Liar Moon

by Ben Pastor

  Bora recognized the medicines from his hospital stay. “This is powerful stuff to take with liquor.”

  Guidi rummaged for and found a half-empty bottle in the left drawer. “Cognac,” he said. The lower desk drawer had been emptied, but when Guidi tried to close it, he met unexpected resistance from the back. Only after pulling the drawer completely out by the brasses did he realize that a number of magazines had slipped behind it, and become stuck to the back of the cavity.

  “What is it?” Bora asked.

  “Pornographic magazines.”

  “Imagine that.”

  Guidi tossed the magazines on the bed, where Bora sat leafing through a manual on interior decoration found on the night table. “When you’re done, Guidi,” he said, “take a look at the initials on the calendar.”

  “Why, did you find the letter ‘C’?”

  “No. There’s a ‘B’, an ‘S’, an ‘M’ and an ‘E’. No ‘C’. But they seem abbreviated notes, reminders of some sort. Whatever his other businesses, Lisi knew how to keep a lid on them. Thinking of it, why should he write ‘C’ for Clara on his calendar? With his famous gift of memory, surely he’d remember if he owed her a monthly cheque.”

  Guidi thought Bora was trying to pacify him, but when he looked, Bora was sneering. He noticed that he’d picked up one of the pornographic magazines.

  “Anyway, Guidi, whether De Rosa was right about Lisi’s impeccable memory or not, we found no telephone directory anywhere. And if Lisi dealt in cash, good luck with finding any written records.”

  “Right.”

  A crumple of paper signalled Bora’s sudden tossing of the magazine on the floor. He joined Guidi at the desk and stood there, watching him. “Contrary to what you think, Guidi, I have no interest in proving Clara Lisi’s guilt, any more than I care to prove she dyes her hair. Neither issue is of interest to me.”

  “How do you know she dyes her hair?”

  “My wife is a real blonde. Do you suppose I can’t tell the difference?” With the side of his boot, swiftly, Bora kicked the pornographic magazine to the other side of the small room. “What amazes me is that Lisi could read about architecture and interior decoration, and still have such atrocious taste.”

  The last room they visited was the kitchen. Hanging from a hook by the stove, Guidi found a key with a pencilled paper disk reading garden gate. They went outside to try it, and it worked. After Guidi unlocked the gate, Bora pushed the swinging leaf until it yawned wide open.

  “I don’t understand how your colleagues from Verona could be so dim-witted as to confuse the tracks on the gravel. And look at the paint job on the gate, here. How long ago would you say it was done?”

  Guidi squatted to release the stationary leaf of the gate from its ground lock, and opened it. “Probably since the legal separation. If you notice, old sprinkles on the pillars indicate it used to be pink.”

  Unduly interested in the bar that served as a pivot to the gate by the right-hand pillar, Bora said, “There are traces of side-swiping here.”

  Guidi looked. Undeniably it was the mark left by a large object that had come through the open gate. The green paint was lifted right off, and beneath it showed a fleshy pink hue, and even the bare metal of the gate. “Push on the pillar, Major. Does it give?”

  “Not enough to fall on our heads when we climbed over the gate, but it does give a little.”

  “Well, the left one does not give at all. It must have been quite a shake. It seems our motorized killer didn’t know the dimensions of the gate too well.”

  “Yes, or else the speed was such that the driver lost control.”

  Guidi thought Bora knew what he spoke about. Glancing at the damaged bar, he said, “Unfortunately, the green paint is still rather fresh. It just peeled off, without leaving behind colour traces of the object that struck it.”

  Bora nodded. “But if it’s a car, it must have got quite a green stripe on its right or left side, according to whether it struck the gate coming or going.”

  “Remember, there were no traces of green paint on Claretta’s Alfa Romeo.”

  “Except that we were concentrating on the front fender.” Bora tossed the bundle of keys to Guidi, and climbed into the army vehicle. “I trust your memory. But all the same I’d like to take another look for myself.”

  In Verona, Bora visited Fascist headquarters over the noon hour, with the pretext of returning the keys to De Rosa. He spent more time inside than Guidi expected, and when he emerged from the gloomy portals he was in a foul mood.

