A Dark Song of Blood (24 page)

Bora watched the field marshal spine the fish in his plate, the tines of his fork heedfully dividing the fragile, waxy flesh, white with a brownish shade; the spine appeared neatly, daintily shaped, nearly transparent, easily surrendering the meat around it until it lay exposed. Kesselring picked up the wedge of lemon and squeezed it over it with even pressure of thumb and forefinger. Caught by sunlight, a spray crowned the slice as juice trickled on the dish. He mopped his fingers on the napkin and began to eat. Bora looked away.

“Truly, Martin, you know better than that.”

“No,
Herr General Feldmarschall
, I don’t. I don’t. I need a note from you within the next few minutes, or Guidi is dead. I would not have come here had I known better.”

Kesselring looked up from the dish. They were outside on a vine-covered balcony that overlooked the lake, and there weren’t enough new leaves on the trellis to shield the sun entirely; the red branches did most of the covering. “None of us is clean in this business. Did you not order reprisals during your stint in Russia?”

“Against guerrilla forces, yes.”

“And what’s ‘guerrilla forces’ to you? Do they speak Russian, do they wear
valenki
boots? I don’t see why you’re choosing to
become involved in this. If it’s friendship you’re thinking of, there’s no such thing in war. There’s camaraderie, not friendship – and for an Italian, after what they’ve done to us! Awful things have happened before. What’s different this time?”

“
Herr General Feldmarschall,
” Bora said dryly, “they will start shooting in less than three hours. If you think an innocent man is worth saving, I beg you to give me a signed message for Kappler.”

“This Guidi, he’s not Jewish, is he?”

“No, he’s not Jewish.”

“You
know
that
.
”

“Yes, I know that. He’s not Jewish.”

“Because if he were Jewish, you understand —”

“For God’s sake,
Herr General Feldmarschall
, I’d ask you if he were Jewish, don’t you see?”

Kesselring took another bite, then let go of his fork, watching him. Bora kept self-control with an obvious effort; still he held his stare, and his lips were unmoved.

Kesselring had his big bony laugh. “We go back forty years, your stepfather and I. Best commander I ever had. You’re like him, but even more unorthodox. You’re courting trouble.” With the napkin he wiped his mouth from side to side. Moderately he drank some white wine from his glass. He poured some for Bora, who did not even acknowledge the gesture. Finally he stood up with his burly frame. “I will call Colonel Kappler and speak to him in person. Wait here.”

While he was gone inside the restaurant, Bora fidgeted. In the incongruous peace of the view, his heartbeat pounded at the sides of his neck, and the explosions from the front seemed never to end. He understood all too well that Kesselring did not wish to apply his signature to a written order.

The field marshal was back eventually. “Kappler is not in. I left a message with his adjutant. Everything is fine. Guidi’s name will be pulled from the list and he will remain at Regina Coeli until you pick him up.”

Bora thanked him. Sweat gathered on his face at the release of tension. In less than an hour he’d be out of Via Tasso on his way to the jail – and that would be before two o’clock.

Kesselring sat again. “It’s all right, Martin. Now let me eat in peace.”

Francesca had lunch at her mother’s.

“What are you going to do with the baby?” her mother asked, taking her long hair in hand and sweeping it behind her back. She was still young, narrow-hipped, large of breasts, with a hungry mouth and fingertips stained by tobacco. Francesca remembered seldom seeing her in other than a robe; in the summer sometimes she was naked. They knew one another’s bodies very well.

“Do you have stretch marks?” her mother asked when her first question was not answered.

“Some.”

“I can’t understand why. I got none with you.”

“I’m going to have it at the Raimondis’,” Francesca answered to the first question. “You know her, she paints watercolors. He’s a physician, and they have no children. She’s been sketching me every month and tells me how
beautiful
my belly looks. She bought me three new dresses.”

Her mother half-closed her eyes, with her hand on a pack of German cigarettes across the table. “I kept you.”

