A Dark Song of Blood

by Ben Pastor

  The target fell, suddenly crumpled like an animal that is given a killing blow. Bora replaced the Walther in its sheath, latched it. It took him four seconds. People turned, wondering what had happened and whether the report had come from the square at all. The SS had not yet taken notice. Bora walked toward the body, one step after the other on the sun-soft asphalt. It took ten seconds to cover twenty steps. The young soldier had let the camera dangle around his neck from its strap.

  Others began to drift in this direction, none yet too close. The Luftwaffe sergeant took his pistol out. Bora looked down. The woman had been hit in the temple, and was dead. Her eyes were open wide. Blood snaked quickly down to her ear, her neck, the white-trimmed blue dress until it reached the pavement. Bora leaned to take a piece of paper from her hand, and already there was a noise from the mouth of Via Tasso, where the SS had been alerted by the gunshot. Bora placed the paper in his left cuff but did not move. After sending his companion for help, one of the SS was running in his direction.

  Less than twenty seconds had passed from the shooting. From Via Boiardo the plain-clothes man rushed to where Bora stood. Ignoring him, he searched the body: hands, pockets, straw bag, bra, garters.

  Coldly Bora asked, “La conosce?” playing into his pretense of civilian identity.

  The Gestapo lifted a congested face to him. “Have you seen anybody shoot?”

  Bora merely repeated the question in German. “Do you know her?” and whatever retort the man had in mind, he recognized the crimson stripes on Bora’s breeches, and kept it to himself.

  The SS were back in force, corralling people to the center of the Piazza. The young lieutenant who had argued with Bora at the funeral led them. Shouting in their coarse way they spread to guard the entrances to the square.

  Bora stood with immense self-control. The SS had begun ordering all soldiers present to take their guns out, and felt the barrels for temperature, smelled them for exploded powder. Bora watched them. The ranting young lieutenant tramped up to him. “What about your gun? Get your gun out, Bora!”

  “I’ll do nothing of the kind.”

  “Get your gun out!”

  Bora set his face hard. “Don’t you come near,” he spelled out, and there was such threat in his voice that the young lieutenant was for a moment cowed and then tried to draw closer.

  Dollmann’s voice came like cool water from behind. “It will not be necessary, Lieutenant. The major was with me.”

  Bora turned. The colonel was a step away, white-faced and elegant and calm. Wherever he had come from, soon they were side by side.

  “But, Colonel,” the lieutenant protested, “I must —”

  “Are you putting my word in doubt? Go check the houses around. We may still be in the gunsight of a killer.”

  The words galvanized the lieutenant into commanding his soldiers to scatter into the surrounding blocks. Dollmann looked at Bora, who breathed slowly, very deeply. “Get rid of the list. You can give it to me.”

  Bora did not glance his way, but relaxed visibly. Two soldiers were lifting the body of the woman, and only blood stayed in her place. A physician had emerged from the hospital, but the SS would not let him past them to examine her. People were starting to flock around the spot. The young soldier took a photo of the men removing the body, and an SS snatched the camera from him and opened it to expose the film, which made Dollmann smile.

  “They stay stupid, don’t they.”

  Bora finally looked over. “I’m taking the list to the Vatican, Colonel. Thank you.”

  “No one leaves the square!”

  The lieutenant was having his vendetta. All present, including Dollmann and Bora, had to wait until Sutor arrived, since Kappler was with a woman friend somewhere and couldn’t be traced. Sutor didn’t drive until eleven-twenty, by which time Dollmann played an irate scene with him.

  “I had an appointment with the vice consul ten minutes ago, and because of this idiocy I am made to appear tardy, Sutor! I hope you have a better reason than the death of some Italian slut to keep me here!”

  “Herr Standartenführer, the embassy is just a block away – I see no reason for you to grow so irate. The men did as they were ordered.”

  “You haven’t heard the last of it, be sure.”

  Sutor was angry. He scented trickery. Turning in a rage to Bora, he demanded, “And you, Major? What were you doing here?”

  “I was actually coming to discuss Antonio Rau’s interrogation with you.”

  “On Sunday?”

  “How am I supposed to know you wouldn’t be there? I often work on Sunday.”

