The Lost Catacomb

by Shifra Hochberg

  At this last remark, Kessler raised an eyebrow, but carefully refrained from comment.

  Noting this with satisfaction, Goebbels went on. “You are to leave tomorrow morning at 5 AM by military transport. A driver will be waiting outside your apartment at precisely 4:30 AM to take you to the aircraft that will fly you to Rome. Be sure to take enough clothing and extra uniforms. You will be stationed there indefinitely.

  “We have, of course, made suitable arrangements for your accommodations and transportation needs within Rome. But please do not hesitate to let us know if anything else is required. Rooms have been secured for you in the Villa Mauritana, close to Kesselring’s headquarters. You will have a driver at your disposal and secure communications lines from the Villa. You may go home now and pack.”

  Thus dismissed, with a wave of the Minister’s hand, Kessler stood up, clicked his heels together, saluted once more, and left the building. He decided to walk the short distance to his apartment. The night air was refreshingly cool, and he wanted to enjoy one last time the peacefulness of a Berlin evening stroll before this involuntary exile from the Fatherland. He decided to regard it as an important career opportunity. And, he promised himself, he would ignore the possibly personal implications about the kind of entertainment he might be expected to provide for some of the well-connected, but more unconventional, clergymen at the Holy See, devotion to the Reich notwithstanding.

  On his way back to the apartment, Kessler took a brief detour to look in once more at The Blue Angel. Just before the two SS officers had dragged him away from his brandy, he'd had his eye on a curvaceous blonde whom he’d never seen there before. It had been several days since he’d been to that particular cocktail lounge, mainly the result of some important meetings in restaurants favored by the Gestapo colleagues who had invited him to dine. Perhaps the intriguing fräulein would still be there at a corner table, aloof and beautiful.

  Since sex in a Lebensborn facility was apparently not going to be an option tonight after all, and since he had no idea what opportunities of that sort awaited him in Rome, he thought that he might as well try his luck. He’d heard that silk stockings, cigarettes, and chocolates could easily seduce Italian women, but their own Fascist Blackshirts, he knew, could also provide them with those luxury items. And he was fastidious enough to shrink from the notion of enjoying the charms of the same prostitutes that some at the Vatican would be so eager to embrace.

  He entered the club. Soft romantic music was still being played at the piano. Perhaps it was a waltz or something from one of Wagner’s operas, but he wasn’t sure. His enjoyment of music was merely amateur, as he readily admitted to himself. He had come from a home where the middle class work ethic was more important than culture, or at least more important than what he had been taught was a decadent obsession with cultural details that characterized inferior races, such as the Jews.

  It was now 11 o’clock. She was still there, looking somewhat bored, her flawless skin and golden hair glowing under the light that pooled onto her table from the wall sconce above. He walked over to the bar and ordered a drink. Pointing in her direction, he asked the barman to send over a magnum of his best champagne and two glasses, with his compliments. The presence of a second glass should convey his meaning precisely.

  Kessler swallowed his whiskey in a single gulp and walked over to the table. “May I join you?” he asked, bowing slightly from the waist and clicking his heels. The young woman looked up at him from under thick dark lashes and tossed her silken hair over her shoulders. She appeared to be about 23 or 24 years old, slender, but lushly curved in all the right places. She was wearing a black sequined cocktail dress with narrow straps and a neckline that showed off her ample cleavage. A matching silk jacket was carelessly laid over the back of the chair next to her.

  She motioned to him to sit down, exhaled a languid puff of smoke from her cigarette, and leaned forward slightly, exposing more of her milky white bosom. Her eyes were pale blue, her lips full and artfully painted a crimson color that matched her long, elegant nails.

  The floral bouquet of a perfume familiar to Kessler wafted towards him. He wondered how she had been able to obtain French perfume of this quality. Perhaps a rich lover? He had once given his former mistress some Guerlain perfume in the pre-war years, before it had become unpatriotic and hideously expensive, even for an officer with his salary and contraband-goods connections.

  “Well?” she said, recalling him from his brief reverie.

