by Gregg Loomis
When had the German army supplanted the Fascists in defense of the Italian boot? Lang selected two boxes from the Italy 1943-44 shelf and carried them to the nearest table, where a small sign instructed him not to attempt to return boxes to shelves. That would be done by Archives staff.
The Archives' very own public works program.
The smell of musty paper tickled his .nose. Fortunately, most of the documents were typed rather than in the old German script Hitler had resurrected and decreed to be used in handwritten papers, one of several lessthan-successful efforts to take Germany back to its glory days.
Like the eighteenth century under Frederick the Great.
For the first hour, Lang glanced through mind numbing orders for train movements, distribution of food rations, and repairs to vehicles, the minutiae of Kesselring's army. He was tempted to read the dispatches but abandoned the idea. If he was going to find anything related to what he wanted, he had no time for the blame shifting that is the correspondence of an army in retreat.
Shoving the boxes aside, he replaced them with two more. It was halfway through the last Italy 1944 that he found it: an aged copy of a letter on unique letterhead. Instead of the usual spread-winged eagle with a circled swastika in its claws, this bird was a two-thirds profile, also spread-winged. In one talon it held a pair of lighting bolts, the crooked cross in the other. A motto circled the figure: MeineEhre 1st Treu. My truth is honor, slogan of the SS.
Lang pulled his chair closer to the lamp to read the faded ink of a teletype flimsy. It translated as:
8 May 1944
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URGENT & TOP SECRET
Sturmbahnfuhrer Otto Skorzeny
Via Rasslia 29
Rome
Herr Sturmbahnfuhrer!
You are hereby specifically relieved of duties imposed upon you by orders effective 1 April 1944. You are to report Berlin immediately for reassignment by most expeditious means available, aircraft included. Prior departure Rome, all documents concerning previous orders to be destroyed, repeat, destroyed.
Heil Hitler!
H. Himmler
Since he was looking at an order that had come by telegraph, there was no actual signature. Still, an order direct from Himmler was an order from Hitler himself, an order confirming that Skorzeny had been in Rome. It was a possibility, if not a good guess, that he had been searching the necropolis for Julian's joke on the Christians. Whatever Skorzeny had been doing there, it wasn't as important to Hitler in the late spring of '44 as having him somewhere else.
But where?
According to Professor Blucher, Skorzeny had been in Montsegur soon after the fall of France in 1940. Shortly thereafter, he'd led a parachute attack on-... Cyprus? He'd been around to rescue Mussolini in 1943, been in Rome in the spring of'44. When did Rome fall to the Allies? Same day as Normandy, June 6, 1944. That would explain one reason Skorzeny was ordered out. That must have been before he went to oust what government? Oh yeah, Hungary. No doubt the reassignment in Himmler's order. By winter of 1944-45, he'd been at the Bulge in Belgium.
Otto Skorzeny, man about Europe.
Rescue a dictator here, take over a government there, no big secrets. Except what he might have found at Montsegur. And Blucher hadn't mentioned what he was doing in Rome. Even so, how did the actions of a fervent Nazi sixty years ago relate to Don's death? The only answer Lang could see was that Skorzeny had found something, a long-buried secret that someone would kill to keep that way.
He looked at his watch. Ten till five. The archives would close in a few minutes. He had discovered all he was going to about Skorzeny and his secret today. He stood, stretched, and read again the sign forbidding return of boxes to shelves.
Tomorrow, he'd be on a flight for Italy. Tonight, he was headed to Kincade's for some Chesapeake oysters and, hopefully, soft-shell crabs. Anticipation turned sour as he recalled he'd be dining alone. Gurt had loved softshells.
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He remembered the first time. It had been, what, Chops, one of Atlanta's more expensive steak and seafood houses? She had looked at the crab, including claws and shell, and then back at him.
"This is a Vitzen, joke, no?"
"The crab certainly doesn't think so," he'd replied.
She looked at him suspiciously. "It is a treat. You go first."
"With pleasure." He had severed a claw, the tastiest part, dipped it in heavy tartar sauce, and popped it into his mouth.
Gurt watched carefully, fully expecting him to try to spit it out. Or perhaps some sort of magic trick where he hadn't really put it in his mouth at all.
He put down his fork.
She was still staring.
''You ate it," she finally said.
In response, he cut into the body and took another bite.
She needed no further coaxing. They ordered an extra serving, to eat between the two of them. Lang's eyes were wet as he exited the building.
CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN
Rome
The Vatican April 1944
Pope Pius XII faced a problem unique to both him and his two hundred and sixty-one predecessors.
