by Ben Pastor
Guidi couldn’t help thinking that Clara Lisi, in Verona, might be going through the same ordeal now, bearing her executed lover’s child. Another criminal case, another disappointment in finding out what the truth was. How foolishly close he’d been to falling in love then, too. “Should I wait?” he asked Dr Raimondi.
“No reason for you to stay. She’s in good hands. We’ll call when the birth occurs.”
Eugene Dollmann sprang to his feet when Bora walked into the lonely back room of the Birreria Albrecht on Via Crispi, so calm in appearance that the colonel thought him successful.
“The routine has been broken,” Bora said. “The informer did not show up. I waited close to one hour and I had to move eventually. Are you sure Kappler is not on to this?”
“I’m sure of it. I can’t understand what happened.”
Bora would not take a seat. “I’m due at Soratte all day tomorrow,” he said. “Unless there are unforeseen developments, I will be at St John’s again next Sunday.”
Letting him into her venerable parlor, Countess Ascanio said he looked pale. Bora was in fact starting to let go of the tension accumulated while waiting in the square, and felt numb. He undid his tunic without removing it. Seated in his favorite chair, he let the cats come to rub against his boots and seek his lap. On her invitation, he kept some of his clothes here, and now, without giving her time to ask questions, he said, “Please help me change, Donna Maria. I’m in haste, and will need help with my shirt and tie.”
And he was in civilian clothes when Mrs Murphy saw him at the Santo Spirito infirmary at half past four on Sunday. He wondered whether she spent any time with her husband. She knew he’d asked to see Cardinal Borromeo, but still, she walked out of a doorway to ask, “Whom are you waiting for?” Bora stood up to answer her, and she listened, with that open way of looking at him, saying, “When was your arm worked on? You shouldn’t be up running errands.”
“It doesn’t really matter, does it?”
“No, except that it fits your government-sponsored childish hero routine.”
Bora would have grown irritable had anyone else spoken the words. “It has more to do with work than heroism,” he grinned back.
“As you wish. The cardinal will be here momentarily – you’ll have to wait.”
“I’ll wait.”
Slim and secure in her springtime frock – how well Bora knew that beautiful women are secure with men who like them – Mrs Murphy leaned against the frame of the door. “We have Gaeta, have you heard?”
“I heard.”
“How long before Rome’s turn comes?”
His security, too, rose a little. “I wouldn’t know. So far the speed from the shore has been about 0.3 miles a day. The Melfa River is at least four times the distance from Anzio. Could be a year and a half.”
She smiled and drew back from the doorway. “You don’t lie well in English.”
“I lie even worse in German.”
“I’ll tell the cardinal you’re here.”
Guidi picked up the phone when the call came. It was some time after six o’clock, and he had spent the past seven hours in the parlor, which at last Signora Carmela had deserted to try the saints in her bedroom. “Francesca had the baby ten minutes ago,” the delighted voice of Signora Raimondi came. “It’s a beautiful boy, at least four kilos. She’s fine, fine. Everything is fine. If you forgive me, I have to go help my husband. Good night.”
9
22 MAY 1944
On Monday, the success of the French advance was a blow even for the hard-bitten Kesselring. No overt dismay was spoken as long as all the officers were together. In private Westphal said, “Bora, it’s a disaster. We can’t hold water with a sieve. As soon as you return to Rome, start implementing the first stages of detachment. Run to Frascati then – see for yourself what the latest news is. Cisterna especially, see what’s happening there. They’ll try to join in the Reclamation Land. Call from Frascati. After that, stay in Rome until I get back.”
Bora landed at the beleaguered Centocelle strip after a rocky flight. There had been a storm on the way, and enemy fire had reached the flimsy single-engine machine, so that they had for the last ten minutes or so barely limped above green, fat fields, skimming trees and losing power.
“How soon do you need a ride back?” the pilot merrily asked him as he left the plane. “I’ll need a while to patch this up.”
“Not tonight, thank you,” Bora was glad to answer.
