A Dark Song of Blood

by Ben Pastor

  “If you mean that Captain Sutor is a more likely candidate for a preventive search, I agree. He might have removed items of clothing or such from her closet. It doesn’t seem as though anyone will be able to get out of him whether he did it, or why, and Sutor has other means at his disposal to get rid of people.”

  It was the first oblique reference to the caves between them. Bora’s hint at relaxation – the removal of his pistol – was at once belied by his posture, and the phone ringing at that moment was a relief to both men. Bora eagerly picked up the receiver and listened to whatever was being said to him. “I have to go,” he said then, without explanation. Belt and pistol were taken up again.

  Guidi readied to leave also. “Can we get together tomorrow? I’ll be going through Magda’s personal items again.”

  “I don’t know. Try me at the office.”

  They came out of the hotel together. Across the street, a full moon lit the powerful intricacy of the gate shielding the Barberini Garden. Guidi, who had been lined up with the others against it, under SS guard, had to look away. He saw Bora glancing down the darkness of Via Rasella as he unlocked his car. Between those two landmarks, in that stretch of irrelevant pavement, any hope of friendship had been killed also.

  “It’s been nearly three weeks,” Guidi said.

  Bora made no comment. But he did turn to Guidi, sketched in the dreary light from above. Much as he longed to ask for advice regarding Hohmann’s death, the time was not right.

  “It was Caruso who put your name on the list, not the SS.”

  14 APRIL 1944

  On a splendid spring mid-morning, Field Marshal Kesselring went to visit the Pope, with Westphal and Bora in tow. It was an extraordinary concession for military men, albeit in civilian clothes, to be allowed in the Vatican. On another occasion Bora would have felt privileged, but he’d been at Campoleone until the night before, a ghastly trip through the reality of no-man’s-land. His left arm ached badly, stabbing pains radiating from the mutilation up to his shoulder. He was nervous about that afternoon’s serological test, and perfunctorily going through the motions until the moment he was introduced to Patrick Atwater Murphy.

  The diplomat was an energetic man of Borromeo’s age, with a florid complexion and bright eyes. He laughed too easily, in Bora’s reckoning, but so did most Americans he knew.

  “That’s an interesting name. Bora – a direct relation to Luther’s wife?”

  “We don’t stress the likelihood.”

  “So, of all names, your parents called you Martin, eh?”

  Bora looked Murphy in the eye, feeling his own youth and loneliness as an injustice in the face of this man’s glib ease. He lies in bed with her and doesn’t want her children. What a waste. “Only because I was born on Martinmas.”

  They engaged in as pleasant a brief chatter as the occasion permitted, with Murphy commenting in his Boston drawl on his return to the boredom of a city where “every public pahk is an excuse for heathen rubble”, and what they called a “swell steak” tried a man’s healthy appetite. “Thank God ‘Cahdinal’ Borromeo is such a good sport and tourist guide. If it weren’t for him, my wife’d be dragging me from cultural pillar to operatic post. So, anyway. What do you do in real life, Major Martin Bora?”

  How much we have in common, she and I. Coolly, Bora said, “I don’t go posting religious theses on cathedral doors.”

  At the hospital, Bora did not expect to meet Treib, the weary-faced army surgeon from Aprilia, who – having recognized him from his office – came to greet him in the hallway.

  “So,” he said, “you made it back in one piece, Major. Yes, we retreated from there too, surviving POWs and all. It’s good to be in a place where I can have enough cotton to make tampons out of. See this?” He acknowledged a bullet scar on his hand. “They almost took me and two medics prisoner near Albano.”

  “You don’t say. Who was it?”

  “Partisans, I suppose – no uniforms anyhow. We got away by the skin of our teeth, and two lightly wounded Americans managed to scramble off with them. How’s your leg?”

  “Fine. I’m here for a different reason.” Bora kept straight-faced. “I need a Wassermann test.”

  Treib looked at him in the same manner. “Was the first blood work negative?”

  “Yes.”

  “Well, let’s go.”

