The Small Boat of Great Sorrows

by Dan Fesperman

  Why, then, had Fordham agreed to venture back to that era when the city had been exhausted, creaking along on pushcarts and horse-drawn cabs in a medieval gloom of hunger and want? The lure certainly hadn’t been the woman who had telephoned to make the request. Janet something or other, supposedly with the war crimes tribunal. She’d been friendly enough, and her bona fides checked out. But something in her manner had carried the unmistakable whiff of the Agency, or some similar organization.

  The tribunal was only the latest outfit seeking to tap his memory. Earlier supplicants had been nameless men in suits, still trying to tidy up after so much sloppiness. They’d knocked at his door, said little, then left with curt nods when he politely declined. A later one had posed as a journalist—a clever effort, but no, thank you. Another had approached him at a café, unannounced, with the bluster and bonhomie of a long-forgotten acquaintance. “Just happened to be on vacation, old boy, so imagine bumping into you here. Let’s talk about old times, shall we?” No sale for that one, either. Fordham had learned the value and safety of silence as well as anyone. After all these years, why give them reason to move against you?

  He would have said no this time, too, until he’d heard the name that finally flushed him: Petric.

  Could there possibly be a connection? And in such an unlikely quarter as the war crimes tribunal? He hadn’t spoken their language in years, and for all he knew there were thousands of Bosnians named Petric. But he doubted it, and for the briefest of moments as he scanned the sidewalks below he saw not the shoppers with their strollers and motorbikes but wispy visions of that other time: thin, grimy boys in dark shorts siphoning gasoline from his motor-pool jeep, hunched old men peddling rerolled cigarettes at the curb, and, yes, the raven-haired prostitutes in all their rumpled glory, offering a half hour of tenderness for a pittance of lire or U.S. Army scrip. For a little extra they would even accompany you afterward on a stroll, arm in arm through the Borghese, where giggling boys by the duck pond climbed trees to toss pebbles at the GIs and their dates.

  The shadow that inevitably fell on such memories was a hunched Balkan figure disappearing around a corner, a sharpened, underfed face with dark eyes, a face that could read your deepest ambitions and play them to the greatest possible advantage.

  “Signor,” a woman’s voice said, returning Fordham to the here and now. It was his housekeeper, Maria. “Your guests have arrived.”

  He turned from the sunlight and stepped indoors, where the plaster walls always seemed to retain their midwinter chill. “Yes,” he said with resignation. “Buzz them up.”

  A maid met Vlado and Pine at the door when they reached the fourth floor. Signor Fordham had only recently completed his nap, she informed them gravely, although the man who emerged around the corner looked far from groggy or ill prepared. He regarded them warily, his gaze lingering a shade too long on Vlado. Then he advanced in a courtly stroll, hand outstretched but quavering slightly, as if shaken by what he’d just seen. China blue eyes shimmered. A full head of white hair swept back neatly from a high forehead. He was tall, about Pine’s height, and in spite of a slight stoop there was something military in his bearing. Considering the occasion, he was dressed almost formally, in wool slacks and blue blazer with a starched white shirt.

  “Welcome to Rome, gentlemen. I’d hoped the subject of Pero Matek would never come up again in my presence, but I’m hardly surprised it has. Too nice a day to stay indoors, so I thought we’d go out on the terrace. Coffee?”

  “Please,” both men answered, and he nodded to Maria.

  “One little matter first, if you don’t mind. If you brought any identification from the tribunal, I’d like to see it.”

  Vlado glanced at Pine as they pulled out their wallets, fishing ID cards from the small stacks of lire they’d picked up at the airport. Fordham gave the cards a long look, comparing their faces to the photos before handing everything back, offering no apology for his apparent mistrust.

