Warburg in Rome (43 page)

He wanted to reach through the screen and touch her, wipe the tears from her cheek with the knuckle of his forefinger. All he could do was sit in silence, watch her dark form, and wait for her face to lift. When it did, he said only, “Sister, I know what you are feeling. I feel it with you.”

“But Monsignor, what do we do now? To whom—?”

“I’m waiting to hear back from General Mates,” he said.

“Monsignor, when I learned about Father Lehmann, I acted impulsively.” Her confession, after all. “I called the number that Philip gave me.”

“Because of Lehmann’s death?”

“Surely it was no accident. Was it murder? Lehmann was swimming with piranhas. So are we. Monsignor, how can such wickedness have intruded upon the Church? I haven’t felt such turmoil since I fled Bletchley Park.”

“What did Philip say?”

“Someone else answered the phone. He told me Philip has been reassigned. Apparently they gave up on hearing from me. I told the man I would speak only to Philip. He said Philip is in service in Palestine. They are contacting him. He will come to Rome. He will be in touch with me.” She fell silent. Then she said, a whisper, “Is that all right, Monsignor?”

“Of course it is,” he answered, cloaking the sudden distress he felt. “This thing is a runaway train, Sister. General Mates swore me to secrecy. When I spoke to him, he could not have been more alarmed. He said fugitive Nazis have riddled Rome. And now they are killing people.”
There
was reason for distress. Of course. But, perversely, Deane knew that what also distressed him was the nun’s having turned back to the man whose love had driven her into the convent. Her Philip. Deane leaned closer, the odd physical intimacy of his lips only an inch or two from hers, but in semidarkness and with the chaste mesh between. Neither of them moved for a long time.

He whispered, “What was your name?”

“What?”

“Your name before. What was it?”

She did not answer. In the silence, Deane felt a burst of shame, as if he’d abused the sacrament of penance. But she had not come here for confession. And there was nothing prurient about her given name. Still, it was the most personal question he’d ever asked her—or anyone.

“Jane,” she whispered.

“Jane what?” Deane was not breathing.

“Jane Storrow.”

Silence.

When she spoke now, her voice was the whisper of a whisper: “Why do you ask me that?”

Deane shook himself, thinking, the word “seduce” is from the Latin for “to lead apart.” In a pointed return to propriety, he said, “Sister, you were right to come here. Dangers abound. You must stay in touch with me. Now more than ever. We must meet.”

“No. No. I must collect myself.” She pulled back fully into the shadow. But it rang like a verdict when she said, “I will wait until I hear from Philip. I cannot see you now.” He heard the swift rustle of fabric as she touched her fingers to her head, shoulders, and breast. When she then said, “Bless me, Father,” it was in farewell.

Despite his disappointment at the moment, Deane by now was relieved that she’d put him off. He could engineer but one runaway train at a time.
The priest speaks, and lo! Who but Christ obeys?
With an unselfconscious and habitual grace, Deane bent from the waist to bow and kiss the altar. He turned to face the people, the dozens of old ladies, Roman stragglers, tourists, pilgrims, American soldiers, the random collection that had made its way into the Gregorian Chapel of St. Peter’s Basilica, one of the numerous side chapels that filled niches in the vast church.

As he neatly swiveled on his heels, bringing the congregation into his awareness, his unmoored imagination kicked up the grainy old movie of some deranged worshiper rising in slow motion to greet him from the pew with the burst of a Thompson submachine gun, cutting him down in the moment of his sacramental glory—kissing him off. It was a perverse fantasy, one that had teased him periodically since he was a young priest at the altar of Good Shepherd Parish on the northern tip of gangster-ridden Manhattan. But now, in a flash of imagination, he saw a familiar face on the figure holding the gun—Roberto Lehmann, come back to life to finish him off. No. He shook the fantasy away.

“
Dominus vobiscum
,” he said, spreading his arms. The aged acolyte kneeling below him muttered the rote reply, “
Et cum spiritu tuo
.” As if he’d known to look, Deane’s eyes went, like the beam of scanning radar, to the figure standing beside the stout marble column in the rear of the relatively small space—not a machine gunner, not Lehmann, but Warburg.

