Liar Moon (12 page)

“Who called the police, then?”

“I don’t know. I don’t know. If you don’t believe me, ask the physicians at the
Ospedale Civile
: they signed my
certificate; they’ll tell you that for three days afterwards I couldn’t even remember my name.”

On his corner of the desk, Bora was motionless again. Guidi noticed a vein pulsing on the side of his neck, where a ragged scar disappeared into his immaculate shirt collar.

“Did you sleep with your master?”

There. Guidi heard Bora callously ask the question, and when the woman did not reply, rephrase it in the same tone. “Did you have sexual intercourse with your master?”

Guidi watched Enrica grow flushed, yet return Bora’s stare.

“Yes.”

“For long?”

“Yes.”

Bora was also blushing, a strange reaction that seemed to have nothing to do with embarrassment. Was it arousal? Guidi couldn’t tell.

“Had you been hired for that purpose?”

“Not for that
purpose
.” She looked away from the German, unhappily. “I’d been hired because the master hoped his wife would carry the baby to term, and wanted a live-in maid for her.”

Guidi sat up in De Rosa’s armchair.

“When was
Signora
Lisi pregnant?” Bora asked, the coldness of his tone betrayed by the rise of blood to his face.

“About two years ago. She lost the baby very soon, by the third month. The master was heartsick. Heartsick. He had already bought toys, baby clothes. He’d already chosen the crib and the stroller. After that there was no more mention of children, because she didn’t want any.
I even heard her throw it in his face that the baby had died because it’d been made by a cripple.”

Bora winced, and Guidi noticed it. But Enrica was a schoolgirl again, clutching her cheap bag. “Some weeks went by, and then I felt sorry for him. What do you expect? The master was not a man to do without. He wasn’t a monk, was he?”

“Do you mean the Lisis no longer had relations?”

“I never saw them in the same bedroom. And I was the one who
offered
it to the master, one evening when his wife went to painting class. He didn’t say no.”

For the past two minutes, Guidi had been nervously shredding a folded piece of paper with his nails, without looking at what he was doing. Only after Enrica Salviati finished speaking did he realize that he’d torn to bits a message signed by Mussolini, which De Rosa had apparently received with the morning mail.

 

Afterward, Bora insisted that he and Guidi stop at the beer hall in King Victor Emmanuel Square before driving back. “Have a pilsner,” he suggested.

“Do you know beers?”

“No. I never drink beer. But I trust the taste of millions of other Germans.”

“What will you have, then?”

“Nothing. I’m not thirsty.
You
look like you need a drink.” Bora chose the table, and sat down. A pillar offered protection from behind, but his chair was directly exposed to anyone coming from the outside. Whether it was a tactical lapse or not, he seemed absent-minded and on edge.

“Are you thinking about what the Salviati woman said, Major?”

“No.”

When the beer came, Guidi wetted his lips with the cool, bitter foam. He said, “I appreciate your courtesy, but there was no need for you to tell De Rosa that
you
shredded the paper from Mussolini.”

“On the contrary, there was.”

“Why?”

“Because I’m a German officer, and I can do as I please.”

Guidi drank deeply. There was no way to judge whether Bora was poking fun at him or was being friendly. As usual, the German had given him neither the time nor a chance to decline the invitation, and had insisted on riding in Guidi’s battered little Fiat. Since at other times he was not shy about driving his repaired and recognizable
Wehrmacht
BMW, it might, after all, be his way of offering some protection to someone travelling with him. Guidi took a long sip. But then perhaps Bora was just an egotist. Or he was afraid for himself, and was trying to escape another partisan attack.

In any case, here he sat, green-eyed, with that skullcap of dark hair that lent him the mien of a crusader. Barely thirty, Guidi judged, well bred and self-confident. Women were attracted to Bora, Guidi was sure of it. And this afternoon, God knows why, he was more than a little jealous of him.
And yet this is the face
, he told himself,
of a man who has just shipped men and women to imprisonment or death.

“Major, if what the maid says is true, and the Lisis hadn’t slept together in two years, why would Vittorio wait until four months ago to ask for a separation?”

Bora ordered another beer for Guidi. “I don’t know.”

