“Of course.”
“Boils down to the same thing—refugee assistance. Archbishop Spellman provides most of the funds for the Vatican relief agency. We’ve raised millions in the States, a nationwide campaign, still at it. Now that Rome is open, we’re betting the farm. Call it the Belmont Stakes, third race in the Triple Crown. I’m Spellman’s jockey. I’m to be the Commissione’s deputy director.” Something in the way Deane announced this implied it was to be his official role—but perhaps not his only one. “Maybe I can help you.”
“I’d appreciate anything we can do together,” Warburg said, but carefully. He could not put his finger on the source of his unease with this guy. Everything he said carried an echo of the unsaid. Warburg added, “My operation is not off the ground yet.”
“My operation’s been going strong since Emperor Constantine.” A crack, but there was no levity in Deane as he made it. “We’re feeding people across the continent,” he continued. “Every Catholic parish in Europe is a franchise soup kitchen of the Holy See. And we’ve been poised for this moment. With the liberation of Rome, the walking dead will start to climb out of their graves. All the feeding and caring that’s been done up to now is mere prelude. As the liberation line moves north behind Clark’s red-hot rake, you’ll see. Tens of thousands. Hundreds of thousands. Not just Jews.”
Warburg heard the echo of Morgenthau’s D.C. critics: the Nazis are oppressing millions—why single out one group? “Relief is one thing,” Warburg said. “I’m still thinking about rescue. That’s what the R in WRB means to me.”
“What can you do from Rome?”
“More than I can do from Washington.”
“We protected them in Rome,” Deane said. “You’ll see.”
“By ‘them’ you mean Jews? By ‘we’ you mean—the Vatican?”
“No offense, David, but you may not know much about how the Holy See and its dependencies operate. A mark of the Catholic Church is unity.”
“Does that include bishops? I’ve been paying attention to Budapest, waiting to hear some moral instruction from the archbishop there. He seems friendly to Hitler, to put it mildly.”
“We were speaking of Rome.”
“Yes. I’ve been paying attention there, too. Do you know of the Cistercian nunnery in the Via Sicilia?”
“No. There are a thousand convents in Rome. If the Cistercians are helping, so are many others. ‘Nunnery,’ by the way, is a pejorative word. Elizabethan slang for ‘brothel.’”
Warburg ignored the correction. “I know that Jews are coming out of hiding all over Rome today,” he said.
“Including out of Vatican City itself,” Deane said coldly.
“I hadn’t heard that.”
The two stared at each other for a long moment, a thick silence. Finally Warburg said, “Look, I understand that no Jew will have escaped this nightmare without some Catholic having helped. That’s obvious.” He paused before adding, “I’m also aware that far from all Roman Jews were protected. You know of last October’s arrests, when the Vatican said nothing.”
“Yes. Tragic. Deeply tragic. I wish it could have been prevented. But every able-bodied Italian male has been hunted by the Gestapo through these full nine months. Thousands of them are in slave labor camps, too. The terror has been total, David.”
“And also quite particular, Father. We know by now that there are slave labor camps and there are death camps. Not the same thing. The Pope criticizes Allied bombing, but not Nazi horrors.”
“Yes. Knowing the Allies will not take his words out on innocents. Unlike Hitler.” Deane slapped his prayer book shut.
The car slowed, entering another village. This one was different: a throng of people clogged the small fountain square. The sun had climbed in the sky, and the piazza was awash in the full morning glare. On one side, rubble from a collapsed building had been pushed out of the road. Ripped mattresses and broken bits of furniture were strewn about. Deane’s driver leaned on the horn. As the vehicle breasted through, men and women had to hop away from the bumper, and when their eyes took in the Vatican flags, some shook fists. Some faces twisted with curses.
The driver snarled a phrase back toward his passengers, and Deane explained, “A Red town. Communist.”
All at once, the car was adjacent to the fountain, and there the crowd was more compactly gathered. In its midst, balanced on an improvised pit of smoldering coals, was a steaming open kettle. Beside that stood a naked young woman, each of whose arms was being pinned by other women.
