Warburg in Rome (26 page)

“But the Pope. The Pope could care less.”

“Perhaps. But perhaps not. Maybe it’s just that His Holiness is more worried about Communists. In that case, not so different from you. Which makes me wonder if you and the Holy See are doing business.”

“What sort of business?”

“You tell me.”

Mates’s declining to speak was answer enough.

Warburg shrugged. “I say let’s finish off Hitler. Worry about Stalin later.”

Mates countered, “Hitler became Hitler because we weren’t worried about him soon enough.”

Warburg turned to stare out at the convoy. “What I’m worried about, General, is my next ship. That’s all. Believe it or not, the Navy claims all upcoming transport billets are spoken for, looking ahead for weeks. No space for refugees, despite FDR. All returning troopships are scheduled over to transporting German POWs back to the States.
Nazis!
Headed to Nebraska! While my refugees are told to wait.”

“Clark wants the captured Krauts off his hands. There’s just no way to deal with POWs here.”

“Meanwhile, Roosevelt’s getting hell in Congress for singling out Jews. I was ordered at the last minute to round up some Catholics for inclusion today. Out there on that ship—seventy-four Catholics, twenty-eight Greek Orthodox, seven Protestants, just so the President can deny he’s helping only Jews. The Swedes are doing more at this point than we are.”

“The Gestapo in Budapest will never let that guy—what’s his name again?”

“Wallenberg.”

“Never let him get away with it.”

Yes, the convoy was setting sail. A plume of smoke burst from the funnel of the
Henry Gibbons
. Warburg welcomed the distraction, and its silencing of Mates. A bevy of small planes had taken off from the escort carrier, the start of the free-roaming air patrols that from now on would buzz around the ships like mosquitoes, looking out for enemy subs. General Mates was like a sub, Warburg thought, running silent below the surface of his own easy, slick manner.

Mates pulled the golden silk square from his breast pocket, and Warburg thought of the girl he’d seen leaving Mates’s bedroom that first morning. A child. Now Mates removed his sunglasses and began to polish the lenses. With his eyes now visible, he looked weary, somehow vulnerable. Lines creased the skin at his brows, a delta of wrinkles at each eye, a bruise-like shadow in its hollow. The burdens of time, if not of this war, were leaving marks on the general’s face. Or maybe it was the strain of hiding the truth of what he was up to.

Something caught Warburg’s eye, a flash of brown movement on the quayside. He looked again. Not brown, but nearly lost within the buff field of a canvas tarp stretched over the bed of a rolling truck was a faded red smirch—the shape of a cross. The Red Cross truck. Her. “I’ll be back,” he said, then began to move quickly along the quay, dodging stacked cartons and huge pieces of off-loaded machinery, pumps, oil tanks, bulging burlap sacks. His eyes were fixed on that red mark as he moved, waiting for the angle to shift so that he could see the driver. The truck, though, was also moving, and Warburg started to run, fearing that he would lose it.

He had lost her once already. On the day after learning, with Monsignor Deane, of the massacre at Fossoli, he had returned again to the Jewish library near the synagogue. He pounded on the door until someone finally answered. An old woman stood inside, back somewhat from the barely cracked opening. She spoke no English, and he was not able to make himself understood. He’d repeated the name “Lionni . . . Lionni!” And “
Delegazione!
” Her muttering response was as unintelligible as it was alarmed, and it horrified him to think that he was frightening her. When she firmly closed the door, he did not press further.

Since coming to Rome, he’d been introduced to perhaps a dozen men described as leaders of the Italian Jewish community, and over several days he’d asked among them for news of Lionni. They’d offered none, whether because they genuinely knew nothing or because they did not trust Warburg, he could not say. And then, the last time he was in the ghetto, Warburg had seen two British Army trucks pulled up in front of the library—the vehicles’ muddy brown color, the crown insignia on the doors. The sight stopped him until he saw a knot of six or seven uniformed soldiers exiting the synagogue. They wore the webbed harnesses and flat-brimmed, netted helmets distinctive to tommies, but two had removed their helmets, and each of them was wearing a yarmulke. Strange, he thought, then forgot about it.

