Warburg in Rome (20 page)

Now Colonel Mates had emerged from the confessional as if from behind a magician’s curtain. “I’m not much for gods myself,” he’d said. Yet here he was. Ocular proof, Warburg thought, but of what?

Some instinct told him that the better object of his attention was no longer the Army officer but his putative confessor. And so Warburg remained where he was, even as Mates left St. Peter’s, having made his way first to the
Pietà
, where he doubtless noticed that, in Michelangelo’s rendition, the mother of the dead Jesus was an exquisite girl of no more than sixteen, with a perfectly turned ankle showing from beneath her robes—the most alluring virgin ever made of stone. Perhaps it was the sight of her that put the bounce in Mates’s step as he turned up his collar, paratrooper-like, and plunged out into the storm.

It was not long before the priest came out of his sacramental closet, and for some odd reason Warburg was not surprised to see who it was. Monsignor Deane set out into the vast church like a man with a purpose, walking swiftly. He carried his breviary. His eyes were downcast. As it happened, his path took him directly toward Warburg, who had merely to take one step away from the pillar to intercept him. “What the hell, Kevin,” Warburg said, an impropriety, but a quiet one.

Deane, startled, jolted back. Before he could speak, Warburg poked him in the chest. “You came to Rome for refugees? You’re here to feed the starving and rescue the displaced? What bullshit.” Warburg was speaking softly, but the heat in his words carried.

Deane lifted his hand. “Hold it there, David. Hold it right there.”

“I will not. I demand to know what you’re up to. Mates on his knees? That man a penitent? What gives?”

“I can’t discuss it.”

“But using refugees as a cover for Vatican intrigue. You
pretend
to care about the—”

“Not pretend. Not cover. Get down off your high horse. I’m responsible for more than one thing, David. That’s all. Not everything is as simple as you think.”

“The Pope and the OSS are in cahoots, and you’re the go-between? All Mates cares about is the Soviets. What? The Holy See brokers a deal with the Germans. What?”

Deane’s face went blank. He said nothing, which Warburg took as a sure admission. But of what?

“It
is
the Germans,” Warburg said. “German Catholics? Austrian? A separate peace?”

“No. You know that’s impossible. Unconditional surrender. Washington has spoken.”

“But the Pope’s circling some kind of deal. He hates Stalin more than he hates Hitler. So does Mates. And the Pope wants to save Germany from utter defeat, that’s obvious. What’s he up to? If you won’t tell me, I have to draw conclusions from what I see.”

“All you see, David, is a man coming from confession.”

“Two men, Kevin. I knew that one was a liar. I didn’t know that both were.”

By the time Marguerite and Lionni drew near the place at dawn, a fierce rainstorm had begun, drumming the ash and charred flesh so that a general wet stench, stinging nostrils and souring the tongue, forecast what they would find. They had rendezvoused in Carpi with two dozen locals—men once vaguely associated with Partisan bands, perhaps, but by now a timid, poorly armed bunch. Once the Gestapo took Fossoli the year before, stuffing the camp with the true Partisans, the mere threat of the place had efficiently emasculated them. Even now, the prospect of approaching the doomed enclosure cast its pall. Inside the truck bed’s firmly shut canvas, the men had clung to the side slats as far as the crossroads half a mile back, where, under the last bottom of darkness, they were glad to offload.

In the barn where they had gathered earlier, Lionni had immediately imposed the force of his determination on the men. Marguerite had taken note of the relief with which they’d deferred to him. Across a bale of straw, he had unfolded a sketched diagram of the camp, and, taking into account the true character of the sorry band in front of him, he had improvised a plan. The dozen men with rifles were to position themselves, in squads of three, at the broad flanks of the camp entrance. Half a dozen others, carrying wire cutters, jerry cans of gasoline, and sticks wrapped at one end in paraffin-soaked rags, were to set up on the side of the camp where the canvas-and-board lean-tos stood, ready to break through the wire and torch the guard shacks. The rest, with handguns, were to follow the truck on foot, at a distance, ready to rush forward—which would, of course, be suicidal if the Germans were still there to resist. In that case, everything would depend on Marguerite and Lionni successfully presenting themselves as Red Cross relief workers, arriving with food and medicine—which, with luck, was all they were. So it was that she and he were first to behold the drenched ruins. The ongoing downpour had doused the fire, but thick, rolling clouds of steam and smoke still rose skyward.

