Liar Moon (19 page)

“It fits us well.”

“It fits us well,” Bora repeated. He glanced away from the piano, and at the old man. “I really don’t know why I came. I needed a respite, I think.”

“To get away from your Turks?”

“Inner and outer, yes. The inner ones are the worst.”

“All the same, I shouldn’t let you stand here. Would you care to sit down? We could go by the stove.”

Bora was already walking toward the staircase. He sat there, his back against the wall. He removed his cap and laid it on the next step.

Unobtrusively Moser came to sit on the piano stool.

Bora couldn’t look at him just now, nor speak. Vulnerable like glass, like thin glass, he avoided looks and
words as unsafe, when he had a craven urge to weep for his dead brother. Far from any concerns about career or safety, his brother’s death was tonight’s great burden. Also his loveless wife, his loneliness. The burden weighed with all the unwept deaths in his life, the unwept losses suffered and yet to come. Ever since driving to the crash site today he’d carried the urge inside, like a wound more cruel than those healing on his body, a sore that was intimate and endless and could no longer be sewn shut like the rest.

So Bora chose not to resist physical pain. It was perhaps the first time since September that he did not oppose some resistance to it. Tonight he’d rather mind the flesh than his grief. In the end, in the end he cared nothing about himself, which was why his body would not forgive him. He was grateful that Moser sat quietly in the semi-darkness, hands on his knees. Silence and shadow were all Bora could endure now that the burden was about to fall.

Pain racked him then. Still, grief was absolute and full of guilt and useless anger. Such frustrated grief, such long-frustrated grief. Pain was less frightening. Bora looked at it, and did not dare pick up the burden again. So he sat and gave himself up to pain. There were other weights, other responsibilities. Tonight he refused them all. He did not want to seek out those who had killed Lisi. He resented Lisi, Lisi’s wife, Lisi’s money. The very task disgusted him tonight. It unnerved him, God knows why. Perhaps because others had something to gain from solving the crime, and he did not. Nothing would come to him from a solution. No relief, no peace.

“It’s difficult to find peace.” Moser spoke calmly. “One never finds it outside. Conquering the enemies outside only gives you spoils to build a house with.”

Bora faced the wall. He said, “It’s worse than that, when one can’t give up.”

“Sometimes one must, Major, and it’s more heroic to do so.”

“I can never give up.”

“Then I am sorry for you.”

Bora shut his eyes, resting his forehead against the cold wall. “Why? We make our choices and fashion our enemies; unless we kill them, they kill us. And when they’re dead, we despise their corpses. We let someone else find them.”

“Sometimes.”

“No, always. Always. Unless we turn scavenger, we must let the dead be. I
know
that.”

And because he’d chosen pain, Bora’s pain grew and strained him. Leg, arm, shoulders, neck: he laboured to control his voice, but could do little more than breathe with inert animal patience, slow and hard.

“You seem extremely tired, Major. Are you unwell?”

Unwell? Bora was losing the battle. He could no longer keep from trembling, nor could he care that it showed. His teeth chattered in his mouth. “I am ill,
Herr
Moser. And I am in terrible pain.”

Bora said it with shame, as if exposing a tainted part of himself, from which filth would smear the room. Fearing it would do so. But the room stayed clean and unpolluted beneath the great painted vault as under a merciful indoor sky.

“What can I do to help you, poor man?”

Bora turned his face away until the tendons in his neck ached with the rest. Nothing would help, nothing.

Bora was trembling not to cry out. In the dark behind him, the dark of shut eyes and an empty house, mornings flashed like lightning, quick visions sank into nothingness as soon as they rose to memory. His brother at the station, smiling their mother’s smile. The exquisite line of Dikta’s hands, cupped to hold his face when she kissed him. Russia. Russia. Russia. The car’s windshield bursting in. Groping in the blood for his wedding ring, and the shred of his hand still bound by it.

It was the voice of the Silbermann, dangerously close, that answered him. Sharp, each sound a keen edge. Melancholy, unforgiving, cruel and innocent, unwilling or unable to lie.

If Valenki had at least told me
when
. If I knew
when.

