He drew a large manila envelope out of his cassock and carefully removed a flat, yellowed piece of stationery. “Here,” he said with a sober expression on his face. “Sit down and read it for yourself.”
She looked at Father Benedetto questioningly, but sat down on a step and began to read the cramped handwriting, her brows knitted together in concentration.
“February 1944—Rome, Italy
“I, Angelo Donato, parish priest of the congregation of Santa Maria in Trastevere, know that I am soon to die. My heart has finally weakened beyond all hope of recovery, and my desire to live has now faded to calm acceptance of my imminent end.
“But I cannot go to meet my Maker without one last confession. It is something I should have confessed long ago. Something of which I have always been ashamed. I am dictating this to a friend as I lie here on what may prove to be my deathbed, in the hope that it will reach you, my most reverend Bishop, and that you will absolve me of the grievous sin that I committed so many years ago.
“Mea culpa. Mea maxima culpa.
“Well before the terrible time of the war—some twenty years ago—I had occasion to visit a member of my flock in the hospital, a woman who had given birth prematurely after many years of agonizing barrenness. I went to urge her to baptize her child as soon as possible, in the event that it did not survive. I wanted nothing more than to ensure its safe passage to Heaven.
“In the bed next to this woman lay another patient who had given birth to a baby boy by emergency surgical procedure several days earlier. She had been run over by a tram that had skidded off its tracks in the deep snow and had been taken by ambulance to the hospital, unconscious and without any identification papers or means of verifying who she was. She lay there in a delirium, tossing and turning, muttering words in a strange language that I could not understand.
“The nurses speculated that she was a tourist, a visitor in Rome, since no one had come looking for her in all the time that she had been hospitalized. Perhaps she was from Poland or Romania, they conjectured. On her neck was a chain with a small cylindrical gold pendant that was embellished with curving letters which I recognized as being part of the Hebrew alphabet. She pulled repeatedly at the chain in her delirium, and finally the object flew off her neck and fell to the floor. I picked it up and placed it on the nightstand next to her bed.
“Just as I was about to leave, having obtained my parishioner's consent that the baptism would take place as soon as her husband could return to the hospital, a nurse entered the room with tears in her eyes. She asked me to remain as she informed my poor parishioner that her tiny infant had succumbed and died.
“As the young woman cried out for her child, sobbing inconsolably, the patient in the next bed began to cough up blood and was dead within minutes. It was a sign from G-d. Or so I thought at the time.
“One baby was dead, but another lived. One woman had been bereaved, and one baby had been orphaned.
“The exchange was rapidly concluded. The dead woman's baby would be given to Fiorella . . ."
“What the . . . !” Nicola gasped in shock as she continued reading and then turned to Father Benedetto with blazing eyes.
“. . . The dead woman's baby would be given to Fiorella Rostoni. She would raise it as her own. No one would ever know. There was no mother. There was no father. There were no identification papers. There was no one to claim the baby. Clearly the dead woman had been a foreign Jew, and no one would be the wiser.
“Yes, my reverend Bishop, she was a Jew. Why else would the dead woman have been wearing what I now know is a mezuzah, a Jewish ritual object, on her necklace?
“I should never have done it. I should have searched for the orphaned baby's family and returned him to them, even though I now realize that he might have met his end in a concentration camp in later years had I done so.
“He has grown up to be a cold, hard-hearted man. He has destroyed a young woman's life. And who knows what evil his ambitions will lead him to in the future? I am responsible. I am to blame. And now . . . ”
The letter fell from Nicola's trembling hands onto the steps, and she jumped up and shifted away from the spot where it lay, recoiling from the document as if it were somehow steeped in poison, like Rostoni's deadly stiletto, able to kill with its very touch.
“Oh, my God," she said over and over again. “I don't believe it." She looked at Father Benedetto in stupefaction. “I just don't believe it. He was a Jew. Rostoni was born a Jew! Is it possible? He sent all those people to their deaths, and he was a Jew himself. He sent them knowingly. He had to know what was going to happen to them. And he did it without any compunction. None whatsoever. And he was a Jew. Just like them.”
“Sent whom, Nicola?” Benedetto said, interrupting her. “I don't understand. What people did he send to their deaths?”
“He told me that he'd made a deal with the Nazis during World War II. He bragged about it,” she began to explain.
“A deal?” Benedetto asked in puzzlement.
“Yes. A deal,” she said, her voice now hard with anger. “Or more like a Faustian pact, to be perfectly accurate. It seems that the Germans somehow discovered that the Vatican had the Temple treasures squirreled away in a secret vault, and they said they’d keep quiet about it only if the Church agreed to remain silent when the Jews were rounded up. Rostoni boasted that he was personally responsible for the deportation of the Jews of Rome. He was the one who brokered the arrangement.”
“I had no idea,” Benedetto said with a quiet shudder, his face pale with shock. “No idea at all.”
“Yes. It's really ironic in light of what we've just discovered in that letter. And not only that, Rostoni had plans to showcase the Temple treasures in his Museum of Dead Nations—a museum that would have celebrated the extinction of his very own people. Not that he knew, of course.”
