by Ben Pastor
Bora’s coldness, in return, was like well water. “On the day of the attack, gunfire came from your police station. My car was struck by it.”
“The men were confused, like everyone else.”
Bora said something in German to someone, curtly. Then, “I spit on your men. It’s you I must know about.”
“What do you want me to say?” Guidi chewed on bitterness. “I would not intentionally fire on you, Major. Now let my men go.”
“Let them go? They’re on their way to Germany.” And Bora put the receiver down.
28 MARCH 1944
As Guidi prepared to leave for work on Tuesday, Francesca asked him, “Where have you really been?”
She had taken the excuse of a sunny morning to wait for him just outside the door. In the awkwardness of her figure she resembled a beautiful boy to whom a strange load is tied. Guidi wished to feel less for her, because she felt nothing for him, and he knew. But she was asking him, her face keen and undeceived. And since Guidi said nothing, she invited him to walk, and down toward Piazza Verdi, where Guidi would board the tram, they went slowly. “I just found out from friends. How did you get away?”
“I can’t tell you.”
She took his left wrist in hand. “They cut you loose or did you cut yourself loose?”
Guidi pulled the cuff of his shirt back over the gash Bora had caused in severing the rope. “No thanks to any of yours. As far as I can tell they managed not only to kill some forty people, but got nearly ten times as many butchered as a result.”
“You’re wrong. You’re dead wrong. It shows you understand nothing about fighting the Germans. How do you know what works and what doesn’t?” When a man crossed their path from the other direction they both went quiet, and Francesca turned around to see if he was looking at them. “What works is killing more Germans, not less.”
“Then I hope next time whoever is responsible will show his face afterwards to get shot.”
“What for? As if the Germans would be satisfied with one or two people!”
Guidi had no more desire to lie than he did to explain the confusion of feelings inside him. “Look, I’ve been in your room while you were out. I found close to eighteen thousand lire in it, and I must know where they come from and what you plan to do with them. The neighbors are talking: all we need is a false step and the Maiulis might end up dead for it.”
They were in the square now, and the sun-filled facade of the Mint shone like the backdrop of a gigantic theater. Francesca stopped, hands on her belly. “You, or I, or the Maiulis, mean nothing compared to what’s at stake. I told you before, either you turn me in, or you shut up about it. As for you, how do I know the Germans didn’t plant you among the prisoners to make them talk?”
“Don’t speak nonsense.” Guidi felt bile in his throat at the thought of Caruso, who had sent him a typed card of congratulations for escaping a most unfortunate mishap, of which we have been officiously informed by the Germanic Ally.
“You can always turn me in to your crippled German friend. The extra weight would help me hang, wouldn’t it?” Francesca spoke in a low, taunting voice, and but for the ugly bulge between them, she’d never been so beautiful.
“Stop it, Francesca.”
“Well, you can’t have it both ways. Now that you say you know about me, you’re either a part of it, or you’ve got to turn us in.”
Guidi’s words came out of him unrehearsed. “I’ll have it neither way. I’m moving out.”
“Good. I have someone who’s looking for a place to stay. I can tell him there’s an opening. Frankly things are going to run much better without you in the house. Go ahead, pack. Let me know when you’re done so I can call my friend.”
Guidi felt foolish. He had never had the intention to move. Now less than ever.
Francesca was still looking at him. “I don’t know what you want from me. Rau doesn’t come any more. I quit going out at night. You wanted to make love – we made love.”
“You did none of those things for me. They were expedient.”
She started walking back, one fatigued step after the other. “Right now everything is.”
31 MARCH 1944
The hospital on Via di Priscilla, near Piazza Vescovio, was where many of the injured SS were recuperating from their wounds. Bora went there on Friday and asked to see a physician.
“You’re aware, Major, that the incubation period is at least seven days.”
“I know, I know. It happened a week ago.”
“Do you have any symptoms?”
“No, but I hear it can be asymptomatic.”
