A Dark Song of Blood

by Ben Pastor

  Air raids hammered the outskirts of Rome on the morning of the 26th; the air was convulsed with them, and still here and there, in the gardens and open spaces, dynamite wrecked what the Germans could not carry along. Bora was in the hard-held town of Valmontone when Tivoli’s dumps were hit by enemy bombers, and though the mountainous spur of Palestrina separated his position from the limestone ledge of Tivoli the noise was overpowering. Twenty miles across the valley, Cisterna had fallen to the enemy.

  When he returned to Rome, there was an odd activity in the city. German diplomats and journalists had already cleared most hotels. Fascist officials with wives and lovers and suitcases filled with money had vanished overnight while the lesser ranks stayed, grim and black-shirted, to take what came. Army trucks drove north. Tanks slowly ground north. Mounted artillery guns wheeled north. Columns of wearily marching men streamed as gray ribbons to the north, flanked by officers ghostly with dust and dry blood. The people in the streets – refugees, bombed-out families, partisans, priests, false priests, whores – were angry. The whores practiced English in paper-bound, dog-eared booklets. “Cum on, Johnnee. Johnnee, want to mek lov? I gotta seester, Johnnee, litta seester.”

  His office was all but empty. He stepped into it to take down the watercolors of Rome from the walls. He took his diary from the safe and placed all in his briefcase. From it, he took out a P38 – not his own, another army pistol he’d carried around since Russia, taken from a Soviet prisoner who no doubt had taken it from a German soldier. He’d tried it out at Valmontone, and now laboriously cleaned it, as it would come in handy before he’d dispose of it. Although his appointment with Treib was not for two days yet, he had already removed the sling and was using his left arm. It didn’t hurt much.

  Having left the Flora, he ordered his driver to take him to the center of town. On the way he did not look at the lines of dark-faced civilians, or at the army vehicles slowly negotiating the narrow streets in a direction opposite from his. At the Spanish Steps he got down to buy flowers from a gray-haired vendor squatting by a wealth of fragrant bouquets. Leaving his car at the foot of the Capitol Hill, with an armful of lilac and mimosa he climbed the long steps to the square, where the cobblestone, weblike corolla of the pavement surrounded the empty pedestal of Marcus Aurelius’ monument.

  Inside the locked museum, Bora knew full well the tense Wolf bared her teeth from above the sandbags, as if victorious over what they meant. Ears erect, she watched among the frescoes that had struck him so deeply when he had first returned to Rome. They told the story of the defense of the Capitol from barbarian invasion, and much as Bora had wanted to see himself on the side of the Romans, it was all too clear that he belonged to the other side.

  Around the pedestal, senseless without its imperial rider and casting a long shadow, he walked to the central double ramp of stairs of the Capitol itself. There within her niche, flanked by recumbent statues of hoary river gods, the statue of Rome as Minerva sat enthroned above and behind the empty stone basin of the river’s fountain. Clad in porphyry, armed, holding the globe of the world, as the ancient Latin verse said, in her extended left hand. Roma caput mundi. Bora felt a renewed envy of the culture she represented. And shame for his own, regret and guilt. Carefully, he laid the flowers on the edge of the fountain, stood at attention to salute, and left.

  In his office, Eugene Dollmann was like an island of spruce indifference in the turmoil. He was supervising the packing of several sealed bottles of a very dark, nearly black wine. Il Messaggero’s pages were torn and crumpled by the orderly to separate the bottles during shipping. “That way I’ll also catch up with the news,” he joked. “Best-kept secret in the region, this Cesanese wine – thick and full and mild, but it does trick you – a great wine for merriment. Stains as deep as elderberry. And say, Bora, I’m shopping around for a gift to give General Wolff. Something artistic but not heavy. What do you suggest?”

  Bora was grateful for that lightness in the face of frenzy. “If he likes oils, a Coleman is a good choice. If he’d rather watercolors, I’d go with Roesler Franz.”

  “Will you come with me to Via del Babuino tomorrow? I was thinking of Perera or one of the other shops.”

  “Save time, Colonel.” Bora opened his briefcase. “Here are my watercolors by Franz – give them to the general.”

