Warburg in Rome (24 page)

Maglione said, “Monsignor Tardini tells me that you are already fulfilling the promise of our great work. Our urgent work, bringing the succor of Our Lord to so many victims of the terrible war.”

“Thank you, Your Eminence.” Deane saw the implication of an opening, and he promptly pushed through it. “And I welcome this opportunity to bring warm and personal greetings to you from Archbishop Spellman.”

At the mention of Spellman, Maglione nodded, but barely.

Deane went on, “As you know, His Excellency is leading an emergency fund drive in America through the National Catholic Welfare Council, and we expect within weeks to put additional substantial benefactions at your disposal.”

“Not mine.”

“The Holy Father’s.”

The cardinal shook his head. “The Pontifical Assistance Commission.” A stern correction.

“Of course.” Deane hesitated. Could he speak openly in front of the nun? He resisted the impulse to look again in her direction. He began slowly, obliquely, thinking that if Maglione wanted to cut him off, he could. “And as you saw in the report I submitted about Archbishop Spellman’s initiatives at the direction of the Holy Father . . .” The nun was scribbling away, shorthand, taking down his every word.
Okay
. “. . . the archbishop has successfully engaged high-level figures in the Roosevelt administration . . .” Again he paused, awaiting the prelate’s interruption. None came. “. . . in discussions about an Anglo-American recognition of a central European Habsburg restoration.”

“What high-level figures?”

“General Donovan, a Catholic.”

“A bad Catholic. Married outside the Church.”

“But he is head of the OSS, Your Eminence. He is close to Roosevelt.”

Maglione answered with a dismissive wave of the hand.

Deane pushed on. “Archbishop Spellman has seen to it that both the President and Donovan get the point of the Catholic anti-Soviet bulwark in Europe, and they understand the Holy See’s role. They welcome it. Both favor the Habsburg initiative.” Deane paused, thinking briefly of Mates in the confessional, how he had pressed the issue of timing. “But Washington can only entertain this plan for a Catholic monarchy as applying
after
the German surrender. Unconditional surrender, as you know.”

“Unconditional surrender is an obstacle to peace.”

“Nevertheless, it remains Roosevelt’s firm policy.”

Maglione slapped a hand down on his desk. “A firm policy that helps Hitler stay in power. We have conveyed that. We have been ignored. Spellman was supposed to make it clear—unconditional surrender helps Hitler. It hurts the Germans, many Germans who oppose Hitler. Germans oppose Hitler, Father. Many Germans.”

“The slaughter at Fossoli, Your Eminence. That was not the work of the Waffen-SS. It was common German soldiers. Wehrmacht infantry, not storm troopers. Germans did that, not the SS. We see few signs that common Germans oppose—”

“Unconditional surrender is immoral!” Maglione said, his voice rising in volume and pitch, his face flushing red.

Deane waited. As he expected, Maglione calmed down, knowing his outburst had cost him control of the exchange.

Deane took advantage of that, shifting. “If I may speak directly, Your Eminence.”

Maglione did not move, which was answer enough. Deane said, “For the Church to advance the Habsburg restoration prematurely, especially in conjunction with figures associated with the Third Reich—this will kill it. Moscow will kill it, but so will London and Washington.”

Maglione glared at the American monsignor as if daring him to elaborate. Here is where Deane could have usefully announced that Archbishop Graz, through his factotum Lehmann, was attempting to preempt the Holy Father, making the plan seem like the proposal of a German cabal instead of that of the Holy See. An Abwehr plan, he wanted to say.
The loyalties of Graz and Lehmann are to Berlin, not to His Holiness!
But Deane’s suspicions were not knowledge.

Colonel Mates had come through with nothing about the German priest—indeed, had simply not shown up for their confessional rendezvous the evening before, though Deane himself had moved mountains to get there, straight from the emergency room. But what the hell, he thought, why not puncture Lehmann’s balloon in any case. “For example,” he said to Maglione, “if the Holy Father were to consecrate Archduke Otto in the Order of St. John of Malta this month, that would alert the Soviets to his dynasty’s fresh importance. Moscow would spark an immediate Allied repudiation of His Grace’s legitimacy. No House of Austria. No Catholic restoration.”

“There has been no promulgation about the archduke.” Maglione’s meaning was clear: How do you know about his elevation to Malta?