“We’ll have an answer on the culture in ten days, but need to follow up with serological work. It takes five weeks for positive serology.” The physician had been setting things ready, and now pressed with his forefinger on the hollow of Bora’s arm to choose a vein to drive a needle into. Blood frothed black in the shaft. “It would help if you tracked the woman down.”
“She could be a Hottentot for all I know. I was dead drunk.”
“Not so drunk that you couldn’t perform.”
Bora looked up spitefully from the syringe. “That hasn’t happened to me yet.”
In front of the hospital he was stopped by Dollmann, who was coming with the German Consul to visit the casualties, and urged the diplomat to go ahead of him. “Have you heard the latest from Kappler, Bora?”
“The last I heard was that such a stench came from the caves, they had to pile loads of garbage in front of them to disguise it. As if you could mask the smell of death.”
“And now he’s going to tell the Roman press ‘what really happened’.”
“It’s somewhat late for any mitigating statement, isn’t it?”
“It makes no difference. The King of Rome wills it. What is it, Bora? You look a bit low. Is everything all right?”
“I had some difficult dealings with the Vatican.”
“You have! How do you think I fared, this past week? It was hellish. They kept insisting that I publish the names of the hostages shot last Thursday. I understand how anxious the relatives of anyone who’s in jail must be, but I couldn’t accede, Bora. Even the Pope asked, and I had to tell him no. I’m asking you to join me on Monday in giving a tour of Rome to the foreign press. Charm is the name of the game, and incidentally all we have to give. If you take the Spaniards, I’ll take the Swiss.”
“What is to be shown to them?”
“The city, of course, and some of the suburbs.”
Bora caught Dollmann’s evasiveness. “What if the Spaniards ask to see the Appian Way?”
“Take them quickly to the monument of Caecilia Metella and back. But make sure the smell doesn’t get as far as that.”
2 APRIL 1944
On Palm Sunday, summer saving time was introduced, which meant Bora continued to get up and leave work at dusk. On Maundy Thursday, he wore civilian clothes to accompany Donna Maria to the Sepulchers of St Martin-in-the-Mounts, also known as Little St Martin’s.
“Do you think it’d embarrass me to be seen with a man in a German uniform?” she teased as he helped her up the ramp of the church.
“I’d rather not chance the trouble, Donna Maria.”
“And is that why you don’t come to visit often at all?”
“Yes.”
“Then come to visit my cats. They miss you.” She stopped to take her breath while he opened the door of the church for her. “These stories of people being killed in caves, Martin – they’re stories, aren’t they?”
“I’m afraid they’re true.”
“For the love of God. Have you done any of it?”
The scent of incense from within was sickening. Bora said, “No, Donna Maria.”
7 APRIL 1944
At two o’clock on Friday morning, when the telephone rang in his hotel room, at first Bora thought his alarm clock had gone off three hours early. He groped for the receiver. “Dollmann here, Major,” he heard. “Steady yourself.”
The Americans have come. In a split second Bora was sure of it, and the schedule of the next hour was mentally laid out before him. “I’m steady,” he said.
“Cardinal Hohmann has been found murdered. Come down at once.” An address in the center of Rome followed, which Bora heard through his astonishment as from a hollow, fearful distance.
Via della Pilotta was an old street behind the Trevi Fountain, perpendicular to the axis of the monument; low archways crowned its length, seemingly buttressing the sides of it. Bora was not familiar with the place, and identified the doorway only by the presence of Dollmann’s car and a police van. The stairs inside were dark. Bora had to grope his way to the landing, where Dollmann waited for him in the ribbon of light from the flat’s accosted door.
“It’s a bad affair, Major. Go to the bedroom.”
Bora went past him to enter, and at once the stench of blood washed over him. A glance into the bedroom sufficed him, before the flash from a police camera made it into a blind space of muffled sounds. When Dollmann followed, the policemen were insisting that nothing be moved, but Bora was covering the cardinal’s body with a robe he’d grabbed at the foot of the bed.
“Please don’t touch the woman, Major,” the policemen warned.
