Death's Door

by James R Benn

  “What else is going on here?” I asked, my teeth on edge. “What’s the real deal? There’s got to be dozens of operations going on in Rome and Vatican City. SOE, OSS, or half a dozen other secret outfits.”

  “Exactly,” Big Mike said. “That’s why you’re ordered to steer clear of anything except this murder investigation. You could get agents killed by charging into their operations. You know that.”

  “Maybe so,” I said, grudgingly. “It still stinks. Diana gets thrown to the wolves, and I’m dancing like a puppet while someone in the Archdiocese of New York pulls the strings.”

  “Hey, Billy, you know as well as the next guy how things work in the army.”

  “I get it, Big Mike. It’s political. General Eisenhower wants to keep General Marshall happy, who needs to keep the president happy. Corrigan’s already dead, so he doesn’t care about being happy. Diana’s probably dead, or will be soon. And me? I’ll know I did nothing while the woman I loved died. Hell, what’s the difference? Two, three hundred miles or two miles away?” I stood up, kicking the chair away, angry at the world but taking it out on Big Mike because the rest of the world wasn’t here. “I could be two hundred yards away and all she’ll know is that I left her there to die.”

  “Billy,” Big Mike said, getting up and resting his arms on my shoulders. “So far it’s all been bad news. Here’s a little good news. Sam said to tell you we know Diana is still alive. As of two days ago, anyway. In the Regina Coeli prison.”

  “How do you know? Are you sure?”

  “Sam’s sure,” Big Mike said, his voice trailing off. I watched his face go pale and felt his arms slip from my shoulders. His eyes rolled up and he swayed like a tree about to be toppled, until he fell, right on me.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  I’D TAKEN THE weight of Big Mike’s fall and gotten more banged up than he had. The hardest part was getting him back on his feet and half carrying him to a bed. Croft had summoned a doctor from the RAF hospital on base, who examined Big Mike and then asked who the devil had discharged him from medical care so soon after surgery. Big Mike was silent on the subject, but agreed to stay prone for the rest of the day. I took the file he’d brought and settled into an easy chair in the library. Croft was right, SOE knew how to live. Not to mention die.

  It quickly became clear that Monsignor Edward Corrigan was connected, and not only to FDR via his cousin the bishop. He worked for the Supreme Sacred Congregation of the Holy Office, the outfit that until the start of the century had been called the Inquisition. I was pretty sure they weren’t burning heretics at the stake anymore, but it made me wonder if there was any religious connection to the killing. I’d been an altar boy back in Boston, and I heard enough gossip about bishops and archbishops to know that church politics was a game of hardball.

  But murder? Revenge, maybe. He’d been killed up close, face to face, with a knife thrust between the ribs, and that could mean it had been personal, the murderer wanting Corrigan to see who was ending his life. Or the killer simply knew how to use a knife.

  An orderly brought me tea. I’d hoped for more coffee, and had been surprised when Croft had had it served this morning. This was an English outfit after all, and tea was in their blood, even though I noticed more Brits picking up the java habit whenever they could get ahold of American supplies. I read through the file, focusing on what little information there was, trying to read between the lines to tease out any thread of substance that would give me something to go on.

  I spread out the documents on the floor, and soon was sitting cross-legged among them, as I’d seen my dad do dozens of times, when a case was going nowhere. A Boston PD homicide detective, he’d often come home with a leather briefcase stuffed with documents, and after dinner he’d be in his den, on his knees, staring at the papers all around him. It was a good long time before he’d let me look, the crime scene photos not being meant for kids in short pants.

  So I played out that scene here, far from my home in Southie, leaning into the motions of my father, hoping by some mysterious means to fall into his routine and absorb his experience—moving files and papers around, tapping key phrases with my finger as if casting a spell and drawing out the truth from a mass of tangled details and the occasional well-placed lie. I found myself doing this more and more, copying the rhythms of my old man, fooling my mind into thinking I had half his smarts, until I failed all on my own—or something clicked and the movements became my own, the memory of then mingling with the here and now, and I saw what had been hidden in plain sight. But not today.

