The Lost Catacomb

by Shifra Hochberg

But through all these difficult months she had not forgotten—she could not forget—her young lover, her sweet Niccolò, whose broken body rested somewhere in an unmarked grave. What a wonderful father he would have made, she reflected for the hundredth time. How happy they would have been had he not been snatched by the rapacious jaws of death.

  As she sat on the veranda, lost in thought, her mug of tea now cold, ignored for the moment as it rested on a low table, she felt the baby move. Its tiny feet kicked and thumped against her as it shifted restlessly inside. Almost reflexively, she placed her hands on her firm, well-rounded belly and smiled through her tears.

  Suddenly the screen door opened behind her, and Tom walked out to the porch. “Surprise,” he said gently. “I’m home. An unanticipated leave.”

  She held out her hand and wordlessly motioned to him to join her on the wicker loveseat where she rested.

  They sat in companionable silence, gazing across the lawn towards the distant oaks, whose tiny leaves rustled softly, murmuring their secrets in the night air. High above the trees, the darkened sky was sprinkled with a thousand stars, recounting the tales of human joy and suffering that they had told from time immemorial.

  “Look, Elena,” Tom said. He pointed towards the North Star and remarked in a philosophical vein that was rare for him and that surprised Elena, “For centuries hunters and sailors have been guided by its light and found their way home.

  “You know what one of our most famous poets once said, don’t you? That it’s a metaphor for love, that ‘it is the star to every wandering bark whose worth’s unknown, although his height be taken.’ That it guides us through the vicissitudes and storms of life, ‘even to the edge of doom.’

  “Sorry,” he said with a rueful smile. “Must be this God-awful war that’s getting to me. I don’t usually sound like this.”

  “It’s been a long time since I thought about the stars,” Elena replied after a moment, her voice low and husky with regret. “My . . . my boyfriend,” she said with hesitation, her hand resting on her baby’s softly curved bulk, “my boyfriend . . . Niccolò . . . once brought a telescope to our apartment and showed me the constellations. He could find almost all of them on a clear night. It was one of his main interests—astronomy.”

  She paused for a moment, almost reluctant to continue. But it had been so long since she had confided in anyone, no one since Mother Teresa, in fact, that she went on, not even waiting to see if he was really interested in hearing more.

  “His favorite constellation was Andromeda. The story appealed to his sense of romance, I guess. Poor doomed Andromeda,” she sighed sadly. “A hideous sea monster waiting to devour her. A deus ex machina in the form of the heroic Perseus.”

  Tears filled her eyes as she turned to Tom. “He needed a Perseus himself. But no one came to his aid. Nor to my parents’,” she added bitterly. “Nor to my poor brother Giulio’s.

  “Thank God you came to mine and my baby’s. I owe you my life.”

  She fell silent now, and he took her small hand in his and squeezed it reassuringly. He understood. There was no need for words.

  In an almost unconscious movement, she leaned against his shoulder and looked out in the direction of Andromeda and the distant stars. She tried to listen to what they whispered to her in barely audible tones, far away, shimmering in magnificent solitude among the cold reaches of infinity.

  Others were worse off than she was, the stars told her. They would never be rescued. She must try to make peace with her irrecoverable loss. She must try to think only of the present. Of what she had now. Not of what she would never have again.

  Several hours later, when Tom’s parents came out to look for them in the dark, they found the two of them asleep on the old wicker sofa. Their heads were touching, with Tom’s arm protectively encircling Elena’s shoulders.

  And billions of miles away, somewhere among the vast stretches and endless expanse of the firmament, the stars looked down and, smiling, nodded their assent.

  Chapter Thirty

  Tom’s next assignment took him back to London for two months. There was much preparation needed for the final thrust of the Allied Forces into enemy territory, an offensive that would take many months, perhaps even a year of careful planning before it could be successfully executed. Tom's presence was essential to the enterprise and he could not be spared, he was told unequivocally, not even for the birth of his first child.

