A Dark Song of Blood

by Ben Pastor

  Bora, who had read and reread Marina Fonseca’s suicide note, looking uselessly for hidden messages that might give him a clue as to its veracity, was now dismally convinced it meant just what it said. Still, he kept his cool at Borromeo’s words. “It’s interesting that you accept uncritically that Cardinal Hohmann did in fact die as we are told.”

  “Why, don’t you? Heaven forbid that I should be curious about such unsavory details, but I saw the police report. It is graphic. You probably could add to that, as you were among the first on the scene.”

  “I hope you’re being so negative because you’re distraught at the loss, Cardinal Borromeo. Surely you had the opportunity to appreciate how good he was.”

  “Oh, I did. I did. The question is, how much did you appreciate him?”

  Even in his grief, Bora was suddenly wary of Borromeo’s words. Hohmann’s political outspokenness had relegated him to the Vatican no differently than his own had landed him on Westphal’s staff. How much was known here, he did not know. Borromeo watched him squirm, and then said, “Time will come for both of us to express our appreciation, each in our own way.” It was a quizzical statement, but Borromeo would add no commentary. “Anyway, you should know that Cardinal Hohmann was close to Marina Fonseca – charitable enterprises, of course. They were often seen together, lately more so than ever.”

  Despite all evidence, Bora was tempted to leave in outrage. “He was nearly eighty. How much of an intimate relation could he possibly maintain?”

  “Ha! You’re naive for a soldier, and a doctor of philosophy.” Unexpectedly the cardinal laughed. “Speaking of lighter and better things, our dear Mrs Murphy tells me she saw you the other day.”

  Bora felt instantly removed from the strain of the moment. An ineffably gratifying, wholly physical reaction made him bristle at the mention of her name, hearing that she had spoken of him to the cardinal. He was careful to say nothing, but Borromeo would not let him get away with silence. He rang a bell, and the ubiquitous little cleric appeared on the threshold with a second tray of espresso. “Her husband will return to Rome this afternoon, and Nora – she’s well educated, you know, and lived in Florence as a child – will have to curtail her volunteer work. Young Murphy is to drive his father from the station.”

  “Drive him?” Bora had no choice but to speak up. “She can’t be old enough to have a grown son.”

  “Mrs Murphy married a widower. He’s quite old enough to have grown offspring – and not to wish for new ones.” Borromeo sipped from the second cup not differently from before, extracting the drink by silent suction. “It grieves her, I think. She loves children.” He stared at Bora, amiably. “But we all have our crosses to bear, eh?”

  That afternoon, Dollmann called Bora at the office.

  “Have you read today’s Unione, Major?”

  “I don’t patronize communist newspapers, Colonel Dollmann.”

  “You ought to read this one. Your beloved teacher is plastered all over the first page, along with an exposé of the last century of Vatican malfeasances... Are you there, Bora?”

  “I’m here.”

  “I was speechless myself, at first. Tried to find out who leaked the information to a clandestine rag, to no avail. Whoever did it, the cat’s out of the bag now – not even the Pope will be able to drive it back in without scratching himself. I heard on the news that Marina’s sister refuses to comment on the news, and well she may.”

  The scandal was enormous. Although the official press refrained from picking up the story without substantiation, by Easter Sunday it was everywhere. Bora met Dollmann at the concert and asked him not to bring up the subject today. Dollmann agreeably nodded, and handed him the issue of Unione.

  10 APRIL 1944

  On Easter Monday, when traditionally Romans went “out of the gates” for the first picnic of the year, all principal highways had been made off limits to civilian traffic by German authorities. So people munched their modest lunches on balconies and on the benches of what city gardens had not yet been requisitioned as dumps for materiel. Even so, in the movie district of Cinecittà – where according to Westphal most of Bora’s colleagues had their lovers – three German soldiers were killed. Bora was sent to investigate and make recommendations.

  He found Kappler already there. Gamely Bora greeted him, and agreed that deportation of the men in the district may be the only answer. “But make sure you put them to work. It’s no advantage to keep them clogging the jails.”

