Warburg in Rome (22 page)

“What’s it say exactly?”

Deane held the newspaper at arm’s length, to sharpen his focus. Translating was a welcome diversion, and he slipped into his preacher’s voice: “‘For the Church prays that God, the Father of mercies, hears the prayers of His children in the village of Fossoli, in the commune of Carpi, in the province of Modena. If Job’s sons were purified by their father’s sacrifice’”—Deane paused to look at Warburg, who showed him nothing, and Deane resumed reading—“‘why should the Church not believe that this prayer to the Father of Lights, from whom comes every good endowment, will not also be heard? For she prays in union with Christ her head, who takes up this plea and joins it to His own redemptive sacrifice.’” Deane lowered the paper.

“Job’s sons,” Warburg said.

“Euphemism for Jews. Not that Job was Jewish, strictly speaking. Not that he existed, for that matter.”

“I wouldn’t know.”

“The point is, the Catholic air commander will be pleased. Here it is, what he needed, in the Pope’s own newspaper. The two key points: Jews, Fossoli. I know the text sounds—what?—liturgical, but that’s the house style.”

Deane handed the paper to Warburg, who fixed his eyes on the lower corner of the front page. Deane turned his attention to the brown envelope, which was closed with a red wax seal and ribbon, stamped with an unfamiliar crest. He leaned forward toward the driver. “
Che cosa è questo?
”

“Dall’editore.”

Deane tore at the envelope, cracking the seal, so that soft bits of the blood-red wax fell on his suit. He removed a piece of paper that held a few lines of tidy script. He read. “Jesus,” Deane muttered, then crushed the paper and let his head fall back.

“What?”

“It’s bad. Very bad.”

“What?”

“The editor says they have reports coming in, a terrible fire at Carpi . . . many deaths . . . The local priest was at the camp. The editor says that Cardinal Maglione is demanding to know why tomorrow’s paper mentions Fossoli. Maglione has told the editor to kill the edition.”

“I don’t get it.”

“I’m afraid it’s obvious. Your friends took a chance. The chance was, if the Krauts couldn’t move those people, they would kill them. That seems to be what happened.”

“Good God.”

Deane winced. Mostly he was angry at himself—what a fool he’d been to accept this scheme. But he fixed his anger on Warburg, the first fool. “Surely you saw that. It was the
likelihood
. The Germans set fire to the camp. Who knows what else they did. Surely you aren’t surprised.”

“I am surprised. I am constantly surprised.”

“Surprise like yours is a luxury. You’re on the wrong side of the ocean for surprise. And for now, those friends of yours, the woman included, are in German territory. Dealing with God knows what. This is what happens in amateur hour. And I got sucked into it. You and I are why those people are dead, don’t you see that?
We
started the fire—with this Latin tabloid as kindling.”

“If you’d put Fossoli in the Pope’s paper
this morning
, like you said you would, maybe the Germans wouldn’t have dared—”

“Don’t be ridiculous. You have a Jew’s fantasy about the papacy’s influence. The Germans could care less about papal proclamations.”

“What proclamation? You’re saying, even though it’s after the fact and useless, the Vatican is taking the prayer for Fossoli back? Who is? Who’s doing that?”

“Cardinal Maglione. The secretary of state.”

“Can they do that?”

Deane snorted. “It’s Maglione’s newspaper. Of course they can do that. Simple as printing a new front page. Easy. In the presses right now.”

“But why?”

“Fossoli is on fire! Fossoli is a battle scene!” Deane lifted the letter. “An ‘instance of active belligerence’! You can’t have the Vatican anticipating German offensives.”

Warburg started to speak, then stopped. Deane sensed how thrown he was, with guilt, remorse—or was it panic? But then Warburg pushed the feelings back. When he spoke now, it was more quietly, with a hint of supplication.

“But if Fossoli is on the front page of the Pope’s paper
tomorrow
, people will take notice. Now more than ever, Father. If those people
are
dead, the least the Pope can do is offer that prayer. Draw attention. Killing this edition of the newspaper is like killing those poor people again.”

But Deane wasn’t buying it. “No,” he said. “Let it go. Bombing that bridge was a half-baked connivance to begin with. I can’t believe I let you rope me into it.” Deane’s leg was really hurting. How was he going to get back to St. Peter’s in time? And sure as hell, tacked to his door would be a
citazione
from Tardini, summoning him to explain how he had dragged Fossoli into St. Peter’s Square. Jesus! He flicked his cigarette out the car window.