  “My name is Hauptsturmführer Jurgen Kessler,” he said, introducing himself. “And yours, fräulein?”

  “Greta,” she replied. “Greta Braun. Thank you for the champagne. I’m new in Berlin. I’ve just been transferred from Munich to the Abwehr offices to serve as a translator. How fortunate that I chose to dine here this evening,” she added, tossing her hair over her shoulders again and lowering her eyelashes provocatively. “Do you come here often?”

  “My home away from home, in fact,” he replied. Kessler poured some champagne into the two Bohemian crystal flutes that the waiter had brought, and raised his glass to her: “To the Reich!”

  “Yes,” she replied, as her fingers closed around the stem of the slender flute, stroking it lingeringly before raising it to her scarlet lips. “To the Reich and its handsome officers.”

  Chapter Eighteen

  An hour later they were heading arm in arm towards her flat, by good fortune some three blocks from his own. The stars shone above in a cloudless, dark violet sky. He marveled at his luck, at how well things had turned out after all. She was at least as beautiful as the Lebensborn girls he’d dallied with before on the instructions of his senior officers, but far more sophisticated. But then he remembered that he had not yet told her he was about to be transferred far from Berlin. Perhaps if he had, she would not have asked him back for a nightcap and coffee.

  She took a small ring of keys out of her beaded bag and opened the door to the apartment building. “It’s just one flight up,” she said. “Let’s not bother with the elevator.”

  Her legs were long and lissome in their silk stockings and high-heeled shoes, and as he followed her up the spiral staircase, with its intricate wrought-iron balustrade, he could see the lace edges of her garters as the slit in the side of her dress opened up along her thighs.

  At the landing on the first floor, she turned left and led him towards her apartment, smiling enigmatically as she silently locked the door behind them. She carefully placed her key ring in the drawer of an antique desk and turned on the brocade-shaded lamp that perched at its edge, filling the room with a faint rosy light.

  “Now darling, what would you like to drink?” she purred. “I have some French brandy and Irish whiskey.” Not easy things to procure in Berlin. Not in 1943 anyway, he thought, intrigued by the prospect.

  “Brandy for me, bitte schön.”

  He sat down on the dark, well-worn sofa, and she closed the drapes at the window—rich crimson velvet with heavy fringes, whose color, he noted with quiet amusement, closely matched the hue of her lips and nails. They sipped their drinks for several moments, and then she licked her upper lip slowly, smiled, and leaned towards him.

  “I’m going to put some music on the gramophone. It’s been a long time since I’ve danced with a gentleman. My late husband, you know, was a pilot in the Luftwaffe. Shot down by the RAF, those schweinhund,” she said bitterly, “six months ago. He'd been on a reconnaissance mission near London.

  “It’s been very lonely for me since then, but I’m finally starting to take charge of my life again. That’s one of the reasons why I accepted the transfer to Berlin. A change of place, maybe a change in my luck.

  “But perhaps I’m boring you. Why don’t we waltz to this lovely romantic music for a while,” she suggested brightly, “and see where it takes us.”

  She made her selection from the small stack of records near the phonograph, wound up the crank, and placed the needle carefully on the disc. Kessler slid
his arm around her slender waist and then moved his hand slowly down towards the top of her firm buttocks, holding her close. She pressed her breasts lightly against his chest and sighed softly.

  He breathed in the delicate floral scent of her perfume, wafting up from between them, and leaned even closer to her, swaying rhythmically to the music. Sensing no objection, he brushed her ear lobe with his lips, taking care not to dislodge her long glittery earring. She raised her lips to his and they kissed, gently at first, then more passionately, her tongue finding its way into his mouth, greedy and insistent.

  She pulled back from him slightly and slipped the straps of her dress off of her shoulders. Her breasts spilled out over the top of her undergarments, ripe and full. “Unzip me, darling,” she moaned. “Ah, das ist sehr gut.”