  “Except that it takes manpower to watch them on work detail.”

  “Why don’t you just go ahead and tell them to shoot on sight?”

  Kappler’s lips nearly disappeared. “I’m so disappointed in you, Bora.”

  “Frankly, Colonel, it’s mutual. I thought yours would work better under pressure.”

  “It was bad for my men to see you come the way you did. It’s unforgivable. Now I cannot trust you anymore.”

  “It can’t be helped.”

  *

  From Cinecittà, though it was to say the least a circuitous way back to the office, Bora drove to the Cassia. There, before the modern, pine-surrounded house with a locked garden gate, he rang the bell and gave the maid his calling card, on which he had scribbled as further identification, One of His Eminence’s former students.

  Within minutes the maid was back without the card, but to report that Baroness Gemma Fonseca declined to meet with anyone at present. Bora had no choice but to accept the refusal, and the only consolation he granted himself was to drive back slowly along the meandering northern course of the Tiber.

  The silt-yellow water ran among green and blooming fields, courted by swallows. Warm, sensual comfort was in the air, which he bodily craved, so much so that he stopped the car before reaching Ponte Salario and sat outside, breathing the clean springtime wind. And he felt – no, he knew – that things would be so much better if he were allowed to fall in love with Mrs Murphy.

  After work, unwilling to see the usual faces at his hotel just yet, he stopped by Donna Maria’s. The old lady spoke up in dialect, “Martì, me se vojono magnà i gatti,” with concern in her voice. “I can’t let them out, poor creatures, because they’ll make stew out of them. Yesterday I lost Pallino.”

  Bora bent to caress one of Donna Maria’s three survivors. Through the years, the cats had been a permanent fixture, the old ones being replaced by the new, until this was entirely a second generation.

  “Pallino trusted everybody,” she said, “that’s the problem. I should have taught him better.” Between them, on a low table, lay a folded copy of L’Osservatore, bearing the first official news of Hohmann’s death. It was a well-written but late and useless attempt to curb the scandal, which Bora had read and now moodily glanced at again. “We aren’t spared anything, are we?” she added, setting aside the tatting pillow.

  “I don’t believe it. I don’t.”

  The old lady clasped her hands. “That’s what everybody thought back in ’89, when that other disaster happened near Vienna. I mean, when the Crown Prince and the little Jewish girl were found dead at Mayerling. What a shock that was! Just like now. We’d all been in love with Rudolf at one time or another – oh, he was beautiful, and married to that staid young goose Stephanie. All we girls thought it terribly romantic to be found dead with the Crown Prince.”

  Bora sat facing Donna Maria, at once favored with a cat on his lap. “Was it in fact suicide, as they say?”

  “I’m afraid so, though all the paperwork was destroyed and – you might know this – all those involved in the investigation sworn to silence. There were rumors, of course, that the Imperial Secret Service had done Rudolf in for his pro-Hungarian stance, and it didn’t help the thing that he had syphilis and could have no more heirs.”

  Bora swallowed. “I see.” The cat in his lap smelled the bandage on his hand, and nuzzled it. “Donna Maria, did you know Marina Fonseca?”

  “By sight. She was so much younger than I – forty, I th
ink. No, I didn’t know her, other than she spent as much on clothes as she did on charity. I believe you were introduced to her family once, but were a child, and would not remember what she looked like.”

  Bora didn’t say how he had seen her last, hair matted with pasty blood against the twisted sheets, when the police wouldn’t let him draw her knees together at least. “Why would anyone want to do as they did?”

  “Oh, well... If you must justify it to yourself, Martin, you must also put yourself in her place. A cardinal of the Church is a prince all the same. Dying with him might have held the same horrible fascination it had for us court girls back then.”

  “I don’t want to justify it to myself, Donna Maria. I refuse it.”

  “That’s just what you do, isn’t it?” She retrieved the tatting pillow, resuming her agile play of ivory bobbins on it. “You don’t mourn for things and people, and ought to.”

