A Dark Song of Blood Read Online Free PDF Page B

when he’s in his cups.” By then a cold dinner was served, which neither he nor Bora chose to eat. They sat with their drinks in hand, Bora looking at the couples growing intimate with what the colonel judged to be more than just uptightness.
    That night Guidi stayed up late to read the dossier. The only noise in the apartment was the snore rising from Signora Carmela’s crippled body. Elsewhere in the building, the neighbors were quiet. Guidi had routinely found out about them: middle-class people, employees and shop clerks, students. There was a small child on the top floor, who could be heard crying in the morning. Across the landing, a flashy, cherry-lipped woman in black received visits from noisy male relatives, and a reclusive old fellow Signora Carmela called Maestro – he played the piano, well in Guidi’s reckoning. Oddly enough, the one Guidi had been least inquisitive about was Francesca, whose small room was at the other end of the hallway. She left for work early in the morning, and was home by curfew. Whether the Maiulis knew that she was pregnant, he couldn’t say either. Her pale, drawn face came to him, the careless way she combed her hair away from it with her fingers as she read, so that it drew a brown wave behind her ear. She didn’t smile, spoke little at meals, and answered curtly to everyone.
    Magda Reiner, instead, continued to live a vicarious merry life in the snapshots of summers past, so different from the last dreadful images. Her blond, plump and smiling countenance against unknown mountains, alongside unknown friends,was forever safe from injury. In one picture, she laughingly embraced another woman.
    As for Ras Merlo, Guidi didn’t know whether to laugh or cry as he read about him. His given name was Radames, though he went by Rodolfo. Born 1900, bersagliere in the bicycle troops during the Abyssinian campaign. Married to Ignazia Pallone since 1930, four children: Vittorio, Adua (known as Aida), Libico (known as Lorenzo) and Cadorna (known as Carletto). Had been instrumental in the creation of the Istituto Forlanini ten years earlier, and presently headed what remained in Rome of the prestigious National Confederation of Fascist Unions. Rumor had it that he had conflated his last name and his wife’s under the pseudonym Piemme , and authored the words of the well-known North African Campaign song ‘Macallè’:
    Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â  Là nell’arida terra del Tigrè
    Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â  nel tramonto del gran sole d’or,
    Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â  solitario, il forte Macallè
    Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â  pieno di ricordi sorge ancor!
    Ever since meeting Magda Reiner at a party during the 28 October anniversary of the March on Rome, they’d been inseparable, or nearly so, until her death on 29 December. “Driven by jealousy”, as the report indicated without other comments, he was known to have roughed her up before witnesses occasionally. And now the provincial policeman was expected to find out whether he’d pushed her over the windowsill.
    For the rest, the data were scanty: the death had occurred after a year’s end party, at around seven forty-five in the evening, on the sidewalk below the deceased woman’s premises on Via Tolemaide. She’d engaged in sexual intercourse at least once in the hours preceding her death, and though her bedroom and apartment doors were locked, delaying the entrance of the authorities, no keys had been found.
    *
    A few streets away, Bora left Ott’s party at one in the morning, under a drizzle that fell askew and began to be weighed down by snow. He often drove himself, especially after hours, taking different routes through the darkened city. He had to face the fact that he was angry with Dollmann, whose loquacity he had repaid to excess by receiving a