Liar Moon

by Ben Pastor

  The driver lowered the window to hear if the anti-aircraft alarm was sounding somewhere. Only a freezing, needling rain, on this side of becoming snow, ticked on the car and pavement.

  Bora left the car. Even if it was a partisan manoeuvre to isolate and assault German vehicles, he’d rather face the danger out in the open.

  As things went, the driver of one of the army trucks had already walked ahead to see, and was now coming back with a swinging step.

  “What happened?” Bora asked.

  The soldier saluted. “Just an accident, Herr Major. The tram ran over somebody; it will be some time before they clear the tracks. We’re taking the parallel street. If you wish, you can follow with your car.”

  Bora looked at his watch. He had a headache, and even the dim light of day bothered his eyes. Damn, he thought, the surgeon should never have told him he was running a fever. Re-entering the BMW, he told his driver, “Forget the pharmacy. Follow the trucks and let’s get out of town.”

  Early on Sunday, Bora buttoned his tunic in front of his window at Lago, with deft small movements. He had slept poorly, but coffee kept up his alertness for the time being. Nagel and the other soldier who’d accompanied the guardsmen had returned the night before. Debriefing had lasted two full hours. Bora had kept Nagel in his office longer than that, and shaken his hand after the interview. Guidi’s pre-dawn phone call had jogged him out of sleep, but did not vex him. He’d agreed to go out with the Italian party because snipers, crazy or not, were his business too.

  And here it was, a dull-edged glassy day that promised more snow. Minute crystals came down in serpentine spirals even now, from a mackerel sky that seemed not to have enough in it to produce snow. Bora looked up at the speckled clouds creating an illusion of tiered space loosely drawn between horizons. The sun was trying to peek out from one of the layers, prying through with long shafts of light. Bora found himself humming along with the piano music from his radio, though it was not a merry piece. But not a sad one either. Like Guidi’s pale long face, it shared information without revealing immediacy of moods. God forbid, Bora thought, perhaps Guidi had no sense of humour.

  Thumb and index clasped the hook of his collar, and he was ready. With the palm of his hand Bora cleaned the window pane that began to grow cloudy under his breath, staring beyond it at the smoke from distant chimneys so as not to look at his hand, whose perfection as a physical tool abashed him now. Smoke drifted white from the chimneys only to turn a cheerless blue higher up, against the tangled brown of trees. It was the sterile blue of Russian skies, a colour Bora had hoped never to see again. Against that sterility, where the low sun took hold of it, the curl of smoke grew orange.

  Guidi’s car was stopping in front of the command post. Guidi came out, wrapped in overcoat, scarf and hat. Around him, bits of snow continued to fall askew and in spirals, as if the invisible moon overhead were shedding its skin to nothing.

  Stepping back from the window, Bora glanced at his hand, closed into a moderate, controlled fist. Forgiveness came hard to his body. But for all the nights he still felt scooped out and empty, he was hyperactive with energy most of his days.

  Guidi was incredulous at the first words Bora told him.

  “The father of the dead girl is around? Why didn’t De Rosa tell us about it earlier?”

  “It’s a moot question, Guidi. Be thankful he chose to tell.”

  “And how long has this person been around?”

  “Zanella is the name. He was in Verona at the time Lisi was killed. Since neither his name nor his daughter’s name begins with a ‘C’, De Rosa said he felt the suspicion didn’t apply. But the man did punch his way into Fascist headquarters about two weeks before the murder. According to De Rosa, he was asking for money, since it was far too late to discuss the dead girl’s honour. De Rosa says Lisi refused to pay.”

  Unconvinced, Guidi watched Bora check and replace the magazine in his P38 pistol. Somehow he wanted to believe, but he had to say, “These late developments are suspicious, especially coming from De Rosa. What else is there, Major? Please don’t tell me Zanella has conveniently disappeared so that we can’t interrogate him.”

  “Not exactly. His name is among those drafted last Tuesday by the Organization Todt for labour in Germany. Drafted as an ambulance driver, you’ll be interested to know. But you can’t blame his removal on De Rosa. He only told me about the man because I grilled him at two o’clock in the morning about the matter of Clara Lisi’s car.”