  They took seats on the balcony, a trifle uneasy after that display. From Vlado’s quick inspection the apartment seemed a spartan place, with few signs of the chockablock décor that usually fills the homes of the old, especially the prosperous ones who’ve traveled widely. No collections of photos or relics or memorabilia. Only one or two paintings. The furniture might have been from an upscale hotel, it was so generic. The terrace offered the lushest display—a floor of painted tiles with an ironwork table and chairs, enclosed by tall, hovering plants in giant terra-cotta pots. It was like some nook in a forest. Vlado briefly sampled the view before sitting, glancing at a torrent of pedestrians and mopeds streaming downhill from the nearby Colosseum, which glowed in the amber of late afternoon.

  “One more bit of housekeeping before we start,” Fordham said. “Were you followed on your way here?”

  Pine seemed taken aback, glancing at Vlado for guidance. “We, uh, pretty much came straight from the hotel,” he finally said.

  “And we’d pretty much gone straight from the airport to the hotel. I guess I wasn’t really looking out for it. It’s not exactly part of our training.”

  “I suppose not,” Fordham said, sounding disappointed. Pushing himself to his feet, he stepped gingerly toward the edge of the terrace, leaning outward to allow a view without revealing himself to anyone below. “There’s a man down there,” he said, returning to his seat. “Doorway across the street, reading a newspaper. Blue jacket, green tie. Showed up just before you arrived. He with you?” He looked first at Pine, then at Vlado.

  Neither had any idea who he meant. Pine got up for a glance, but Fordham hastily motioned him back to his seat.

  “No sense attracting further attention. Probably nothing. Just a feeling.”

  “You know, it’s us looking for him,” Pine said, trying to strike a note of levity. “Not the other way around.”

  “It’s not Pero Matek I’m worried about. It’s the other ones.”

  “The other ones?” Vlado said.

  “The problem is that neither of you has any idea what you’re dealing with. Just like I didn’t.”

  “That’s why we’re here,” Pine coaxed. “To find out.”

  “But I may be doing us all a disservice by telling you. These things happened a long time ago, but in some quarters they haven’t lost their currency, or their potency. Long half-life, this kind of information. Some of it should have been buried in lead and locked away.” Then he turned toward Vlado. “You should know that as well as anyone, I’d expect. Are you his son, or is the connection more distant? I’m referring to Enver Petric, of course. Né Josip Iskric.”

  “My father,” Vlado said, feeling as if his one advantage in the interview had been stripped away. How had the man figured it out so easily? Surely not from the tribunal, he hoped. Maybe it was the sort of deductive leap possible only for the overly suspicious, even paranoid. Yet, for an irrational moment, Fordham seemed like some sort of spirit guide, an eccentric old mystic who could gaze through the foliage of his balcony into the mist of the past. The man’s blue eyes shimmered. Powerful emotions were at play, but Vlado couldn’t read them.

  “I suspected you might be his son the moment I heard your name. When you walked in the door I was certain. Those eyes. The way you listen. That earnest quality.” That word again. Vlado winced. “It’s the only reason I agreed to see you at all. Even then, that woman who called nearly put me off enough to refuse.”

  “Janet Ecker?” Pine said. “What’d she say?”

  “It’s not what she said. It’s the way she was. Like the man I just saw across the street. Again, nothing definite. Just a feeling. Schmoozed me just like they would. People from the Agency. The ones who’ve been coming round here for years, trying to get a rise out of me. I guess I was worried she might be from their world instead of yours.”

  Vlado and Pine exchanged glances. The old man’s precautions suddenly didn’t seem so fussy, and certainly not laughable.

  “It’s not easy,” Fordham said. �
�Breaking cover like this. Maybe I’m still seeking expiation. Forgiveness of sins. Though God knows I’m not Catholic.”

  “Expiation?” Vlado asked.

  “That part comes later,” he said, still unreadable. “Patience.”

  He stood, creeping again to the edge of the terrace, leaning the way he had before. Apparently satisfied but revealing nothing, he returned to his seat.

  “What do you know about those days, anyway?” he asked Vlado. “Your father ever tell you much?”

  “Nothing. I didn’t even know he’d lived here until a few days ago.”

  Fordham nodded, seemingly not surprised. “Then I suppose the only way to tell you this story correctly is to take you to the scene of the crime,” he said, Vlado wondering what the crime might be. “Besides, it’s a fine Roman afternoon, and this weather won’t last. Come on. I’ll call us a cab.”

