Warburg in Rome (38 page)

The next morning, Deane celebrated an early Mass for the cardinal’s New York entourage. Henry Luce was there with his wife, Clare Boothe Luce, the most famous convert in America and one of the few women in the U.S. Congress. She had only recently turned to the Church, devastated after the death in an auto accident of her nineteen-year-old daughter. As Deane placed the sacred wafer on the congresswoman’s tongue, he saw tears coursing down her cheeks. For her, this entire religion was an exercise in grief and always would be. Deane realized that, after the past year, that’s what it should have been for him, too. The feeling shook him.

An hour later, he was in the sacristy, waiting. Sister Thomas soon arrived, satchel in hand. She plunked it on the vestment case next to the briefcase Deane had already placed there. She unbuckled her satchel and began pulling folders out of it. “You were right,” she said. “I found cables in the file, mislabeled, perhaps deliberately. The Americans arrested Ante Pavelic two months ago. He had been hiding in a monastery in Salzburg, disguised as a monk. Someone tipped off the Americans and they snagged him. They were about to transfer him to Frankfurt, where senior Nazis are being held pending the war crimes trials. The archbishop intervened, by his own report.”

“The archbishop?”

“Of Salzburg. Grubner. He protested the violation of cloister in the arrest. He indicated the Holy Father’s interest. Pavelic was mysteriously released. The cables are dated as of weeks ago.”

Deane scanned the yellow cable forms she had spread on the case. “Can we know if the rumors are true,” he asked, “about his being here?”

“Not likely in Vatican City itself. Croatians seem to be ensconced in the extraterritorial dependencies. They got to Rome first, snapped those places up. Have you discussed with Spellman what Warburg told you?”

“
Aussenweg
? His Eminence waved it off as Tito’s propaganda. Croatia is Catholic to the core, and Tito is a Catholic-hating Bolshevik—period. And if there are Germans being credentialed by the Pontifical Commission, it’s because German Catholics, like Adenauer,
resisted
Hitler, and they should be supported now—also period. Besides, Germans, too, need compassion, and the vast majority of them were as much victims of the Nazi cabal as anyone.”

“Do you believe that?”

“Look,” Deane said, “if I was German, believing what Germans believed, would I have behaved so differently?”

“The SS?”

“Not the SS, no. I would not have behaved like that.”

“So why the compassion?”

“The Church judges and forgives. And then it helps. Sanctuary, Sister, is for the guilty. We may not like it, but there it is. The Vatican’s ancient instinct is to offer sanctuary. Is that bad?”

“It depends, Monsignor. Wouldn’t you say it depends?”

“Sister, Spellman is proud of the fact that it was he who insisted with General Marshall that Vatican visas not be overly scrutinized. Guards at American checkpoints don’t look twice if they see the seal with crossed keys. Visas are the new sanctuary. This whole thing depends on the Allies’ being loath to antagonize the Pope. Spellman spent all of Thursday afternoon with Tardini. And the next morning, all morning long, with Tisserant. Tisserant is pushing the innocent-Catholic line, too.”

“Tisserant approved Vichy,” the nun said. “In his mind, the French criminals deserve protection, which he offers by protecting the Germans. Tisserant’s ties to Vichy are well known on the Third Floor. And he was just promoted to cardinal bishop. What does that tell you, Monsignor?”

“Tells me the train is leaving the station, get aboard. Commies are the problem, not Nazis.” Deane took a small key from within the folds of his cassock and unlocked his briefcase. He withdrew a large manila envelope, unfastened the figure-eight tie, and spilled out its contents: photographs. “Take these,” he said.

“The Germans?”

“Yes. These are the big-fish candidates for
Aussenweg
, the photos to match with what you find in the visa application pool. These characters send in faked baptismal certificates—Catholics!—looking to get new names validated.”

Sister Thomas flipped through the pictures, official Wehrmacht portraits for the most part, stern faces, sharply peaked hats with leather visors, the telltale eagle badges. Three or four wore the Waffen-SS hat with its skull. “Grim lookers,” she said. “The inner circle?”

“Treblinka, Sobibor, Drancy. Like that.”

“That’s what I meant—when you sang of sanctuary—by ‘it depends.’”

“Yes.”

“But I can promise you, Monsignor, no one wears hats with skull badges in the photographs that come across the visa desk.”