She gazed abstractedly at the piece of paper still lying on the floor, clenching her fists, lost in thought. When she finally recovered her composure, she took a deep breath and looked at Benedetto with narrowed eyes.
“Well, too bad he's dead and we can't tell him he was really Jewish,” she remarked spitefully. “I bet it would have given him a heart attack on the spot. I could have saved myself a lot of trouble tonight.
“Anyway, I think I should call Bruno now,” she continued. “He needs to know that I’m safe and that Rostoni is dead. This new piece of information can wait. I'm still having trouble digesting it myself. Are you sure the document is genuine? That there's no mistake?”
He sighed. “No mistake. I know God works in mysterious ways, but this is beyond even my ability to comprehend.”
“So what are we going to do about Rostoni's corpse?” Nicola asked, refocusing on the task at hand. “And do you want the newspapers to know that the Director of the Vatican Museums was a Nazi collaborator? Or that he was the architect of that hideous Museum?”
“I’m not sure,” he replied, as he considered the implications for the Holy See. “I’ll have to call the Vigilanza to remove the body. I think it’s best if I tell them that Rostoni must have been frightened by something and had a heart attack, or maybe a stroke. That will explain the stiletto—that he must have tried to use it for protection. And if I’m asked, I’ll tell them I have no idea what he was doing near the underground vault in the middle of the night.
“I really see no point in embarrassing the Church, Nicola. Rostoni’s dead. He was clearly a deranged individual. Deranged and evil. He can’t do any more harm. And the main thing is that the Museum has been discovered and his plans—whatever they really were—have been thwarted.”
“All right,” she agreed halfheartedly, too tired to argue the point. “But how will you explain our presence here?”
“That’s easy enough. I’ll say that we were working late on the catacomb project and lost track of the time. We heard noises, saw an open door, and came down here to investigate. And since I see that you’re wearing latex gloves, even if you tou
ched the pectoral cross, there should be no trace of your fingerprints on it. You’re in the clear. Give me the gloves,” he said, reaching for them decisively. “It won’t occur to the Vigilanza to search me.”
“Okay, but what about the Swiss Guards that I knocked out with this?” Nicola asked, holding up the halothane. “They saw my tessera. And I still have their pagers and their can of mace in my pouch belt.”
“Don’t worry, Nicola. They’ll be too frightened to admit what happened to them, even if they do remember your name. They know they could be prosecuted for their unfortunate little breach in Vatican security. And as for the Vigilanza, believe me, they’ll be happy to minimize any potential scandal. Give me your pouch belt and that canister.
“In any event, Rostoni was an old man. No one expected him to live forever.”
“Funny,” she said, “but his last words were, ‘I have no regrets.’ The truth is, Father, neither do I. I never thought I’d have the strength, the courage, to do what I’ve done tonight. I never thought I could witness such horrible deaths and not collapse or go into severe shock. But those men who ambushed us in the catacombs were hit men sent by Rostoni to kill Bruno and me. They deserved to die. They deserved to die horribly.
“I’m not much of a believer in formal religion,” she reflected, “but I’m sure this was divine justice. Some sort of heavenly intervention. Those glass cases with the frozen Nazis have been cracked and compromised. The preservative has leaked out, and the generator that maintained the cryonic system is broken. There's no way the cadavers can be salvaged.
“And it's not just that,” she went on. “I’d like to think now that my poor grandfather's death has finally been avenged and that maybe all of those murdered Jews whose relics are exhibited in that vile Museum are at least partly avenged. Or they will be, when we locate their heirs and restore the artifacts to their rightful owners.”
“I hope so too. And I’ll give you all the help you need to find them,” Benedetto promised.
“And now that Rostoni is dead,” Nicola continued, “I guess my friend Matt can also rest in peace. I’m sure the Cardinal was involved somehow in his death, though I can’t prove it just yet.”
“You’re probably right,” he replied. “Rostoni wielded far more power than I ever imagined.”
“By the way,” she said, gesturing in the direction of the sealed doorway, “the vault with the Temple treasures that we read about in the manuscript is right over there. Behind that very door. Unfortunately, only Rostoni had the code to the alarm system, and the room has been booby-trapped.
“I guess we’ll have to leave the treasures where they are,” she said reluctantly. “At least in the meantime. They’ve waited for so long already. For centuries, in fact.
“Let’s call Bruno now,” she finished. “There’s still more work to be done.”
Endings
“Haste still pays haste, and leisure answers leisure,
Like doth quit like, and Measure still for Measure.”
~~ William Shakespeare, Measure for Measure, V, i, 407-408.
Rome, Piazza di Spagna --
Nicola sipped her Earl Grey slowly out of a porcelain cup with a series of delicately hand-painted roses near its rim. She and Bruno were in Babington’s Tea Rooms near the Spanish Steps, a fragrant pot of tea and a basket of fresh buttery scones, studded with currants, resting on the linen-covered table at which they sat. A pile of newspapers in several languages lay scattered on the banquette beside them.