  “Are you sure you want to part with them?”

  “Yes. I’ve spoken to the field marshal, and I’m going back to field duty as soon as we leave the city. I won’t need Roesler Franz where I go.”

  “Did you get regiment command?”

  Bora nodded. “I meet the men at Lake Bolsena.”

  Having packed the wine, the orderly left the room. “What about Sunday?” Dollmann earnestly asked.

  “I’ll carry on as planned.”

  “Do you want me there?”

  “It’s not necessary. I confronted all the anxiety I’ll ever confront, and worked it out to the details. From Aristotle’s Ethics to Marcus Aurelius’ Meditations, in a big circle I came back to my hometown Leibniz and his simple advice, ‘It must be done: it will be done.’ The point I had most trouble with was not owning to it if it comes to that – I’m a poor liar.”

  Dollmann looked mildly alarmed. “You have no choice. Think of it – you’d ruin the operation. Westphal would be embarrassed, myself probably implicated, your family disgraced, let alone what would happen to you.”

  “Well, I’ve gone through all that, and I’m fine.”

  *

  As for Donna Maria, she was not deceived by self-control. She kept wary eyes on him that evening, afraid by what he chose not to tell her. “Martin, we’ve known one another twenty-three years, and you’ve been to me the son I never had – please don’t frighten me. What is it you’ll do tomorrow?”

  Bora shook his head, but more to forbid himself to speak than to refuse her. “I cannot tell you, Donna Maria. If all goes well I’ll see you tomorrow night.”

  Her shoulders sank. “You frighten me. This has nothing to do with the war, does it?”

  “Everything has to do with it. I can’t get away from it.”

  “You can stay here and not do it.”

  “I can’t. Please go to Mass for me in the morning.”

  Bora stayed at her house until very late. And little by little, absent-mindedly at first, he began telling her about Russia, about his brother’s death, about Stalingrad. The terrible stories found a way out of him like the telling of a dream, and because the crimes were not his, he could not free himself by speaking of them, a witness chained to the sight of them forever.

  Oh, what he had seen, what he had seen and carried inside these years, the gaping long holes of the East with victims ready to fall in them, the burned-out churches and villages where as from a defiling incestuous meal the stench rose of seared human flesh. Blue flies clustering over dead bodies, over countless dead bodies that lay tainting the spring and infecting the summer air. Only wintertime starkly sealed the corpses in their own frozen blood, as in crackling cloaks of eternity. How he had without guilt, yet guilt-ridden, followed in the wake of the SS through Judenfrei regions where for weeks blood had rotted in the swollen cadavers. One would turn them over and the nauseating odor of rotted blood would follow the jellied black ooze from mouths and noses, which the first time staggered him nearly to unconsciousness.

  He spoke to her unrelieved by the ordeal, incapable of damming the words until all was said. And he wouldn’t allow her to touch him afterwards, and would not touch her.

  “Go to Mass for me tomorrow morning, Donna Maria.”

  It was past one o’clock when he returned to the hotel. He began to undress, but did not go to bed. He felt the warmth of the season on his torso, under his armpits, a gentle moisture such as from embracing someone closely, and God knows he was alone. Along with the loneliness before one’s death, he thought, there’s only the loneliness of one about to kill.

  Seated on the bed of the impersonal rented room, he r
emoved the barrel from his Russia pistol and secured it to his own side arm. Disassembling the gun with one hand was a chore, but he had practiced it often enough to be proficient at it, pieces coming apart and then together again. He timed the interval between extracting the P38 from the holster and aiming it, squeezing the trigger and putting it away. Replacing the clip, too, which he had to do holding the weapon against his chest with his left wrist. He did this for nearly an hour. And though he had been target shooting at least once a week since coming to Rome, still he held the empty gun at eye level and exercised the steadiness of his arm. Were the telephone to ring now, he’d be wrenched out of concentration like a limb torn from a tree. His mind clicked not differently from the hours spent in the car after his wife left him, a purely mechanical function of nerve centers. One thought to the next, like an electric clock linking seconds into minutes with a red thin hand. He removed the scapular medal from around his neck and put it away. Over the flat of his briefcase he wrote two letters, sealed them and placed them in the inner pocket of the tunic he would wear in the morning.