“As a simple matter of speculation, Your Eminence. So it occurred to me. I am under the impression that Archbishop Graz would like to be the archduke’s consecrating sponsor, if indeed the archduke is so honored.”

Maglione stared at him for such a long time and with such utter immobility that Deane suspected some sort of catatonia. No such luck. Maglione spoke at last, backtracking in their exchange to say with measured contempt, “I expected Archbishop Spellman to exert his influence in Washington in this matter. If your report is accurate, he has failed me.”

Deane now sensed that Maglione might be dying. His desperate hope was to offer the last drops of his life’s blood, like melted wax, as the seal on a new alliance built around Catholic Austria. A legacy of peace and a blow against Moscow. But time had run out. He had Germans willing to work with him. Where were the Americans? Germans were good. Americans were bad. Unconditional surrender was the locked door. Maglione would rather blame Spellman than face the fact that he, the Vatican lord of
realpolitik
, had been living in a self-serving dream world. In the name of that dream, he had, moments before, been frantic that a nearly meaningless—and never published—prayer for desperate Jews in a death camp only hours from here might have compromised the ferocious political detachment on which Maglione’s fantasy depended. Or was the fantasy a mere excuse for that detachment? The desperate Jews were dead now. No longer a problem. Which is why Maglione had so abruptly conquered his anger about Fossoli.

The whole repugnant truth of the Vatican’s futile policy of neutrality was suddenly manifest to Deane—a policy he himself had defended to Warburg. Was it Maglione’s policy, or did it in fact originate with His Holiness? Maglione’s influence mattered, because if the Pope took his view from the sitting secretary of state, Spellman’s only chance at being named to Maglione’s chair had just gone up the chimney like papal smoke. And getting Spellman’s ass into that chair was job one for Deane in Rome.
Jesus
.

The cardinal reached forward and picked up his pen. He adjusted the papers on his desk, readying a new document for his signature. He wrote his name with a flourish, then rolled a green and bronze curved blotter over it. As far as Maglione was concerned, the supplicant nobody was dismissed. Audience over.

The rudeness was astonishing, and Deane thought back to the exuberant charm of Cardinal Maglione’s arrival in his formal apartment the other day. Here was the man in his naked boorishness. Deane looked over at the nun. She had closed her steno pad and, while standing up, gestured toward Deane, indicating the door.

Deane pulled his crutches up and hoisted himself from the chair. Once again he towered over the stooped prelate. “And one other matter, Eminence, if I may. You should know this, and so should the Holy Father. I would be derelict not to report it. President Roosevelt has sent a personal emissary here to Rome. He was on the military plane that brought me. The local chief of the War Refugee Board. Roosevelt’s intervention for the Jews.”

“Morgenthau,” Maglione said without looking up from the next document. He continued to read with his pen poised, but said absently, “The Jew among Roosevelt’s ministers.”

“Yes, Secretary Morgenthau is the head of the board, but it is decidedly Roosevelt’s initiative. The President gave a speech in Washington about it yesterday. One thousand Jewish refugees, he said, will be exempt from normal quota limits.
Jewish
refugees. Being promptly brought to America. Washington is speaking up about the Jews, and doing something.”

“What is one thousand? We have one thousand just in our Roman convents.” He signed his name.

“One thousand is just the beginning, Your Eminence. Many Jews will be rescued to America. But the larger point is that it’s public. A
public
initiative on behalf of the Jews, Your Eminence.”

“Too late. You know that. Too late.”

“Are you aware of Budapest? Roosevelt’s man is moving to help Jews in Budapest.”

Maglione looked up. “Moving publicly?”

“No. But he is taking direct—”

“
Not
public!” The cardinal banged the blotter down on the paper, his point proven. The Holy Father’s point. Public initiatives—condemnations, protests, denunciations—only get people killed. Maglione rolled the blotter over his signature, rocking the device back and forth. If Maglione could have flattened Deane with that blotter, he would have.

In the outer office, with the door to the cardinal’s office closed, the nun stood at her desk, staring down at it. Deane sensed some turmoil, saw a person struggling to make a decision. He said quietly, in English, “May I read your mind, Sister?”

She looked up sharply, conveying her dislike of his recourse to forced whimsy.

He made his guess: “Archbishop Angelo Rotta, the Budapest nuncio.”

She stared at him. In her eyes he saw the cloud of uncertainty. Perhaps fear.

