Warburg in Rome (48 page)

In a sidebar to the wire-service story was a short article quoting a Carabinieri official to the effect that the Jerusalem bombing was carried out by the same Jewish terrorist cabal that had attacked the British embassy on Via XX Settembre, a group calling itself the Irgun. The official reported that the investigation by Roman authorities into the embassy bombing was progressing, with suspects expected to be apprehended soon. That there had been no casualties in the embassy bombing, the official said, was a tribute to the prompt response of the Roman police.

As Deane read, a subtle perception tugged at his attention, a sense, perhaps, of being observed. There were others at the café, and a waiter was floating among the tables, balanced by his tray. A hint of sandalwood came to his nostrils. He raised his eyes, and at once they found their point of focus on a distant figure onto whom a break in the clouds was sending a shaft of light. A laywoman coming from the direction of the Angelicum.

As she entered the square, her stride was purposeful. Her posture was erect. She seemed indifferent to the scene around her—the remnant Roman Forum, Trajan’s broken glories, the most dramatic ruins in the city. She seemed to be walking toward the corner where ancient Rome intersected a mundane district of modern commerce, beginning with the café at which Deane was seated. She seemed, that is, to be walking directly toward him.

As she drew nearer, he saw that she was modestly dressed in a plain brown skirt reaching below her knees, a white blouse, a brown woolen sweater-jacket. She had the wholly unglamorous appearance of the practical women who ladled soup into the tin bowls of camp dwellers. But her sweater was open, showing the belt at her waist, which emphasized not slenderness but extreme thinness. In her right hand she carried a cloth satchel. Her left arm hung free, swinging as she walked. The sweater sleeve was bunched at her wrist. She was bareheaded, with salt-and-pepper hair cropped so close to her scalp that Deane thought of the shaven-headed young woman of the year before.

She wore sandals. As she drew nearer, he saw that her legs were unshaven. Legs, he realized only then, that he had never before beheld. Her legs.

Deane was wrong to assume that Thomas was headed to his table, that she had seen him at all. He was so aware of her it seemed impossible she had no idea that he was sitting there, an ordinary priest with his coffee and morning paper, a figure, above all in this city, to ignore. Her gaze was fixed on the middle distance, as if drawn by Mussolini’s palace. She drew close to the café, veered slightly and automatically to avoid the tables, and made as if to walk on by.

Deane stood. “Sister,” he said.

Seeing who it was addressing her, she leapt back, nearly stumbling into the street. By the time she regained her balance, her face was flushed.

He saw that her eyes were red, bloodshot. He stepped toward her. “Sorry to startle you. I was startled myself to see you. I spoke without thinking.”

“What are you doing here?” she asked.

“I was at the Angelicum,” he answered, pointing toward it. “I was looking for you. They turned me away. And then—” He gestured at the newspaper.

When she took in what he had been reading, she reached into her bag, withdrew a copy of the same newspaper, and dropped it on the table so it covered his. There was anger in the act, and something else.

“I am so sorry, Sister,” he said, gesturing again at the paper.

“Don’t call me Sister.” Her face was wrecked. Her free hand went to her lips, trembling. But her burning eyes challenged him.

“I mean about . . .” But he could not say it. He gestured at the newspaper, the story it told. Deane felt as if he had been transported into some other reality, a dream state or hallucination. This was Thomas, his familiar friend, but this was also a hostile stranger who’d taken deep offense at him, as if he were the one who’d placed the Jerusalem bomb. But why was she dressed like this?

“Will you sit?” he asked, indicating the nearby chair.

At first she didn’t move. That he met her immobility with immobility of his own seemed to be what she required, and she sat. When he was seated, he put out his cigarette and raised a finger toward the waiter, saying to her, “Will you have coffee?”

“No.” A firm refusal. To his surprise, she reached for his cigarettes and took one. She held it at her lips as he offered a match. Still her hand trembled. Something told him to make no comment. She inhaled expertly, an old habit. She put her hand on the newspaper. She said, “You told me it was Nazis who caused Father Lehmann’s death. It was these Jews. Here in Rome. The Jews who blew up our embassy.”

“And now they’ve killed your Philip.”

Surprise showed in her face, that he knew. All she said was “Please don’t call him that. He wasn’t mine.”

