Warburg in Rome

by James Carroll

  “Not implications, General,” Warburg said, addressing Clark. “Nothing implicit in what I said. I have put before you an explicit case tying the CIC to Nazis.”

  Clark said, “And tying the Catholic Church to Nazis, no?” Clark turned to Deane. “So what about it, Monsignor? Isn’t the Very Reverend Tardini the one who handles Vatican diplomacy? He’s the man I do business with. Have you spoken to him? If I asked him to come over here, what would he tell me?”

  “I have no idea what he would tell you,” Deane answered calmly, but he knew full well what Tardini would tell Spellman. This Monsignor Deane, how dare he! A violation of sacred Holy See confidentiality! Having denounced Deane, Tardini would turn his rage on Spellman himself. And Deane could kiss his own promotion to bishop goodbye. No ring, no next rung on the ladder. Still, Deane’s calmness was real.

  “Well, Monsignor,” General Clark said, “perhaps Tardini’s the one you should take this up with. Pavelic, he’s a Catholic, isn’t he? The whole goddamn Croatian thing, that’s the Catholic Church, isn’t it?”

  Deane said, “The Vatican has its business here, General. Fair enough.” It surprised Deane how unfazed he felt. This shit was so much bigger than anybody’s being promoted to bishop, himself included. Let Tardini do what Tardini does. He said, “But I’m here as an American, because America is ensnared in this rats’ nest, too. That’s what this whole thing is, a rat line, for getting rats off the ship. Off the continent. Rescuing rats, General. Is that what we fought the war for?”

  With forced detachment Clark leaned forward slightly as if to say, Who the fuck are you? What fucking war did you fight? But he said, “I think we know what we fought the war for, Monsignor. As for the rats’ nest, why don’t you leave that to us?” Clark looked at Mates, a curl at his mouth. “Aren’t you the rat exterminator, General?”

  “Yes, Sir. Selectively.”

  Warburg waited until Mates looked at him, then said, “And how would the American people react to your selections, General?”

  “What are you implying now, Mister?” Clark asked.

  Warburg looked steadily at Clark. “Monsignor Deane is friendly with Henry Luce, General. Mrs. Luce is a fervent Catholic. What do you think readers of Time magazine would make of your rescue of Nazis?”

  Clark snorted. “Rescue of Nazis, no. A first salvo against the Reds, yes. Henry Luce sat in that goddamn chair a month ago, right there.” Clark pointed at one of the chairs that had not been offered to Warburg and Deane. “Luce proposed the very thing that has you so worked up, recruiting the Germans who know Stalin’s weak points. And Luce’s wife? Hell, yes, pious Catholic! She’d take her cue from the Holy Father, and where’s his complaint? Anyway, you think there’s a publisher in America who’d violate Army censorship? Think again, Warburg.”

  Deane heard the sneer in the way Clark pronounced Warburg’s name.

  Still, Warburg stared impassively back at the two officers. It was Mates who flinched slightly. He unbuttoned the flapped breast pocket of his tunic and took out a silk square. He blew his nose—the business of a man covering up his uneasiness. Why, Deane wondered, did Mates seem the one who’d just been thwarted?

  When Deane and Warburg left the Palazzo Margherita, they found that the skies had opened, and the rain was bouncing in its own puddles. They ran to Warburg’s car. Neither spoke as they returned to the Vatican. When the guard at the sovereign edge of St. Peter’s Square peered into the car and saw the red tab at Deane’s clerical collar, he waved them through. Warburg pulled into the square, between the Bernini fountain and the colonnade, and stopped. Deane said, “Jesus, David. Henry Luce? A friend of mine?”

  “I was scrambling, Kevin.”

  “No you weren’t. You expected that, didn’t you? You knew Clark would blow us off. You brought up Luce so that I would get the whole picture.”

  “Well, did you?”

  Deane could not think what to say.

  Warburg grabbed Deane by the arm. “Look, I am as thrown as you are. If there’s a difference between us, Kevin, it’s that I’ve been trusting you. I’ve trusted you from the first day we arrived here. You’ve never trusted me. Why is that?”