Deane said, “You are the Holy See’s cipher clerk. Am I right? Twice I’ve seen you with sheets covered with numbers. I thought accountant at first. But no. Code. Cryptograms. I saw you instructing Tardini. And here you brief the cardinal. He depends on you. You manage the communications with the papal nuncios.”

The nun only stared at him.

“So you have read what Archbishop Rotta, in his secret dispatches, is saying about Budapest. Thousands of Jews being taken.”

She said, “Do you know the Sala dei Chiaroscuri?”

“The chapel of Nicholas the Fifth. One floor down.”

“Wait for me in its sacristy.”

In 1937, Jane Storrow earned her DPhil in applied mathematics at the Mathematical Institute at Oxford, one of only a handful of women ever to do so. But throughout the last two of her seven years there, she had attended Mass each morning at Blackfriars Hall, the Dominican college. For her, the plunge into the cold abstractions of geometric logic had involved an unexpected confrontation with transcendent mystery, especially once she fell under the spell of Blaise Pascal, who was as much her spiritual master as her philosophical mentor. The limits of the axiomatic method, and the ultimate impossibility of mathematical certainty, were, for both of them, channels into the mind of God. Yet formal religion was at first repugnant to her, as if devotedness betrayed intelligence. But at Blackfriars the simplicities of sacramental language—bread, wine, gestures of kneeling and bowing, aromas of incense, the touch of water, silence—came to seem as elegant as the solved formulas of theorems, though with far surpassing significance.

Even as her faith quickened, she continued to understand herself in secular terms, like the layman Pascal. Thus she welcomed it when, upon receiving her degree, she was recruited to Bletchley Park, the just established security service enterprise on the Varsity Line, a short train ride from Oxford. That only the top four in her class were invited to join this vaguely defined project made it irresistible. Soon enough, she understood that the red brick Victorian manor house, amid its white-trimmed complex of buildings surrounded by two hundred acres of pasture, was the center of a war-spawned crash program in cryptanalysis, and she fervently embraced the work. For a year she remained there, living in the eaves below the copper roofs; applying the factoring of large composite integers to protocols of code-making and -breaking; and falling in love with Philip Barnes Morton, a Cambridge mathematician for whom her attraction to God was the only indication that she was not perfect. His imperfection lay in his being married to the doe-eyed Edith.

Jane might have been capable of illicit lovemaking, but she was not remotely able to join Philip in a betrayal of his wife. Because of that, she’d found it impossible to stay at Bletchley. On an impulse that at the time had seemed mad, but would later come to seem to have been inspired, she’d bolted. A breakdown? Perhaps. She went straight to Blackfriars, asked to see the novice mistress, and requested admission to the order as a postulant nun. To the Dominicans she was a catch. No one pressed her on the motives behind her flight to God.

Upon her solemn profession three years later, a ceremony centered on her being vested with the white habit—
Clothe me, O Lord, in the nuptial robe of chastity
—she was singly honored with the name of the order’s greatest mind, Thomas Aquinas, a rare approbation, especially for a woman. From now on, braced by the vows and the monastic hours, simplicity was to define her. Simplicity, she’d learned from Pascal, was the surest mark of truth. She was in no way prepared for it when, a short time later, the Dominican master general summoned her to the Angelicum in Rome. Stunned and a bit frightened, she obeyed, of course. Soon enough, it made sense that her postulancy had been uniquely shaped by intense schooling in Virgil’s Latin and Dante’s Italian.

When Deane, before leaving Cardinal Maglione’s office, asked her her name, she replied, “Sister Thomas.”

At the head of the center aisle of the papal chapel, Deane bowed to the Blessed Sacrament, since genuflection was out of the question. He realized that the melody of the hymn
Pange Lingua
was floating through his mind, and he recalled being one of several dozen seminarians lined up in these very choir stalls, tiered like bleachers in a gym. Now, he stood still. His gaze floated, once more drawn to the chapel’s brilliant adornments—frescoes, statues, carvings. Like many of the sacred rooms in the Vatican, it seemed more a place to be visited in wonder than in devotion, yet a prayer came unbidden into Deane’s mind.
Into your hands, O Lord, I commend their spirits
. Whose spirits? But he knew. The poor souls at Fossoli, who had not been far from his thoughts since he’d heard their fate.