Warburg in Rome (14 page)

Instead of taking her to an important office, the officer led her to a stairwell and down a shadowy flight to the cavernous below-grade floor, isolated and dark. As she followed him around a corner, he all at once turned on her. “Signorina . . . ,” he began, but with misery in his voice, not threat. She knew what he was up to, her new expertise. He took his wallet from his trousers. His fingers were like sausages. He opened the wallet and removed a bill of a currency she did not recognize. He held it delicately before her face, letting the green paper dangle from his thumb and forefinger, while with his other hand he fumbled with the buttons at his fly. There was nothing of force in him, only the expectation of compliance. Weren’t all
le donne di Roma
starving? Hadn’t they all become whores? Or had he seen something in her that led him to assume that she would gratify him?

Her face must have carried the answer, for she could see him realize the mistake he’d made. His eyes widened. He stepped back from her. Once, it might have shocked Marguerite to find herself—to find women—so routinely victimized, but no longer. War.

Did this man know what she could do to him? She had already been thinking of herself as two distinct persons. He had seen the first: victim. Now he saw the second: killer.

With his fat hands atremble, he stuffed the money back into his pocket. He turned abruptly, wanting to get away, but also saying, “Follow me.”

She went behind him down a corridor, then up a long, winding spiral of stairs, passing one level after another, to the top floor of the building. At a wooden hallway bench already half taken up by three rough-looking Italian men, he pointed for her to sit. He disappeared into the adjoining office, and moments later reappeared. With gestures—pointing at his wristwatch, then at the door—he indicated that this was where she should wait. He started to head off, but she raised a hand, stopping him. “If you please,” she said in curt English. “The card.” He glanced at the Italians beside her, discounted them. Sheepishly, with his fat fingers he searched in his pockets for the business card she’d given to the sentry. He found it, handed it to her, and was gone. Pathetic man. Pathetic men.

At last the door opened, and a squat soldier came out. Stripes marked his sleeve. He cast his eyes over those on the bench, finally settling his gaze on her. He said, “
Signorina? Che cosa volete?
”

“Yes,” she answered, a sharp English word. “I am here for Mr. Warburg. He knows me. He gave me this.” She offered the card, aware that if this Warburg were as important as he’d seemed at the airport, her escorting officer would never have crudely dangled money in her face. This soldier ignored the card and instead pushed the door half open with a sweeping gesture aimed at her. Marguerite stood but made no move to go where his hand pointed. With his partial blocking of the threshold, she would have had to brush against him.

To Marguerite’s left was the glass panel of another door, and she glimpsed her reflection in it. In an instant of self-measurement, she saw the wholly unfetching, loosely draped skirt of a Red Cross worker, a white blouse closed at her throat, and the oversized blue sweater that cloaked her breasts. Only the red neckerchief at her throat gestured at style, but that was for the sake of the bruises on her neck. She saw the gash, still marking her left cheek, where she’d rubbed her face against the metal of the boat.

The soldier waited, but she did not move. He shrugged, then led the way into the room.

There were four desks, each piled high with cartons, and each, but one, being worked by a man in dusty olive. At the rearmost desk sat a man in a gray suit, white shirt, and necktie, his black hair sharply parted and slicked back. A cigarette hung from his lips, a ribbon of smoke rising into his squinted eye. He was leaning back in his chair, a foot stuck in the bottom drawer of his desk.

He swiveled, saw her, and tipped forward in his chair. In short order, he hung up the phone, came around the desk, and stretched his hand out to greet her.

Marguerite stifled her disappointment. She had come on the remote chance that he could help with the mad scheme, but now she felt that the chance was gone. At the airport depot, he had conducted himself like an American of rank, but this cluttered space, shared with military nobodies, sealed the conclusion she had come to in the corridor: yet another poseur. That he seemed glad to see her did not help.

“Hello, Miss,” he said.

She took his hand, contact that made her aware of all she was withholding. She said, “Hello, Sir.”

“How did you find me?” he asked. “I only realized later how useless my card from Washington would be.”

“No. Not useless. On the Via Veneto, General Clark’s headquarters. Someone knew you.”

“Right. They put me here.” He grinned, sweeping his arm around the cramped room.