He sighed as he sat behind his desk, the one in the office with a view of St. Peter's Square. Bernini's gently curving colonnades usually gave him a sense of serenity. Today the view was marred by armed German soldiers standing in a crescent exactly one step outside the border of the Holy City. According to Kesselring, the German commander of Italy, they were there for the Pope's protection. Pius knew better; they were his jailers. Worse, they demanded the papers of every person leaving or entering the Vatican. And things got no better. General Wolff, SS commandant of Rome, had let slip, intentionally or not, the fact that kidnapping the Pope for the Vatican's riches was an option being considered in Berlin.
Pius cared little for his own safety, but the secret that had been unearthed below the Vatican was his responsibility. If the inscription was correct, its existence presented a painful dilemma. On one hand, it proved Jesus Christ had walked this earth, potentially silencing two thousand years of skeptics. On the other, the picture of Christ it painted was far different from the humble carpenter's son from Galilee.
He could perhaps eradicate the inscription and remove the relics that both validated the Gospels and made them liars. But where would he put such documents? Certainly not in the secret papal library that was anything but secret
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to the inner core of church scholarship. He would have to pray for guidance from above.
In the meantime, he must do nothing to force the Germans to act, do nothing although future generations could well revile his failure to condemn Hitler, the Nazis, and the barbarism Europe had not seen in a thousand years. The history of his papacy, even what would be perceived as his legacy, was irrelevant. The Church would survive him. It might not survive what was below the Vatican.
He had hoped he would be revered as the Pope who found the first contemporaneous documentation of Christ's existence. Now he was faced with being seen as collaborator with the Germans.
He had prayed such proof might be found by excavation, that Constantine had left some evidence, some relic of Our Lord, and those prayers had been cruelly answered. What was he to do? Did the Germans know exactly what had been found? If so, Pius despaired of the Church being able to keep the find, let alone its secret.
There was nothing he could do, really, other than pray for-guidance from above. Pray and 'do nothing to provoke the Germans into action.
An ornate Louis XVI clock beside the window indicated that there were a few minutes left before the scheduled meeting. The Pope picked up a stack of papers and began to refresh his memory with a chronology that would not have been conceivable even a year ago.
The Allies had landed in Sicily last July. A few days later, the first bombs had fallen on Rome, damaging a rail staging area in the St. Lorenzo District as well as a medical school and a church. Pius, the first Roman Pope in over two hundred years, had reacted with
shock and anger, as had his fellow Romans.
He had proposed that Rome be made an open city, one neither defended nor attacked. After all, the Eternal City should be spared the destruction bombs had created in London and Berlin. It was the last time he had spoken out.
There was a gentle knock at the door. Without waiting for a reply, FraSebastiani, Pius's personal assistant, appeared with a tray bearing espresso and four small cups. He set the tray on a table in front of the desk and withdrew. Years of service had acquainted him with His Holiness's moods, and one look at the pontiff's face told him conversation was neither wanted nor needed.
Getting up, Pius filled a cup and returned to his desk and the dismal scenario in front of him.
After the bombing, Pius had spent hours of the night in the lower levels of the Vatican, praying for peace, for Rome. And he had prayed for ... He closed his eyes. God had seen fit to grant the latter prayer, the cause of Pius's present distress.
Within days of the air raid, Mussolini had been arrested at his weekly visit with the king. Six weeks later, Eisenhower, the Allied Commander, had announced the capitulation of the Fascist government, and two days after that, the Allies landed on the Italian peninsula.
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The Germans had occupied Rome, filling the vacuum left by the collapse of Mussolini's government and the flight of King Victor Emanual. Shortly thereafter, over a thousand Jews had been arrested in the ghetto barely a mile from the Vatican. The only remaining true descendants of ancient Rome had been trucked off to the railway for deportation, many of the vehicles actually stopping long enough for guards and drivers to snap photographs of St. Peter's.
Pius had said nothing publicly. He could not. The fate of the Jews was deplorable, unthinkable, but to provoke the planned kidnapping and certain discovery of what the archaeologists had uncovered by opposition would be even worse.
Occasional bombing of Rome continued despite the prior Fascist boast that not even a swallow could fly over the city without permission. The Germans parked their tanks and trucks in the most historic piazzas, their anti-aircraft weapons on the roofs of many of the four hundred-plus churches. They also raided one of the Vatican's extraterritorial properties, a monastery, taking prisoner several Jews as well as men evading the orders for conscriptive labor.
Pius, outraged, sent a mild protest to the German ambassador. His reply was that the Italian Fascists had committed the sacrilege, a fiction the Pope was forced to swallow. He forbade the future use of Church properties for sanctuary to persons evading the Germans, although he suspected his orders were widely ignored.
In March, an SS police company was ambushed in the Via Rasella. Thirtytwo Germans died along with two Italian civilians. Within twenty-four hours, by direct order of Hitler, three hundred twenty Italian men and boys were taken to the Ardeatine Caves outside Rome and shot, five at a time. The papal newspaper, widely read as the only non-Fascist source of news, prepared an editorial expressing outrage. Pius changed it to blame the resistance for their attack on the occupiers. It was a bitter cup from which to drink, but the Pope could not risk provocation of the Germans. Not now, not with ...