Anguish sliced through him, as if dammed blood from the inner wound were being lanced free to cleanse it, to wash over him and drain him of grief. Nothing would be given back to him. But the ancient music opened each vein of bitterness to bleed into streams, dark pools, so that Bora did not weep with tears. Because men do not outwardly weep.

The music said no.

It was a long time before Bora could move or speak again. The music had ended, and the house was deadly quiet. Pain was strong enough to stun him.

“
Herr
Moser, I am looking for someone I don’t want to find,” he said.

“But you will.”

 

“We found him,” Guidi informed Bora in the morning, calling from his house. “Not far from where we first saw the blood trail. If you have time in the noon hour, come and see.”

Bora only said, “I’ll come.”

Guidi put the receiver down. An insistent clatter of cups signalled that breakfast was ready in the kitchen. Pulling up his socks by the window, he saw a day clear like a washed mirror; all things stood minutely etched in it and even grains of dust cast shadows on a day like this. This was the morning he knew he would capitulate and tell his mother how the lipstick had come to be on his handkerchief. And
why
, which was in the end less wearisome than arguing with her or exchanging monosyllables across the table three times a day.

So he told her.

On her feet by the sink his mother accepted the truce, hands tight in a knot under her apron, not so gracious in victory as she was appeased in her righteousness. Guidi took a hefty bite of bread to keep from embellishing the confession. She poured him chicory coffee. Funnily enough, this morning his mother’s eyes appeared fixed and curiously round, like the eyes of a chicken that has watched the worm emerge from out of the soft earth, and by a steady glare hopes to further its inching out.

“So you were joking that she’s a street-walker.”

Guidi sent down a swig of coffee after the bread. “What would I give my handkerchief to a street-walker for, Ma?
Let’s leave it as it is. She’s someone the authorities are working on.”

“Of course. I’m not curious about your job. I never ask.”

But there she stood, counting every bite he took.

“Her name would mean nothing to you, Ma. You don’t know her. You never even spoke to her. Besides, she’s in jail.”

“In jail? What for?”

“Murder.”

The worm had unfurled out of its burrow entirely, but the chicken was not sure it wanted it now. Complacently Guidi found himself reminding his mother this was the kind of profession he was in. “Your husband was in the same line of work all his life and paid the bills with it. You never seemed to mind that.”

“Sandro,
do not!
… I’d be grateful if you didn’t drag your father’s memory into this.”

“God forbid.” Guidi gathered the last of the bread in his mouth, drank the rest of his coffee and decided to leave her with something to pick on for the day. Hands spread on the table as he stood from his chair, “You know, Ma,” he said, “I do go to bed with women.”

 

At half-past noon, the temporary morgue in Sagràte was open, and reeked of phenol-disguised decay.

Bora stopped by the entrance to hand his greatcoat to Turco, who carefully draped it over his arm. “Is the inspector already in, Turco?”

Guidi heard the words from beyond the glass panel of the next door, and walked out to meet him. Bora said, “I told you my dogs would find him.”

They walked in, and faced the body on the table. At once Guidi caught Bora’s intent observation. “But your dogs were not the first,” he remarked. “Look at his feet. Some creature has been gnawing at them.”

Bora spoke, with his eyes on the body. “Where was he, exactly?”

“Not far from where we met on the hillside. Minus the dogs and with snow coming hard, we didn’t realize he had fallen behind a tangle of roots and branches. You were right in that he didn’t live long. He bled to death, and he’s starting to lose rigidity already.”

“How many bullets in him?”

“Three. See, two in his chest.”

“And no shoes on, obviously.”

“That’s the strangest thing. He had been wearing them when we tracked him.”

“So, he did not kill to secure footwear for himself. I thought so.”

Guidi shrugged. “It seems he removed his shoes before dying. A few feet away we found another pair, presumably those of the man who was shot in the ditch. He set his own like a cross beside himself, we’ll never know why.”

“Set in a cross, eh?” Bora drew closer to the table, so that his uniform touched the impure edge of it. “Had you shown an interest, I’d have told you the rest of Valenki’s story.”

“Does it matter?”

