A Dark Song of Blood (42 page)

Bora entered the square from Via Merulana and parked his car.

The day was a clear May Sunday of blue shadows; deep and less deep they drew themselves inside the arches of the Pope's loggia and under buildings, alongside the obelisk in the square behind the basilica. Young priests flagged their skirts in and out of the Lateran Palace. Across from it stood the old
Hospital of St John, at the entrance of which Bora parked his car facing Via San Giovanni.

The great Renaissance facades hemmed the wide, irregular space in bricks and stone, ornate moldings. It was on this piazza that for a thousand years the popes had looked from their apartments, jubilees had been declared, rebels and assassins executed. Bora left the ignition key in the lock and got out of the car.

He scanned the population of the square. Two soldiers sat on the railing around the red granite obelisk brought from Thebes centuries before. Across the pavement a woman pushed a baby carriage in the direction of the baptistry, toward Via Amba Aradam. Back to the square, a young private was taking photos of the ten-arched loggia, while a group of priests with leather portfolios flitted around the side of the Lateran and entered it. It all reminded him of the early German days in Rome, when there was time for tourism and taking snapshots.

As Bora stood by his car, an old couple left the hospital behind him – a gray-faced man accompanied by his wife, both very slowly bound to catch the tramway or bus at the other side of the palace, by the green facing the basilica. Next to his car there was an ambulance with no one in it.

At the entrance of Via Tasso, two blocks away from where Bora was, two SS men stood guard at the corner. They were now following with their eyes a flock of gaily dressed young women near the gate of the Scala Santa.

Bora glanced at the watch on his right wrist. It indicated fifteen minutes to eleven. At eleven once a month the informer had regularly come to rendezvous with a Gestapo plain-clothes man to exchange the list for money. He could not see the plain-clothes man, who was perhaps standing back in Via Tasso or its parallel, Via Boiardo.

Bora felt the benign warmth of the sun on his shoulders. He had thought things over very carefully, and at this point everything had been weighed in his mind. All doubts on one side,
all certainties on the other, and by far certainties outweighed doubts. The only real question was from which of the seven streets leading to the square the informer would arrive – his ability to act depended on this. An arrival from the Scala Santa would make the shooting impossible under the eyes of the SS. Worse if the meeting happened near Via Boiardo. He was hoping the informer would approach from Via Merulana or Via San Giovanni, preferably the latter.

Meanwhile he took minute note of everything: smells, colors, sounds, dimensions. It was as if his eye were a precise mechanical or camera eye, lying about nothing yet feeling nothing either. The sky, with swallows. The echoes of the nearing front. A window among the many of the Lateran Palace was open. The church loomed, a gigantic wreck landed from a planet of autocratic antiquity.

The young soldier with the camera climbed the steps of the loggia and entered the shade to take a photo of the square. The woman pushing the baby carriage had nearly reached the corner of the baptistry, but stopped to pick up the child and pacify it. Bora waited for eleven o'clock. The calm in him had risen to brimming point. Could one be too calm? Such security, such security.

The SS lit cigarettes and sat on the hood of their car. From the open green before the basilica two Luftwaffe men were approaching, recognizable in their smoky gray uniforms. Resting every five steps, the elderly couple passed before the obelisk. At ten to eleven, a warning of anxiety tried to rise in him like a discordant note – the informer would not come, or would escape him. He had waited uselessly last Sunday. Bora took a deep breath and held it to steady himself. The soldiers by the obelisk left their perch for the stairs of the loggia. The Luftwaffe men were a sergeant and a private – they too had cameras. The private's head was bandaged under the field cap.

Sunday was good, actually. Neither Kappler nor Sutor would be at Via Tasso. Likely the officer on duty would not know him.
A bus stopped at the mouth of Via Amba Aradam, but no one alighted from it. It started again and crossed the square, turning wide around the obelisk. The old woman waved at it. The bus did not stop and continued down toward the green, past the powerful flank of the palace. The Air Force private took a snapshot of the sergeant posing before the obelisk.