Francesca shrugged, with a little smile. “The man who rents with me – we’ve gotten together a couple of times. He feels so guilty about it, he asked me to marry him.”

“What did you tell him?”

“I laughed in his face, Ma. He’s a policeman. What would I want to marry him for?”

“There’s something to be said for those who offer.”

Francesca went to the long mirror on the door to look at herself sideways. “We’ll see if he asks again.”

*

A look at the still-distant southern periphery showed Bora that the roadside airport ahead was being strafed. He took the first right turn with the intention of reaching Rome by a parallel route, only to find that the Centocelle Field was under attack, too. So it was by circuitous country lanes that he finally came to Via Tasso at five past two. SS men would not let him through the door. Judging by the number of vehicles jamming the street, Maelzer had decided to charge Kappler with responsibility for the execution. Bora decided he’d try Regina Coeli again and physically get Guidi out of there.

Dollmann was waiting for him by the car.

“I don’t know why you insist, Major; all decisions have been taken. Kappler went to Maelzer’s at noon. Mackensen refused to give men from the army, so Kappler took it upon himself. Caruso was supposed to complete the list by one p.m., but didn’t. Kappler is on edge, and it’s just as well that you didn’t get to meet him. There’s nothing we can do to stop it now.”

As briefly as possible Bora explained to him the situation. Dollmann set his face in a hard manner. “My poor man, by this time they’re dragging everyone out of the jails to be shot. If Kesselring didn’t sign a piece of paper, you have nothing.”

Bora refused to panic. “Will you come with me to Regina Coeli?”

“No. I’m going to meet Wolff at Viterbo.”

Bora drove off. At the head of Via Nazionale he discovered he was out of fuel. He lost twenty-five minutes waiting for a can of petrol to be brought down from one of the dumps. The soldier told him, “You’ve got a leak in your tank, Major. One of the bullets must have damaged it the other day. You’ll be dry again if it doesn’t get patched.”

Bora told him to work at it, and with pain worsening in his arm he walked up the street to the Ministry of Colonies, where he placed a phone call to his secretary and asked for another car to be sent down immediately. Fifteen more minutes passed
before a camouflaged BMW arrived. Bora took his maps, the extra petrol tank and continued toward the river.

It was some time past three when he crossed over, only to find that the trucks until this morning crowding the jail’s courtyard were gone. He went in. The Third Wing had been nearly emptied. He worked his way to the Italian Wing. Guidi was not there. Neither was Sciaba. And now the memory of General Foa gave him a shock in the blood, because he knew he’d be first on Kappler’s list.

For some minutes Bora sat slumped at the wheel of the car. In the sunshine, the warm light of day created red swirls before his eyes. He had stomach cramps. He’d eaten nothing since the negligible lunch of yesterday noon and felt light-headed. The pain in his arm was at one point so sharp, he winced on the seat and had to grab his forearm. All the same he had to think, quickly.

Where? Where in Rome would over three hundred men be brought for execution? No, not in Rome. Out of Rome, obviously. But where? To one of the barracks, no doubt. There were tens of them, all around the perimeter of the city, forts and fields and proving grounds. Which one might be chosen from this side of town? He thought at once of the barracks at the northern edge of Rome, past the Vatican, a long row that formed a virtual military citadel. Forte Bravetta was where executions by the Italian Army took place, way out on the Aurelia. And there was the old army shooting range in the northern bend of the Tiber.

He roused himself and walked out of the car to ask the Italian policemen at the entrance of the jail in which direction the trucks had left. They told him they had crossed the bridge, which Bora could not understand. “You mean they went toward the center of Rome?”

They didn’t know. The trucks had gone across the Tiber and taken the river road that followed it.

“North or south?”

“South.”

Back in the car, Bora studied a map of the city and its environs to make sense of the directions. It had to be out of Rome. Three hundred and twenty bodies are difficult to dispose of, and somehow he could not envision trucks returning to town with such grisly cargo for the Romans to see. True, he’d gone through Russian villages where the SS had solved the problem by having the victims dig their own mass graves. There was no time today, unless the graves had been already mechanically dug by engineers. Where, the question was, and how far?