  The dress slithered to her feet, and she bent forward to toss it out of the way. She stood there, clad only in a pale peach satin and lace bra, satin tap pants, and a matching garter belt and silk stockings. She stepped out of her shoes and removed the rhinestone earrings, which she gently laid on a nearby chair.

  Kissing him lightly, she reached over to unbutton the jacket of his gray uniform. “I hope you don’t think I’m hurrying things too much. But it’s been so long since . . . .” She left the sentence unfinished, as she reached for his belt and holster. “These, too,” she insisted, and placed them carefully on the sofa. “They could get in the way. Maybe even be dangerous, you know.”

  Her hips undulated gracefully to the music, and she removed her garter belt and stockings, while he watched, dizzy with desire. No one had ever performed a striptease for him, not the Lebensborn girls, many of whom were of country, peasant stock, and certainly none of the whores he’d ever slept with—they were all business.

  “Your turn again, mein herz,” she whispered, reaching for his zipper.

  He now stood there, breathing heavily in his undershirt and boxers, his erection pushing its way though the opening at the front of his shorts. She nuzzled against him and unhooked her bra. Only her satin panties remained.

  He cupped one of her breasts, pinching her nipple lightly, as one hand wandered further down, stroking and massaging, and she panted beneath his touch.

  “Bitte, I’d rather do this in a bed,” she groaned, taking his hand and leading him towards the bedroom.

  He followed her down the dark hallway to her room, and they tumbled onto the bed. Soft moonlight filtered through the bedroom curtains. He removed her panties, and as her thighs parted at his touch, he began to explore her with his tongue.

  Moaning loudly, thrashing back and forth in ecstasy, Greta cried out, “Yes, mein Gott, now! Gott im himmel, please!”

  Suddenly she snapped her legs together around his head and neck, pinioning him. “Yes, now!” A swift blow to the back of his head, a sudden twisting of his neck, a cracking sound, and it was all over.

  Two shadowy figures, British intelligence operatives, had emerged from the closet and now stood in the dark near the bed, having delivered the coup de grâce. They had spent a rather uneventful evening behind the bedroom closet door, waiting for “Greta” to signal them.

  “God, I thought I’d have that swine inside me in another minute. Bad enough it had to go this far,” she said in the King’s English, jumping off of the bed and grabbing a sheet to cover herself up.

  “Actually, it was a pretty good show,” one of them remarked dryly. “You might consider doing this professionally after the war.”

  “Knock it off, James, or I’ll make sure you don’t come along the next time I have to do this sort of thing!” she snapped.

  “Tom,” they called to a third man, who only now emerged from behind a tall armoire. “Go get his uniform out of the living room and put it on. You’ll exit through the front entrance to the apartment building, the same way that damn Kraut came in, just in case someone else has been watching him. We’ll take the ‘package’ out through the back.”

  “Greta,” in the meantime, had removed her blond wig. She ran her fingers through her short brown hair, splashed some water onto her face from the ewer on the nightstand and removed most of her makeup. She dried her face with a small towel left there for that purpose and pulled on some nondescript dark clothing. Her scarlet nails would have to be dealt with later.

  She glanced up as Tom returned to the bedroom dressed in Kessler’s uniform and nearly froze in shock. “My God! They told me they were planting a double, but I never imagined you would look so much alike,” she said, now shuddering visibly.

  “Glad you think so,” he replied matter-of-factly. “Time to go,” he said, nodding briskly to the other two agents.

  Deftly, the three men bundled up the body in a dark burlap bag and gathered up the wig, jewelry, evening clothes, and Kessler’s underwear, shoes, and socks separately, while “Greta” straightened the bed linens, turned off the lights, and carefully removed all traces of her presence from the apartment. The group silently slipped out of the building through a back exit and carried the body to a waiting automobile.

  “Let’s go! Move it!” they said to the driver, quietly closing the trunk and the car doors.

  Tom, in the meantime, had left through the main entrance, taking care to lock the apartment and entry doors with the keys “Greta” had placed in the living room desk drawer. A block away, he dropped them into the sewer and then made his way to Kessler’s apartment, softly whistling “Deutschland Uber Alles.”

