A Dark Song of Blood

by Ben Pastor

  “Truly, Martin, you know better than that.”

  “No, Herr General Feldmarschall, I don’t. I don’t. I need a note from you within the next few minutes, or Guidi is dead. I would not have come here had I known better.”

  Kesselring looked up from the dish. They were outside on a vine-covered balcony that overlooked the lake, and there weren’t enough new leaves on the trellis to shield the sun entirely; the red branches did most of the covering. “None of us is clean in this business. Did you not order reprisals during your stint in Russia?”

  “Against guerrilla forces, yes.”

  “And what’s ‘guerrilla forces’ to you? Do they speak Russian, do they wear valenki boots? I don’t see why you’re choosing to become involved in this. If it’s friendship you’re thinking of, there’s no such thing in war. There’s camaraderie, not friendship – and for an Italian, after what they’ve done to us! Awful things have happened before. What’s different this time?”

  “Herr General Feldmarschall,” Bora said dryly, “they will start shooting in less than three hours. If you think an innocent man is worth saving, I beg you to give me a signed message for Kappler.”

  “This Guidi, he’s not Jewish, is he?”

  “No, he’s not Jewish.”

  “You know that.”

  “Yes, I know that. He’s not Jewish.”

  “Because if he were Jewish, you understand —”

  “For God’s sake, Herr General Feldmarschall, I’d ask you if he were Jewish, don’t you see?”

  Kesselring took another bite, then let go of his fork, watching him. Bora kept self-control with an obvious effort; still he held his stare, and his lips were unmoved.

  Kesselring had his big bony laugh. “We go back forty years, your stepfather and I. Best commander I ever had. You’re like him, but even more unorthodox. You’re courting trouble.” With the napkin he wiped his mouth from side to side. Moderately he drank some white wine from his glass. He poured some for Bora, who did not even acknowledge the gesture. Finally he stood up with his burly frame. “I will call Colonel Kappler and speak to him in person. Wait here.”

  While he was gone inside the restaurant, Bora fidgeted. In the incongruous peace of the view, his heartbeat pounded at the sides of his neck, and the explosions from the front seemed never to end. He understood all too well that Kesselring did not wish to apply his signature to a written order.

  The field marshal was back eventually. “Kappler is not in. I left a message with his adjutant. Everything is fine. Guidi’s name will be pulled from the list and he will remain at Regina Coeli until you pick him up.”

  Bora thanked him. Sweat gathered on his face at the release of tension. In less than an hour he’d be out of Via Tasso on his way to the jail – and that would be before two o’clock.

  Kesselring sat again. “It’s all right, Martin. Now let me eat in peace.”

  Francesca had lunch at her mother’s.

  “What are you going to do with the baby?” her mother asked, taking her long hair in hand and sweeping it behind her back. She was still young, narrow-hipped, large of breasts, with a hungry mouth and fingertips stained by tobacco. Francesca remembered seldom seeing her in other than a robe; in the summer sometimes she was naked. They knew one another’s bodies very well.

  “Do you have stretch marks?” her mother asked when her first question was not answered.

  “Some.”

  “I can’t understand why. I got none with you.”

  “I’m going to have it at the Raimondis’,” Francesca answered to the first question. “You know her, she paints watercolors. He’s a physician, and they have no children. She’s been sketching me every month and tells me how beautiful my belly looks. She bought me three new dresses.”

  Her mother half-closed her eyes, with her hand on a pack of German cigarettes across the table. “I kept you.”

  Francesca shrugged, with a little smile. “The man who rents with me – we’ve gotten together a couple of times. He feels so guilty about it, he asked me to marry him.”

  “What did you tell him?”

  “I laughed in his face, Ma. He’s a policeman. What would I want to marry him for?”

  “There’s something to be said for those who offer.”

  Francesca went to the long mirror on the door to look at herself sideways. “We’ll see if he asks again.”