“The photos they submit to the Holy See will be doctored to make them look like S-Bahn ticket takers,” Deane said. “But these eyes, these noses, these faces—same men.”

Sister Thomas fingered the photos soberly. Then she asked, “Where does Mr. Warburg get these?”

“From Jews,” Deane answered. “Not sure who. There may be Haganah units after these Nazis. Maybe Jewish renegades from the British Army. Polish fighters. Warburg won’t tell me.”

She took in the photos for a moment, then said coldly, “Let’s assume the Nazis who’ve gone to ground
are
looking to get out. Safe assumption. If they expect to help one another, then yes, their names
could
have been compiled. At some organizing center. Vienna, you say? And interested Jewish groups might have gotten hold of the list. Plausible. It would be a simple matter to match names with German file photos. These. But not addresses. Traceable addresses would come into play only here at the Vatican, when the Germans submit false papers for authentication. They supply addresses because we have to be able to respond to them.”

“That’s what the Jews want. Contact points. And they want advance notice of German plans to come through Rome. Rome, according to Warburg, is halfway between Vienna and Buenos Aires.” Deane fell silent for a beat, then said, “This all assumes that the Holy See has put itself at the service of men like these. Do you believe that?”

Sister Thomas lifted one of the photos, a man with the face of a vulture. Slowly, she shook her head. “No. Not the Holy See. Lehmann, yes. Maybe the low-level clerics who sign off on the applications. Who knows what that Croatian gold is buying by now? But Tardini? Montini? They would never allow such a thing without His Holiness knowing about it.”

“But Argentina,” Deane said. “Someone senior advanced the Red Hat for Caggiano. And where
did
that gold go? And why did it disappear right after I told Tardini about it? Meanwhile, shady people are going to Argentina. You yourself have seen those phony monks.”

Deane’s agitation might have sparked hers. But the nun’s mind was stuck on something else. She said, “So if Warburg’s source
is
Haganah . . . what? I find a photo match for one of these Nazis, give you the monster’s new identity and an address, you pass it on to Warburg, and . . . then what? We become party to Jewish revenge? Assassination? Is that what you’re asking me to do?”

Deane did not answer her.

She said, “Isn’t that what makes us different, that we bring the criminals to trial? Isn’t vengeance a mark of the Jewish God, not ours? Don’t we have the law instead of revenge?”

“The law, Sister,” Deane said, “that comes to us from the Jews.”

“But these Jews blew up my nation’s embassy!” Sister Thomas’s cheeks had suddenly become as white as her wimple, the starched linen frame of her face. Her mouth was drawn thin with feeling. Her eyes were flint. “My brother was killed in the Blitz! And now the Jews blow
us
up! England’s embassy! These Jews are imitating Nazis.”

Deane touched her arm. “Hold on. Hold on, Sister.”

She checked herself and whispered, “I just need to know what you’re asking me to do.”

He pressed her arm through the multilayered folds of her sleeve. Don’t compare them to Nazis, he wanted to say, they just want to prevent the bastards from escaping. But of course she was right. What, Warburg’s people would arrest the Nazis and send them off to the tribunal at Frankfurt? Not likely. Deane had allowed Warburg to steamroll him.

He maintained his grip on her arm, and she did not resist it. He felt bone through the folds of her garment. Now he saw how thin her face was, thinner than before. “No,” he said, forcing himself to focus. “I’m not asking you to join in lawless revenge. I have another thought. Warburg is in over his head here. I’ve promised him nothing. What he laid out—significant and senior Vatican complicity with Nazis—I did not believe, and said so. It’s only now that I see what’s happened.”

“So parse it for me.”

“
Aussenweg
—that’s all Warburg and his friends care about. The Germans. But that means Croatians, which means Catholics, which means us. There is a needle’s eye here, Sister, and we have to thread it. You said the Americans had Ante Pavelic in custody in Salzburg. Did the cable say what Americans? What unit?”

Sister Thomas turned to the stack of cables, removing her arm from his grip. The nun flipped through the stack until she found it. She read, then held it up. “‘CIC,’ the cable says. What’s that?”

“Counter-Intelligence Corps,” Deane said. “It’s what replaced the OSS after Truman canned Donovan. The head of CIC in Rome is General Mates.”

“The man you worked for.”

“You could just as readily say he was working for me.”

