by Bill Mesce
A gust of wind splattered Harry’s trouser legs afresh with rain. He slid his hands into the pockets of his leather flight jacket and stepped into the via, raindrops slapping on the waterproofing stretched over the crushed crown of his officer’s cap. “Would you like to go on, Mr. Hauser? Or is there something more here you want to see?”
Hauser gave the length of the street another perusal and shook his head. The practiced adamancy with which he had requested the visit was long gone. “I just thought I should see where it happened.”
Harry turned and led the way down the street to where he’d left their jeep parked on the Via Del Traforo so as not to block the smaller street. “Watch your step, Congressman. The stones are slippery.”
“I’m not a congressman,” Hauser said sheepishly. “Just an assemblyman.”
Lieutenant Colonel Harry Voss allowed himself a small, caustic smile. “I’ve got faith in you.”
Harry steered the jeep through the Porta San Sebastiano in Rome’s city wall, and turned on to the Appian Way.
Hauser switched hands on the little crank at the top of the windscreen that moved the wipers back and forth across the glass. “I think my hands are starting to cramp,” he said, stiffly flexing his replaced hand. “How do you do this when you’re driving alone?”
“It makes for quite a ride,” Harry said. He pulled the jeep to the side of the road as a convoy of American Army lorries rumbled past toward Rome. “Rest your hands a minute.”
Hauser fidgeted, uncomfortable with the silence. Then, “I understand we’re from the same part of Newark.” The casual tone sounded forced.
“Really.”
“You’re over in the North Ward, right? Seventh Avenue?”
“Seventh Avenue.”
“There’s some wonderful restaurants in that part of town. My family’s eaten at the Vesuvius quite a few times. It’s very good. As good as any place in New York I’d say.”
“I wouldn’t know, Mr. Hauser. I didn’t get to too many of those places.”
“Oh.” The young man sounded chastened. “I just thought, because we’re from the same part of town – ”
“Mr. Hauser, we’re not from the same part of town.”
“Well, we’re not exactly neighbors, but I could walk from my house to yours in – ”
“You could, Mr. Hauser, but you wouldn’t.” Harry at work had the patience of an oyster gestating a pearl. But of late, he could find little tolerance for much else. Curmudgeon, he had been chiding himself more and more. “Your people are over in the Forest Hills section, in those big houses on Lake Street overlooking the park. My people are jammed in walk–ups and use the public baths. You may come over and eat in the nice restaurants, shake hands with Jo DiMaggio when he stops by, but you don’t take a walk over to the Ward.”
Hauser’s head bowed. “I didn’t pick my family, Colonel.”
Harry steered the jeep back onto the road. “I didn’t pick mine either, Congressman.”
*
The Appian Way forks not far from the walls of old Rome. There is a church at the fork, marking the spot where the crucified Christ supposedly appeared to St. Peter who asked the apparition, “Lord, where are you going?” Harry took the right fork, the Via Ardeantina, and a few minutes later pulled off the Imperial road into a gravelled car park. Harry turned off the engine and reached into the back of the jeep for a Coleman lantern.
Hauser was still, looking out through the runnels of water at the low, brush–covered slopes surrounding the car park. At the head of the gravelled space, spread about in an arc, were three cave entrances leading into the hill.
“Are you ready, Congressman?”
“Please stop calling me that.”
Harry stepped out into the rain and headed for the left–hand cave. He stopped, half–way between the jeep and the hill, and looked back. Hauser was still in the jeep. Harry waited. Slowly, the umbrella emerged first, blossomed, then Hauser came out underneath. At each of the cave openings were flowered wreaths, crosses large and small, some of wood, some of folded palm fronds. Hauser looked toward the dark maws – again the little boy, this time afraid of the dark – then followed Harry slowly toward the left–most entrance.
They paused in the archway of the cave mouth while Harry struck a match for the Coleman and Hauser shook the rain from his umbrella. The young man took a deep draught of the dank air, his nose wrinkling unpleasantly.
