Warburg in Rome (3 page)

She went out into the corridor, away from the elaborate central staircase, toward the innocuous-looking door that opened onto the back stairs, originally for servants. The bags slowed her going, but she went down deliberately and quietly. In short order she was through the first-floor utility room, out into the cluttered service alley that ran behind the building, then onto the broad Via di Santa Prisca. The wartime blackout meant no streetlights, so at this time of night the street was a desolate vacancy. It ran downhill, a winding channel to the nearby Tiber. Marguerite moved as quickly as she could, was soon at the river, down onto the unseen quayside. There she emptied first one sack of files, then the other, into the rushing water that only moments before, a short way upstream, had run past the now
Judenrein
Jewish ghetto.

PART ONE

WAR

One

A Mighty Endeavor

D
AVID WARBURG WAS
alone—alone with his thoughts. In the shadowy tin tube he tried to picture the armada far below and well to the north—something like a thousand warships and merchantmen, if the rumors were to be believed. Legions more of landing craft swarming shoreward like water beetles, the tides breaking into waves of men hurling themselves against fire-spewing bunkers. Fortress Europe stormed at last, the great drama unfolding since dawn today.

During the fuel stop at an outcropping of rock in the Azores only hours ago, Warburg and the dozen others had clustered around the shortwave at Base Ops—a thrown-together canvas shanty on the edge of the steel-mats airstrip that stretched pretty much across the entire island. “The President, the President!” a gas jockey had yelled at concert pitch, and sure enough. Men huddled and hushed. Once the radio static cleared, the unmistakable patrician vowels floated in upon the crackling air, America’s most familiar voice, with its most reassuring cadence. “Last night,” FDR began, “when I spoke with you about the fall of Rome . . .”

The fall of Rome had been everything to those particular listeners, until then the essence of their concentration, anticipation, dread, and hope. Now they were being told that Rome was mere prelude, an overture to the music that mattered. “. . . I knew at that moment that troops of the United States and our Allies were crossing the Channel in another and greater operation.” Greater than Mark Clark’s liberation of the Eternal City, the first Axis capital to fall to the Allies? When Fifth Army tanks had rolled onto the tarmac of Ciampino Airport, Warburg’s plane had taken off from Fort Dix field, the wheels-up he and presumably everyone else on board had awaited for weeks. In the Azores, they had still been two thousand miles shy of Rome, yet—so the President implied—the pages of history were turning already. The real operation was far to the north. Bloody Italy had always been a feint.

“It has come to pass with success thus far. And so, in this poignant hour, I ask you to join with me in prayer.”
Ahem
s and shuffling, even in the radio shack. Hats came off. The President’s tone slipped into a chute of the properly lugubrious. “Almighty God: our sons, pride of our Nation, this day have set upon a mighty endeavor . . .” Warburg’s gaze went involuntarily to the next man, a bald sergeant whose freshly bared head was bowed, his eyes closed, lips moving. To Warburg, the President’s pieties rolled on in packages, hardly registering.

But then a phrase leapt out of the sanctimony as Roosevelt said, “Help us to conquer the apostles of greed and racial arrogancies . . .” Arrogancies? Was that a word?
Racial
arrogancies? Warburg squeezed closer to hear what this could be, but Roosevelt had slid smoothly into the slot of his most solemn petition. “Some will never return. Embrace these, Father, and receive them, Thy heroic servants, into Thy kingdom.”

Arrogancies. Racial arrogancies. These hours later, the phrase was still hovering in Warburg’s mind. Wrapped in a blanket against the freezing altitude, he now sat on the narrow metal bench that ran along one wall of the stripped-down fuselage. The C-54 Skymaster, once reconfigured for cargo, was carrying passengers again, but apparently as ballast, the men distributed so as to keep the craft in balance. No matter who they were—brass, civilian VIPs, seat-of-government functionaries—the cargo was what mattered. In addition to the twelve or fifteen figures harnessed, like Warburg, on the twin benches, the plane held pallets of sacks and boxes stacked to the ceiling, running fore to aft and stamped USA QM. Cartons of C rations, evaporated milk, flour—thirty thousand pounds of Quartermaster supply, a first gesture of relief for starving Rome. The plane’s windows were blacked out, with the only light coming from three yellow-hued naked bulbs hung at intervals and filling the cramped space with eerie shadows that, early on, had made Warburg think of Plato’s cave.

