A Dark Song of Blood (32 page)

“I like to be wanted, which is very different. You don’t want me, Miss.”

“How do you know?”

“I hope I can tell want when I see it.”

She had taken her compact case out, and – peering into the square little mirror – was applying heavy strokes of lipstick on her lower lip. “That’s funny, because you look to me like the kind who falls for a woman who doesn’t even know he exists.”

Bora followed the motion of her hand on the upper lip and the grimaces she made in the process. Yes. That was true enough. And what would Mrs Murphy say?

19 APRIL 1944

On Wednesday afternoon, Westphal gave him leave to attend Marina’s burial, a strictly private matter to which Bora had however been invited by Gemma Fonseca.

The area of the cemetery where the family vault lay bore signs of hasty repairs to monuments and intricate crosses. In the devastation, wreaths of palm leaves and fresh flowers seemed to mourn the loss of monumental art no less than that of human life. Only Gemma was present with her mother, a decrepit figure in a wheelchair, wrapped in mourning like a winter night.

After the ceremony, Gemma handed Bora a manila envelope. “I wanted to give you these also. I thought of them after you left the other day.”

Bora looked inside, where several postcards from Marina were gathered.

She lowered the veil in front of her face. “Those, the police – who took the letters – had no interest in. You will find the messages altogether of a trite nature, I fear, but they are other samples of her handwriting.”

It was Dollmann’s chauffeur who’d driven the women here. Bora accompanied Gemma to the car, where he made sure her mother was comfortably returned to her seat, and then asked for a few minutes more. From the
Verano
gate they walked back, only far enough inside the cemetery to be safe from prying eyes, before Bora showed the suicide note. He was ready for the reaction that must necessarily follow, but not for the words she pronounced, still weeping.

“Marina wrote this with her right hand – why?”

“I don’t know what you mean.”

“She was left-handed. Ambidextrous, actually, but never used her slower right hand for correspondence. Never with me, certainly.”

Seated behind the wheel of his car, afterwards Bora compared all the samples he had. The unsteadiness Guidi had remarked upon, and ascribed to the writer’s state of mind, could well be explained by Gemma’s comment. He tried to contact the inspector upon his return to the office, but heard he was off to Tor di Nona after a gang of tire thieves, and not expected back for the day.

Indeed, it was past nine in the evening before they spoke by phone, as Guidi had stopped by the office on his way back from the periphery and found Bora’s message. Having heard what the German had to say, he interjected, “The fact remains that the victim’s sister recognizes the handwriting. You
assume
there might have been coercion of some kind.”

“Or that by writing in a fashion unusual for her – but not detectable by others, since most people are right-handed – she sent, as it were, a distress message. Any news about the post-mortems?”

Guidi was tired and silently yawned into the mouthpiece. “I have hers, which was given to me by colleagues as a courtesy. The Vatican had its own medical staff draft the one for the cardinal, and they hold on to it. No, Major Bora, I can’t. I’m stretching the rules as it is, and I had to insist with my counterpart to get it, as his office had been rifled overnight and he was not in a generous mood. Either I bring it over to your hotel, or you stop by to look at it.”

Bora showed up at the police command within ten minutes. Marina Fonseca’s death, he read, had been caused by a self-inflicted gunshot in the right temple – crushing of both bone tables, destruction of brain tissue, massive hemorrhage, et cetera. Noticeable mydriasis. No other signs of violence on the body. Small discolorations present in the hollow of her right arm, such as are caused by a hypodermic needle. Bora reread the sentence and then asked Guidi if he could make a phone call.

At the other end of the line Gemma Fonseca was defensive, not just surprised. “Didn’t I mention it to you? Marina was a diabetic. She controlled her disease by self-administering intravenous insulin three times a day. It was thanks to our good relations with the Vatican that she could continue the cure, scarce as medicines are these days.”

“I see. Do you happen to know the individual dosage?”