  “Why did you review the dossier without my permission?”

  At once Guidi’s defences went up. “‘Your permission’? You asked me to collaborate. Since when do I need your permission to carry out my police duties?”

  “De Rosa said you assured him you had discussed it with me, and it isn’t so!”

  “What of it, Major? And since you put such trust in De Rosa, did you ask him why he gave us the wrong keys?”

  “I couldn’t give a damn about the keys. I want to know why you didn’t consult me.”

  Straddling the sidewalk, Guidi felt emboldened. “I’ve done even worse, Major. I went to see Claretta without telling you.”

  Bora let something angry escape him in German. “I’m beginning to have enough of you, Guidi. You have decided to thwart this investigation for motives of your own, and if you don’t change tack, I want you out of it.”

  “So that for motives of your own you can continue to treat Clara Lisi like a suspect?”

  “She is such until I prove the contrary!”

  Arguing, they’d approached Bora’s parked vehicle, and were now shouting at each other across the canvas hood.

  “Did you ever stop to think, Major, that ‘C’ could stand for camerati? How long would it take for a GNR truck to ride from Verona and kill the old man? Of course they’d want an outsider to look into the matter then. What do you know about De Rosa’s real intentions? ‘Centurion’ and ‘Captain’ both begin with a ‘C’, no more and no less than ‘Claretta’!”

  “Don’t you speak bloody nonsense!” Bora had opened the door to enter, but now slammed it shut again. “And just what did you discuss, Clara Lisi and yourself?”

  “I asked about any possible motive for her husband’s murder.”

  “Other than her motives? And I wager you found out nothing. No one knows anything about Lisi’s business. How can a man spend years in a town this size, take two wives and make a fortune without anyone noticing?”

  Surprisingly, Guidi cooled down at Bora’s frustrated words. He said, “If you’re bent on arguing, Major, we can continue to do so on our way to the city garage.”

  As it was, they did not argue during the drive, nor after reaching the garage.

  Claretta’s Alfa Romeo was still parked near the end wall, but something about it had changed. “Did they wash it?” Guidi wondered out loud. But now that they were close, both saw that the front fender had been repaired, and a freshly washed and waxed metal body sat like a sleek blue fish under the electric lamp.

  Bora was too astonished for a nasty comment. He halted some three feet from the car, while Guidi walked right up to it and then all around, looking inside and trying the doors one by one. He was in the process of squeezing his arm into the partially lowered front window, when a brassy, sonorous woman’s voice filled the garage.

  “What do you think you’re doing?”

  What, indeed?

  Both Guidi and Bora recognized Marla Bruni, the soprano who’d made the papers two years earlier by unexpectedly baring her bosom in the second act of Otello. Smashingly appointed and with that glorious portion of her anatomy well sustained by girdle and brassiere, she heel-tapped from the entrance in flashes of red and purple.

  “Stop at once, little man!”

  She had none of Desdemona’s meekness as she flung her foxes in Guidi’s face. “You!” she stormed at him. “Will you step back from my car, or should I call the police?”


  Ten minutes, several threats and a stormy explanation later, what most burned Guidi was being called “little man” by La Bruni.

  “First the wheelchair to the comrades, now the car to a bigwig’s lover!” he stammered in his anger. “No doubt De Rosa has another fine tale for you, Major Bora!”

  Bora kept ominously silent. But it was with an enviable sense of timing that Centurion De Rosa had left headquarters when the German descended on it like a thundercloud.

  At half-past one, during a despondent lunch in a Piazza restaurant crowded with German officers, Guidi could not even enjoy the first veal he’d had in years. Across from him, Bora’s fork had not touched what lay on his plate.

  Bora spoke first, with an uncritical plainness that in him might indicate fatigue, or a worsening of physical pain. “We could hardly expect they’d tamper with evidence to score points with a prima donna.” And, having said the words, he looked up from his intact cutlet. “On the other hand, cars are scarce, and lovers plentiful. Losing her car to an opera singer is probably as close as Clara Lisi is going to get to the world of the stage.”

