A Dark Song of Blood

by Ben Pastor

  Bora could not bring himself to look at her. He went past her to reach for his pistol and holster on the night stand, girt himself with them and walked out of the room.

  Outside the air was clean, the sky high and cloudless. Shadows lay blue carpets across the streets, and on them people were blue. He drove the distance to Villa Umberto and entered the park from the riding grounds, where things were green in excess of blue even at this time of year. Under the fretwork of pine trees he sat in the car. To the policeman who came an hour later to inquire discreetly, he said nothing was the matter, though he had the Walther in his lap; when later another policeman accosted him, Bora simply squared the pistol at him.

  All around, light washed brightly in the free spaces of sky, but in the shade it drizzled or tossed coins on the frost-yellow grass, or it made the surface of the car into a leopard-like pelt. In time it turned white and the shadows, still spotted, all moved creeping on the earth. Bora looked at the shadows and remembered how summer skies raced overhead when his brother had died. Children were eating sunflower seeds around the crash site. “Gdye nyemetsky pilot?” he recalled asking of them, “Where’s the German pilot?”, as he parted with his hands the hairy, barbed forest of tall flowers under a cloud of dust, with a crunch of salty loam under his teeth. How the shadows raced even then. Bora looked away from the outside, seeking some neutral surface within the car.

  And there was the gash in the Russian earth, as if a ploughshare had turned it open to prepare it for sowing, its moist sod evaporating in the heat until the line of sunflowers trembled double, a mirage suspended above itself. Flowers on flowers, and the jagged, greenish tail rudder stood like a fin of dead fish past the flowers.

  The boys ate sunflower seeds, and his brother was dead.

  It was long before bells tolled deep from Trinity Church and St Isidoro’s across the spaces now ruddled and flushed. Longer yet until the air became without shadows, of the dead color of ash. Then a waning moon came up somewhere to grizzle the dark.

  Bora did not feel the cold. He was bodily numb and his mind clicked orderly from thought to thought with the rhythm of gears finely serrated. Thoughts of Russia and thoughts of death and thoughts of Benedikta. The dark grew near, until like drapes it clung to the windows, and he didn’t know if his eyes were open or closed.

  All day and all night Bora sat in the car, thinking.

  Icy moisture dressed the twin needles of the pines while he traveled to Via Veneto the morning after, perfectly clear-headed. It was his well-known enclosed world of tightly woven runners and typing noises behind doors, where adjutants had adolescent faces and low voices never echoed themselves. Bora kept his things handy in the desk, and washed and shaved before going to Westphal’s office.

  “What are you doing back so early, Major?” The general took a friendly look at him.

  The answer came remarkably unemotional, as if the startling words bore no relation to the meaning of it.

  3

  5 FEBRUARY 1944

  The weather was still cold, but without hard frost.

  “You know about leap years,” Signora Carmela told Guidi as he got ready for work. “A year that leaps / troubles in heaps.”

  “It can’t get much worse than it’s been,” Guidi remarked. “Is there anything I can get you at the store?”

  “No, thank you. Remember that today is tobacco day, in case you need a smoke. Not that I approve of smoking, but you seem to be good in every other sense.” Signora Carmela tugged at the small charm on her chest, a slim gold horn that enjoyed much fondling. “Not that I should ask, but how are things coming with Francesca?”

  Guidi was caught off guard. “I’m not sure how they ought to be coming.”

  “We hoped you might help her open up a bit.” Signora Carmela sighed. “Such a strange girl. Speaks so little, eats so little. Seems to have no desire to be any more a part of us than as a boarder. We’d love to be closer to her, if she let us.”

  With some polite, generic formula Guidi took his leave, and because it was his day to report to Caruso, he went straight to the Questura Generale. In the waiting room, with guarded hilarity, he was told about the Chief’s mishap, as he’d been mistakenly arrested in a routine round-up of civilians and held for several hours before being able to prove his identity.

  “He’s still livid, Inspector. Watch out when you go in. He’s also furious at the Vatican.”

  “What for? For resenting his violation of St Paul’s extraterritorial rights?”

  “God forbid you should mention the operation to him.”