“To the best of my recollection, it was twenty-five units. Whatever do you ask for, Major? She was scrupulous about her diet
and medication, and never came even close to neurasthenia or any other of the mental disturbances hypoglycemics are accused of. Please tell me what this is about.”

“I was hoping it might help me figure things out, that’s all. Thank you. I may have more questions when we meet next.”

Guidi had watched him, standing by with his hat on in the attitude of one ready to go home. It peeved him that Bora always looked energetic, and his latest investigative tangent on an open and shut case frankly annoyed him. Without a word he retrieved the medical report from the desk where Bora had laid it, and turned the goose-necked lamp off. Bora took the hint, and headed for the door.

“Am I mistaken, Guidi, or isn’t your heart in this?”

Politely the inspector let Bora out before switching the overhead light off. “My heart has nothing to do with it, Major.”

21 APRIL 1944

Hannah Kund came to the police station first thing Friday morning. Guidi judged her somewhat masculine, with her blond cropped hair and flat shoes, blouse and necktie. Had he not known she was not the girl who’d been reassigned on account of the “lesbian” kiss, he’d have drawn conclusions from her appearance. She answered every question without hesitation, adding nothing unless specifically prompted to do so. Magda was a good girl, just a little mixed up. What did that mean? Well, she liked men and they sometimes took advantage of her. What kind of advantage? At least one of them had roughed her up. How so? Slapped her around, bruised her neck... Patiently, Guidi reconstructed Hannah’s version of Magda Reiner’s life in Rome.

She regularly sent gifts (Lenci dolls: she was a regular at La Casa dei Bambini) to her little niece in Germany, accompanying them with cards reading, “Love from your Auntie.” Clearly her
daughter, now eight years old. Drinking was a “bit of a problem”, in Hannah’s words, from which Guidi inferred Magda Reiner might have lost control at parties. Her career as an embassy secretary might have ended soon, even without her death. Names of boyfriends? Some of them she spoke of, some of them she kept quiet. The names he heard, Guidi knew already, none of them better identifiable or traceable to the scene on the fateful night. Merlo and Sutor had met once in the lobby of her apartment building, as she returned to it with Hannah. Sutor had made a scene the following day and called her a slut. An Italian Air Force pilot had seduced her in the back seat of a car just three days before her death. All in all, though, it seemed she’d never gotten over the loss of her fiancé in Greece.

Hannah Kund sat upright in front of Guidi’s desk, her blond-lashed eyes unwavering.

“Magda used to say that a past lover sounds always so much better than the present one,” was the first phrase she’d volunteered.

“Did you know if she’d recently had a new set of keys made?”

“Why, yes. That’s another reason why I noticed her key chain was missing. She’d asked me to go make a copy of the key to her apartment, because hers had broken in the lock.”

Guidi was careful to keep his excitement down. “Did she give you the pieces of the old key?”

“No. She’d made a stearin mold of the keyhole.”

“And when was this?”

Hannah Kund peered into a small book, apparently last year’s agenda. “The first of November.”

“Anything else you can tell me about Magda Reiner?”

“It’s not really relevant, I don’t think, but she hoarded food. She bought all she could and took it home. What kind? Canned food, mostly, and sweets. She loved those nougat sweets – Moretto, I believe they’re called.”

Guidi did not recall seeing large quantities of food in Magda’s apartment, and made a note of it, though in these days of
scarcity it might have been a temptation impossible to resist for those who had searched the place first. The wrapper in 7B, however, was from a Moretto.

23 APRIL 1944

On Sunday General Westphal was at Soratte, and so Dollmann. In the morning Bora went to Via Giulia seeking a meeting with Cardinal Borromeo, who – suspecting he was after Hohmann’s post-mortem, or some related document – pretended not to be in. As he was scheduled to meet his commander in the evening to go over the developments around the Alban Hills, Bora could not insist. Back at the office, he sat by the phone waiting for last-minute updates from the front. At six he left for his overnight stay in the mountains, but was flying back before long with a sensitive message for General Maelzer. Maelzer, typically, ordered him to hand-deliver the answer. Bora had only the time to stop by his room for a new container of aspirin on his way to the airport.