But she was not grinning. “‘War refugees,’ you said at Ciampino.” His eyes were nothing like Carlo’s. “I work also with refugees.”

“Yes, I saw that. You were right to demand that milk. Quirinal, was it? How are the children?”

“Not good. Not good.”

“If you’ve come for more food, I can help, I assure you I can help—”

“No. No. I have not come for that.” She read his question: Then what?

But he said, “Of course, even a dunce would have seized on the importance for my work of your being Red Cross. Back in Washington, I tried for weeks to contact the Red Cross in Rome, but we concluded that the Germans shut you down months ago.”

Marguerite only stared back at him.

“But obviously,” Warburg said, “in Washington we knew nothing. I should have taken your information when I met you at the airport.” He picked up a canvas-cloaked bundle, freeing a chair. The other men in the room were busy at their chores with boxes and papers. Lists, she saw, pages with columns of names. On a makeshift bulletin board, such papers were being posted beneath hand-lettered headings:
Casoli, Cremona, Lipari, Malo
. . . Familiar town names to Marguerite, the locations of what had been Fascist holding camps.

Warburg handed off the bundle to the soldier, saying, “Clear the room, Sergeant. Give the men a smoke break.” An order, a wave of the hand, and, like that, Marguerite and Warburg were nearly alone. A man of authority after all. The soldier who had shown her in was waiting at the threshold for an order.

“Here,” Warburg said. “Sit.”

“I prefer not to sit.”

“Oh.” A look of mystified helplessness crossed his face, but it went as quickly as it came. He stepped back to the desk and leaned over to snuff out his cigarette in a cluttered ashtray.

She said, “I have colleagues . . . downstairs. They were not admitted.”

“Well,” Warburg said, “let’s go downstairs, then.” It was unusual not to be taller than the person she was speaking with. Marguerite’s father had told her again and again that her gawky height was proof of royal blood, and only gradually had she realized he was teasing. He had not lived long enough to reckon with a daughter who was taller than he.

“Shall I bring my translator?” Warburg cast a glance at the soldier in the doorway.

“I can translate,” she said.

A few minutes later, Marguerite and Warburg were closeted in a small room on the first floor, waiting for Père Antoine and Signor Lionni to be shown in. Alone, the American man and the Italian woman had found it impossible to speak. No matter what he said to her, she responded with barely more than the hint of a shrug. Finally the door opened, and a soldier showed in the white-robed priest and his diminutive partner, a Roman version of Quixote and Sancho Panza.

The surprise came when Lionni, speaking through Marguerite, told Warburg his name.

“I beg your pardon?” Warburg said.

“Lionni. Giacomo Lionni.”

“Lionni? I know of a man called Jocko Lionni. You?”

Lionni nodded.

“The Delegation to Assist?” Warburg said, checking the astonishment he felt in seeing this small man. “You are the head of the Delegation to Assist Hebrews, correct? I have lists that originate with you. We’ve been trying to find you. My God, Lionni, we thought you were dead.”

After Marguerite translated, Lionni grinned. “That was what the Germans were supposed to think.”

Warburg clasped Lionni’s hand. “You gave us what we needed to persuade Washington to send us.”

“Us?” Marguerite asked.

“Me,” Warburg answered. “The War Refugee Board in Rome—just me. For now. This is just a start of American help.” He faced Lionni. “We know what you’ve done.”

After Marguerite’s translation, Lionni pushed the priest forward. “Not what I have done,” he said, then waited out the translation before adding, “Padre Antonio. The rabbi of the Delegation since October.” Lionni spread his infectious grin again.

After the brief translation, Warburg turned to the priest. “I’m honored, Father. I know of your work, too. A monastery on Via Sicilia, yes?”

The priest nodded.

“Thank you,” Warburg said.

Lionni stepped between them. “But we are here to speak with you of something else.” Again, the translation; again, the next sentence. “Not refugees,” Lionni said. “Slaves. Soon to be smoke.” Without waiting, Lionni pulled out of his shirt the folded paper. Opening its creases on the table, he slowly smoothed each newly exposed line with the fleshy part of his hand. Lionni wanted Warburg to sense this map’s importance.

The Italian placed the tip of his forefinger. “
Conosce Fossoli?
”

Marguerite: “You know Fossoli?”