  Caruso’s stubble stood on his head like a ruffled cat’s back. He acknowledged Guidi’s entrance by a slashing gesture of the right arm in the air, his nose deep in paperwork. “Keep it short. What’s new with the Reiner affair?” When Guidi reported, “Boyfriends, girlfriends!” Caruso barked, looking up above his glasses, “What are you talking about? As if you had time to waste! You’ve been spoon-fed a suspect. All you have to do is prove his guilt. What’s this going far afield on your own?”

  Guidi kept standing, not having been asked to sit. “Naturally I am looking into Merlo’s involvement. Up to now, I haven’t found a reason why he should kill any woman.”

  “Obviously you haven’t read the material I’ve given you!”

  “He chases skirts and he’s jealous, Dr Caruso, but — ”

  “Here!” Out of his drawer, Caruso pulled a leather case, which he tossed on the desk. “I didn’t think you’d need this much help, but these spectacles were found in the Reiner bathroom, complete with his initials on the case. Not mine, not those of her supposed German boyfriends – Merlo’s own.”

  Guidi could not believe his eyes. “But when...?”

  “Never you mind when! They were found. Follow your leads, instead of going off on a wild chase. This office isn’t afraid of prosecuting one of our own. You shouldn’t either.”

  “It would have helped greatly had I known about this. I assumed we did not have access to the apartment.”

  The chief of police gave him a hateful stare. Folded on his desk lay L’Osservatore Romano. No doubt he’d been reading Vatican reactions to his night raid on St Paul Outside the Walls. Daringly, Guidi said, “We all know you aren’t afraid of consequences, Dr Caruso. It’s a great lesson for us that you arrested not only Jews and conscientious objectors, but army and police officers as well.”

  Caruso missed the irony. “It was a brilliant operation, yes. The Church squawks, but that’s what the Church is all about anyway. I’ve done my duty. Now get out of here and do the same – Merlo is guilty and should not be protected.”

  Guidi took the glasses, and left the office with a spiteful need to sneer, which the men in the next room – having overheard the exchange – precipitated by grinning from ear to ear.

  Countess Ascanio looked green in the light that filtered through the spaces of the folded shutters – green and striped, she looked, and in front of her Bora’s figure also stood dissected by those lines of alternating shine and darkness. “Donna Maria,” he said.

  She drubbed her rubber-tipped cane hard on the tiles, before opening her arms in a demanding invitation. “What are you waiting for? Come!” Her embrace was long, strong; she pushed him back only enough to hold his face down and kiss him on both cheeks (her lips were cold, soft). She added in a choked voice, “Handsome, that’s what you are. Step back. Fammiti vedere, quanto sei bello.”

  Bora let her survey him unresistingly, though he knew how close her scrutiny had always been.

  “How long have you been in Rome? Five weeks? And you haven’t visited me before? Bad man, bad man!” Her only mention of his injury was, “And to think I had the piano tuned for you, hoping you’d come.” That was all. “I don’t know why I hoped you would. I knew. You belong to this house, and must come back to it eventually.”

  Bora let her talk, oppressed by grief, uselessly struggling against it. “You heard about Peter,” he said.

  “Yes,” she
said. “Your stepfather wrote me. Poor Peter, with a baby on the way. God tries us, Martin – God tries us hard.” Bora only nodded. “Sit down,” she urged. “Tell me everything. You’re well, are you? Are you well?”

  “I’m well, Donna Maria.”

  “There, sit down. It’s been five years, and the last time you were in a great hurry to go home and marry.” Smiling multiplied the wrinkles on her face. “Your wife? No babies yet?”

  Bora sat down, feeling as if he were sand, and her kind words came to erode him piecemeal. “She’s in Rome,” he compelled himself to say next. “She went to the Sacra Rota.”

  Donna Maria set her jaw firmly, with her hand palpating the handle of her cane. Her lids winked once or twice. “Why, what’s happened?” And at once, “I must ask Nino about this.”

  “I doubt Cardinal Borromeo keeps tabs of annulments, Donna Maria.”

  The cane’s tip drummed, irritably. When she spoke again, she had composed herself to placidity once more. “So. How are you taking it?”