  When they emerged onto the sidewalk there was no sign of the man with the newspaper and the green tie. The ride was a strange one. They changed cabs twice, with Fordham speaking only to the driver for the first two trips, waving off their questions as they rode north through the city at dusk—up past the ruins of the Forum, then along crowded streets past the shoppers and off-season tourists, squeezing past the top of the Spanish Steps before veering west toward the river. Not until they caught the third taxi, by the Tiber, did Fordham stop turning incessantly to look out the back. Settling at last into his seat, he spoke again.

  “What do you know about the way things worked here in 1946?”

  “Just what we’ve seen in the cables,” Pine said. “And those weren’t rich in context.”

  Fordham nodded. “The city itself wasn’t so different,” he explained. “It was the people who were an unholy mess. Refugees from half of Europe, and nobody had a dime. But if you were on the run or had something to hide, it was a great place to be. The Italians were too busy purging one another to worry much about other nationalities. The politics would go left one week, right the next. Just like today, only now it’s every month. So, the carabinieri pretty much left it up to us and the British to sort out the foreigners. Croatians and leftover Ustashi were my department. I was one of eight officerinvestigators with the 428th CIC detachment, Army counterintelligence. We had a little office at 69 Via Sicilia. British Intelligence was just upstairs, thinking they still ruled the waves. Then there were the leftovers from OSS, James Angleton and his people, technically still working for the army even if officially without portfolio. The CIA wasn’t born yet. He was a strange one. Tall and skinny. Wore a big coat, big hat. One of our people went to see him once and found him crawling on the floor, checking for microphones. Which of course made us wonder if he’d bugged us. He was already more worried about Moscow than any leftover Nazis. Hated Tito. Saw any Ustasha types as potential allies.”

  “There were a lot of Croatians here?” Vlado asked. “And Bosnians?”

  “Thousands. Coming out of the DP camps or up through Austria. A lot of them wanted to get down to Argentina or over to America. Ante Pavelic himself ended up as Juan Perón’s security adviser, you know. There should have been a song about him in Evita. We were supposed to be rounding them up, but somehow they kept slipping through the cracks, mostly with the help of an evacuation network run by some Croatian priests, over at the Confraternita di San Girolamo. That’s where we’re headed. San Girolamo. Father Krunoslav Draganovic ran the show there. He also happened to be head of the pope’s Pontifical Relief Commission for Refugees, which tied him into all the DP camps. Sometimes they sent people back across the border—with our help—to plant bombs or generally raise hell. But mostly they shipped all their bad eggs to safety overseas. Gave them new names and put them on freighters to Argentina, America, Canada, you name it. Everybody called Draganovic’s network the ratline. It’s how Klaus Barbie got away.”

  “The Butcher of Lyon?”

  “Yes. And it was more than a little embarrassing when it came out later that we’d helped him get away, with Draganovic pulling the strings. The cover-up said Barbie was the exception, not the rule.”

  “You don’t agree?” Pine asked.

  “Nobody would who was here then. But the proof’s gone by now, of course. Which is why I keep my mouth shut.”

  He paused to give further instructions to the driver. They were still headed up the Tiber, in traffic growing heavier by the minute. The dome of Saint Peter’s loomed in the distance to their left.

  “The day I met Matek I was looking for a Nazi. An old SS man we kept rounding up and the British kept letting go. Fiorello, our CO, was determined we were going to keep picking him up until the Brits kept him locked up. That’s the way it was then. You were never sure who was on your side one day to the next. We had a list of his mistresses, and we’d visit them one by one until he turned up. I drew Inge, whom I always thought of as Marlene Dietrich, mostly because of the way she talked. She lived in a run-down old pension on Via Abruzzi, place full of exiles. Always smelled like boiled cabbage.

  “Well, Inge was in, but our SS man wasn’t. He’d dumped her for some new gal across town, so I phoned in the name from downstairs and decided to check the books. That’s how we made the rounds then, checking registration records, then visiting the newcomers, making sure their papers were in order. Just about everybody had some kind of information, and usually all it took to get it was a few cigarettes. And that day, Matek’s name was the latest entry. So I paid him a call.”