  During that time he called home whenever he could to check up on Elena, who was now at the end of her ninth month of pregnancy. She was cheerful most of the time, his parents reported on the occasions when he spoke to them rather than to her, though she tired easily and was occasionally given to contemplative moods and a desire to be left alone, resting in her room. Tom could only assume that she was feeling the burden of the past encroaching upon her hopes and fears about her imminent transition to motherhood.

  While Tom would not be able to leave London Headquarters to be with his wife when she delivered—and in any event, the timing of a first birth, with no past medical history to rely on, was unpredictable at best—special consideration was given to him so that he could call home on a daily basis once she'd reached her due date.

  “I’m really sorry, Tom,” his commanding officer had said after one of those hurried phone calls to Connecticut. “Believe me, I wish we could spare you for a week or so, or even for just a few days. But our timing is critical now. We’ve worked hard to lay intelligence foundations in France and Italy, and we just can’t let you go. I hope you understand.”

  Tom, of course, understood, far better than any one would suspect. He wasn’t even sure that Elena would have wanted him waiting in the wings when she was about to become the mother of her dead lover’s child. An event of this sort, a first birth, was always momentous, but in this case it was fraught with both joy and sorrow since it would bring back memories of Niccolò. And if the baby were a boy, and were he to resemble his biological father, Tom was not sure if this would comfort or pain Elena even more. He wasn’t sure how he himself would react, for he still held out hope that in the fullness of time Elena would put the past behind her and come to love him as much as he now loved her.

  Her courage, her resilience in the face of unspeakable loss, her beauty, the enduring nature of her love for those who had been so precious to her and would never return, and yes, her vulnerability—all these qualities had made him love her more than he had ever thought possible. She was so much younger that he was in years, yet older than he hoped he would ever be in terms of what she had gone through, of what she had suffered. And their different cultural backgrounds, instead of constituting an obstacle to be overcome, merely added an ineffable aura of romance to his idealization of her.

  He would be patient for as long as it took, but he hoped that somehow the birth of this little baby would not only give her something to live for in the short term, but some stake as well in the as yet undefined future, whose contours were unformed, still to be constructed and shaped—a future he desperately hoped would include him fully, as a crucial part of her life.

  His thoughts were now interrupted by a loud rapping on his office door.

  “Captain Keating,” one of the young secretaries called out excitedly as she entered the room without even waiting for his response. “Captain Keating, a telegram has just arrived for you from the United States. It was routed through the Foreign Office. General Armstrong said I should give it to you without delay. I . . . I hope it’s good news. I mean, about your wife and the baby, sir.”

  She looked at him expectantly and then realized that he might want some privacy while reading it. Tom hesitated a moment before unfolding the piece of paper, waiting for the young woman to leave. She was halfway through the office door when he gave out an exultant whoop of joy.

  “It’s a girl! My wife has had a baby girl! Get me a phone line, will you, Sarah? I need to make an overseas call, right now. This is fabulous news!”

  Chapter Thir
ty-One

  It was mid-May, and the first shoots of grape hyacinth, pale narcissus, and brightly colored daffodils had already begun to emerge from the sun-warmed soil in the gardens outside the Apostolic Palace, cautiously poking their celadon leaves into the spring air. A sultry evening breeze was now blowing outside, despite the time of year, making it all the more incongruous that somewhere on the third floor of the papal residence, the famed terza piano, a fire had been lit in one of the small rooms that served as a library.

  “That will be all for now,” Rostoni said, nodding in the direction of the door. “Just close the draperies over there before you leave,” he added.

  The young housekeeper looked at him inquiringly, but said nothing despite the peculiarity of the request. After all, the windows were still open, catching the nighttime breeze. Why cover them up with the curtains?

  “You heard me correctly, Francesca,” Rostoni reiterated, a slight edge of anger to his voice. “I require total concentration. The moonlight is disturbing.”