  Instead of answering, Deane got out of the car. He’d heard the accusation—Jew hatred—and he was sick and tired of it. Then Warburg got out and crossed over to Deane. Once again he seized the priest’s arm. The rain pounded them. Deane had finally donned the goofy saturno headgear, but only because of the downpour. Warburg was hatless. He had to speak loudly, almost shouting. “Listen to me. With the brush-off from Clark, it boils down to this. The Aussenweg network is beyond us, maybe. And the CIC, too. And who the hell knows what’s hidden in the Vatican catacombs? I’ll tell you what I do know. I know who killed Jocko Lionni, and I need you to help me find him.”

  Two nights before, Warburg had refused to let Marguerite go alone to Santa Maria della Vittoria. It was after ten o’clock when they’d arrived at the church, time enough for Lehmann to have left his note and gone. Marguerite had the key to the donation box from one of the Cistercian sisters, the women who had raised her at Casa dello Spirito Santo. She opened the box, ignored the few coins it held, and withdrew a folded envelope. Warburg followed her across the darkened church to the bank of blue votive candles, which offered light to read by. He stood aside, letting his eyes drift to the marble face in the candles’ violet illumination—an altarpiece statue. A woman, head thrown back, covered by a nun’s cloak. It was news to Warburg that a Catholic saint should be so explicitly in the throes of erotic arousal. Ordinarily he’d have been transfixed by such a sight, but his attention remained on Marguerite, even turned away as she was. He resolutely did not intrude upon the space she’d claimed simply by hunching over what she was reading.

  A few moments later, she folded the note back into its envelope and led the way out of the church. She was silent during the drive back to her enclosed family villa, now the home for girls in trouble. Before leaving Warburg’s car, she turned to him, declaring, “He says nothing about Vukas.”

  “Slobodan Vukas,” Warburg said to Deane now. “A Franciscan friar.”

  “I recognize the name,” Deane said. “He was on the list you gave me.”

  “Yes. He had taken over the Casa dello Spirito Santo. Now he’s gone from there. We thought Lehmann would lead us to him.”

  “‘We’?”

  “Marguerite d’Erasmo and me. She knew Vukas in Croatia. He ran a death camp for children.”

  “A Franciscan priest?”

  “Yes. The real thing. Pavelic’s chaplain. After Lionni on the Via Cassia, he knows he’s a target. He knows that the next attack will be smarter. But Vukas is key to the Road Out—yes, what you called it, the ratline. But there’s a road back in this, too. Vukas runs a group called the Crusaders—the vanguard of the Croatian restoration. Pavelic needs him in Rome, their staging area for the take-back of Yugoslavia. Almost certainly Vukas is holed up in another of the Vatican extraterritorials. How many of those places are there, anyway?”

  “Monasteries, convents, schools, institutes . . . dozens.”

  “I need you to find him, Kevin. I know what you’ll say: it’s too many places. But narrow it down. Suppose he avoids the obvious Croatian institutions. Suppose, instead, he depends on his fellow Franciscans.”

  “Or Franciscan nuns,” Deane offered. The pull he felt from Warburg, suddenly, was like a magnet. But that presumed some metal in himself. He said, “Vukas would feel safer with nuns. Nuns wouldn’t turn away a monk in sandals. Most convents sheltered Jews.”

  “Even Jews?”

  “Do me a favor—spare me the ‘even Jews’ stuff.”

  “The point is, Kevin, once you settle on a few places to look, it might be easy. Vukas has a harelip. He drools, which requires a constant handkerchief. Hard to hide that.”

  Through the rain, so quietly, Deane asked, “What are you after here, David?”

  “Justice, Kevin. At least in this one case.”

&
nbsp; Justice. Deane thought that Warburg could pull such a word out of this thicket of corruption and contradiction and have it seem true. Yet Deane, the contentious friend, was compelled to supply another word. “You mean revenge, David,” he said coldly.

  And Warburg, coldly, declined to reply.

  By now the rain was dripping off the capacious brim of Deane’s hat. It was streaming from Warburg’s matted hair onto his face. The pigeons were gone from the open square, as were the cats, pilgrims, and vendors. The men were alone in the drenching, womb-like piazza. The only witnesses to the monsignor’s moment of decision, now arrived at, were the travertine marbles high on the crown of St. Peter’s façade, the twenty-foot-high Christ, and, flanking him, the eleven loitering Apostles. All the Apostles—lo!—but Judas.

