Warburg in Rome (33 page)

“I’m sure they do.”

“Sister . . .” Deane touched her sleeve. Not her arm, just her ample white sleeve. “. . . our friendship is important to me. Very important.”

“I admit that what Philip said to me was upsetting. What he said about you. And, speaking of Irish mist, he did refer to your Irishness.”

Deane grinned. “Which is worse, my being Irish or being American?”

Sister Thomas laughed, but briefly. “That what he said about you bothered me so much—there is the surprise.”

“That I would be duplicitous with you.”

“Yes.”

“It bothered you because our partnership has become friendship.”

“Yes.”

“Sister . . . Jerusalem, Zagreb, Vienna, Budapest, Vatican cables galore—none of it matters to me like you do.”

Sister Thomas straightened her posture. “I suppose, Monsignor, that is what I needed to hear from you. Now we should resume as before.”

Deane accepted her brisk shift away from feeling, welcomed it. He matched her new tone of voice. “But what about MI6?”

“I told you. I said out of the question.”

“Sister, we began by discussing a hundred million dollars in gold. If it’s Ustashe gold, that makes it loot. Unregistered. Coins smelted into bars, but also jewelry and—we should acknowledge this—teeth. Held here, in the Vatican. Perhaps already being dispensed. You are at the center of something with this. Who knows what? There may come a time when you can influence British thinking about such matters, and perhaps British policy. If you acted as a source . . . must you burn the bridge—?”

“Monsignor, that bridge was a conflagration, burned long ago. Gold has come to the Holy See, and so, obviously, has some malign intrigue. I have no choice but to be responsible in handling this knowledge. But no gold for me. And as little intrigue as possible. I will have only one co-conspirator here. And, for better or worse, that is you.”

Deane heard the echo in “better or worse,” and he recognized as inappropriate the happiness he felt at her declared preference.

At night, the summer heat brought the Romans outdoors: old men on stoops sucking briar pipes, clustered women snapping church fans to the beat of gossip, families bedding down on sidewalks, shirtless lads dancing in fountains. Father Lehmann observed the passing scene as if it had nothing to do with him, such was his mood.

He occupied the right rear seat of the big Mercedes limousine, the dignitary’s place, where he belonged. Earlier, he’d been forced to ride in front, beside the driver, like a footman. He still felt the overweening presence of the three men who had made the trip out. They had been dressed, as he was, in the black suit and clerical collar of priests at large in the world. None was present now, just Lehmann and the driver, winding up the long day’s journey to and from Genoa, where Lehmann’s companions had boarded the liner
Fernando Ruiz
, bound for Buenos Aires. Everything had gone smoothly, from roadblocks to seaport checkpoints to the customhouse to the gangplank. At each stop, the men had presented credentials and visas to the Carabinieri or the American military police. Addressed deferentially in Italian and English, they had mumbled their replies, with Lehmann standing by to step in at any question. But there had been no questions, not one. The Vatican license plates, the clerical dress, the papers stamped with the seal of the Holy See, and, at the pier, the collar-wearing ship’s chaplain waiting to greet them as Church dignitaries—all successful.

As the three black-clad figures made their way up the gangplank, the chaplain turned to Lehmann and addressed him
sotto voce
in Spanish. “You are the Argentine priest from Rome.”

“I am German,” Lehmann replied coldly, but in the unaccented Spanish he had learned at home. “
You
are the Argentine priest.” He was not pleased to think of himself as the object of talk. Indeed, there was much about the day that had not pleased him, beginning, as they were first leaving Rome, with the tone of voice with which the unnamed German seated directly behind him had whispered in his ear. The man had leaned forward and grasped his shoulder, squeezing it painfully. “We know your mother,” he’d said. “She favors her mantilla. If there is a problem today, your dear mother will be made to know of it.”

At that moment, the man had ceased being merely a fugitive with whom to empathize and had become a menace whose history included the slaughter of mothers. Lehmann had found it possible to sit rigidly for a long moment before offering the barest nod, his only reply. In truth, he had wanted to turn, grasp the man’s hand, and plead, “Not my mother! Leave my poor mother alone!” But now, hours later, came the rush of words he wished he’d said:
How dare you—you who shamed the fatherland! You dare to threaten an old woman, whose only son is even now saving your pathetic skin!