  Rostoni had deliberately chosen to call one of the junior housekeeping staff to build the fire, knowing that such individuals could be dismissed on the flimsiest of pretexts if they were uncooperative or loose-tongued. And though the war seemed to be coming to an end, Rostoni knew that it would be a long time before the Italian economy would improve. No one could afford to lose her job, however little it paid. Yes, Rostoni knew he could count on the discretion and silence of little Francesca, who had not dared to question or comment aloud on the unusual circumstance of a fire in May.

  He waited until the door was closed and the soft echo of her footfall disappeared down the hallway. Walking over to the massive mahogany desk at the far end of the room, he removed a key ring from his pocket and opened one of the drawers. The desk was one of many used by the Holy Father, depending on the task at hand or his mood. There was a formal study in which the Pope would greet guests, for instance, and sign important documents in a somewhat public venue, but occasionally he preferred a more intimate setting in which he could compose the early drafts of his encyclicals or attend to diplomatic correspondence.

  This was one such room, and it housed not only these early versions of the Pope’s pronouncements on theology and faith, sometimes carelessly tossed onto a silver tray to await the next moment of inspiration or revision, but several of his predecessor’s hand-written manuscripts as well. These had been filed away in a locked drawer, untouched since his death a few short years ago. It was these papers that Rostoni intended to deal with tonight, together with some coded documents related to Ratline activities that might possibly incriminate him and others at a later date.

  Rostoni emptied the drawer in question onto the desktop and thumbed through several of the pages. It was just as he’d heard in whispered conversations, conversations so indirect in their wording and purport as to be all but incomprehensible to anyone outside the Pope’s closest circle of advisors.

  Pius XI, the previous pontiff, had indeed been preparing a series of documents in which the Holy See would express its doubts and reservations about anti-Semitic legislation just before what could only be characterized as his conveniently timed death. He had already published one encyclical condemning Nazi teachings. Rostoni smiled to himself triumphantly as he recalled the nasty rumors that the physician father of Claretta Petacci, Mussolini’s mistress, had hurried Pius XI to his death on the Duce’s orders in order to avoid scandal.

  Of course, nothing had ever been proven. There had been no post-mortem to detect the presence of poison, and there were no other extant drafts of these papers. It was, however, entirely possible that some bureaucratic toady or other, with a misplaced sense of loyalty to the previous pope, had filed other copies in the Secret Archives. If that were the case, Rostoni could only hope that they were in some obscure place where they would never be discovered for decades, or that they were in a classified file that would never be accessed by scholars.

  All of these ruminations, however, were now keeping him from the task at hand. The fire was burning steadily behind the wrought-iron grate, and, carrying the sheaf of papers to the hearth, he dropped them into the flames one at a time, waiting until the final scraps had been consumed. Taking a heavy poker in his hand, he stirred the ashes. Good. Everything from the locked drawer had been consumed, totally and without leaving any identifiable trace.

  He walked back to the desk and placed some of the papers the Pope had been working on in the drawer and locked it. Should anyone ever open the drawer for any reason at all, at least there would be something inside it, something innocuous but credible. He pulled the heavy velvet curtains apart and let the fresh night air enter the room. He was prepared to remain there until the smell of the fire had dissipated and the ashes had cooled.

  Patience, he congratulated himself silently as he sat down in a deep armchair to wait, patience and tenacity were indeed among his major gifts.

  Chapter Thirty-Two

  Baby Julia was now almost two months old. Elena had named her for her brother Giulio, though at Tom’s suggestion, when they had conferred by telephone, she had anglicized the spelling of her little daughter’s name—or their little daughter’s name, for as far as the older Keatings knew, this was Tom’s baby. Elena knew she would never return to Italy, and the spelling of the name symbolized her realization that her life and her future were here in America, with Tom and his family, at least for the foreseeable future.

