A Dark Song of Blood (29 page)

In those two weeks Bora had not been in touch, though only the bloody climb of Via Rasella separated his hotel from Guidi’s office. Guidi had made no effort to see him either, even though, now that the evidence found in 7B was back in his hands, he’d had it examined and should share the findings with him.

Dinner had been scanty, and Guidi left the table hungry. Francesca went to her room, where he knew she hoarded dry biscuits. In her condition, and with bread rations down to one hundred grams per day, he could not bring himself to making an issue of it. As for the Maiulis, they lived on little, and slept off their appetite by going to bed early.

After the house was dark, Guidi walked to the phone and dialed Bora’s number at the Hotel d’Italia. Bora simply said, “Come.”

They met in Bora’s room, the first time they had faced each other since that terrible Thursday, and no word was made of it. The German said, “Have a seat.” His wife’s photograph was still on the table, with the pilot’s snapshot tucked in one corner. Otherwise, the bed was made; no clothes or personal objects lay in sight. Guidi had the impression that Bora lived here ready to leave at any time.

“Major, the ashes found in 7B match those found in the Reiner bedroom. They come from onion-skin or writing paper of similar consistency. No, not ledger paper. The rest – fibers from a woolen blanket, a candy wrapper, fruit peels and the apple core – merely point to someone’s presence in the apartment. But the ashes draw a possible connection.”

Bora concealed his surprise, if he felt any. Fully dressed despite the late hour, he hadn’t as much as removed his belt and holster. Either that, or he’d worn them again for Guidi’s coming. He asked, standing at the foot of the bed, “What about the shoe imprint in the ashes?”

“From what I saw at the shoe store, it’s consistent with a rubber sole. The wrapper is from an Italian nougat. There’s a strong possibility the murderer hid unseen in the apartment, and perhaps even stalked Magda from there. No special locks had been placed on the door, so...”

“I went back to 7B,” Bora said. “Even though I had the key, I tried to open with a penknife, to see if it could be done. I failed, but in the process I noticed stearin inside the lock.”

“Someone had an extra key made from the mold?”

“It appears so. But whether or not the squatter in 7B was the killer, he knew how not to leave significant traces. Even the toilet seemed unused at a first exam.”

The debt to the living.
Guidi minded Dollmann’s words, and yet all he could feel were the bruises of Bora’s punches and kicks while being forced into the car. Odd, how bits of memory were coming back from that night. The hours previous to that
were still a merciful blur in Guidi’s recollection. “Did you find anything else?”

“This.” On the palm of Bora’s hand, a small object came into view. “It was lodged between the tuck and dust flaps of one of the storage boxes. It looks like a button from a shirt cuff.”

Guidi snatched the button. “Let me see.” He studied it under the light from the table lamp before closing his fingers firmly around it. “It isn’t a man’s button, Major. It comes from Magda Reiner’s dress.”

Once more Bora guarded his surprise, but not so well. “Wasn’t she wearing a nightgown and a robe when she died?”

“She came home in a brown dress, and there’s a missing button from that very dress. It means — “Guidi had to check his excitement. He needed a cigarette, rummaged uselessly for tobacco and paper in his pocket, and already Bora had tossed a pack of Chesterfields on the table.

“It means that she was in 7B with the killer.”

“Maybe.” Having found matches in his pocket, Guidi lit a cigarette. “For now, it means she was in 7B that night, possibly between the time Captain Sutor drove her home and the time she fell to her death. What was she doing there? Had she heard noises from a vacant apartment, and gone to check on things? Unlikely that a woman alone would do that. And – if she did – was she let in, or did she have the key? Whatever happened in 7B, she survived it long enough to change into her bed clothes.” Guidi savored the good tobacco.
Would I keep the picture of the woman who left me?
he thought.
Why does he? Either he’s still in love with her, or he wants to keep away from someone else.
“Surely Merlo had no reason to be in 7B, nor did Captain Sutor – her lovers she would likely receive in her apartment.”