It had to be Forte Bravetta, the military compound due west of where he stood now. Resistance leaders had been executed there in the past week. It stood in an open, desolate stretch beyond the church of Madonna del Riposo, where nothing but blackened stumps of medieval towers and deep ditches marked the way. The truck drivers might have chosen to get there by the level ground of Viale del Re, crossing the Tiber again, two bridges down. He took the road skirting the park-like hills behind Regina Coeli, hoping to overtake the convoy.

He did not, and there were no trucks at the Bravetta compound. The Italian officer on duty was courteous to him, but no help at all. Bora felt he could shout with disappointment. All day, despite his rushing from place to place, he had kept the goal before himself with some measure of confidence that he would achieve it. Now for the first time he felt that he would not: that it was over, that it was past four twenty and Guidi was dead. Great discouragement took him. He was hungry and in pain. Hunger especially infuriated him, a base animal reaction when everything else was more important than that. He was tempted to drive straight to his office and hole himself in it, thinking of nothing any more.

The Italian officer watched him with sympathy from a few steps away. He said, “Major, I won’t ask what you’re looking for, but whatever it is, give it up. There’s nothing you can do.”

Bora felt a new spurt of obstinacy. “How long does it take to execute three hundred people?”

The officer’s blue eyes blinked. “Are you telling me or are you asking me?”

“I’m asking your opinion.”

“It depends. With a machine gun it takes five minutes. But if it’s a regular military execution, why, it’d take hours.”

“How many hours?”

“Four or five at least.”

Bora entered the car and started the engine. “Thank you. Now I must try to believe that.”

Francesca laid the new dresses on her bed. She liked best the dark blue one with a white trim at the neck and sleeves, too elegant to wear with cotton stockings.

It made her nervous to have heard no news on a German reprisal, especially when whispers of the attack had begun to circulate. She wondered whether she could safely go back to work in the morning. Out of a drawer she took the silk stockings Guidi had given her and rested them by the dress, judging them a perfect match.

In the parlor the Maiulis were talking to neighbors who had come to listen to the radio. Above all other voices, Pompilia Marasca’s could be heard asking why the inspector had not been home in two days. Signora Carmela replied something about engaging the help of St Anthony and St Jude, who had “never been known to fail.” Silence was made when the professor turned the radio on for the five o’clock news.

Twenty minutes later Martin Bora had driven back to Regina Coeli, where he once more considered his options. There were six roads out of Rome by which the trucks might have traveled south; he had no idea of the final destination, but knowing the actual way out of the walls was a first step.

Having heard from the policemen how the prisoners had been bound in groups of three, hands tied behind their back,
he asked for a pocket knife. The request caused some curiosity, but a switchblade was produced. Bora drove to the place where Via Portuense left the walls, and inquired of a shopkeeper about a convoy, to no avail. At five thirty he tried the same with a woman sewing on her Via della Magliana doorstep. At five forty he was on Via Ostiense, where he began growing unnerved at the lack of information. The Ardeatine Gate came five minutes after that. A beggar told him that no army vehicles had gone by since the morning, and even then, it was just a single car. Bora tore himself from there and reached St Sebastian’s Gate just after six o’clock.

The sun was going down and the enclosed, ominous body of the Roman gate stood over him with its two round towers cramped in by walls. Bora took a disheartened look at the centuries-old outline of St Michael engraved inside the archway to guard it from foreign invasion. Across the street a shoemaker was getting ready to close his shop. He said that, yes, trucks had been passing by all day, the last few of them not long ago.

Bora felt as one who has been doused with icy water. Drowsiness and pain were gone from him in a brief surge of nervous energy, forgetful that it had been nearly three hours since the executions had started. The reality of it hit him only after he went past the gate in the orange sunset that drew shroud-like, immensely long shadows from the walls flanking the Appian Way.