’re thinking. But don’t you worry, we’re not in the habit of claiming bodies we didn’t shoot. We didn’t kill this one. I even left a couple of men to guard him.”
