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Anger flared. She stubbed out the cigarette in a saucer. “I am not a Sicilian woman.”
“You are a beautiful woman.”
The anger expanded, although she was pleased by the blatant flattery.
“You’re out of date. Times have changed. This isn’t just a man’s war. Perhaps,” she said more calmly, “things have changed forever. Maybe the war has given us that.”
“Maybe,” the Sicilian said, emptying the last of the grappa down his throat.
“So what do we do now?” Carlo asked.
The Sicilian said: “We have to get guns. We have to meet the other partisani. We have to get organised. But first,” he said to Maria, “there is something you must do — find out why Dietrich is here.”
“Perhaps he’s looking for Mussolini,” Maria said tentatively.
“Possibly. But I doubt it. Otto Skorzeny’s been put in charge of that. And Hitler wouldn’t risk a clash of personalities like that — Skorzeny and Dietrich. Christ, what a couple!” the Sicilian exclaimed, admiration in his tone. “But in any case, they’re all wasting their time in Rome. Mussolini was taken to Gaeta and then to the Pontine Islands.”
“It’s not just Mussolini they’re after,” said Angelo. “They want to get Badoglio, his ministers, the King, every one of the shit-heads,” said Angelo, whose hatred embraced all authority-
“Even Skorzeny will have his work cut out,” the Sicilian said. “They’re all nicely tucked away, a lot of them at the Macao barracks surrounded by half the Italian army.”
“Perhaps Dietrich brought a message from Hitler,” Maria ventured.
The Sicilian brushed aside the suggestion. “The German ambassador to The Holy See could have delivered that. Any number of Germans could have delivered it. The Führer,” sarcastically, “could have telephoned The Vatican himself. “No,” he said thoughtfully, “there was something more to it than that. I think Dietrich was on personal business. SS business.”
He stood up, one hand feeling the bald patch. He was not a tall man, but his muscles pushed against his open-necked white shirt. The undiscerning would have likened his face to that of a peasant, but there was authority there — family authority — and small refinements in the set of his brown eyes, the sensitivity of the line from nose to mouth. None of which diminished the overall impression of implacable brutality.
He turned to María. “Now you must get to work. After all, you have the best spy in The Vatican.” He took her arm. “Come, I’ll see you home. By the way,” he said as they reached the foot of the stone steps, “did you know it’s Mussolini’s sixtieth birthday today?”
IV (#ulink_fe1427ed-eadd-5e40-a07e-f11374154d5a)
Maria Reubeni’s Vatican contact was praying. As usual his prayers were tortured.
Kneeling beside his bed in his Vatican quarters he pressed his hands together and shut his eyes as he had done when he prayed as a child in the Bronx.
“Please, God, forgive me for my devious ways.” Consorting with the Nazi bishop and at the same time betraying his confidences.
“And for doubting the Holy Father.” Wondering why, despite his financial help to the Jews, the Pope had not been more outspoken in his condemnation of their persecutors.
“And” — bowing his head lower — “for the times I have doubted Your infinite wisdom.” For permitting this terrible war irrespective of whether its victims found ultimate salvation.
Here he paused, because he was about to seek forgiveness for a carnal sin that he knew he would repeat since he was powerless to prevent it.
“And forgive me for failing to sublimate desires of the flesh.” Maria Reubeni.
Father Liam Doyle, twenty-five years old, grey-eyed with wavy brown hair and keen, Celtic features already stamped with the conflict of innocence and knowledge, prayed a little longer before rising and going to the window of his frugally-furnished room, and staring bleakly across the shaven lawns of The Vatican gardens where children played and fountains splashed in the dusk.
He had felt confused ever since his arrival at The Vatican two years ago from the small church in New York. There his principles and his volition had seemed inviolate: to help the poor — there were enough of them in the Bronx — and to guide the congregation, mostly Irish like himself, in the ways of God.
But Liam Doyle, son of a policeman and a seamstress, one of eight children, had been blessed, or cursed, by a facility with languages. First he had become fluent in Latin and then he had mopped up Spanish and Italian so that he was much in demand in the ghettos. Word of his linguistic abilities reached St. Patrick’s Cathedral and he was dispatched to Rome as a young seminarian.
The honour frightened him, but delighted those who worshipped in his grimy little church with its anti-Papal graffiti on the outside walls. “Patrick Doyle’s boy going to join the Vicar of Christ. Now there’s a thing.” Their delight was heightened by the fact that he would take with him the sins to which they had confessed — he was much preferred in the Confessional to the Bible-faced Father O’Riley — those sins, that is, that had escaped the wrath of Patrolman Patrick Doyle.
Liam Doyle’s fear had been well justified. He could not equate the splendid isolation of The Holy See with Christian charity. When he explored its treasure troves he remembered the pawn shop across the street from his old church where women hocked their wedding rings for a dollar.
