Warburg in Rome (45 page)

Justice. Deane thought that Warburg could pull such a word out of this thicket of corruption and contradiction and have it seem true. Yet Deane, the contentious friend, was compelled to supply another word. “You mean revenge, David,” he said coldly.

And Warburg, coldly, declined to reply.

By now the rain was dripping off the capacious brim of Deane’s hat. It was streaming from Warburg’s matted hair onto his face. The pigeons were gone from the open square, as were the cats, pilgrims, and vendors. The men were alone in the drenching, womb-like piazza. The only witnesses to the monsignor’s moment of decision, now arrived at, were the travertine marbles high on the crown of St. Peter’s façade, the twenty-foot-high Christ, and, flanking him, the eleven loitering Apostles. All the Apostles—
lo!
—but Judas.

She had made clear to him her intention that they should remain apart until she’d heard from Philip, which he understood. She needed to sort through her feelings, and he respected that. He had found it possible to let go of his own impulses. But that was before.

Deane’s thoughts went from Sister Thomas to the unknowing nuns among whom Vukas might have sought shelter. What were the odds that the mother abbess of a convent in Rome would violate the rules of the Vicariate? Religious foundations of women were allowed to admit to residence male externs such as retreatants, chaplains, and spiritual directors if accommodations could be provided outside the cloister. But the mother abbess was required to inform the cardinal vicar of any such admission. The Vicariate’s commission for religious orders had its offices in the warren of rooms at the far end of the corridor off which Deane’s own offices were located, and it turned out to be a simple matter for Deane to consult current records there. He found that of the seven Roman convents that had registered male admissions in the past week, only one was Franciscan. A friar named Bruno Pladic, OFM, identified as a professor emeritus of medieval history at the University of Trieste, took up residence in Santi Tre Vergini two days after Lionni was killed. Pladic—a Slavic name, like Vukas.

The convent in Testaccio was named for three Christian virgins martyred by Diocletian. It was attached to a crumbling sixth-century basilica, and was itself all but derelict. The ancient building was tucked into a crowded hillside southwest of Aventino, a gritty area where, for most of a century, squatters’ hovels had competed for space with broken-down caravans and with the thrown-together tin huts of Rome’s forgotten transients, including Gypsies. The nuns of Santi Tre Vergini had begun as a contemplative presence, but while caring for their impoverished neighbors, they had slowly become impoverished themselves. The adjacent basilica was a dark horror-house of neglect, haunted by homeless desperadoes. Now the convent was defined by its soup kitchen—and also by the stench of sewage, which seeped from the shantytown above into the rotting walls, fouling the cloister, chapel, and ill-used guest wing with mold. An unlikely place for a distinguished visiting friar.

Deane was reluctant to approach the convent alone—an American priest all too conspicuous, with the mother abbess likely to be skittish. That was why he’d thought of Sister Thomas. One nun to another, a shot at really learning something. Setting out to explain the urgency of her coming with him, he hoped she would see it. Deane went to the second floor of the Apostolic Palace, to Tardini’s suite of offices, expecting to find Sister Thomas at her desk in the small room from which she supervised the prelate’s communications with his nuncios and legates.

She was not there. Her assistant was an elderly Italian laywoman, Signora Palladio, a stenographer and file clerk. If most such positions in the Vatican were held by men, the prior exception for the cryptanalyst-nun had required a further exception, since it would not do to have a female, not even a Cambridge DPhil, supervising a male, not even a clerk. Signora Palladio’s winged typewriter table was in an alcove fronting the room in which Sister Thomas worked, the way Deane had seen Thomas’s own table tucked into the corner of Cardinal Maglione’s office the year before.

The woman knew Monsignor Deane and greeted him warmly. She explained that Sister Thomas had been at work earlier. “But then an officer came to see her. She told me to take my
pranzo
, my meal. When I returned, she was gone.” The woman paused. “Perhaps she is ill,” she said, with ample concern.

Deane thought at once of the nun’s thinness, emaciation almost, and felt a rush of worry.

“Officer?” he asked. “What kind of officer?”

“British.”

