Liar Moon (15 page)

“Things don’t look good, Major,” he rolled down the window to say.

Bora ordered the soldier guarding the doorway to go inside. “
Things
is a vague term. I take it you refer to specifics.”

“Please. Let us not play games. I have difficulty reconciling your present clumsiness with the high degree of
achievement you displayed in Russia. If you could break out of Stalingrad with your entire unit, you could surely get fifteen Jews to Gries.”

“Mechanical failure happens to the best of us. The Republican Guard delivered the prisoners in a disgraceful lorry. The front tyre rod gave in, and the Jews went off the road in the mountains. It’s a miracle I didn’t lose my men in the accident. It was night-time, and the Italians were too drunk to be of any help. I will have to report, of course, the fact that two of my soldiers were pulled out of an anti-partisan operation because of your request. In view of the impeccable record I seem to hold here as a rebel-hunter, doing without any of my highly trained men places my continuing success in jeopardy. As for the prisoners, we will leave no stone unturned in hunting them down. The rugged terrain hampers us considerably, but I am hopeful.”

“The hell you are. Negligence is the least you’ll have to answer for.”

Bora was careful to show no alarm. “You’re making a lot of fuss over fifteen Jews. I must say I am astonished by your lack of interest in my pursuit of bandits. They’re much more dangerous than Jews.”

“Nothing is more dangerous than Jews.”

“I stand corrected.”

“Corrected? That, I’m going to make certain you are.”

 

On Friday, Bora was grateful for the call ordering his immediate presence in Verona, where the drafting of a plan for a joint military action on Lake Garda was under way. The combined German – Italian operation was expected
to begin on 15 December. He even looked forward to a night in some lonely hotel room, unless Colonel Habermehl offered him hospitality in his bachelor flat behind Palazzo Maffei. By evening, it was raining in Verona, but it turned cold enough for ice to form on the streets in the morning.

“Thank God you’ve come to visit. I die of boredom at night if I have no one to talk to.” In shirt-sleeves and grey braces, Colonel Habermehl poured a Scotch into his glass, and after a moment of hesitation added no ice to it. “You’re sure you don’t want one, Martin?”

“No, thank you.”

“Too bad.” Habermehl gulped the liquor with a toss of his head. “What generation is this of yours, that would rather get killed than make love?”

“I wouldn’t go as far as that,
Herr Oberst
. If I had a choice in the matter—”

“As if I don’t know you. When I heard about your accident in September I told myself, ‘Here goes my best friend’s stepson, without even enjoying his wife for a straight month.’ You should have insisted on evacuation to Germany, and at least a couple of weeks’ furlough. Even without your left paw, I bet you could have figured out how to entertain her.”

“Times are hard.”

“Times are always hard for somebody. You must learn to extract as much as you can.” Habermehl returned to the bottle. “Just a drop, what do you say? Let’s drink to our little Paul Joseph Goebbels’ intimation that ‘Our will to win is unshakeable’. Or, no, better yet: let’s drink to his ‘Hit a rogue more than once!’”

“No, thank you.”

“Have it your way. Speaking of little men, this morning I met De Rosa. Puffed-up as always, like a bantam rooster. He told me he’d tried to telephone you without success.”

Bora sat upright in the armchair, where he’d slumped until now. “Was it in reference to the Lisi affair?”

“Yes. I even wrote it down somewhere. You know I have no memory. Now, where did I?… Oh, I know. I’ll check the interior pocket of my tunic.” Quickly for a man of his size, Habermehl walked out into the hallway. He returned holding an envelope, on which he had scribbled with a fountain pen. “It washed out, sorry. It was raining when I took it down. See if you can make it out, Martin. Or else call De Rosa from here.”

Bora recognized a few important words.
Girl’s father – first abortion – money – argument.

“May I use the telephone, Colonel?”

“Go ahead,” Habermehl answered from the liquor cabinet. “It’s in the hallway.”

Soon after, at his address on Via Galileo, Centurion De Rosa cut a less than martial image in his pyjamas, even though he was clutching a handgun. That he was hardly expecting Bora to show up on his doorstep and at this late hour was obvious by the embarrassed way he put the weapon away.