  “There’s no time.”

  “One of these days time will be made whether you like it or not.”

  Bora stood. “Donna Maria, I must go.”

  “No, you mustn’t. You can spend the night here, and you know it. Your room is always ready. This is your house.”

  But Bora did go. In the morning, as soon as he reached the office, he heard from Dollmann over the phone that Pasquino, one of the three talking statues of Rome, had been found with an anonymous message around its stubby neck for all to read.

  Ai tempi bboni der gran Papa Sisto

  er cardinale fu l’arma de Cristo:

  mo’ stemo a vede ’na cosa assai barbina,

  ar cardinale je piace la Marina.

  “What does it mean?” Westphal asked him a few minutes later.

  “It’s a distasteful pun on Baroness Fonseca’s first name, which is the same as ‘Navy’. It says that while in the old days the cardinals were the army of Christ, now they prefer his Navy.”

  “It’s a capital joke, Bora. Write it down for me, I want to circulate it. So, what else is new about old Hohmann?”

  “The Vatican forbids an autopsy.”

  “What about the Fonseca woman?”

  “It depends on her family, but if the Vatican has a say in it, I wouldn’t expect miracles. A plain post-mortem is the best we’ll get. As Colonel Dollmann puts it, they did have bullet holes in their heads, and her fingerprints are on the weapon. The handgun belonged to her late husband, a collector of side arms and great hunter. They say she was a remarkable shot herself.”

  Good-humoredly Westphal nodded. “If only the Reiner girl had been a champion diver, you’d have your answer for that one, too.”

  At dinner that evening, Francesca, who was gone from the house as long as ten hours a day, announced she would no longer work until after the birth of her child. “I got some money from home, so I don’t have to keep standing behind the counter with this weight on my feet.”

  Guidi had nothing to say to her. In the two weeks since he’d returned to work, he had gathered as much additional information on her as he’d been able. The child was her employer’s, as it seemed. She had seen him off and on for three months, and when he’d offered to marry her, she’d turned him down and moved to Via Paganini. As Danza had reported months ago, nothing political had emerged, but Guidi knew by now how selective or blind the eye was that Roman police turned to violation of the curfew, illegal gatherings and the like. Francesca was involved, impossible to say to what extent. The danger came from the SS and from fanatics like Caruso.

  In those two weeks Bora had not been in touch, though only the bloody climb of Via Rasella separated his hotel from Guidi’s office. Guidi had made no effort to see him either, even though, now that the evidence found in 7B was back in his hands, he’d had it examined and should share the findings with him.

  Dinner had been scanty, and Guidi left the table hungry. Francesca went to her room, where he knew she hoarded dry biscuits. In her condition, and with bread rations down to one hundred grams per day, he could not bring himself to making an issue of it. As for the Maiulis, they lived on little, and slept off their appetite by going to bed early.

  After the house was dark, Guidi walked to the phone and dialed Bora’s number at the Hotel d’Italia. Bora simply said, “Come.”

  They met in Bora’s room, the first time they had faced each other since that terrible Thursday, and no word was made of it. The German said, “Have a seat.” His wife’s photograph was still on the table, with the pilot’s snapshot tucked in one corner. Otherwise, the bed was made; no clothes or personal objects lay in sight. Guidi had the impression that Bora lived here ready to leave at any time.

  “Major, the ashes found in 7B match those found in the Reiner bedroom. They come from onion-skin or writing paper of similar consistency. No, not ledger paper. The rest – fibers from a woolen blanket, a candy wrapper, fruit peels and the apple core – merely point to someone’s presence in the apartment. But the ashes draw a possible connection.”

  Bora concealed his surprise, if he felt any. Fully dressed despite the late hour, he hadn’t as much as removed his belt and holster. Either that, or he’d worn them again for Guidi’s coming. He asked, standing at the foot of the bed, “What about the shoe imprint in the ashes?”

