Warburg in Rome (46 page)

“Yes.”

“David Ben-Gurion is quoted here as saying whoever did this is ‘the enemy of the Jewish people.’”

“
Merde
,” one of the others said.

“An attack at noon?” Marguerite said. “A hotel?”

“Army headquarters,” Malachi retorted. “Not civilians.”

“British vermin,” the third man said. “And the parasites that feed on them.”

“Vermin?” Marguerite repeated. “Parasites? Those are Fascist words for Jews.”

“Enough!” Malachi commanded, and his sharp tone silenced the two men. “This was an operation of the Jewish Resistance Movement,” he said to her. “This has been planned. Much prepared for. Carefully prepared for.”

“Hotel staff?” Marguerite said. She would have liked to keep a measured air, but astonishment and anger laced her voice. “Clerks? A nightclub? Passersby?”

“I told you. There would have been a warning. That is always the way. With so many dead, the British certainly ignored the warning.”

“Why would they do that?” Marguerite asked.

“To vilify us.”

“They would let dozens of people die to vilify the Haganah?”

“Irgun. This is Irgun. This is Gidi.”

“Gidi” was the alias of the legendary Irgun commander in Palestine. Marguerite had heard him referred to, but always with lowered voices. It had yet to come clear to her where the Irgun began and the Haganah left off. It wasn’t clear to the Irgun, either, or to the Haganah. Perhaps this attack would clarify things.

Malachi folded the newspaper, a decisive signal that its subject was closed. “And you, Miriam?” he said. “You have a report to make?”

Marguerite glanced at the others, a pair of hard men. But of course they would be. She herself was supposed to be hard.

She had told David that, once her report to Malachi was made and responsibility for the final disposition of Vukas handed off to men prepared to accomplish it, she would come to him. She would return ready, finally, to resume what they had begun.

Since the day of Jocko’s burial, there had been only interruptions, beginning with the curse of the cryptic message Father Lehmann had left in the donation box, an emotional scrawl. At first, crushed by what she read, she had resolved to show the letter to no one. But then, late the next day, she learned about Lehmann’s death. That had taken her immediately to David’s flat, overlooking the Piazza del Popolo. When he answered the door, she simply handed him the paper, and watched him read:

Verily I say unto you, all sins shall be forgiven unto the sons of men, and all blasphemies wherewith soever they shall blaspheme. But he that shall blaspheme against the Holy Ghost hath never forgiveness, but eternal damnation
.

When David looked up at her, Marguerite said, “These are the words of Jesus. I thought Father Lehmann was using them to condemn me.”

“But he was condemning himself.”

“That is what I realized when I learned what he had done . . . But I, too, am condemned.”

“Such words are heartless,” Warburg said. “I thought Jesus was the God of mercy. Where is the mercy here?”

He opened his arms, and she went into them. They found the way to his bed while holding each other. Now, when they made love, unlike before, all was gentle but for the fierce moments in which each one cried out. Mostly, their embrace was merciful, kind, and quiet. Surprised by tranquility, they eased into the forgetting of everything but physical sensation, two minds lost in one body. They held each other for a long time, saying nothing.

The next evening, she returned to David’s place. He had just learned from Monsignor Deane about Santi Tre Vergini. Having explained about the posted guard and the handkerchiefs on the clothesline, David insisted on going with her. She replied that it was for her to do alone—to confirm what Deane had seen and to bring news of Vukas’s hiding place to Malachi, handing the burden off but also fulfilling her duty to Jocko and the children of Sisak. Because David trusted her, and loved her, he let her go.

She assumed—they both assumed—that she would return very soon. At his door, they kissed lightly. She pulled back. She reached into her bag and withdrew a folded square of cloth. She held it out to him. He took it. She turned and hurried down the stairs, leaving him to stare at the fabric, white wool with black stripes. He opened it, and fringes fell at the corners. A
tallit
.

Malachi expected this Miriam to hand over what she knew of the place where Vukas was hiding, and, resigned to her role, she might have. Jocko’s fate had turned her one way, and Lehmann’s another. Warburg was showing her yet a different way, and it was the one she wanted. She would be a killer no more, not even of Vukas. She would gladly let Malachi’s team take care of the Croatian monster, avenging Abel and his men—avenging the bullet through Jocko’s lip. She knew they would.