  *

  A look at the still-distant southern periphery showed Bora that the roadside airport ahead was being strafed. He took the first right turn with the intention of reaching Rome by a parallel route, only to find that the Centocelle Field was under attack, too. So it was by circuitous country lanes that he finally came to Via Tasso at five past two. SS men would not let him through the door. Judging by the number of vehicles jamming the street, Maelzer had decided to charge Kappler with responsibility for the execution. Bora decided he’d try Regina Coeli again and physically get Guidi out of there.

  Dollmann was waiting for him by the car.

  “I don’t know why you insist, Major; all decisions have been taken. Kappler went to Maelzer’s at noon. Mackensen refused to give men from the army, so Kappler took it upon himself. Caruso was supposed to complete the list by one p.m., but didn’t. Kappler is on edge, and it’s just as well that you didn’t get to meet him. There’s nothing we can do to stop it now.”

  As briefly as possible Bora explained to him the situation. Dollmann set his face in a hard manner. “My poor man, by this time they’re dragging everyone out of the jails to be shot. If Kesselring didn’t sign a piece of paper, you have nothing.”

  Bora refused to panic. “Will you come with me to Regina Coeli?”

  “No. I’m going to meet Wolff at Viterbo.”

  Bora drove off. At the head of Via Nazionale he discovered he was out of fuel. He lost twenty-five minutes waiting for a can of petrol to be brought down from one of the dumps. The soldier told him, “You’ve got a leak in your tank, Major. One of the bullets must have damaged it the other day. You’ll be dry again if it doesn’t get patched.”

  Bora told him to work at it, and with pain worsening in his arm he walked up the street to the Ministry of Colonies, where he placed a phone call to his secretary and asked for another car to be sent down immediately. Fifteen more minutes passed before a camouflaged BMW arrived. Bora took his maps, the extra petrol tank and continued toward the river.

  It was some time past three when he crossed over, only to find that the trucks until this morning crowding the jail’s courtyard were gone. He went in. The Third Wing had been nearly emptied. He worked his way to the Italian Wing. Guidi was not there. Neither was Sciaba. And now the memory of General Foa gave him a shock in the blood, because he knew he’d be first on Kappler’s list.

  For some minutes Bora sat slumped at the wheel of the car. In the sunshine, the warm light of day created red swirls before his eyes. He had stomach cramps. He’d eaten nothing since the negligible lunch of yesterday noon and felt light-headed. The pain in his arm was at one point so sharp, he winced on the seat and had to grab his forearm. All the same he had to think, quickly.

  Where? Where in Rome would over three hundred men be brought for execution? No, not in Rome. Out of Rome, obviously. But where? To one of the barracks, no doubt. There were tens of them, all around the perimeter of the city, forts and fields and proving grounds. Which one might be chosen from this side of town? He thought at once of the barracks at the northern edge of Rome, past the Vatican, a long row that formed a virtual military citadel. Forte Bravetta was where executions by the Italian Army took place, way out on the Aurelia. And there was the old army shooting range in the northern bend of the Tiber.

  He roused himself and walked out of the car to ask the Italian policemen at the entrance of the jail in which direction the trucks had left. They told him they had crossed the bridge, which Bora could not understand. “You mean they went toward the center of Rome?”

  They didn’t know. The trucks had go
ne across the Tiber and taken the river road that followed it.

  “North or south?”

  “South.”

  Back in the car, Bora studied a map of the city and its environs to make sense of the directions. It had to be out of Rome. Three hundred and twenty bodies are difficult to dispose of, and somehow he could not envision trucks returning to town with such grisly cargo for the Romans to see. True, he’d gone through Russian villages where the SS had solved the problem by having the victims dig their own mass graves. There was no time today, unless the graves had been already mechanically dug by engineers. Where, the question was, and how far?

  It had to be Forte Bravetta, the military compound due west of where he stood now. Resistance leaders had been executed there in the past week. It stood in an open, desolate stretch beyond the church of Madonna del Riposo, where nothing but blackened stumps of medieval towers and deep ditches marked the way. The truck drivers might have chosen to get there by the level ground of Viale del Re, crossing the Tiber again, two bridges down. He took the road skirting the park-like hills behind Regina Coeli, hoping to overtake the convoy.