Warburg was silent. The car screeched along, carried by momentum gained on the lower slopes of the Janiculum. Visible ahead was the bridge across the Tiber. The driver was blasting his horn, swerving around other vehicles, making horses rear. Deane gripped his left knee with both hands, bracing the leg. He was unable to deflect any longer the real truth of what had just happened. This Jew had not roped him into anything. He had gone along with the cockeyed scheme for the sake of his own vainglorious ambition, thinking he himself could rescue the Church’s tattered reputation. Yes, helping some desperate Jews, but along the way gaining praise for himself when the camp inmates were rescued, pleasing Spellman and greasing the upward promotion chute for both of them. He felt ashamed. Using those people. He felt disgusted with himself. He deserved this goddamned pain.

Finally Warburg said, “What did you call them? Sons of Job? Why not just say ‘Jews,’ Father? What’s so hard about the word ‘Jews’? And if that pathetic prayer is a violation of Vatican neutrality, your Church has already been taken captive.”

“The prayer wasn’t pathetic. It was heartfelt. I wrote it. And I meant it.” At least that.

“But without the word ‘Jews.’”

“Why does that matter?”

After a long silence Warburg said, “I can’t explain it to you, Father.”

“Just as well,” Deane said. “I can’t deal with this now. My leg is killing me.”

“I’m sorry, but I have another question for you.” Warburg paused to give Deane a chance to look at him, but he didn’t. “How did you know I went to Yale?”

Now Deane met Warburg’s eyes: “What?”

“Eli. Yale. I never mentioned that to you. How do you know?”

“You thought I’d slurred you or something.”

“Never mind that. How do you know? You have Vatican intelligence
on me?
”

Before Deane could answer, the car screeched to a halt and the driver called, “
Arrivati!
” The papal flags did their trick. Attendants and nurses swarmed the car, and in short order Deane was on a wheeled stretcher being pushed away. He called back to Warburg, “Find out what happened in Fossoli. Have the driver take you.” And to the driver, “
Accompagnalo! Accompagnalo!
”

Warburg instructed the driver to take him to the Jewish enclave on the banks of the Tiber, to the building to which Giacomo Lionni first summoned them. Warburg was better informed now than he had been three days before. Jews had lived on those blocks by the river since before Christ was born. But since the Reformation, which sparked a brutalizing insecurity in the Catholic Church, the district had been a kind of open-air prison, the ghetto. Walls were built, and the gates were closed at dusk. For more than three hundred years, until only eighty years ago, Roman Jews were the Pope’s prisoners—here.

The building in which Warburg, Lionni, Mates, and Marguerite d’Erasmo had met was adjacent to the synagogue, a kind of library and community center, and it was there that Warburg left Deane’s car. The driver was clearly anxious to get back to the hospital. Warburg watched the limousine gun away behind its fluttering yellow flags.

The sun was still high in the sky, but the heat had eased off, and here the riverside boulevard was in the shadow of rangy, high-canopied pine trees. Warburg looked up and picked out the second-floor window of the room in which Lionni had gathered them. The blinds were drawn. The door to the building was locked, but it was double-sided and poorly latched. Warburg banged it loudly, and the frame shook. He had no real reason to expect that Lionni was back in Rome already, or that he would have returned here. He stepped back and saw that the windows on the
third
floor were roughly nailed over with boards.

Warburg crossed the nearby side street and entered the small piazza that fronted the looming synagogue. Built after emancipation as a kind of declaration, the synagogue was one of the largest buildings in Rome. Its Moorish, squared-off dome rose as a majestic counterpoint to the cupola of St. Peter’s, across the river. As he approached the entrance, he sensed a chill on his neck, the same brief discomfort he’d felt years before, walking up to Beth Israel in Burlington, hoping to hand his father’s
tallit
to the rabbi. He blanked that memory. Here, a high, spiked fence surrounded the synagogue. The iron gate was slightly ajar, and Warburg saw that its square lock was broken, the metal plate jimmied back. When he tugged the gate it swung open but unevenly on the hinges. A few steps took him to the oversized door, made of oak into which was carved a triptych of filigreed arches above Hebrew letters he did not understand.