“Even the Catholic Church grants an annulment if marital rights are denied.”

“Perhaps Lisi loved her.”

After the first beer, Guidi, who was a teetotaler, began to feel unusually merry. The second one worked wonders. He found himself happy that Claretta had kept away from her husband for two years, happy that Bora had brought him here. “
Love?
Come, Major. A man like Lisi, running after every skirt! Surely he wasn’t the type to fall in love.”

Bora removed an infinitesimal grain of dust from his left sleeve. “Are you engaged to marry?”

“No.”

“Do you have a woman?”

“Why, no.”

“Then what do you know about it? You must live with a woman to know what it means to fear that you might have to live without her.”

Pluckily, Guidi guzzled the second beer. “I don’t think you’re the same type of man Lisi was.”

“The comparison is irrelevant. I wasn’t speaking about myself at all.” With a glance at his new wristwatch, Bora said, “Time to go. Are you up to driving?”

Guidi smiled. “I never felt better.” But for some reason the chair would not budge from under him.

“Fantastic,” Bora grumbled. “Just what we needed. Give me the key to the car.”

“Why?”

Impatiently, Bora stretched his right hand across the table. “Come on, come on, Guidi, hand it over. Now we’ll have to make you down Heaven knows how
much coffee! Why didn’t you tell me you’re not used to drinking?”

Guidi searched his pockets, giggling as he did. “Why should I have?”

“Because you’re stone drunk.”

Guidi found Bora’s sternness irresistible. “Me? Drunk? I’ve never got drunk a day in my life!”

Less than an hour later, Guidi was taking a frustrated look under the hood. He said something to the effect of an apology, angry for apologizing when it certainly wasn’t his fault if the old Fiat had broken down, especially when Bora had insisted on driving it.

“There’s no chance it’ll start again,” he concluded. “It’s happened before, and we had to haul it.”

Bora stood a few paces away with his back to the car, reading the road map. Whatever he answered, the wind caught his voice, and Guidi didn’t understand what he said. Even so, both knew the closest village was nine and a half miles away, and except for the unlikely passage of a military vehicle, they had a long walk ahead of them.

Bora tossed the map back in the car. “We might as well get going.”

Guidi, whose intoxication had cleared enough for him to question whether Bora could manage the march, volunteered to seek help alone.

“Why?” Bora slammed the hood down. “This is
nothing
. Near Kursk I spent a week on foot behind enemy lines, with a broken arm and no ammunition.”

“I see,” Guidi said. It was difficult to assess how much daylight remained in the muted dimness of the afternoon,
because the sky had been overcast all day. Shredded, furious clouds rolled in from the northern horizon in an ever-renewing carpet, dark and less dark, but always compact. A few birds flew askew in the gale. Guidi lifted his collar against that gale. He recognized the weather pattern. The temperature would drop soon enough. By sunset it would either turn to soaking rain, or, if the wind changed, to clear and frigid. He glanced northward for a break in the clouds.

“The forecast indicates fair weather tonight,” Bora informed him. “We ought to have a good frost, too.”

For a few minutes they walked, Guidi with hands driven into the pockets of his coat, all too aware of the raw blasts that came from behind to chill his ears, Bora seemingly indifferent to them but for difficulty in lighting a cigarette. They stopped, and Guidi made a cradle of his fingers, so that Bora could keep the lighter’s little flame from being extinguished. After a few attempts, Bora’s cigarette grew incandescent at the tip, and he passed it to Guidi to start his own.

“There’s nothing like a walk to mull over a problem, Guidi.”

On Bora’s lighter, Guidi noticed, was an embossed
Luftwaffe
eagle. “Not that we have any solid leads,” he said, idly wondering whether Bora had relatives in the German Air Force.

Bora took a quick draught of smoke. “On the contrary, I believe we have too many, and we haven’t yet looked into half of them. De Rosa can run at the mouth about Lisi’s golden heart, but you and I know Lisi’s wealth had aroused jealousies within and without the Party, not to
speak of slighted husbands, former and present wives and pregnant girlfriends.”

“Well,” Guidi spoke in the wind. “Could Lisi have been a gambler?”