The gate of the camp was wide open, which confirmed the locals’ report, given in the barn, that the Germans, once rail transport was stymied by the bridge collapse the day before, had been ordered to abandon the camp. Word was, they had left the remaining prisoners behind. Upon hearing that, tears of relief had come into Lionni’s eyes, but he had not allowed them to spill. His emotions were at home in the vise of his will. Now Marguerite downshifted and slowed the truck almost to a standstill. The one working windshield wiper slapped loudly at the rain, but because of the foul-smelling cloud, neither she nor Lionni could at first make out what they were seeing. They edged through the gate.

“Marguerite,” Lionni said. He and the tall woman were alone by now under the sheltering overhang of one of the only buildings not to have fully collapsed. He was soaked to the skin, face streaked with ash, body reeking—and so was she. Their hands were bloodied and scorched. The ferocious rainstorm continued to rage. Dawn had given way to a morning only somewhat brighter. What they had found was clear to see. A dozen naked chimneys stood in a row, each in its cone of rubble, the remains of torched ramshackle wooden walls and roofs that had housed inmates. Here and there, blackened upright beams and skeletal staircases smoldered, smoke still rising even in the rain.

An accidental pile of corpses, with others strewn around it, stood in a lane between the tall barbed-wire fence and the line of chimneys. Onto that pile Marguerite had launched herself, desperately clawing through the bodies, looking for life, not finding it. By the time Lionni pulled her away, she was whimpering with the effort to lift the dead, one off the other, as if untwisting limbs and disentangling bones would quicken breath. When she recognized Lionni, she said only, “Please, please.”

By that time, Lionni and others had, with cold efficiency, raked through the burned-out buildings, a similarly futile search for survivors. The rain had doused the fires enough to stall the general cremation—an interruption that, given the condition of the cadavers, was less reprieve than further insult. In the stupor of his willed detachment, Lionni had taken refuge in the act, yes, of counting. Enumeration had defined his entire last year, and once again he was counting Jews.

Lionni was certain to have come across some of these people before, but there was no question of recognition. Within the boundaries of the former buildings, he had made a rough estimate of the human remains able to be identified as such—more than a hundred. Then, in the lane, he had quickly surveyed the corpses piled and strewn there—somewhere between seventy and a hundred people, apparently killed with bullets. Many seemed to have been shot in the neck and head at close range.

By now Lionni and Marguerite were a long time standing in their sheltered corner, not speaking. Most of their failed rescue party had drifted away from the charnel camp, theoretically to alert Carpi and to retrieve the carts, tools, and tarps necessary, once the lashing rain eased up, to dignify the grotesque remains of the dead. All dead. Unless some had been able to flee into the surrounding woods, which seemed unlikely. Every prisoner had been burned or shot; every woman, every child, each of the few males. Dead.

“Marguerite . . . ,” Lionni repeated. She seemed hardly aware of his presence.

“Yes?” she finally said, but from the underworld into which she’d first fallen from that hilltop overlooking Sisak. When she moved her head to look at Lionni now, it seemed to her that his upper lip was misshapen, and she expected him to wipe it with a handkerchief.

Lionni said, “I cannot think how to speak of this . . .”

“Then don’t,” she said.

“But we must. If we don’t speak of it, the evil here will swamp us, too.” He paused, then said, “I found bodies of Germans, Wehrmacht uniforms. There were Germans killed here also.”

“By whom?”

“Other Germans. They fired into the crowd, but from both sides. Stupidly. They shot each other. Their bodies fell on both sides of the penned-in prisoners. I see that the Germans themselves are young, very young. Almost children. The left-behind German guards were boys.”

“Not Gestapo? Not SS?”

“No. Youths. Not
Oberführers
—not one. The fools shot each other because they had no idea what they were doing or how to do it. They had guns. That was all. And hatred, of course. The frenzy of hatred. Guns against half-dead weaklings with no way to resist. Who knows if the soldiers were even ordered to do this?”

“Then why would they?”

“Because these people were Jews.”

The rain drummed.

After some moments Marguerite said, “You were wrong about the bridge. If the train could have gone, these people would still be living.”

