Warburg in Rome (12 page)

Deane shook his head. “Lord Haw-Haw on Radio Berlin, I’d have thought.” He was the soul of
buon umore
. At the mention of Berlin, the Japanese dignitary turned toward Deane, who immediately met his eyes. “Or Tokyo Rose, perhaps.” Deane’s grin said, Just joking. He nodded at the diplomat, who once more turned quickly away.

Now Deane allowed himself a hefty swallow of the drink he held. Foul taste, just as he recalled, but the familiar jolt of alcohol was welcome. He turned his smile on Tardini. “And if the GI’s name was O’Hara, Most Reverend Monsignor, we can be sure he had the nuns in school, and therefore knows full well what the Colosseum is.”

Monsignor Tardini stared at Deane for a long moment. With the insult upended, an unwelcome air of unease had blown in. Tardini sought to dispel it by putting a casual hand on Deane’s forearm and introducing him as the new vice director of the Pontificia Commissione di Assistenza. The clerics would have needed no further explanation, since all were aware of Spellman, his generous sponsorship of the Pontifical Relief Commission—and his blatant ambition to be named papal secretary of state. Deane knew that his own status here depended on his being Spellman’s man. Normally, the thought of Spellman as Maglione’s successor would have provoked laughter among the Italian prelates, but Maglione was sickly, and at war’s end power politics would shift. The Church might need an American at the Pope’s elbow, and His Holiness was unpredictable. It cost the Vatican insiders nothing to curry favor with the wily Spellman, and therefore with his man here. Hence the implication of affection in Tardini’s introduction. Deane knew better than to take it personally, especially after yesterday.

Before the limp-handed introductions were complete, a flurry of arrival noises drifted in from the apartment entrance, and, like leaves to the rising sun, the gathering turned. Cardinal Maglione, a scarecrow figure made even more stick-like by his bright red, shoulder-caped vestments, swooped into the room at the head of a small parade of other men. Deane had laid eyes on the great prelate only across the distance of the nave of St. Peter’s, and he wondered why Maglione seemed so familiar. Then he realized he was looking at El Greco’s
Saint Jerome
, if shorn of the beard.

Despite Maglione’s grotto-eyed gauntness, he seemed vital and happy, with his hands alternately upraised, as if greeting pilgrims, and then tugging at his watered-silk cincture, which seemed not quite to fit. Indeed, the air of recent weight loss clung to him. Yet his broad smile was surprisingly engaging. When he met Deane’s gaze, he stopped for an instant, a kind of recognition, then moved on. Behind Maglione were two more bishops, three dark-suited laymen, and, bringing up the rear, a lean cleric in an unadorned black soutane, another El Greco figure, but this of a young man.

Protocol brought Maglione to Tardini, who deftly kissed the ring, the single
baciamano
that this gathering would require. The cardinal ignored Deane and the others, instead turning back to announce his party. He gestured the laymen forward, but was suddenly speaking in a language that momentarily threw Deane. Only upon hearing the name “von Weizsäcker” did he realize it was German.

From then on, Deane’s major project was to stifle the cold resentment he felt. The initial current of interest he’d sensed coming from Maglione was perhaps a breed of embarrassment, stirred by recognition of his being American, for the prelate had arrived with Ernst von Weizsäcker, the German ambassador to the Holy See, and his deputy, Albrecht von Kessel, both dressed alike in dark business suits. Von Weizsäcker had a full head of white hair, dramatically combed straight back. He carried himself with an exaggeratedly upright posture and took in his surroundings with one eye half closed, as if missing its monocle. Maglione’s flamboyant introduction of the pair was greeted with a chipper round of applause.

Deane knew of both Germans, especially von Weizsäcker, the patrician Prussian who had served as Hitler’s secretary of state. Berlin had posted him to the Holy See just as the German vise closed on Rome in September. In briefings at Spellman’s office, Deane had heard that von Weizsäcker had then lodged Germany’s formal protest against Catholic sheltering of “criminal elements,” by which, of course, he meant Jews. It was a protest he’d have made to Maglione, yet here was Maglione kissing his heinie—and covering it. Now that the Allies held Rome, the Kraut diplomat was himself a criminal element, taking refuge under the skirts of Holy Mother the Church.

