The Small Boat of Great Sorrows (24 page)

“The Butcher of Lyon?”

“Yes. And it was more than a little embarrassing when it came out later that we'd helped him get away, with Draganovic pulling the strings. The cover-up said Barbie was the exception, not the rule.”

“You don't agree?” Pine asked.

“Nobody would who was here then. But the proof's gone by now, of course. Which is why I keep my mouth shut.”

He paused to give further instructions to the driver. They were still headed up the Tiber, in traffic growing heavier by the minute. The dome of Saint Peter's loomed in the distance to their left.

“The day I met Matek I was looking for a Nazi. An old SS man we kept rounding up and the British kept letting go. Fiorello, our CO, was determined we were going to keep picking him up until the Brits kept him locked up. That's the way it was then. You were never sure who was on your side one day to the next. We had a list of his mistresses, and we'd visit them one by one until he turned up. I drew Inge, whom I always thought of as Marlene Dietrich, mostly because of the way she talked. She lived in a run-down old pension on Via Abruzzi, place full of exiles. Always smelled like boiled cabbage.

“Well, Inge was in, but our SS man wasn't. He'd dumped her for some new gal across town, so I phoned in the name from downstairs and decided to check the books. That's how we made the rounds then, checking registration records, then visiting the newcomers, making sure their papers were in order. Just about everybody had some kind of information, and usually all it took to get it was a few cigarettes. And that day, Matek's name was the latest entry. So I paid him a call.”

“You spoke the language?” Vlado asked.

“Serbo-Croatian? Some. But Matek had learned some Italian at Fermo. He'd just arrived and was pretty skinny after all that time in the camp. It was pretty clear his papers were a rush job, but he had that look in his eye that dared you to do something about it. He said Father Draganovic himself had gotten him out of Fermo, so right away he had my interest. The father had driven down to the camp in a U.S. Army staff car, which somehow didn't surprise me. He'd held a mass for a few hundred Croatians, then prayed the rosary and asked anybody with special requests to see him afterward. Matek had gotten a job at San Girolamo working as a typist and driver, which piqued my interest further. I'd been trying to get a hold of some information there for months.”

“What kind of information?” Vlado asked.

“They kept a master list of all the émigrés—names, aliases, military rank, you name it—everybody they'd ever housed or fed or were trying to ship out, including all the big Ustasha types in hiding. We'd turned another worker who was supposed to slip us a copy, but a week later they fished him out of the Tiber. So you had to be careful.”

“Did Matek tell you his military background?” Vlado asked.

“A few lies. But we didn't concern ourselves too much with that, because within a few days an order came down from Washington to go after Pavelic, the dictator himself, and suddenly Matek was our best bet for an insider.”

“This was when?” Pine asked.

“June of '46. Tito's people had been screaming for months that we were hiding Pavelic in Italy. I think somebody in Washington finally got tired of hearing it.”

“Were we?” Pine asked. “Hiding him?”

“We certainly hadn't been looking for him. Especially people like Angleton. But our guys were game for the chase, and the word around town was that Pavelic was holed up at Castel Gandolfo, the pope's summer residence, out with the peacocks and chicken coops. Supposedly some of his old security chiefs and cabinet members were there, too. The only way to know for sure was to get that list out of San Girolamo. And damned if we didn't, with Matek's help.”

The taxi reached its destination, stopping by a bridge, Ponte Cavour, beneath the leafless sycamores lining the Tiber.

“Best to keep moving as we talk,” Fordham said, looking around quickly as they crossed a busy boulevard. “Makes it harder to eavesdrop.” Pine rolled his eyes.

They strolled into a modest but spacious piazza with one side facing onto the boulevard by the river. A high grassy mound at the center of the square seemed to glow beneath the fading orange sky. Bordering the other three sides were long five-story buildings of fairly recent vintage, by Roman standards, boxy and severe, with rows of narrow rectangular windows. The ones on the north and east sides were made of scrubbed white marble, but the one at the south end was ugly brown brick. It was joined to a faded dark chapel that looked centuries old.