Five to eleven. Bora's heart took in a long draught of blood. The informer was coming from Via San Giovanni. He recognized the features from the photo Dollmann had showed him, and forgot everything else – SS, plain-clothes man, witnesses. Unemotionally he watched from his place by the car, hand crossing before his body to unlatch the holster. He would let his target walk into the square and past Via Merulana, but not reach Via Boiardo.

The young soldier kept taking photos. The woman with the carriage had turned the corner and soon would be gone down Via Amba Aradam. It was just past five before eleven. The SS chatted with each other.

The informer's steps were neither rushed nor slow, as if the way were familiar and followed by rote, with a careless attitude of business at hand. The thought suddenly came to Bora that it was like the unobtrusive and deadly entrance of a virus into the system, coming in with the unspoken power to kill. Soon the target would be within range. Thirty-five steps away, thirty-four, thirty-three. Thirty. Twenty-five.

Bora took the Walther out of the holster and gripped it firmly. The Luftwaffe men struck a conversation with the soldier carrying a camera. A priest strolled out of the palace, nose in a newspaper.

Bora stretched his arm until eye and gunsight came in line, and the informer's head in it. There were no thoughts in his mind at this point. He fired one shot.

The target fell, suddenly crumpled like an animal that is given a killing blow. Bora replaced the Walther in its sheath, latched it. It took him four seconds. People turned, wondering what had
happened and whether the report had come from the square at all. The SS had not yet taken notice. Bora walked toward the body, one step after the other on the sun-soft asphalt. It took ten seconds to cover twenty steps. The young soldier had let the camera dangle around his neck from its strap.

Others began to drift in this direction, none yet too close. The Luftwaffe sergeant took his pistol out. Bora looked down. The woman had been hit in the temple, and was dead. Her eyes were open wide. Blood snaked quickly down to her ear, her neck, the white-trimmed blue dress until it reached the pavement. Bora leaned to take a piece of paper from her hand, and already there was a noise from the mouth of Via Tasso, where the SS had been alerted by the gunshot. Bora placed the paper in his left cuff but did not move. After sending his companion for help, one of the SS was running in his direction.

Less than twenty seconds had passed from the shooting. From Via Boiardo the plain-clothes man rushed to where Bora stood. Ignoring him, he searched the body: hands, pockets, straw bag, bra, garters.

Coldly Bora asked, “
La conosce
?” playing into his pretense of civilian identity.

The Gestapo lifted a congested face to him. “Have you seen anybody shoot?”

Bora merely repeated the question in German. “Do you know her?” and whatever retort the man had in mind, he recognized the crimson stripes on Bora's breeches, and kept it to himself.

The SS were back in force, corralling people to the center of the Piazza. The young lieutenant who had argued with Bora at the funeral led them. Shouting in their coarse way they spread to guard the entrances to the square.

Bora stood with immense self-control. The SS had begun ordering all soldiers present to take their guns out, and felt the barrels for temperature, smelled them for exploded powder. Bora watched them. The ranting young lieutenant tramped up to him. “What about your gun? Get your gun out, Bora!”

“I'll do nothing of the kind.”

“
Get your gun out!
”

Bora set his face hard. “Don't you come near,” he spelled out, and there was such threat in his voice that the young lieutenant was for a moment cowed and then tried to draw closer.

Dollmann's voice came like cool water from behind. “It will not be necessary, Lieutenant. The major was with me.”

Bora turned. The colonel was a step away, white-faced and elegant and calm. Wherever he had come from, soon they were side by side.

“But, Colonel,” the lieutenant protested, “I must —”

“Are you putting my word in doubt? Go check the houses around. We may still be in the gunsight of a killer.”

The words galvanized the lieutenant into commanding his soldiers to scatter into the surrounding blocks. Dollmann looked at Bora, who breathed slowly, very deeply. “Get rid of the list. You can give it to me.”