The starboard passengers were entirely cut off by the wall of cargo from those on the larboard bench. On Warburg’s left, a man had been steadily hunched over a book, as if there were light enough to read. On Warburg’s other side, an eternal sleeper was pressed into the corner, hugging himself against the cold. Under his own blanket, Warburg wore the heavy olive parka that had been supplied as they boarded the plane in New Jersey, and under the parka, the gray suit and tie of his kind. Most of Warburg’s fellow passengers had spent the long transatlantic hours as intent on their stoic hunching as he was. Only bursts of steamy breath made clear that the otherwise impassive hulks were even alive.

Before taking off from the Azores on this last leg of the flight, the laconic pilot had craned in from the cockpit to apologize for the temperature that was soon to plummet again, but saying, “Cargo’s what counts. This man’s army don’t give a shit for men,” he’d drawled, adding, “God help those bastards up in Cherbourg.”

Warburg reached into the thickness of his clothing for a pack of cigarettes, but when he brought it out, he found that it was empty. He crushed the foil and cellophane, thought better of dropping it, and stuffed it back in his pocket. At that, the man on his left rose from his apparent stupor, leaning over with a pack in his fist, a magic trick. He shook it once, expertly producing a pair of cigarettes. They each took a light from Warburg’s match. “Thank you,” Warburg said.

“Forget that cargo, the canned food,” the man said through the smoke-marbled steam of his breath. “The tins pop their seals when they freeze—salmonella here we come.” He snorted gruffly, a bear in his GI blanket coming out of hibernation. Warburg too, in his blanket, must have seemed oafish, when in fact he was as thin as he was tall. His neighbor was not a bear, Warburg thought, but a defensive tackle on the bench. For a man who had sat silently for so long, he was suddenly animated, as if he himself had popped a seal. “Think about those beaches,” he said. “Those Kraut pillboxes.”

“Yes,” Warburg said. “Good luck to our guys.”

“Amen,” the man said, and he patted the book in his lap, an odd act of punctuation. He took a drag on the cigarette, studied it while exhaling, then brought his eyes directly to Warburg’s. “What brings you across?”

Warburg dropped his glance to the glowing ember of his cigarette. This was the first time he’d been asked to explain himself. “I’m with the Treasury Department,” he said, aiming to let it go at that.

But the man pressed. “To Rome for the Allied occupation? Let me guess. ‘Eye Sea,’ isn’t that what they call it? Invasion currency. Legal tender to be used by civilian and/or military personnel in areas occupied by Allied forces. You giving out the funny money?” Such jovial gruffness seemed forced, but that may have been a function of the man’s having to speak above the roar of the engines. The image of a football player, however, no longer seemed apt. Warburg recognized the deliberate display of insider lingo, a standard bureaucratic gambit. Tag, you’re it.

“Not exactly.” Warburg smiled, doing a bit of forcing himself, but staying with his cigarette. It was true that Treasury was tasked with providing specially printed military currency, and the black-and-blue banknotes had been rolling out of the Bureau of Engraving’s presses for weeks. But Warburg’s mission was far from that. Since the late-winter meeting in Morgenthau’s office, he’d counted the days until this one—while steadily moving the pins on his map and memorizing dispatches from Geneva, Lisbon, Budapest, and Istanbul. At night he’d slavishly bent over Berlitz manuals in Italian and Yiddish, ahead of quizzing by tutors early each morning.

Janet Windsor had lost patience with his obsessive unavailability. He’d tried to describe what he was learning from the Riegner cables, occasionally reading them to her. One telegram began, “It is the eleventh hour of the reign of death,” but Janet interrupted him and left the room. For the first time, they quarreled, and before long stopped seeing each other. There would be no wedding. After that, when he pictured Janet, readily conjuring her alluring figure, her moist lips with the sly hint of her tongue, he felt sad. But his fierce desire for her, once thwarted, had become tangled as much in relief as in grief. He regretted that his thoughts had turned back to her now.

“And you?” Warburg asked, veering away from that thicket of loss.

The man beside him dragged deeply on his cigarette. “I have Italian. It might help. I guess they need a lot of help.”

“I guess they do,” Warburg said, though without being sure who “they” were. He had a “they” of his own. One report had put the number of displaced people in Italy alone at half a million, the number of orphaned children at twenty thousand.
His
. Warburg let his eyes fall to the man’s shoes. Civilian, black.