What a fool he’d been to think himself central. The magnificent Himmler would have prepared an entire syndicate of escape, roads out everywhere. Thousands of senior figures of the Reich were fugitives now—Gestapo chiefs, Nazi Party magistrates, SS
Gruppenführers
, ghetto administrators, Wehrmacht generals, racial policy officers, killing center commandants. Legions of Allied investigators were out to get them, and escape hatches would be popping open from Lisbon to Amsterdam. Who knew how many dolts like Lehmann there were? To the men he was rescuing, he was a mere bag handler, a nobody. And, in truth, was that not exactly the case?

Had the war gone another way, these men would have been heroes worthy of Wagner, but instead they were base criminals. Lehmann could acknowledge, if only to himself, how failure had transformed the Führer’s entire project like that—gold into lead, conquerors into cowards, demigods into beasts.
So yes, run, you bastards! And if along the road you find a mongrel dog, then kick it. And be sure to kick also the dog’s bitch of a mother. Or, better, just kill her. Madre!

The Piazza della Rotonda, in front of the Pantheon, was choked with a crowd of young Romans, men and women. A midnight festival, raucous laughter, glad shouts, bottles of Chianti being passed, cigarette smoke wafting in the air like incense. A mundane fact of the city’s overcrowding, youngsters escaping the confines of tiny apartments shared with siblings, parents, and grandparents. Only in public spaces centered on fountains could romance bloom. Indeed, gushing fountains could seem the promise.

The crush around this fountain had ensnared automobile traffic, and Lehmann’s driver joined others to lean on the horn, pointlessly adding to the cacophony. Outside Lehmann’s window, close enough to reach out and touch, a young man and woman were passionately kissing, the hands of each one kneading the other’s buttocks. Lehmann looked away.

He felt as if he had stumbled into
Primavera
, Botticelli’s celebration of sensuality, dancing girls, flying cherubs, one of the women draped in diaphanous white, her naked form fully apparent, being seized at her breasts by a winged male.
You, I want you
.

Without a word to the driver, Lehmann opened the door and got out of the car.

Hours later, he was still walking the streets of Rome, aimlessly in motion. Somewhere, he had unfastened his rabat and collar and, together with his black suit coat, discarded it all, leaving him in shirtsleeves, a man with no collar whatsoever. For all he knew, he’d been grinning madly the whole time, thinking: This is what a life comes to, a life for God, for Germany, for the Church, a life for
Madre
—how dare that bastard threaten her!

Breathe, he commanded himself again and again, recalling the long-lost contemplative discipline of his monastic youth. Breathe the Jesus Prayer:
Lord Jesus Christ, have mercy on me, a sinner. Lord Jesus Christ, have mercy on me, a sinner
.

But instead of calming, his mind raced. Was it only now hitting him that the war had been lost? Germany humiliated once again. His nation’s humiliation identical with his own. Lehmann clung to his postwar distinctions: Hitler wicked, Deutschland virtuous. Nazism flawed, Bolshevism irredeemable. If grotesque crimes were committed, that was the effect of war itself. Hadn’t the now self-righteous Allies given themselves over to nihilistic destruction, and didn’t the selfsame sanctimonious Allies include the devil Stalin? And if anything was to be faulted for the last catastrophic year, wasn’t it Washington’s diabolical demand for unconditional surrender, which gave sane Germans no alternative to insanity? Bolshevism was the war’s truest victor.

As he walked, these mantras rolled unbidden off the prayer wheel of his mind:
This is what a life comes to, a life for sad-eyed prisoners of war, for Archbishop Graz, for
Aussenweg,
for Himmler, a life for vowed poverty, obedience, chastity. Chastity! Where is my nymph in white?
With no knowledge of how he came to be there, Lehmann greeted the dawn on Via Sicilia, at the gate of Casa dello Spirito Santo.

His hangover, as if produced by an alcoholic binge, lasted for days, but eventually Lehmann regained control of himself. He satisfactorily fulfilled his duties as the Vatican’s delegate to the Allied Control Commission for Italy, responsible for administration of POW camps, which still held hundreds of thousands of German prisoners. Three days a week, traveling in his limousine, Lehmann visited “disarmed enemy forces” in open-air camps and improvised prisons in half-bombed factories in Viterbo, Pisa, Villa Marina, Vercelli.