  The gifts to the dignity of man are desperate and expensive beyond reckoning.

  28 MAY 1944

  On Sunday morning, Treib glanced at the envelopes on his desk, looked up at Bora and down again. He could see one of them was addressed to General Westphal, and the other to Erwin Franz and Nina Bora von Sickingen, presumably his parents. A well-used, cloth-covered, strongly bound diary followed. “What is it? Are you going back to the Russian front?” And because Bora – who came from tossing his Russia pistol into the Aniene from Ponte Salario – amicably shook his head, Treib continued, “I didn’t think so. How long do you want me to hang on to these?”

  “Until we move out of Rome. The diary I’ll come for tomorrow.”

  “And if you don’t?”

  “My parents can have it, then.”

  It was all they said about it. Treib placed the objects in his drawer and locked it.

  In his apartment at Via Matilde di Canossa, Guidi looked forward to the day off. At noon he’d go for a bite, take a walk perhaps and return home to lounge. He planned to catch up on reading and correspondence, waiting like everybody else for the Americans to come. Things were changing, imperceptibly. Though he’d neither spoken directly, nor seen Caruso since their scene in March, rumors were that the head of police was apprehensive about a German retreat. He’d likely leave with them, though the Germans despised him and some – like Bora – made their antipathy obvious and obnoxious.

  Owing to damage to the aqueducts, there was no water in the apartment, but Guidi didn’t need to shave today, or cook for himself; he had enough in a pail to flush the toilet and brush his teeth. Stretched on his bed, he unfolded a newspaper and began to read.

  *

  At that time Bora was driving away from Piazza Vescovio, bound for St John Lateran’s.

  From his room by the Spanish Steps, Eugene Dollmann glanced at the elaborate column sustaining a statue of the Immaculate Conception, ninety years old this year. Like a vase surmounted by a crown and a cross, the strange baroque bell tower of St Andrew-in-the-Groves rose above the roofs down the way. He was nervous for having to trust someone else to achieve an end, and genuinely concerned for Bora. Love of intrigue had as much to do with all this as his sense of justice. In the past two weeks he had more than once been tempted to cancel the plan, but once he’d agreed within his own mind to act, Bora never went back on his decision. To those he had merely added external confirmation. So Dollmann stayed in his room, pacing the floor for a while and returning to the window, where fat spring clouds sailed, laden ships behind the serpent-conquering Madonna.

  Bora passed St Mary Major, at the other end of Via Merulana from the Lateran.

  Donna Maria fed her cats, with an ear to the cannonade awakening the porcelains on the shelves. Martin must have stopped by very early this morning to leave a bouquet of flowers on her doorstep; no note was with them. The maid walked in to ask, “Is the major coming to dinner tonight?”

  Donna Maria distractedly petted her oldest cat, a mangy black male with a white spot on his neck like a Roman collar, familiarly known as Monsignore. “I hope so,” she said. “I hope he comes.”

  Bora entered the square from Via Merulana and parked his car.

  The day was a clear May Sunday of blue shadows; deep and less deep they drew themselves inside the arches of the Pope’s loggia and under buildings, alongside the obelisk in the square behind the basilica. Young priests flagged their skirts in and out of the Lateran Palace. Across from it stood the old Hospital of St John, at the entrance of which Bora parked his car facing Via San Giovanni.

  The great Renaissance facades hemmed the wide, irregular space in bricks and stone, ornate moldings. It was on this piazza that for a thousand years the popes had looked from their apartments, jubilees had been declared, rebels and assassins executed. Bora left the ignition key in the lock and got out of the car.

  He scanned the population of the square. Two soldiers sat on the railing around the red granite obelisk brought from Thebes centuries before. Across the pavement a woman pushed a baby carriage in the direction of the baptistry, toward Via Amba Aradam. Back to the square, a young private was taking photos of the ten-arched loggia, while a group of priests with leather portfolios flitted around the side of the Lateran and entered it. It all reminded him of the early German days in Rome, when there was time for tourism and taking snapshots.

