Liar Moon

by Ben Pastor

  “That’s true, we’re idiots at times. Enlighten me.”

  “I didn’t even know Lisi had died, the scum. Much less that they had arrested Claretta. I came because I had to see her again.”

  “You had to, or you wanted to?”

  Gardini stared at him with hostility. “What’s it to you?”

  “It makes a difference.”

  “I had to and I wanted to. How’s that?”

  “I expect you were the one who telephoned her in the country some time ago. Did you inform her you were planning a visit?”

  And even as Bora was talking to the man, the odour of rain on the flagstones of the courtyard meant another time, and another place. Standing to kiss Dikta, before the War, unsure about her love even then but all taken up by their lust for each other, which did conceal love in him, enough to make him hope it did in her, too. His parents’ country house in Gohlis, a venerable Bora doorway to a world of polite spaces, corners still friendly from his childhood, but now less innocent as he visited them again with her. Rain had for the longest time reminded him of that kiss.

  That he should be standing here with a man who would be dead in an hour’s time was like being dropped from a free space of possibilities into a trap. The courtyard, the task at hand, his career – traps one inside the other. And he was not the one to die today.

  Gardini said nothing. Lasser’s men had clearly worked on him. Bloodstains on his sleeves marked where he might have staunched a nosebleed. From the way he sat, Bora recognized the discomfort of a body that has been beaten.

  “What I really want to know,” he continued, “is whether you were with Clara Lisi on the afternoon of 19 November.”

  “I’m not telling.”

  “Were you in Verona that day, or anywhere around Verona?”

  “I’ve told you all I’m going to say, Major.”

  Time was up. Bora walked away from the truck, and Gardini waited until he was nearly out of earshot before calling him back. He had a different anxiety in his voice. The grudge had diluted, or else it was not the most important feeling at this moment. “How is she?”

  “She’s fine.”

  The truck’s engine started, and there was really nothing else to say.

  On the second floor of the SS headquarters, Lasser’s office no longer had Lasser in it. The nameless Standartenführer with the scarred lip stood there instead.

  As Bora walked by, he called him in. Without closing the door, he announced, “I have your report here, Major,” and when Bora said something, he rudely cut him off. “Save your breath. We know you’re good with words. There’s no way we’re ever going to beat you at the game of words. But we’re not in your philosophy class.”

  Bora heard himself losing prudence. “If that’s your assessment, then I hope you’ll let me go, since I have plenty to do, and being complimented on my writing is really a waste of your time and mine. Regarding the incident, you should be protesting with the Italian authorities. According to Article Seven, it was ultimately their transport, and their responsibility.”

  The eyes of the SS officer stayed on the folder he had in hand. “You are Martin-Heinz Bora, lately assigned to O.B. South, and before that, to O.B. East, Army Group III?”

  “I am.”

  “Was not your assigned area within the 1941 operational range of Einsatzgruppe B?”

  “I expect it was. If I recall, Einsatzgruppe B stretched from north of Tula to south of Kursk. It was difficult not to fall within its range.”

  “Does the name Rudnya mean anything to you?”

  Bora regained enough prudence not to comment. “It’s a place name,” he said.

  “Near Smolensk, is it not?”

  “It’s a place near Smolensk, yes. I hope you’re not testing my proficiency in Soviet geography.”

  “Far from it. I have here a copy of Operational Situation Report USSR No. 148, dated 19 December 1941. There is a reference to the execution of fifty-two Jews in it.”

  “You must not refer to Rudnya, then. There were ten times as many executions there. The fifty-two were captured in Homyel and shot for passing themselves off as Russians.”

  “No thanks to you, Major.”

  It was uncanny how one could sweat in such a cold room. Bora said, “It was hardly my job to assist the Einsatzgruppe. It seemed to be doing quite well by itself.”

  “Were you not called in to answer for your refusal to lend army support to the Rudnya and Homyel Special Units operations?”