Another knock at the door, this time the meeting. Cardinals Rossi, Pizzardo, and Canali, the Pontifical Commission for the Vatican City State, the entity charged with the security of the Vatican. Pius extended his hand for the kissing of the papal ring. He was still unsure exactly where to begin, but at least he would no longer have to bear the secret alone.
CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT
Nimes, France
L'Hopitalde Nimes
A week earlier
She had no idea how long she had been here, but this morning was the first she had awakened aware that she was, in fact, here.
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In the days (or weeks or months) previous, she had roused to the sound of her own screams more often than not, screams provoked by. the same, unchanging dream. It was so real, she thought she must have experienced it rather than dreamed it.
That, of course, was impossible.
The sun, a brilliant orange light in a cloudless sky, exploded, hurling her out into space like one of those jets of solar gas she remembered seeing somewhere. She seemed to hang motionless in space for a long time before she began to fall, her velocity increasing as she saw an inhospitable earth rushing up to meet her at an impossible speed.
That's when she began to scream, both in the dream and in real life.
Sometimes she thought maybe at least part of the dream was real, the falling to earth part.
Her earliest memory was of aching all over and being partially covered by bits of jagged rock that could have come from another planet, for all she knew. And she didn't know much. For instance, she had no idea where she had come from, what her name was, nor why she was lying on a hillside covered with stone fragments.
At first she had thought her face was bleeding heavily. Putting a hand to her brow, she touched something both wet and furry. That's when she realized her eyes were shut. Opening them, she looked right into a shaggy face with big brown eyes. A dog was caressing her forehead with a very wet tongue, a not entirely unpleasant sensation. And not a totally unfamiliar one, either, although she could not remember when a dog had last licked her face.
As her eyes began to focus, she saw a man-a boy, actually-peering at her with a worried expression. He had said something to her, but she could 'not hear. The only sound her ears perceived was a soft whisper like gentle rain falling through heavy foliage.
She touched her ear with the one hand free of rubble.
This time it wasn't the dog's licking making the side of her face wet. The hand, came back dripping crimson.
From some place she could not remember, she knew facial wounds, even superficial ones, bled heavily. Still,
she wasn't exactly comforted by the knowledge.
Superficial or not, she felt no pain other than the 'ache all over her body.
Gathering her strength, she stood, her legs as shaky as a newborn colt's. The dog ran in a circle around her, its mouth opening in what she supposed was a bark. The boy/man extended a hand, and she reached for it.
Then her world went dark.
Her next memory was staring at white walls seamlessly blending into white ceiling. It had been disorienting, not knowing how she had gotten here, where she was, or how long she had been here. She glanced down at a hand resting on a starched sheet. An IV needle was taped in place. From the smudges of old adhesive, she gathered the needle had been replaced several times.
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Without moving her head, her eyes traced the tube to a bag half full of transparent fluid hanging on a chrome stand.
From the visual clues, she guessed she was in some sort of hospital, although she had no idea how she knew this.
She had had no life before the sun exploded.
Through vibrations of the floor or some other means, she sensed someone else in the room.
Fully conscious of the effort, she refocused her line of sight from the IV
bag and stand to the foot of her bed. The doctor was there again. At least, she guessed he was a physician. He was definitely a man in white-white shirt with white lab coat, topped by unruly shocks of white hair.
He looked up, noting her attention, and flashed white teeth at her, saying something she could not hear.
She knew what was coming and neither looked forward to nor feared it. After flipping the pages of her chart at the foot of her bed (how did she, know what he was looking at?), he pulled back the covers, took the arm with the IV in it, and half-pulled, half-lifted her to a standing position on the floor. The tiles felt cool and soothing. With one hand on the IV stand and the other resting lightly, if protectively, around her waist, he led her out into the hall.
After she had gone about halfway toward the end, the doctor surrendered her to a nurse before standing in front of her, smiling. He pointed to his ear, then to hers, before making a circle with thumb and forefinger, the universal OK
/>
sign.
But her ears weren't OK. She could not hear. Perhaps he meant she soon would be OK. She hoped so. Not just because being deaf was a decided disadvantage. Without hearing, she had so much trouble speaking that she had all but abandoned the effort.
She could communicate by writing on the notepads they gave her. Unfortunately, she couldn't convey the very information the doctor and nurses wanted most: her name, where she came from, and so on. She had no such data to give them.
Somehow, again from that reservoir of knowledge that seemed to have no source, she knew that it was likely at least most of her memory would return, although she had no idea when. Until then, she would have to be patient, let the cuts, bruises, and aches heal, and hope she would know who she was before much longer.