It had only been a day since their earth-shattering discovery of the secret Museum and Nicola’s fateful confrontation with Rostoni. Bruno had arrived at the Apostolic Palace shortly after Nicola’s call, having sent a group of reporters and photographers to the catacombs to document evidence of the stolen artifacts and the strange showcase with its now decomposing corpses. Concerned for her safety, even though Rostoni was dead, he’d rushed to her side and had supported Father Benedetto’s decision to suppress both the story of the Cardinal’s involvement in the Museum and the existence of the Temple treasures, at least for now.
Yesterday’s edition of the Herald Tribune was spread out on the table in front of them, and they began to peruse it with great satisfaction one more time.
The International Herald Tribune
Museum of Dead Nations Uncovered
ROME—Reuters—An anonymous tip has led to the discovery in Rome of a secret art collection concealed in a crypt near the catacombs of the Via Appia Pignatelli. The underground museum is said to contain Jewish-owned artwork and ritual objects confiscated by the Nazis during World War II that were allegedly intended to become part of Hitler’s planned Museum of Dead Nations. A gag order has been placed regarding evidence of some unusual scientific experimentation that had allegedly been conducted in the museum. The remains of two as yet unidentified bodies were also found in the catacombs.
An unnamed source at Interpol has confirmed that the discovery of the artifacts may be linked to the recent death of internationally acclaimed art correspondent, Matthew Osborne, who had been investigating the whereabouts of artwork stolen from Greek Jews in the early 1940s. Forensic testing has revealed that Osborne died of a rare, fast-acting poison injected into his bloodstream, which mimicked the symptoms of cardiac arrest.
The Italian government has taken provisional custody of the catacomb and its contents. International efforts are now underway to locate and return the art to its rightful owners and their heirs.
* * *
“I’m glad we were able to keep our names out of the newspapers,” Nicola told Bruno, “though I’m still not completely sure it was a good idea to suppress the story about Rostoni’s involvement. He’s going to lie in state in San Pietro and be given a lavish funeral, and no one but us and Father Benedetto will know that what he really deserves is to be buried in obscurity, in unsanctified ground.”
Her gray eyes clouded for a moment with tears as she thought of all her relatives, whose traces had vanished completely during the war and whose places of burial would never be known. Though she suspected she might eventually locate some family members somewhere in Italy, perhaps even in Rome itself, she knew it would be a difficult task. It would require great reserves of patience in dealing with the labyrinth of Italian bureaucracy and red tape, and the perseverance to check out all possible leads through genealogical lists of Holocaust victims on file in Washington and Jerusalem.
She had no idea which members of Niccolò’s extended family might have survived the war, who might have changed a surname or identity in order to do so, or who might have emigrated, perhaps even to the United States. But she also knew that she had the tenacity to see it through, and that she would do so, not only for her own sake, but to sanctify the memory of the young man Elena had loved so briefly, so desperately, nearly a lifetime ago.
Finding out what had happened to Elena’s own family would prove to be equally complex, but Father Benedetto had offered to assist in obtaining parish and municipal records, and Nicola hoped that eventually some information would turn up. Perhaps the dead might finally be laid to rest, and her grandmother would now be willing to return to Italy, at some point, to confront her past and make peace with it.
But no matter what her search might ultimately reveal, Nicola had begun to reclaim her roots and fashion an identity based on her newly discovered heritage—an historical past that was part of a living legacy that transcended dead relics and vanished civilizations. She understood how tenuous her own life and personal happiness were within the larger context of events and forces seemingly beyond her control. She had faced death and had come out on the other side—victorious, like her grandmother—and had found an inner strength she’d never known she had possessed.
The world lay all before her, replete with the freshness of new possibility, untainted and as yet untarnished. With Bruno, she could become anything she wanted to be. Anything.
Zurich, Bahnhofstrasse—
“The Cardinal’s death
is a blow, but not a fatal one,” a heavily accented voice replied at the other end of the line. “There are others waiting to take his place. Many others.
“We will need to regroup our forces and plan more carefully this time. The other branch of the Museum will need to be moved immediately, to Engenweill. Können sie Mich hören?” he said heatedly. “We cannot be sure that its current location has not been compromised.”
“I understand,” Giovanni answered quickly. “I’ll get to work on it at once.”
“The clinic will provide a secure front for the delivery and storage of large shipments of goods. There are secret underground areas, currently used as research laboratories, where no one will ever think of looking. The remaining artifacts will be safe there, until we can bring our master plan to fruition.
"And we will need to redouble the guard on our cryonics lab. Without the Führer's body, everything we've worked for could fail.”
“All right. But what about the special collection that the Cardinal guarded for so many decades in the Vatican itself?" Giovanni asked. "What will we do about that? It cannot be accessed at the moment.”
“Leave it for the time being. Someday it will join the other objects we have amassed. Someday soon. Patience, mein lieber freund. Patience and tenacity will be our watchwords.
“Heil Hitler!”
“Heil Hitler!”
* * *
About the Author
Shifra Hochberg has a Ph.D. in English literature from New York University and teaches at Ariel University in Israel. She has published over 20 academic essays and is currently writing another novel.
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