Warburg in Rome (47 page)

Perverse association. Warburg shook it off, letting his eyes stray to the obelisk in the center of the Piazza del Popolo. The place was named not for the “people,” as he’d first imagined, but for poplar trees. He’d read that the obelisk marked what had been, for centuries, the site of public executions in Rome.
Where the fuck is she?

Again Warburg rebuked himself for letting her go alone. He reviewed it: how she had called it her mission, said it was her last. She was going to the meeting place for the sole purpose of telling the Haganah about Santi Tre Vergini. She was handing Vukas over to what passed, even in Warburg’s eyes by now, for proper authority. And then she was coming to him.

Obviously not. Had she lied? He knew that was possible. She had gone down into a darkness of which he knew nothing, and she was still in search of the door to herself. Unlike Jesus—
Verily I say unto you
—Warburg did not condemn her.

Rome had condemned her. The city was her labyrinth, with a slew of monsters, unbridled all. The Croatian. The Pope. The Nazi priest. An American general. Fugitive Fascists. And, why not, also the killer Jews. Warburg realized he’d come to loathe the place. All he wanted at this point was to save her from it.

When the first light of morning kissed the tip of the obelisk, the point of the spear, he stood and went to the bed. He knelt there, searching underneath with his hand. He pulled out the wrapped leather holster he hadn’t touched in a year and then left his rooms. He drove the three blocks to the Tiber and turned south, following the river to the far edge of the ancient city, past the ghetto and, on the far bank, Trastevere. He went to Testaccio, the hilly
rione
nestled in the crotch of the Aventine Hill.

What he knew to look for was the towering Romanesque belfry of the Church of Three Virgins, the feature Deane had emphasized in locating the convent on the map he’d brought to their meeting. Now, in the flat early light, Warburg saw the landmark from the river road. He plunged into the neighborhood. Losing sight of the bell tower, he made his choices at every corner by turning toward elevation, since he knew the basilica crowned the hill. The engine of his aged Fiat whined at the steepness of the streets, which, because of the hour, were clear.

He was driving fast already, bumping through rocks and mud, but when he heard the unmistakable report of a gunshot, he pressed the accelerator to the floor.

He came around a last corner. He saw the church and the looming bell tower and the walls of the adjoining convent. In the street ahead stood a man, facing away and holding a rifle at the ready. Opposite the man, in front of the basilica entrance, stood a woman. They were as unmoving as figures on an agora frieze—a Roman hunter, a Gypsy queen. An Ustashe gunman, Marguerite.

Marguerite was facing the gunman as if entranced, making no effort to get away. The man was poised to shoot. Warburg let the car soar.

The machine struck the gunman before he’d really seen it. A brutal crunching of steel on bone knocked him away, while Warburg registered the jolt of the collision in his hands on the wheel. He stopped the car, got out, and raised an arm toward Marguerite. “
Sono io. Vieni!
” was all he said. It’s me. Come!

And she did. This choice differed from the decisions she’d made in the tower and on the street because of who had put it to her. David. He was here.
L’chaim
. She rushed toward him. A defining choice.

They mirrored each other in leaping into the car from opposite sides, slamming doors with the sound of one sharp slap.

But before Warburg could get going, a second gunman appeared at the adjacent gate, on Marguerite’s side of the car. The man raised his rifle but stumbled slightly, giving Warburg time to reach into his coat and withdraw the pistol. The man leveled his weapon at Marguerite. Warburg brought his gun up in front of Marguerite’s face and fired. The man fell.

Warburg looked at Marguerite. Her eyes met his. Now he understood what he had seen in those eyes all along, this depth of pointed feeling. And he saw in her the glint of recognition. They were alike.

Warburg dropped the gun on the seat, popped the clutch, and got them away.

Immediately upon waking, Kevin Deane threw back the covers, rolled out of bed, and dropped to his knees, beginning the day as he had every day for forty of his forty-five years. This morning, though, he had no idea how to start his prayer.

What first to entrust to the hands of God? Usually he called to mind the lost ones whose welfare consumed his working days—refugees and the displaced. They were mostly nameless to him, but he could readily conjure the faces of those he saw on his rounds of visits to camps and shelters.
All you holy men and women, saints of God
. But this morning his devotions were preempted. The intrigue with Warburg, the fate of the Croatian priest, the handkerchiefs, Sister Thomas, the death of her Philip.
Where was she?

