Warburg in Rome (27 page)

“I came to see Father Antonio. He is my friend. I was his student. Here, with the sisters.”

“The sisters are gone. This is a friary now. Religious men. Franciscans.”

“What?”

“You should not be here at this hour.
Magnum silentium
is soon to begin.”

“I am sorry, Father.”

“I know you. We’ve met. Where have we met?” Lehmann pulled the door wide. “Come in.”

“No, Father. No. I am sorry. I did not mean to intrude.” She lowered her eyes, demurely hugging herself. “I thought—”

“It’s all right.” Lehmann felt the pull of her predicament. And he caught the scent of her perfume, which underscored her allure. It hit him then, how beguiling she was. “Come in,” he said. “You can see the courtyard. It is as it was. You say you were a student? Would you like to see the courtyard?”

“But where can I find Father Antonio?”

“I do not know. The sisters were moved to the Convent of Santa Maria della Vittoria. Perhaps with them.” Lehmann knew very well that the sisters had jettisoned the old priest.

“But why are they gone?” she asked.

“Who are you?”

“I am Marguerite d’Erasmo.”

“I remember,” he said. “We met in the Vatican. An office in the Apostolic Palace. Briefly. Some time ago.”

“I do not recall. I was with Rome Red Cross. So perhaps the Pontifical Relief office.”

“Yes, that’s it. You wore a Red Cross cap.”

She said shyly, as if making an admission, “I have been away from Rome, in Geneva—the Red Cross Committee International. But I am returned now. Only as of today. I came here first.”

“Seeking your priest.”

“Yes. I should go now. Thank you, Father.”

But he stepped toward her, touching her arm, which was still wrapped around her body, just below her breasts. “No, Signorina, one moment. You will be with the Red Cross in Rome—once more?”

“Yes.”

“That is good. I myself work with refugees, also for Vatican offices. Rome is more filled with lost ones than before. You will see. I consult the Red Cross. No doubt we will work together now that you are returned.”

“You have refugees here, in the Casa?” she asked.

“In a way. This is a place of prayer. A house for holy men. You know that the friars are an international order, and here have come monks driven into exile, enemies of Bolsheviks and Mensheviks and Chetniks. The Church once again has martyrs.”

“Chetniks from Croatia?”

“No,
enemies
of Chetniks.”

“I was in Croatia,” she said. “I knew Franciscans.” Vukas. She knew better than to say his name. “Are you Franciscan?”

Lehmann opened his arms wide, indicating his soutane, the getup of a secular priest. He bowed and, with a hint of self-mockery, said, “I am a delegate of the Sacred Congregation for Extraordinary Ecclesiastical Affairs. I am Father Lehmann.”

“You are German.”

“Yes. From the Rhineland, seat of resistance to the National Socialists. But I spent most of the war here in Rome, attached to the Vatican, working for peace. Now, instructed by the Holy Father, I minister to German-speaking prisoners held in camps throughout Italy. I am their poor priest. There are tens of thousands.”

“Yes. I know. Also hundreds of thousands of others.”

“Indeed. All children of the one merciful God. Do come in. See the courtyard. That, at least.”

At his gesture, she stepped over the portal frame and preceded him into the courtyard. Her heels gave her calves an arresting turn. She was wearing silk stockings with a perfectly aligned hem slicing up the back of each leg. She took a dozen steps, then stopped. In the half-light of evening, the roof lines were defined, and lights shone from several windows in the main building. Lehmann saw a movement in one of them, a dark form, a flash of white—someone watching. Only a few seconds passed, but the German priest took note of the woman’s hesitation, her focus. She had seen the dark form, too. The white glint flickered again, a handkerchief dabbing at a mouth. She turned away.

Because the priest’s cottage door was ajar, the wash of its interior light spilled out onto the packed dirt. Indicating the cottage, she said, without turning back to him, “This was where I took my lessons with
mon père
.”

“This is my house now.”

“Père Antoine is an old man,” she said. “He was frail. Is he all right, do you know?”

“I am sure he is fine.” Lehmann remained behind her. In the wind, the point of the mantilla fluttered at the small of her back. Had she worn that shawl, like a Roman noblewoman, as the feminine vestment for the sacrament of penance? “Signorina,” he said quietly, “did you want the priest for confession?” He spoke the words without breathing, a proposition.