  She had made clear to him her intention that they should remain apart until she’d heard from Philip, which he understood. She needed to sort through her feelings, and he respected that. He had found it possible to let go of his own impulses. But that was before.

  Deane’s thoughts went from Sister Thomas to the unknowing nuns among whom Vukas might have sought shelter. What were the odds that the mother abbess of a convent in Rome would violate the rules of the Vicariate? Religious foundations of women were allowed to admit to residence male externs such as retreatants, chaplains, and spiritual directors if accommodations could be provided outside the cloister. But the mother abbess was required to inform the cardinal vicar of any such admission. The Vicariate’s commission for religious orders had its offices in the warren of rooms at the far end of the corridor off which Deane’s own offices were located, and it turned out to be a simple matter for Deane to consult current records there. He found that of the seven Roman convents that had registered male admissions in the past week, only one was Franciscan. A friar named Bruno Pladic, OFM, identified as a professor emeritus of medieval history at the University of Trieste, took up residence in Santi Tre Vergini two days after Lionni was killed. Pladic—a Slavic name, like Vukas.

  The convent in Testaccio was named for three Christian virgins martyred by Diocletian. It was attached to a crumbling sixth-century basilica, and was itself all but derelict. The ancient building was tucked into a crowded hillside southwest of Aventino, a gritty area where, for most of a century, squatters’ hovels had competed for space with broken-down caravans and with the thrown-together tin huts of Rome’s forgotten transients, including Gypsies. The nuns of Santi Tre Vergini had begun as a contemplative presence, but while caring for their impoverished neighbors, they had slowly become impoverished themselves. The adjacent basilica was a dark horror-house of neglect, haunted by homeless desperadoes. Now the convent was defined by its soup kitchen—and also by the stench of sewage, which seeped from the shantytown above into the rotting walls, fouling the cloister, chapel, and ill-used guest wing with mold. An unlikely place for a distinguished visiting friar.

  Deane was reluctant to approach the convent alone—an American priest all too conspicuous, with the mother abbess likely to be skittish. That was why he’d thought of Sister Thomas. One nun to another, a shot at really learning something. Setting out to explain the urgency of her coming with him, he hoped she would see it. Deane went to the second floor of the Apostolic Palace, to Tardini’s suite of offices, expecting to find Sister Thomas at her desk in the small room from which she supervised the prelate’s communications with his nuncios and legates.

  She was not there. Her assistant was an elderly Italian laywoman, Signora Palladio, a stenographer and file clerk. If most such positions in the Vatican were held by men, the prior exception for the cryptanalyst-nun had required a further exception, since it would not do to have a female, not even a Cambridge DPhil, supervising a male, not even a clerk. Signora Palladio’s winged typewriter table was in an alcove fronting the room in which Sister Thomas worked, the way Deane had seen Thomas’s own table tucked into the corner of Cardinal Maglione’s office the year before.

  The woman knew Monsignor Deane and greeted him warmly. She explained that Sister Thomas had been at work earlier. “But then an officer came to see her. She told me to take my pranzo, my meal. When I returned, she was gone.” The woman paused. “Perhaps she is ill,” she said, with ample concern.

  Deane thought at once of the nun’s thinness, emaciation almost, and felt a rush of worry.

  “Officer?” he asked. “What kind of officer?”

  “British.”

  Philip. Deane did not move. Then, as if he would see Thomas there, he looked past the woman into the office proper. On Thomas’s desk he saw, lying at an angle atop a tidy pile, an unfolded page in the telltale yellow of a cablegram. The nun was discreet with all kinds of communications, no matter how trivial. What prompted her to leave this one exposed? Not illness. He pictured her, startled, pushing back from her desk and hurrying away. Why?

  “Signora,” Deane said, “I’d like to leave a note for Sister.”

  “Sì, Monsignor,” the woman said, and handed a steno pad to Deane. He bent and jotted a few lines.

  He tore the page from the pad. “I’ll just leave it on her desk.” He went from the alcove into Thomas’s office. The woman’s view was blocked. Dropping his page, he picked up the cablegram. Normally he’d never have taken it, but what was normal now? Feigning a cough, he stuffed it into his cassock. With a brisk farewell to Signora Palladio, he left.

