“Jane,” she whispered.
“Jane what?” Deane was not breathing.
“Jane Storrow.”
Silence.
When she spoke now, her voice was the whisper of a whisper: “Why do you ask me that?”
Deane shook himself, thinking, the word “seduce” is from the Latin for “to lead apart.” In a pointed return to propriety, he said, “Sister, you were right to come here. Dangers abound. You must stay in touch with me. Now more than ever. We must meet.”
“No. No. I must collect myself.” She pulled back fully into the shadow. But it rang like a verdict when she said, “I will wait until I hear from Philip. I cannot see you now.” He heard the swift rustle of fabric as she touched her fingers to her head, shoulders, and breast. When she then said, “Bless me, Father,” it was in farewell.
Despite his disappointment at the moment, Deane by now was relieved that she’d put him off. He could engineer but one runaway train at a time. The priest speaks, and lo! Who but Christ obeys? With an unselfconscious and habitual grace, Deane bent from the waist to bow and kiss the altar. He turned to face the people, the dozens of old ladies, Roman stragglers, tourists, pilgrims, American soldiers, the random collection that had made its way into the Gregorian Chapel of St. Peter’s Basilica, one of the numerous side chapels that filled niches in the vast church.
As he neatly swiveled on his heels, bringing the congregation into his awareness, his unmoored imagination kicked up the grainy old movie of some deranged worshiper rising in slow motion to greet him from the pew with the burst of a Thompson submachine gun, cutting him down in the moment of his sacramental glory—kissing him off. It was a perverse fantasy, one that had teased him periodically since he was a young priest at the altar of Good Shepherd Parish on the northern tip of gangster-ridden Manhattan. But now, in a flash of imagination, he saw a familiar face on the figure holding the gun—Roberto Lehmann, come back to life to finish him off. No. He shook the fantasy away.
“Dominus vobiscum,” he said, spreading his arms. The aged acolyte kneeling below him muttered the rote reply, “Et cum spiritu tuo.” As if he’d known to look, Deane’s eyes went, like the beam of scanning radar, to the figure standing beside the stout marble column in the rear of the relatively small space—not a machine gunner, not Lehmann, but Warburg.
Warburg waited by the column, and after the Mass, Deane found him. Deane had removed his silk vestments and was now cloaked in his red-trimmed soutane and the cappa. He had his breviary under his arm, the obligatory saturno in his hand. Warburg was wearing a tan raincoat and carrying his fedora. It had struck him, as he removed his hat upon entering St. Peter’s, that the Christian custom of male bareheadedness in church had almost surely evolved from the rejection of Jewish modes.
The men shook hands warmly, as if all were well between them. Using the basilica’s hush as a reason not to speak, they walked to the center of the five great portals leading to the exit. Outdoors, Warburg put his hat on, Deane did not. Each man pulled his garment close against the damp wind. Descending the stairs into the great Bernini piazza, Warburg came right to the point. “I’ve been waiting to hear from you, Kevin. You’ve put me off half a dozen times.”
“Perhaps I’ve been waiting for you to come to Mass.”
Warburg refused the banter. He said, “I know about Father Lehmann’s death.”
“Yes. Terrible. People here are quite upset.”
“Really?”
They crossed into the square proper, heading toward Cleopatra’s Needle. Despite the threat of full-blown rain, pilgrims were arriving, vendors were unfolding their kits, stray cats were looking for legs to brush against, and pigeons were wheeling in the air.
“Yes, really.”
“I’ve come here, Kevin, because Lehmann was the source of the material I gave you. I’ve been waiting for you to identify those bastards. Now that Lehmann’s dead, I can’t wait any longer.”
“You got that stuff from Lehmann?” Deane was genuinely surprised. “I assumed Haganah or something.”
“Not that Lehmann knew he was giving it to me,” Warburg said. “There are tunnels inside tunnels here, but I didn’t expect to be shunted aside by you.”
“David, I don’t know what you imagine Vatican City is like, but if there are signs attached to the statuary, they decidedly do not read ‘This way to the hidden Nazis.’”
“Well, Lehmann’s death makes the point, wouldn’t you say?”