“But tell me what has happened. You are . . .” He raised his hand, indicating her clothing, her cigarette. The thought vaulting into his mind was
But you are beautiful
.

“I have left the order,” she said. “I will apply for dispensation from my vows. It all became very clear, very quickly. Not unlike seeing in an instant the key to a cipher. I should never have taken vows. I have been dishonest. That is what I just saw—yesterday, through the night.”

“Because of Philip?”

“I loved him, as I told you. When I couldn’t have him, I thought I would have God instead. It was an unworthy motive. My vocation was based on rejection. Like a rebound love affair. Nothing real about it.”

“That’s not true. Whatever prompted it, your vocation became real. I saw that for myself.”

“You do not understand, Monsignor.” At this, a faint smile crossed her face. “You do not see what’s real, right in front of you.”

“What do you mean?”

“Our Sherlock Holmes bit, what we were trying to parse, you and I—what we found! The beeswax candles. Caggiano. Looted Croatian gold in the Holy See. Holy Mother the Church, in the end—how else to say it?—in bed with Nazis. Pavelic, Lehmann, Stangl the Treblinka commandant, for the love of God! Living in our religious houses. Nazis in monasteries and convents. Vichy collaborators protected. The protectors promoted. Gestapo killers with Vatican passports. The Church welcoming them in Argentina.”

“We did parse it, you and I. And I am drafting a report, laying it out. All of it. It’s on my desk right now.”

“A report to whom? They all know! Tardini knows. The Third Floor knows.”

“A report to you. You were going to be my first reader.”

“And probably your last,” she said. “There’s too much. Too much to be the work of functionaries, rogue priests, the odd Fascist bishop. This bile is the work of the Church. How can you be part of that?”

“It isn’t ‘the Church.’
Members
of the Church, yes. Even officials. But not ‘the Church.’ And I am not part of it, Sister.”

She slammed her hand onto the table—“Don’t call me that!”—making the spoon jump off the saucer of Deane’s demitasse.

He said, “I’m sorry, I—”

But her fury was loose now. She snapped her cigarette toward the street. “That’s who these Jews should be blowing up, the fugitive Nazis! And the monasteries and convents where they are sheltered. Stangl, blow him up! Nazis! Not British soldiers! Not the valiant men who defeated Hitler! Why are the Jews blowing
us
up? Although if the Jews killed Lehmann, I say jolly good for them.” She shocked herself with that, and fell silent.

Deane recalled her scruple from before, her not wanting to be party to revenge. The
Jewish
God of vengeance, she had said.

But what if Jews were defending themselves? That’s what he should have answered her. Not revenge, but survival. He had no use for bombs, but clearly their war was not over. That was the point. It was in the Jerusalem news story:. . .
retaliation for British raids
. The Jews were still at war. Yet he had no way to speak of that with her.

For a long time Deane matched her silence. Then he said, “I don’t think the Jews killed Lehmann. I think he killed himself.” Deane recalled her asking if Lehmann had been murdered, but he saw now, in the jolt of her reaction, that she had not thought of suicide. Her face softened, which prompted him to add, “Whatever Lehmann did or was doing—that’s still sad, if he killed himself. Don’t you think?”

She nodded, chastened. “Yes. Very sad. I’m sorry for saying what I said. I’ve been . . . very upset.” She touched the newspaper. “Did you read this? The story says that on the radio in Palestine, the Irgun announced they would ‘mourn the Jewish victims, but not the British ones.’” She was shaking her head, as much from incomprehension as disapproval. She went on, but quietly, “How dare they! And what about the Arab victims? The largest number of dead at that hotel were Arabs who have nothing to do with the Jewish complaint against us.”

Deane was mystified by her—a woman whom he knew so well yet who seemed a stranger, a woman enraged but also grief-stricken. One moment she seemed mad, railing at Jews, at the Church, at him; then an out-of-the-blue identification with Arabs. All tied to the harsh fact of Philip Morton’s death, and how could she possibly have reconciled her feelings to that?

Deane knew that if he himself were to give vent to what was bottled inside him, his expressions would carve a similar arc from rage to desolation, with no more consistency or restraint than she was showing. But wait. Had she just advocated what he dreaded most that morning, a convent being blown up as long as bad men die?
Jolly good for them!
Deane himself had set Jewish warriors loose to kill the harelipped Ustashe priest—and to kill whom else? Again he asked himself: Were innocents to be slaughtered now because of him?