  “No. I was in the field when both requests came, and by the time I returned to base camp, the operations had been carried out.”

  “But you were not out in the field in Shumyachi.”

  “No. In Shumyachi I simply said no, as Paragraph 47, 1.b of the Military Penal Code directs. My reasons there were primarily related to my men’s morale. Half of them had children of their own, and somehow a skin infection didn’t seem to warrant shooting the whole paediatric ward.”

  “You’re hardly qualified to judge medical conditions.”

  “But I’m highly qualified to judge troop morale.”

  It was clear that the folder held much more than his report about the 1 December incident. Bora could not distinguish the other documents from where he stood, but they resembled typewritten reports to the Army War Crimes Bureau, such as ones he’d authored and signed himself.

  The act of tightening his mouth stretched the scar on the SS officer’s lip. “Your report may say what you wish, Bora. I will tell you what I think. I think you have done nothing to prevent the escape of Jews, and nothing to secure their recapture. Thanks to the shabbiness of Italian equipment, I cannot prove you physically tampered with the truck, though a ball joint at the end of the front tie rod was loosened. You selected the worst route, and planned it so that the transport would be effected at night. Furthermore, I believe you got into bed with the local church, even to the point of staging the arrest of a priest who guided the rest to locations off-limits to us. This is consistent with reports we have of you from the East, where your army smarts suddenly got stupid when it came to Jews. There were nests of Jews hiding in the countryside up and down from your command at Lago, and now there are none. Somebody tipped them off, right in your backyard. Too much for a coincidence, I say. If you didn’t have the friends you have, I’d call you a Jew-lover.”

  As on the emergency-room table, Bora was suddenly past anguish. He said, angrily, “I don’t like the term.”

  “Fuck what you like or don’t like, you big-mouthed aristocrat. If it weren’t for your connections, we’d have taught you a lesson long ago. I want you to know I’m going to make it my personal business to pry your friends’ hands off your shoulders. We’ll see how long your luck holds up then.”

  Guidi waited for Bora in Piazza Cittadella, at the back of the INA Palace. “Major, did you have to have Gardini brought here, of all places? Do you know how many make it out of that door?”

  Little did Guidi understand. Bora was catching his breath, and not only from having just come down two ramps of stairs from Lasser’s office. “I don’t wish to appear egotistical to you, Guidi, but to date I have lost several men and one hand to the partisans. If you add the ideological questions, which for me are more important than the personal ones, you’ll see why I acted the way I did. Your Gardini killed at least three German soldiers and managed to blow up a petrol depot. He knew what he was doing, and where he’d end up if caught.”

  “Did you at least tell him that Claretta is in jail?”

  “Yes, but he likely thought I invented it to make him talk. He needed to believe I was lying, I think. One dies better if one leaves no worries behind. Don’t make that face, Guidi. In Russia we strung partisans up by the wayside.”

  “What about Claretta?”

  Bora knew he was being cruel, but he didn’t feel charitable at this moment. “If she’s guilty, she stays in jail. If not, since you’re so concerned, why don’t you go ahead and propose to her?”

&
nbsp; They left Verona shortly thereafter, bound for the hamlet of San Pancrazio. Guidi sat silently next to the army driver, preparing the questions for the Zanella woman. In the back seat, Bora ostensibly read about Mozart’s travels in Italy, keeping his left leg stretched out to rest.

  Rain had washed out the snow. Fields ran in brown strips and squares, parted by willows and trash trees, grooved by ditches full of lead-coloured water. Farms went by, with their dishevelled haystacks and muddy yards. Guidi watched them file past. As he did, he caught through the corner of his eye how Bora was, in fact, contemplating his wife’s photograph in the safety of the open book.

  Mud had iced over and melted in front of the farmhouse. Guidi, who was the one who went to knock on the door, sank in the mire to the edge of his shoes. Wiping his soles on the doorstep, he said, “Polizia.”