  Sutor boiled inside. For a crazy second he was tempted to seize both men and take Bora in, but was afraid of what Wolff or Kesselring might do. Too furious to speak, he choked in gall as he let both of them go.

  Dollmann traveled in Bora’s car past Via Tasso to the nearby Villa Wolkonsky, where he alighted. Bora turned left, and by way of Via Manzoni crossed Rome in a zigzag to the Tiber bank near Ponte Vittorio, where he stopped to toss the clip and used barrel in the water. Back in the car he replaced the original barrel on his P38, gave it a good general cleaning and placed a fresh clip in it.

  The appointment was at the Vatican Museum, where Borromeo was nowhere to be found. It was the Secretary of State, Cardinal Montini, who received the list, and glanced at it with a pained expression on his hawk-like face. With his back to the window of the small room, Bora observed him silently read the names of Jews sheltered by religious institutions and of Jews living under assumed identities, with addresses and hiding places. He said, “Your Eminence, I wish to confess the killing of the woman who carried the list.”

  “I’ll send in a priest.” Montini began to leave the room.

  Bora prevented him by stepping to the door. “I wish for you to hear it.”

  Newspaper folded under his arm, Guidi walked down the street from his apartment to a nameless trattoria, popular with railway employees and government workers. He sat just inside the doorway, where the warmth of the sidewalk drifted in, a pleasant rush now and then to ruffle the hem of the tablecloth. On the opposite sidewalk, in front of one of the many soup kitchens organized by the Vatican, a barely moving queue of refugees and idlers wormed to it from around the block. The doors had just opened at twelve.

  The waiter had gotten to know him in the past two days. “Inspector,” he winked as he brought a small carafe of wine, “the Americans are four days out.”

  “Is that a fact.”

  A motion of the head to the back room might equally indicate a radio hidden in it or someone come from the Alban Hills with the intelligence. “They saw them.”

  Guidi did not comment. He hoped it were true, for the city’s sake. For the Maiulis’ sake. For the sake of Francesca and those like her. He was halfway through a dish of pasta when the waiter tapped his shoulder discreetly, to make him look out of the door. German army trucks went by, their tarpaulins lowered in the back, either empty or carrying loads they did not want the Romans to see. The people in the soup line lifted hateful faces but gave no voice to their exasperation. A column of ambulances followed, battered, mud-caked, windows spattered gray. Blood dripped from them as from butcher carts. Guidi remembered the meat truck he had sat in on his way to the caves, and how it smelled of animal death in the nostrils of those about to be killed.

  “See what I mean?” the waiter insisted. But when a German staff car stopped by and a girl-faced junior officer came to ask for a drink, he obligingly produced a pitcher of water and a glass. Guidi watched through half-closed lids from his chair, noticing how the inside of the soldier’s mouth seemed pink and raw in the chalky mask of his face.

  Afterwards the waiter, towel in the crook of his arm, leaned with a smirk against the door frame as the staff car started again and continued north. “I keep a gallon of water for the Germans, I do – special for them. In a gallon I put a glass of piss. Not enough for them to notice, but I do get a laugh when I see ’em drink it. They
’re too bushed to notice. And if they say anything, I tell ’em Rome is famous for its stink water, that the popes paid a fortune to drink it and pass stones.” A sudden doubt went through him. “Inspector, do you think a glass of piss is enough to hurt ’em?”

  “Probably not.”

  In his lonely office, Bora took a sip of water and put the glass down. He had difficulty swallowing, as if his throat were somehow locked, stopped, and liquids struggled going down as breath coming up. The undoing of tension was always painful in excess of tension itself. He had been tense until all fibers in his body hung wired for action. And what shamed him most, what seemed unbearable at this hour was how he had been tempted to shoot the SS lieutenant who insisted to see his weapon. That was the reason for carrying an extra clip – not to conceal use of his gun, but to kill other Germans if it came to it. The admission of it brought a wave of blood to his face. It seemed to crest in him as though blood could crest in a human body, veins being but channels for it to tide occasionally in passion or regret.

