A Dark Song of Blood

by Ben Pastor

  Guidi forgot about the partisans. He stared at Bora with a crazy need to weep. “I’m glad you came.”

  Bora said he was glad he did.

  “Do you have transportation?”

  “Oh, yes.”

  “Is there... anything you need?”

  Bora laughed a little. “No, I’m traveling light. It’s the safest way to do it.”

  From his gear Guidi surmised he wasn’t simply going north. It was in battle array that Bora left Rome, likely to set up resistance along the way at a railroad bridge or bend in the road, or village perched on the mountainside. “I don’t expect us to meet again,” Bora continued with a lightness of sorts. It was unlike him to lack intensity, unless he was by force keeping himself from it. “So I had to stop.” He stretched his hand out, and Guidi hesitated before taking it, for a moment thinking they should be embracing instead. But Bora was not a man to embrace another. He stood looking straight at him, hand vigorously clasped around his. “Goodbye, Guidi. Be well.”

  Guidi watched Bora turn to the door. Then his sickly unwillingness to be hurt angered him into what he said next. “There’s something you must hear,” he said when Bora was already past the threshold and bound for the first step. “I will be joining the Resistance even as you leave the city.”

  Bora halted on the step without turning. He simply nodded and continued down. His quick pace went down the stairs, and shortly his car drove off the curb into the night.

  At Porta Pia the cheering was wild as the American convoy traveled along Corso Italia toward the abandoned German headquarters, looming on the curve that bent deeply in the direction of Via Veneto. Mrs Murphy sat up in bed, wide-awake at the sound of voices under the windows. Her husband stood at the windowsill in his pajamas, talking in English to someone below. “Welcome to Rome, boys!” he was saying, and she began to laugh and cry.

  Guidi sat with his door still open, as when Bora had walked away. When the two men bounded upstairs, he had been waiting for them.

  “He’s been here, hasn’t he?”

  “You shouldn’t have left your lookout to celebrate. Yes, he’s been here.”

  “Which way did he go?” Even the older, wiser partisan was high-strung, hopeful and keen like a hunter who found the trail.

  “North.”

  “Well, of course, north! Don’t you play stupid, Inspector – which road did he take?”

  “The Cassia.”

  “Did he tell you that? How do we know it’s true?”

  Guidi believed it to be true. “If you catch up with him,” he said, “you’ll know.”

  A long way from the Cassia, near Ponte Salario where one could see the moonlit shaft of an ancient watchtower and little else, Bora walked from his car to the wayside inn. “Colonel,” his driver asked, “is this a good moment to stop?”

  “Yes, it is.”

  The innkeeper remembered Bora from a couple of lunches with Dollmann, but tonight he was beside himself at the sight of German uniforms. His wife could be heard crying in the bedroom when he looked down from a narrow balcony above the door. “What’s that? Who’s this? Oh, it’s you, sir! Go with God, go with God, don’t get us involved now that the Americans are so close!”

  Bora began to laugh despite himself, and it was strange to be laughing in the full light of the moon on a night like this. “All I want is for you to set dinner for however many you can serve, and I want to pay in advance.”

  “Dinner! Are you joking? You have the Allies behind you!”

  “Come get the money, man, and tell me how many you can serve. I don’t care to shout from here.”

  The innkeeper came downstairs, but only cracked his door. “Eighty, maybe a hundred.”

  “A company, that’s perfect. Here, pay yourself.”

  The man felt the money Bora drove into his hands. “It’s too much!”

  “Throw in some extra wine.”

  “You don’t have that many men with you...” The innkeeper peered out.

  “It’s not for my men.”

  “But then —”

  “If the Americans ask, tell them it’s compliments of the German Army. They‘ve done well.”

  Ahead on the Salaria, explosions went off, and airplanes were heard coming low. The innkeeper all but closed the door. “When do you want the dinner prepared?”

  “Right away. And keep your lights on.”

  Guidi left his apartment for Porta Maggiore, where American jeeps were already parked. Young soldiers hustled about, groups of people clapped from the sidewalks, waving handkerchiefs at the glare of headlights. A bare-headed, bespectacled officer asked him something in English, and Guidi shook his head. “Habla español?” the American tried.

  “No, parlo italiano.”

  “Pero usted entiende?”

  “Un poco.”

  The officer wanted to know how far it was to St Peter’s, and which way to get there. He took out a map and showed it to Guidi under a flashlight. Halfway through his halting explanation Guidi caught himself sobbing. The American saw the little drops on the paper and was embarrassed. He turned the flashlight off. “It’s okay,” he said after some time, taking Guidi’s arm in the dark. “It’s okay. I understand.”

  The bridge to be held was two miles ahead, and the strafing had been heavy, but for now silence and darkness were remade. Bora’s Mercedes had blown two tires. The driver was working at it by the side of the road. A slope rose on the right, hemmed with summer grass, gorse and quaking brome. From the moonlit fields there came a scent of poppies growing in the wheat. Marshes lay to the left of the road toward the river, and out of the boggy soil stumpy trees rose, where small owls asked their question, kee-hooo? Further up began the olive trees. Bora walked away from the car and into the field.

  An ancient ruined sepulcher stood receded from the road, or was it one of those old shrines with naive prayers to the saints? Bora sat on a low wall. An opaque near-summer sky hung overhead, and there was a summer temperature already, but caressing, comfortable. The city lay behind, and ahead lay an unlimited darkness of villages perched on rock walls, narrow defiles strangled by vegetation, river valleys, steep mountain passes. The fugue of nature, high and low, plains and ranges, slow rivers, foggy expanses, all the way back north, as though one were barred from here, condemned not to stay. As though this were an Eden, and he with his were banished for the sin of arrogance.