“What about the ashes? Was someone burning papers in her bedroom or in the vacant apartment?”

“Well, somehow they migrated from one place to the next. Light as they are, they’d easily attach themselves to clothing or hair. The residue in 7B, at any rate, is more noticeable than in
the bedroom. So, in the forty-five minutes between her return home and her death, Magda Reiner was in a place to which she theoretically had no access – 7B – possibly met someone there, went back to her room and prepared for bed. Next, she was dropping four floors down to the sidewalk.”

“
He
was the one she was afraid of.”

“Likely, and someone she would not or could not speak about with her co-workers. We assume she’d met him before he killed her, but that’s not necessarily true.”

“Shirker, partisan, German deserter, escaped prisoner, spy. For whom do you vote? It has to be one of those. And was it Sutor she argued with before her death, or the mysterious tenant?”

Even as the thought
Antonio Rau speaks German
went through him, Guidi blurted out, “If I have to vote, it’s either a deserter or a spy. What’s the name of the man who went missing in Greece?”

“Potwen, Wilfred. I can’t see how he could have gotten here, but there’s plenty I can’t see at this moment.” Thinking of Hohmann, of Gemma Fonseca’s refusal to see him, Bora started to unbuckle his belt, which – made heavy by the pistol holder – came undone quickly. He placed it across the back of a chair. “Have you noticed how in the file I retrieved from Caruso’s office there is no mention of a search previous to ours?”

“Yes, but he might have
failed
to record it. I wouldn’t draw any conclusions from that.”

“He might have said the truth about not having access to the Reiner apartment. We know he got Merlo’s old glasses from Sciaba’s store.”

“If you mean that Captain Sutor is a more likely candidate for a preventive search, I agree. He might have removed items of clothing or such from her closet. It doesn’t seem as though anyone will be able to get out of him whether he did it, or why, and Sutor has other means at his disposal to get rid of people.”

It was the first oblique reference to the caves between them. Bora’s hint at relaxation – the removal of his pistol – was at
once belied by his posture, and the phone ringing at that moment was a relief to both men. Bora eagerly picked up the receiver and listened to whatever was being said to him. “I have to go,” he said then, without explanation. Belt and pistol were taken up again.

Guidi readied to leave also. “Can we get together tomorrow? I’ll be going through Magda’s personal items again.”

“I don’t know. Try me at the office.”

They came out of the hotel together. Across the street, a full moon lit the powerful intricacy of the gate shielding the Barberini Garden. Guidi, who had been lined up with the others against it, under SS guard, had to look away. He saw Bora glancing down the darkness of Via Rasella as he unlocked his car. Between those two landmarks, in that stretch of irrelevant pavement, any hope of friendship had been killed also.

“It’s been nearly three weeks,” Guidi said.

Bora made no comment. But he did turn to Guidi, sketched in the dreary light from above. Much as he longed to ask for advice regarding Hohmann’s death, the time was not right.

“It was Caruso who put your name on the list, not the SS.”

14 APRIL 1944

On a splendid spring mid-morning, Field Marshal Kesselring went to visit the Pope, with Westphal and Bora in tow. It was an extraordinary concession for military men, albeit in civilian clothes, to be allowed in the Vatican. On another occasion Bora would have felt privileged, but he’d been at Campoleone until the night before, a ghastly trip through the reality of no-man’s-land. His left arm ached badly, stabbing pains radiating from the mutilation up to his shoulder. He was nervous about that afternoon’s serological test, and perfunctorily going through the motions until the moment he was introduced to Patrick Atwater Murphy.

The diplomat was an energetic man of Borromeo’s age, with a florid complexion and bright eyes. He laughed too easily, in Bora’s reckoning, but so did most Americans he knew.

“That’s an interesting name. Bora – a direct relation to Luther’s wife?”

“We don’t stress the likelihood.”

“So, of all names, your parents called you Martin, eh?”