  I was lost in thought when Kaz came in and flopped down in a chair opposite mine, hitching his trousers up as he crossed his legs.

  “Well, this ought to be fun,” he said.

  “You heard?”

  “Captain Croft gave me the news as soon as I got here. The driver stopped at that fleabag hotel of yours and packed up your gear. It’s in the room next to Big Mike’s. He was sleeping when I looked in on him.”

  “Easy for him,” I said, getting up and closing the door, keeping my voice low. “He’s not visiting Rome ahead of the Allied armies.”

  “Billy, we are on a secure base, in an SOE building. Do you think there are spies about?” Kaz gave a little laugh, to show he wasn’t serious, but I saw in his eyes that he was, as worry briefly furrowed his brow.

  “Of course there are spies here, Kaz. That’s what these people do. Which means there could be double agents, too. Or SOE security checking on us.” It sounded crazy, but the secret stuff was the craziest part of this war, and that was saying something.

  “You have a point,” Kaz said, in a tone that said it was one I’d taken too far. “As for Rome, it is where you wanted to go, you said so yourself last night. Now we have the SOE to get us there. It is a gift from heaven,” he said, twirling his fingers upward.

  “Well, God Himself does have something to say about it,” I said. “Our orders come direct from the White House. General Eisenhower’s only the messenger.” I told Kaz about FDR and the bishop, and the warning to steer clear of Diana.

  “That does complicate things,” Kaz said, tapping his finger on his knee, already figuring the odds. “It seems as if we must fool not only the Germans, but our own people. It would not be the first time, Billy.”

  “True,” I said. “I’d hoped you’d go along with it.” It meant a lot that he would, but I expected nothing less. Kaz and I were bound together in this war. Each of us had risked his life for the other, and we both cared deeply about Diana. Kaz, because of his love for her sister Daphne, and all that she had meant to him. Me, because I loved her, and felt I had something to live up to, a responsibility to the dead to make the most of life. It was complicated.

  “It would make things more interesting,” he said.

  Kaz liked things interesting. He didn’t have a lot to look forward to, and when he got bored, he tended to dwell on that fact. Things weren’t as bad as they once were, but I still worried about him. Yet I knew I could count on him whatever the odds. He was a thin, bookish-looking guy with horn-rimmed glasses, but he was tough, too. The real thing, the kind of toughness that didn’t show until the odds were ten to one.

  “I will see what I can find out about the prison, the Regina Coeli,” Kaz continued. “Now tell me what else we know about the unfortunate Monsignor Edward Corrigan.”

  “Well, he was a smart guy. Went to Columbia Law School after he became a priest. I’m guessing his cousin the bishop helped grease the skids since he got sent to Rome right after that. He went to work for the Supreme Sacred Congregation of the Holy Office,” I said, looking up to see if Kaz knew what that meant. Kaz knew something about everything.

  “The Inquisition,” he said. “Much tamer now than in previous centuries. Go on.”

  “He also worked for the Sacred Congregation for the Propagation of the Faith, which sounds like missionary work.”

  “Yes, it is called by its Latin name, Propaganda Fide.”

  “
Kaz, how do you know so much about the Vatican? Are you religious?” I knew that Kaz, like most Poles, was Catholic, but I’d never once asked him about what he believed. We’d talked about love, death, fear, and loss, but never about God. It felt strange asking now, after so long.

  “No, not at all. I was an altar boy for a while, which made my mother happy. But I asked too many questions which the father could not answer, so he asked me to leave. That made me happy, since I preferred reading the newspaper on Sunday mornings. I never could take all those Bible stories seriously.”

  “I was an altar boy myself,” I said. “I kind of liked it. The ceremony, being part of something larger than myself, separate from everything else.” I shrugged, embarrassed to admit I liked getting dressed up in white lace.

  “You will have plenty of pomp and ceremony where we are going,” Kaz said. “I’ve been there, to visit an older cousin who became a priest. He worked at Propaganda Fide, teaching students from Africa.”