“What point?”
“He went off the road at the same spot as Lionni’s car, the wreckage of which was still down there.”
“Lionni’s car?”
“You know about Jocko.”
“Of course I do. But what are you saying?”
“The wreckage of the car Jocko died in was still in the ravine. Lehmann’s car landed on it.”
“Good God, David. The papal gendarme’s report said nothing about that. It says only that he went off the mountain road, an accident, drunk.”
“Which, despite being an account offered by the Holy See, is not true. Lehmann’s death was no more an accident than Jocko’s was. Surely you see that.”
“But Lionni’s was an accident.”
Warburg shook his head.
“Christ,” Deane said. He shuddered. “I’m sorry about Jocko Lionni. I admired him. You know that. He was a hero. But Father Lehmann, I never liked him. He was something of a snake. And I knew he was up to his eyeballs in the Aussenweg thing.”
“Obviously so, since he made a point of it with where he died. He chose the place.”
“If they know that in the Vatican,” Deane said, “doors are slamming on all three floors of the pontifical household, drawers being shut, safes locked, cabinets sealed. Like a diving submarine. Get ready for the magnum silentium.”
“In Jocko’s case it was not suicide. It was murder.” Warburg remembered Marguerite’s refusal of that word, preferring “combat.” But “murder” made it more likely Deane would help. “Kevin,” Warburg said, “maybe now you’ll work with me. Or are you in the diving submarine too?”
“Look, I carried what you gave me as far as I could. The names, photos, everything.”
“You were going to match those names and photos with the new identities.”
“But this is more than a Jewish concern,” Deane said. “I’ve had to look at it more broadly than you.”
“What the hell does that mean?”
“It means that crimes against the Jews are not to be adjudicated only by Jews. Enraged Jewish soldiers in the British Army have been assassinating German POWs. This Haganah business is assassination, too, but in cold blood. Blatant revenge. Emotional responses are one thing; elaborate plotting is another. I won’t be part of that. If there are men at large who oversaw the death camps, then they should be arrested. There are procedures in place for tracking fugitive war criminals, and there is a tribunal, under proper authority, for bringing them to trial.”
“I know that. What do you think I’m searching for if not ‘proper authority’? Goddammit, proper authority, doing its proper duty, is exactly what I want.”
Deane said, “I already took what you gave me to American officials.”
Warburg channeled his surprise into a single word, “Who?”
“General Mates.”
“Fuck!”
“What do you mean, fuck? The CIC is all about catching these bastards. That’s what they do.”
“Don’t be a fool, Kevin. The CIC is all about the next war, not the last one.”
“Hold on, David. I learned from Vatican sources that CIC-Vienna had Ante Pavelic in detention in Salzburg and then let him slip away, disguised as a priest. An outrage, and I felt it as a Catholic because the archbishop of Salzburg was complicit. When I told Mates about it, he hit the ceiling. Mates was more outraged than I was. Enraged at the incompetence in Vienna of his own CIC, suckers for a fake priest. I saw his rage for myself.”
“You saw what he showed you.
The man is a congenital liar.”
“I doubt that.”
“The CIC is not incompetent. It’s corrupt.”
Deane held his ground. “I know Mates well.”
Warburg nodded. “Right. In confession with you that day. He tells you all his secrets.”
“He worked for us on that Habsburg thing, trying to generate grassroots support for the archduke.”
“Where?”
“Vienna, mainly. Catholic clergy.”
“And Zagreb?” Warburg asked. “Through Croatian clergy?”
“Yes.”
“Nazis, all of them.” Warburg heard the anger in his own voice, tried to neutralize it. “You saw the names I gave you. Mostly Croatians. Those men are Pavelic’s inner circle, sheltered in Vatican dependencies all over Rome, right now. You saw that! And of course I should have seen this, too: General Mates is their protector. Pavelic is Mates’s ace to Tito’s king. The Ustashe wins the pot. A Catholic counterweight to Bolsheviks. The restoration fantasy resurrected, in cahoots with Nazis, and the Vatican is as complicit now as it was a year ago. Hell, maybe including you.”
“No.”
“Spellman?”