Warburg waited by the column, and after the Mass, Deane found him. Deane had removed his silk vestments and was now cloaked in his red-trimmed soutane and the cappa. He had his breviary under his arm, the obligatory
saturno
in his hand. Warburg was wearing a tan raincoat and carrying his fedora. It had struck him, as he removed his hat upon entering St. Peter’s, that the Christian custom of male bareheadedness in church had almost surely evolved from the rejection of Jewish modes.

The men shook hands warmly, as if all were well between them. Using the basilica’s hush as a reason not to speak, they walked to the center of the five great portals leading to the exit. Outdoors, Warburg put his hat on, Deane did not. Each man pulled his garment close against the damp wind. Descending the stairs into the great Bernini piazza, Warburg came right to the point. “I’ve been waiting to hear from you, Kevin. You’ve put me off half a dozen times.”

“Perhaps I’ve been waiting for you to come to Mass.”

Warburg refused the banter. He said, “I know about Father Lehmann’s death.”

“Yes. Terrible. People here are quite upset.”

“Really?”

They crossed into the square proper, heading toward Cleopatra’s Needle. Despite the threat of full-blown rain, pilgrims were arriving, vendors were unfolding their kits, stray cats were looking for legs to brush against, and pigeons were wheeling in the air.

“Yes, really.”

“I’ve come here, Kevin, because Lehmann was the source of the material I gave you. I’ve been waiting for you to identify those bastards. Now that Lehmann’s dead, I can’t wait any longer.”

“You got that stuff from Lehmann?” Deane was genuinely surprised. “I assumed Haganah or something.”

“Not that Lehmann knew he was giving it to me,” Warburg said. “There are tunnels inside tunnels here, but I didn’t expect to be shunted aside by you.”

“David, I don’t know what you imagine Vatican City is like, but if there are signs attached to the statuary, they decidedly do not read ‘This way to the hidden Nazis.’”

“Well, Lehmann’s death makes the point, wouldn’t you say?”

“What point?”

“He went off the road at the same spot as Lionni’s car, the wreckage of which was still down there.”

“Lionni’s car?”

“You know about Jocko.”

“Of course I do. But what are you saying?”

“The wreckage of the car Jocko died in was still in the ravine. Lehmann’s car landed on it.”

“Good God, David. The papal gendarme’s report said nothing about that. It says only that he went off the mountain road, an accident, drunk.”

“Which, despite being an account offered by the Holy See, is not true. Lehmann’s death was no more an accident than Jocko’s was. Surely you see that.”

“But Lionni’s
was
an accident.”

Warburg shook his head.

“Christ,” Deane said. He shuddered. “I’m sorry about Jocko Lionni. I admired him. You know that. He was a hero. But Father Lehmann, I never liked him. He was something of a snake. And I knew he was up to his eyeballs in the
Aussenweg
thing.”

“Obviously so, since he made a point of it with where he died. He chose the place.”

“If they know that in the Vatican,” Deane said, “doors are slamming on all three floors of the pontifical household, drawers being shut, safes locked, cabinets sealed. Like a diving submarine. Get ready for the
magnum silentium
.”

“In Jocko’s case it was not suicide. It was murder.” Warburg remembered Marguerite’s refusal of that word, preferring “combat.” But “murder” made it more likely Deane would help. “Kevin,” Warburg said, “maybe now you’ll work with me. Or are you in the diving submarine too?”

“Look, I carried what you gave me as far as I could. The names, photos, everything.”

“You were going to match those names and photos with the new identities.”

“But this is more than a Jewish concern,” Deane said. “I’ve had to look at it more broadly than you.”

“What the hell does that mean?”

“It means that crimes against the Jews are not to be adjudicated only by Jews. Enraged Jewish soldiers in the British Army have been assassinating German POWs. This Haganah business is assassination, too, but in cold blood. Blatant revenge. Emotional responses are one thing; elaborate plotting is another. I won’t be part of that. If there are men at large who oversaw the death camps, then they should be arrested. There are procedures in place for tracking fugitive war criminals, and there is a tribunal, under proper authority, for bringing them to trial.”

“I know that. What do you think I’m searching for if not ‘proper authority’? Goddammit, proper authority, doing its proper duty, is exactly what I want.”

Deane said, “I already took what you gave me to American officials.”

Warburg channeled his surprise into a single word, “Who?”

“General Mates.”

“Fuck!”

“What do you mean, fuck? The CIC is all about catching these bastards. That’s what they do.”

“Don’t be a fool, Kevin. The CIC is all about the next war, not the last one.”