“Do as they say, Bora,” Dollmann added. “You see how bad it is.” Across the bed, the SS faced him, given away – even as Bora was – by his pallor. Together, they walked back to the landing, where they stood and lit cigarettes. “What are we going to do? This is a bad mess to cover,” Dollmann muttered. “The scandal. And on Good Friday of all days.”
It had taken this long for Bora to succeed in saying anything. “Who is she?” he asked.
Dollmann groaned. “One of the Fonsecas. A fine woman, I thought... What an ugly business this is. Of Borromeo we knew, but who’d have thought it of our own Hohmann?”
“I don’t believe it.”
“Now, Bora. It’s only because he was your teacher. The evidence is there.”
To Bora the smell of blood gave a kind of fever, and out of that discomfort, felt so many times before, he wanted to know, “How did you find out about it?”
“Entirely by accident. I was to meet the cardinal at Babington’s yesterday afternoon to discuss the Easter concert. When he did not appear, I thought it strange, as he’s the soul of punctuality. I sought him in the usual places, with no luck. Well, I thought, could he have taken sick? No one was at his residence, by which I assumed his secretary had already gone home, as indeed he had, in order not to violate the five o’clock curfew.” Dollmann glanced back toward the crack in the door, from which the muffled voices of the policemen came. “The appointment at Babington’s was at four forty-five – I was to drive the cardinal home afterwards – but by the time I did the telephone rounds and tracked down his secretary, it was nine o’clock. The fellow told me Hohmann had gone to a one o’clock appointment with Baroness Fonseca, location undisclosed.”
“How so?” Bora interrupted.
“Just so, and it wasn’t the first time that Hohmann didn’t say where he was meeting her. Not seeing him return to his residence, the secretary resolved that the cardinal had come directly to Babington’s. I disabused him of that opinion, demanded to be given the Fonseca address and telephone number, and called this place. I received a busy signal, and after several attempts over an hour and half, I suspected the phone was off the hook, which incidentally it was. So – you know me, I like to find out what goes on – eventually I decided to come here in person. This I really did not expect.”
Having finished his cigarette, Bora held the stub between his fingers as if wondering what to do with it. “How long do you think they have been dead?”
“The police say six to seven hours, and the phone had been off the hook at least since nine thirty, when I first tried to call. As far as I can tell, she shot him and then herself. And as far as what they were doing, there can be no doubt in anybody’s mind.”
“Oh, for the mercy of God. It’s entirely out of character, Colonel!”
“How would you know? Do you know?” Dollmann was placing another cigarette in his mouth. “We’re all moral icebergs – tips showing, and that’s all.”
“I don’t believe it of Cardinal Hohmann.”
Inside, the policemen had nearly finished their preliminary work. Newly arrived medics were with difficulty bringing stretchers up the narrow stairs. Against Dollmann’s advice, Bora told them to wait below, and walked back into the Fonseca doorway. For a time, he spoke to the policemen – a uniformed man who was checking the bathroom for clues, carefully stepping over a scattering of minute glass splinters, and a plain-clothes man with the camera – and it was in the middle of the conversation that the SS reluctantly joined them.
The uniformed officer was saying, “There’s no question that blood flow and the pattern of stains indicate it happened right here on the bed, and that the old priest,” (was he being coy, as the scarlet robe lay visibly on the rug at the side of the bed, or had he decided not to draw conclusions from that?) “... well, the old priest was with her when it happened.” A slender man with a thoughtful face and a Lombard accent, he looked around the room for a time, then added, “If a note is found we might learn of a motive. My experience is that with crimes of passion, though, everything can happen unexpectedly and with little or no premeditation. The pistol is a 1915 army Beretta, such as officers carried in the Great War. Tracing it to either one of the victims would help.”
Averting his eyes from the nakedness the officer had uncovered again, Bora said. “You had better communicate at once with Assistant Secretary of State Montini,” and to Dollmann, in German, “What will be the official version?”