She turned to face him. “Yes,” she said with surprising frankness. “I need a priest.”

“I am a priest.”

The silence hung between them.

Then Lehmann gestured with one upraised arm, pointing the way to the chapel.

But she turned toward the cottage. “Since this is where I met with Père Antoine . . .” She stepped toward the open door, with Lehmann following. She ducked her head slightly as she crossed into the small house. An oil lamp sat on the table, casting its flickering light around the space. As Lehmann followed her in, he pulled the door closed behind, conscious of the illicit air. If that watchman had awakened, he might be seeing this. The friars, though, were at Compline by now.

The woman drew one of the chairs away from the table and knelt before it, resting her elbows on the rough twine seat, her knees on the broad-planked wooden floor. Adjusting the mantilla forward, she lowered her head onto her hands. Lehmann moved the second chair and sat facing her shoulder, so that she had his profile.

“
Benedicite, Signorina
,” Lehmann said softly. The words came to his lips naturally, but otherwise he felt cut loose from his mooring. He was at the mercy less of this woman than of a threatening sexual arousal, which made him more conscious of himself, in fact, than of her.

Lehmann was a man with little intimate experience of women, but also one who lived to impress women whenever he encountered them. He was the favorite of every female circle to which his mother belonged, and even if those women were always older, that made them, if anything, more susceptible to his charms. Erotic implication with erotic unavailability—the lethal mix of his magnetism. His Latin good looks, his studied congeniality, the heat of his own affection for himself, these were dark stars in his personal night sky, and all at once they had been pulled into stunning alignment. Tonight.

She began to whisper, and though her words were barely audible, Lehmann recognized at once the act of contrition: “O my God, I am heartily sorry for having offended Thee . . .” She recited the formula slowly but precisely, right to its conclusion: “. . . with the help of Thy grace, nevermore to offend Thee, and to amend my life. Amen.”

When she fell silent, Lehmann was nonplussed. “But Signorina—your sins. You did not confess your sins.”

She said nothing.

“Signorina, Christ in His mercy requires the confession of sins. You must confess,” he said, intending to be stern.

But instead of enumerating her sins, she whispered, “Please forgive me, Father.”

Lehmann felt something like panic rising in his chest. “I cannot forgive what I do not know. The manifestation of conscience is required. You must tell me.”

“I have sinned. That is enough.”

“No. You must tell me.”

“Then I will go.” She shifted her weight and began to rise to her feet.

“Wait.” Lehmann turned in his chair to look directly at her. She met his gaze with naked plainness, and at once he was lost in the green depths of her eyes. But canon law makes it plain: if the sacramental norms are not observed, the guilt of the sinner is compounded by the guilt of the minister. She was asking him to join her in sin. And, as if she had exposed herself physically before him, he could not find it in himself to refuse. The norms be damned. He raised his hand, nearly touching her forehead with his fingertips. “
Dominus noster Jesus Christus te absolvat et ego auctoritate ipsius te absolvo
. . .”

No sooner had he completed the rote recitation, stirring the air above her head with the sign of the cross, than she seized his hand and pulled his fingers to her lips as if she were a peasant woman. She kissed him. He remembered that he, too, had once kissed her—in exactly the same place, her hand. Had she come here to reciprocate, this woman, so unlike the fawning Legionaries of Mary? The touch of her mouth to his flesh, even there, ignited an impulse on which, despite a lifetime’s sublimation, he might have acted. But before he could move, she was up from her knees, through the door, out into the black wind, and gone.

“Jesus H. Christ,” Deane said when Warburg told him that the War Refugee Board was being shut down.

They were sitting on a bench beneath the canopy of an artfully pruned pine tree, on the edge of what had once been the playing field of the Pontifical North American College. Now the grassy plain atop the Janiculum Hill was a crowded tent city, the college building and grounds, including the basketball court, having been given over to displaced persons months before.