  He did not, and there were no trucks at the Bravetta compound. The Italian officer on duty was courteous to him, but no help at all. Bora felt he could shout with disappointment. All day, despite his rushing from place to place, he had kept the goal before himself with some measure of confidence that he would achieve it. Now for the first time he felt that he would not: that it was over, that it was past four twenty and Guidi was dead. Great discouragement took him. He was hungry and in pain. Hunger especially infuriated him, a base animal reaction when everything else was more important than that. He was tempted to drive straight to his office and hole himself in it, thinking of nothing any more.

  The Italian officer watched him with sympathy from a few steps away. He said, “Major, I won’t ask what you’re looking for, but whatever it is, give it up. There’s nothing you can do.”

  Bora felt a new spurt of obstinacy. “How long does it take to execute three hundred people?”

  The officer’s blue eyes blinked. “Are you telling me or are you asking me?”

  “I’m asking your opinion.”

  “It depends. With a machine gun it takes five minutes. But if it’s a regular military execution, why, it’d take hours.”

  “How many hours?”

  “Four or five at least.”

  Bora entered the car and started the engine. “Thank you. Now I must try to believe that.”

  Francesca laid the new dresses on her bed. She liked best the dark blue one with a white trim at the neck and sleeves, too elegant to wear with cotton stockings.

  It made her nervous to have heard no news on a German reprisal, especially when whispers of the attack had begun to circulate. She wondered whether she could safely go back to work in the morning. Out of a drawer she took the silk stockings Guidi had given her and rested them by the dress, judging them a perfect match.

  In the parlor the Maiulis were talking to neighbors who had come to listen to the radio. Above all other voices, Pompilia Marasca’s could be heard asking why the inspector had not been home in two days. Signora Carmela replied something about engaging the help of St Anthony and St Jude, who had “never been known to fail.” Silence was made when the professor turned the radio on for the five o’clock news.

  Twenty minutes later Martin Bora had driven back to Regina Coeli, where he once more considered his options. There were six roads out of Rome by which the trucks might have traveled south; he had no idea of the final destination, but knowing the actual way out of the walls was a first step.

  Having heard from the policemen how the prisoners had been bound in groups of three, hands tied behind their back, he asked for a pocket knife. The request caused some curiosity, but a switchblade was produced. Bora drove to the place where Via Portuense left the walls, and inquired of a shopkeeper about a convoy, to no avail. At five thirty he tried the same with a woman sewing on her Via della Magliana doorstep. At five forty he was on Via Ostiense, where he began growing unnerved at the lack of information. The Ardeatine Gate came five minutes after that. A beggar told him that no army vehicles had gone by since the morning, and even then, it was just a single car. Bora tore himself from there and reached St Sebastian’s Gate just after six o’clock.

  The sun was going down and the enclosed, ominous body of the Roman gate stood over him with its two round towers cramped in by walls. Bora took a disheartened look at the centuries-old outline of St Michael engraved inside the archway to guard it from foreign invasion. Across the street a shoemaker was getting ready to close his shop. He said that, yes, trucks had been passing by all day, the last few of them not long ago.

  Bora felt as one who has been doused with icy water. Drowsiness and pain were gone from him in a brief surge of nervous energy, forgetful that it had been nearly three hours since the executions had started. The reality of it hit him only after he went past the gate in the orange sunset that drew shroud-like, immensely long shadows from the walls flanking the Appian Way.

  If he let go of tension for a moment, dangerous weariness came on him, a desperate need to sleep after thirty-six hours of waking. It was by inertia that he functioned now, because hope could not possibly attach itself to such slim possibility as Guidi’s survival until this time.

  He grew so dazed at one point that his car went off the road and into the grassy verge, where he steered away barely in time to avoid crashing against the wall. There was a fountain a few steps ahead, just a metal pipe spouting water into a mossy basin. Bora walked to it and put his head under the cold flow.