  Despite Guidi’s efforts, the rise in his interest had to be obvious, because Bora made a rather long, somewhat amused pause.

  “It seems that I was right in suspecting that De Rosa had Marla Bruni in his sights. The soprano got the car and De Rosa got the soprano. Will I ever learn about the rottenness of the Italians?”

  Although Bora smiled saying the words, Guidi was offended. He was about to refuse the offer of a cup of coffee, but remembered Bora always had the real thing at his disposal, and let the major pour him a hefty cupful. Briefly he reported on his meeting with Enrica Salviati.

  “We’re practically back where we started from, Major.”

  Across his gleaming desktop Bora pushed a sugar bowl toward Guidi. “Why? You can talk to Zanella’s wife. I have her address.”

  Guidi promptly unfolded the piece of paper Bora gave him. “Thank God it isn’t far from Verona.”

  Bora seemed pleased. Too pleased, in fact, for someone who’d lost the prisoners entrusted to him. Guidi assumed they’d been recaptured, or shot. “Now that I’ve lifted your spirits, let’s go hunting. We can talk on our way down to the cars.”

  When they drove through the fields, cackling flights of crows drew ever-changing, incomprehensible scribbles against the white foothills. The snow on the highest saddlebacks was already tongued yellow by sunlight rifting the clouds.

  Bora paid attention to colours and textures, noting how the same light appeared tender on one surface and crude, cruel on another. Indifferent on farm walls or where it lit up the frozen squares of sheets hung to dry, it turned into a fat, happy light on round objects, meagre and dour on angular ones. Light knotted narrow bands in between trees, but lay lavish and exacting like enamel on their branches facing east.

  Russian colours, Russian season. Bora remembered writing to his wife about the light in Russia, sending her sketches that according to his mother she had not yet had time to unwrap. In the yawning blue beyond the fleece of clouds, the dark of the moon stood out like a ghostly circle, barely bluer than the sky. No liar moon, this one. It resembled a communion wafer to be held on one’s tongue until it melts.

  The cars stopped in a windless lot by the road, and Bora got out to meet Guidi. Patting the woolly heads of his German shepherds, Bora gave clipped instructions to their handler. Then he said, “Tell me all you know about the convict, Guidi.”

  “Other than that he was being transferred from one jail to another when he escaped? Well, he was an infantryman, and on furlough from Albania for shell shock at the time he knifed his mother to death over an unshined pair of boots. There’s no telling where he got the gun and ammunition, but from what I showed you, he did.”

  Bora nodded. Quickly he pulled a leather glove onto his right hand with the help of his teeth before saying, “I will be honest with you, Guidi. If my men and I happen to surprise him, we’ll deliver him to you gladly. If he fires at us, we’ll gun him down.”

  “I expected you to say that.”

  “Only so that you know.”

  Like fleece growing tighter, the sparse clouds overhead were closing in to create a compact layer, soon to seal over the rising sun. A dry sprinkle of snow came down to powder the dogs’ backs. Wherever sunlight still peered through, the flakes glittered like bits of foil. Bora, who was still running a fever, appreciated the cold air. He started across the field ahead of Guidi, and though his knee ached sharply, he kept pace.

  When Guidi caught up, Bora said, “There was a prisoner of war while I wa
s in Russia – I never knew his name or patronymic, but we called him ‘Valenki’ because of the winter boots he wore. He wasn’t what you call a ‘well man’. And, like your convict, he had a fascination with footwear. Instead of moping around and begging like his companions – you haven’t seen begging until you’ve seen Russian prisoners of war do it, Guidi, it makes you sick instead of angry – he’d squat by the fence of the compound and look at the soldiers go by. Soldiers and refugees, because at that time we were still advancing rapidly. Well, Valenki stared at everyone’s feet, and in all seriousness predicted who would die before long. The other prisoners laughed at him, and so did those among us who spoke Russian.”

  Flanked by Turco, Guidi watched his step on the stony, snow-covered terrain.

  “Do you speak Russian too, Major?” Turco asked admiringly.

  “Yes. But I never laughed at Valenki.”