“Was this one of the catacombs you hear about?” Hauser asked.
“There’s some nearby but this was a mine. They dug for something used to make concrete.”
The Coleman hissed to life, and, in the girdling circle of light, they could see more wreaths and crosses along the walls of the cave, and other leavings as well. Hauser moved closer to one of the cave walls, yet held himself at a distance, as if concerned something along the dusty wall might reach out to touch him. Harry brought the lantern closer and held it high.
Along with the flowers and crosses were prayer cards, rosaries, holy medals, flickering votive candles. There a pipe; there a favored scarf; a set of keys; a weathered cap; a pair of wire–rimmed reading spectacles. Letters – messages dedicated not to the living but to the dead – were tucked in crevices and ledges. There were photographs: some of people alone, some with family, all from joyous days – a family picnicking under a vine–laced arbor, a man and woman in the shabby stateliness of a poor couple’s wedding day, a beaming gentleman proudly holding aloft the pudgy form of a squalling infant. And along the cave walls, where hard, flat stone showed through the dust, messages in paint and chalk were awkwardly scrawled across the uneven surface.
Hauser removed his homburg and nodded at the writings. “What’re those?”
“‘We miss you, Father;’ ‘Dear God, look kindly on my beloved son’… If you’re going to canvass votes in the North Ward, you really should learn some Italian,” Harry said dryly.
Hauser’s head bowed, shook from side to side. “How did they decide…how many?” he asked, almost a mumble lost in the collar of his trench coat.
“I understand there was quite a bit of haggling,” Harry said. “Right after the attack, some of the Germans in command wanted to level the whole Via Rasella. Cooler heads prevailed. In the end, they decided ten for each German soldier that died in the attack was…’appropriate.’ Three–hundred and thirty–five.”
“How did they pick them?”
“The Germans had some people in custody. They told the Italian authorities they had to supply the rest. They cleared out the jails. People who were doing time: big crimes, little crimes. People who were under arrest. Jews.”
Hauser looked up, frowning. “You said 335? How does that work out ten for each?”
“The kind of slip–up people make when they do things in a rush. They accidentally took five too many. Just one of those things.” Harry headed further into the cave. Hauser followed. Their footsteps made soft padded sounds in the powder–covered floor. “The Germans tied their hands behind their backs, loaded them on trucks, brought them out to where we parked. They brought them in here five at a time.”
As they proceeded deeper into the cave, Harry noticed that Hauser seemed to be moving slower, almost canted backward as if expecting an attack to come out of the darkness ahead. The tunnel ended 120 meters from the entrance in an intersection with another tunnel.
“Here,” Harry said and they stopped. “Five at a time. They had them kneel, then five members of the SD stood behind them and shot them in the head. Then another five, and another five, until they were done. They let them pile up, and when the pile got too big to deal with, they moved over there and started another pile. When they were finished, they set explosives to close off the cross–tunnels and the entrances.” Harry gave a finalizing shrug.
“Where are they now? The bodies, I mean.”
“When we took Rome, we were asked to open the caves. The bodies were in pretty bad shape by then; it’d been three months. A lot of them were
coming apart. Impossible for next of kin to make an ID. There’s a group of Italian doctors that’ve been trying to put the bodies back together since July, identify as many as they can. When they’re done, the word is they’ll build some kind of mausoleum in here; inter the bodies together.”
Hauser took a few steps to where one of the piles of corpses presumably had amassed, near the edge of the Coleman’s circle of light. He reached up and began massaging a point on his forehead.
“All right, Mr. Hauser,” Harry said. “Now you can go home and stand up in front of the state assembly and say you’ve been to the Via Rasella and to the Ardeatine Caves. Not that this has much to do with the business conducted by the New Jersey State Assembly, but it’ll let the people of the North Ward know that what they care about, you care about. And maybe you’ll end up their congressman after all. Can we go now?”
Hauser nodded feebly.