“One must always be ready, Major.” He stammered an excuse. “Traitors, political enemies, partisans – one must be ready for unforeseen events.”

Bora overheard a rustle in the bedroom, and assumed that
events
might include jealous husbands. Without waiting to be invited, he stepped in.

“You didn’t answer the phone when I called you twenty minutes ago.”

“I was busy.”

“Well, I must talk to you. Colonel Habermehl gave me your message.”

“My message? Ah, yes. Yes. The story of the abortion and the girl’s father.” Sweeping a furtive glance toward the bedroom door, De Rosa stretched on his bare feet to whisper in Bora’s ear. “Give me five minutes. It’s a delicate question, a married lady.”

“You have five minutes exactly. Be quick about it.”

De Rosa kept his word. Bora heard him speaking
sotto voce
, and a somehow familiar woman’s voice answering in a distinct vibrato, “Thank God. I was really scared for a minute.”

When he came out in his stockinged feet, pulling up his army breeches, De Rosa found Bora standing in the living room with a disapproving look, as if not wearing one’s boots were for a German more inexcusable than having a married lover.

Bora said, “You told Colonel Habermehl how the father of a girl who died during an abortion had a row with Lisi over money. When did the incident take place?”

“After 8 September, I don’t recall exactly when. The only reason why I even thought about it, Major, is that you insisted on hearing if Lisi had enemies. The way I see it, there’s no way to prove that any of the girls had even
been
with Lisi, if you catch my meaning. I told you they swarmed around him like flies.”

“Does the man in question have a first and last name?”

“He has both. Neither one begins with a ‘C’, though.”

Bora sat down in an unpadded armchair, without taking off his cap. “This is very interesting, and I wish to hear every detail of the argument. Tell the lady in the other
room to make herself comfortable for an hour at least. There are other things I wish to ask you.”

“Now?” De Rosa gave him a hateful look. “Major Bora, I understand you’re a man of action, but we can meet tomorrow and nothing will change. It is absolutely necessary that I take the lady home before one.”

Bora checked his watch. “Go ahead. I’ll wait here.”

“But—”

“It’s already half-past midnight. Obviously the lady doesn’t live far from here. Do your bidding and return. I’ll wait here.”

Rapid-fire whispering ensued from the bedroom, then a completely dressed De Rosa walked angrily toward the living-room door. Bora heard the clicking of a woman’s heels following him out of the flat to the landing, and then the metallic clang of the elevator cage closing shut.

Alone in the house, Bora looked around. It was an unremarkable place, devoid of books, with a diminutive kitchen off the living room, a single bedroom and a bath. On the writing desk, inside an ashtray encrusted with sea shells, sat two tickets for the past opera season, and some receipts. Flyers from expensive hotels – the Grand Hotel in Gardone, the Metropole Suisse in Como – were stuffed in a manila envelope. Political junkets, Bora thought.

The kitchen was impractically narrow, but outside it a trellised balcony with lawn chairs extended to the bedroom. There, hooded lights floated the dark-sheeted bed in an underwater azure glare. The scent of woman was deep in the room, and Bora withdrew from it.

Ten minutes later, the front door was slammed open.

Surprised at not having heard the sound of the elevator cage beforehand, Bora glanced up from the newspaper he’d been browsing.

“Swine!” From the hallway a voice came to him strangled by rage and the exertion of climbing several floors. “I caught you without the bolts on the door, swine!”

Bora put away the newspaper.

A distracted middle-aged man flew into the living room and, having done so, he remained agape long enough for Bora to light himself an American cigarette.

“Are you looking for Centurion De Rosa?” he asked.

The man took a step backward. “I thought…”

Bora looked away from the man’s humiliation, from the absurdity of the situation. Half-heartedly, without lying, he said, “Centurion De Rosa isn’t here.”

 

At three in the morning, Colonel Habermehl found the De Rosa episode much more amusing than it had seemed to Bora. Laughing until he had tears in his eyes, he asked for more details.

“There isn’t much else to say,
Herr Oberst
. I was bracing myself for a tasteless scene, Italian-style, but Bruni’s husband was so disappointed to find me alone instead of De Rosa in good company, he couldn’t even keep up his fury. He started bawling in front of me, and gave me an earful about faithless women.”