Philip
. Deane did not move. Then, as if he would see Thomas there, he looked past the woman into the office proper. On Thomas’s desk he saw, lying at an angle atop a tidy pile, an unfolded page in the telltale yellow of a cablegram. The nun was discreet with all kinds of communications, no matter how trivial. What prompted her to leave this one exposed? Not illness. He pictured her, startled, pushing back from her desk and hurrying away. Why?

“Signora,” Deane said, “I’d like to leave a note for Sister.”

“
Sì, Monsignor
,” the woman said, and handed a steno pad to Deane. He bent and jotted a few lines.

He tore the page from the pad. “I’ll just leave it on her desk.” He went from the alcove into Thomas’s office. The woman’s view was blocked. Dropping his page, he picked up the cablegram. Normally he’d never have taken it, but what was normal now? Feigning a cough, he stuffed it into his cassock. With a brisk farewell to Signora Palladio, he left.

The paper burned at his chest as he made his way back to his office. He closed the door. Leaning at his desk, he smoothed the paper out and saw that it contained digits bunched into perhaps two dozen groups of five. At the top of the page was a mark—the crown, scepter, and unicorn of the British seal, and, in plain text, the heading
H.M. Government Communications Headquarters
. Between the lines of numbers, someone—not Sister Thomas, whose handwriting Deane knew well—had penciled a string of words, an obvious decoding of the encryption: “Explosion Tuesday—Headquarters British Forces Palestine-Transjordan. Killed on duty—Philip Barnes Morton, Major, Royal Signals, Section IX. Details unavailable . . .”

Deane stared at the page as if the numbers and letters would rearrange themselves into some other meaning. He sat down.
Yes, Philip. But not this
. He ran his open hands over the paper, pressing its two creases smooth, as if erasing. Then he picked up the telephone, waited for the operator, and asked to be put through to Sant’Agata, the Vatican residence for consecrated women. There, the portress told him that Sister Thomas was at her Curia office, which Deane knew not to be the case. He could not think what else to do, so he set off.

Santi Tre Vergini was at the upper limit of a lane that was almost too narrow for Deane’s car. The road was so badly rutted that his driver muttered unhappily as the undercarriage repeatedly banged. Upended pavement stones competed with mire from the recent rains, threatening to trap them. Finally Deane left the car and continued the climb on foot, soiling his shoes with mud. He kept his eyes up and ahead, on the bell tower that marked the place.

The sun was high in the sky, and played with the tower, momentarily blinding him. The basilica, with its belfry, was on the far side of the compound, with the main church entrance apparently facing a distant street. The church’s roof line was jagged. In places the earthenware tiles were gone, with bare slats exposed, suggesting that the church interior was partially open to the sky. As he approached the nearer convent enclosure where the hill plateaued, he could see an opening in the flaking stucco wall. A half-rotted gate hung at an angle off its post. Because the fractured gate was necessarily ajar, Deane could see that, just inside the close, a man sat on a shaded ledge, hat pulled down on his face. He was dozing. Deane slowed, uncertain. In the crook of the man’s arm was a shotgun. A guard.

Deane stopped where he was, then backed away. He retreated to an upended crate just out of the guard’s sight line. By stepping onto the crate he was able to look over the convent wall and down into the enclosure. He was peering into one of two courtyards, with a corner of the other yard visible beyond the dividing single-story structure. The near courtyard was strung with clotheslines, from which only a few articles of clothing hung. Approximating the human form, a brown garment with long sleeves and full-length legs was pinned at the shoulders on one line, hanging like the flayed skin of a martyr. Deane’s old-country father wore such an undergarment—“long handles” he’d called it. On the same line hung a sleeveless undershirt, also male apparel, and a pair of faded gray drawers with fly buttons at the yoke. On another line, carefully arranged in a row and fastened with wooden pins, were a number of white cloths, each one a foot square. Six of them. Deane thought at first they were purificators, the altar linen with which the priest wipes out the chalice, but then it hit him: handkerchiefs. Who would have one undershirt but half a dozen handkerchiefs?

Marguerite climbed the stairs to the fifth floor of the beaten-down building. She moved quietly, an instinctive caution. And sure enough, sounds of voices coming from within the small attic room alarmed her. She had been told that “Malachi,” the one-word alias of the commander she was meeting, would be alone. She froze four or five steps from the top of the staircase. She heard three male voices. The heated discussion was in Hebrew, a language she could recognize but barely understand. She waited.

