by Ben Pastor
Indeed, it was past nine in the evening before they spoke by phone, as Guidi had stopped by the office on his way back from the periphery and found Bora’s message. Having heard what the German had to say, he interjected, “The fact remains that the victim’s sister recognizes the handwriting. You assume there might have been coercion of some kind.”
“Or that by writing in a fashion unusual for her – but not detectable by others, since most people are right-handed – she sent, as it were, a distress message. Any news about the post-mortems?”
Guidi was tired and silently yawned into the mouthpiece. “I have hers, which was given to me by colleagues as a courtesy. The Vatican had its own medical staff draft the one for the cardinal, and they hold on to it. No, Major Bora, I can’t. I’m stretching the rules as it is, and I had to insist with my counterpart to get it, as his office had been rifled overnight and he was not in a generous mood. Either I bring it over to your hotel, or you stop by to look at it.”
Bora showed up at the police command within ten minutes. Marina Fonseca’s death, he read, had been caused by a self-inflicted gunshot in the right temple – crushing of both bone tables, destruction of brain tissue, massive hemorrhage, et cetera. Noticeable mydriasis. No other signs of violence on the body. Small discolorations present in the hollow of her right arm, such as are caused by a hypodermic needle. Bora reread the sentence and then asked Guidi if he could make a phone call.
At the other end of the line Gemma Fonseca was defensive, not just surprised. “Didn’t I mention it to you? Marina was a diabetic. She controlled her disease by self-administering intravenous insulin three times a day. It was thanks to our good relations with the Vatican that she could continue the cure, scarce as medicines are these days.”
“I see. Do you happen to know the individual dosage?”
“To the best of my recollection, it was twenty-five units. Whatever do you ask for, Major? She was scrupulous about her diet and medication, and never came even close to neurasthenia or any other of the mental disturbances hypoglycemics are accused of. Please tell me what this is about.”
“I was hoping it might help me figure things out, that’s all. Thank you. I may have more questions when we meet next.”
Guidi had watched him, standing by with his hat on in the attitude of one ready to go home. It peeved him that Bora always looked energetic, and his latest investigative tangent on an open and shut case frankly annoyed him. Without a word he retrieved the medical report from the desk where Bora had laid it, and turned the goose-necked lamp off. Bora took the hint, and headed for the door.
“Am I mistaken, Guidi, or isn’t your heart in this?”
Politely the inspector let Bora out before switching the overhead light off. “My heart has nothing to do with it, Major.”
21 APRIL 1944
Hannah Kund came to the police station first thing Friday morning. Guidi judged her somewhat masculine, with her blond cropped hair and flat shoes, blouse and necktie. Had he not known she was not the girl who’d been reassigned on account of the “lesbian” kiss, he’d have drawn conclusions from her appearance. She answered every question without hesitation, adding nothing unless specifically prompted to do so. Magda was a good girl, just a little mixed up. What did that mean? Well, she liked men and they sometimes took advantage of her. What kind of advantage? At least one of them had roughed her up. How so? Slapped her around, bruised her neck... Patiently, Guidi reconstructed Hannah’s version of Magda Reiner’s life in Rome.
She regularly sent gifts (Lenci dolls: she was a regular at La Casa dei Bambini) to her little niece in Germany, accompanying them with cards reading, “Love from your Auntie.” Clearly her daughter, now eight years old. Drinking was a “bit of a problem”, in Hannah’s words, from which Guidi inferred Magda Reiner might have lost control at parties. Her career as an embassy secretary might have ended soon, even without her death. Names of boyfriends? Some of them she spoke of, some of them she kept quiet. The names he heard, Guidi knew already, none of them better identifiable or traceable to the scene on the fateful night. Merlo and Sutor had met once in the lobby of her apartment building, as she returned to it with Hannah. Sutor had made a scene the following day and called her a slut. An Italian Air Force pilot had seduced her in the back seat of a car just three days before her death. All in all, though, it seemed she’d never gotten over the loss of her fiancé in Greece.