Warburg nodded. “Former POW camp. Holding pen for points north. Prisoners overwhelmingly Jewish.”

An efficient tattoo, needles of a man’s Italian and a woman’s accented English, painted the picture of what Lionni wanted. Four hundred still alive. Ready for the railroad cars. Warburg focused on the map and saw the hatched line over the Po River.

He looked up. “So you think the Army Air Corps drops the bridge, that solves the problem?” He was addressing Lionni, but he was staring at Marguerite.

She translated. Lionni shrugged. “Solves one problem,” he said. “The other problems we take in order.”

It had never occurred to Warburg that more could be done than the arrangement of an exodus for those who had, by dint of luck or wit, already eluded the Nazis or escaped them. They were running. His job, he’d thought, was to give them a place to run to. Islands of Swedish sovereignty in Budapest. A Danube channel. A gateway out in Istanbul. Equivalents, perhaps, in other cities. But here was a proposal to catch the Nazis in the act. Once.

But Warburg checked himself. He faced Lionni. “So we get the bridge blown. The rolling stock cannot roll. The prisoners cannot be taken north. The Germans still have them. Then what?”

Lionni leaned forward, and Marguerite imitated him as she translated. “The senior SS have already departed the camp, ahead of the broad German retreat. The prisoners are the left-behinds, and their guards are left-behinds, too. You say ‘left-behinds’?”

“What do you mean?”

“Not combat soldiers. The German guards are themselves wounded. Weak. Very young. The guards are fewer than twenty.”

“How does he know this?”

“He knows.”

“Wounded. Weak,” Warburg repeated. “Still with weapons, no? Still with orders to clear the camp. If we prevent them from evacuating the prisoners, what do you think they do then?”

Lionni stared hard at the American. Finally Lionni spoke, an unpunctuated forced march of iron words. Then he stopped.

Marguerite translated very slowly, her eyes cast down; someone else speaking through her. “‘What then? What then?’ If we had thought in November ‘What then?,’ thought what was to come in December, we would not have been here in January. If we thought ‘What then?’ in January—no February. The Jews of Rome lost the luxury of ‘What then?,’ the luxury of a future tense. The Jews of Fossoli have at most four days unless something is done. Is that a future, Mr. Warburg?”

When Warburg replied simply, “No,” Marguerite conveyed the negation even more simply, with a shake of her head.

When a breeze swept into the room, the corners of the map on the table flapped up. Warburg shuddered with a terrible recognition: he was a man of phony rank, impotent. “You understand,” he forced himself to say, “I am not with the U.S. Army. I have nothing to do with target selection. Nothing at all to do with combat. Or bridges.”

Instead of translating, Marguerite said to Warburg, “But they know of you at General Clark’s headquarters. You yourself have the rank of general.”

Warburg was aware of blood rushing to his face, a blush. This woman had witnessed it when, outlandishly, he had pulled rank on intimidated NCOs at Ciampino.

“You are here to help refugees?” she asked quietly. “Or only to bury them?”

Her words fell like a blow on Warburg, and he saw the names again—
Regio, Fiorello, Chiara
—the names he had studied on the reams of paper in the boxes in the cramped room on the top floor of this building, and before that in Washington. Until this moment, Warburg had not really understood what he had come to Rome to do.
Giannino Salvucci. Leona Modena
. Them.

Actual names had lodged themselves in Warburg’s memory, but suddenly they were mere names no more. The sight of the stooped but fierce Jew, Lionni, made Warburg long for the sight of other Jews. He wanted to picture individuals among the throng who were now his people, but as yet he had no faces. All he had were names.

Padre Antonio leaned forward with a raised finger. “
Mes amis
,” he began, and with his French he put Marguerite more at the center than before. She would have to translate into Italian and English both. The priest said that in addition to the absolute value of lives saved at Fossoli, the meaning of such an act for the thousands whose faith in humanity had been shattered would be impossible to calculate. Warburg understood him, and despite being moved, could not help imagining such a grandiose plea being put to Clark’s commanders. Their eyes raised to the ceiling: the nobility of what humans could be capable of, if only they weren’t human. It was the thought of those commanders that opened what was, in this room of his mind, the only other door—Peter Mates.