  Afterwards the surgeon brought the results to the waiting room, where Bora had been sitting and pacing around for an hour. “Congratulations. The Wassermann is also negative. We’ll repeat it in two weeks to make damn sure. It seems you haven’t gotten anything else, either. Very lucky, the women are ridden. May I remind you to use caution if you frequent prostitutes?”

  “I don’t,” Bora said dryly.

  Treib’s bleary eyes traveled to Bora’s wedding ring. “Well, who was she?”

  “Probably a whore from the hotel. If I haven’t paid her she’ll show up, and I’ll know. It was the night after the trouble at the caves, I wasn’t thinking. And I’m no longer married,” Bora felt he should add. “But I do want to be able to reproduce in the near future.”

  “Would you care to take a look at some infected blood?”

  “No, thank you.”

  “It’s really interesting how the little devils whip around.”

  “I get your point, Captain.”

  7

  16 APRIL 1944

  “I felt I should apologize for refusing to see you. The last few days have been very difficult, and I am still trying to shield our mother from hearing what happened to Marina.”

  Gemma Fonseca resembled her sister in age and looks. Fair, gray-eyed. The quiet elegance of her house – a deco interior of lacquered smooth lines – was much like her person, but there was a lack of sparkle in both, and a nun-like severity to the turn of her face as she invited him to enter. “I should have known from the note on your card that you might have good intentions. How may I assist you?”

  Bora removed his cap, which the maid came to take with a curtsey. He related his distress at the events, though it was such a resplendent Sunday morning, everything inside and outside of him demanded happier things. “My respect for the cardinal brings me here,” he concluded. “You could say he was my spiritual father, so it’s particularly painful for me to face his death, and your sister’s.”

  Framed by the clean angles of the parlor’s door, for a time she looked at him, as if wondering how much she could share with him. On her cheeks, a delicate, nearly fragile skin stretched taut over the bones, and her wrists were also thin, blue-veined. The left eye was slightly off, looking outwardly only enough as to make her stare oddly fixed, as that of an icon. Her figure seemed strung up by some force of will or pride. “I appreciate your condolences. Marina and I were very close.”

  Her tension was such that Bora found himself hoping she would take a seat and relax. “Lack of a thorough post-mortem will not make things easier,” he said cautiously, going through his own process of assessment. Gemma Fonseca was visibly tempted to take a seat, but did not.

  “Why so?”

  “Because its absence will clinch the apparent motive for the deaths.”

  Instantly, she gained a desperate, nearly wild look on her unadorned face. Her hand sought the sofa, and on a corner of it she sat, only the rigidity of her shoulders maintaining a semblance of control. She began to weep without lowering her head, hands knotted in her lap.

  “I so much hoped you would say that, Major. I am so grateful you said it.”

  If nuns cry, they cry like her. Like a sky that rains and cleanses itself. Bora sat facing her. He was not embarrassed by her reaction because it had no anger and no noise. “My expectation is that you might offer me clues contrary to what seems, and I do not believe is.”

  “I don’t know that I can. Until today I have been putting the authorities off, but I will have to answer their questions sooner or later.”

  Bora had the suicide note in his pocket, but said nothing about it, ra
ther, “I wonder if you could favor me with a sample of your sister’s handwriting.”

  Whatever she thought of the request, without questioning it she reached for a sleek silver box on the tea table, and from it handed a pale blue envelope to Bora. “This had been mailed Friday morning, and arrived the morning after Marina died.”

  It was the same fine cotton fiber stationery of the suicide note, and – even after a cursory examination of the contents, a thoughtful, innocuous family letter – undoubtedly written by the same hand. Whether Bora’s profound disappointment was apparent or not, Gemma Fonseca finally prompted him. “Will you tell me the reason for your request, Major?”

  “By your leave, not now.” The tall capitals, rounded loops, the slight downward slant of the lines were familiar to him, as he’d learned from brooding over the note in days past. Nonetheless, Bora asked, “May I keep it?”

  “If you wish. You see there’s no reference to a crisis of any kind. Although we never lived more than fifty miles apart from each other, Marina and I exchanged letters every week. It was a habit we picked up as adolescents and kept ever since, even during her marriage.”