Hannah Kund sat upright in front of Guidi’s desk, her blond-lashed eyes unwavering.
“Magda used to say that a past lover sounds always so much better than the present one,” was the first phrase she’d volunteered.
“Did you know if she’d recently had a new set of keys made?”
“Why, yes. That’s another reason why I noticed her key chain was missing. She’d asked me to go make a copy of the key to her apartment, because hers had broken in the lock.”
Guidi was careful to keep his excitement down. “Did she give you the pieces of the old key?”
“No. She’d made a stearin mold of the keyhole.”
“And when was this?”
Hannah Kund peered into a small book, apparently last year’s agenda. “The first of November.”
“Anything else you can tell me about Magda Reiner?”
“It’s not really relevant, I don’t think, but she hoarded food. She bought all she could and took it home. What kind? Canned food, mostly, and sweets. She loved those nougat sweets – Moretto, I believe they’re called.”
Guidi did not recall seeing large quantities of food in Magda’s apartment, and made a note of it, though in these days of scarcity it might have been a temptation impossible to resist for those who had searched the place first. The wrapper in 7B, however, was from a Moretto.
23 APRIL 1944
On Sunday General Westphal was at Soratte, and so Dollmann. In the morning Bora went to Via Giulia seeking a meeting with Cardinal Borromeo, who – suspecting he was after Hohmann’s post-mortem, or some related document – pretended not to be in. As he was scheduled to meet his commander in the evening to go over the developments around the Alban Hills, Bora could not insist. Back at the office, he sat by the phone waiting for last-minute updates from the front. At six he left for his overnight stay in the mountains, but was flying back before long with a sensitive message for General Maelzer. Maelzer, typically, ordered him to hand-deliver the answer. Bora had only the time to stop by his room for a new container of aspirin on his way to the airport.
As he was leaving the lobby of the Excelsior the lights went off, and when he arrived at the Hotel d’Italia, the power had not been restored. The whole building was dark. Candles flickered at the bar and on tables, where people spoke in hushed tones. Bora found his way up three ramps of stairs with the help of a flashlight, which he had to put away to place the key in the lock with his right hand.
Later, he couldn’t remember whether he had expected it or not, but, two steps into the room, there was a rustle of clothes on both sides of him and at once his arms were jerked into immobility. Pain raced up his left shoulder. A handgun sought his head and came to lodge under his chin, hard against the floor of his mouth. Two, three men. The pistol is not army. Bora fought but could not get himself loose, nor could he lower his head, and the front of his body was open to blows. He tried to throw himself down, and the gun was cocked. Bora heard the click in his head.
No words being spoken, still the men were close enough for Bora to smell tobacco and stop struggling, anxious to recognize by smell and contact who it might be, and whether the men wore uniforms (they didn’t). The momentary relaxation caused the grip to relent enough for him to turn halfway and drive his knee up the groin of one of those holding him, hear him yelp, and his right arm was free but already they were landing powerful short blows on him. Pain infuriated him and he thrashed around enough for them to try to grasp his hair, but it was too closely cropped, so they held him by the neck then, twisting his right arm behind his back and upwards, until t
he spasm in it made him rigid and stock-still.
Bora had no doubt they’d break his arm. His muscles trembled in opposition to the jerking motion upwards. It was as if an electric current shot through his shoulder, creating sparkling chains of light before his eyes. He twisted in pain and the gun was frantically driven back against his head. Agony in his elbow made him stiffen with heart in mouth for the splintering of the bone. He tried to close his right hand in a fist and couldn’t, no more than it’d be possible for him to keep from crying out any moment.
Something seemed to roll out under his feet just then. Visible as a pale swath on the floor, light from the hallway lamps glared, spreading under the door. Pressure on his arm fell and Bora unadvisedly swung it around to hit the man with the gun, offering himself to be brought down by a crashing blow in the back of the ear. He never lost consciousness, though he had a nosebleed and was too dazed to follow the men out. Back on his feet, he staggered to the bathroom to turn on the water in the sink. He soaked a towel and wiped his face looking away from the mirror, trembling with the release of tension, or mounting anger. The water reddened in the basin when he squeezed the cloth. He had to stand there to stanch the flow, which wasn’t much but kept coming. He ached all over, but other than that he was unhurt.
