Liar Moon (23 page)

Bora stopped thinking. He pursued and tackled the running shadow from behind, and the weight of his tall body knocked the stranger over. Stella groaned on the pavement as the men stumbled over him. “He’s got a gun, Major!” And Stella’s moving about made Bora lose hold of the adversary. Blindly he struggled against an arching, kicking body full of elbows and bony angles. Impeded by the greatcoat, Bora used his size to gain an advantage, but it wasn’t enough. He struck with his right fist in frustration, and still the stranger slipped from under him with the benefit of two sound legs. Bora wouldn’t let him go. He kept after him, as if the godawful noise didn’t mean bombs might be falling at any minute. Pain and the dizziness of fever had disappeared as if a sponge had wiped them off. Chasing the stranger down the street where Guidi had gone before, Bora no longer felt his body. “He’s armed, Guidi!” But not even Bora could hear what he was shouting. From a few feet away, a bright-tongued shot blasted out of the dark, missing him. Bora returned fire this time, aiming low.

Pausing to take some kind of aim was enough to break the spell. Agony sliced through him with the terrifying ease of a razor. Bora, who’d just thrown his dead weight forward not to lose his prey, blacked out for a moment, even as he collided full force against him. In falling, he brought him down, and lost him again.

Guidi was ready. At the end of the street, where the dark was belted by a waving dance of spotlights and gunnery beacons, he made out the stranger coming straight at him, saw him at the last moment try to swerve. Guidi could have fired, but didn’t. They scuffled, and then Guidi managed to throw the man over, shoving him flat on his back. He made out the clump of the handgun and stepped on the squirming wrist, kicking the weapon out of the way. He had no way of knowing if the others had been wounded, or worse. But at least the wail of the siren finally cranked down, winding into an immense, stunning silence.

Guidi called out in the dark, “Major Bora! Stella, how is it going?”

Stella answered from afar in a strangled baritone. “Son of a bitch, he got me in the blooming shoulder!”

Bora came to his knees. He didn’t know where the voice came from to answer that he was fine.

 

The air raid never materialized. It was likely another false alarm, caused by a play of night clouds in the spotlight. No engine sounds, no distant explosions. The criss-cross of anti-aircraft beacons ceased over the rooftops. In the newly made darkness, Bora sped toward the hospital, carrying Stella, who staunched his wound with a rag
and blasphemed in his teeth, and the prisoner under Guidi’s armed guard.

Picking up speed, braking, gears changed every moment, Verona was coming to after the alarm. Thrown out of bed by the air-raid alarm, drowsy tenants climbed back from basements and shelters, ghosts stumbling in their night clothes, here and there crossing at their own risk in front of the BMW’s spanking clip. Stella was let off before the hospital. By the time they reached the central police station in Piazza dei Signori, Guidi found that consignment of the prisoner and all the explaining fell on him. Bora had disappeared with the excuse of washing his face.

“There’s a German officer with me,” Guidi told the policeman on duty. “I’m sure he wants to have his say, too.”

“Well, where is he?”

“He’s coming.”

“Have a seat, Inspector.”

Guidi did not sit down. Only after handing over the prisoner did he take a good look at him. “Sooner or later you’ll have to open your mouth,” he said blandly, and watched while the policeman frisked him. Something about the pinched young face was familiar. Half-lit by the crescent of electric light from the floor lamp, the features seemed not exactly known, but familiar. He was undergoing the search in a straddling stance, grim-eyed, hostile and familiar. Guidi stared. “You’ll have to talk.”
Where the hell is Bora?
he was thinking meanwhile.

Steps approached in the hallway, but it wasn’t Bora. Two brunettes in short, huge-shouldered furs shuffled by, hoarsely complaining to a fresh-faced patrolman about being brought in. An exchange of looks passed
between them and Guidi as they went by, a wary, cynical glance, and no interruption in their groaning. The young patrolman prodded them forward. “Shut up, whores.”

Guidi couldn’t imagine what had happened to Bora. He stepped to the door and looked out into the hallway. There, slumped at an impossible angle on a chair, a drunkard snored, hands palms-up on his knees like a beggar. Next to him a diminutive man with a black eye stood in his pyjamas, and at the other end of the hallway sat a boy with a vice-ridden grin, scratching with a nail the wooden surface between his open thighs.