  The paper burned at his chest as he made his way back to his office. He closed the door. Leaning at his desk, he smoothed the paper out and saw that it contained digits bunched into perhaps two dozen groups of five. At the top of the page was a mark—the crown, scepter, and unicorn of the British seal, and, in plain text, the heading H.M. Government Communications Headquarters. Between the lines of numbers, someone—not Sister Thomas, whose handwriting Deane knew well—had penciled a string of words, an obvious decoding of the encryption: “Explosion Tuesday—Headquarters British Forces Palestine-Transjordan. Killed on duty—Philip Barnes Morton, Major, Royal Signals, Section IX. Details unavailable . . .”

  Deane stared at the page as if the numbers and letters would rearrange themselves into some other meaning. He sat down. Yes, Philip. But not this. He ran his open hands over the paper, pressing its two creases smooth, as if erasing. Then he picked up the telephone, waited for the operator, and asked to be put through to Sant’Agata, the Vatican residence for consecrated women. There, the portress told him that Sister Thomas was at her Curia office, which Deane knew not to be the case. He could not think what else to do, so he set off.

  Santi Tre Vergini was at the upper limit of a lane that was almost too narrow for Deane’s car. The road was so badly rutted that his driver muttered unhappily as the undercarriage repeatedly banged. Upended pavement stones competed with mire from the recent rains, threatening to trap them. Finally Deane left the car and continued the climb on foot, soiling his shoes with mud. He kept his eyes up and ahead, on the bell tower that marked the place.

  The sun was high in the sky, and played with the tower, momentarily blinding him. The basilica, with its belfry, was on the far side of the compound, with the main church entrance apparently facing a distant street. The church’s roof line was jagged. In places the earthenware tiles were gone, with bare slats exposed, suggesting that the church interior was partially open to the sky. As he approached the nearer convent enclosure where the hill plateaued, he could see an opening in the flaking stucco wall. A half-rotted gate hung at an angle off its post. Because the fractured gate was necessarily ajar, Deane could see that, just inside the close, a man sat on a shaded ledge, hat pulled down on his face. He was dozing. Deane slowed, uncertain. In the crook of the man’s arm was a shotgun. A guard.

  Deane stopped where he was, then backed away. He retreated to an upended crate just out of the guard’s sight line. By stepping onto the crate he was able to look over the convent wall and down into the enclosure. He was peering into one of two courtyards, with a corner of the other yard visible beyond the dividing sin
gle-story structure. The near courtyard was strung with clotheslines, from which only a few articles of clothing hung. Approximating the human form, a brown garment with long sleeves and full-length legs was pinned at the shoulders on one line, hanging like the flayed skin of a martyr. Deane’s old-country father wore such an undergarment—“long handles” he’d called it. On the same line hung a sleeveless undershirt, also male apparel, and a pair of faded gray drawers with fly buttons at the yoke. On another line, carefully arranged in a row and fastened with wooden pins, were a number of white cloths, each one a foot square. Six of them. Deane thought at first they were purificators, the altar linen with which the priest wipes out the chalice, but then it hit him: handkerchiefs. Who would have one undershirt but half a dozen handkerchiefs?

  Marguerite climbed the stairs to the fifth floor of the beaten-down building. She moved quietly, an instinctive caution. And sure enough, sounds of voices coming from within the small attic room alarmed her. She had been told that “Malachi,” the one-word alias of the commander she was meeting, would be alone. She froze four or five steps from the top of the staircase. She heard three male voices. The heated discussion was in Hebrew, a language she could recognize but barely understand. She waited.

  At exactly eleven p.m., the appointed hour, she rapped on the door once, firmly. The voices fell silent. The door was pulled open. She was here to brief them on what Warburg had learned from Deane, and on what she herself had then seen in Testaccio, as the day had faded into night, loitering in and around the basilica of Santi Tre Vergini, with an eye on the adjoining convent. She was still dressed oddly, having pulled together a disguising Romany wardrobe from the stock of clothes left behind by the street women who shared her family villa. Her head was wrapped in a black scarf, knotted to send a slender fall of rough silk to her shoulders. Her layered skirts were broad, bright-patterned, belted with a wide leather strap. She wore a black basque, a fitted bodice that drew in her waist and pushed up her breasts. She stank of musk oil. Inside the half-ruined basilica, she had nicely resembled other women among the squatters who had taken over the place.