  “Is he still there?”

  “No, they sent him on a mission to Bulgaria, to evangelize among the members of the Eastern Orthodox Church. He was never heard from again. He was quite happy with his life in Rome, and was distressed at being sent to the Balkans. He was not the evangelizing type.”

  “Quiet and studious, like you?”

  “Yes. We were close. Our families would spend time each summer in the mountains, and we got along well. I was glad when he became a priest, not because I believed in all that nonsense, but because the life suited him. Until they sent him to Bulgaria. There is still resentment toward Catholic missionaries there among the Orthodox, and I am sure he was killed for his efforts.”

  “Dangerous work,” I said. “But our man Corrigan never left Rome. Looks like he mainly did legal work for the Holy See.”

  “He was a scrittore,” Kaz said, heaving a sigh and returning to the present, leafing through pages of the report. “It means ‘writer,’ but is used as a rank for lawyers within the Vatican.”

  “It looks like the typical career of a successful bureaucrat. Good schools, influential relatives, plum assignments, and leaving the tough jobs to others, like your cousin. Except for this,” I said. I handed Kaz a file of letters. “They’re all from British POWs who wrote home about visits from a delegation from the Vatican.”

  Kaz flipped through the letters, scanning them quickly. “They all mention Father Corrigan,” he said. “How helpful he was.”

  “Right. Seems that with the war on, there wasn’t much news on the missionary front, so the Vatican sent out a delegation to tour the prisoner-of-war camps in Italy. Corrigan was part of that delegation, and helped bring letters out to families, and supplied winter clothing to a lot of the POWs who’d been captured in the desert.”

  “Interesting,” Kaz said. “It gives us somewhere to start. Perhaps he picked up some information that was too dangerous for him to possess. Or got mixed up in spy business. We can try to find the rest of the delegation. I wonder if the Germans allowed them to visit prisons in Rome, like the Regina Coeli?”

  “Maybe we can arrange something,” I said quietly. I still didn’t trust everything about this setup.

  “There are no photographs of the body,” Kaz said. “Where was he found?”

  “Outside one of the main doors to Saint Peter’s Basilica,” I said. “His body was found before dawn by one of the Swiss Guards.”

  “Which door?” Kaz asked.

  I looked through the report. “The left, facing the exterior.”

  “Quite interesting,” Kaz said. “The leftmost door to Saint Peter’s is only used for funeral processions. It is called the Door of Death.” He raised an eyebrow, and grinned. “It seems Monsignor Corrigan was indeed found at death’s door.”

  “Odd place to leave a body,” I said.

  “Our killer has a sense of the macabre,” Kaz said. “Or was it coincidence?”

  “There are no coincidences,” I said, remembering what my father drummed into my head. “Only reasons that we haven’t uncovered yet.” Did that hold true for Diana as well? Was there a hidden reason I’d been picked for this job? Was there some thread of a relationship between Corrigan’s murder and Diana being picked up by the Gestapo? If there were, would it lead me to her? Or to the Gestapo? I shook off these useless musings. Dad would have said not to worry about what the future holds until you look it in the eye.

  “Anything else of value in these papers?” Kaz said, pawing through the sheets on the floor.

  “Not that I can find. They’re all secondhand reports, no names mentioned. Except for references to ‘Rudder,’ which sounds like a code name.”

  “Ah,” Kaz said, finding one. “Rudder reports that Commissario Filberto Soletto of the Vatican Gendarmerie Corps had been a regular informer to the OVRA, the Italian Fascist secret police, and now reports to the Gestapo.”

  “Which is why we can’t expect much help from the Vatican police. Soletto has already decided that a Jewish asylum seeker killed Corrigan when he refused to help him. Most of the Gendarmerie are straight arrows, according to Rudder, but Soletto keeps a lid on things, and has powerful allies among the more conservative cardinals.”

  “We will have to find this Rudder as well,” Kaz said. “He is obviously feeding information to the Allies. We could use his help.”