  When tiny Julia was brought to her for the first time, after the ether from the delivery wore off, Elena wasn’t sure whether to be pleased or disappointed that the baby resembled her own side of the family. No apparent similarity to Niccolò could be discerned, except perhaps for the softly curling dark hair, a feature that Elena had, in any case, shared with her dead lover. Her initial disappointment, however, was quickly replaced by relief, for at least the baby’s looks would not be an embarrassment to Tom or his parents, something for which Elena realized she should be grateful.

  Julia was beautiful, Elena thought, the most beautiful baby in the world. And as time passed after the birth, she found herself looking forward to Tom’s return on army furlough, wanting to share her joy and to see him hold her little daughter in his arms. She hoped he would accept Julia fully, that he would love her as if she were his own, for if Elena were to make a new life for herself here in America, this was one of the factors critical to its success.

  Tom’s parents had been wonderful to her, lavishing every little luxury on her and the baby. A bedroom next to the one occupied by Elena had been converted into a lovingly decorated nursery, with white eyelet curtains at the windows, an antique cradle that Tom himself had slept in as an infant now swathed in pink fabric, and a myriad of stuffed animals arranged on top of a pine dresser that held the baby’s layette.

  A comfortable rocking chair was perched near the window, and Elena spent many hours of the day and night seated there, nursing the baby. Tom’s parents had been discreetly shocked at first when they realized that Elena planned to breastfeed Julia. It was not the fashionable thing to do in the United States during the war years, and certainly not accepted practice among people of their social background. But they quietly returned the glass bottles and sterilization kit they had purchased and sent the baby nurse packing, along with a generous bonus.

  They would respect their young daughter-in-law’s wishes, even if they seemed unsophisticated and unworldly, and quickly learned not to disturb Elena when she retreated behind closed doors to nurse their grandchild. If Elena didn’t mind waking up in the middle of the night to breastfeed the baby instead of handing little Julia over to a baby nurse, it was really none of their business. As long as she was happy and the baby was content and thriving, that was all that mattered.

  Late one summer night, about ten weeks after Julia’s birth, as a soft breeze billowed gently through the window and pale moonlight gleamed on Elena’s bare shoulders as she fed her child, there was a knock on the nursery door. She had left the
door only partially closed to encourage some cross ventilation, since Tom’s parents had retired for the night and were unlikely to disturb her.

  Startled by the sound, she released the drowsing baby’s mouth from her breast and tried to pull the straps of her thin nightgown back up over her shoulders just as Tom walked into the room. She hadn't known that he was coming home on a last minute leave and was completely surprised. He stopped a few feet away from her, averting his gaze as best he could, embarrassed to have intruded on this moment of intimacy between mother and baby.

  “I’m sorry, Elena,” he said, finally looking at her after she had adjusted her nightgown. “I . . . I was just so excited about seeing you and the baby that I didn’t stop to think. I had no idea you had decided to breastfeed her. I thought . . . I thought she was being bottle-fed and that it was all right for me to come in. I was just so happy to be here finally, to see you and Julia,” he stammered awkwardly. “I’m sorry if I’ve upset you.”

  But to his amazement Elena’s face lit up, and she smiled and rose from the rocking chair to hand him the baby. “Here,” she said softly as she placed Julia in Tom’s arms. “This is little Julia. You can hold her. Don’t be afraid. She won’t break. She’s been fed and will sleep quite peacefully for the next few hours. Isn’t she adorable?”

  He cradled the baby in his arms, brushing her forehead gently with his lips. Then moving towards the crib, he laid her down carefully and covered her with a light blanket. Elena was now standing close to him, so close that he could smell the subtle but intoxicating perfume of her skin and hair as they watched the sleeping baby stir, make soft cooing sounds, and close her eyes once more.

  Turning to look at Elena, he saw that she had moved closer to him, perhaps unconsciously, her bare arm lightly grazing the sleeve of his uniform. He looked down at her tranquil face, luminous in the soft glow of the moon. His heart began to pound rapidly, and it was all he could do to stop himself from taking her in his arms. She stood there, still smiling at her baby, and then turned to him, her hand reaching up to touch his cheek, caressing it lightly.