Bora did not glance his way, but relaxed visibly. Two soldiers were lifting the body of the woman, and only blood stayed in her place. A physician had emerged from the hospital, but the SS would not let him past them to examine her. People were starting to flock around the spot. The young soldier took a photo of the men removing the body, and an SS snatched the camera from him and opened it to expose the film, which made Dollmann smile.

“They stay stupid, don't they.”

Bora finally looked over. “I'm taking the list to the Vatican, Colonel. Thank you.”

“No one leaves the square!”

The lieutenant was having his vendetta. All present, including Dollmann and Bora, had to wait until Sutor arrived, since Kappler was with a woman friend somewhere and couldn't be traced. Sutor didn't drive until eleven-twenty, by which time Dollmann played an irate scene with him.

“I had an appointment with the vice consul ten minutes ago,
and because of this idiocy I am made to appear tardy, Sutor! I hope you have a better reason than the death of some Italian slut to keep me here!”

“
Herr Standartenführer
, the embassy is just a block away – I see no reason for you to grow so irate. The men did as they were ordered.”

“You haven't heard the last of it, be sure.”

Sutor was angry. He scented trickery. Turning in a rage to Bora, he demanded, “And you, Major? What were you doing here?”

“I was actually coming to discuss Antonio Rau's interrogation with you.”

“On Sunday?”

“How am I supposed to know you wouldn't be there? I often work on Sunday.”

Sutor boiled inside. For a crazy second he was tempted to seize both men and take Bora in, but was afraid of what Wolff or Kesselring might do. Too furious to speak, he choked in gall as he let both of them go.

Dollmann traveled in Bora's car past Via Tasso to the nearby Villa Wolkonsky, where he alighted. Bora turned left, and by way of Via Manzoni crossed Rome in a zigzag to the Tiber bank near Ponte Vittorio, where he stopped to toss the clip and used barrel in the water. Back in the car he replaced the original barrel on his P38, gave it a good general cleaning and placed a fresh clip in it.

The appointment was at the Vatican Museum, where Borromeo was nowhere to be found. It was the Secretary of State, Cardinal Montini, who received the list, and glanced at it with a pained expression on his hawk-like face. With his back to the window of the small room, Bora observed him silently read the names of Jews sheltered by religious institutions and of Jews living under assumed identities, with addresses and hiding places. He said, “Your Eminence, I wish to confess the killing of the woman who carried the list.”

“I'll send in a priest.” Montini began to leave the room.

Bora prevented him by stepping to the door. “I wish for you to hear it.”

Newspaper folded under his arm, Guidi walked down the street from his apartment to a nameless trattoria, popular with railway employees and government workers. He sat just inside the doorway, where the warmth of the sidewalk drifted in, a pleasant rush now and then to ruffle the hem of the tablecloth. On the opposite sidewalk, in front of one of the many soup kitchens organized by the Vatican, a barely moving queue of refugees and idlers wormed to it from around the block. The doors had just opened at twelve.

The waiter had gotten to know him in the past two days. “Inspector,” he winked as he brought a small carafe of wine, “the Americans are four days out.”

“Is that a fact.”

A motion of the head to the back room might equally indicate a radio hidden in it or someone come from the Alban Hills with the intelligence. “They saw them.”

Guidi did not comment. He hoped it were true, for the city's sake. For the Maiulis' sake. For the sake of Francesca and those like her. He was halfway through a dish of pasta when the waiter tapped his shoulder discreetly, to make him look out of the door. German army trucks went by, their tarpaulins lowered in the back, either empty or carrying loads they did not want the Romans to see. The people in the soup line lifted hateful faces but gave no voice to their exasperation. A column of ambulances followed, battered, mud-caked, windows spattered gray. Blood dripped from them as from butcher carts. Guidi remembered the meat truck he had sat in on his way to the caves, and how it smelled of animal death in the nostrils of those about to be killed.