Deane craned forward toward the driver and asked his question: What’s going on? But the driver was gape-mouthed and did not reply. He dropped the car out of gear, but it continued to inch forward. Most of the people, several dozen, were too intent on the naked woman to notice the car. A heavy bearded man had shears at the woman’s head, hacking at her hair. Her submissiveness was total. Out of the nearby cauldron rose the fumes of boiling tar, and to the side, a clutch of boys were wrestling with chicken carcasses, stripping them of feathers.
The car was still rolling slowly forward when Deane opened his door. Warburg did the same with his. What the hell—?
When the car stopped, the two men got out and, mirroring each other, moved silently forward. They towered over the people in the square. Their height and the sight of Deane’s clerical garb subdued them. Now the papal flags fixed to the car’s bumper could be seen to fully register. The man with the shears stopped cutting, and the women holding the girl loosened their grip. She slumped to the ground, hiding her nakedness in a crouch. With one hand she covered her scalp.
“Che cosa?” Deane asked.
“Puttana dei tedeschi!” one of the women snarled.
While Deane spoke to her, and then exchanged unpleasant words with the man holding the shears and with others in the crowd, Warburg removed his suit coat and went to the girl. He stooped and draped his coat around her. Coaxing her to her feet, he turned her toward the car. A large bald man blocked his way. “Move!” Warburg said. The man stepped to the side. While the priest continued his rebukes, Warburg led the girl away.
The intimidated chauffeur had not stirred from his seat. Warburg gestured for the girl to get into the back of the car. He followed her in and closed the door. Taking that as his signal, Deane abruptly walked away from the crowd, got in on his side, giving the girl her space, and softly closed his door—no parting rebuke needed. He quietly commanded the driver, “Vada!”
A few minutes later, out in the deserted countryside again, Deane ordered the vehicle stopped. The girl seemed in shock, slumped, as unmoving as marble, eyes shut. Deane, addressing Warburg over her head, said, “They call it pitchcapping here. Goes back to the days of witches. ‘Puttana.’ Slept with some German. ‘Horizontal collaborator.’ I’m afraid there’ll be a lot of payback now. Especially from the Reds.”
Deane got out, went back to the trunk, opened it, and opened his suitcase. He returned with a white garment over his arm. He gently told the girl to get out. When she did, he looked away while handing her the robe. Rousing herself, she donned it, the hem falling to her ankles, the pleated yoke settling on her shoulders. Once unfurled, the linen could be seen to be trimmed with lace and red piping. But for her bloodshot eyes, moist nostrils, and soiled cheeks, she looked all at once less the shorn victim than an uncoiffed angel—a nun in her undergarment.
Moments later they were under way again. The girl was sitting in the front seat. Deane had instructed the driver to learn from her about friends or family who would take her in, either in Rome or on the way there. Warburg had his suit coat back. He was staring into his own reflection in the window. How ludicrous it seemed now, that quotation under glass on his desk back in D.C.: “Never did I feel so strongly the sense of abandonment, powerlessness and loneliness . . .” What did he know of such things? And who was he to have lectured poor Janet about them?
Janet. It was she he was seeing in the window’s reflection—her gorgeous body, languid in the tanning
sun by the swimming pool at her parents’ place. But not naked. She had never been naked with him. He felt a rush of chastened gratitude now, a belated appreciation of her modesty.
“Real love, compared to fantasy”—Dostoyevsky’s line came to Warburg’s mind—“is a harsh and dreadful thing.” That Red Cross woman at the airport, he suddenly thought, she would know that. Her body, too, had struck him.
“The poor girl,” Deane said.
Warburg turned from the window, facing the priest. “Maudlin,” he said.
“What?”
“In the airplane you spoke of Bedlam. The other insane asylum in London is called Maudlin. The one for women. Original name, St. Mary Magdalen. Maud. Maudlin.”
“How the hell do you know that?”
“English major.” In a different context, Warburg might have grinned, making a crack about Russian novels, quoting goddamn Dostoyevsky. Instead he let his eyes drift to the girl in the front seat. Mary Magdalen. But this child was no whore. How unfair his associations were.