“The mound is the mausoleum of Caesar Augustus,” Fordham said. “Everything else in the square is a Mussolini creation, and that damned ugly hunk of bricks at the south end is San Girolamo. The Croatians couldn't afford the marble, I guess. But it worked well enough for Draganovic and his ratline.” He pointed to the marble walls of the nearest building, just behind them. Beneath the windows there were carvings of ancient Roman armies but also of the Fascist armies of World War II. Latin inscriptions ran overhead, with Mussolini's name prominent, along with a reference to his distant predecessor, Augustus.

“Hard to believe it's still here,” Vlado said, having grown used to Berlin, where every remnant of the Nazis had been either bombed, buried, or annotated to museum status.

San Girolamo also displayed art of the era, in three huge, colorful mosaics looming above the fifth-floor windows. Jesus was in the centerpiece, a fawning crowd at his feet. The two flanking pieces featured priests ministering to crowds, presumably in Croatia. The inscriptions on this building were also in Latin, although the checkerboard symbol of Croatia was featured prominently. Vlado saw spray-painted graffiti on the bricks as they approached—a skull and crossbones topped by the words GIOVENTÙ NAZISTA.

“What's
Gioventù
mean?” Vlado asked.

“Youth,” Fordham said. “ ‘Nazi Youth.' Guess they still feel comfortable here.”

The place made Vlado edgy, and for the first time in all his travels he could sense his father's lingering presence, a wan ghost in worn clothing drifting beneath these words and images, saluting an armed guard on his way through the door. Such petty players, his countrymen, in these great struggles of the continent—instigators and assassins who lit the bonfire of Europe, then went off to fight among themselves. Even the great Pavelic, killer of millions, had been a sort of nothing here, hiding in cassocks and convents, then sailing in the belly of a freighter under a forged name.

“Looks like the Croatians felt right at home here,” Pine said.

“Oh, they were great allies. Another Catholic nation making nice with Germany, and right across the Adriatic. It was a friendship for the ages, which is why the Vatican took it so hard when Tito took over.”

“But if they couldn't afford the marble,” Vlado asked, “how'd they afford the ratline?”

“Draganovic,” Fordham said. “Supposedly had a few crates of gold right there in his office. Looted from the State Bank of Croatia as the war was ending.” Vlado remembered the references to Matek and the strange convoys out of Zagreb. No wonder the good father had helped him get out of the DP camp. “Probably had two hundred pounds of it. The British had helped him bring it up from a monastery in Austria.”

They paused, facing the brown walls of San Girolamo. The mosaics were barely visible in the fading light.

“Can we go inside?” Vlado asked.

“You might be able to talk your way in. But everything would be locked up. Just like on that weekend in '46.”

“Matek had a key?”

“Several. To file drawers and offices. He'd stolen them, of course. Just for a day or two. Had us copy them, and kept a few of the copies for himself. That was part of his bargain.”

“What else did he ask for?”

“Oh, he wanted the moon. But no cash, we insisted. So he came up with a wish list. Quite eclectic. A few tools. Some cigarettes. But mostly a lot of passes and travel documents, for freedom of movement. We weren't giving him those until he'd gotten us the goods, of course. He also wanted documents for a friend. A confederate. He'd concluded he couldn't pull it off without an extra set of hands.”

Vlado let that sink in a moment. “My father,” he said.

“Yes.”

“So that's when you met him.”

“Just before the break-in. I had to make sure we approved. And I did, with reservations.”

“Having to do with his war record?”

Fordham nodded grimly. “But probably not in the way you think.” He looked around, as if worried again about eavesdroppers. No one was in sight, but darkness was falling. The air was chilly. “Gentlemen, if we're to continue, and if I'm to give you what you really came for, there are better places to talk about things like this. That blue van over there's been giving me the creeps since we got here.” Neither Vlado nor Pine had noticed one. “And some of it, I'm still not sure I should be telling you. For your own good, as well as mine.”

“Meaning what?” asked Pine, who was still looking around for the blue van.

Fordham pursed his lips, suddenly looking older than he had all afternoon. “Meaning that just because it's fifty years old doesn't mean it's lost its ability to do harm. Even to kill. And meaning that after fifty years, I suppose it's finally time for me to come clean.” He turned toward Vlado. “With you, in particular.”

CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

Another three-taxi relay took them to a restaurant called Rimini's. It was one of Fordham's favorites, and he apologized personally to the proprietor for arriving so early. It was barely 6 p.m.

“No better than tourists. But we'll pretty much have the place to ourselves.”

Even so, Fordham was edgy whenever a waiter approached, eyeing the kitchen door at the sound of every coming or going. Rimini himself seated them, putting them near the back, then pacing awhile nearby, as if unsure of what to make of these sullen early arrivals. As if correcting for their mistake, he waited a good ten minutes before delivering menus.

Vlado was hungrier for information than for food, but not until Rimini took their orders did Fordham return to the subject. “Meeting your father was Matek's idea,” he began. “He'd told your father I might be able to help him return home. Of course, Matek didn't tell me any of this until five minutes before the meeting. Said it would be up to me to bring up our plans for San Girolamo. So I handled it very clumsily.”

“Was Matek there?”

“In the hallway. It was at your father's pension, which was worse than Matek's.”

Fordham flinched as a waiter materialized with the first course, a bounty of antipasti in bright reds and greens. Vlado tried to imagine Fordham as a young man, with a face smooth and well fed and the swagger of a soldier whose war was won.

“So you told him about the plan,” Vlado prompted.

“Not completely. Didn't want him running back to Draganovic with the details.”

“Did you think he might?”

“Not really. As a driver he'd ferried around enough of the father's guests to realize the sort of business they were in, the power they could wield. And everyone had heard about the poor fellow fished out of the Tiber. So the minute I raised the possibility of procuring a little information, he shut down. Asked me to leave.”

“Did you?”

“I was too defeated and embarrassed not to. But I came back.”

“He changed his mind?”

“No. Turns out Matek had been counting on your father to refuse, but he'd wanted me to see what we were up against. Matek believed your father's reluctance only made him more desirable. He didn't want to work with anyone who didn't have a healthy fear of Draganovic. He said the key was making your father fear us more.”

“How?”

“With his security file. By putting him in a position where he'd either have to help us or be revealed to the authorities. Your father had spent some time as a guard at Jasenovac.” Fordham hesitated, lowering his fork. “You knew that, I hope?”

Vlado nodded. His stomach clenched, and he gently put down his fork.

“But of course that wasn't enough for Matek,” Fordham continued. “He wanted to rig up the worst possible dossier—massacres, atrocities, eyewitness accounts—then show it to him and say, play ball or else.”

Vlado flushed, glancing at Pine, who had also put down his fork and was staring intently at Fordham. They caught each other's eye, Pine with an expression that seemed both embarrassed and angry. Remembering the vivid account he'd read two days earlier, Vlado wondered now how much had been fiction. He felt a jealous anger brewing, this time on his father's behalf.

“So his father's file is all a lie?” Pine said, barely in a whisper.

“Pretty much. As far as anything detailed goes, anyway.”

“And you agreed to this plan?” Vlado said, leaning forward, his voice rising.

“Please.” Fordham looked around nervously. “I didn't, in fact. I checked with Fiorello, just in case, and he felt the same. Matek would have to find somebody else. Someone we could lure with a carrot, not a stick.”

“But that's not how it worked out, was it?” Vlado said.

Fordham shook his head, looking doleful. He dabbed his mouth with a napkin. “We were pressured from upstairs. Someone at the embassy. Young hotshot from Washington on special assignment from State. He'd been making the rounds in Europe and had taken a personal interest in the hunt for Pavelic, so he calls me over to his suite at the Grand Hotel. Big corner room with the windows open and the shutters thrown back. ‘You have a job to do, Robert,' he says. ‘And I'd hate to see a fine career ruined because of some philosophical objection.' It was get in line or get out of the way. So we got in line. And it turned out that Matek and your father weren't the only players in the deal.”

“Who else?” Vlado was terse now, an interrogator in pose and demeanor. All that was missing was the bright lamp. If he could have, he would have tied Fordham to the chair, making him stew until it hurt.