  All parts of him were undoing tension gradually and with pain. Thighs, upper arms, the muscle bands on his chest, the shield of his stomach. To the acute soreness of his left arm he did not even pay attention. He could not confront the possibility of chronic pain resuming in it. He moved the glass of water away from himself, wishing for numbness; but anxiety mounted within, for blood to carry and make him blush and grow pale. Like debris all aches and pains, losses, departures, estrangements, defeats rode the wave of his blood. The faces of death witnessed and caused, and yet to witness and cause: the deaths ahead, including his own.

  He was grateful to have orders to travel to Valmontone, north of which the sole delivery route for the nearly encircled 10th Army clawed the mountainside.

  “The world’s currency is ingratitude.” In their parlor, Professor Maiuli shared with his wife a rare moment of bitterness. “My dear, I had taught Antonio Rau nearly up to the fourth declension, wherein I planned to include the five exceptions of assentior, experior, metior, ordior and orior. I had finally driven into him the inchoative reflective verbs – except for two of them – and what did he do but betray our trust? I could forgive him for contributing to my arrest, but he nearly caused Francesca’s, who is a strange girl but undeserving of political suspicion.”

  Signora Carmela adjusted a crocheted doily behind his head. “They say he died.”

  “Do they now?”

  “Francesca heard it some place.”

  “And where is she today? I thought she’d be back for lunch.”

  “I thought so, too. I’m keeping a dish warm for her.” Signora Carmela let go of a moaning sigh. “Things aren’t the same without Inspector Guidi, who was the only dependable tenant. He never did say why he was leaving, except that it had nothing to do with our treatment of him.”

  “Well, let’s hope she stays at least.”

  Guidi paid the bill, then returned to the table to finish a half glass of wine. Meanwhile, Osservatore Romano at hand, a priest entered in a black flutter. The waiter obviously knew him well. “Don Vincenzo, good day. The usual?”

  “The usual.”

  Guidi gulped the wine. As he stepped out of the trattoria he overheard him tell the waiter in a low voice that the Germans had just killed a woman in St John’s Square.

  “So what’s new, Don Vincenzo?” The waiter philosophically took the report.

  28 MAY 1944, AFTERNOON

  The shelling at Valmontone was deafening. Some of the hits came across the plain from the American positions at Artena, on its limestone rib balanced between deep waterless ravines, only three miles from the Valmontone train station.

  Bora covered his right ear to capture, mostly by lip reading, what the 65th Division officers were telling him. High above them the Collegiate Church, exposed as a sprout in the heart of the bean-shaped town, braved shells and puffs of smoke. Down here rubble of bomb-shattered houses created some shelter, but pieces fell from it, tiles, beams, entire inner walls, some of them seemingly held up only by wallpaper.

  Only after several failed attempts and interruptions was Bora able to get the line with Kesselring, who was at Frascati. The only receptacle the Signal Corps had found to set up the telephone in was a latrine in the back of a grocery store, now used to house the wounded and the dead. Bora yelled in the telephone, standing before a urinal brimming with stale, bloody waste. There was no water in the pipes, and with good reason, since there were no pipes left outside the room. Artillery fire battered some place nearby, so close that the inner wall of the latrine shook and lost sheets of plaster, baring the bricks. While Bora talked a captain came in and, careful not to step into the yellow pool on the tiles, undid his fly to relieve himself. Bora turned halfway from him, still shouting into the mouthpiece. When he finally walked back into the store, paratroopers from the 29th Armored Grenadiers, blanched with agony and blood loss, were being hauled in on improvised stretchers, some of them simple unhinged doors.

  The nearly thirty miles back to Rome were not advisably traveled until after darkness set in. So Bora waited for the explosions to bloom in the darkness. Long and bright were the intervals of magnesium flares. Shells traced through the night like fantastic meteors, fireworks, Roman candles, like a fearsome hell mouth opened south and west to expose the devilry below. He boarded his car at nine o’clock. The two miles to nearby Labico would be the most dangerous, with all that the hills hugged it tight to form a deep gap. It entered his mind as he started off that the SS might be waiting for him in Rome.