Deane thought he saw a question in Warburg’s eyes, and answered it: “My surplice.”
“Your what?”
“A vestment for hearing confessions.” Deane might have laughed. But no. This was too sad.
In any case, though there were questions in Warburg’s mind, the garb cloaking the girl was not one of them.
Marguerite d’Erasmo was walking among the children at the Quirinal gardens. Dozens of children, perhaps hundreds, impossible to count—toddlers clinging to the hands of older siblings, adolescents, boys, girls, androgynous waifs. Empty-eyed and silent, except for the rattle of coughs and sniffles. The children wore the home-woven garments of peasants, tattered aprons, or the soiled plaids of school uniforms. Today the sun would burn, but the youngsters would remove none of their clothing for fear of losing it, because what they wore was all they owned. Mostly they were unshod, and many limped with pain from the sores on their bare feet. Some were sunburned, with flushed faces, and some were pale as toadstools. Some sat blank-faced and unmoving, others clustered around pits in which the nighttime coals smoldered. Boys in twos and threes threw their fingers in games of morra. Boys at play in every circumstance!
How the throng of young ones had come to congregate here was a mystery to Marguerite, but the rest of their stories she knew well—the flight of families from battle-ravaged towns to the south and bombed cities to the north, captured fathers, kidnapped mothers, the hidden children left behind in barns and cones of hay, from which finally they joined the snaking lines of desperate Italians on the march toward Rome. In wartime, children are invisible except to one another, and here their companionship had become a condition of survival. The gardens were a kind of no man’s land into which, until yesterday, adults were all but forbidden admission. Adults were dangerous.
Thoughts of Sisak came unbidden to Marguerite, the trucks roaring around their oval circuit, the dog, the devil priest cupping the heads of toddlers, selecting them. But she had tried to dispel the thoughts with her Memorare—a prayer no longer, but an incantation: O Mother of the Word Incarnate, despise not my petitions. . .
Now that the open-air kitchen had been established in the corner of the gardens nearest the former palace—stock pots sterilizing water for reconstituting the evaporated milk, onto which lumps of bread were being set afloat for ladling into tin cups—Marguerite was permitting herself actually to look at these little ones. Near the serving tables, a crush of youngsters pushed forward, but elsewhere the children seemed indifferent to the food. Awake and aware of the day, they had assembled themselves with apparent purposefulness, but their herding was unthinking. They seemed blind to Marguerite, for whom they made room like sheep dumbly ovaling a shepherdess. Her own senses were far more concentrated than usual, but were tethered, in truth, to the herd at Sisak.
Quirinal, she told herself, you are in Quirinal. When she came upon a girl who had curled her willowy body into a fist, beneath the canopy of a prostrate shrub, Marguerite stooped. The stench of urine rose from the child’s filthy frock, which unaccountably made Marguerite think she knew her. The girl’s hands were at her mouth, where she furiously gnawed at her fingernails. Marguerite gently took the girl’s fingers, thinking as she did of her own father, how it always reassured her to have him reach for her hand.
If Marguerite’s father came to mind now, wasn’t it because he was the one to whom she longed to tell the final story of Carlo, as if then she herself would understand?
Should she have known that such male fierceness, enough to draw her at last, could have been fueled only by the demonic? In Croatia, she thought she’d come to share equally in Carlo’s hatred for Ante Pavelic, the Fascist warlord. Wasn’t she like Carlo in despising the Ustashe crimes, centered on Jasenovac? If only half of what was said about the place was true, yes, it paired Pavelic with Hitler. To say nothing of Sisak. Nothing of the Franciscan.
But now Marguerite understood that what she had felt, even that deadly morning after seeing the children in the gas trucks, was cool compared to the furnace that burned in her red-bearded pirate. Having attached herself to his guerrilla band in the rough borderlands between Yugoslavia and Italy, she saw now that she had been merely a child at play, not knowing it was play for her alone. Until Trieste.