“Spellman knows nothing. He wouldn’t know the Balkans from the Baltics.” Deane stopped.
Warburg read the priest’s sudden unease. Deane’s future was tied to Spellman. It would not do to display disdain for his patron. And, sure enough, Warburg heard the defensive note in what Deane said then: “But why would Spellman know anything about the Croatians? They were a sideshow during the war, and still are. Who in the States has ever heard of Croatia?”
Warburg nodded. “So General Mates needed a Vatican partner who was up to speed on darlings like Pavelic, somebody who would be, how shall I put it, less squeamish than you. Lehmann, obviously.”
“In fact, I was the one to tell Mates about Lehmann, last year.”
“In that confessional.”
“Yes. General Mates checked him out. He came back to me saying Lehmann was clean.”
“And?” Warburg poked Deane, not totally without friendliness. “Do the damn arithmetic, Kevin. You knew for certain that Lehmann wasn’t clean. Mates all but announced the thing to you. He’d recruited Lehmann somehow. Maybe he offered to help with Aussenweg, but for his own reasons. Perhaps blackmail.” Warburg stopped. Blackmail about Marguerite? But she’d come late to Lehmann’s story.
“What blackmail?”
“Let’s think out loud,” Warburg said, shifting away from Marguerite. “The U.S. Treasury Department is tracking Nazi loot. I see the reports. At the very end, millions went from Berlin’s Reichsbank to various Swiss banks, several accounts held by entities in Rome, including something called Santa Maria dell’Anima.”
“The German church.”
“Lehmann’s church, a simple funnel. Money from Berlin to the Holy See.”
“With Lehmann as the teller at the window? Jesus.”
Warburg said, “Mates would have had to keep all that from you because you’d have blown the whistle on it. Right?”
“In fact, I did blow the whistle once. There was a stash of Croatian gold in that building over there.” Deane pointed at Santa Marta. “Tens of millions. I reported it, and the gold disappeared.”
“Disappeared from you,” Warburg said. “They just put it someplace else. Good chance General Mates knew about it. Probably knew that you’d done your duty. Which meant that, for his purposes, he couldn’t trust you. Not like he could trust Lehmann. After that, Mates had to maintain his distance from you.”
“He did. I wondered about that.”
“And after Lionni’s death, Mates would have realized there were new players in the game.”
“Zionists.”
“Jews, Kevin. Jews. From Mates’s point of view, dogs in the manger, messing everything up, since everything depended on the Nazi killers going free. That’s the deal Mates has going—the Austria–Argentina Express, tickets punched to give Pavelic a leg up in Zagreb. And a fresh start for Germans to help build the anti-Communist bulwark. All of it suddenly in jeopardy. After Lionni’s death, Mates would have pressed Lehmann. You assume it was Nazis who gave Lehmann reason to drive off that cliff. It might have been Americans.”
Deane felt like a mulish pupil unable to keep up with the lesson. Sister Thomas had pushed such questions at him, but this Jew had just dragged the monster out into the light where even a dunce like him could see the thing clear.
Wait a minute. Why “this Jew”?
A brisk wind whipped across the plaza and tore at Deane’s cape. He pulled it closer around him. His eyes went to the cross atop the massive Egyptian obelisk. Jesus.
“David.” Deane spoke carefully, each word a step in a minefield. “I have to ask you. Does your contempt for General Mates start with the fact that he’s working with the British against Zionism?”
“Mates told you that?”
“Yes.”
“To discredit me,” Warburg said. “And you believed him.”
“He told me to be wary of you.”
“And you have been.”
“But is it true?”
“Does it discredit me? My trying to get Jewish DPs to Palestine? Are we back to that? The Church’s insistence on the Wandering Jew?”
“Not my insistence,” Deane said, yet he himself had just produced a visceral “this Jew.”
Warburg said, “You make assumptions, Kevin, without knowing it. I guess we all do.”
“Not an assumption now, David, but a question. What do we do with this? We both see it: Americans helping the commandant of Treblinka to escape. The Gestapo chief of Lyon. The others on that list. That’s not our America.”
“And a Church supporting Pavelic—”
“—is not my Church.”