Guidi turned back to the room, where the prisoner now sat in handcuffs.

“Of course, these documents are false,” the policeman was saying with contempt. “Typical fake
Papier
they use to take in the Germans. He’s a ‘technical assistant’ same as I am, this one.” He showed Guidi a personal pass that read on one side,
German Command of Engineering Liaison
, and on the opposite side,
Feldnachrichten Kommandantur
. It authorized the carrier to circulate freely “at every hour of the day or night, even during air raids”, and informed those whom it may concern that the carrier’s bicycle could under no circumstance be seized or requisitioned. “It’s a good thing he didn’t have the two-wheels with him, or you’d never have nabbed him. Doesn’t want to talk, but before tomorrow morning I promise you I’ll have him cough up his name. Look here.” The policeman pointed out to Guidi the date on the papers. “They haven’t even bothered to write ‘Year XXI of the Fascist Era’ after 1943. Eh, you! Who was the baboon that made you this lousy
Papier
?”

Guidi’s knuckles were beginning to ache from the blows he’d landed on the man’s face. He glanced away from the papers, and at the prisoner’s face again. “I think I know who he is,” he said, surprised that it had taken him this long to remember. Out of the room, down the hallway and down the steps, he walked into the street, where the BMW was parked. Surprisingly the major had forgotten to lock it. Guidi took from the front seat the folder Bora had obtained from the navy and, leafing through it, climbed back into the police station.

The photos were what he wanted. He unclipped a group photograph of sailors from the rest, looking for the circled figure. Sure, the beard had been shaven clean. A wintry pastiness had replaced the tan. Some weight had been shed. But the face, especially the grim deep-set eyes, and the straddling stance were the same.

“And a civilian gun licence? How did you get it?” the policeman was braying at the prisoner when Guidi re-entered the room. “This is an English gun, you son of a whore, where did you get
this
?”

A few steps away, with his back to the door, Bora stood listening.

“Finally, there you are,” Guidi said. “Major, you don’t know who we’ve got!”

Bora looked over. He had his usual countenance, cool and undemonstrative. Aside from a pronounced pallor and the fact that he seemed to have held his head under the faucet, nothing looked amiss. “Who did we get?”

“This is Claretta’s ex-boyfriend!”

“I see.” Bora turned his attention to the prisoner, without any anger whatever. “He’s tall for a submarine sailor.”

They remained at the central police station until about ten.

Once the prisoner had been removed to a cell, Bora spent some time convincing the policeman on duty to refrain from interrogation until he received “further instructions”. He’d minutely examined handgun and false papers, photos and navy documents. “This is very interesting, Guidi,” he said. Soon he dialled a number on the policeman’s telephone. The paleness on his face had extended to his lips, a paper-white, dead man’s paleness. It stood out as a silver stain above the field-grey collar, even in the half-light of the floor lamp. When the call went through Bora spoke in German, perhaps to his headquarters, perhaps elsewhere.

Guidi understood he was asking for a captain in the SS.

“
Ja. Ja. Ich glaube, dass er ein Bandit ist
,” Bora said in a low voice. And he betrayed himself by briefly closing his eyes, as if the revelation or the simple effort of speaking exhausted him.

Guidi tried to understand whatever else he could from the whispered German conversation. So, Claretta’s ex-boyfriend was a partisan. It wasn’t the first partisan he’d seen, but this one seemed bellicose and intractable like a wild bird. Contrary to expectation, it wouldn’t be easy getting anything out of him. Hence Bora’s phone call. Guidi left the room.

In his cell, deprived of ammunition and what little else he had, the young man sat in his shirt-sleeves and barefoot, without even his socks on. Guidi thought of the Russian prisoner Bora had spoken of. “Poor Valenki”, as Bora called him. And he thought of the madman the Germans had brought down with three shots in the body.
With a battered, dark air of challenge, Carlo Gardini, Class of 1915, avoided Guidi’s stare.

“It is all arranged,” Bora informed the policeman as he and Guidi prepared to leave. “At seven hundred hours tomorrow, a representative of the Security Service will come to interrogate him.”