The brigade numbered fifty men. In its boldest strike yet, they had slyly come down out of the hills in pairs or threesomes. A third of them set up ambushes on the roads leading into the seaport city, while the rest lost themselves in its plazas and courtyards, like stevedores or sailors on leave. Carlo had left Marguerite behind in Vranjak, to stay with the other women.
As was typical, he had said nothing of the unit’s project, but a terrible premonition after he’d gone convinced her that disaster awaited them. She had followed, moving through the night along the simple road, understanding that all she had to do was keep going downhill. She arrived in Trieste at dawn, just after the trap was sprung, and Carlo’s contingent of thirty Partisans had captured the entire militia barracks while its fighters were still asleep. Marguerite came upon the scene at the great piazza on the water’s edge just as the gunfire began. The shots echoed off the proud neoclassical palaces that lined three sides of the square, a vestige of the city’s Habsburg grandeur, though by now many of the buildings were in ruins. Assuming a battle, she crouched, moving forward slowly toward the noise.
But she was wrong. There was no battle. As she stepped out of the shadowy arcades, it was readily apparent who was who, because the men of Carlo’s brigade were dressed, as always, in dark peasant gear and the red kerchiefs that were the sole gesture of a uniform, donned just before action commenced so they could recognize one another. Their prisoners, though, were as they had been when asleep—men mostly in their underwear, sleeveless shirts, tattered white drawers, bare feet. Those who were clothed wore the black shirts of the Ustashe—that red-and-white-checkered crest for a shoulder patch. Dozens of prisoners, unresisting, were surrounded by rifle brandishers. They lay face-down on the cobblestones or knelt with their hands clasped above their heads.
Marguerite did not understand what she was seeing, and at first could take in only the sound. The Partisans, her comrades, were firing their weapons unopposed, short machine-gun bursts, single gunshots in quick succession. Red-kerchiefed brigade members were dragging bodies to the water’s edge and throwing them into the harbor. Then Marguerite saw the familiar figure with rampant red hair and beard. Carlo was moving slowly through the knot of prisoners, placing the snout of his pistol at one head after another and firing. Carlo was the group commander. This was his operation. His victims were, to him, the villains of Sisak. “I am stopping it,” he had said to her on the hill above the racecourse. “That is what I am doing.” A massacre.
The Quirinal girl refused to open her eyes. Marguerite coaxed her with soft words, to no avail. Sweat poured off the girl’s face, and Marguerite recognized the fever. “Come, my sweet,” she said, and scooped the child up. She was
perhaps eleven or twelve, weighed next to nothing. She mounted no resistance, was conscious, but was wholly indifferent to her own condition. Marguerite carried her to the medical tent, where equipment, pristine white cloths, gray woolen blankets, and bottles of various fluids were just being unboxed. A nursing sister was in charge, and she welcomed Marguerite. The sister took the girl into her arms, saying, “Now we begin. One child at a time.”
Carlo looked up from the man he had just executed, turned, and saw her. Their eyes locked for the briefest moment. Oddly, he lifted his pistol and aimed it at her. Then he threw his head back and laughed. She turned and ran into the alley from which she’d come.
I fly unto Thee—the verse she’d habitually prayed while running within the walled garden of her childhood home in privileged Parioli. But the Trieste air was wet and murky, this was a quayside slum, and she was no girl at play. She tripped and fell. She got up, running. The alley narrowed. At a fork, she went right. She saw her father’s face, then the wreckage of his automobile, which she had never seen and never stopped seeing. Papà! Papà!
Marguerite’s task in life had been to draw her treasonous parents back from the fires of hell by being good. And so she was. Essential to being good was the recitation of her prayer: I fly unto Thee . . . in Thy mercy hear and answer me. As she fled now, recitation was automatic, yet she knew the prayer was as useless as the magic word of her dreams.
When Carlo caught up to her, he seized her arm, and for the first time hurt her. He threw her against a wall. “Tesoro mio, Tesoro mio,” he began, but she covered his mouth with her hand. In his right fist he held the pistol.
“Treasure? What treasure?” she demanded. “How could I not know this about you? How could I think you are good?”
Warburg in Rome Page 6