The room was in chaos. He could see reflected in the mirror how drawers had been rummaged through, emptied and their contents dumped on the floor, the wardrobe ransacked. His army trunk pulled out from under the bed and overturned, books, papers, photographs and letters spread around it. Even the bed had been searched. Angrily Bora watched the reflected chaos in the room swing away as he opened the mirror cabinet and reached for the painkiller. He was out of Cibalgina, so he gulped three aspirins, straightened his uniform out, and drove back to the airport.
In the morning, a call from Via Tasso awaited. Bora returned immediately after entering his office at nine o’clock. When Sutor rudely asked why he had not been in earlier, he protested, “I want you to know I haven’t even gone to my hotel room to shave yet.”
There was a pause on Sutor’s part. “How so?”
“I just returned from Soratte. I spent the night there.”
The line seemed to go dead on the other side. Bora was curious. He felt his temples begin to pound under the skin, and with the quickened heartbeat the bruise behind the ear hurt. The sense of danger peaked in him for the first time since last night. In spite of it, his voice stayed calm, even indifferent. “Well, how may I be of assistance?”
“When did you leave for Soratte?” Sutor asked instead.
“At 1800 last night. I told you, I spent the night there.”
“You’re lying.”
Every word counts. I can’t make a mistake. “Why should I lie, Captain?”
“Let me ask General Westphal about it.”
“The general is on the line with Berlin. Of course if the matter is urgent, I will alert him at once.” Bora took the short breath of one preparing to lift a weight or sustain a physical blow. “I don’t understand your apparent insistence on my being in Rome last night, Captain Sutor. I don’t recall any function I should have attended.”
Sutor hung up, never having given the reason for his call.
According to his instructions, Bora’s hotel room had not been touched. When he returned to it that evening, in a cool mind he separated the clothes that needed washing or ironing; the rest he replaced in drawers and wardrobe. Books and magazines found their way back onto shelf and bedstand, small objects – cufflinks, medals – were gathered again in their boxes. He wanted to know what was missing. Thoroughly he went through the papers tossed out of the trunk, dividing them into piles: photographs, sheet music, manuals, sketches.
It was obvious that his address book was no longer in the bed-stand drawer (the prophylactics were still there), but he hoped it had been thrown somewhere in the scattering. It had not. He went as far as emptying the drawers again to make sure, looked behind the radiator, the bed, in the bathroom – nothing. To make things worse, the power failed again. He sat in the dark, chewing on the powerless need to make somebody physically pay for it.
26 APRIL 1944
There was a tender spring rain outside when Bora and Guidi met at the police station over the noon hour on Wednesday. The roofs shone like mirrors under the veil of water, and on the west side of the room the windows were tearful.
Bora made such a valiant show of ease, he was sure Guidi was taken in. After listening to the inspector’s report on his interview with Hannah Kund, he made a note of the date and place where the new key had been made. Then he said, “Well, I have news, too. You’ll never imagine who came to see me at the office this morning. His gummy head polished like sealskin, it was Merlo himself. Officially, it was to invite General Westphal to a performance of I Pescatori di Perle, but I knew what it was about. I let him talk. He knows his opera, I can tell you that. He never recognized me from the Pirandello play, but has heard from someone within the Rome police that Pietro Caruso is after him. Knows I’m your counterpart in the investigation, knows about you. Clearly Caruso has his enemies, and this is really amusing, because now it’s all up in the air.”
Guidi grumbled. “It’s hardly amusing at all, Major. What did you tell him?”