 

A delicate layer of sleet had fallen on the city in the meantime. When Guidi and Bora walked out of the police station, the few cars parked near by had shiny, granulated white roofs. It was bitter cold, an aching cold. Guidi tied the scarf around his neck. Too bad he hadn’t worn his hat. This was one of the times he regretted not listening to his mother’s advice, waiting for Bora to precede him inside the BMW. But Bora handed him the keys.

“You may drive.”

It wasn’t like Bora to entrust himself to others, especially when it came to speed and timeliness. Without comment, Guidi took the keys and sat behind the wheel. Bora leaned against the other door before letting himself in. Once inside, Guidi heard him breathe laboriously, and try to control his breathing. “Here we go,” Guidi said, and turned the key in the ignition.

The car had a powerful engine. Guidi was not used to anything of the sort. It zoomed on the icy surface from its parking place, grazing the opposite sidewalk before regaining an even keel. Guidi did his best. Even on the city streets he had to take care at each corner to keep from skidding. Soon enough he was gaining speed and stepping on it, across train and tramway tracks. Bora did not criticize him, and by the time they left downtown,
Guidi had gone from prudence to a measure of pleasurable foolhardiness.

They roared through the suburbs. Guidi even regretted having to stop by the German roadblock in the open countryside, where all documents were duly asked for and read. Bora presented his papers first, and when the soldier peered in to see who was at the wheel, he briefly added, “
Polizeikommissar Guidi, mein Freund.
”

Then they were in the lonely countryside again. Dark houses, abandoned factories and farmsteads rolled by, eaten by the night behind them. No perspective, no horizon was visible for a long time, then the sealed obscurity began to break into luminous stripes, fleeting and colourless, as the rising moon filtered among the clouds. A river came up, like a strip of foil.

“Be careful, there’s already ice on the bridge.” Despite his efforts at self-control, Bora was trembling, and his voice gave him away.

Guidi glanced at him. “I will.” He slowed down, approached the bridge at a moderate speed and crossed it without incident. “What will happen now to Carlo Gardini?”

Bora did not answer at once. “The Security Service will take over the interrogation,” he said after some time. “Gardini carried an Enfield with plenty of ammunition. It isn’t a revolver easily found in Italy. It’s a good war weapon, I had one in Spain back in ’37.”

“If the SS take him into custody, the Italian authorities can forget about a chance to interrogate him.”

Guidi’s words fell into several minutes of silence this time. From what he could make out in the darkness,
Bora was sitting back, breathing hard. Whether he was fighting not to tremble, or trying to stretch his left leg, he didn’t seem to consider there wasn’t nearly enough room, and his knee struck the edge of the dashboard. Guidi sensed a whiplash jerk going through him, and was aware of how precariously Bora hung on to self-control.

“Are you all right?”

Bora mumbled a strained sentence in German. Correcting himself, he added in Italian, “I’ll speak to
Hauptsturmführer
Lasser. He knows why I have to do it.”

“Who’s Lasser? And why you have to do
what
?”

Bora didn’t say.

Half an hour later, Guidi was wondering what in God’s name he should do. He kept talking to Bora and Bora answered less and less lucidly.

“Should we stop a moment, Major?”

“No. Keep going, keep going. I’m fine. Just a little tired.”

“It may be better if I take you directly to Lago and then have Turco come and get me.”

“I told you, no. Mind the road.”

Silence followed again. Bora leaned away from him, and all Guidi could hear was his quick, laboured breathing. When the first sparse houses of Sagràte grew out of the darkness alongside the road, followed by church and town office and finally police station, Guidi drew a sigh of relief.

Bora’s strained voice said, “Do not stop here. Drive straight to your house.”

“I can walk from here, Major.”

“To your house.”

Guidi drove to his house, which was at the opposite end of town. His mother’s window was dark, but he wagered she was sitting there, waiting.

Bora asked to have the keys back.

“Should I call Lieutenant Wenzel, Major?”

“No need.”

But Bora knew he couldn’t possibly manage the few miles to Lago. He drove back toward the police station, and past it, stopping as he’d done many times in front of the army post near by. He could see that Wenzel was still up by the barely visible line of light that marked his blackened window on the upper floor.