  “From what I saw at the shoe store, it’s consistent with a rubber sole. The wrapper is from an Italian nougat. There’s a strong possibility the murderer hid unseen in the apartment, and perhaps even stalked Magda from there. No special locks had been placed on the door, so...”

  “I went back to 7B,” Bora said. “Even though I had the key, I tried to open with a penknife, to see if it could be done. I failed, but in the process I noticed stearin inside the lock.”

  “Someone had an extra key made from the mold?”

  “It appears so. But whether or not the squatter in 7B was the killer, he knew how not to leave significant traces. Even the toilet seemed unused at a first exam.”

  The debt to the living. Guidi minded Dollmann’s words, and yet all he could feel were the bruises of Bora’s punches and kicks while being forced into the car. Odd, how bits of memory were coming back from that night. The hours previous to that were still a merciful blur in Guidi’s recollection. “Did you find anything else?”

  “This.” On the palm of Bora’s hand, a small object came into view. “It was lodged between the tuck and dust flaps of one of the storage boxes. It looks like a button from a shirt cuff.”

  Guidi snatched the button. “Let me see.” He studied it under the light from the table lamp before closing his fingers firmly around it. “It isn’t a man’s button, Major. It comes from Magda Reiner’s dress.”

  Once more Bora guarded his surprise, but not so well. “Wasn’t she wearing a nightgown and a robe when she died?”

  “She came home in a brown dress, and there’s a missing button from that very dress. It means — “Guidi had to check his excitement. He needed a cigarette, rummaged uselessly for tobacco and paper in his pocket, and already Bora had tossed a pack of Chesterfields on the table.

  “It means that she was in 7B with the killer.”

  “Maybe.” Having found matches in his pocket, Guidi lit a cigarette. “For now, it means she was in 7B that night, possibly between the time Captain Sutor drove her home and the time she fell to her death. What was she doing there? Had she heard noises from a vacant apartment, and gone to check on things? Unlikely that a woman alone would do that. And – if she did – was she let in, or did she have the key? Whatever happened in 7B, she survived it long enough to change into her bed clothes.” Guidi savored the good tobacco. Would I keep the picture of the woman who left me? he thought. Why does he? Either he’s still in love with her, or he wants to keep away from someone else. “Surely Merlo had no reason to be in 7B, nor did Captain Sutor – her lovers she would likely receive in her apartment.”

  “What about the ashes? Was someone burning papers in her bedroom or in the vacant apartment?”

  “Well, somehow they migrated from one place to
the next. Light as they are, they’d easily attach themselves to clothing or hair. The residue in 7B, at any rate, is more noticeable than in the bedroom. So, in the forty-five minutes between her return home and her death, Magda Reiner was in a place to which she theoretically had no access – 7B – possibly met someone there, went back to her room and prepared for bed. Next, she was dropping four floors down to the sidewalk.”

  “He was the one she was afraid of.”

  “Likely, and someone she would not or could not speak about with her co-workers. We assume she’d met him before he killed her, but that’s not necessarily true.”

  “Shirker, partisan, German deserter, escaped prisoner, spy. For whom do you vote? It has to be one of those. And was it Sutor she argued with before her death, or the mysterious tenant?”

  Even as the thought Antonio Rau speaks German went through him, Guidi blurted out, “If I have to vote, it’s either a deserter or a spy. What’s the name of the man who went missing in Greece?”

  “Potwen, Wilfred. I can’t see how he could have gotten here, but there’s plenty I can’t see at this moment.” Thinking of Hohmann, of Gemma Fonseca’s refusal to see him, Bora started to unbuckle his belt, which – made heavy by the pistol holder – came undone quickly. He placed it across the back of a chair. “Have you noticed how in the file I retrieved from Caruso’s office there is no mention of a search previous to ours?”

  “Yes, but he might have failed to record it. I wouldn’t draw any conclusions from that.”

  “He might have said the truth about not having access to the Reiner apartment. We know he got Merlo’s old glasses from Sciaba’s store.”