Nor could he understand the arrogance of some of the monsignori in a world addled with poverty, starvation and suffering. Blessed are the meek …
And he never felt at ease in this state within a city. These blessed one hundred and nine or so neutral acres bounded by St. Peter’s Square, The Vatican walls and the walls of the Palace of The Holy See, constituted by the Lateran Treaty in 1929, where less than one thousand people lived tax-free lives of privilege.
Was this the way Jesus, the son of a humble carpenter, would have wished it?
But perhaps the fault lies in myself, Father Doyle brooded as the dusk thickened and settled on the courtyards, chapels and museum; on the grocery, pharmacy and radio station of the minute state from which the spiritual lives of three hundred and seventy-five million Catholics were ruled. There has to be authority and it has to be garbed with spendour: it is a throne. And there has to be immunity from outside pressures: a regal purity, perhaps.
Liam Doyle sighed. My trouble, he decided, as a plump cardinal strode past in the lamplight beneath like a galleon in full sail, is that I see every side of an argument. I lack decision.
He decided to brew a pot of tea on the gas-ring beneath a Crucifix on the wall. And while he waited for the kettle to boil he read the worn Bible that his mother had given him twenty years ago, seeking as always answers to his confusion. From the testaments he found solace, but it was only temporary, and when he awoke in the morning the doubts were still there, fortified by sleep.
The war had not helped Liam’s state of mind. It wasn’t merely the mindless slaughter vented on the world by an insane dictator: it was the effect of the war on The Vatican. It seethed with rumour. It was haunted with fear that the Germans would occupy it — they wouldn’t be the first to sack Holy Rome — and there was even a story that Hitler planned to kidnap the Pope.
But it was the politics of the place that particularly unsettled Liam. The uneasy suspicion-that the Papal diplomats were more concerned with stemming the tide of Communism than with condemning Nazi Germany. But how could you condemn a nation that was locked in battle with Bolshevism, the greatest threat to Christianity the world had ever known?
And there I go, Liam thought as he poured water into his dented aluminium teapot, seeing both sides of the argument again.
He poured himself a cup of tea and took a bourbon biscuit from a tin on top of the bookcase. Sitting on the edge of the bed, nibbling the biscuit and sipping the scalding tea, he tried to channel his thoughts in other directions — to his work for the Pontifìcia Commissione Assistenze (PCA), the Papal charity organisation for which he worked as an interpreter. But this time the Bible had failed him: his tortured train of thought continued its headlong progress.
Not only were Vatican officials engaged in dubious politics but many minor officials were involved in spying. They spied on the British and American representatives imprisoned in the Hospice Sant’ Marta, and on the Pope himself. Phones were tapped, cables deciphered, Vatican broadcasts monitored.
Many of the spies operated from ecclesiastical colleges and other Papal organisations outside The Vatican in the city of Rome. What disturbed Father Liam Doyle most acutely was that he was one of them. And that night he was going to meet the woman who had recruited him, Maria Reubeni.
* * *
Liam had met Maria through his work as an interpreter. He had lately mastered German and she worked as a Hebrew translator. In view of the plight of German Jewry it was inevitable that they should have met.
The meeting occurred in an open-air café beneath a green awning off the Via IV Novembre, near the ruined markets and forum of the Emperor Trajan, on June 2nd. The date was imprinted on Liam’s brain.
The purpose of the meeting was to question a Jewish refugee from Poland, who spoke Hebrew and Yiddish and a little German, in an effort to compile yet another dossier on Nazi atrocities, in order to provide The Vatican with the proof they continually demanded.
The refugee who had been smuggled across Europe to Marseilles and thence to Rome was so exhausted and scared that they had agreed on the telephone not to interrogate him in an office.
Instead of coffee or a glass of wine they gave him a lime-green water-ice. He was, after all, only twelve.
At first he spoke in small, shivering phrases but soon the warmth, the water-ice and the mellow antiquity of the place had their effect. And it was a familiar tale that he told the priest and the Jewess.
It dated back to November 23rd, 1939, when the Jews of Warsaw, where he lived, had been ordered to wear yellow stars. Then, eleven months later, confinement to the ghetto administered by a Jewish council. Famine, cold, deaths by the thousands.
Then in 1942, Endlosung, the Final Solution.
Fear halted the words of the little boy in the too-long shorts, shaven hair beginning to grow into a semblance of an American crew-cut. They bought him another water-ice, and waited. The girl pointed to a lizard, watched by a hungry cat, basking on a slab of ancient brick. The boy’s lips stopped trembling, he smiled.
And in a strange mixture of languages he delivered his adolescent version of the terrible facts that were leaking out from Eastern Europe. The beginning of the liquidation of the Warsaw ghetto, transportations to Treblinka death camp, gassings with carbon monoxide from diesel engines, followed by another gas (which Maria knew to be Zyklon B).
Horror froze around them in the sunshine.
Then the boy came to the revolt of the Warsaw Jews which began on April 18th, two months ago. He had been smuggled through the German lines in an empty water-cart during the fighting.