As camps went, this one achieved a relative luxury, anchored by three large canvas structures braced by ropes stretched from towering cypress trees on either side of the field. Centered on those olive-drab behemoths were orderly rows of smaller brown tents supplied by the U.S. Army. Wood-framed structures were set aside for hygiene, medical services, a school, and cooking, and at all corners of the compound were sentry-manned checkpoints to keep bandits out. But the American pair were focused on neither the near scene nor the far. Instead, Warburg explained what had happened.

He did not know whether things would have been different, he said, had Roosevelt lived. After all, the promises of the year before had been left unfulfilled, even for as long as FDR survived. Astonishingly, there had been no repeat of the
Henry Gibbons
. That first thousand refugees setting sail from Naples had been the last. At Fort Ontario, in upstate New York, they had been denied immigrant status, and remained in guarded barracks to this day, prisoners.

The WRB had succeeded in slowing deportations out of Budapest, with about twenty thousand Hungarian Jews successfully evacuated to the south and nearly two hundred thousand others provided safe haven in place long enough to live out the war. But an untold number were lost, and the Swedish diplomat Raoul Wallenberg had disappeared in the storm of the Soviet conquest of Budapest. From an appallingly safe distance, Warburg had done his part to preside over too little, too late, and he knew it.

And the horror was far from over. As the war had wound down in paroxysms of destruction, including the Allies’ springtime bombing of German cities, the floodgates of desperation had broken fully open, with millions of “dehoused” people driven out into the countryside, clogging the roads, having nothing to eat but weeds plucked from gullies. Across the continent, almost no one had clean water. Plague stalked the streets of Europe again.

Italy continued to be a destination for migrating Jews, and by now Jews from beyond the Alps made up the vast majority of those held in Italian camps. More arrived every day. Warburg’s charges had been made not only homeless but stateless, with no hope—or, for the most part, desire—of returning to former shtetls, towns, or neighborhoods. Therefore they were at the bottom of every relocation list—the Army’s, the Red Cross’s, and the UN’s. Relocate? Where? And what nation would sponsor what visa? The undocumented and undocumentable were condemned to a self-perpetuating limbo.

Warburg, together with WRB officials operating from Turkey, Portugal, and, lately, from Germany itself, had been blocked at every turn in their attempts to bring more displaced persons to the United States. And “DPs” was how Warburg’s workers had taken to speaking of their refugees, since they had learned not to draw Washington’s attention to the overwhelmingly Jewish character of those in need.

The British, meanwhile, had effectively shut off the only other avenue of Jewish escape. Within weeks of the European war’s end, Churchill had shockingly been ousted as Prime Minister in a snap election, and Clement Attlee’s new Labour government showed signs of sticking to the anti-Jewish restrictions of the 1939 White Paper. The Royal Navy had clamped the flow of immigration to Palestine by seizing the Jewish-sponsored ships that had managed to sail from Mediterranean ports. The British were interning intercepted passengers in camps on Cyprus. Jews making it to Palestine were counted in the hundreds.

Thus the WRB, along with other relief agencies, had been reduced to the static management of tin-and-canvas asylums in Europe and North Africa. Most infuriating to Warburg, though, was being required by an utter absence of alternatives to maintain most of the German concentration camps, even if rechristened as temporary “transit” points. But not temporary enough. Nearly four months after the end of the war in Europe, Jews were still living behind barbed wire that the Nazis had strung, still wearing rags, and, in all too many cases, still starving. And Warburg was one of those in charge of this disgrace.

But with Roosevelt’s death, the truly unthinkable had happened. Before President Truman had set off for the July summit meeting of Allied leaders in Potsdam—last week—murmurs had rumbled through Washington about presidential succession. Since the newly appointed secretary of state, James F. Byrnes, was to travel with Truman, the next-in-line official was the secretary of the treasury. If something happened to Truman and Byrnes, flying into the still hot war zone on the same airplane, the new President of the United States would be a Jew.

Was it coincidence, then, that just before departing for Berlin, Truman had startled the nation, to say nothing of an unsuspecting Henry Morgenthau, by abruptly announcing the appointment of a new treasury secretary? Snap: Truman’s poker pal from Kentucky, Fred Vinson, was in; Morgenthau was out. If the presidential plane went down, no Jew would succeed to the White House.