Behind him, on his small desk, were the yellow pages of the long memo he had been drafting late into the night, his summary of the malign machinations in which he’d become ensnared, from the Danube Federation and Father Lehmann to the Croatian Franciscans and the American sponsorship of Nazi escape to Argentina. Oddly, perhaps, he began his account with his day-one discovery that most of the Jews being sheltered from the Nazis in the Vatican had been baptized,
conversos
—a first confrontation with the fact that things in Rome were not what they seemed, not by a long shot. His purpose in writing was to identify each of the moral boundaries that had been crossed, and each of the story’s lacunae that could be filled only by actions taken from inside the Holy See, from the criminal appropriation of extraterritorial foundations to the elevation of Cardinal Caggiano to the disappearing Ustashe gold. He was composing, in effect, a report to the Vatican
about
the Vatican.

But that was last night. Now he was kneeling at his bedside. It was, in the liturgical phrase, right and just to be in the posture of a child, since it was with a child’s sense of helplessness that the entire unbelievable intrigue had left him. The unspeakable leaves you speechless. In point of fact, it was only at moments of extremity like this that Deane felt any true sense of identification with his Lord. Near despair, Deane most felt his faith. He did believe.
Not my will but Thine
were the only words that came into his mind. He moved his lips around them. He made the sign of the cross, stood, shook himself, and began his day.

Dressed in cassock and collar, he went to the
colazione
, the informal refectory in which senior clergy resident in the south wing of the Apostolic Palace took their light breakfasts. Happily, the men by custom sat apart from one another—three priests present already, but at separate tables. Deane lifted the morning newspaper from its rack and took his usual chair by the window, which opened onto the gardens and a view of the rear façade of the main wing of the palace. As always, his eyes went first to the balconied window across the courtyard, the Pope’s library, as if today the Holy Father would show himself. He never did.

The newspaper was fixed to a rod along its crease, the manipulation of which took a certain skill. Deane had it. He lifted the paper, flicked it for the front page, and what he read stunned him: “Jerusalem Hotel Destroyed by Terrorists.” Shocking at any time, but staggering now. He scanned the story quickly, looking for the name “Philip Barnes Morton,” not finding it. Dozens were killed, a death toll expected to climb.

Sappers clawing through rubble. Hotel workers killed, passersby, various nationalities including British, Arab, French, and, also, Jews. Many wounded. Many missing. There was no mention of “Headquarters British Forces Palestine-Transjordan,” but Deane assumed he was reading of the attack referred to in the cable—Philip Barnes Morton, killed on duty. The story said a Jewish paramilitary group was responsible, the Irgun or Haganah or Palmach, a confusion of culprits that squared with Deane’s own confusion. Which of these groups was Warburg involved with? Deane instantly put the question another way: With whom has Warburg involved me? What bastards they are, what monsters!

Deane lowered the newspaper, realizing he could have as readily seen a headline announcing the destruction of Santi Tre Vergini, the innocuous Roman convent that he himself had made a target—based on what? A few handkerchiefs hanging on a clothesline? Forget the harelipped Croatian—what would the killers do to the nuns who had hung the laundry?
Roman Convent Destroyed by Terrorists
. How could he have allowed himself to be dragged into this vendetta?

To look away from the news and its guilt-inducing implications, he faced the courtyard, only to fix his gaze upon the Pope’s window.
And you, Your Holiness, where are you in all of this?
The blank drawn curtain supplied the answer:
Nowhere. Deus absconditus
.

Deane thought of the unfinished scrawled memo on his desk. To whom was it addressed? Presumably, since it aimed to make explicit a Vatican entanglement in nefarious activities and crimes, such a document would be addressed to the pontiff. There was little point in thinking of Apostolic Protonotary Tardini as its recipient, since there was every reason to think he was already more or less fully informed of the malignity. As to other stalwarts of the Pope’s Curia, they would rank suppressing the scandal of Catholic complicity in Nazi crimes in Croatia with advancing the overthrow of Tito—a wash. And both purposes were being nicely served by the rehabilitation of Ante Pavelic. Deane had no doubt that Pavelic’s ass was
somewhere
at rest on a velvet cushion with crimson tassels woven
somewhere
on the Third Floor.

Therefore, not to Tardini, not to the Curia. Stir into this already lethal brew the bloody purposes of Jewish revenge seekers and freedom fighters . . . Who besides Deane foresaw the approaching intersection of all these lines, the inevitable train wreck?
Might I have a word with you, Your Holiness?
But the thought of taking such a brief to the Third Floor was ludicrous.