As he was leaving the lobby of the Excelsior the lights went off, and when he arrived at the Hotel d’Italia, the power had not been restored. The whole building was dark. Candles flickered at the bar and on tables, where people spoke in hushed tones. Bora found his way up three ramps of stairs with the help of a flashlight, which he had to put away to place the key in the lock with his right hand.

Later, he couldn’t remember whether he had expected it or not, but, two steps into the room, there was a rustle of clothes on both sides of him and at once his arms were jerked into immobility. Pain raced up his left shoulder. A handgun sought his head and came to lodge under his chin, hard against the floor of his mouth.
Two, three men. The pistol is not army.
Bora fought but could not get himself loose, nor could he lower his head, and the front of his body was open to blows. He tried
to throw himself down, and the gun was cocked. Bora heard the click in his head.

No words being spoken, still the men were close enough for Bora to smell tobacco and stop struggling, anxious to recognize by smell and contact who it might be, and whether the men wore uniforms (they didn’t). The momentary relaxation caused the grip to relent enough for him to turn halfway and drive his knee up the groin of one of those holding him, hear him yelp, and his right arm was free but already they were landing powerful short blows on him. Pain infuriated him and he thrashed around enough for them to try to grasp his hair, but it was too closely cropped, so they held him by the neck then, twisting his right arm behind his back and upwards, until the spasm in it made him rigid and stock-still.

Bora had no doubt they’d break his arm. His muscles trembled in opposition to the jerking motion upwards. It was as if an electric current shot through his shoulder, creating sparkling chains of light before his eyes. He twisted in pain and the gun was frantically driven back against his head. Agony in his elbow made him stiffen with heart in mouth for the splintering of the bone. He tried to close his right hand in a fist and couldn’t, no more than it’d be possible for him to keep from crying out any moment.

Something seemed to roll out under his feet just then. Visible as a pale swath on the floor, light from the hallway lamps glared, spreading under the door. Pressure on his arm fell and Bora unadvisedly swung it around to hit the man with the gun, offering himself to be brought down by a crashing blow in the back of the ear. He never lost consciousness, though he had a nosebleed and was too dazed to follow the men out. Back on his feet, he staggered to the bathroom to turn on the water in the sink. He soaked a towel and wiped his face looking away from the mirror, trembling with the release of tension, or mounting anger. The water reddened in the basin when he squeezed the cloth. He had to stand there to stanch the flow,
which wasn’t much but kept coming. He ached all over, but other than that he was unhurt.

The room was in chaos. He could see reflected in the mirror how drawers had been rummaged through, emptied and their contents dumped on the floor, the wardrobe ransacked. His army trunk pulled out from under the bed and overturned, books, papers, photographs and letters spread around it. Even the bed had been searched. Angrily Bora watched the reflected chaos in the room swing away as he opened the mirror cabinet and reached for the painkiller. He was out of Cibalgina, so he gulped three aspirins, straightened his uniform out, and drove back to the airport.

In the morning, a call from Via Tasso awaited. Bora returned immediately after entering his office at nine o’clock. When Sutor rudely asked why he had not been in earlier, he protested, “I want you to know I haven’t even gone to my hotel room to shave yet.”

There was a pause on Sutor’s part. “How so?”

“I just returned from Soratte. I spent the night there.”

The line seemed to go dead on the other side. Bora was curious. He felt his temples begin to pound under the skin, and with the quickened heartbeat the bruise behind the ear hurt. The sense of danger peaked in him for the first time since last night. In spite of it, his voice stayed calm, even indifferent. “Well, how may I be of assistance?”

“When did you leave for Soratte?” Sutor asked instead.

“At 1800 last night. I told you, I spent the night there.”

“You’re lying.”