Although the rain had not reached the city, a dark wall of clouds to the east created a citadel of shifting battlements. The scent of moisture rode the wind, and jasmine bushes in bloom at the edge of the field saturated it. A strong breeze blew by the time Bora arrived to headquarters to start the orderly motions of retreat again, four months from the day he had last done so.
It rained large star-shaped drops on the sidewalk two hours later. With a whipping sound they came down as though individually directed to earth, and once more the scent from visible and invisible gardens rode the air. Bora believed he had trained himself into near-perfect control, but the odor of the earth receiving the rain was strangely arousing to him. He wondered whether he had wasted his nights in Rome, now that he had to leave it and did not want to. He must quit thinking of Mrs Murphy, and find someone else. Find someone else. Whatever days were left – find someone else, and not go away from Rome without at least once making love as he needed to do, long and slow and hard and no apologies for it, no drinking, no worry of disease.
“Where to, Major?” the army driver asked, standing at attention.
“Frascati.”
It was a formidable storm that hit Rome, charged with electricity, running bizarre St Elmo’s fires on telephone wires and tall churches. A yellow sky fringed the steel-dark clouds where the storm had passed already. Whites gleamed phosphorescent, reds stood out bloody; colors were muted, soured. It seemed to Bora to be leaving behind a city smoldering under a biblical pall of smoke. When it started to rain he could no longer see behind or ahead, but from the side window the immediately engulfed ditches ran high, turbulent and muddy.
In his mind, Bora kept rehearsing yesterday’s conversation with Borromeo, who’d agreed to meet him at the infirmary as a matter of privacy, or else – why was he thinking this? – to encourage him to see Mrs Murphy. As his second condition, he’d asked Borromeo precise questions of the “did you or did you not?” type, and the cardinal would not admit to anything directly. But indirectly, Bora thought, I learned he’s contrite about it – as contrite as Borromeo will get about anything, and I’ll get him to give me details later on. Claims we should have known it was going on, that it is part of the Church’s humanitarian mission, though helping those in need is apparently construed as including royalists as well as partisans, enemy soldiers and double-dealers. He admits sometimes “errors are made” – I never get used to it, how the clergy speaks of errors as though they arose on their own, through no one’s fault. Worse, he admits to losing control of things, occasionally, to the extent of not knowing what happens after the succor is rendered. That could mean many things, including what I think happened. Christ, I only hope the Church will be as forthcoming when we need a helping hand.
24 MAY 1944
At ten minutes before six on Wednesday morning, Bora stepped into his office and turned on the light. The telephone rang almost immediately. He lifted the receiver and listened to the report of heavy bombardment to the west. “When did it begin?”
The voice seemed to come from another world. “Five minutes ago.”
Bora made a note of the hour – five forty-five a.m. – and asked other routine questions. “Call me back when it’s over,” he concluded. He had spoken to Westphal on another line when the call from the outskirts of Anzio came back: they had just stopped now. Bora looked at his watch. Forty-five minutes. Not unusual, yet he was uneasy. “How strong was it?”
“Very strong, a hell of fire and smoke. Can’t see a thing past it.”<
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Bora wandered with his eyes on the map. No matter what they told him, his attention kept returning to Cisterna, set in a hub of roads, with a spidery route to Valmontone across the saddle of the Lepini Mountains. Cisterna lay only eight miles from Frascati, guarding the lakes in the Alban Hills. Bora stood by his desk as he waited to speak to Westphal again, with concerns too vague to put in army terms. How could he say that in two weeks they’d be routed north of Rome because of what happened now? What he reported was factual and constrained, though the mood must have been conveyed, as Westphal paused before remarking, “Let us hope it’s not as bad as that.”
On Wednesday, too, Guidi moved out of the apartment on Via Paganini. Signora Carmela did nothing to detain him, and even helped him pack. “I’ll tell Francesca you said goodbye.”