  Less than a mile from the city wall was a fork in the road. A wild, romantic place he knew well, with fig trees peering from fenced yards and the baroque facade of a chapel by the curve. Here at Quo Vadis the fleeing Peter encountered Christ and turned back to Rome in shame, having asked the question that became the name of the chapel, “Whereto Goest Thou?”

  There was no one in sight he could ask for advice, and Bora had no time to look for anyone. He bore left and continued until the road divided again. He ignored the lane descending into a field. He’d passed the entrance of one catacomb, and already the side road leading to the Cemetery of Praetextatus came up. This entire area was honeycombed with underground passages used as Jewish and Christian burials in Roman times. Tunnels extended for prodigious distances beneath the surface, intersecting at angles on several levels of resilient but easily cut volcanic stone. Bora traveled on a crust under which thousands were buried.

  It was too coincidental for him not to draw the grim parallel. He soon dismissed it because of the repercussions such violation would have in the Vatican: yet everything else about the idea made sense, when the catacombs themselves had been dug in abandoned stone quarries. The grim image of a natural grave spurred Bora to press on, to Praetextatus’ burial ground. He’d ask at St Sebastian’s, where Via delle Sette Chiese merged close by.

  The door to the ancient basilica was not locked. Inside, the darkness within was nearly complete, though it was one of those clear, sweet springtime evenings laced with sparrows and scent of blooming grasses.

  Hearing the sound of army boots, a man kneeling in the front pew got up and made a sideways motion to slide away. Bora told him to stop. It was a small priest with a suffering face, a bird’s neck swimming in his collar. Bora dragged him toward the faint light of the doorway. He spoke to him curtly, barely in control of his words: it was now seven o’clock.

  “I don’t know,” the priest moaned. “I don’t know who you are.”

  It was abject, complete fear, Bora understood, but had no time to examine or allay. He dug into his shirt collar and held out a medal by its ribbon. “Look, the scapular medal. I’m Catholic. I must know if German trucks have gone by.”

  “I have seen none.”

  Bora took a deep breath. Good. Good. It meant the execution place lay somewhere between here and the walls. “Are there any quarries or sa
ndpits nearby?”

  The priest rolled his eyes. “Quarries? Yes. No one has used them in a long time, though.”

  “Where?”

  The directions included country paths and backtracking at right angles toward the ledge of a small river due north. “Don’t go into the valley. Keep to the ledge.”

  Bora ran to the car. In the waning light things were seen and unseen, their contours blurred. He drove on, remembering to swerve toward the ledge only after he had nearly come to the river. No signs of trucks. Darkness below. He rolled down the window. No sounds.

  Again the need to let go and close his eyes came. He was in the middle of nowhere and it was dark. It was late. The dead were all around, old and new, but he could not see them. He felt an unbearable nearness and yet a sense of being utterly lost. Why had he been allowed to come so far and fail? A taut braid seemed to be unraveling inside him. It would fast become frayed unless he held to it somehow, in some other way. He mechanically began to say the old Latin words as if it’d make a difference, arms folded on the wheel and his head on them. Broken thoughts, old Latin words, over and over, to keep the braid inside from growing slack. Illuminare his, qui in tenebris et in umbra mortis sedent —

  Then he heard the sound. Eyes wide open in the dark, he sat up. It was the muted, distant sound of gunfire coming at intervals as if from a distance, or an enclosed place. The car faced south, and the reports came from the west, past the wide band of catacombs along the Appian Way.

  Bora jerked the car into reverse, backing through the countryside onto the road. He rejoined it near Via delle Sette Chiese, which he found blocked by the SS where it crossed the Ardeatine. His mind was working now in reckless but logical patterns. He turned around and careered toward Rome nearly two miles in order to enter the Ardeatine from its north end, although there would be troops there, too. Soon he could see the slits in the blackened front lights of trucks entering the road from the opposite direction. Gaining speed, he caught up with them as they went through the roadblock, where no one stopped him. They were engineers’ trucks, and even so Bora refused to let his heart sink.