  A fair, wide woman answered the door. The sight of Bora’s uniform visibly agitated her, and it took Guidi’s mild approach to assure her that nothing had happened to her husband in Germany. Once inside, he did the asking, while Bora listened standing by the door.

  “We don’t want to hear that name mentioned in this house,” she began. “Don’t expect me to pronounce it. He was a filthy rotter, Inspector. God knows he’s given us grief and tears, and may he roast in hell where he is. Whoever killed him, God bless him.”

  “Or her,” Bora said from the door, eyes low.

  Guidi ignored the comment. “You needn’t go through the story of your daughter,” he offered. “We know how it was.”

  “Do you?” She bared square, yellow teeth in a humourless grin. “Do you? And from whom do you know it? From the midwife that butchered her? From his friends? From the wife he bought himself, and who wasn’t enough for him?”

  Bora glanced up. But for the language, he could have been in the East right now. One after the other, the stoic faces of Slavic women came back to him, pleading without tears, or asking for justice. He’d killed their men, their farm animals, taken over their houses. He’d reopened their churches, given them food, sat with them for evenings. This was one more life-worn mother’s face with a story to tell.

  She said, “I went out as hired help when I was young; don’t you think I know how rich men are with their servant girls? I told my daughter, too. God knows I told her. But who’d think an ugly cripple who could be her grandfather would do what he did. My daughter, she was young, and that’s all I have to say for her. Children don’t do wrong.”

  Guidi nodded. “Your husband came home after the army was disbanded, and from what we know he immediately went to Lisi.”

  “Sure he did. I only wish he’d kept his rifle so he could have done justice to him right then.”

  “What did he tell Lisi?”

  “The things a father would throw at a swine like that. And he had the gall to offer us money, as if money would give us back our child. But that’s just the way rich people are. They throw schei at you, and everything is supposed to be made all right. Well, it wasn’t made all right for us. No, sir.”

  Guidi glanced at Bora, whose silence was as it had been when Enrica Salviati had been interrogated. He wondered, God knows why, if it wasn’t after all an aristocratic shy reserve.

  “Well,” he continued, “they say it was your husband who asked for compensation.”

  Like bones set in a double line, her teeth showed again. “Who says? Whoever says that is a swine and a rotter! The swine’s money wasn’t good enough for us to wipe ourselves with.”

  “Did your husband have access to a car?” The question came from Bora, who’d walked to the kitchen’s only window and looked out of it.

  “Why do you ask, because he was an ambulance driver in the army?” sourly the woman spoke back. “That’s why you took him to Germany.”

  Bora was suddenly impatient, though he wouldn’t look at her. “I personally have no use for your husband. The war effort needs him. Just answer my question, please.” He knew she was staring, but there would be no tears. It was raining again, on a world flat as Russia but not so desolate and immense. Bora thought of his mother, of her lovely face and the tears Valenki had said she would cry for her sons. He couldn’t remember his wife crying, ever. When he turned from the window, the woman was clasping her hands. This gesture, too, he knew so well. He stared at the knot of swollen fingers, bulging with blue veins.

  “Is that what you want to know?” She familiarly motioned with her head for Bora to draw close, but Bora ignored the summons. “If that’s what it’s about, listen good, because I’ll tell you how it went. Could my husband get his hands on a car? He could. He did. He had a car at his disposal on the day the cripple was killed. Got it from the army depot. Had a friend there, I don’t know how he managed, but he drove back here in a car. Everybody knew the cripple had separated from his wife and lived alone with a servant woman in the country. My man told me, right here, at this table, that he’d made up his mind to go and get it over with. Yes, to kill him, what else? If that’s what you wanted to hear, you heard it. Except that God didn’t grant him the grace of doing it.”

  Guidi didn’t know how Bora could keep his sullen peace. He was high-strung with impatience. “Why, had Lisi already been wounded when your husband arrived?”

  “One better than that, Inspector. My husband was still driving there when who should come screaming down the road but the cripple’s maid. He braked not to run her over, and she went on screaming and crying and asking for help, that her master had been killed or something, and would he get help.”