  No matter how hard he tried, Guidi could detect no humour in Bora’s comment. As for himself, he was still smarting at the “little man” matter, and the way Marla Bruni hadn’t let out a peep of complaint against Bora. “I hope you will not tell me De Rosa isn’t trying to set Claretta up, Major.”

  “Either that, or he hopes to lay the opera singer.”

  The expression, so out of place in Bora’s otherwise restrained speech, surprised Guidi. Certain now that the German was unwell, he let the issue fall until coffee was served. Even then, all he said was, “Are you by any chance good at maths?”

  Pushing the brimming demitasse away from himself, Bora stared at Guidi. “It depends. Why do you ask?”

  “At headquarters I saw two of Lisi’s bank accounts, dating back a couple of years.”

  “I know. I saw them too.”

  “It might be worthwhile to study them more closely. To look for connections between deposits and withdrawals and the dates marked on the calendar at his country house.”

  “I don’t see what good it’ll do.”

  “I’m not sure. But we have little else to go by.”

  Bora asked the waiter for the bill. “I disagree. We haven’t yet spoken with the physician who drafted the post-mortem. Then there’s first wife Olga Masi, not to mention any details Clara Lisi might have kept from us. What do I care how Lisi made his money? His killer is what I’m after.” With a tired sweep of his hand across the chin, Bora seemed to discover the bristle on his face. “Holy Christ, I haven’t even shaved.” He groped into his right breast pocket, from which emerged a security razor. “Fortunately I always carry this along. Here, Guidi, leave the tip. I’ll be back in five minutes.”

  When they left the restaurant the sky had grown hazy with feathery clouds, and the temperature was dropping again. Bora, white-faced and clean-shaven, wanted to go directly to the hospital to discuss Lisi’s autopsy, but Guidi resisted. “I must drive back to Sagràte, Major. I haven’t yet seen the body of the old man you found shot by the wall.”

  “Very well, I’ll see the physician on my own. But just to make sure you go right back to Sagràte; I’ll have you driven there courtesy of the Wehrmacht.”

  “As you like. Promise that you will take a close look at Lisi’s bank accounts.”

  Bora neither said yes nor no, but before entrusting Guidi to an army driver he stopped by Fascist headquarters and demanded to be given the copy of the dossier kept there.

  “I’ll examine the accounts when I have time,” he briefly informed Guidi. “I’ll call your home number if I find out anything worth repeating.”

  “You have the original. Why did you take the copy as well?”

  “Because I want to be able to control everything from now on.”

  The old Verona hospital on Via Lombroso smelled like all old hospitals. Phenol, old wood, soap, decay. Bora distinguished each odour while walking down the high-ceilinged corridor, as distinctly as when they had rushed him in on a stretcher, and mangled raw flesh was all he ought to have been able to smell. But that was north of here, in the new hospital complex, and the odour of oiled wainscoting had been missing then.

  As soon as he entered the office and introduced himself, an intern stared vacuously at him from behind thick glasses. He resembled a young owl, an Italian Trotsky, and the impression was accentuated by the wiry halo of precociously greying hair on top of his head.

  “Yes, yes.” Having heard Bora’s reasons for coming, he leafed through a pale green folder. “Vittorio Lisi, I remember perfectly. Here we are. In a few words, death was caused by cerebral haemorrhage, following the fracture of three vertebrae: the seventh cervical, and the fifth and sixth thoracic. We attempted to intervene, but it was too late even for trephining. As for the rest, there was the old fracture of the lumbar vertebrae from twenty years past.”

  “No sign of other trauma?”