“It does.” Leaning forward, Bora examined the dead man. His head was shaven, a reddish stubble barely shadowing the pallor of skull and cheeks. His neck had arched back in the throes of agony but was losing rigidity, as Guidi said. Eyes and mouth gaped open. Much
blood had flowed from his lungs up his throat and nose. Bora looked closely, and the survey struck Guidi as an excess of morbidity.

“What do you hope to read in his face, Major? He just looks dead.”

“Indeed.” Bora took a careless step back. “He does remind me of poor Valenki. Did I tell you how one day I asked Valenki how he could be sure about his predictions?”

“No.”

“Well, he answered that God had appeared to him in a blaze of clouds and granted him the gift of reading people’s destiny. ‘How?’ I asked. By seeing those about to die barefoot even though they might be wearing shoes. He said, ‘The dead don’t wear shoes,
uvazhaemiy
Major, and so I see them wearing no shoes, as they will be soon.’ I can’t vouch for the civilians, Guidi, but those of my men whom he pointed out did die shortly afterward. Even though it didn’t take a prophet to anticipate disasters on that front. It’s neither here nor there, Guidi, but the example goes to prove that shoes may have meant something very peculiar to this poor man. And it isn’t out of the blue that I told you Valenki’s story: it suggests a possibility we ought to consider.” Bora took out a cigarette and put it between his lips. “Just as it isn’t clear to us what the madman meant by stealing his victims’ shoes, we don’t quite know what Lisi meant by scrawling a ‘C’ in the gravel. Perhaps, Guidi, we ought to learn a lesson from our defunct madman: whether we flatter ourselves that we understand them, whether they escape us altogether, things seldom are as they appear.”

“Yes, well. Whatever, Major. So, what happened to Valenki?” Guidi asked.

Bora lit the cigarette. “Poor Valenki. This story of the shoes and the dead went on for a while, until one day I saw him crouching away from the fence, with his face in his hands. It was not like him to cry, so I called out to him. I asked what was wrong, which made him even more miserable. He said, ‘Ah, esteemed Major, I’ve seen my own two feet bare, and I know too well what it means. May the Mother of God have mercy on me.’ I felt sorry for him. I handed him a cigarette through the fence – he loved to smoke – and scolded him, ‘Come, Valenki, these are all tales. Put them out of your head.’ But he wouldn’t take the cigarette. He looked at me with eyes starting out of his head. ‘I see your mother and my mother weeping, esteemed Major, but my mother is not weeping as hard as yours.’ Cigarette?”

“No, thanks, Major.” But when Bora showed the pack of Chesterfields, Guidi took one, and gently placed it in his chest pocket to keep it from breaking.

Bora took a draught, and slowly let the smoke out of his mouth. “I tried to take it in good part, you know. ‘Don’t be silly, Valenki, you don’t even know my mother,’ but I must confess that his words hit home. My younger brother had just volunteered for the Eastern Front, and I worried about him enough, even without predictions. As for Valenki, he just shook his big shaven head. ‘
Gospodi pomilui, Gospodi pomilui
,’ he wept, crossing himself as he asked God and the Virgin Mary for mercy.” Bora looked straight ahead, but Guidi saw him blink. “All the same, he tried to escape that night, and the guards shot him dead.”

“Were your men responsible for it?”

Bora seemed genuinely surprised. “
My men?
Do I seem to you the kind of officer who would be assigned to a prison camp? My regiment was stationed near by, that’s all. But God knows I’ve been thinking more than once of poor Valenki and his shoes. We chatted almost every morning. He’d look over as we prepared to move out and call, ‘It’s no good today, esteemed Major. Watch out this morning.’ And without telling my men, if Valenki said to watch out, I would surely watch out.”

Guidi smiled just enough not to offend the German. “But you did not believe him.”

“Why not? Why shouldn’t I believe him? Couldn’t the Lord God have spoken to Valenki? He was as good as any of us, except that he was Russian. He was crazy, too, which likely made him better than most of us. You see, Guidi, ‘The dead don’t wear shoes.’ Being barefoot equals being dead. Half a world away, poor Valenki would agree. Anyway, good for you. You must be pleased you solved this case at least. By the way, could you tell whether anyone else had come across the body before you?”