  He harbored regret, not anger but regret, deep sadness. Looking at the stars, he found the constellations so different from the night in late March when he had driven off from the caves with Guidi. That was a springtime dark sky with stars like pins holding it up. This sky was lighter and as though sagging, with stars caught in it like in a dragnet. No comparison at all. Sadness, that was it. An undefinable sense of belonging here and wanting to stay behind. But Time caught up with all of them, through the cannonade, and the importance of this act of departing. Everything shrank into a capsule enabling him to see past, present and future in neat order, without anger and without anguish.

  The dark entrance of the brick structure was visible to him in the shade of the moon. Where windows had been, empty orbits opened. It was pitch dark inside, probably too overgrown with nettles, used as a latrine maybe, and then at sunup green flies would go in and out of it. Or else the grave would remain empty, as a barren womb.

  Bora’s desire to see the ruins up close was checked at once. There was no time, no time, time was a luxury again, and he couldn’t see ahead of himself any more, destiny-wise. Wife, family, his city, destruction, the end of the war, like a jumble of cold winter mornings and coming to grips with life. Another life, maybe, other family, children – too far ahead to see, when Death may be waiting anywhere for him, and acceptance of it did not make it less frightening, so that was not the solution either. Accepting Death won’t make it walk off nor give you respite because you acknowledge it. He knew, he accepted that, and wondered whether it was possible to have a vision of the future and this to be a lie �
� physical destruction bound to happen shortly, even tonight.

  So he felt a little sadness for himself, too, as a finished vulnerable being; not anger, but sadness. Flashes rose and a low, renewed echo of gunfire rumbled now and then from the left, behind and ahead. New worlds were forged out of that convulsion in the land. Yet these horizons must be dark again some day, and tranquil, with girls looking at them at night from their balconies, thinking back of us then, long gone, long gone, many of us long dead. And pulsating flickers may go off now and then in those dark horizons, but mean nothing...

  Well, he was alive. Alive and well, and getting out of Rome. And he’d solved not one, but two cases. The little sadness inside was tempered by that satisfaction, even as political risk was postponed. That, too, was a success.

  The soldier stood by him at attention. “Car’s ready, Colonel, sir.”

  Guidi, along with most Romans, never went to bed that night. Daylight found him wandering with people he didn’t know toward St Peter’s Square, where the Pope was to come out to bless the crowd. American soldiers in rose-strewn jeeps rode tossing sweets on the sidewalks, where women and children scrambled for them. Cigarettes were pressed into his hands by smiling men in dust-colored uniforms and he grew tired of saying, “No, no, thank you,” and began accepting them.

  “If you don’t want ’em, I’ll take ’em.” A young boy trailed him, with a petulant beggarly way which made Guidi feel ashamed.

  “And what are you going to do with them? You’re too young to smoke.”

  “That’s what you think.”

  Young women rode balanced on the hoods of jeeps, holding on to windshields and soldiers, light skirts flapping over their knees. People sang and cheered and wept. From the windows of brothels weary-faced, painted women waved, and the soldiers whooped back. Two nuns were running like schoolgirls, hand in hand, to be the first in the square when the papal window opened.

  The boy of the cigarettes, having stuffed his pockets with them, showed some scribbling on his arm to a friend. “And what’s that, a tattoo?” the other boy asked.

  “Are you stupid? It’s my sister’s address.”

  “You haven’t got a sister!”

  “What do the Americans know?”

  Guidi fell out of the crowd little by little, by slowing down his pace; still he was nearly sucked onward by inertia.

  “The Pope’s coming out at seven!”

  “Let’s go see the Pope!”

  The bells began to ring, a myriad bells from over four hundred churches. People called to one another in the stream, became lost and reunited.

  “Francesca!” someone cried out, and Guidi was tempted to turn and look, but did not.

  At the bridge, where the crowd funneled nearly to a stop, he turned back, and slowly, bustled by the wave still mounting the opposite way, over rose-carpeted streets he retraced his steps home.

  THE MARTIN BORA SERIES

  by Ben Pastor

  LUMEN

  £8.99/$14.95 • ISBN PB 978-1904738-664 • eB 978-1904738-695

  October 1939, Cracow, Nazi-occupied Poland. Wehrmacht Captain Martin Bora discovers the abbess, Mother Kazimierza, shot dead in her convent garden. Her alleged power to see the future has brought her a devoted following. But her work and motto, “Lumen Christi Adiuva Nos”, appear also, it transpires, to have brought her some enemies. Stunned by the violence of the occupation and the ideology of his colleagues, Bora’s sense of Prussian duty is tested to breaking point. The interference of seductive actress Ewa Kowalska does not help matters.

  “Pastor’s plot is well crafted, her prose sharp... a disturbing mix of detection and reflection.” Publishers Weekly

  LIAR MOON

  £8.99/$14.95 • ISBN PB 978-1904738-824 • eB 978-1904738-831

  September 1943. The Italian government has switched sides and declared war on Germany. Italy is divided, the North controlled by the Fascists, the South liberated by Allied forces slowly fighting their way up the peninsula. Wehrmacht major and aristocrat Martin Bora is ordered to investigate the murder of a local Fascist: a bizarre death, threatening to discredit the regime’s public image. The prime suspect is the victim’s twenty-eight-year-old widow Clara.

  “Atmospheric, ambitious and cleverly plotted, Liar Moon is an original and memorable crime thriller.” Crime Time