Warburg in Rome (42 page)

“The Nazis have threatened my mother. I cannot stay here.”

“I know about your mother. I’m taking her under my protection. From now on, she’ll be safe, because I will have her.” Mates paused before adding, “I am taking her home.”

“What?”

“To Mainz. Mainz, right across the Rhine from U.S. headquarters in Frankfurt, where the war crimes trials are about to start. It’s the last place fugitive Nazis would hang around. Safest place in Europe. Wouldn’t your mother like to return there? I have colleagues standing by to escort her on my personal aircraft. She could resume her role on the Ladies’ Altar Guild at the Mainz Cathedral. She’d have status as a special dignitary of the German-American Friendship League. Wouldn’t she like that? I’ve already seen to the requisitioning of your family
Landhaus
on the river. I’m having it repaired and staffed, just waiting for her. She could sponsor teas for the wives of American brass. Wouldn’t she like that?”

“Yes. Actually, she would.”

“Father, I solve your biggest problem, Mama, so you can focus on what you have to do in Rome. Once things are running smoothly here, you can visit Mainz on my aircraft.”

“And if I defy you, my mother is at your mercy. Your hostage.”

“You’re not dealing with Nazis here, Father.” Mates let a beat fall, and another. “Not hostage, but collateral. A reason for me to trust you from today on.”

“And my reason to trust you?”

Mates laughed. “Let me remind you of something, you Kraut bastard. You fuckers lost the war. You have no choice here. You defy me now and I let out the word that you’re working for the Jews, that you sent the Nakam team after Pavelic. Down here in the loosey-goosey Med, the Nazis can track you
and
your mother. They can do it in Barcelona, too.”

“Barcelona!”

“Isn’t that where you’re headed? Isn’t that the point of the
Estado Español
passports—for Señora Carmela del Socorro and her maidservant?”

“How—?”

“You forget, Father, I am the connoisseur of passport forgery in Rome. Your master counterfeiter also works for me. But he works for others, too, like the
Aussenweg
operators. You think the Nazis aren’t wise to your plans for Barcelona?”

Lehmann silently took this in. Then, quietly, he asked, “And if something were to happen to me . . . what would become of my mother?”

“I would take care of her. I would see to it that she had what she needed.”

Lehmann said, “When can this happen? When can my mother be in your airplane?”

“When can she be ready?”

“Tomorrow. By dusk.”

“All right. Tomorrow. Have her—and her Maria?—at the American flight line at Ciampino at eight.” He faced away, turning back to the wheel.

“General, wait,” Lehmann said. “May I have your word of honor?”

“For—?” Their eyes locked again through the rearview mirror.

“Protecting my mother. If something befell me.”

“Yes, Father. My solemn word.” He pressed the ignition. “We’d better get back. Your driver is waiting for us at the Campo dei Fiori, beside the statue of Giordano Bruno, whom you Catholics burned at the stake for thinking.”

He was like one of those cramped priests railing against the vices of the poor banished children of Eve, bitter refutation of every hope, the frenzied legacy of flesh, the lash of an unforgiving purity. But the object of his final negation was himself.

Drums sounded in Lehmann’s ears as he drove. Unusually, he was at the wheel of the SVC automobile, and he was alone. The slim white body of the Via Cassia stretched out in the headlights. The road was his lean lover whose curves beckoned, urging him to drive ever faster. The way ahead was hard to see because the bilge of his self-loathing had flooded into his eyes.

Less than an hour before, he had left the airport with the screeches of his mother ringing in his ears. Only when she had made her way up the aluminum stairs and into the American plane, her bags and Maria ahead of her, did he tell her the truth. She had been overjoyed at his news about Mainz—going home after all, to resume the Rhineland life she loved. But when he then said that he was to remain in Rome without her, she collapsed on him, clung to him, a kind of animal embrace that shocked him with its indecency.

He’d explained nothing, said only that he would follow her, forced her arms from his neck and pushed her back more roughly than he’d intended. The stewards on the plane helped her take a seat in the posh cabin, one man holding a tray bearing a tulip glass and a bottle of Henkell champagne, which, coming from Mainz, should have delighted her. But she never noticed. Lehmann’s accidental roughness was the last thing she took from him, and her last look at him was scrubbed clean of tenderness, leaving only the desert of hurt from which he knew he would never escape, no matter how long he lived.