His access was complete because, as a priest of pontifical right, he was the Vatican’s delegate, not Germany’s. Yet he grew tired of hearing that Germany had openly repudiated the Geneva Conventions, and that therefore punitive policies were acceptable. The poor men he saw were emaciated, suffering from infected wounds, unset fractures. Mess tents were as unsanitary as latrines. Wehrmacht officers were as ill treated as men of low rank. Barbed-wire cages were open to the rain. Cholera and typhus were epidemic.

It was Lehmann’s place to register Vatican protests against such abuses, which he did with self-righteous passion. His Holy See superiors regularly backed him in his high-level complaints.

Of all of this he spoke to his mother. Two or three nights a week, he stayed in her opulent apartment. She was proud of him, his work for the Church, his work for the unfairly maligned heroes of the fatherland. Of what he did in secret for the other heroes, though, he never spoke. Not to her. Not to anyone.

One warm evening shortly before dusk, as he returned from his Vatican office to the Casa dello Spirito Santo, his driver made the usual turn onto Via Sicilia, and he saw her. She was sitting at a sidewalk table at the corner café. He stifled the impulse to order his driver to stop. Moments later, inside the Casa’s courtyard, he got out of the car, went straight into his small house, and removed his cassock. He donned the one civilian shirt he owned, rolled the sleeves to his elbows, and went out again, not caring who in the monastic enclosure saw him leave. Only as he approached the café did he slow his pace, relieved to find that he had not imagined her.

“Buona sera, Signorina.”

She looked up at him, an unabashed docking of his gaze. Otherwise, she did not respond.

Was she expecting him? He said, “I am Father Lehmann.”

“I know who you are.”

She was wearing a light brown sleeveless dress, open at the throat, so that he could trace the line from its hollow down to her breasts, the valley there just hinted at. Her upper arms were bare. Her lips were pale. She wore a thin gold chain around her neck. Between the two long fingers of her left hand was a smoldering cigarette. In her right hand was a small book, which she held as if about to resume reading. To her he was a moment’s distraction, nothing more. With a lurch in his stomach, he realized he had nothing to say to her.

She said, with a flick of her head toward the Casa, “You are at leisure?”

Lehmann felt himself blushing. To be on the street without his clericals was like being in his underwear. Leisure was the last word he’d have used—
licere
, the Latin for being allowed. “I was coming out for air, yes. A leisurely walk about.” He forced a grin. “About the streets of Rome.” How different this was from their first meeting in that Vatican office, when he had found it possible to lean over and kiss her hand. But he was a different man then. Born to impress. The war was not yet lost. And—how did he know this?—she was a different woman. Capable of being impressed.

She closed the book and placed it beside her glass, which seemed an invitation. He touched the empty chair opposite her and raised an eyebrow. “May I?”

“As you please.”

He sat. The waiter appeared at once. Lehmann nodded at her glass and said, “Cinzano?” A moment later, a small tulip glass had been placed on the table before him. He picked it up and held it toward her, as if to toast. He said, “Vermouth. From the German
Wermut
. Do you know the meaning of that word?”

“No.”

“Wormwood. From the Book of Revelation. A star that falls upon Earth and poisons a third part of the waters.” He sipped his drink and grimaced.

“‘And many people died of the waters,’” she recited, “‘because they were made bitter.’”

He laughed. “I thought, among laity, only Protestants knew the Bible.”

Marguerite gestured down the street, toward the Casa dello Spirito Santo. “A convent girl,” she said. “Complete instruction. The Book of Revelation speaks of Satan’s reign of a thousand years. The original Thousand-Year Reich.”

In reply to this, Lehmann only stared at her.

She smiled and said, “I come to this café occasionally because, as a girl, this was where we came for gelato. Because of those happy memories, I am at leisure here.” She looked straight at him with her dark eyes. She was that girl again. Innocent. Direct. Then her glance flitted away.

He was certain the woman had just seen him afresh, but how? Had seen him as someone of interest, but for what? As if in answer to these questions, her eyes returned to his face, but now stared openly with a question of their own.