“Yes, please. You should have enough groceries until she comes back tomorrow. Meanwhile I’ll do what I can to obtain the professor’s release. I saw him this morning and he told me he’s doing fine – has made some friends in the work crew. He thinks he’s found an ancient coin while digging on the riverbank. Don’t worry about him.”
Suitcases at his feet, Guidi decided to call Bora’s office before leaving. From Pompilia’s apartment there came music – ‘Signorine Grandi Firme’ – and the stomp of dancing feet. For a creature all nerves she seemed to be able to entertain two and three men at a time, mostly naive teenagers she managed to meet who knew how, and where. Their immature laughter came too, in raucous waves.
He had to hold the line several minutes before the major came to the receiver. Gruffly he identified himself. “Bora here.” Then, to Guidi’s direct answer, “Yes, I did,” he replied, “Merlo admitted the underwear was his gift to the girl, and said she was wearing it on that day when they met for a quickie in the afternoon. Since she had none on when she died, it stands to reason that the killer threw the briefs into the trash with the rest of the objects found there.”
From Bora’s grumpiness, Guidi suspected how desperate the military situation was. But they had to make the best of the few times they could discuss matters, so he thought out loud. “Well, we assume the blanket and the other objects belong to the mysterious tenant, and that she had provided them to him. We assume he killed her, for whatever reason. Why would he go through the trouble of disposing of the stuff, when escaping must have been more urgent?”
Bora was quiet for a few seconds, during which shuffling of papers was heard. Then he said, “More urgent, maybe, but not necessarily more expedient. He had a safe hiding place, after all. In the confusion that followed the murder, there was probably enough time for him to lock her doors, take the keys, grab all the evidence he could from 7B, dispose of it in the bins down the street and escape. Your police reports state that it was eight o’clock before they arrived on the premises, and one more hour passed before the Security Service showed up.”
Here was the moment, Guidi thought, to throw his own wrench in the works. “Except for Captain Sutor, who was reportedly still in the building when Magda died.”
Bora’s silence was complete this time. Even the papers were still at his end of the line.
“I am not going to ask how you know,” he started again, with an undefinable edge in his voice, “as you must have your sources. But answer me this – do you think he killed her?”
“First answer me this, Major – would you prosecute if I said, ‘Yes’?”
“I would.”
Guidi had no doubt Bora would. “Well, the answer is that I don’t know yet.” He reported quickly on Sutor’s movements, as observed by the militiaman Merlo had sent after him. “It was a German who was overheard arguing with Magda shortly before her death, Major, and a German blanket and German newspapers that were disposed of. And whoever was concealed by Magda may be the innocent bystander to another liaison, and to murder.”
“Maybe. I am starting to develop my own credible theory, but don’t have time to expound it now. If that’s all for the moment, Inspector, I must go back to my work.”
Guidi cleared his throat. “Actually, since we’re on the line, let me ask you for the release of Professor Maiuli. Will you do what you can to —”
“I’ll do nothing whatsoever.”
“Consider the benefits of an act of forbearance at this time.”
“This time? This time is like any other time. Don’t annoy me, Guidi.”
Guidi spat the words out. “Forgive me for insisting, but I doubt things are as usual.”
Bora slammed the phone down.
Unwilling to accept the refusal, Guidi tried the number again. It was busy at first, and then someone answered in bad Italian that the major was out of the office. The inspector thought it an excuse, but Bora had left for Cisterna, now directly threatened by American troops.
From her balcony at Via Monserrato, Donna Maria watched the evolutions of airplanes directly overhead, swift fighters circling and plunging in combat with one another. When cockpits or wings caught the sunshine, a glint like lightning came from them, and then they were high and small and dark again. From his car Bora watched them too, on Route 7, barely past Ponte Lungo. Unlike Donna Maria, through his binoculars he knew it was German airplanes that went down in graceful extended arcs. They fell on the side of the green hillocks to the east, or toward the cream-colored scar of the limestone quarries Tivoli way.