The door lock, too, was broken. He went inside. What he beheld took his breath away—not the grandeur of the soaring space, though once it had been grand, but the wreckage of it. Enough light filtered in through the high, arched yellow-paned windows for him to see that benches were upended, haphazardly piled front and back. Wooden slats protruded from the nearest pile, jagged rods, broken chairs, charred cardboard boxes—the remnants of an interrupted fire, a squatter’s fire perhaps.
Fires at Fossoli
. He thought of Marguerite d’Erasmo. Where was she?

Rows of columns supported the roof. On the high ceiling, he could make out a ribbon swirl of several bright colors, and he thought of his father, whose rare biblical reference, on rainy days, was to the rainbow:
Lookie there, Davy! Sign of God’s promise to Noah. No more floods!
But a flood of hatred had swamped this place. So much for promises, including the One God’s.

On walls and columns, wires hung loosely from places where light fixtures had been ripped away. Tapestries had been half torn from the walls, and fell in tatters from the railings of a three-sided balcony. The great sanctuary, on the wall opposite the entrance, designed to house the Torah ark, a pulpit, and a reader’s stand, was wrecked beneath the collapse of a massive wooden canopy. All was still.
A
Jew’s fantasy. One God. Marguerite
. Filtered shafts of twilight wedged through the air, with motes of dust floating before Warburg like souls. And then he saw, crumbled in a corner on the floor, a white cloth with black stripes, a
tallit
like his father’s, although this one was soiled with what could have been blood.

Six

Cleopatra’s Needle

R
OBERTO LEHMANN PULLED
the bell rope at the broad entrance to the Casa dello Spirito Santo. Though the nondescript, multistory façade showed nothing of the monastic enclosure it concealed, he could picture the scene within: stone tower, arched portico, colonnades of the cloister walk. He had begun his religious life as a boy in a Rhineland version of such a place, a dozen years before. How he had loved the aroma of incense, the stone-cooled air, the silence infused with the lilting echoes of chant. The monastery was his first taste of heaven.

He pulled on the bell rope again, with impatience. Finally the small portal within the much larger gate creaked slowly open. A hunchbacked gargoyle of a man, in the ubiquitous blue smock of a manual laborer, stepped to the threshold as if to block it. “
Che cosa volete?
” he asked brusquely. Only then did he look up from his stoop to see that the visitor was a soutaned cleric. He stepped back with an apologetic drop into near prostration. “
Entrate, Padre. Entrate
.”

Knowing full well there was no point in approaching the mother abbess, Lehmann instructed the man to take him to the priest. Moments later, he was standing in the rear shadows of the small chapel. A figure was bent in prayer, kneeling at a bench halfway to the sanctuary, from which the one permanent candle sent its red flickers around the darkened space. Lehmann heard something, then realized the sound was swallowed sobs. He slowly walked forward, aware of the alerting patter of his footsteps, and stood beside the white-robed priest, who responded by drawing himself up from his knees to sit. Otherwise the man made no move, and there was no acknowledgment.

“Padre Antonio,” Lehmann said.

“Sì.”

“Or should we speak in French?”

The old priest looked up. “Italian is good.”

“But you are from France.”

“
Sì
. And you?” But the old priest seemed to know. Lehmann liked to think his own Italian was accentless, but it wasn’t true.

“May we speak, Padre?” Lehmann assumed the priest would lead him out of the chapel, but he did not move. Lehmann sat on the bench, separated from the priest by several feet. “I know your history. You came to Rome in disgrace.”

“What is that to you?”

“How old is your child by now? A child no more.”

Padre Antonio said nothing.

“Does Mother Abbess know who her chaplain has been all these years? A renegade priest?”

Still Padre Antonio was silent, impossible to read.

“I have come from the Vicariate of the Holy See. I speak for the cardinal vicar. I am providing official notice of an apostolic visitation, pending a canonical reclassification of Casa dello Spirito Santo.”

“Official notice must go to Mother,” the French priest said.

“Mother has received such notices before,” Lehmann said, “but this one will be enforced. You are commanded by the cardinal vicar to inform her. The Congregation of Apostolic Visitation acts with solemn authority. The French Cistercians are to be transferred to the Convent of Santa Maria della Vittoria. Mother Abbess must prepare herself and her sisters. This monastery is to be restored to the Order of the Friars Minor.”