But how? She was ambushed by doubts tied to what she had just read in
Il Tempo:
Jewish fighters responsible for the wanton killing of innocents. A bomb without warning. Carelessness at the King David to the point of murder. Marguerite took a step back. Considering her words carefully, she said, “My information is less certain than I thought. I went to the place tonight. I saw no sure evidence that Vukas is there.”

“You said handkerchiefs.”

“I saw no handkerchiefs for myself. But what are handkerchiefs? We must have a sighting of the man himself. I did not see him.”

“Where is the place? What is the name?”

“What is the plan?”

“The plan is of no concern to you. Tell me where is the place.”

“What is the plan?” she repeated, calmly. But her mind was taken over by a vision of the explosion she had witnessed at the British embassy on Via XX Settembre, the combustion flash that seared her eyes, the wall of heat that hit her, most of a block away, the roar of the falling debris, followed by the eerie silence in the cone of which came the recognition that this conflagration was something
she
had done. It had mattered infinitely, not only to her but to Jocko, that no one had died in the embassy. Jocko had been the one to force on Abel the precautions they had taken, including the sawhorses placed to keep passersby away and the ruse of her own visit to the embassy ahead of time, the reconnoitering that made certain no one would die. That had mattered, in the end, to Abel and the others, too.

But to these men? Would they just topple the Santi Tre Vergini bell tower, bringing down a wall of rubble not only on the adjacent convent but on the abandoned church? Abandoned by all except squatters, thieves, whores, Gypsies. Vermin and the parasites that feed on them. If their plan included taking care to spare such nobodies, not to mention the nuns who’d unknowingly offered Vukas shelter, Malachi would tell her. He knew what she was asking. His refusal to answer meant the plan was another King David Hotel.

“There must be further surveillance,” she said. “There must be confirmation. The convent must not be attacked. Only Vukas.”

“I told you. The plan is of no concern to you.”

“With Abel, the plan was agreed to by the group.”

“Abel is dead. And this is not your group.”

Marguerite stepped back toward the door. “A good point. You are not my group. I have made a mistake.” She turned, half opened the door. But Malachi grabbed her and slammed her against the door, forcing it closed. His face was only inches from hers, reeking of garlic. “Where is the place?” he demanded again. “What convent? What is the name?”

Marguerite answered with nothing but her unflinching eyes.

He closed his fists on the pleated fabric of her bodice and lifted her, pressing up into her breasts. “Tell me, you Gypsy whore.”

But she would not. Yes, she thought of Carlo Capra, how he had seized her like this, in rage, but Malachi was not Carlo. Nor was this rage—only the distillation of male dominance. Grasping that she was not going to answer him no matter what he did to her, Malachi roughly released her.

She said, “I am not a Gypsy. If I am a whore, it is a whore for Zion.” Then she turned, opened the door, and left. Behind her, a man cursed loudly until, once again, Malachi silenced him with a single, drastic word.

By the hour before dawn, Marguerite was back in Testaccio, now with a beaten leather satchel slung across her chest. The satchel carried, among other things, her own copy of
Il Tempo
. She knew that David would be awake, waiting for her. But perhaps he, too, would have found the newspaper by now. Reading of the bombing of the Jerusalem hotel, he might guess why she had not come to him as planned.

She entered the church by the door she had used the afternoon before, and made her way through the shadows, past the rising and falling hulks of sleepers, to the door of the bell tower. She had jammed it closed with an odd piece of iron and was satisfied to see it that way still. The bell tower was an elevation of sixty winding steps.

Sunrise over Rome was a slow-moving miracle of dazzling reflections, as the golden rays found, first, the dome of St. Peter’s, then the lesser domes of other churches, then the ocher tiles of slanted rooftops and the white marble wedding cake of the Victor Emmanuel monument. Closer in were the pointed fir trees of Aventino, their needles ornamented with tiny dewdrops, glistening like diamond dust. The trees called to mind the cypresses in the foreground of the
Il Tempo
photograph, dumb witnesses to the Jerusalem hotel’s destruction. In her proselyte’s instruction in Judaism, she had been told that King David himself had stood near that very spot, overlooking the valley, when he wept for his wicked son:
O my son Absalom! Absalom! Would to God I had died for thee!