  Chapter Nineteen

  Mauro Rostoni leaned forward in his chair, resting his elbows in a proprietary gesture on the large antique desk that occupied at least half the floor space of his small office in the Apostolic Palace. Something would have to be done about finding him new, more spacious accommodations, he reflected angrily. This room, quite frankly, was more crowded than he wished and not located close enough to the wellsprings of power in the Holy See. He knew that Mother Pasqualina, the Pope’s housekeeper, would object, since she was already jealous of the Pope’s reliance on him for advice and assistance. But that was her problem, he thought with sadistic relish.

  Though he had been ordained only a year ago, in that brief period of time he had established himself as a figure to be reckoned with in the Vatican. He had begun as a humble aide to the Cardinal Secretary of State, based on the enthusiastic recommendation of his mentors at the Gregorian University—and, if the truth were to be known, with support from the deep pockets of some family connections, who had quietly donated ample funds to the Secretariat’s expense account and the University’s scholarship fund. Rostoni had quickly proven himself to be a man of many talents—politically astute, loyal, and above all discreet, qualities that were rare even in more experienced members of the Curia establishment.

  He had been useful to Luigi Maglione, the Cardinal Secretary of State, on more than one occasion and in delicate situations that required unusual tact, so that Maglione could hardly object when, several months ago, the Pope had called Rostoni into his private study for a personal conversation that had led to his new position as the pontiff’s right-hand man. Maglione, quite simply, would have to find himself a new assistant.

  Rostoni thought back to the point in time at which he had made his career choice, for that was precisely what he considered it to be. For him, the Church and holy orders were not a calling that filled a spiritual void in his life, a vocation that gave purpose to his existence, or something that filled a deep-seated and unshakeable need to help others. Truthfully, the only person whom Rostoni had ever considered helping was himself.

  From his early adolescence and onwards, he had been fascinated by the power of the Church and her formidable princes. It was an irrefutable fact of life that mighty Rome, symbolized by the throne of St. Peter, held sway over most of the civilized world. Its wealth was incalculable, its supremacy unquestioned. Its sheer dominance over the spiritual welfare and very lives of its subjects transcended borders, cultures, and languages. Its approval had been the making—or breaking—of kings and k
ingdoms, of dictators and demagogues throughout the centuries.

  For the young Rostoni, the Catholic Church had come to represent the pinnacle of temporal achievement rather than the font of spiritual authority. Most importantly, for his purposes, one did not need to be born with blue blood flowing in one’s veins in order to inherit the seat of power, for the Church cultivated an aristocracy of talent, a meritocracy, an elite to which anyone could aspire, given a bit of luck, the right timing, and the right connections.

  And as Rostoni knew well from his close study of Church history, celibacy and poverty did not need to be part of the package. As for obedience, some were made to obey and follow, but others were there to command and lead. He would be one of the latter and take his pleasures when and where he could, as had so many others before him. Bishops and cardinals, popes and prelates—why the Borgia pope had even committed incest with his own daughter Lucrezia, swiftly disposing of her in a hastily contrived alliance of lands and fortunes when she became pregnant.

  Had not the admirable Duce himself written a popular novel, L’amante del cardinale, back in 1909, on the subject of the liaison between the beauteous Claudia Particella and Bishop Carlo Emanuele Madruzzo during the 17th Century?

  Yes, Rostoni thought, he too had ambitions in this direction. He would obtain his initial sexual experience, not perhaps with a great lady of noble birth, as had the protagonist of Mussolini’s historical novel, but with easier prey—prey that could be blackmailed or intimidated into submission. Not for him the surreptitious nighttime visits to brothels or establishments of dubious repute, like so many of his acquaintances.

  No, he had had his eye on the luscious little Elena Conti for some time now and had thought he’d found the perfect means of leverage over her. But she had slipped through his fingers. Into thin air, as it were. The mere fact of her disappearance had become almost an obsession with him, and finding her—punishing her for rebuffing him and flouting the Racial Laws—had become a matter of pride that gave him no rest.