Warburg in Rome (7 page)

“Yes, Sir.”

“And get them some of that flour.”

The sergeant turned and barked orders at his crew, the chain of command kicking the dog.

Monsignor Deane spoke briefly to the Italians and moved away toward the hangar, where in one cleared area the C-54 passengers’ luggage was being offloaded. As Warburg moved to follow Deane, the woman half reached out a hand and surprised him by saying in English, “Thank you, Sir.”

“You are welcome, Miss,” he said, struck again by her face. Battered as it was, he saw that she had healed somewhat. The bruising was not fresh. On impulse, as if this were the breakup of a conference on Pennsylvania Avenue, he pulled out his wallet, withdrew a business card, and handed it to her. “If I can help,” he said. She took the card and pocketed it without a word. Without seeing its useless letters and numbers, his office in Washington.

A few minutes later, outside the pedestrian door on the hangar’s far side, Warburg rejoined Deane. The sun had climbed in the sky and was asserting itself, a hot day coming. The rumble of jeeps, small trucks, and animal carts competed to ignore the shrill whistles of numerous MPs. Warburg put his suitcase down beside the priest’s.

“Hey, by the way,” Deane said, “nice move back there with the Red Cross people.”

“You set the pick, Father. Or should I say ‘Monsignor’?” Warburg smiled.

“Pick-and-roll, David. Like a couple of point guards. And why don’t we make it ‘Kevin’? Since you’re not in the club.”

“The club?”

“The Church.”

“What if I’m a convert?”

“Are you?”

Warburg laughed, but also, at the base of his spine, shivered. Convert? “No. No.”

“You still play b-ball?” the priest asked.

Warburg shook his head. “Not in years.” A pair of exceptionally tall men, recognizing each other—a different club. “But you were no point guard.”

“Neither were you. Not bad for a pair of posted forwards, then.”

After a beat of silence, Warburg said, “What did you make of that woman?”

“What about her?”

“Bruises. On her face and neck.”

“Get used to bruises, David.”

Warburg turned to the priest—was there a hint of condescension? But he saw only a matter-of-fact clarity in Deane.

Pushing toward them through the mess of traffic was a large black sedan. Its horn was blaring. “This is me,” Deane said. Fixed to the car’s front bumper were a pair of gold-and-white flags. “You need a lift?”

Warburg shrugged. “I guess my reception committee didn’t show.” In fact, he felt a familiar stab of resentment, the goddamn Army, the goddamn State Department, both primed to ignore the WRB.

“Where are you going?”

“Clark’s headquarters, wherever that is.”

“So you
are
brass. We’ll find it. Hop in.”

The driver, on the other side of a half-shut glass screen, was dressed in a chauffeur’s cap and suede gloves, even in June. They set out along the multilane main road to Rome, but it was so pitted with unrepaired shell holes and so congested that the driver turned off. Soon they were a lone vehicle following a narrow road hugging a meandering stream.

With Warburg ensconced beside him in the back seat, Deane explained that he’d spent four years at the North American College in Rome, earning a doctorate in theology at the Gregorianum, the pontifical university. He loved Italy. He loved Rome. He hated what Mussolini had done to it. Never mind the Krauts.

He fell silent and looked out the window. The fields around them were barren and unplanted—battleground, not farmland. The road also twisted through battered villages of ruined buildings and burnt huts. The faces of villagers lifted at their passing. Those vacant expressions may have been what prompted the priest to open his book. Deftly, he flipped a ribbon, and his lips began to move silently.

After passing yet another battered town, Warburg couldn’t help interrupting him. “The church belfries are all destroyed,” he said. “Every church we’ve passed. The Germans attacked the churches?”

“Just the towers. Because of lookouts and snipers. It’s the first thing that approaching artillery targets. Belfries. Steeples. And not just the Germans. That’s our propaganda. The Allies do it, too.”

“How do you know this?”

“My job has been to keep the archbishop briefed.”

“On the war?”

“The battle for Rome. It was touch and go here for months. After Clark blew up Monte Cassino, the Church was as afraid of the Allies as of the Germans. With good reason, actually. The only destruction you’ll see when we get to the city was caused by our own B-17s.”

An awkward silence settled between them. Deane went back to his breviary. After some moments, though, he lifted his eyes to stare straight ahead. “WRB,” he said.

Warburg did not reply.

“You said WRB.”

“That’s right. War Refugee Board.”

“Morgenthau.”

“Yes. I told you, I’m with the Treasury Department. I’m setting up in Rome.”

“Where?”

“To be determined. A lot to be determined.”

“But the ‘Board’. . . the name is ‘War Refugee,’ but actually your work is about . . .”

What is it with this word, Warburg wondered, that makes people hesitate before using it? He finished Deane’s sentence. “About the Jews. Yes. If we put the word ‘Jew’ in the name, Roosevelt couldn’t possibly have approved it, and Congress would have howled. But Jews are the point.”

“I know what’s happened to Jews.”

“What’s
still
happening, Father.”

“I share your concern, David,” Deane said, but with the air of a man steering away from what he’s thinking. “In fact, you and I have a lot in common. Call it coincidence. You’ve come here for the War Refugee Board. I’ve come for Pontificia Commissione di Assistenza. Catholic Relief Services. Have you heard of us?”

“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.