A Dark Song of Blood (27 page)

It was not his habit sleeping naked, but he was. And there was perfume in the room, in the pillow. A nauseous head-splitting pain laid him flat on his back again. Cheap perfume. And something on the mattress pricked his shoulder blade. He held up a woman's hairpin. His eyes opened wide and he looked at the ceiling swing back and forth for a while. He didn't have the slightest idea of whom he had brought to bed last night. For once he had not kept wise control. For the third time he hoisted himself on his elbows. Looking around he saw there was no evidence of his using a prophylactic, and he thought he must have really been drunk, then. He reached into the drawer at the right of the bed where was a sealed packet of them – as if he couldn't tell already by the state of the bed that he had used none.

It was one thing sitting at the edge of the bed with his feet on the floor, and another getting up from that position to reach the bathroom door. The doors were no steadier than the walls. Bora managed to lean over the bathtub and pour a bath. There was water, and it was hot. He sat in it to soak. He knew he'd start worrying as soon as his head cleared enough to remind him that this was no place and no time to have intercourse without protection.

Cardinal Hohmann was livid and looked dead with his eyes closed, unwilling to listen to what Bora told him. Never had such as this been done. Never. In the shadow of Peter's and Paul's
grave, no less. He was dismissed. Dismissed, dismissed. There was no message for General Westphal, and he was dismissed.

Bora, still nursing his hangover, was not about to be dismissed. “May I point out to Your Eminence that seven Italian civilians were killed along with our soldiers, some of them children? One boy was cut in half by the explosion.”

“Do not sicken me, Major. As if you cared. This is how you observe your open city status.”

“It doesn't mean we're to be bowled down without redress, Your Eminence.”

“Ten to one? You call it
redress
?” Hohmann's eyes opened behind the spectacles, and it was as if sharp bits of metal were boring holes out from his devastated old face.

“All we want is for
L'Osservatore
to present a balanced statement toward the army.”

Hohmann closed his eyes again. The splendid sunshine only carved hollows in his countenance this morning. “Dollmann has already been here to ask.”

“Dollmann is SS. It's because the army wishes to distance itself from what has happened that we must have assurance there will be no overt criticism of us in your press. Hard feelings breed unadvisable actions, and these breed hard measures.”

“None of your sophistry, Major Bora. Come out with it – what do you offer in exchange?”

“We will pull some troops out by Wednesday,” Bora said through his teeth.

“What kind of troops – the non-essentials?”

“Everybody is essential now.”

“How many?” Bora presented a typewritten piece of paper and Hohmann read. “So, do you also get involved in blackmail these days, Major Bora?”

“We must do what we must do, both of us. Do I have Your Eminence's word?”

Disgustedly Hohmann set the paper on his lap. “All you have is a heartsick old German's word. It is disgraceful for
you to be here, and for me to listen to you. I hoped better of my students.” When Bora clicked his heels, Hohmann sighed deeply from his sparrow-like chest. “Tell me, what was your dissertation, in the end?”

“
Latin Averroism and the Inquisition.
”

“And your position on the non-eternity of the world?”

“I agree with Aquinas, Your Eminence –
Sola fide tenetur.
”

“It isn't all we manage to hold on to by faith alone, Major.” Hohmann waved him away. “You disappoint me more than I can tell.”

Bora left through the ornate door, without looking back.

Crossing the waiting room of the cardinal's residence, flooded by the brilliant Roman morning, with a swell of the heart he recognized Mrs Murphy standing there. She was dressed in black, and Bora caught himself impractically hoping she might have somehow become a widow meanwhile; but she was simply in the required attire for a papal reception. She saw him and nodded in reply to his salute. Bora was still turned toward her as he stepped past the threshold. Here he ran down a group of Japanese nuns waiting to see Hohmann, to whom he profusely apologized though they did not understand a word he said.

27 MARCH 1944

Guidi returned to work on Monday to find that three of his men had been arrested by the German Army. “Do you mean the SS?” he questioned Danza. “No, army. Major Bora led them.” Instantly on the phone, Guidi reached Bora. Any expression of gratitude was so buried in him by disgust and hatred that all he did say pertained to his men's release.

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.