  It took him an hour to come in sight of Porta Maggiore, the aqueduct marble gate into which Highway 6 entered the city. Rome seemed abandoned. As a revenant, the events of the morning flowed in from the streets he traveled: worse, he felt compelled to go through St John’s Square, though it lay outside his route. He drove slowly across it, was twice stopped by German patrols on his way into and out of it. Someone had placed a sprig of flowers where the woman had fallen.

  Guidi had no curiosity about the identity of the woman shot by the Germans until later on Sunday evening, when he called his office and inquired. They had no information on her, other than it seemed to be a freak accident. There was no description, and it was unclear who had fired the shot, or why.

  At Via Paganini Signora Carmela heated the dish she had kept for Francesca and served it to her husband. “She’ll have to be satisfied with a sandwich if she comes now,” was her comment. “I try to take care of her but she’s a hard one to care for.” She lovingly watched the professor bite into the supper. “Eat, eat – you need to regain your strength after all you’ve been through.”

  *

  Bora was used to the heterogeneous population of the hotel, which he mindlessly surveyed upon entering the sunken lobby. There were always the same people at the bar, or lounging on easy chairs waiting to go upstairs. Barely disguised prostitution went on, and all pretenses of seemliness meant nothing once one heard what was being said between the officers and the women.

  He was about to cross the lobby to start up the stairs when he recognized Mrs Murphy waiting in a small armchair with a controlled face of anxiety, hands in her lap. Her being here threw him entirely. He hoped for a moment, for a moment... When she caught sight of him and came to her feet, he joined her at once. “Mrs Murphy, has anything happened?”

  She seemed grateful he chose not to misunderstand her reason for being here.

  “Major, I have a favor to ask. I went to your command hours ago, but was told by the orderly you were not expected any more tonight, and then I remembered how Cardinal Borromeo mentioned you stay here.”

  Yes? Why would he? Why would he tell her?

  “This is terribly awkward, really. It’s wrong for me to be here.”

  “No, no, please. Tell me, how may I be of assistance?”

  She tried to keep some hold on her anxiety, her lovely face only half-raised to him. “You see, I’m not even sure I can get out now. I’ve been here two hours. It’s after c
urfew. It’d be terrible if I couldn’t...”

  Her distress made him feel a surge of tenderness, an eager need to protect her and please her. “Don’t worry, I’ll escort you out. It’s best if we don’t meet here, in any case.”

  By the sidewalk outside were Bora’s and Mrs Murphy’s cars. “We could go somewhere else.” Bora hesitated. “I’m not sure where. I wasn’t expecting...”

  “It will not take long.”

  “Let’s go to my office.”

  Once they arrived at his office, her composure rebuilt itself, while Bora went through an insecure mental list of his likely needing to shave, shine his boots, et cetera.

  “I hope you understand this visit must remain private, Major. I do not wish for His Holiness to hear that I have come to plead with someone in your position. As a lay person, it is altogether my initiative.”

  Bora couldn’t help asking, “Does your husband know you’re here?”

  “I wish to embarrass him even less.”

  Now that she had removed her lacy gloves, her hands bloomed like lilies from the cuffs of her jacket. Bora looked at her hands, at the wedding ring on her finger. Self-consciously with his thumb he circled the useless gold band on his own right hand. “I understand.”

  “I was hoping to meet you in person because we had occasion to speak in days past.”

  Bora invited her to sit. She did, and he took his place behind the desk. He’d have liked for her to see the office with the watercolors of Rome on the walls, less naked than it was. The half-filled glass of water on his desk reminded him of the anguish of a few hours ago. The shot fired this morning had not yet died in his ears – not even the wild shelling at Valmontone had covered it. But he was calm. He was in control. Only her scrutiny weakened him. He moved the glass further away from himself.

  Mrs Murphy kept thoughtful eyes on him. Hatless, her head was perfectly wrought against the white walls, young and graceful, her consciousness of his observation of her only revealed by the firmness of her voice. “I recall your mention of it, Major Bora, and offer you a chance to prove how much you care for children. There is – you must know – an American Red Cross shipment of powdered milk which your army halted and has been holding in a warehouse for three weeks. You don’t need it, or don’t need it as much as the Roman children do. I have come to ask that you release the shipment to the Vatican, which can best distribute it.”