“‘Procedures in place,’ you said. ‘Proper authority.’”
“Yes.”
“General Clark,” Warburg said. That simply.
“All right,” Deane answered, but uncertainly. “And how do we get to Clark?”
“By going to his office.”
Deane stared at Warburg.
Warburg said, “Right now.”
It took Deane a moment to realize that Warburg was dead serious—and dead right. Deane nodded. “Fast break,” he said.
Tugging their garments, they crossed out of St. Peter’s Square, out of Vatican City, to Warburg’s car on Via della Conciliazione, halfway to the Tiber. They drove to the Palazzo Margherita on Via Veneto, the grand building now commonly referred to, even by Romans, as Sede, for headquarters. They arrived just as the khaki-clad enlisted clerks and junior officers were squaring up the folders for the in-boxes of their superiors.
The corridors were crowded with self-important Americans in uniform. Warburg led Deane up the stairs to the second floor, to the palatial office of General Mark Clark, who, at war’s end, had been given his fourth star and named commander of Allied forces in Italy. General Clark’s executive officer greeted them. The exec, a colonel, knew Warburg, but it was clearly the Vatican official—the cape and red piping, the Roman priest’s hat he was carrying—that got his attention. The colonel promised to show them into the general’s office as soon as Clark’s daily brief was finished.
“Daily brief?” Warburg asked. “Who briefs the general?”
The colonel answered only with a stare, which the stolid Warburg returned. What, Deane wondered, had Warburg just asked? Who cares who briefs the general?
Deane and Warburg sat on a hard bench against the wall. Twenty minutes later, they were ushered in.
Clark’s handsomeness was marred by dramatically protruding ears, his gravitas undercut by youth—he was the youngest full general in the U.S. Army. But there was steel in the man, as the Germans knew, and as his own troops could not forget. He had unflinchingly ordered the reduction to rubble of the sixth-century Abbey of Monte Cassino, where Saint Benedict had invented Western monasticism. He had ordered minefields crossed, knowing the mines w
ould be cleared by his own dead. General Clark did not stand when the two men entered his office, made no effort to look pleased, and did not invite them to sit. Nor did Clark flinch as he listened to them from across the minefield of his desk.
No one else was present. Warburg did most of the talking. Deane was impressed as he listened to the summary of what they’d come to, and he reminded himself that Warburg was a trained lawyer. This morning he was the prosecuting attorney.
Warburg’s charges built to the climactic indictment of Clark’s own Counter-Intelligence Corps, acting—no doubt without authorization—to cooperate with Croatian Fascists, facilitating the escape to Argentina and beyond of some of the most sought-after Nazis. Indeed, the CIC had already allowed the release from Allied custody of the Ustashe commander Ante Pavelic, one of the worst war criminals. That Warburg did not refer by name to General Mates struck Deane as odd, but then he realized that the note of impersonality in his blistering of the CIC was essential. To maintain his damning objectivity, Warburg had to keep a distance from his own loathing.
When Warburg had nothing further to add, Clark sat silently for a long moment, then leaned close to his desk intercom. He pushed the button, but still said nothing. A door behind him opened, a door hidden until then in the panel molding and leading in from a small side office. General Mates strode through.
Mulish Deane suddenly understood Warburg’s question about the daily brief. They had interrupted the intelligence officer’s morning report. Of course it would be Mates. Warburg had foreseen this.
Clark said, “I believe you both know General Mates.”
Neither Warburg nor Deane spoke.
Clark looked up at Mates. “General?”
“Sir, the one point of fact in the nonsense you just heard has to do with the escape from detention of Ante Pavelic. CIC-Vienna bungled that. I investigated, found malfeasance—gross negligence—and have initiated court-martial proceedings to punish the responsible personnel. Pavelic is being hunted as we speak, and I am sure we will capture him. Otherwise, what you heard is a fairy tale. Mr. Warburg has ties to the Haganah, which obviously has its own agenda here. Apparently he has enchanted Monsignor Deane with these fantasies. I have consulted with Vatican officials, and they would be as appalled as I by the implications of these charges.”
Warburg in Rome Page 34