  Bora found the question merciless but necessary. He had been preparing for it. “Not well, I’m afraid.”

  “Do you love her?”

  “Yes.”

  “Do you have a picture of her?”

  How many times people had asked him. He took out and showed the photo he carried in his wallet. The old woman looked. “Hm,” she said to herself. “Hm. Does she love you?”

  “Donna Maria, she’s leaving me.”

  “Sometimes you leave people to set them free, as I did with your stepfather. Of course it was impossible, in our position, to stay married after Sarajevo started the Great War. It worked out for the best. He found your mother and married her happily, and I fell in love with D’Annunzio.” She complacently digressed. “I was the woman he called Chiaroviso in his Faville. Not La Boulanger. But you – what are you going to do?”

  Bora felt the words escape him, with great shame for pronouncing them.

  The old woman reacted by one more imperious tap of the cane’s rubber. “Che sciocchezze! What nonsense, Martin.”

  “It’s true.”

  “Look at me and tell me it’s true, in my face.”

  “It’s true, Donna Maria.”

  “Because of her? Because of five missing fingers? Nonsense. Look at yourself, you’re a strapping young man. I shouldn’t be hearing this nonsense from you, Martin! When the war is over – and you’re going to lose it, just as His Holiness lost Rome to Italy in 1870. You are, you are. It’s lost already, it doesn’t merit talking about it. Why, then you’ll find someone to make children with.” She watched him without blinking, without smiling. “You’ve got plenty of them tucked in, there where you men keep them. You’re young! When you wrote me from Russia, I saw pictures of you in that godforsaken place, snow up to your waist. If you didn’t want to die then, what’s this nonsense now? Don’t you play German with me.”

  Bora smirked despite himself, because of her misunderstanding. “It’s not suicide I had in mind, Donna Maria. I want to be sent west to the front.”

  “To Anzio?”

  “As soon as possible. General Westphal can’t use health reasons to hold me back. I’m fine. I feel fine.”

  “And you’d do this to your mother? She’s already lost the other one, your stepfather’s own. This is all nonsense.” More patiently she looked him up and down. “Do you at least have a lover? If you don’t have a lover, these days must be really hard for you.”

  Bora had a great desire to crumple in the armchair, to let go. And yet fear of losing control held him sitting straight, unrelenting in the effort to keep check on himself. Slowly, Countess Ascanio shook her head. Propping herself on cane and tea table, she stood. As she left the room, she said, “I’m not coming back for an hour, Martin.”

  Bora held in his grief until she pulled the door shut behind her.

  9 FEBRUARY 1944

  Francesca asked for a ride at breakfast, as they made the best of thin bread slices and watery coffee on the starched linen cloth Signora Carmela laid out every day. Guidi stared at her, and so did the Maiulis, who had hoped the two of them would get along amiably. The professor buried his nose in the cup, and his wife reached for the horn-shaped charm under her shawl.

  Her careworn youthful face looked white behind the swatch of dark hair, so much more delicate than the tone in her voice. “It’s cold today, and I have a delivery to make at Piazza Venezia.”

  Guidi frowned. “The piazza is closed to civilian traffic.”

  “I know that. Why do you think I asked you?”

  The Maiulis were trying so hard to be inconspicuous, they seemed to be sinking in their chairs. Impatiently Francesca pulled her hair back. “I have to take a batch of envelopes to one of the offices there. I figured that since you have permission to travel freely, I could take advantage of it. I guess not.”

  “I didn’t say I wouldn’t take you.”

  Outside, frost laced the windshield of Guidi’s little Fiat. While he scraped the glass with a piece of cardboard, Francesca stood by in her long shapeless coat, sniffling in the cold. They first drove by the store, where she picked up a mid-sized parcel, and then she directed Guidi to take Corso Umberto toward Piazza Venezia. Halfway down the wide Corso, they were stopped by German guards, who looked at Guidi’s documents and let them go.

  After Francesca delivered the package, Guidi offered to drop her by the store. Because in his awkward attempt to make conversation he mentioned his mother, whose birthday it was, “Your mother was a schoolteacher? Mine is a model,” she carelessly spoke back. “There isn’t much to it; all you have to do is take your clothes off and let painters look at you, not necessarily because they want to paint you. She’s a whore, really.”