“Ah, that’s the good part. I don’t often relish my position as an aide, but the perception of power that comes with it is exhilarating. I told him that I – I left you out of it, since you haven’t any power – had proof he was at the scene of Magda Reiner’s death. I told him he’s suspected of having pushed her out her bedroom window, adding that his rough treatment of prostitutes is also common knowledge.”
You haven’t any power. Guidi didn’t think for a moment that Bora was protecting him and was offended.
Bora ignored him, smiling, with his shoulders to the window. Ominous as it was for him that the intruders in his room might be after the suicide note and had to content themselves with his address book, he maintained a demeanor so congenial as to sound convincing to his own ears. “He was taken aback, Guidi. Had no idea Caruso is trying to pin murder on him. Claims he’d been adamant about Party accounts at the National Confederation of Fascist Unions and has made enemies. He assumed they’d try to turn the tables on him in matters of money, but not this. Describes himself as a good husband who would never want this to reach his wife’s ears. ‘She must be deaf, then,’ I told him. Guidi, I was enjoying myself. When it was over – and it took him the better part of two hours to spill it out – I felt so ambivalent about him, I’m telling you now that he might be the killer after all. According to him, Magda Reiner threw herself at him at the 30 October party, besieged him with phone calls until he would agree to a rendezvous. Wore no undergarments on that occasion and nature took its course. No woman had ever done that for him, and he was understandably flattered. Loved her, he says, like a high-school student.”
“What utter nonsense, Major!”
“I’m not done. As Fräulein Kund told you, one afternoon he ran into Sutor in the lobby of the Reiner apartment, and did not buy the tale Magda told him – that Sutor was there for Hannah Kund. Had a militiaman spy on Sutor’s movements after hours and was aware he visited her. Says he never heard of Emilio or Willi, but by the third week in December, his love had turned to hatred, like Othello’s for Desdemona – his own words.”
“But of course, he swears he didn’t kill her.”
“Quite the opposite, he won’t swear either way.” Bora glanced down in the street, still speaking in a good-natured voice. “You can be sure I pressured him, but he’s quite more defiant than I’d have given him credit for. Challenged me to prove he killed her. Didn’t threaten me, because he knows better. As for you, Guidi, after I told him you would not blindly accept Caruso’s indictment of him, Merlo said he expects you to do your duty as an honest functionary. And added you’ll never be able to prove he did it.”
“That remains to be seen. What about the glasses?”
“As poor Sciaba
said, he’d returned them to the store. Claims that the case – which is interesting – disappeared from his office at the beginning of February, and that he doesn’t know how either object ended up in her apartment.”
“Naturally he’d claim that. And does he admit to having seen the body?”
“He does.”
Guidi clammed up. It vexed him that Caruso had given him to believe Merlo was too powerful to be trifled with, and had thrown his own weight around when the provincial policeman had not toed the line. What Bora said was true, he had no power. But it remained to be seen whether he couldn’t prove Merlo’s guilt.
“I tried to reach the Reiner elders,” Bora tried to mollify him. “No success thus far, as their house was bombed and they moved in with friends. As soon as they’re tracked down, however, I’ll ask more questions about our Greek-Front Wilfred, the 1936 affair and any present liaisons the girl might have gotten into. Unless of course she fell in love with a partisan in hiding, and we’re back to square one.”
Guidi did not notice how punctilious Bora’s pretense of levity was. His mind went back to Antonio Rau, whose movements in Rome before his coming to Via Paganini for Latin lessons were shadowy. He was not especially tall, but would the clothes Magda had bought fit him otherwise?
27 APRIL 1944
Cardinal Borromeo distanced himself from people by refusing audiences and making them sit through long waiting periods indoors, and by other but no less successful methods out of doors. This time he gave an appointment to Bora at the Ara Coeli shrine by the Capitol Hill. There was a measure of malice in it, since Bora’s leg injury made the vertiginous climb of one hundred and twenty-two steps a reminder of a bodily as well as moral need for humility. Borromeo watched him, standing on the slab of an ancient scholar who had mortified himself by choosing burial in a much-trafficked threshold. “You’re not panting,” was the first thing he said.