“On the way to certain death. Probably they were already dying. Typhus. If I was wrong, it was only in expecting that normal German soldiers would not behave as beasts. So yes, I was wrong.”

“Normal Germans?” Marguerite repeated, but she was thinking—Croatians. The Sava River. The laughing guards racing their trucks in the great oval. The presiding priest, Vukas. “Normal? What is normal?” she asked dully, not expecting Lionni to answer. Nor did he.

Instead, Lionni led Marguerite out, thinking they should go to the truck now. As they crossed back into the narrow lane where the dead were strewn, he saw a figure in black stooped over one of the corpses, a man wearing a cape and an odd hat. Lionni approached the man, slowly at first. When he realized what the man was doing, Lionni, with his limping gait, began to run. He was screaming, “
Fermo! Fermo!
Stop! Stop!” It was a biretta the man wore, and under his cape was a cassock. A purple stole draped from his neck. A priest. In the rain and mud he was kneeling in prayer, performing last rites. “Stop!” Lionni screamed again.

The priest had barely come to his feet when Lionni crashed into him, knocking him back, almost making him fall. As it was, the priest dropped the small black case he was carrying, and vials spilled to the ground—the sacramental oils, holy water.

“How dare you! How dare you!” Lionni screamed. “Get your filthy prayers away from here! Get out! Get out!”

The priest backed away, terrified of the lunatic who’d attacked him. The priest clutched a crucifix in one hand and held his biretta down on his head with the other. One of the Partisans appeared and stepped between the priest and Lionni. “What’s wrong with you?” the man asked Lionni. “Prayers for the dead. What’s wrong with that?”

“Not
these
dead! Not
Christian
prayers! Leave them be.” Lionni lunged at the priest. The Partisan, a much bigger fellow, held him back. “If you want to pray,” Lionni shouted, “pray for the Germans. Go to the corpses in uniform. Kiss your cursed cross to
their
lips.
They
are yours.
They
are the ones who did this!
They
are Christ’s! Not the Jews. Don’t you dare go near the Jews!”

Marguerite was stunned. Only moments before he was comforting her. Now he was mad.

Lionni struggled to get free, apparently to attack the priest. The Partisan threw him roughly back. Lionni accidentally stepped on one of the sacramental vials, and when he saw what it was, he stomped on it again, and on the case, the candles, the sacred cloths. He jammed his heel down on the second vial, crushing it all. He stomped and stomped, kicking up rainwater in a frenzy of curses and sobs. Then he slowly sank to his knees, to all fours, banging the soggy earth with his fists, splashing the mud so that it bounced up into his face. “
Cristo!
” he muttered. “
Cristo! Cristo!
”

Marguerite stooped to him, cloaked his shoulders with her arm. In Lionni this hatred was ancient, but it was entirely new to Marguerite. Christ! Diabolical Christ! Christ had done this! That once unthinkable recognition was new to her, yet she also realized that at some point in the past she had felt this. But when? She closed her eyes against the question.

But the answer came anyway, in the form of his face—the brilliantly red-bearded Carlo Capra, his irresistible toothy smile.
Amore!
A Partisan hero. An anti-Nazi. The one who’d plunged her into the abyss to which now she had found the bottom, the absolute ground of her great split—the two distinct women who would live on as bedeviling ghosts of the girl she was: Marguerite before and after, outward and inward, alive and dead. The pressure in her right forefinger came back to her, her body’s memory more than hers. In her tensing finger was the answer.

“Normal? What is normal?” she had asked Lionni. Even holding Lionni now, Marguerite curled that finger again—the slight movement of knuckle and muscle required to pull the trigger of a gun. She herself was normal. She saw it. A normal beast.

The Pontifical North American College was established by the Vatican as a counterbalance to the slyly undermining influences of Protestant—and democratic—dominance in the United States. Since the turn of the century, nearly all of America’s bishops had been alumni of the elite Roman theologate, and they had shown their gratitude to their alma mater by lavishly funding it. That was why the college, with its palatial main building and elaborately tended gardens and fields, was so beautifully set on the crest of the Janiculum, the second-highest hill in Rome. A view of the city spread to the east, across the Tiber, a panorama of bell towers and domes. In the late-afternoon sun, shadows emphasized the dominating ocher of the ancient clay from which so many of the visible structures had taken form.