  “You spoke the language?” Vlado asked.

  “Serbo-Croatian? Some. But Matek had learned some Italian at Fermo. He’d just arrived and was pretty skinny after all that time in the camp. It was pretty clear his papers were a rush job, but he had that look in his eye that dared you to do something about it. He said Father Draganovic himself had gotten him out of Fermo, so right away he had my interest. The father had driven down to the camp in a U.S. Army staff car, which somehow didn’t surprise me. He’d held a mass for a few hundred Croatians, then prayed the rosary and asked anybody with special requests to see him afterward. Matek had gotten a job at San Girolamo working as a typist and driver, which piqued my interest further. I’d been trying to get a hold of some information there for months.”

  “What kind of information?” Vlado asked.

  “They kept a master list of all the émigrés—names, aliases, military rank, you name it—everybody they’d ever housed or fed or were trying to ship out, including all the big Ustasha types in hiding. We’d turned another worker who was supposed to slip us a copy, but a week later they fished him out of the Tiber. So you had to be careful.”

  “Did Matek tell you his military background?” Vlado asked.

  “A few lies. But we didn’t concern ourselves too much with that, because within a few days an order came down from Washington to go after Pavelic, the dictator himself, and suddenly Matek was our best bet for an insider.”

  “This was when?” Pine asked.

  “June of ’46. Tito’s people had been screaming for months that we were hiding Pavelic in Italy. I think somebody in Washington finally got tired of hearing it.”

  “Were we?” Pine asked. “Hiding him?”

  “We certainly hadn’t been looking for him. Especially people like Angleton. But our guys were game for the chase, and the word around town was that Pavelic was holed up at Castel Gandolfo, the pope’s summer residence, out with the peacocks and chicken coops. Supposedly some of his old security chiefs and cabinet members were there, too. The only way to know for sure was to get that list out of San Girolamo. And damned if we didn’t, with Matek’s help.”

  The taxi reached its destination, stopping by a bridge, Ponte Cavour, beneath the leafless sycamores lining the Tiber.

  “Best to keep moving as we talk,” Fordham said, looking around quickly as they crossed a busy boulevard. “Makes it harder to eavesdrop.” Pine rolled his eyes.

  They strolled into a modest but spacious piazza with one side facing onto the boulevard by the river. A h
igh grassy mound at the center of the square seemed to glow beneath the fading orange sky. Bordering the other three sides were long five-story buildings of fairly recent vintage, by Roman standards, boxy and severe, with rows of narrow rectangular windows. The ones on the north and east sides were made of scrubbed white marble, but the one at the south end was ugly brown brick. It was joined to a faded dark chapel that looked centuries old.

  “The mound is the mausoleum of Caesar Augustus,” Fordham said. “Everything else in the square is a Mussolini creation, and that damned ugly hunk of bricks at the south end is San Girolamo. The Croatians couldn’t afford the marble, I guess. But it worked well enough for Draganovic and his ratline.” He pointed to the marble walls of the nearest building, just behind them. Beneath the windows there were carvings of ancient Roman armies but also of the Fascist armies of World War II. Latin inscriptions ran overhead, with Mussolini’s name prominent, along with a reference to his distant predecessor, Augustus.

  “Hard to believe it’s still here,” Vlado said, having grown used to Berlin, where every remnant of the Nazis had been either bombed, buried, or annotated to museum status.

  San Girolamo also displayed art of the era, in three huge, colorful mosaics looming above the fifth-floor windows. Jesus was in the centerpiece, a fawning crowd at his feet. The two flanking pieces featured priests ministering to crowds, presumably in Croatia. The inscriptions on this building were also in Latin, although the checkerboard symbol of Croatia was featured prominently. Vlado saw spray-painted graffiti on the bricks as they approached—a skull and crossbones topped by the words GIOVENTÙ NAZISTA.

  “What’s Gioventù mean?” Vlado asked.