  Pushing back the glasses on his nose, the intern took a passing glance at Bora’s left arm, as if to evaluate by habit the extent and type of his mutilation. “Only those consistent with the blow received and the fall. I personally examined every part of the deceased’s body to make sure the head wounds were not due to other causes: puncture or slashing wounds, for example, or crushing blows.” When Bora asked for the folder, he readily handed it to him. “While cleaning Lisi’s face, I noticed a discoloration of skin on his left temple. Not a wound, but rather an abrasion. There had been no break of the epidermis, no loss of blood. I remember not believing the bruise was caused by striking his head against the gravel, because, no matter how superficial, those lesions contained dirt and were recognizable. I thought at the time that it looked like someone had kicked him. But then I understood the mechanics of the rescue. It had nothing to do with premeditation. Medics were not the first on the scene. In the confusion of policemen and volunteers, there was apparently much activity around the supine body. It’s evident that, even with the best of intentions, one of the volunteers stumbled on the wounded man.” The owlish face knit into a frown, such as Bora had seen in army physicians when death robbed them of success. “In any case, Lisi was as good as gone. I assure you that from the moment the victim was struck, there was no hope whatever to save him.”

  Bora laid the folder on the physician’s desk. “Other than the accident that killed him, would you be able to tell me what Lisi’s general state of health was?”

  “Yes. Here is the addendum to the autopsy, required by law in such cases. As you see, it was drafted in full compliance with articles 34 and 35 of police mortuary regulations, as by Royal Decree of 21 December 1942. I assume you are interested in the victim’s pathological story.”

  “His epicrisis, yes.”

  The bespectacled round eyes sought Bora’s face. “Did you study medicine?”

  “No, philosophy.”

  “Well, here. You can see for yourself. The internal organs were generally in good shape for a man of Lisi’s age, especially given his immobility the past two decades. Small calcium crystals were starting to form stones in the urethra, nothing to speak of. The prostate on the other hand did show a suspicious hyperplastic mass, but the size of it was still small. Had he not been run over, Vittorio Lisi wouldn’t have dropped dead any time soon.”

  4

  In Lago, enough snow had fallen overnight to cushion outside sounds, and only because of his vigilance did Bora hear the crunch of tyres under his office window.

  Suddenly, it was one of those times when his habit of being unafraid failed him. Ever since Spain, Bora had taken inordinate care in the practice of storing anxiety deeply within, as safely as an army trunk was organized, with the heaviest objects at the bottom, tucked away in the corners. This morning he watched the ugly mottled green of the SS vehicle pulling in, and was for a moment at risk of giving in to fear.

  Everything became sharper at once. Images took on the quality of a
n acid-etched silhouette. He remembered each instance of great fear as a precise scenario comprised of layers, circumscribed horizons, dimensions unforgiving and eternally set. The room where he stood was instantly transformed into a paradigm of itself, so that for ever – in the moment it took an SS officer to dismount from his vehicle – this wall and doorway, that slice of winter light across the desk and flaws in the tiled floor would be associated with fear. Composing himself grew more difficult with the passing years. But the gathering of courage had to happen quickly, and Bora had accomplished it by the time the visitor, like death, appeared on his doorstep.

  It took Bora all of three seconds, having heard the question, to answer, yes.

  The rest was a matter of details. Called in for consultation, Oberfeldwebel Nagel evaded Bora’s glance. A family man who’d been with him since Russia, he stared at the SS colonel even as he answered Bora. “The road through Schio is not advisable, Herr Major.”

  “And why not?” the SS officer cut in. “We have no reports of enemy activity in that area.”

  “Begging the Standartenführer’s pardon, I led patrols through there twice in the last month, and it’s not a safe itinerary. I wouldn’t drive a truckload of prisoners that way.”

  Bora lowered his eyes to the map spread on his desk, visibly pondering the alternatives. The map faced him like the world. How well he knew the hazy green and brown shadings, hills and rivers and plains – in his hundred days here he’d committed them to memory until he owned them all. He said, pointing at the rugged brown piedmont, “This is what I suggest.”

  The SS officer glanced over. “Is it a shorter route?”

  “No, it’s not shorter. It is safer.”

  Nagel nodded in assent, with the same detached mien. Had he not known Bora at all, he could not have ignored him more.

  The SS officer’s attention went from one to the other of them. A pitted scar on his lower lip, like a pinch in the flesh, made his mouth look oddly feminine. “Well,” he told Bora at last, “do whatever you goddamn decide, you’re the one who’s been here. It’s on your head if anything goes wrong.”