And why shouldn’t such questions make a person mad? The difference between him and her was that she had thrown off the sanctifying cloak, literally uncovering herself, exposing the emaciation less of flesh than of virtue. Good Sister Thomas, with the dropping of a veil, was simply gone, replaced by this harried, tortured—and yes, anti-Jewish—woman. As for Monsignor Deane, he was still primly vested, his breviary squared neatly on the table with newspapers bearing the grotesque report from Jerusalem. His breviary his shield. Shielding him, but no one else.

Shielding him from her.

“Jane,” he said, but so tentatively that she might not have heard. He waited for her rebuke. When it did not come, he went on. “Tell me what you learned about Philip.”

“A captain from Group Six came to my office yesterday. He brought the first cable they’d received, earlier.”

“You read it at your desk.” Deane reached into his coat pocket and gave her the folded yellow paper. “I took it. It’s how I knew.”

She opened the cable flat on the table, stared at it, saying, “Philip was officially attached to Signals. The bomb was shortly after noon. He was in his office, three floors above the basement room where they brought in the cans. Milk cans, can you believe it? Filled with chemical explosives, nitroglycerine probably. His office was in the dead center of the collapse. His body was one of the first identified.”

“I am so sorry.”

She looked at Deane, seeming entirely sane now. She said, “He lied to me.”

“What?”

“He told me, when we met here in Rome, that Edith was dead. I spoke of that to you.”

“Edith?”

“His wife. She was dead. Then yesterday the captain said Philip’s body was mangled but that his wife had come at once and identified it. ‘His wife?’ I said to the captain. ‘Yes,’ he said, ‘Edith Morton.’ She’d come from England to be with him. They lived a block from the King David, she heard the explosion, was there on the instant. Poor Edith. Philip had lied to me, thinking that I would be at his mercy if he were widowed. Thinking, pathetic woman that I am, that I would work for him, his lovesick Vatican spy.”

“Good God, that’s—”

But she went on, “What if I had said yes? How long would he have kept it up, the lie that Edith was dead? How would he have done that? Was such deceit peculiar to Philip, or is it universal now? Your fellow General Mates lying to you about Father Lehmann. The Jews lying about being mere victims. German lies—of course. But also British lies. American lies. Catholic lies. There you are. That’s the report on your desk. This continent awash in lies, swamping even the Church. That is why I went to Mother Superior last night, having seen
my
lie. I could not go on with it.”

“Philip’s death made you see how much he still meant to you? That you had always loved him?”

“No. Not at all. I reckoned with Philip back when I said no to him, here in Rome. That was when I began to face the truth.”

“What truth?”

“It wasn’t Philip I loved. It certainly wasn’t God. It was you.”

Deane could not think what to say. Opposite him, she was poised, stripped-down, decisive, lean. By contrast, Deane was hamstrung, tired, humbled by a lifetime of indirection. Around them people were paying their bills, heading off to jobs, boys with schoolbooks, trams in the street, a sharp smell of truck exhaust, a beggar approaching, and, in the distance, a pair of wing-hatted nuns crossing the square, unaware that the tortured priest and exclaustrated sister even existed.

Finally Deane said, “Jane . . . May I call you that?”

“Yes.”

He said, “Our friendship has been so important to me. But it depended on neither of us using the word . . . love.”

“I know. And I don’t use it expecting your reply.”

“But lies everywhere . . . universal? Jane, have there been lies between us?”

“No. No.”

How relieved he was at that.

She said, “I know what makes us different, you and me. You believe in God.”

“Yes, I do,” Deane said, words that came from his very depth. He gently placed the flat of his hand on the black leather of his breviary, the wife.

“And I do not,” Jane said. “God has nothing to do with me.”

“That cannot be true.”

She shrugged.

God was in the eye of the bird, there, watching them. God was in the crust of bread on the waiter’s tray. God was in the water glass. God was in the corruptions that had seared this woman’s conscience. God was the breath that had shut itself up in Deane’s lungs, like a beast in its cage. God was terrible, which was how Deane knew that He was real.