  As Bora stood by his car, an old couple left the hospital behind him – a gray-faced man accompanied by his wife, both very slowly bound to catch the tramway or bus at the other side of the palace, by the green facing the basilica. Next to his car there was an ambulance with no one in it.

  At the entrance of Via Tasso, two blocks away from where Bora was, two SS men stood guard at the corner. They were now following with their eyes a flock of gaily dressed young women near the gate of the Scala Santa.

  Bora glanced at the watch on his right wrist. It indicated fifteen minutes to eleven. At eleven once a month the informer had regularly come to rendezvous with a Gestapo plain-clothes man to exchange the list for money. He could not see the plain-clothes man, who was perhaps standing back in Via Tasso or its parallel, Via Boiardo.

  Bora felt the benign warmth of the sun on his shoulders. He had thought things over very carefully, and at this point everything had been weighed in his mind. All doubts on one side, all certainties on the other, and by far certainties outweighed doubts. The only real question was from which of the seven streets leading to the square the informer would arrive – his ability to act depended on this. An arrival from the Scala Santa would make the shooting impossible under the eyes of the SS. Worse if the meeting happened near Via Boiardo. He was hoping the informer would approach from Via Merulana or Via San Giovanni, preferably the latter.

  Meanwhile he took minute note of everything: smells, colors, sounds, dimensions. It was as if his eye were a precise mechanical or camera eye, lying about nothing yet feeling nothing either. The sky, with swallows. The echoes of the nearing front. A window among the many of the Lateran Palace was open. The church loomed, a gigantic wreck landed from a planet of autocratic antiquity.

  The young soldier with the camera climbed the steps of the loggia and entered the shade to take a photo of the square. The woman pushing the baby carriage had nearly reached the corner of the baptistry, but stopped to pick up the child and pacify it. Bora waited for eleven o’clock. The calm in him had risen to brimming point. Could one be too calm? Such security, such security.

  The SS lit cigarettes and sat on the hood of their car. From the open green before the basilica two Luftwaffe men were approaching, recognizable in their smoky gray uniforms. Resting every five steps, the elderly couple passed before the obelisk. At ten to eleven, a warning of anxiety tried to rise in him like a discordant note – the informer would not come, or would escape him. He had waited uselessly last Sunday. Bora took a deep breath and held it to stead
y himself. The soldiers by the obelisk left their perch for the stairs of the loggia. The Luftwaffe men were a sergeant and a private – they too had cameras. The private’s head was bandaged under the field cap.

  Sunday was good, actually. Neither Kappler nor Sutor would be at Via Tasso. Likely the officer on duty would not know him. A bus stopped at the mouth of Via Amba Aradam, but no one alighted from it. It started again and crossed the square, turning wide around the obelisk. The old woman waved at it. The bus did not stop and continued down toward the green, past the powerful flank of the palace. The Air Force private took a snapshot of the sergeant posing before the obelisk.

  Five to eleven. Bora’s heart took in a long draught of blood. The informer was coming from Via San Giovanni. He recognized the features from the photo Dollmann had showed him, and forgot everything else – SS, plain-clothes man, witnesses. Unemotionally he watched from his place by the car, hand crossing before his body to unlatch the holster. He would let his target walk into the square and past Via Merulana, but not reach Via Boiardo.

  The young soldier kept taking photos. The woman with the carriage had turned the corner and soon would be gone down Via Amba Aradam. It was just past five before eleven. The SS chatted with each other.

  The informer’s steps were neither rushed nor slow, as if the way were familiar and followed by rote, with a careless attitude of business at hand. The thought suddenly came to Bora that it was like the unobtrusive and deadly entrance of a virus into the system, coming in with the unspoken power to kill. Soon the target would be within range. Thirty-five steps away, thirty-four, thirty-three. Thirty. Twenty-five.

  Bora took the Walther out of the holster and gripped it firmly. The Luftwaffe men struck a conversation with the soldier carrying a camera. A priest strolled out of the palace, nose in a newspaper.

  Bora stretched his arm until eye and gunsight came in line, and the informer’s head in it. There were no thoughts in his mind at this point. He fired one shot.