By the following day, the Americans attacked Cisterna. The army rendezvous happened in the reclamation land near Latina, which meant there was little to be hoped for now. Westphal collapsed during a briefing and was hospitalized for exhaustion, so Bora took his place at Frascati, where he spent all day with Field Marshal Kesselring.
Francesca returned home on Thursday morning, alone, as if nothing had happened. Her figure was once more slim under her clothes, though breast and belly had not resumed their shape. She let herself in and went straight to Guidi’s empty room. “Can I have it?” she called out to Signora Carmela. “I like the bed better.”
“Where is the baby?”
“With my mother,” she lied.
Signora Carmela seemed to shrink under her hump. “You’re not bringing the baby here?”
“Not for now. If you don’t mind, I’m going to move this saint’s picture – it gives me the creeps.”
“St Gennaro? The creeps? Why, he’s the most powerful saint in the book! Easily offended, too. You shouldn’t move him, it’s bad luck.”
Francesca had already reached for the frame and pulled it down. “Here.” She presented it to Signora Carmela, “You can have him in your room, so you get the good luck, eh?”
“I already have St Lucia and St Carlo, and they don’t get along with Gennaro.”
“He’ll have to find a home inside the wardrobe, then, because I don’t want him.”
“The Blessed Yellow Face isn’t going to like it.”
“He’ll get used to it. What’s there to eat?” She followed the resigned Signora Carmela to the kitchen. “Any phone calls for me while I was gone?”
“Only one, from your mother, about an hour ago. She wanted to know if you had a boy or a girl, and how you were doing.”
Francesca grinned, with both hands gathering her hair behind her back. “She must have called right before I got there with the baby.”
As for Guidi, he liked his place at Via Matilde di Canossa. He had a flat of three rooms, up two ramps of stairs from the street, in a neighborhood of Regime-built workers’ tenements – case popolari – that until recently had been all open fields and isolated small villas. Across the Via Tiburtina, the wall of the Verano Cemetery curved, besieged from all sides by tenements and modern houses, some of them bearing the signs of nearly a year of air raids.
He had his own radio now. In the evening he listened to Radio Bari and the BBC broadcasts after hearing the national station of Radio Roma, in order to have a more likely view of the events. Cassino, Fondi, Terracina were in the hands of the Allies. Nothing remained of the Fascist airport at Guidonia. Explos
ions had continued all day, closer and more readily traceable to the lake region of the Alban Hills, where fighting was reported heavy.
He had no reason to wonder, but he did ask himself what Bora felt on these days made to sharpen a man’s resistance if he’s winning, and wear it down if he’s losing. Likely arrogance and generosity battled in him, with his inability to let go. They had come close to being friends only because Bora had wanted it, tyrannically. Though it never entered his mind that the German’s unexpected lack of insistence about the Hohmann-Fonseca case might be meant to protect him, Guidi grew melancholy at the notion of Bora’s offer of friendship. Not being able to dislike him was even worse than despising him.
The telephone was on the next landing, one floor down. Thursday evening, Guidi called Signora Carmela and ended up speaking to Francesca. She told him the professor had just been released, and then asked for a ride to Piazza Ungheria in the morning. “Must go back to work, don’t you know?”
By habit, though it was an inconvenience, Guidi said yes.
At two o’clock that night, he was awakened by a terrific explosion, enough to rock the house like an earthquake wave. Not an airplane bomb, unless just one had been dropped. The Germans were probably blowing up ammunition dumps and military facilities on their way out. He listened for more noises and when nothing came over the rumble of cannonade he had grown used to, he went back to sleep.
Bora had been the one to bring orders to destroy the dump. He stayed with the engineers to watch the results, and thought the rage of fire racked by repeated bursts was beautiful in the darkness. Surely more impressive than the blowing up of the two city airports hours earlier. No one would take off from them any more. Roads cut, bridges collapsed, railroads knotted in bundles and torn: his Stalingrad nausea was creeping up, but slowly. They were starting to kill this city, and he could not bear the thought of it, yet he carried the orders to do it in his briefcase.