A Dark Song of Blood (20 page)

Actually Westphal had told him, “Avoid it like the plague.” Bora cast a glance at the wall map of Rome. More and more like an island, its irregular outline was eroded by daily raids. The ancient roads fanning from it – Aurelia, Flaminia, Cassia, Salaria, clockwise to the southernmost Appia and Ardeatina – could be made impassable any day. And the claustrophobia of army and SS was on. He heard from the next room that his secretary had arrived and engaged in her routine of morning motions. Removing her coat, nearing the desk, moving back the chair to see what orders had been left for her. Reading them. He came to the door of his office, and she stood at attention. “Why don't you take the day off?” he said.

“The day off, Major?”

“You deserve it. Take the day off.”

She put the papers back on the desk. “Thank you, Major.”

“You looked very charming at the reception.”

She saw through his courtesy, still. “Thank you, sir,” she said.

Shortly Westphal came in with a cigarette in his mouth and newspapers under his arm. “Where's your girl going?”

“I gave her the day off.”

“Relenting, are we?” The general smiled. “Are you taking her to bed?”

“No, sir.”

“I was just joking. As if there were reasons. Well, what about Berlin? I bet you'll get me out of good humor quickly.”

What happened in Caruso's office could be surmised by the occasional barking shout of the old man, and the crash of his fist on the desk, and the liberal use of the word
merda
in what already resembled a diarrhea of insults.

Guidi found himself uncannily calm under it. He let the barrage crest and wane and flush down to a grumbling sewer, only worried that spittle from Caruso's vituperative mouth would leave stains on his typed copy.

“Do you know what this is? This is shit! These are big, round pieces of shit you're handing me, expecting me to gobble them down!” Flung from his hand, the report fluttered like a wounded bird across the room to the floor. “You have the murderer, you
have him
! The proofs are there, if you have eyes to see! What's this nonsense about
reasonable doubt
and
the possibility of culprits unknown
, who do you think will buy it?”

“The Germans will.”

“The Germans will do as I recommend to them!”

“That's good, Dr Caruso. Westphal's aide will be here at ten.”

Caruso swallowed, bilious with contempt. “I won't receive him. And as for you, no further investigation is allowed. Get out of my office.” Guidi leaned over to retrieve the report. “Leave
that alone!” Caruso shouted. “That stays here, and no one sees it but me! It goes to the trash along with you!”

Guidi dropped the report. “If you would read past the first page, sir, you'd see how I arrived at my request for more time. I intend to find Magda Reiner's killer. The only thing I have not yet figured out is why Merlo is being framed, but that may emerge eventually.” And, though Caruso had grown fearfully congested, veins knotting on his temples, he added, “In the end, exposing a possible conspiracy is as important as finding how the woman died. I am modeling the readiness to ‘prosecute one of our own' you insisted on, Dr Caruso.”

Silent and motionless, Caruso sat in the chair with his eyes sunken under the contracted brow. The only sign of activity on his body was the flicking from marker to marker of the gold hand on his bulky wristwatch. It seemed hours before he said the words. “You are fired.”

Suspended
is what he should have said, but he said
fired
, like an outraged employer. As Guidi went without comment to the door, he growled after him, “Someone else will take over for you. Out. Out. Out. Do you think you're clever? You don't know what clever is!”

In the next office, the policemen were silently standing behind their desks, and when Guidi went by, they clapped a mute applause to him without letting their palms meet.

Knowing that Bora was not one not to be received, Caruso went home indisposed by nine o'clock.

By this time Guidi had driven back to Via Paganini. Frustration and anger were catching up with him quickly, in excess of what they would be had he vented them somehow during the argument. His head throbbed hard when he stepped inside. The apartment was cold, quiet. The Maiulis had not yet returned. From their glass domes in the parlor, only the saints were staring out. Guidi tried the radio, but the power was off.

The more he tried to nurse his spite, the more disgruntled and vengeful he became, sick of his ways. Having been shouted
out of a room mortified him, as though his composure were not a strength. Hell, he had unobtrusively gone through life this way. He was sick of it.

In the cloudy day, the hallway was dark, and only Francesca's door, slightly open, afforded some light at the end of it.
Is she home?
he wondered.
Why is she home?
Guidi walked to the door, reached it and was about to knock but didn't; he simply pushed the leaf inwards.

Francesca sat on the bed, sallow against the white of the sheets, bare-breasted as he had seen her once, except that she had removed blouse and drawers this time. Only the cotton stockings sheathed her legs still, up to the widening of the muscle of her thighs. And on her pale flesh the contrast of black cloth made an impression on Guidi, as did the unexpected triangle of dark fleece between her legs, which the growing belly did not hide yet, but would soon.

She had in her nakedness the oblivious immobility of the model who removes her mind from matters at hand, such as nudity and being watched. The lack of emotion that went with the display of her body was perhaps what emboldened Guidi into starting to unbutton his shirt, plucking each with fumbling energy. Halfway through the buttons on his chest Francesca lay back, resting her elbows on the mattress, so that her belly was lifted and flattened by the position, and more visibly the triangle draped dark in the thighs was revealed. Then Guidi was quick with his clothes, undid his trousers and removed those, shoes and socks followed, and he was long and lean and white at the foot of the bed. His skin felt like candle wax, and was clear and hairless and of the kind that seems to glow opalescent in the light. Last came his shorts, which were tensely molded around the painful knot of his groin. And he could not have borne it had Francesca laughed or looked away or moved in any other way than she did, calmly drawing her stocking-sheathed feet to the edge of the bed and parting her knees like a beautiful animal.