At exactly eleven p.m., the appointed hour, she rapped on the door once, firmly. The voices fell silent. The door was pulled open. She was here to brief them on what Warburg had learned from Deane, and on what she herself had then seen in Testaccio, as the day had faded into night, loitering in and around the basilica of Santi Tre Vergini, with an eye on the adjoining convent. She was still dressed oddly, having pulled together a disguising Romany wardrobe from the stock of clothes left behind by the street women who shared her family villa. Her head was wrapped in a black scarf, knotted to send a slender fall of rough silk to her shoulders. Her layered skirts were broad, bright-patterned, belted with a wide leather strap. She wore a black basque, a fitted bodice that drew in her waist and pushed up her breasts. She stank of musk oil. Inside the half-ruined basilica, she had nicely resembled other women among the squatters who had taken over the place.

Then, at the convent, she had noted the presence of two rifle-bearing guards, one at the automobile entrance to the enclosure and one on the roof of the main of three buildings. Otherwise, she had been unable to confirm what Deane reported. She climbed the bell tower of the basilica, and had been able to look down into the two convent courtyards. The clothesline in the one was bare, and the only figures who’d appeared in the other, apparently cloistered, were brown-robed sisters, solitary walkers in their circuit of postprandial prayer. In the clothesline courtyard, near the door, there was a weary canvas chair and, beside it, a tin bowl, as for a dog. She had seen no sign of Vukas. When the last of the convent lights was extinguished, about two hours ago, she had left.

“I am Miriam,” she said.

The man opened the door wide, and she entered.

He and two others had been standing around a small table. They were dressed in rude proletarian clothes. The man who’d opened the door—Malachi?—wore a seaman’s cap pulled low over his forehead. A pair of broken cane chairs were against one wall. A cot with a bunched blanket was against another. Under the cot were a pair of wooden boxes of the sort used to carry weapons and ammunition. Spread open on the table was a newspaper, the apparent object of the argument she had interrupted.

The man in the cap addressed her in Hebrew, but she shook her head, replying with the phrase she had often used in Galilee: “You must speak very slowly.”

“English, then,” the man said.

“Yes.”

He gestured at the newspaper. The front page was organized around a photograph of a large building, a corner section collapsed to the street, with interior staircases exposed. Six stories—no, seven. In the foreground were a pair of cypress trees. The banner headline, in Italian, read, “Jerusalem Hotel Destroyed by Terrorists.” Looking closely, she saw that it was an early edition of the next day’s
Il Tempo
.

“Would you translate, please, in English?” the man said.

So none of them had Italian.

Marguerite stared at the page, unsure what she was seeing. Slowly, focus came, and horrified understanding. She conveyed what she read. Explosions at midday destroyed the King David Hotel, the limestone structure looking across the Kidron Valley to the Old City and Mount Zion. The only luxury hotel in Jerusalem. Half of one wing entirely collapsed. Many dozens assumed to be dead, including hotel staff and clerical workers. The explosion was carried out, the article said, by Zionist terrorists.

As Marguerite looked up from the paper, two of the men resumed their argument in Hebrew. The man in the cap banged the table. “Enough!” he barked. He looked at Marguerite. “Surely it says the hotel was the British military headquarters. Surely it says that.”

“No. It makes no mention of British headquarters.”

“The southern wing of the hotel, that is the damage?”

Marguerite looked at the story. “Yes. Southern.”

“The Secretariat of the Mandate, then. And British Army headquarters. Including the intelligence office, with its records, all the files on Irgun and Haganah. That is what was destroyed.”

“It says a nightclub was destroyed,” she said. “A restaurant, crowded. The French consulate across the street was damaged. Passersby were killed.”

“Does it mention a warning? There would have been a warning.”

Marguerite looked again. She spoke the translation aloud. “The British government spokesman says there was no warning. ‘A despicable, cowardly act,’ he says. ‘All available information is to the effect that the perpetrators were Jews.’” Marguerite looked up from the paper. “Are you Malachi?”