  Dollmann is right, and so Borromeo. I should reconcile myself to it. Bora sat, looking beyond Gemma’s mournful figure, toward a gleaming doorway of aluminum and glass. “Did you keep all the letters?”

  “I did, Major. But in anticipation of the police’s securing them, I have already disposed of several, for no other reason than they are private and were never meant for eyes other than my own. You might as well know this.”

  Bora did not often feel defeated. At this moment, though, it was as if everyone in this sordid affair – Hohmann, Borromeo, the sisters – had betrayed him, and nothing and no one could be trusted. Gemma Fonseca might have read through his disgust this time.

  “I was tempted to destroy all, much as I treasure them. Had I not received your visit today, I probably would have.”

  Yes, and no one would have been the wiser for it. Bora spoke automatically now, only because he’d after all come here on an errand. “Should you wish to find out more about me, my references are Cardinal Giovanni Borromeo, Ambassador Weizsäcker and Countess Maria Ascanio, who knows me best of all.” It was his turn to set limits to the meeting, and he stood to indicate that he was ready to go.

  Gemma Fonseca extended her had toward him from where she sat, a small gesture of controlled despair, which came in no way close to touching him. “Please, Major. Do not go in haste. Let me tell you how good Marina really was.”

  17 APRIL 1944

  On Monday, the working-class Quadraro district, which Bora and Westphal had crossed in January on their way to the coast, sat under a cloudy sky. In the unseasonable warmth, the Fascist militiamen sweated in their black cheviot shirts. The SS had already changed into summer uniforms, but perspired even more. It took them hours to round up seven hundred and fifty men in reprisal for the death of two militiamen. A red-faced Sutor confronted a crowd of loud women, many holding small children in their arms. Their bawling recriminations no doubt annoyed him, but Bora knew that seeing his Mercedes parked a few steps away had to be the greatest irritant. So he stood by with an unlit cigarette in his mouth, monitoring the progress of the operation for General Westphal.

  That evening, though he’d heard about the deportation, Guidi did not raise the issue with Bora. It was best to say nothing, especially since Antonio Rau had mysteriously resurfaced for his Latin lessons, and Francesca’s pregnancy was in the late stages. As for himself, he’d never even brought up with the Maiulis his intention to leave the apartment.

  Just before sundown they met in Bora’s car, parked in the green darkness of the Villa Umberto gardens. A waning moon sailed over the heads of the trees with a sheen of silver, and through the open window the scent of flowers came from the old beds of irises and roses. As darkness increased, even under the tree cover the blush of the embattled western sky flared bright at times. A low voom-voom-voom accompanied the brightness.

  Bora was in pain, which was less apparent from his stiffness than from the attempt he made to counter it. He said, “I have arranged for you to interview a second embassy employee who knew Magda Reiner. Hannah Kund is her name, now serving in Milan. Not a close friend, but she does speak serviceable Italian. She’d been gone from Rome since her furlough before Christmas, and it was a shock for her to hear of her colleague’s end. I took the liberty of showing her the personal items still in her bedroom, and she was particularly surprised that Magda Reiner’s keys are missing.”

  “Why would she particularly notice that detail?”

  “That’s what I asked, Guidi. The Reiner girl had a silver key chain she made much of, a Greek meander motif her fiancé had sent her from Athens. Apparently she kept all her room keys on it. Now, although she had some clearance at the embassy, she was by no means privy to sensitive material —”

  “That we know of,” Guidi intervened.

  “True. But she would not carry around keys to relevant offices on her key chain.”

  “So, the killer locked her doors to fake a suicide and took the keys.”

  “He might have also wanted to delay the entrance of the authorities. And of course, the apartment was searched before we arrived. They could have taken the keys then.”

  Guidi felt vindicated. “My point exactly, Major. Caruso and Sutor, in one way or another, had access to her place, and so probably Merlo. Surely the killer did. As for Magda’s button – and Magda herself – she ended up in 7B. Was she forced in there? Not likely, since she somehow returned to her apartment and got ready for bed. But she did lose the button, the front, top button of her dress. Was there a struggle in 7B?”