The colonel looked as though he’d taken ill-tasting medicine. “They’ll likely claim illness or derangement, and won’t broadcast it until after Easter, if they can manage it. It’d be an even more grievous scandal if it came out now, as she was the darling of charity circles. The question is, if the lay press learns of it, there’ll be no stopping the mudslide.”
Sternly the Germans watched the policeman call the Vatican, and vaguely mention a dreadful accident to a prelate. “Quit mulling about this,” Dollmann told Bora afterwards, easing him ahead of himself out of the bedroom door. “It’s what it looks like, so reconcile yourself with it.” On the landing, out of his breast pocket, he took an envelope which he passed on to his colleague. “She did write a suicide note, clear as the light of day. It was on the bed table when I arrived here. I took it upon
myself to remove it before the police joined me, whatever good it’ll do. I’m giving it to you only so that you won’t be tempted to look into some alternative explanation that sadly isn’t there.”
Bora would not look at the note before getting back to his hotel. Aghast as he was at the events of the night, the contents made things worse.
My beloved sister, Cardinal Hohmann and I will have gone to our judgment by the time you receive this. Know that I was the material executor of this act, but that – terrible as it might seem – it is still less than the shame before God and man of our months of secretly sinning together.
Pray for us,
Your sister Marina.
It was merciful that now, at four o’clock in the morning, there was just about enough time for Bora to wash thoroughly, change uniform, and go directly to work.
After the morning briefing, General Westphal made a guarded attempt at minimizing matters.
“Well, well,” he replied to Bora’s news from his stance by the window, “the sad truth of things. What a way to be rid of our difficult contact with the Vatican. Borromeo must feel he’s gone up a notch.” Below, workers were setting up stands for the Easter concert to be held in front of headquarters, a gift to the Roman people. “And how are the Fascists coming along with the interrogation of the Nazarene College students?”
Frowning, Bora gathered the general’s mail. The sight of the bodies on the bed – even after all the death he
’d witnessed – had made him physically ill, and he was running a fever because of it. Thinking of his angry last words to Hohmann, he said distractedly, “Kappler has them now.”
“Poor Kappler, it seems no one appreciates his tour de force at the caves. Even teenagers have the gumption to criticize him in class.” Westphal turned, as if the thought had some humor in it for him. “It’s good that the deportation of Roman males fell through – he’d have every housewife in town flying at him with rolling pin in hand.”
Bora had started opening envelopes and cut himself with the penknife. Westphal watched him take a handkerchief out and laboriously try to dab his palm. “You know, Bora, I’m getting worried about you. What does Chekhov say about men without women – that they turn clumsy?”
“He says they turn stupid.”
“That, you’re not. But you wouldn’t get so emotionally involved in things if you had something else going – even old Hohmann got himself some. No? Well, disbelieve it all you want, he had a lover and she blew his head off in bed. Oh, never mind the blood drops on the floor, that’s what we have maids for.”
8 APRIL 1944
On Saturday, Cardinal Borromeo agreed to meet Bora after the yearly baptism of converts in St John Lateran.
“If you’re coming to mourn Cardinal Hohmann, I hope you will not expect me to say anything but parce sepulto.”
“He was not one to need forgiveness,” Bora said testily. “No, sir, I came to confirm that the removal of troops I negotiated with the cardinal is completed.”
Borromeo looked a bit annoyed. “So, you don’t want to talk about Hohmann? I’m surprised. Conceited though the poor man was, he had good words for you now and then.” Bora was really so grieved – and Borromeo could see it – it was cruel of him to speak as he did. He sipped from his demitasse as an anteater from the termite mound, with dainty draughts. “I know you’ve come to speak about him. Sit down, peace of angels. I can’t understand why laymen think they have to speak in riddles to us – I can speak straight.” After finishing the coffee, he balanced the cup in the hollow of its saucer, his eyes on Bora’s bandaged hand. “To say that I’m sorry he died – that’s immaterial now, isn’t it? We’re all just passing through, and all that. I regret the way he went, which reflects badly on all of us. But then we all have our failings. How weak the flesh is. It is a strange physiological fact how man’s flesh gets weaker and weaker from the midriff down.”