The Venus of Salo (eBook)

Ben Pastor (Autor)

eBook Download: EPUB

2024 | 1. Auflage
368 Seiten
Bitter Lemon Press (Verlag)
978-1-916725-08-9 (ISBN)

Infos

October 1944, in the Republic of Salò, a German puppet state in the north of Italy and the last fascist stronghold in the country. After months of ferocious fighting on the Gothic Line, Colonel Martin Bora of the Wehrmacht must investigate the theft of a precious painting of Venus by Titian, stolen with uncanny ease from a local residence. While Bora's inquiry proceeds among many difficulties, the discovery of three dead bodies throws an even more sinister light on the scene.

BEN PASTOR, born in Italy, worked as a university professor in Vermont before returning to her country. She is one of the most talented writers in the field of historical fiction. The Venus of Salo is the 8th in the Martin Bora series to be published by Bitter Lemon. In 2008 she won the prestigious Premio Zaragoza for best historical fiction. She writes in English.

Textauszug

1

960TH GERMAN GRENADIER REGIMENT HQ NEAR MT CASSIO, SATURDAY, 14 OCTOBER 1944

The voice spoke Russian. It cut through the dark, slicing it like paper, and the shreds were not to mend again. Martin Bora did not want to open his eyes, did not want to know whether it was night or not, whether this was Russia or not. As with voices in dreams, the sounds seemed to be inside him – inside the dark within – not travelling to him from elsewhere. Surely, if he stretched, he’d feel the jagged top of the wall and mud cleaving to his boots, but he didn’t. Instead, he lay there on his back. He did not recall lying on his back when the Russian dogs smelled him and strained furiously at the leash.

There was no wall, no mud. And the voice was harsh, but no longer speaking Russian.

Darkness broke.

Bora opened his eyes. The blinding glare of a torch filled them, causing him to blink; no place in his skull was safe from it. He recoiled from the brightness without averting his face.

“Get up,” the voice said.

Something told him it was useless to seek the handgun at his bedside. Elbows propped on the mattress, Bora tried to make sense of things, much as one stumbles through spider webs, becoming tangled in their gummy wraiths. “What happened, what is it?”

The flood of light waved aside, just enough for him to discern civilian clothes, a baggy overcoat. A hefty man, middle-aged, a beefy jaw unhinging to speak.

“Gestapo. Get up, Colonel von Bora.”

Bora stiffened across his shoulders. He was not awake enough to rally his wits, but enough to taste fear. Dog-tired, exhaustion overwhelmed him in bed despite the ever-present pain in his mutilated left wrist; he took penicillin and what not for it, but the injections hurt and he could not say they helped. So he stared into the glare, befuddled, resisting the temptation to ask, “What is the charge?” – a phrase that was second nature to all of them in those years. Instead, as he freed his legs from the quilts, he repeated, “What happened?”

The man said nothing. When Bora went to stand up and reach for his uniform across the chair, another figure flung his riding breeches at him from the dark.

“Get dressed.”

Many times, he’d wondered what he would feel at a moment like this. The truth was that formless panic took over everything else. This has to be Russia, he made himself think. Had better be. Red Army voices from the past were still inside him, speaking not so differently from the man before him. He heeded all of them, automatically.

The whiteness of his underwear exposed him, lean and briefly vulnerable: at once, he began to cover it up with the field grey of the uniform. He slipped into his breeches, laced them with one hand and was halfway through buckling his prosthesis when the army shirt flew at him. He donned that, too, pressured into fitting himself.

The glare stayed on him; that invisible someone else was now rummaging in his dresser. Bora heard the army footlocker slam shut. The shaft of light moved up as he stood buttoning his tunic. The army cap came his way, and he put it on.

“What about my men?”

They shoved him forward, walked him through the dim silence of the small requisitioned house. “They know you’re leaving. Your things are packed.”

No sentry stood at his post by the front door. What appeared to be an unmarked, civilian car waited with the engine running. Under a sad drizzle, Bora was let into the back seat. The burly man sat down beside him; the other placed his footlocker in the trunk, and the car took off. Eyed furtively, the phosphorescent hands on his wristwatch read 11:04.