From the airport, he’d driven back to the center of Rome, to the Church of Santa Maria della Vittoria near the Via Veneto. By then it was completely dark. The woman whom he had so foolishly thought of as his had commanded him to be there by dusk, and he was late, but he did not care. The Jew. The lying Jew.

He’d left the car purring at the curb. He pushed through the leather curtain that defined the narthex of the church and stood for a moment while his eyes adjusted to the dark interior, settling on the two banks of votive lights, one red, one blue. He’d been in this church dozens of times, always to stand transfixed before its side chapel sculpture, the
Ecstasy of Saint Teresa
. Lehmann had treated those sojourns with pious devotion, pilgrimages with the saint’s autobiography in hand, to read again the words that Bernini had so outrageously rendered in stone: the Carmelite’s transported face, her eyelids fluttering closed, her lips barely parted, a hint of her tongue, the suggestion of lewd color in her cheeks despite the marble. She was in the throes of female ecstasy, yet Teresa was holy.

Lehmann spied the donation box near the door, but before depositing his envelope, he made his way through the shadows to the statue, beside the raft of blue candles. The saint’s words came automatically to mind: “The pain was so great that it made me moan . . . and yet I could not wish to be rid of it.” As always before, Lehmann went missing for a moment. And, as always, he came to with a chill on his neck, with the urge to look quickly, guiltily around to see who had witnessed his standing there.

He moved away, down the aisle to the box. He deposited his envelope and then went out into the night, away.

Now, the savage wind from the open window at his elbow tore at his sleeve. He was miles from Rome, well along the ancient road, a solitary intruder on the rough and hilly terrain. Far ahead in the black sky, well above the cone of headlights, was a single brittle star that mocked him with its beauty. Stars burn out, eternally unremembered, with their one huge advantage of knowing nothing of their fate. Lehmann knew his.

The road’s next curve came more sharply than he expected, and he was driving much too fast. He hit the brakes, sending the car’s rear wheels into a sideways movement, an uncontrolled drift into the guardrail. The guardrail held, hurtling him back across the road. The collision caused his head to bang against the door frame, a blow above his ear, jolting his teeth onto his tongue, the taste of blood. Not here, he thought, not yet!

He was able to correct and bring the car back to center, onto the naked female form of the road ahead. Her naked form, faithless and deadly. Of course, he had known from the instant of his sacrilegious absolution of her that first night in the priest’s cottage in the Casa that he was being seduced, willingly seduced. Yet his mortal sin was not fornication but treason.

Instead of slowing, he pushed the pedal down, but the blow to his head had sharpened his perception, and now he was focused on the guardrail, looking for the break. Because he knew it was close, he opened the palm of his right hand and put the gelatin capsule into his mouth, a flashing thought of Herr Himmler.

He saw it, an open gash in the rail where the Jews’ car had gone through. He aimed for it, and the powerful engine of the Vatican automobile roared as he pushed the pedal to the limit. When the wheels left the road and the car soared out into the inscrutable air, he bit down on the capsule.
Madre! Madre!

Eleven

Ratline

“T
HE PRIEST SPEAKS
, and lo! Christ the eternal and omnipotent God bows His head in humble obedience to the priest’s command.” Where had he read that?
Our Sunday Visitor
or some such. In Deane’s mind, the self-mocking shorthand had become, “The priest speaks and lo!”

He bent over the altar with the round white disk of bread between his thumbs and forefingers. He brought his mouth close to the bread as he’d done every day of his life since ordination. And the priest spoke.

As the rubrics required, he pronounced the transcendent phrase with exquisite precision:
Hoc est enim corpus meum
. “This is truly my body,” words uttered by Jesus at the Last Supper. But as Deane placed the host on the gold paten, closed his eyes, and genuflected, he always continued with what, according to Saint Paul, Jesus had gone on to say then:
quod pro vobis tradetur
, “which will be broken for you.”