Once before, she had watched the extravagant light of dawn quicken the glass needles of pine trees. She knew when and where—the knoll above Sisak. She had watched the sunlight slide like a glacier down the slopes toward the derelict racetrack that had been given over to the camp for children. Carlo. Croatia. Now Jerusalem.

Her gaze went to the roof line of the Red Cross palazzo on the Aventine Hill. Once that building would have made her think only of her father, or perhaps of her innocent self long ago. But now, again, it was a David who came to mind, the other David, hers.
O my love, David, David, would to God
. . .

She had not deliberately deceived him, but deception was the effect of what she had done. It was out of the question to have returned to him last night, to have involved him further in her desecrations, to have not come here to finish this one last desecration herself. What this dawn illuminated most clearly was her absolute return to the numbness to which, for more than a year, she had become wholly accustomed.

The numb state was good. And the dawn also gave her the practical light she needed. From Malachi’s hovel, she had rushed back to her place in Parioli for this satchel. Now, from it she withdrew and assembled, in practiced sequence, the cut-down rifle stock, the barrel, the bolt, the firing pin, the cheek pad, the wooden hand guards, and the telescopic sight. With the weapon set, she inserted four bullets into the breech, then threw the bolt handle, driving a cartridge into the centerfire. She braced against the belfry wall, back from the ledge. Through the lens of the aiming device, she found the clothesline courtyard, zeroed in on the dog’s water dish, and set herself to wait.

Absorbedness transformed time. At some point, as she expected, the courtyard door opened, and the Doberman pinscher bounded out. The animal dashed with such exuberance from one wall to another, bouncing and leaping, that only then did Marguerite sense how constricted the yard was. Within a moment or two, the dog trotted to the dish, looking up expectantly at the door. That was when the man appeared, dressed only in scrawny long underwear, carrying a washbasin pitcher in one hand, a handkerchief in the other. He bent to pour water from the pitcher into the dog’s dish. Then, as if taking commands from Marguerite, the man looked up at the sky, to enjoy the first splash of morning light, giving her a clear sight of his mouth.

Whatsoever man that has a blemish
. . .

The year before, at Sisak, she had locked binoculars on this same face, and had wished then, without knowing it, for the cold steel inside the curl of her forefinger. Marguerite fixed the crosshairs on the glistening cleft of the upper lip. Careful. Premeditated. Chosen. How different this was from the first time. She waited, still.

. . .
he shall not approach the altar
.

She did not know what she was waiting for until, as the friar continued his casual survey of the surrounding roof lines, his gaze came to her, perched in the archway of the bell tower. She adjusted her face away from the weapon, so that he could see her clearly, perhaps to remember her from the day of her visit to that monastery in Zagreb. She wanted him to sense that she had tracked him from Sisak. In his eyes she saw an instant’s shock of recognition—enough. Gunsight fixed upon his blemish, she squeezed the trigger, as she’d so gently done on the firing range in Galilee hundreds of times. As she did in panic in a urine-soaked alcove, once.

The thunderclap at her ear, the reverberating echo above the surrounding rooftops and out into the city, made her realize that now she would be a target. The guards. But she kept the crosshairs on Vukas, following him as he crumpled to the ground. Good. The dog at once began to lean onto Vukas, licking at the blood pouring from his exploded face. Once, she’d have gladly shot the Doberman, but not now. No more killing than was necessary. She watched Vukas through the sight for a further moment, to be sure he was dead.

She placed the gun on the floor, leaving it. She descended the spiral staircase with no thought of escape. Vukas dead—that must be enough. And for the moment, it was. As for the rest of life, that no longer registered as hers. What she had feared before, now she knew: there was no escaping what she had become. Now, simply to hand herself over to it, hopeless.

Twelve

Vieni! Come!

D
AVID WARBURG SAT
looking out his window, unsure what else to do. She had told him midnight, an hour after midnight at the latest. Then it was two hours after midnight, three. The city was dark, with the yet darker silhouette, opposite his window, of what he thought of as the Caravaggio church, for its stunning altar painting of the crucifixion of Saint Peter, one poor old bastard being gut-hauled upside down.