Maria leaned forward and spoke to him in Hebrew. The boy straightened his back and answered her firmly.
Liam asked Maria what she had said.
“I asked him if the Jews fought well.”
“And what did he say?”
“He said they fought like tigers.”
“And?”
She shrugged. “They were massacred.” She sipped her glass of wine. “But at least they fought. For the first time in nearly two thousand years they fought back as a people.”
Liam stared at her fascinated. When he had first seen her he had been aware of an instant physical reaction. But his emotions had been swamped by the sickening catalogue of inhumanity the child had carried with him across Europe.
Now the passion in her voice reawakened the feelings. He wanted to lean across the table and touch her hand. He was appalled.
She put away her notebook and said: “Well, there you are, Father, there’s your evidence. Do you believe it?”
“Of course I believe it.”
“But will anyone else inside your little haven believe it?”
He ran one finger under his clerical collar. “I cannot say,” lamely.
“So you, too, are a diplomat rather than a priest.”
He wanted to shout: “Not true.” To unburden his conscience to this beautiful, aggressive daughter of Rome.
She lit a cigarette. “Don’t worry, Father. They will want more proof as always. And they will say, ‘We need more than the word of a child.’ As if anything more was needed,” patting the boy’s stubbly hair. “Another ice-cream?”
At that moment the cat pounced. But the lizard was too quick for it, disappearing in a blur of olive movement.
The boy laughed and said to Maria: “That’s how I escaped.”
“No more ice-cream?”
He shook his head.
“Then it’s time I took you home.”
“Where is he staying?” Liam asked.
“He has family here. That’s why he was brought to Rome. They thought it would be safe here. But now …” Her hands finished the sentence, Italian style.
“A Polish Jew has a family in Rome?”
“You wouldn’t understand,” the girl said. “He is a Jew. He has family everywhere.”
Liam wondered at her hostility. He guessed — hoped — that it related only to her attitude towards The Vatican. She stood up suddenly, every movement vital, and paid the bill. Then she took the boy’s hand. “Good-bye, Father, it has been pleasant meeting you,” in a voice that belied her words.
Liam stood up and, to his amazement, heard himself proposing another meeting, lying to himself and to the girl, concocting a story that they needed to compare notes to enable them to present convincing evidence to the Papal authorities, knowing that this was a lie within a lie because many dossiers and petitions had been presented to The Vatican with negligible results.
She looked at him quizzically. “Very well. I’m dining in Trastevere tonight. Perhaps we could meet there for a drink. You do take a glass of wine, Father?”
“Occasionally,” Liam told her.
They arranged to meet at a trattoria, and he watched her walk away holding the boy’s hand and he knew that he should never see her again, that he should run after her and cancel the appointment, but he didn’t move. And, as she passed out of sight, he knew, standing there among the ruins of imperial Rome, that his life, his creed, had been irrevocably changed, that he was about to embark on a struggle with temptation which would be the greatest test of his life.
They met that evening in a trattoria, in the Piazza D’ Mercanti in the artists’ quarter of Trastevere on the opposite bank of the Tiber.
Liam was disappointed to find that Maria had company. A young man with swaggering manners and, Liam suspected, many complexes, and a Sicilian who was never called by his name. Both men indulged in the sort of banter which many men employ to disguise their unease in the presence of clergy.
They drank from a carafe of red wine and smoked a lot, as did most of the other customers who crossed the river to find Bohemia. A musician in a grease-spotted black suit and open-necked white shirt was playing a violin, but only the occasional thin note penetrated the noise of Italians relaxing.
Liam and Maria completed the farce of comparing notes, then the swaggering young man named Angelo ordered more wine and topped up Liam’s glass, and Liam thought: “You’re trying to get me drunk, my young friend. What better joke than a drunken priest?”
“So, Father,” the Sicilian said, lighting a thin cigar, “what do you think of the latest events?”
“The war you mean?”
“What else? Your information must be good, Father. The best in Rome, eh?”
“I doubt if I know more than you,” Liam said, believing he told the truth.
“Come, Father, an American priest inside The Vatican. You must have access to much intelligence.”
Liam frowned. He couldn’t think of any particular intelligence that had come his way.
“Are you not in contact with Mr. Tittman, the American diplomatic representative?”
“I’ve met him,” Liam said.
“I’m told that he is angry because he doesn’t always have the same privileges as other diplomats.”
“That,” said Liam, “is because in the past the United States had barely recognised The Vatican diplomatically. It is only through the Holy Father’s kindness that he is there at all.”
“And Sir D’Arcy Osborne, the British envoy. Do you know him?”
“I’ve spoken to him,” Liam said. He realised that the Sicilian was showing off his knowledge. “Why?”
“They’re both still sending their coded messages on The Vatican radio. A lot of good that will do them — the Italian Fascists have cracked the code and passed it on to the Germans.”