He had to find her. He returned to the derelict rooming house in Trastevere where he’d dropped her off that night, but now he brought along Sergeant Rossini to translate. The old lady who answered there said that Signorina d’Erasmo had indeed come back to her flat two days before, but she had gone away again, without explanation—which was, the woman said, what she always did.

“Gee, Mr. Warburg, if you don’t mind my asking,” Rossini had said from his place at the wheel, “who is this dame?”

Indeed. Now Warburg was running hard, his tie flying, his stare fixed upon that cross without a god. Every night for the past week, Marguerite’s face was the last image in his mind as he went to sleep, and more than once he’d awakened with her name on his lips. He almost called it now, and was certain by the time he caught up with the truck that she was at the wheel. It was moving steadily as he leapt onto the passenger-side running board, reaching through the window. The driver was startled and immediately hit the brakes, almost throwing Warburg off.

The driver was a corpulent man, his forehead streaked with sweat, his cheeks bristling with an untrimmed growth of beard. Warburg brushed past the disappointment of not seeing her, and asked, “
Per favore. Signorina d’Erasmo
,
sapere?
Do you know?”

“
Vada! Vada!
” the man said with a wave of his fist. His eyes flashed angrily—crazily. But if there was madness here, Warburg realized, it was all his own. He jumped away from the rolling truck, and he landed hard.

PART TWO

POSTWAR

Seven

Road Out

I
T WAS EVENING
. The lilting chapel plainsong was disturbed by the suddenly stirred-up air, a summer wind that blew open the heavy oak door. It caught pages of the psalters, hems of the friars’ robes, flames licking candles. The golden light of the lowering sun washed in. One of the brothers got up from his knees and crossed quickly to close the door, but not before Roberto Lehmann felt the intrusion of weather as an omen. Which of the robed visitors had drawn the displeasure of nature? Or was it him? Lehmann thought back to how he’d finally come to be here, beginning with his onetime and ever discreet mentor, Heinrich Himmler.

By March, four months ago now, Himmler knew that all was lost. Claiming to be deathly ill, he abandoned the Führer by cabling his resignation to Berlin, not daring to face the man himself. He stripped his uniform of insignia, shaved his mustache, donned a disguising eye patch, and set out on foot for the border with Denmark. British soldiers caught him. Before they could begin an interrogation, he swallowed the cyanide capsule he had been carrying for two years.

Suicide had not begun as Himmler’s chosen mode of escape. Earlier, without informing the Führer, he had devised a better plan—
Aussenweg
, the Road Out. He had hoped to take it himself, but prepared it, in any case, for his most trusted brothers: a mythic road through Rome, where the gatekeeper would be the dependable Argentine-German priest, whose transfer from Mainz to Rome Himmler had arranged in the first place. Then, a year ago, Himmler had ordered Lehmann to see to the confiscation of the monastery on Via Sicilia—yes, for its diplomatic privilege.

Events since then had traumatized the priest, but also purified his purpose. Lehmann felt Himmler’s end as a personal loss, yet it changed nothing. Subsequent news of Hitler’s suicide and the abject surrender—no, destruction—of German forces changed nothing. The Catholic war against Bolshevism continued, more urgently than ever. And he, Father Roberto Lehmann, commissioned by the noble Himmler himself, was central to it. The Road Out stretched from Vienna to the Plaza de Mayo in Buenos Aires. It would rescue the most stalwart enemies of the Kremlin atheists and set them up to continue the great crusade. At each point, from Vienna to Zagreb to Rome, Franciscans and other clerics stood ready and willing to shore up the passage. Thus, only months after the end of the war in Europe, the choir stalls of Casa dello Spirito Santo were crowded at Vespers with gray- or brown-robed men. Of the twenty-seven men in habits, only fourteen were actual monks.

The Croatians among them were true Franciscans and true fugitives, both. While Croatians were a lesser race, even if Himmler had declared them free of Slavic blood, Lehmann knew them as invaluable allies. Having survived the old war, they were ready for the new one. Indeed, the Croatian Catholic network was proving pivotal to his entire enterprise.

Casting his eyes about now, Lehmann could distinguish the impostor friars by the unpracticed diligence with which they moved their lips around the Latin syllables. Most wore spectacles, which were probably fake. Some had monkishly small beards. In addition to the Croatians, the company included Frenchmen, Germans, and Hungarians—men in flight from Allied search teams but also from vengeance-seeking mobs who knew them as Gestapo, Ustashe leaders, or Vichy officials. Lehmann did not know who they were or what their roles had been, nor did he care to know.