Then Deane saw it—the ingenious character of the Pope’s avoidance. By declining to appoint a papal secretary of state to replace Cardinal Maglione, His Holiness had guaranteed that no single figure would have the responsibility to present him with news he did not want to hear, news upon which he might have to act, or even acknowledge.

The Pope’s blank window stared back. Deane had to laugh at the thought that His Holiness might ever read what he’d been writing—what, passed along by papal chamberlains, for God’s sake? But the real joke was that His Holiness, to be informed of the sewage rising above the floorboards of his own sacred domicile, had need of such a memo in the first place.
The man can smell. He knows
.

Deane looked again at the front page of the newspaper, with its rabid show of what the Jewish resistance could do. Laid bare in this grotesque act of terror was wickedness involving Deane himself. Who the hell are you, he asked himself, to mount the moral high horse? What have you brought down on those poor nuns in Testaccio? For a few handkerchiefs.

He had to find out what was happening at Santi Tre Vergini, which meant he had to get to Warburg. He thought of summoning his car, but it was too early. Vatican drivers weren’t on duty yet. He might have phoned over to Sant’Agata, for Sister Thomas, a bold move at this hour, before Terce, but surely not unprecedented, given her work as secretary of ciphering. But she was gone. He had determined late the day before that she had packed her bag and left the sisters’ Vatican City quarters for the Angelicum, the Dominican college beyond the Tiber. Cloistered there, she would not see the newspaper this morning. What did she know? What was she thinking?

Deane went back to his room, knowing that he had no choice but to plunge into Rome, a prospect that struck him just then as setting out into an unmapped wilderness. Despite local Church custom, he did not want flailing skirts at his ankles, so he changed from his cassock into his street clericals, black suit and rabat. He tucked his breviary under his arm and left.

There was frost in the air, the start of an overcast, chilly day. At the yawning mouth of St. Peter’s Square stood the first of what would become a line of taxis, and he took it to the Piazza del Popolo, to Warburg’s place. But there was no answer at Warburg’s door. Back on the street, where the morning traffic was picking up, he was at a loss, faltering and bereft. Lately such feelings defined the magnetic field of his preoccupation, how the needle of his awareness, set free, went to her. The Angelicum.

The walk down the arrow-straight Via del Corso took him, within twenty minutes, to the Palazzo Venezia, Mussolini’s balcony. A few blocks east was the Pontificium Athenaeum Internationale Angelicum, named for the angelic doctor Thomas Aquinas. A pontifical university, it was also the mother house of the Dominican order. No surprise, then, that Sister Thomas would have gone there.

The main building was a huge structure, typically Roman for the way it displayed its history in mismatched tropes of Renaissance and Baroque architecture, with slapped-on modern fixes. The entrance was up a broad set of well-worn stairs. At the closet-sized vestibule just inside, Deane presented himself to Brother Porter, a white-robed friar, stooped and aged. With crisp authority, Deane asked to have Sister Thomas Aquinas informed of his visit. Long minutes passed. Deane leaned against a wall, opened his breviary, and ran words of the appointed psalm through his lips, like rounds through a Gatling gun. Then an ageless nun appeared in the foyer, garbed like Sister Thomas, but stout. She spoke Italian with an accent Deane placed as French. Sister Thomas, the nun said with resolute brevity, was not in residence. No information about Sister Thomas was available, nor would information about her become available.
Fermo
.

Deane resumed walking, back in the direction of the Palazzo Venezia and the Vatican beyond. But as he crossed into the first square he came to, a plaza opening out toward the massive ruins of Trajan’s Market, he hit upon a newsstand and glimpsed yet another headline featuring the word “terrorist”—a later edition of
Il Tempo
. He bought the paper, took a table at a nearby café, ordered a cappuccino, and lit a cigarette. In an updated story, he read that, indeed, the King David Hotel did house the headquarters of the British Mandate Authority and the British Army. Casualties were expected to be well in excess of one hundred, the vast majority civilians. The bombing was thought to be a Jewish retaliation for British raids on offices of the Jewish Agency and the British confiscation of documents tying the agency to underground groups. Most of the dead were hotel workers, but dozens of British military officials were also killed. The British Army commander for Palestine, a General Sir Evelyn Barker, called for a retaliatory boycott of all Jewish businesses, to “strike the Jews in their pockets,” which was where Jews most hated to be hit.
Jesus
.