Deane stood to the side, near one of the grand windows, sipping his Cinzano as if he liked it. He watched as the gathering reordered itself around the Germans. In addition to the diplomats, and two or three of Maglione’s Curia flunkies, the arrivals included a bespectacled, cape-wearing German bishop. That would be Ludwig Graz, Deane realized, the rector of the German national church in Rome. Positioned a step behind Graz, ready to take an order, was the dark-complected El Greco figure, the young priest in black.

The strings of conversation had easily reknotted into German, reminding Deane of the Vatican’s astounding multilingualism. He chided himself for not seeing this coming. Von Weizsäcker and von Kessel, to avoid arrest by the Americans, would have taken over Vatican apartments just vacated by American and British diplomats. Deane had to remind himself: the Vatican was neutral in this war. His Church was neutral.

The day before, when Deane’s wires had unexpectedly crossed with Tardini’s, the short-circuit was sparked not by the diplomats, but by the place where they were housed. Like the Allies before them, the Axis envoys would now be lodged in Santa Marta, the hospice compound on the opposite side of St. Peter’s Square from the Apostolic Palace, beside the Gate of Bells. Santa Marta was one of the first places in Vatican City that Deane had asked to be shown.

The group of buildings, surrounding a courtyard containing a statue of the Madonna and Child, was constructed in the late nineteenth century to house victims of a cholera outbreak, and then served as a hostel for pilgrims. Deane’s guide was one of the sisters of St. Vincent de Paul, the nuns who’ve been running the place for the half century of its existence. The sister wore the cobalt-blue habit of her order, but what really made her distinctive were the starched white wings of her headgear. From the neck up, she looked like a swan about to take flight.

She had assumed that the American wanted to be shown the VIP quarters, the apartments on the top floors of the five-story building where the diplomats lived—the “guests of the Holy Father”—or perhaps the rooms on the lower floors that housed union leaders, cousins of Victor Emmanuel, or former associates of Mussolini’s who had defected after Il Duce’s overthrow. A mélange of political misfits had been resident in the place throughout the war. But no, Deane had asked her to show him the cellars.

Santa Marta had provided a home not only for the well-connected, but also for a multitude of anonymous sanctuary seekers, with the dank cellars reserved for the last to come when the Germans took over Rome. In crypts that once served as the cholera morgue were hidden the most desperate of the refugees, the ones the Germans had most wanted. And, assuming they were still there, the ones Deane wanted to see for himself.

The nun gathered the hem of her robes as she wound down the staircase. The rosary hanging from the white cincture at her waist clanked against the iron handrail. Deane had to duck to keep from hitting low-wattage light bulbs and was soon walking at an ever more stooped angle. The subterranean complex below the nineteenth-century edifice implied an archeological calendar, less cellars than caverns that once opened into pagan mausoleums, catacombs, the Vatican necropolis.

As Deane followed the nun through several arched thresholds, he thought of André Gide’s
Caves of the Vatican
, a work of bitter satire that ridiculed the blind wanderers amid the cloisters and catacombs of faith. But since the novel had been published, in the early twentieth century, the popular image had taken hold of a deeply buried labyrinth of dank tunnels coursing under Vatican Hill. Fanciful but false. Caves suited the anti-Catholic imagination. Instead, what Deane found was a mundane series of cement-paved corridors, lit and clean, with whitewashed walls. Stout wooden portals to which his escort paid no attention closed off numerous rooms and hallways, leading he knew not where.

Deane sensed that this underground realm was actually far from mundane. That human beings had lately been unspeakably hounded in the heart of Europe still left him short of words, and he was unable to shake the nagging worry that he was himself somehow tied to it. Whatever defined the facts of the Jewish condition north of the Alps, here, in the very heart of Catholicism, that condition had to have been different. Complaints of Roman Catholic unconcern, or worse, about the fate of Jews had to be untrue. Deane thought of that Jew on the airplane to Rome. He wished the man, Warburg, were at his side now, both of them seeing with their own eyes that the Church had not failed this test.