  Guidi was certain he had mistaken her words. “What?” he mumbled.

  She laughed. “Why, does it scandalize you that I call my mother a whore? Well, she is. She sleeps with men for money. Germans, mostly, because they have the money, and when it comes to getting into something warm, who cares if the whore’s Jewish?”

  With an eye on her bitterly amused face, Guidi found himself driving at a snail’s pace. He said, “Your father?”

  “He put me through school. Sends checks now and then. Turn at the next corner, there. No, there. I met him a couple of times, when I was younger and he passed himself off as an uncle. He’s a handsome man. A man of God. But I’d rather take his money than Mother’s, all things being equal. I make barely enough for room and board.” She relaxed her shoulders, with a hand on her belly, palm spread. “And it’s too late to do anything about this, so – well, it’s got a right to be born in this wonderful world of ours – I’ll have to go through with it. I didn’t even realize I was pregnant until last month. I haven’t menstruated in two years, what with the lousy diet and all.”

  There were times when Guidi wondered how he’d managed to stay naive, despite his job. Unused to women’s talk, he said clumsily, “What will you do then?”

  “Give it up for adoption. Any better ideas?”

  “I wouldn’t know.”

  “Well, it’s starting to show through the winter clothes. I figure I’m due in late May or early June. My only problem is telling the Maiulis. They’re so close-minded. But I don’t think they want to lose a tenant.”

  “Wouldn’t your boyfriend – that is, wouldn’t he take care of things?”

  “Well, aren’t you nice. No, it’s not likely he would.”

  “Oh, right. I forgot, you said he has a wife.”

  Francesca merrily tossed her head back. “And you a policeman! Do you believe everything they tell you?” In front of the stationer’s, she got down quickly. Before slamming the car door, she said, “I may not come back tonight,” she said. “Just tell the Maiulis I’m staying at a girlfriend’s house.”

  At noon, Guidi – getting lost only once – drove to German Army headquarters at the Hotel Flora, with the intent of discussing the unexpected appearance of Merlo’s glasses. A c
ool-faced young woman in uniform informed him that Major Bora was out, and not expected back soon. Guidi thought better than to say he’d seen Bora’s Mercedes parked below.

  “Would you take a message for the major?” he asked.

  “Yes, certainly.”

  “Simply write this – Must find out who got there before us.”

  The young woman gave him a curious look, but jotted down the words. Behind her, Bora’s door was open onto a full view of his desk: papers stacked, maps. Something was missing from the array of objects, though Guidi could not say what.

  All along Via Veneto, armored cars and nervous, gun-toting patrols discouraged him from staying around until Bora showed up. But had Guidi waited ten minutes more, he’d have seen Bora leave for the Questura Centrale, bound to deliver a withering reprimand to Pietro Caruso of the Polizia Repubblicana on behalf of German Army Command South.

  That evening, the first news the Maiulis related was the radio item of a Canadian airplane that had crashed in the periphery. The second was that Francesca had not shown up. Guidi reassured them about her, and while dinner was being prepared, went to his room to scribble the latest in his notebook. The notes were actually questions. Had Caruso just received Merlo’s glasses? If his men had gained early access to Magda’s apartment, why had the key not been made available to him? Had the Germans taken it back? What did Merlo’s glasses actually prove, other than he’d visited Magda at one time or another?

  Bora’s help, now that it was needed, couldn’t be counted on. Sure, he was “away from work”. I bet he was in the back room with his wife. And he got the secretary up front covering for him. In his jaundiced state of mind, Guidi was more than a little envious of the German, his handsome wife, and to what use “the nights with her” were undoubtedly being put. He compared that to Francesca’s lack of interest in him – as if she ought to be interested in him. But then – she says she has a lover. Does she? Is he the father? Maybe she has no lover at all. At the moribund glare of the bed lamp, Guidi realized he’d been scribbling Francesca’s name all over the page of his notebook. And he recalled, with sudden clarity, that what was missing from Bora’s desk was the photograph of his wife.