Harry escorted him back down the dark tunnel, past the reliquary of mementos and remembrances, back into the rain and to the jeep. Harry lit himself a Lucky Strike and offered the pack to Hauser who shook his head no. Harry reached into the glove box and drew out a small flask. Again, Hauser shook his head no.
“Take a sip. It’s grapa. A fruit brandy. That’ll really impress the folks back home.”
Hauser flashed a bitter look in Harry’s direction, then took a deep draught from the flask. “I tried to enlist,” Hauser said quietly. “Right after Pearl Harbor. I was turned down. They said my work was too important to the war effort.”
Harry started the engine.
“I’m a manager in my father’s factory,” Hauser continued. “I think he was the one who went to the draft board and told them…” Hauser sighed sorrowfully. “What could I do?”
Harry shifted the jeep into gear. “I didn’t say a word, Congressman. Hell, I’d do the same for my kids.”
*
Harry dropped Hauser at his hotel, then drove to the Hotel Flora at the head of the Via Veneto where the Americans had set up a number of administrative offices and billets in apartments previously occupied by the German Commandant of Rome and his staff. The endless rain had provided an unchanging vespertine cast throughout the day, but Harry guessed the hour to be nearing evening mess as most of the offices were closed and dark.
Though a lieutenant colonel’s silver oak leaves brought with them certain perquisites – and in an establishment as comfortable as the Flora, the niceties could be quite nice indeed – Harry had foregone the usual privileges and chosen a smallish room for his office, something off the main corridor and ignored. When he’d arrived in Rome five months earlier, the room had contained a scuffed wooden desk, creaking chair, and several file cabinets whose drawers clanged emptily. The room was now crowded with paper: filled file cabinets, stacks of files atop the cabinets, covering his desk, piled on the floor. They were reports, depositions, correspondence, interrogatories, transcriptions, forms, flimsies, logbooks, date books, note books, agendae, memorandae, diaries, sheaves of foolscap filled with hand–written notes. The writing, printing, and typing were in English, Italian, and German. Some items carried the imprimatur of the American Embassy, some of the British consul. There were letterheads from Mark Clark’s American Fifth Army, the British Eighth Army, the German Fourteenth Army which had occupied Rome, the Rome offices of the German SS and their police arm the SD, the Gestapo – whose headquarters had been just down the via at the Hotel Excelsior – and any number of Italian civil and military authorities. The sheer mass of it seemed to intimidate Harry’s colleagues, both junior and senior, and that was just fine with him. Their trepidation allowed him to continue to compile notes and other bits of datum in his own way, on his own schedule, with only an occasional bothering information request to answer.
As he flicked on his office light he immediately saw a new piece of paper appended to the mass: an envelope of weighty bond paper, almost iridescent in its whiteness, sealed with an oblong of red wax looking like a clot of dried blood, set square atop his littered blotter. He opened the envelope, impressed at its gold leaf lining. There was a small square of paper inside, of the same quality bond as the envelope, folded once neatly in half. It was a simple note, addressed to him requesting his appearance “at his earliest convenience” at an address he recognized as being a short drive from the Flora, near the center of the city by the Pantheon and just off the Piazzo Rotondo. There was no signature, no letterhead, no return address on the envelope. Nonetheless, he tucked the note in his jacket pocket and bustled off to his jeep.
What there was which had intrigued him, and compelled him to immediately hurry from his office, was a ghostly watermark in the shape of the papal seal that had appeared when he brought the note up to the desk lamp.
*
Curtains were drawn across the display windows and door of the shop, and no light showed round their edges. Huddled in the shallow doorway out of the rain, Harry checked the note again. Tentatively, he rapped on the glass of the door.
With the tinkle of an entry bell, it opened almost immediately. “Shopkeep” was a demeaning description for the gray–haired gentleman who opened the door. Small but proportionate, almost delicately built and featured like a finely–crafted porcelain doll, he was immaculately composed in a tailored suit, his gray crown brilliantined and sharply parted.