  It galled Guidi that Turco was warming to Bora. “Well, there’s no need for foreign explanation here. The fugitive needs a pair of shoes, kills for them, and discards them if they don’t fit.”

  “My soldier was still wearing his boots.”

  Guidi didn’t want to say the carabinieri had happened on the body immediately after the killing, and kept mum.

  “Shoes or no shoes,” Corporal Turco intervened from behind the foul little cloud of his cigarette smoke, “this girl” (he used the Sicilian word picciotta, nodding toward Lola-Lola) “will take us straight to that lazzu di furca.”

  Bora turned to him. “Fine weather for tracking, eh, Turco?”

  The Sicilian seemed flattered by the familiar address. Despite his protestations to Guidi against the Germans, he now looked at Bora with respect, vigorously assenting. “Why, sir, that’s a fact. Does vossia… Does the major hunt?”

  “Not animals.”

  Talking, they had reached the place where they would part ways, on the side of a narrow irrigation ditch stopped by ice. Through Bora’s binoculars it appeared like a scar in the snowy earth, rimmed here and there by dry stalks of furze tall as a man and ruddy like rusted metal.

  Bora passed the binoculars to Guidi. “Pyrej, the Russians call that plant. If you’re really hungry you can make bread out of its flour.” He glanced around at the cheerless countryside. “I see plenty of things one could live on, if one had to.”

  Guidi scanned the edge of the field and the hills beyond it. He found Bora’s superficiality unbearable in light of his other involvements, his other duties. A cold-blooded killer seeking justice against a cold-blooded killer. How did he justify deportations to his arrogant self-righteousness as faithful husband and honourable soldier? Even Russia was a pretext to show his ability to handle things. Claretta’s survival must not register on the scale of what mattered to Martin Bora.

  Soon they had come to the irrigation ditch, where Guidi and Bora synchronized their watches. “You keep to the flat land,” Bora said, “and we’ll edge the hills. We will spread out in a semicircle and join again with you here at eleven hundred hours. If you hear firing, don’t come. You needn’t trouble yourself with what else we may be doing in these parts.”

  An hour later Bora and his men reached a clearing at the foot of the northern hills, where a ledge overgrown with brushwood formed a small recess that offered a shelter from the wind. Snow had been falling steadily for the past thirty minutes, and the northerly scattered it in gusts of powdery consistency. The white sprinkle adhered to dead leaves and trunks and the men’s winter uniforms.

  Against the rock wall of the recess, traces of a fire built from twigs and small branches were rapidly being covered by snow. Nagel took a stick, poked the fire with it and felt the stick with his bare hand.

  “Still warm, Herr Major.”

  Bora could see how young trees at the top of the ledge had been snapped to provide fuel.

  “And the fire’s so small, sir, it doesn’t look like there was more than one man. Slept or sat here overnight.”

  “Yes. Whoever it was, he moved out all right, but he could still be near by.”

  Cautiously the soldiers started up the incline. Looking back at the fields, past an undulating curtain of thin snow, the houses of Sagràte were haphazardly sprinkled like pebbles along the road. Bora could no longer see Guidi and his men, because a sparse growth of trees intervened. No doubt the dogs had started after a trail, and if they hadn’t come here directly, it meant the fugitive was elsewhere.

  Bora climbed ahead of the patrol. His boots found firm footing at times, at times they slipped, and he had to resist the urge to hold out his left hand for support. But being outdoors was invigorating to him. The cold earth smelled clean and good under his steps.

  What did Guidi understand? The Russian winter had nearly killed him, but it was summertime Russia that frightened his soul. If he just closed his eyes, the sinister triangle of the airplane rudder rose like a dead fin out of the sea of sunflowers in bloom. The snow was gone, the task at hand, gone. Those immensely tall and unbending stalks rose up, thick as a man’s arm and hairy with a razor-sharp bristle, through which he struggled in his nightmares. He fought and wrestled against them, his strength against theirs, squeezing among them until he could not breathe. Tirelessly he drove himself through until he made it to the airplane.

  “More tracks, Herr Major.”

  Nagel’s words startled him, so that Bora stumbled and had to reach for the closest branch in order to keep standing in the snowdrift. It’s the fever, he thought, and, Thank God it is wintertime.