The mountain trail rolled bumpily under the wheels; it climbed at first, only to negotiate a zigzag of narrow bends before reaching what had to be the state highway. They were heading north, surely. Bora sat facing forward, although the dark in the car was nearly as solid as in his bedroom. Splintered trees and devastated farms must have been pitching and bobbing up like wrecks in that sea of darkness. Bora imagined them as they kept heading downhill. He was cold, fatigued, yet alert now and totally tense. In and out, he tried to breathe through his diaphragm to relax, but it was no use. Worse. As drowsiness left him, stabbing pangs started in his forearm, a rapid irreversible progression until it became a bloody pain. He folded his left arm against his chest and clutched his elbow, thumb and forefinger pressed hard against the sore flesh-covered bone. Trying to conceal his suffering, he felt the envelope inside his chest pocket – Nora Murphy’s note on Red Cross stationery, carried around unopened for a week before he decided to read it. If I have to die, he thought, it might as well be now that she tells me.

Without turning to the man at his side, he asked, “Where are we going?” And, having received no answer, he sullenly minded the twists and turns of the car. The river valley below, that much he knew, led to a fork in the road, west to Piacenza and east to Parma. The latter route eventually led to Germany. God always has mercy, she had written him. In His wisdom, He has seen to it that my unhoped-for present happiness … She did not say so exactly, but he understood she might have fallen pregnant: the side effect of victory toasts on her diplomat husband, in liberated Rome. I cannot be so bold as to pretend to know what the future holds in store for us, Colonel, but you must promise that you will, between now and then, open your heart to what other love may come your way. She had underlined other, not promise. It might mean something. He did not reread Nora’s message: only folded it along the crease, replaced it in its envelope and slipped it into the pocket over his heart. In time, everything makes sense. Losing his left hand to a grenade attack, the annulment of his marriage, that brief, impossible passion for a married woman. Even a sort of bittersweet solace for having no impediments, if love ever were an impediment to death.

Half an hour, one hour went by. Through the corner of his eye, Bora perceived the bulk of the man beside him; from the rustle of waterproof cloth, he knew he was reaching inside his trench coat. He held his breath until he perceived the pungent, medicinal aroma of a cough drop.

“May I know why I’m being spirited off?”

Again, no reply. The engine pitch changed as the car reached level ground. Now and then, they went around an obstacle or rode the shoulder. They gained speed, slowed down to a creep. A roadblock came up, and with it a dozen godforsaken right places for firing a bullet through his head. We shall dissolve into Nothing – Georg Heym’s poem came to his mind. We shall dissolve into Nothing – but he could not recall the lines that followed.

A damaged, near-illegible road sign went by – the outskirts of Parma, home to Army HQ 1008. Once again, from here they could go left or right, or ahead to the Po River and its war-ravaged bridges. He settled into his habit of self-control over pain and fear.

By and by, he realized they were indeed coming to the river, where by coincidence or design, docked to a wooden platform on the bank, an unsteady but workable ferry waited to carry them over. Then came a rough regaining of the road, in the eerie distant glimmer of an air raid God knows where on the horizon. Bombed-out villages, bleak detours, shortcuts through the fields and along canals. At every crossing, Bora tried to think of where the next SS or army headquarters might be. As far as he could tell, they kept heading north. He recognized the turn-off towards Brescia, home to three SS commands at least, and to Army HQ 1011. Still they kept going. Every so often, German soldiers or Italian guardsmen stopped them at checkpoints. Bora was thinking of a letter to his parents, whether he should have written one or would be allowed to write one. Whether there’d be time for it after all.

Three wordless hours and more went by, through the damp autumn night, a pitilessly long stretch of time to mull over his life and what lay ahead. At Montichiari Bora identified the last possible turn-off – to an airfield, Ghedi, from where he could be flown off to Germany – but still the car headed north. Sinking into his deepest layer of animal-like forbearance, he found a dull equidistance between resignation and fear.

If not Ghedi, or Brescia, was it the lake they were heading for? Lake Garda, of course. Yes, yes. They would soon seek the steep, narrow Garda shore. Barely visible hills floated on both sides of the car. A downhill stretch, followed by the bristle of shadowy cypresses and a series of curves where palm trees drew the fanciful outlines of exotic belvederes. The lake must be ahead; no, to the right. Below them, to the right. Despite his stoicism, Bora was startled when the car came to a stop by a blind wall, slightly at an angle.

He didn’t move until they opened his door to let him out. It seemed forever, with the engine still running. Bora heard the trunk unlock, then the dull sound of his footlocker being dropped on the road. Both car...

Produkt-Details

• Erscheint lt. Verlag: 23.5.2024
• Verlagsort: London
• Sprache: englisch
• Themenwelt: Literatur ► Krimi / Thriller / Horror ► Krimi / Thriller
• ISBN-10: 1-916725-08-2 / 1916725082
• ISBN-13: 978-1-916725-08-9 / 9781916725089