Bora looked Murphy in the eye, feeling his own youth and loneliness as an injustice in the face of this man’s glib ease.
He lies in bed with her and doesn’t want her children. What a waste.
“Only because I was born on Martinmas.”

They engaged in as pleasant a brief chatter as the occasion permitted, with Murphy commenting in his Boston drawl on his return to the boredom of a city where “every public
pahk
is an excuse for heathen rubble”, and what they called a “swell steak” tried a man’s healthy appetite. “Thank God ‘Cahdinal’ Borromeo is such a good sport and tourist guide. If it weren’t for him, my wife’d be dragging me from cultural pillar to operatic post. So, anyway. What do
you
do in real life, Major Martin Bora?”

How much we have in common, she and I.
Coolly, Bora said, “I don’t go posting religious theses on cathedral doors.”

At the hospital, Bora did not expect to meet Treib, the weary-faced army surgeon from Aprilia, who – having recognized him from his office – came to greet him in the hallway.

“So,” he said, “you made it back in one piece, Major. Yes, we retreated from there too, surviving POWs and all. It’s good to be in a place where I can have enough cotton to make tampons out of. See
this?
” He acknowledged a bullet scar on his hand. “They almost took me and two medics prisoner near Albano.”

“You don’t say. Who was it?”

“Partisans, I suppose – no uniforms anyhow. We got away by the skin of our teeth, and two lightly wounded Americans managed to scramble off with them. How’s your leg?”

“Fine. I’m here for a different reason.” Bora kept straight-faced. “I need a Wassermann test.”

Treib looked at him in the same manner. “Was the first blood work negative?”

“Yes.”

“Well, let’s go.”

Afterwards the surgeon brought the results to the waiting room, where Bora had been sitting and pacing around for an hour. “Congratulations. The Wassermann is also negative. We’ll repeat it in two weeks to make damn sure. It seems you haven’t gotten anything else, either. Very lucky, the women are ridden. May I remind you to use caution if you frequent prostitutes?”

“I don’t,” Bora said dryly.

Treib’s bleary eyes traveled to Bora’s wedding ring. “Well, who was she?”

“Probably a whore from the hotel. If I haven’t paid her she’ll show up, and I’ll know. It was the night after the
trouble
at the caves, I wasn’t thinking. And I’m no longer married,” Bora felt he should add. “But I do want to be able to reproduce in the near future.”

“Would you care to take a look at some infected blood?”

“No, thank you.”

“It’s really interesting how the little devils whip around.”

“I get your point, Captain.”

7

16 APRIL 1944

“I felt I should apologize for refusing to see you. The last few days have been very difficult, and I am still trying to shield our mother from hearing what happened to Marina.”

Gemma Fonseca resembled her sister in age and looks. Fair, gray-eyed. The quiet elegance of her house – a deco interior of lacquered smooth lines – was much like her person, but there was a lack of sparkle in both, and a nun-like severity to the turn of her face as she invited him to enter. “I should have known from the note on your card that you might have good intentions. How may I assist you?”

Bora removed his cap, which the maid came to take with a curtsey. He related his distress at the events, though it was such a resplendent Sunday morning, everything inside and outside of him demanded happier things. “My respect for the cardinal brings me here,” he concluded. “You could say he was my spiritual father, so it’s particularly painful for me to face his death, and your sister’s.”

Framed by the clean angles of the parlor’s door, for a time she looked at him, as if wondering how much she could share with him. On her cheeks, a delicate, nearly fragile skin stretched taut over the bones, and her wrists were also thin, blue-veined. The left eye was slightly off, looking outwardly only enough as to make her stare oddly fixed, as that of an icon. Her figure seemed strung up by some force of will or
pride. “I appreciate your condolences. Marina and I were very close.”

Her tension was such that Bora found himself hoping she would take a seat and relax. “Lack of a thorough post-mortem will not make things easier,” he said cautiously, going through his own process of assessment. Gemma Fonseca was visibly tempted to take a seat, but did not.

“Why so?”

“Because its absence will clinch the apparent motive for the deaths.”