Guidi half-kneeled between them, but it was uncomfortable, so he took her by the hips and moved her back and lay on her, too timid to use his hand and energetically, nervously trying to enter her by driving his belly against the lower bulge of her belly in the right direction. He did at last, soon enough, and it had been so long it seemed since he'd gone into a woman and yet it turned so familiar again, that sliding in by a little chafing force, now rubbing the sides of the narrow fleshy depth, now the top, until it was all in and the flat whiteness of his belly was against her entirely, and he could angle his arms and relax before starting to move on her.

Her arms were at ease in a circle over the head, her breasts large and dark-nippled. The angle of her face drew itself in the lavish, crisp darkness of her undone hair. Guidi took her breasts and felt their firmness, the shift of glands under the skin, with his thumb he followed the curve of the flesh until her armpits, where a tangle of hair in each was soft and had a thin wild odor of life in it. And he was already moving, his body had quickly begun to shake and vibrate on her, in her, he was saying soft words to her and tried to kiss her. She wouldn't kiss him back, though her thighs tightened around him and made his motion more insistent, blood riding his veins in frantic jolts. Pleasure came in waves up from rubbing inside her, until he grew so rigid and hard he thought he could cry, and cried out, too, at frantic speed jerking over her, buttocks and thighs and the small of his back up and down driving him. Then a new rigidity, the need to cry out again, and he arched his spine then and drove his knees on the mattress when semen came out of him in a spurt that repeated itself and seemed to him a grand pouring out of thick discharge, after which what had been divine for a while left him, and he lay quite inert between her legs.

His desire was fast becoming an incomprehensible but no less strong need to weep, to accompany the emptying of his body with the emptying of the soul by tears. He conquered the
need, and already Francesca propped herself on her elbows with a smile neither mocking nor ecstatic – a pleased smile of the flesh. With a quick pat on his shoulder she let him know, nicely but without giving alternatives, “You can get off now.” Great shame came over Guidi then, Adam-like in the discovery of his nakedness, all divinity stripped from him, and only the white limpness of flesh left behind, which of its own accord slipped out and was his once again, unflatteringly attached as an appendix and that was all. He turned around to slowly put his shorts on again, on which moisture drew a stain right away, while Francesca sat up and was mopping between her legs with her blouse, which she then threw in a corner of the room, asking, “What time is it?”

Back from his useless errand at the
Questura Centrale
, Bora was on the phone when an orderly rushed in with the news that the Fascist parade had been attacked by partisans.

“Was Pizzirani hurt?” Bora put down the receiver.

“No, sir. It's unclear what happened, but the parade was broken up. The PAI are there now, and the SS are on their way.”

“Well, there's nothing we can add to that. I'll inform General Westphal.”

Westphal had overheard from his office. “The fools, I knew it! I knew they would get in trouble. Just wait until General Maelzer hears this! Get in touch with Kappler, Bora, and get first-hand information from him.”

Bora dialed the Via Tasso number. “Just the man I was thinking of!” Kappler said. “You heard about Pizzirani. No, only his ego is bruised, but this is it for ceremonies.
We
knew that, didn't we? Sure, the
republican guard
charged, but it was my boys who gathered a handful of suspects. I'm going to the site to take a look. Why don't you meet me there?”

Via Tomacelli ran straight into the Cavour Bridge, past which Piazza Cavour sat under the gigantic, cake-like monstrosity of the Palace of Justice, set at an angle from it.

“Typical.” Kappler spoke to Bora with his foot on the runner of his car, as a hunter stepping on his kill. “Grenades and some gunfire, and they were gone. The Fascists panicked. It would have never happened to us.”

Bora took the dig personally. “Allow me to disagree. It can and does happen to us, with all that we don't hold parades. How much do you expect to learn from those arrested?”

“Who knows. They probably had nothing to do with it. The trouble is that there's open abetment of terrorism in the Roman upper class.”

“Well, then, we make things worse by going to dinner parties with them and toasting their health. All this catching the small fish amounts to little.”

“Why, thank you,” Kappler said acidly. “And here I was, thinking I was doing a good job. The biggest offenders are your skirted chums in the Vatican. The attackers could leisurely walk to Castle Saint Angelo from where we stand.”

“Some of the biggest offenders are our drinking partners and the women we take to bed.”

“Oh. In that case you and Colonel Dollmann are safe.”

Somehow, Bora showed no umbrage. “Pizzirani has already informed us there's another ceremony planned hereabouts for the twenty-third. He wishes to celebrate the Founding Day of Fascism up the street, at the Teatro Adriano.”

“He must be crazy, there's no security there.”

“Don't let it trouble you, Colonel. We ought to worry about our own, and let the Fascists get themselves blown across the Tiber if they're stupid enough to sit on bombs.”

Kappler laughed. “I can't believe you're the same man who's got a soft spot for Foa.”

“I have no quarrel with Foa.”

“Other than he's Jewish, I presume.”

Bora did not answer. He looked beyond the bridge, toward the squat statue of Cavour looming from its high pedestal in a forlorn oasis of meager palm trees.

Afterwards, skipping lunch for the day, he went instead to St Mary of the Orison and Death, a sinister church at the end of the old street that ran into Via Giulia. Bora stopped by it for no other reason than it was the anniversary of his father's death. He had no intention to pray or to look over the relics of the old Brotherhood that had once made it its mission to bury the forsaken dead. He went in and out in the way visitors in Rome dip into churches and seek the outside again – just the time to whiff musty incense and plaster, feeling they've done their duty.

Next he stopped at Donna Maria's on Via Monserrato. If there was any place he called home now, this was it, a
palazzetto
almost Spanish in its elaborate entryway and wrought-iron balcony, where a potted oleander had been sitting ever since Bora remembered. Donna Maria, with a cat on her shoulder, had seen him from the window of the dining room and rapped on the glass with the head of her cane for him to notice. Bora saluted her and went in.