  “I hope he didn’t,” Bora said impulsively.

  “You’re damn right. He drove her to the state route and left her there. She could flag down someone else, he said. As if cars were plentiful! See, he only wanted her out of his way to get to the villa on his own, which he did. But the cripple was dead already, or almost dead, the swine.” The hard calloused hands unclasped. “We’re not such animals that we don’t understand it’s useless to get angry at the dead. But my man said he just stood there laughing, watching the swine lie with his back all twisted up. It was too late to do much else, but by God he said he kicked him in the mug, as a reminder of our dead child.”

  Bora was startled, a reaction that was not lost on Guidi. “And then?” he urged.

  “The Devil’s got him in his belly now, that’s what. And God bless who sent him there. My husband returned the car to the depot the same day, and at the beginning of the following week you Germans came to pick him up for labour.”

  Bora straightened himself by the window, searching his tunic for cigarettes. “The decision was unrelated, you can count on that. What was your husband planning to use to kill Lisi?”

  The woman held up her hands, squaring them in the air. “These. It’s easy to kill cripples, don’t you know?”

  Bora remembered he’d left his cigarettes in the car, and he was desperate to smoke just now. He said, “Not always.”

  Notebook in his lap, Guidi had been scribbling at a furious pace. “Did your husband say if he struck the gate on his way in or out?”

  The woman glowered at him. “My husband never had an accident. He used to race in mountain rallies when he was young.”

  “Did he say if he met any cars on the way to the villa, or back?”

  “He didn’t say and I didn’t ask. But with all their trying to keep the rotten swine’s death a secret, it’ll come out sooner or later. First they said it was an accident, and now they’re saying the wife killed him for money. The rich don’t kill for money. That, I know. Power’s what they want. With all the lives the cripple ruined, you’ll be searching until doomsday for the one who might have done him in.”

  When Guidi stood to join Bora, who’d walked to the door and was leaving, she remained in her chair. “If you want to arrest me,” she called out, “you go right ahead. Jail can’t be worse than what I’ve got.”

  “I’m not going to arrest you,” Guidi said.

  Mud had overflowed into Guidi’s shoes when they reached th
e car. Bora smirked at his own soiled boots. “There’s an affecting proletarian wisdom in her, isn’t there?” he said lightly. “‘The rich don’t kill for money.’ Neither do the poor, apparently.”

  “There’s nothing to smile about, Major. We can hardly check all the vehicles in the army depot.”

  “Especially considering we sent the lot to Germany. Don’t worry, the old woman is telling the truth. It’s another blind alley we’ve got ourselves into.”

  “Thanks to De Rosa! And you still listen to him.”

  Bora ordered the driver to start the car. “Guidi, Guidi, what am I going to do with you? You have an inquisitor’s lack of humour, and none of the ruthlessness that goes with it. I don’t listen to De Rosa. De Rosa is the garbage we’ll leave behind when we’re done with Italy. His companions might have tried to blackmail Clara Lisi, and failed at that. They might have killed Enrica Salviati, who knows. As for me, I keep in mind what Mussolini wrote about you Italians: it’s not impossible to talk to you. It’s plain useless.”

  “So, if Zanella didn’t do it and Gardini didn’t do it and De Rosa didn’t do it, Claretta gets the rap so that we can close the case.”

  “I never said any of those people are off the suspect list. The only one among them who has a shaky alibi is De Rosa. Gardini would be the easiest to charge, but it’s unlikely he’d borrow a car to do what he could do by shooting.”

  “Well, there’s one more trail. If Lisi lent money to the Verona Fascists, as you said—”

  “Don’t put words in my mouth.”

  “It could be a conspiracy, not just a cover-up.”

  Bora seemed mildly intrigued. “I’ve ridden De Rosa’s rear about this as much as I could. It’d be interesting if it turned out that he did it, though. Colonel Habermehl would have a drink or two over the revelation.”