  Perhaps because of his flimsier clothing, Guidi had less appreciation for the cutting wind riding the flat land. The snowfall was thickening, and soon they might have to interrupt the search. Even Lola-Lola ran about distracted by the weather, not to speak of Blitz’s wanderings. Guidi’s shoes had grown uncomfortable, and his feet stiff and numb in them. Bora and his soldiers had disappeared in the distance. Another hour and fifteen minutes had to pass before the rendezvous at the ditch; the ditch itself was invisible as the plain grew white and uniform before and behind Guidi’s men.

  Ahead of his group marched Turco, shoulders rounded, rifle slung muzzle down the way his Mafia cousins carried them. Calling out to the dogs, the snub-nosed German soldier followed his own trail; three other men advanced in a broken line. Snow stuck to the front of their clothes as they went.

  Despite the weather, the policeman in front of Guidi hummed in his low, off-key voice. Cavuto, of course, judging by the fragments of words floating from him.

  “Come, there’s a trail in the forest / I’m the only one who knows of it / D’you want to know it too…”

  Then Turco called out. “Accura! Inspector, somebody’s been through here!” He had reached the edge of a wooded patch, and pointed to footprints that the canopy of trees, bare though they were, kept from being filled quickly.

  “They’re not German boots, are they?”

  “No, there are no hobnails.”

  When Guidi joined him, Turco had stepped further into the woods. Guidi followed him, after ordering Cavuto to stand ready to cover them. Cavuto nodded, oddly singing down to a hum. “Down there among the trees / Woven with blooming boughs / There’s a sweet simple nest / Just as your heart desires…”

  He’s scared, and sings to calm his nerves, Guidi thought. Or else he thinks that singing of hidden trails will reassure the partisans if they’re on the lookout.

  “It’s one man’s footprints, Inspector.”

  “Stop moving around, Turco, you’re confusing things. Where do they go, can you tell?”

  The Sicilian kept an intent, puzzled face to the ground. “Here and there, looks like. Like he was pacing back and forth or something. He stopped here, and then took a few more steps. I can’t tell, Inspector, but he had shoes on.”

  “It’s only been snowing hard for the past hour, so we’re pretty close to him. Keep your eyes open, men. God willing, we’re wrapping this up today.”

  The dogs had suddenly become single-minded again. Lola-Lola pawed a
t the trace, and Blitz squirmed with enthusiasm. Following them, Guidi and his group walked the depth of the wooded patch and then began edging it again, eventually coming into the open, where snow circled hard against them.

  The song had got into Guidi’s head, reeling like a noxious fly.

  “It seems like a wonder / The woods and the moon / Passionate tales they tell…”

  Right. Enchanted forests, my foot. Now it’s all partisans and Germans. And madmen on the loose.

  Here footprints were being obliterated rapidly, though the dogs were not mistaken now and strained to reach the rise in the land that heralded the hills.

  “Come, there’s a trail in the forest / I’m the only one who knows of it / D’you want to…”

  A rifle shot cracked among them, whipping down from the incline. The bullet went past Turco and grazed the arm of one of his companions. Echoes rolled after it from the piedmont.

  “Get down!” Guidi shouted.

  Another shot came, and then in quick succession three more, from a different angle. Guidi recognized these as from the Germans’ semi-automatic weapons. More echoes slapped the hills, growing fainter. Nothing followed this time.

  “Marasantissima, they must have got him!” Turco rose from the snow, clumsy like a calf when he’s first born. “Either that, or he’s run off.”

  The two groups met on the wooded hillside, which Guidi’s men reached by climbing, and the Germans by following the length of the ridge.

  “We found blood,” Guidi informed Bora. “There’s a good amount of it some fifty yards on that side, and the snow is very disturbed. You can see there are drops and trickles here, and here. The dogs are going crazy.” As he spoke, Guidi realized that Bora was ordering to call the dogs back. “Why did you do that, Major?”

  “We put at least two bullets in him, possibly three. I guarantee you, he’s not going far.” With his boot Bora smoothed the bloodstains on the snow into a pink mash. “He won’t live until morning.”