“And you? What did you tell him?”

“Nothing. What could I tell him? My only reason for being there was to find out the address of the man who fought with Lisi. I needed to keep De Rosa in one piece for the time necessary to hear the information. Fortunately Bruni left without seeking redress. A few minutes
later De Rosa showed up, out of breath. It seems he hid himself in the porter’s booth on the ground floor, and had been praying to all the saints while Bruni climbed the stairs to catch them by surprise.”

Habermehl poured himself an abundant nightcap. “Good thing you chanced upon the love scene! Tomorrow we’re stuck with the joint operation plan, but you will follow up on the new lead the day after tomorrow?”

If he shut his eyes, Bora could see the ants labouring up Gerhard’s bloody side. “No, sir. The day after tomorrow I’m on patrol.”

The new hospital complex lay north-west of Verona, between the Adige’s riverside and the foothills of Quar-tiere Pindemonte, where houses gave way to fields and the Industrial Canal could be seen steaming in its banks. Before joining Habermehl and the others at German headquarters, Bora had an early morning appointment with the head surgeon, who’d treated him on the day of his wounding.

“Sunday is a good day.” A smiling nun preceded Bora down the perfectly scrubbed, phenol-scented corridor. “Doctor Volpi is less busy than usual. How is your left leg?”

Bora was not surprised to be addressed with
lei
here. He knew the Vatican had instructed its religious to “abstain with garb and prudence” from adopting the Fascist mode of address. The abstention clearly included addressing Italian-speaking
Wehrmacht
officers.

“Better, thank you. Do you remember me, Sister?”

Her hands in the folds of her sleeves, the nun halted in front of a glass door, which she opened for him. “Yes, indeed. Your other leg sent some good kicks my way.”

Bora entered.

“Good morning, good morning.” Unceremoniously the surgeon had Bora undress and sit on the examination
table, and started to cut the bandages around his knee. “Just as I thought, it’s become infected again. How many times must I tell you, Major? All this activity, with badly healed wounds – you had better watch out.”

“I’m busy, I can’t.”

“Do less, or do otherwise. The human body deserves respect, and you’re paying none to yours at the moment.” After disinfecting the wounds, the surgeon probed for the metal fragments still embedded around Bora’s knee. “At least a couple must come out today, more if we can. You’ll have to lie down for it, it serves no purpose for you to watch what I’m doing. Mark my word, without sulpha drugs, without antibiotics, one of these days we won’t be able to prevent a serious infection. What then? Do we amputate the leg we fought to save, or do we let you go to your Maker with septicaemia?”

While the surgeon dug into the taut flesh, Bora stared at the sterile blankness of the ceiling. It cost him a muscle-breaking effort not to let fear overtake him, as he again lay on the table, smelling disinfectant, smelling blood.

“Did you know you’re running a fever?”

“I don’t feel feverish.”

“Put this under your arm.” A thermometer came his way. “Ah, here is one of the fragments,” he said, as if Bora didn’t know from the burst of pain travelling up his thigh. “Just a little more patience, it’s coming.”

Bora held his breath until he heard the clink of metal being dropped into a basin. A warm stickiness ran down his knee, sponged off at once.

“Does it hurt?”

“A little.”

The carving into his flesh resumed.

“You should thank God that you were holding a briefcase on your lap that day, or else you’d have got a burst of shrapnel into your belly. You’d have lost more than one hand, and we wouldn’t be here talking about it. Wait, the other piece is coming out. Frankly, I can tell you now, when they brought you here I knew you wouldn’t die only because you struggled like an animal.”

Bora glanced at the surgeon’s white crew cut, low over his bloody knee. “Sister, out there, told me I kicked her.”

“You also nearly crushed the bones in her hand, as for that. Give me back the thermometer.”

Disinfection, bandaging. It was then the arm’s turn. The amputation seemed to be healing. Bora said nothing about it, but the surgeon fingered the stump with a frown.

“Don’t tell me it doesn’t hurt. I cut my share of arms and legs and hands during the Great War. In my opinion, there are neuromas forming at the nerve tips. Not the sort of pain you chase with aspirins. If you have someone at the post who can give you shots, I’ll give you morphine to take along.”