The body of Christ is broken. Deane paused with his knee on the floor, his head bent so that it nearly touched the altar, his mind mobbed by the truly broken figures with whom he had become obsessed. At this moment of the Mass, across the past year and a half, he had increasingly been seized, paralyzed in the attempt to make an oblation of the sons and daughters of the camps, the living and dead, the bags of bones, the breathing skeletons—the Jews. But again and again, something stopped him. This: if Jesus were present in those camps, Deane had finally to acknowledge, it would not have been as the eternal and omnipotent God, but as yet another anonymous figure in the selection line. Lo! Jesus was a Jew. He never spoke in Latin. And, heresy of heresies, some burnt offerings are not redemptive.

There. He’d said it. At last. The suffering of Treblinka, Fossoli, Sobibor, and places yet unknown had redeemed nothing. In no way was that suffering willed by God. The priest speaks, and lo! His consolations of salvation through sacrifice are lies.

Only moments later, Deane had the wafer between his fingers again, and, obeying the ritual, he snapped it in half. Broken for whom? This time, his mind went to the body of his fellow priest, the German, whose broken corpse had been found yesterday in a wrecked car at the bottom of a steep ravine below the cliff road en route to Ravenna.

Even if Deane had yet to figure the math, Roberto Lehmann embodied the Church’s deadly entanglement in the nihilism that had swamped Europe—nihilism the war’s true victor. Now the metaphoric brokenness of Christ implied the Church’s own quite literal brokenness—how, in the Pope’s very household, robed men routinely passed one another with slyly averted glances, as if what bound the papal court at last was fear of the evil eye.

For all his supernumerary prestige as a privy chamberlain, Deane had been privy only to the shadows of Vatican secrets—with the shadows themselves casting shadows: savage Croatian fascism tied to the Franciscans; the Holy See plotting to castle Tito with Pavelic; Church congregations, tribunals, and commissions at the service of Nazi fugitives; powerful figures of the Roman Curia, beginning with Tardini and Tisserant, sponsoring criminal escape in the name of mercy. Always, there was the missing gold. Meanwhile, an ethereal figure hovered above these blatant corruptions, whether with detachment, ignorance, or rank approval: Pope Pius XII himself.

But what the hell—privy chamberlain means private bed maker, nothing more. In truth, Deane was a lowly nobody, an American outsider who had been fed only what the Italians wanted him to know, crumbs.

Still, crumbs can mark the way through the forest, and Deane had just come to a clearing at last, seeing—lo!—Jesus with a number tattooed on his arm.

The priest speaks and gets it wrong. So why shouldn’t the rubrics command a triple striking of the breast, as Deane, bowing low, enacted it then?
Domine, non sum dignus! Domine, non sum dignus! Domine, non sum dignus!
“Lord, I am not worthy that Thou shouldst enter under my roof.” Until lately, this confession had been a rote formula, signifying little. But today Deane brought his fist against his chest as if he meant it. Not worthy. No kidding. Monsignor Obvious.

Thomas Aquinas, he thought then. Not the saint.

Again he genuflected, chiding himself for these rampant distractions. And anyway, there was no impropriety in a passing thought of Sister Thomas. She and he were friends. Nothing wrong with that. He made the sign of the cross over the chalice and the ciborium, swept his arms heavenward, then said, “
Oremus . . . audemus dicere . . . Pater Noster
.” We are bold to say, Our Father.

Bold. Sister Thomas had boldly come to his confessional the day before, the sacred booth in which, several afternoons a week, he continued to put himself at the service of repentant GIs. When he’d slid the screen open, she’d said at once, “It’s Sister Thomas, Monsignor,” but he’d known already—her scent, soap overlaying sandalwood incense. She apologized for presenting herself there, but it was the only way she could promptly see him, having just learned of Lehmann’s death.

Stalking Curia offices, the nun had already compiled a partial list of Germans to whom pontifical credentials of various kinds had been issued in recent months, including certificates of appointment as Vatican delegates to international bodies, confirmations of membership in the Order of Malta, and general letters of recommendation. Again and again, she’d found the signature or scrawled initials of the Very Most Reverend Roberto Lehmann.

On the other side of the screen, she had quietly wept, not confessing sin but drowning in it. Deane sensed how, for her, Lehmann had come to represent a grotesque suspicion of moral degradation, and how, with his death, the suspicion was confirmed. In this matter of Nazis, her beloved Holy Mother the Church was on the cusp of becoming the Whore of Babylon. Deane knew this.