Finally the nun led him to an arched entranceway, sealed by a pair of peaked wooden doors; in the center of each was a closed iron grill, suggesting that once a prison had operated here. This was the heart of the labyrinth. With little effort the nun pushed the doors open; they were unlocked. A broad, rectangular room, low-ceilinged but bright, stretched before them. Several dozen cots were ordered in four rows, with blankets tucked into mattresses. Washstands, straight-backed wooden chairs, and cloth-draped shelves stood along the walls. Bundles sat at the feet of the narrow beds, but only here and there. A pair of Vincentian sisters, each with her winged headdress, were busy folding blankets, cleaning up a recently abandoned space.

Despite the impression of tidiness, a faint stench of overcrowding remained. Perhaps a dozen people were seated or stretched out on various cots, at a remove from one another. The nun explained in unadorned Italian that, until a few days before, more than one hundred people had been living in this space, including children. And this, she said, was only one cellar room among several that had served as dormitories. All but the few “guests” before them had promptly left when the Americans entered Rome.

“And these?” Deane asked.

“They are sick. Or they are not Romans, not Italians. They are perhaps travelers from abroad. Bohemia. They have no one to help them. They have nowhere to go. But they must leave. The bishop said they must depart.”

Deane left the nun’s side to approach an elderly woman who was sitting on the edge of her cot. Her head was covered with a firmly knotted scarf, and her possessions were bundled at her feet. Tears streaked her face. To Deane’s surprise, a rosary was wrapped around her cupped hands. Her lips were moving through the
Ave
s. Deane gently touched her shoulder. “
Vi benedica, Signora
,” he said. She ignored him.

He returned to the nun. “What bishop?” he asked.

“Bishop Salerno. I asked Mother Pascalina for confirmation, but she said I was to defer to His Excellency.”

“I’ll speak to the bishop, Sister. We will let these people stay as long as they want.”

The nun did not reply.

“And the rosary, Sister. Why is she saying the rosary?”

The nun looked at him blankly.

“If she is Jewish. You told me this is where the Jews have been hidden.”

“Yes, Father,” the nun replied, “but they are baptized Jews. The Jews who come to His Holiness for protection, they are baptized.”

Within moments, Deane presented himself unannounced at Tardini’s office on the far side of St. Peter’s Square. The gatekeeper in the outer office, an aged Jesuit, recognized Deane from his welcome visit that morning and did not try to stop him when he brushed past, opening Tardini’s door without knocking. The stout prelate was seated at an overlarge desk. Standing beside him was a nun whose white habit was set off by her black veil—a Dominican. Both she and Tardini looked up at Deane with startled expressions. The nun had been leaning at Tardini’s side. She held a pencil, with which she had apparently been ticking off items on some document. Seeing Deane, she reached down to the document and turned it over.

“Please excuse my interruption, Most Reverend, Sir,” Deane said. But he, too, was startled. A nun at the prelate’s elbow? And what’s on that paper?

Tardini stared impassively at Deane, then forced a smile. He said, “No, no. We were just finishing.”

At that, the nun scooped up the document, and other papers, from the prelate’s desk and quickly moved away. She left the room without raising a glance toward Deane.

Tardini’s desk was positioned in front of tall windows, open to the square. Again Deane said, “Forgive my intrusion, Reverend Monsignor.”

A cigarette sat smoldering in an ashtray, and Tardini smothered his impatience with his reach. “What is it, Father?”

“I’ve just come from Santa Marta,” Deane said. “I’ve just been told that the Jews we’ve been protecting here in Vatican City are converted Jews. Catholic Jews. Can that be so?”

Through cigarette smoke, Tardini dumbly blinked up at the American monsignor. “What? What?”

Deane said, “I have heard the point made again and again, Monsignor. I’ve made it myself. Many dozens of Jews have been given sanctuary within the walls of the Vatican. This is the great rebuttal to the charge of the Holy Father’s indifference to Hitler’s crime against Jews. And now I learn that the Jews here are baptized?”

“Some are baptized, Father. Certainly. That must be true. Among so many.”

“But all? Or most? How many?”

“And some are the spouses of the baptized. They themselves are not Catholics. They are unconverted Jews. Many wives and husbands.”

“How many?”

Tardini shrugged.

“Monsignor, I have heard Archbishop Spellman describe the Vatican’s extraordinary—if discreet—rescue of Jews. He describes it to Jewish leaders in New York. He described it to President Roosevelt, when Roosevelt asked why His Holiness has not condemned the Nazis for—”