“I’m sorry,” Harry said in Italian. He held up the note. “I know you look closed, but I was sent this message – ”
“Ah, yes,” the elderly fellow said, instantly ushering Harry inside with a gracious sweep of his arm, and a shallow bow. “You are here for His Eminence. May I take your hat?”
Harry shook the rain off his cap. “No thanks.”
“Please to follow me then.”
The front room of the shop was unlit but Harry saw identifiable shadows: a tailor’s modeling form, in the corner a table–top sewing machine. In the curtained display windows he could make out robed shapes.
The old gentleman led him down a short, dark hall and stood away from a lit doorway allowing Harry to enter first.
Harry recognized it as a fitting room, but a rather posh one, at least in his eyes. After all, he had never seen anyone fitted any place but standing on a milk crate at the counter of the neighborhood tailor shop back home. The room was paneled, carpeted, with a curtained alcove for wardrobe changing, and a model’s stand set in a semi–circle of three mirrors. There were also two amply cushioned chairs set round a small mahogany table.
“Colonel Voss!” the Cardinal hailed from atop the model’s stand. “Good evening.”
“Good evening.”
In the flow of his cassock with its red piping, the Cardinal cut a slim, fluted figure. Slight he was, but his straight–backed form seemed hardly fragile. His high–cheeked, long face held a sepulchral seriousness, even when it opened – only ever slightly – in a smile.
“Though we’ve never been formally introduced,” the Cardinal said, his voice feathery soft, “permit me to say it is a pleasure to see you again, Colonel.”
“Ah!” the tailor – for Harry now understood that was what the old gentleman was – brightened with admiration toward Harry. “You are an acquaintance of His Eminence?”
“We’ve passed each other in the halls,” Harry said.
The Cardinal gestured toward one of the chairs with a long–fingered hand. “Please sit. It is the end of the day.” The Cardinal made a show of looking down his long nose toward Harry’s boots with their edging of Ardeatine mud. “I’m sure you’re tired.”
Harry nodded a thanks and took a seat. He looked for something to do with his cap and set it on the floor by his chair.
“It’s a frightful day, yes?” the Cardinal said. “I know some people enjoy the rain. They find it soothing. I’m afraid all it does for me is make me ache. And I can’t seem to rid myself of the chill. You as well? The maestro can provide you with something if you’d like.”
The tailor stepped forward, bowing toward Harry like a wai
ter announcing the plate du jour. “We have coffee – American, not ersatz – and tea – British.”
“Don’t be sparing,” the Cardinal admonished the tailor, then turned to Harry: “The maestro also has a terribly good cognac he hasn’t mentioned. A perfect antidote.”
“Antidote?” Harry asked. “For the chill?”
There came the Cardinal’s small, unwarming smile. “Age, my dear colonel.”
“Nothing for me, thanks.”
“Tea as usual, Eminence?”
“Grazzi, maestro. And perhaps a nibble.”
The tailor nodded agreeably and withdrew.
“I must compliment you on your Italian!” the Cardinal said. “Where did you learn?”
“I grew up in an Italian neighborhood back home. It was a necessity.”
The older man nodded understandingly. “Ah, yes. I detect an accent. The south?”
“Most of the people I lived with were from the Campania area.” Harry cleared his throat and shifted uncomfortably in his seat. “Sir, I’m afraid I don’t know what the protocol is for a proper address. I think the old fellow said, ‘Eminence?’”
The small, meaningless smile again. “I’ll strike a bargain. You can refer to me as ‘Cardinal’ and not kiss my ring; I’ll call you Colonel and not salute.”
“Agreed,” Harry responded with a smile of his own.
The tailor returned carrying a silver tray which he set on the table. On the tray were the appurtenances for tea and a plate of biscotti.
“Colonel, I appreciate you meeting me like this. It is one thing to observe the proper protocols, but sometimes the officiousness of a formal office visit…” He shook his head. “Oppressive, I find, don’t you? Phones ring, people interrupt, then it’s time for the next appointment. The maestro was kind enough to stay late and permit us this opportunity to talk at leisure. Again, mille grazzi.”