“Hold on, David. I learned from Vatican sources that CIC-Vienna had Ante Pavelic in detention in Salzburg and then let him slip away, disguised as a priest. An outrage, and I felt it as a Catholic because the archbishop of Salzburg was complicit. When I told Mates about it, he hit the ceiling. Mates was more outraged than I was. Enraged at the incompetence in Vienna of his own CIC, suckers for a fake priest. I saw his rage for myself.”

“You saw what he showed you. The man is a congenital liar.”

“I doubt that.”

“The CIC is not incompetent. It’s corrupt.”

Deane held his ground. “I know Mates well.”

Warburg nodded. “Right. In confession with you that day. He tells you all his secrets.”

“He worked for us on that Habsburg thing, trying to generate grassroots support for the archduke.”

“Where?”

“Vienna, mainly. Catholic clergy.”

“And Zagreb?” Warburg asked. “Through Croatian clergy?”

“Yes.”

“Nazis, all of them.” Warburg heard the anger in his own voice, tried to neutralize it. “You saw the names I gave you. Mostly Croatians. Those men are Pavelic’s inner circle, sheltered in Vatican dependencies all over Rome, right now. You
saw
that! And of course I should have seen this, too: General Mates is their protector. Pavelic is Mates’s ace to Tito’s king. The Ustashe wins the pot. A Catholic counterweight to Bolsheviks. The restoration fantasy resurrected, in cahoots with Nazis, and the Vatican is as complicit now as it was a year ago. Hell, maybe including you.”

“No.”

“Spellman?”

“Spellman knows nothing. He wouldn’t know the Balkans from the Baltics.” Deane stopped.

Warburg read the priest’s sudden unease. Deane’s future was tied to Spellman. It would not do to display disdain for his patron. And, sure enough, Warburg heard the defensive note in what Deane said then: “But why would Spellman know anything about the Croatians? They were a sideshow during the war, and still are. Who in the States has ever heard of Croatia?”

Warburg nodded. “So General Mates needed a Vatican partner who was up to speed on darlings like Pavelic, somebody who would be, how shall I put it, less squeamish than you. Lehmann, obviously.”

“In fact, I was the one to tell Mates about Lehmann, last year.”

“In that confessional.”

“Yes. General Mates checked him out. He came back to me saying Lehmann was clean.”

“And?” Warburg poked Deane, not totally without friendliness. “Do the damn arithmetic, Kevin. You knew for certain that Lehmann wasn’t clean. Mates all but announced the thing to you. He’d recruited Lehmann somehow. Maybe he offered to help with
Aussenweg
, but for his own reasons. Perhaps blackmail.” Warburg stopped. Blackmail about Marguerite? But she’d come late to Lehmann’s story.

“What blackmail?”

“Let’s think out loud,” Warburg said, shifting away from Marguerite. “The U.S. Treasury Department is tracking Nazi loot. I see the reports. At the very end, millions went from Berlin’s Reichsbank to various Swiss banks, several accounts held by entities in Rome, including something called Santa Maria dell’Anima.”

“The German church.”

“Lehmann’s church, a simple funnel. Money from Berlin to the Holy See.”

“With Lehmann as the teller at the window? Jesus.”

Warburg said, “Mates would have had to keep all that from you because you’d have blown the whistle on it. Right?”

“In fact, I did blow the whistle once. There was a stash of Croatian gold in that building over there.” Deane pointed at Santa Marta. “Tens of millions. I reported it, and the gold disappeared.”

“Disappeared from you,” Warburg said. “They just put it someplace else. Good chance General Mates knew about it. Probably knew that you’d done your duty. Which meant that, for his purposes, he couldn’t trust you. Not like he could trust Lehmann. After that, Mates had to maintain his distance from you.”

“He did. I wondered about that.”

“And after Lionni’s death, Mates would have realized there were new players in the game.”

“Zionists.”

“Jews, Kevin. Jews. From Mates’s point of view, dogs in the manger, messing everything up, since everything depended on the Nazi killers going free. That’s the deal Mates has going—the Austria–Argentina Express, tickets punched to give Pavelic a leg up in Zagreb. And a fresh start for Germans to help build the anti-Communist bulwark. All of it suddenly in jeopardy. After Lionni’s death, Mates would have pressed Lehmann. You assume it was Nazis who gave Lehmann reason to drive off that cliff. It might have been Americans.”