“There was an agent Angleton wanted to run. Some low-level Ustasha hiding out at a convent. He was going to take a radio, explosives, cross the border and raise hell. After a year of good deeds, they'd give him safe passage to the United States. But he had a dirty file. Dirty as they come.”

“So you switched his file with my father's.”

“Not switched. We wouldn't have wanted any Jasenovac reference in his dossier. But his records made a convenient case history for your father. Real witnesses talking about real events.”

“I know,” Vlado said. “I've read them.”

Fordham swallowed heavily, then nodded. “It let us kill two birds with one stone, as it were. Gave our operative a new identity and put your father in chains, figuratively speaking. Not that the operative ever amounted to much. Tito's people caught him inside a week. Shot him.”

Fordham turned his eyes to his plate, sopping up a puddle of oil with a crust of bread. Vlado reached across the table and grabbed the offending hand, squeezing the wrist, then leaned into Fordham's face while speaking in a rasping whisper. “Stop it. Stop it! You're not eating anything until you're finished talking!”

Pine watched openmouthed but did nothing to stop Vlado. Fordham glanced nervously at a couple who had just entered the restaurant, but this only drew further ire.

“Don't look at them!” Vlado hissed. “Don't look anywhere but at me until you're done. I want to know exactly what happened next. Every detail. When did you tell my father?”

“The following week.” Fordham's voice was shaky, barely audible. He looked at the hand gripping his wrist with an expression of alarm. Vlado eased his grip but not his gaze. “I took the file over to his pension.”

“What did he say?”

“Told me it wasn't him. Said he'd heard stories, of course. Seen some things he hadn't liked. But nothing like this.”

“Did he say what he
had
done?”

Fordham shook his head. “And I didn't ask. That would have been admitting we'd doctored his file. But at some level he must have known what had happened, because he said, ‘This is Pero's doing, isn't it?' I said I didn't know what he was talking about. That we'd pushed Matek the same way we'd pushed him. I knew he didn't believe me. He was angry. He . . . grabbed me for a minute. By the wrists.” Fordham looked away, and Vlado flushed in spite of himself, gently and slowly letting go. “Then he let go and sat down on the bed.”

“And he agreed.”

“Not at first. Said he could embarrass us as much as we could embarrass him. I told him to go ahead and try. I told him we'd throw him back across the border with a big U sewn to his britches and a rap sheet a mile long. They'd shoot him at sunrise. And with that he gave up. Besides, we were still offering what he wanted most. The opportunity to go home. Work for us, I told him, and we'd make the file go away. Give him a new identity, clean as a whistle: Enver Petric, the village farm boy who'd sat out the war, and an ethnic Muslim into the bargain.”

So this was where Vlado's name had come from: a lying spy and a murderous scoundrel. Vlado then asked the question that had been lurking behind his anger all along, although he wasn't yet sure he was ready for the answer. “What was my father's actual record, then?” His stomach fluttered as if he'd just leapt from a diving board.

“I never allowed myself to read it,” Fordham said.

“Never allowed yourself?” Vlado's fist struck the table. Pine placed a hand lightly on his arm. The couple at the front table looked up with startled expressions, and a waiter approaching briskly with a tray full of steaming platters paused in midstep. They waited in silence while he distributed the food, but Vlado didn't take his eyes off Fordham.

“I was afraid of how clean it might be,” Fordham said quietly, after the waiter departed. “Although he
had
been at Jasenovac. That I knew for sure.”

“But only for a few months,” Vlado countered, some of the steam gone from his voice. “And it was right at the end of the war.”

Fordham flushed, and for once he didn't seem to care if he was overheard. “Look,” he said, leaning forward. “I don't defend what I did. But do you have any idea how many people they could kill at Jasenovac in just a month? Let alone two. Or by what means? Are you at all familiar with how they concluded their business at the time your father would have been present?”

Vlado said nothing, dazed by the blow.

“Well, I'll tell you, since you're so eager for
every
detail.”

Now it was Vlado who was looking around the room.

“Look,” Pine interrupted, “I really don't see any need to—”

“I do,” Vlado said. “Let him finish.”