  “Something tells me we’re not going to get much help with this one,” I said. I didn’t like how many powerful men had a stake in this investigation. FDR, Bishop Finch, a crooked Vatican cop, and the cardinals who protected him. That wasn’t even counting the Germans who ringed Vatican City, watching those who entered and left.

  “Hey, Kaz, maybe the Germans saw something. They have to watch the border day and night, right?”

  “Yes. Most of the Vatican is walled, but Saint Peter’s Square is wide open. The Germans painted a white line to mark the border, and I understand they patrol it constantly.”

  “But the locals can go in and out, right?”

  “Certainly,” Kaz said. “Anyone who did not raise suspicion could have walked right by a German guard and killed the monsignor.”

  “And walked out again,” I said.

  “Yes,” Kaz said. “The doors to the basilica are behind large columns; it would be quite difficult to see from the square. But we need to know when he was killed, and nothing here states that. If it was in the evening, then many people would have been leaving the piazza. Late at night, or early morning, I think it’s likely that the guards would have questioned anyone leaving.”

  “Well, it hardly matters. I doubt the Krauts will cooperate with our investigation.”

  “One never knows,” Kaz said. “Perhaps we will find a way to speak with someone at the Regina Coeli. It is on the Tiber River, a quick stroll from the Vatican.”

  “As long as we can stroll out, and back in again,” I said.

  “Excuse me,” a voice said from the doorway. It was an American, tall and lean, with thick blond hair and a weathered look around the eyes, like that of fishermen I had known back home. I hadn’t heard the door open, and wondered how long he’d been standing there. “Either of you guys seen Andy around?”

  “Captain Croft?” Kaz said. “He was in his office a short time ago.”

  “Sorry to interrupt,” he said, and turned to leave. His voice was a deep, mellow baritone, and he seemed familiar.

  “Have we met?” I said, standing. I was sure we had. I got a look at his insignia and saw he was a lieutenant. A US Marine lieutenant, a rare sight in Italy.

  “No, Lieutenant Boyle,” he said, his lower lip jutting out a bit as he looked down at me. “We haven’t. See you later.” With that, he was gone.

  “Who was that?” Kaz asked.

  “Don’t know,” I said. “But he looks so damn familiar. How else would he know my name?”

  “Perhaps you are right, and the walls have ears,” Kaz said.

  “This is supposed to be a secret operation, using the British SOE to smuggle us into
Rome,” I said, throwing myself back into my chair. “So what’s a US Marine lieutenant who knows me by sight doing here?”

  “Another mystery,” Kaz said. “I also wonder why they sent Big Mike here. Captain Croft said he should still be in hospital.”

  “Far as I can tell, it was to tell me in no uncertain terms not to try to spring Diana. They probably figured I’d take the personal approach more seriously. And you know Big Mike—he’d insist he was fine as soon as Sam asked him.”

  “It is a pity we cannot speak directly with Colonel Harding.”

  “We can do the next best thing,” I said. “All we need to do is find a communications unit and send a radio teletype to SHAEF.”

  “Why not ask Captain Croft? He may have the right equipment here; there are radio masts on the villa roof.”

  “I’d rather not,” I said. “Let’s blow this joint.”

  It was a good idea. Too bad the guard at the door ordered us back into the villa. My jeep was nowhere in sight, and there was security at every exit. We were prisoners.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  WE SPENT THE afternoon being turned away from the SOE radio room, Croft’s office, and every door that led out of the villa. Kaz and I went through all the reports again, and again. Nothing new. A directive from Colonel Harding stressed the importance of not violating Vatican neutrality, but what he really meant was not to get caught violating Vatican neutrality. The big worry was that the Germans would use any excuse to occupy Vatican City and take the Pope into protective custody. Meaning he’d be a hostage to the Third Reich.

  I understood all that. It wasn’t going to stop me if I saw a chance in hell of freeing Diana, but that was probably an accurate description of the odds, so I didn’t worry about it. What I didn’t understand was why we were being held incommunicado, and the sudden appearance of the Marine lieutenant. Or what the hell was going to happen next.