The man said, “Churchill’s ‘soft underbelly of the Mediterranean’ turned out not to be so soft, eh? I thought I’d be back in Rome three months ago.”

“Back?”

“I went to school there.” When the man added, “Here’s hoping Normandy is no Anzio,” it was with the air of a man changing the subject.

Warburg was grateful that the noise was too loud for further talk. Smokes extinguished, he and his bench-mate fell back into the lull of their mutual isolation. Hours later, the plane’s downward lurch snapped everyone alert, and the blackout shades on half a dozen small windows were lifted. At that, early-morning light divided the fuselage’s interior into bright wedges. Warburg lifted the shade behind his ear and pressed his face to the cold glass, taking in coastline, tidy landscape, church-centered villages, squares of forest, rolling grassland, a pastoral scene all pretty and seemingly innocent. Yet the lingering haze of dawn made everything gray, like film shot for a Movietone newsreel. As the C-54 went into its descent, circling what he took to be Ciampino Airport, he saw several AAF planes ahead of them, tracking the same spiral down. As they went lower, Warburg made room at the window for the man next to him.

An amazing sight below—the airfield. Across the vast expanse of tarmac, aircraft and trucks vied with one another for space, with only the narrow crisscrossing runways clear of vehicles. Even there, the succession of planes, gliding in from alternating directions, was steady, so the landing strips were uncongested only by comparison.

“Bedlam,” the man next to Warburg said, nodding at the airfield. Against the noise, the man was again speaking at the top of his voice. “Which is from ‘Bethlehem’—did you know that?”

Warburg looked at him. As Warburg had done only moments before, the man was shrugging off the parka that, at altitude, had kept him warm. “Bedlam Royal Hospital,” the man continued. “The London insane asylum. Original name, Saint Mary’s of Bethlehem.”

Warburg thought of taking up the etymology challenge, but let it go, answering only, “It does look like madness down there.”

The man bent over, bunching his coat to stow it. When he straightened, it was to remove as well his black suit coat, exposing a collarless white shirt with French cuffs, the links of which sparkled gold. He bent over again, this time to draw out of his valise an odd black garment with slings into which he slipped both arms, like a plainclothes cop donning a shoulder holster. Or like a proper T-man.

When the man reached behind his neck to snap a button, Warburg saw the clerical collar and realized he was witnessing the vesting of a Catholic priest. While he slipped his arms back into his suit coat, Warburg’s impulse was to look away. But the priest was grinning, as if he enjoyed being watched. He spread his arms and said, “From Clark Kent to Superman.” The way to cut off mockery is self-mockery. Warburg knew enough to see the small red tab at the collar as a sign of some rank. The priest put his hand out. “Also known as Kevin Deane. Nice to meet you.”

“Hello, Father. I’m David Warburg.”

“Oh, really? Warburg. I’m from New York. We have to talk, when we’re down and can hear ourselves.” With that he turned back to the window.

And so did Warburg, thinking, Here we go again.

Before sunrise that same morning, the second dawn after Rome’s liberation, Marguerite d’Erasmo awakened from her first sound sleep in days. She untangled the bedclothes, flicked on the table lamp, rose, and went straight to the curtain that sheltered a corner of the room. She was in the garret of an old boarding house in Trastevere, the Tiber-side neighborhood where many of Rome’s workers, artisans, students, and pensioners lived. This was the mansard flat she’d lived in before fleeing Rome months before. It had been kept for her by Signora Paoli, the building’s aged
portiere
, who’d greeted her with an embrace upon her return the night before. Now, pulling the curtain aside, Marguerite found the oversized copper tub—still there. She hadn’t dreamt it.

Originally a livestock drinking tank, the tub had been hoisted up to the building’s attic when pipes for running water were installed to that level—not so long before Marguerite had found the place two years ago. The narrow trough was the furthest thing from a claw-footed lounging tub, but she remembered how the wooden back rest, sloping just so, had made it comfortable enough. Unlike the fine ladies’
vascas
in the rooms where she’d bathed as a child, Marguerite had learned to love this elongated animal waterer for its simplicity and for accommodating her tall, thin frame at full stretch. Brooding trances, warmth on her skin, lung-searing steam, peace—such were her prior associations with the tub, but this morning it looked all at once like a ready casket. She closed her eyes for a moment. Unaccountably, her nostrils were seized by the stench of urine, as if, in her absence, those farm animals had been here to reclaim the thing.