“You’ve seen how padded his bank accounts were. If he gambled, they surely didn’t bump him off because he couldn’t afford to pay his gambling debts. Of course it could have been an assassination à la Matteotti. A political adversary is done in without witnesses, and even History is left wondering.”

“Major Bora!”

“What? Isn’t that what happened to Matteotti twenty years ago, and only because he was a famous socialist? I’m not stupid.”

“You ought not to speak so lightly.”

“Ha!” Despite the stiffness of his gait, Bora forced Guidi to keep up with him. “In our case, it’s more likely the widow did it.”

“Likely, but unproven. And between you and me, Major, if that were a fact – mind you, if it
were
a fact, could you honestly blame her?”

So that it wouldn’t be snuffed out by the wind, Bora spoke with the cigarette in his mouth. “I told you once that I haven’t been asked to handle this case in order to pass moral judgement. You’re much more concerned about matters of ethics than I am.” Bora pressed his lips and smoke escaped from his nostrils in a faint quick cloud, soon snatched by the wind. They had walked more than a mile when clear patches of grey evening sky began to float above the convulsed race of late-autumn clouds. “There’s our fair weather,” Bora observed.

Guidi, whose bladder was starting to resent the amounts of beer and coffee stored in it, had stayed behind for a respite. From the wayside where he stood, careful the wind would not spray urine against his trousers, he could see Bora waiting a few feet away. His back was turned, and he stood ramrod-straight as if the march were not affecting the pain in his wounded leg.

A minuscule star pricked the east like a pin. Another followed, and another, and soon the darkening sky was full of them, little lights now bold, now dim, as if panting with fears of their own. Already a frail, opaque moon sailed like a glass boat up high. Bora raised his eyes to the crescent. As wraiths of tardy clouds overtook it, it more and more resembled a delicate wind-filled sail overhead; rushing, finely wrought, the moon would not be so graceful again until after it went entirely dark, tomorrow or the day after. For reasons of his own, Bora showed no ill humour this evening, something that Guidi was ashamed to resent more than an argument.

“
Luna mendax
.” Quoting the Latin saying, Bora smirked, and kept his eyes on the moon.

“‘The moon is a liar’?”

“Yes. You never heard the proverb? I’ll tell you about it some time. You know, Guidi, we ought to check De Rosa’s alibi.”

The words came as an attempt at conciliation. Guidi, who tonight treasured the notion that Claretta had been long refusing her bed to Lisi, fell for it.

But Bora’s indulgence sealed over like ice. “On the other hand, it is impossible not to see her as an ungrateful mate after what Enrica Salviati had to say.”

Dusk gathered around them, and soon they were silent.

They had resigned themselves to wandering in the dark when the round hum of an engine rose from the distance behind them. Guidi glanced back in alarm. He couldn’t help thinking that a partisan band was about to find him in the company of a German officer. Alongside him, Bora’s only reaction was to unlatch the holster on his left side. Guidi, too, reached inside his coat.

A large car was approaching, the slits of its blackened headlights projecting feeble cones of glare ahead. Bora and Guidi couldn’t make out how many people were inside, and kept on the defensive. The car scaled down its gears, creeping to a halt on the shoulder by them. From the semi-darkness of the lowered window, “
Wollen Sie mitfahren?
” The question floated to them over the idling of the Mercedes-Benz engine.

Bora and Guidi were both surprised, but while Bora’s hand left the holster, Guidi’s did not. The bald head of a stout old man emerged like a strange birth from the window. He smiled. After speaking a few sentences in German to Bora, who readily answered, he spoke to Guidi in Italian. “I saw a Fiat stopped a while back, and was wondering who might have left it there, with the curfew and the danger of night air raids. Now,” he said, clearly pleased at the sight of Bora’s uniform, “I understand. My house is less than four miles off that way.” He pointed to the twilit flat countryside broken by hills like islands. “You are welcome to spend the night, and I can take you to town in the morning.”

Bora did not trouble himself with consulting Guidi on the matter. “Yes, please.”

They were soon travelling along in the ageing German car, toward sites unknown. Guidi marvelled at Bora’s imprudence in accepting a ride just because the driver spoke German.