The chief
Aussenweg
tollkeeper operated from Vienna, a German whom Lehmann had met once, in the archbishop’s palace in Mainz. His rank of
Reichsleiter
had been clear to Lehmann from his distinctive gold lapel insignia. Now the
Reichsleiter
, presumably no longer in uniform, launched men on the secret pilgrimage, equipped with the necessary passwords and gold coins for bribes and with the understanding that everyone would be using a false name. Everyone but Lehmann, a fact in which he took due pride.

After Vespers and a light collation in the refectory, Lehmann went walking alone in the outer courtyard. Soon the friars would be at Compline, and then the great silence would fall. They would retire to their cells. The wind was howling and carried the damp odor of the fetid Tiber a few blocks distant. Above, the swifts of dusk soared like one creature in a great wheel.

At the monastery, Lehmann held the office of procurator, and he demonstrated that he stood apart from the friars, and above them, by this habitual opting out of the day’s final communal service. His postprandial walk kept him in the shadows of the cloister at one end and of the high blank wall at the other. In this way, like a lord surveying his demesne, he circled the sheds, the carts, the chicken coop, the automobile with its Vatican license plates, and the priest’s cottage, which he had taken for himself the year before.

Being removed from the monastic discipline in 1941, upon his assignment to the cathedral in Mainz, had meant Lehmann could care for his widowed mother. His father, a successful importer, had recently died of tuberculosis, but since then,
Madre
carried herself like a highborn war widow, her satins black. With Lehmann’s transfer, he brought her to Rome, rescuing her from the incessant Mainz bombing raids, but also ushering her into the social whirl of the papal court.

At the Casa, he might have been expected to resume his hemmed-in life as a Franciscan. If he declined, it was not mainly because of his mother—although he used her as an excuse. More important, he had to maintain his status as a priest of pontifical right, diplomatically credentialed in the Holy See, and he could not do that as a friar. He continued to keep his room in his mother’s apartment near the Piazza Navona, but he also valued the Casa’s distance from her. He spent three or four nights a week in his cottage here, a secret pleasure to be on his own, belonging neither to
Madre
nor to the cloister.

As he strolled along the arcade now, he preferred his polished shoes to common sandals, his fine black cassock and white linen shirt to a coarse brown habit stinking of body odor. He liked his cologne, his shirt’s double cuffs, his gold cufflinks, his gold signet ring stamped with the seal of the House of Habsburg.

Because his walk had taken him into the outer courtyard, he heard the knock on the main gate—a sound that, at such an hour, should have been heard by the watchman alone, but where was he? A watchman who sleeps! Lehmann again had the thought that he should not have kept the dolt on after the Cistercian sisters had at last evacuated the place. The knock was repeated. He went to the gate himself and pulled open the small, eye-level hatch. On the other side he saw a veiled figure, and at first he thought it was a religious sister. But then he recognized the black lace mantilla cloaking a woman’s head, a Roman lady—the look his mother had mastered. Though her face was obscure in the shadow, Lehmann sensed how fiercely her eyes were fixed upon him.

“
Buona sera
,” she said softly.

“
Che cosa?
” Lehmann asked.

“
Il sacerdote
.” The priest.

Lehmann hesitated, suddenly alert.

“Padre Antonio,” she said then. “I have come to see Padre Antonio. Père Antoine.”

“He is not here.”

“
Per favore. Il mio confessore
.” He is my confessor.

Lehmann’s first impulse was to close the hatch, the simplest and most truthful answer to the woman. Yet it seemed cruel. He opened the gate.

When she saw his cassock and collar, she said, “
Buona sera, Padre
.”

Lehmann shook his head. “I am sorry, Signora, Father Antonio is not here. He is gone.”

“I don’t understand.”

“More than a year, he is gone.” The shawl obscured her face somewhat, and she was still in shadows, but Lehmann sensed something familiar. She was tall. Her hair was dark, a cascade to her shoulders in line with the mantilla. She wore a cape, closed at her throat. Her left hand was at her cheek. He said, “Are you all right?” He nervously fingered his ring.