“As well you should,” Fordham said, nodding soberly. “I've been feeling guilty about this for more than fifty years. I should have owned up to it long ago. Should have never been a party to it. But even if your father did nothing but dig latrines, he knew what he knew and held his tongue. He kept it all to himself while murderers like Matek walked free. Okay, so we found a way to shut him up. But why hadn't he spoken up earlier? As an investigator, you know as well as anyone what it means to conceal the guilt of others.”

“Believe me,” Vlado said, feeling a queasy kinship. “I know.”

“So did they even carry out the burglary?” Pine asked.

“Oh, with flying colors. First Saturday night in July. While I waited across the square in a jeep. After an hour they came lumbering out with a couple of boxes like they owned the place. None of the guards even raised an eyebrow. Amazing. Matek had a big bulge in one of his coat pockets, a fat envelope he'd stuffed in there for himself. We spent the rest of the night photographing everything so we could put it all back Sunday. It was a windfall—every name of every émigré, including their aliases. Enough to keep us busy for weeks. But of course there were gaps, too. Correspondence with the Vatican that we'd expected to see. Correspondence with Angleton, too, which, personally, I wanted as much as anything. I wanted to put him out of business.”

“You think that was the sort of thing Matek kept for himself? The envelope in his pocket?”

“That's my bet. At first I thought he'd turned it over to Angleton, that Matek had been working for him as well. Later I wasn't so sure. But it would have been some of the biggest sticks of dynamite in the whole barrel.”

“Then why didn't you withhold his passes?”

“I tried. I was overruled. The man upstairs again.”

“Who was he?” Pine asked.

Fordham smiled ruefully. “It's the one question I haven't yet decided whether to answer. It's the one name they'd still want me to keep to myself. But I suppose if I wanted to play it safe, I shouldn't have met with you at all. They'll assume the worst anyway.”

He paused for a moment, as if collecting himself. He dabbed his face with a napkin, then gestured toward the newly arrived food.

“Do try some of this before it gets cold, won't you. It's quite the best there is in Rome. There's fish coming, too, along with a little veal.”

Then he took a bite, Vlado willing to indulge him for the moment. Raising a glass of wine, hand quavering slightly, Fordham seemed about to propose a toast. But all he spoke was a name.

“Samuel Colleton.”

“He was the man upstairs?”

“Well, well,” Pine said.

“Who is Samuel Colleton?” Vlado asked.

“Number-two man at the State Department,” Fordham said. “But the job he really wants—has always wanted—is to be head man at the Agency. And that job comes open when the current director retires in May. Colleton's not the only contender, of course, and he's the oldest, a disadvantage. But apparently a certain momentum has been building, a feeling that maybe the old man deserves one last moment of glory—a sort of lifetime-achievement award. Which is why any hint of scandal from his past would sink him. Reputations are at stake, gentlemen. And perhaps more.”

“Harkness,” Pine said.

“Pardon?” Fordham said.

“Paul Harkness. A State Department operative out of Sarajevo. He helped put together our botched operation. Technically, Harkness works for Colleton, and might still be working for him if Colleton gets the promotion.”

“Ah,” Fordham said. “
That
kind of diplomat.” He chuckled mirthlessly, relaxing for the first time in a while, shaking his head as he scooped another bundle of noodles onto his plate. “These kinds of things always end the same, don't they? Just as you're ready to make your move, your operation goes to hell in a handbasket, and nobody on the ground ever knows why. Exactly what happened to us with Pavelic.”

“Someone botched it?” Vlado said.

“New orders from Washington, right after the break-in. Our hunt was postponed until further notice, leaving us dead in the water. Then Matek sank us.”

“Matek?”

“He skedaddled. And I got the sack. All after a big mess over at Draganovic's personal quarters, at 21 Borgo Santo Spirito, right next to Saint Peter's. Official Vatican property, so you couldn't touch him there. But the sidewalk out front was fair game, and Matek phoned me from over there a week after the break-in. Said if we came right away, we'd find the ones we'd been looking for, arriving in a car with diplomatic tags.