  “That, or sexual intercourse.” Bora said the words, recalling with acute melancholy the handful of torn silk at his wife’s feet, the last time he’d made love hoping she still cared. “Whoever was in 7B could have followed her afterwards.”

  “Whoever was in 7B was hiding, Major. Spy, deserter, whatever. The question is, was Magda hiding him? Was it she who made a copy of the key to the vacant apartment?” And because Bora sighed, Guidi said, “I can see it troubles you.”

  “The death of an embassy employee? It should trouble me.” But tonight it was the thought of Dikta, and pain, that troubled Bora most of all. “Well,” he spoke up, “let us say it was Magda Reiner who made a copy of the key to the vacant apartment, for whatever reason. Let us say she met someone there. Whoever it was, she did not wish to receive him in her room – for his sake, or her own.”

  “Or both. Concealing a deserter, unless your policies have changed, carries the penalty of death.”

  Again Bora sighed. The surgeon in Verona had warned him that pain would return. Aspirins and other painkillers no longer worked, but he had been resisting the temptation to ask for morphine so far. Fleeting and weary, the want came at times to have his whole arm taken off, and the pain with it.

  “I’ll check with the locksmiths in the area,” Guidi added.

  “Fine. I can confirm that she first met Merlo and Sutor at the same party celebrating the March on Rome, on 28 October 1943. Fräulein Kund reports her friend ‘couldn’t choose between the two, but seemed afraid of one in particular.’ No word about which one. There had been this young Emilio, and also a no-better-identified Willi.”

  “As in Wilfred?”

  “We don’t know. I plan to phone the Reiner family again.” Bora took his cap off to rest his neck against the seat, letting his shoulders slouch. Brighter flares blanched the sky, and the low voom-voom-voom intensified then. It was as good a time as any to bring up what else troubled him. “By the way, Guidi, what do you know about the Hohmann-Fonseca case?”

  “I know it happened.” Guidi had not expected Bora’s mention of the murder. He’d heard about it, but it was both out of his district and perhaps of his league, given the rank of the victims. “Why, did you know either of them?”

  Except for what Gemma had said about destroying some of the
letters, Bora decided to report all he knew, aware that Guidi would have access to all the police had gathered to date. “I’m asking the favor of a professional consultation on a matter of handwriting,” he concluded. “I disbelieve the facts because of my affection for the dead. I realize that everything else, including this, points to a murder-suicide.”

  As daylight had nearly gone, Guidi took out his flashlight to glance at the envelope addressed to Gemma Fonseca and read the note inside it.

  “Here is another letter from her,” Bora said, “written one day earlier.”

  Once more Guidi read. “It’s the same hand,” he remarked then. “The suicide note is less steady, but given the circumstances, it is to be expected. You realize you’re to turn this evidence in, Major Bora.”

  Bora did not reply, slowly massaging his neck. “Marina Fonseca had dismissed the household staff for the day,” he volunteered. “And as for the cardinal’s secretary, he’s a young Austrian Jesuit, unlikely to question anything or anybody connected to the cardinal. He’s in shock at Santo Spirito even as we speak. The handgun, which Baron Caggiano used in the Great War, had been taken from a cache of antique weapons in the Fonseca’s principal residence at Sant’Onofrio.”

  “Clearly the baroness had not abided by the rules.”

  By closing his eyes, Bora was more keenly aware of his pain, the scent of blooming shrubs, and the distant battle. “Of turning in usable weapons? No. But unless she’d kept the pistol handy for the last several months, I also wonder how she fetched it from a remote villa in the environs, served neither by tramway nor public cars. I assure you, it’s remote. All roads at Sant’Onofrio lead to the mental hospital, and her place overlooking the Valle di Rimessola was made unreachable by bombs during the winter.”

  “Didn’t the cardinal have his own transportation and chauffeur?”

  “He did. But on that day he asked to be driven to the Pantheon Square well ahead of the one o’clock Fonseca appointment. From here we lose his traces until the time of his death.”