“But isn’t Mates the one who told you Lehmann was harmless? He investigated Lehmann and said he was free of German intrigue, but we know Lehmann is the linchpin of this entire bloody affair. And are we to believe your General Mates does not know what Lehmann is up to?”

“Sister, he is not
my
General Mates. But if CIC is involved here—”

“That means you will go back to him.”

“Going to Mates instead of proceeding through the rogue Jews Warburg may be dealing with—that’s the point.”

Sister Thomas said nothing.

Deane said, “Which is complicated between us.”

“Indeed so, since my own government’s Secret Intel Service is still waiting to connect with me.”

“Your Philip.”

“No. His Majesty the King. My country.”

“But your contact would be Philip? He’s stayed in touch with you?”

“Monsignor, if I’d heard from Philip, wouldn’t I have told you? Wasn’t that our agreement?”

“Our agreement is why I am telling you about Mates, that I have to bring him into this. Our agreement matters to me, too.”

Now it was Sister Thomas who put her hand on Deane’s arm. He did not move. Pathetic celibate gesture, he thought. Yet for them erotically charged. That’s what made it pathetic, of course.

After a moment, Deane said, “But you do know how to contact him. Philip.”

“Yes.”

“Maybe you should. There are things happening here that should be stopped. Treblinka, Sobibor, Drancy, the skulls on their hats! Sister, these men are high on the Allied war criminal list. It’s Allied authorities who should be dealing with this, not assassins from Palestine. And not the Swiss Guard.”

“But the Americans?” She removed her hand, began to pull the cables together, stacking them beside the photos. “Ante Pavelic in custody in Salzburg, then ‘mysteriously released.’ Doesn’t that suggest the CIC let him go?”

“All the more reason for me to approach Mates. He’d be enraged to know that. Obviously the Americans in Austria had no idea who Pavelic was. But Mates ran the OSS Balkans operation. He knows the Ustashe. His operation supported Tito
against
Pavelic. If Pavelic
is
here, or in one of the Holy See dependencies, Mates would stop at nothing to get him.”

“Nothing?”

“That’s the problem, isn’t it?” Deane said. “Where is the morality in all of this? You and I have to protect the morality.”

“Monsignor, perhaps first we should try to find it.” With this rebuke, she filled her satchel, buckled it, and made ready to go.

How ridiculous he felt. A pompous, self-important cleric, knowing nothing:
I kissed myself off
. All at once he realized that he’d failed to take in the most pressing fact of the encounter that was about to end. The woman before him looked gaunt, almost sickly. Her arm was not bone, it was rope.

“Sister?”

“Monsignor?”

“I have to ask. You seem . . . are you losing weight? Are you unwell?”

She shook her head. “A fast, Monsignor. Fast and abstinence. This is a penitential season, wouldn’t you say?”

Ten

Nakam Means Revenge

A
S SOON AS
Lehmann had left their small hotel room, Marguerite hurriedly douched herself, grimacing as always. She dressed, went downstairs, and, as always, paid the bill. But this time, she went as quickly as she could to a street off the Piazza Mattei, a narrow lane whose four- and five-story buildings kept it perpetually in shadow. The old buildings had been subdivided into lodging rooms and dormitories; no shops. The flats were transient hovels for indigents, Rome’s riffraff. Nothing done there but sleep and fornicate.

Climbing up two grimy flights in a spiraling dark stairwell that reeked of urine, she came to a door, rapped softly, and waited. Moments later, the bolt of a lock was thrown, the door cracked. “It’s me,” she said, but even those two words carried a note of apology. She was not supposed to come here.

Lionni pulled the door fully open. He wore trousers and a sleeveless undershirt that drooped, leaving most of his chest exposed. He held his cane but was not leaning on it, and she realized he’d readied it for use as a club. Exposed, his chest was hollow, his scant flesh hanging loose. He was stooped and looked old. His face was etched with disapproval.

“I must talk.” She brushed by him and entered the room, which was cluttered with a cot on one wall and a small table by another. Clothes were piled in a corner. Papers and file-card boxes covered the table. Before Lionni could protest, Marguerite said, “I’ve just come from Lehmann. He told me there is a meeting of the Crusaders’ high council today at a monastery somewhere outside Rome. Pavelic will be there. Harelip is going. It’s the first time he will have left Spirito Santo. He is taking the Vatican car. We can follow him. He’ll lead us to Pavelic.”