Death's Door

by James R Benn

  “How good a forgery?” Diana asked.

  “Practically the original,” May said. “We have three lieutenants in one house who were going stir-crazy. They convinced their host to take them to the opera. So they dressed up in the finest clothes they could find, and she took them to her box. Wealthy woman. Right in the next box was none other than General Rainer Stahel, the military commander of Rome! So the lady begins flirting with him outrageously. She evidently thought it the best way to distract his attention from the very quiet young men sitting with her. At intermission, she asked him for his autograph, if you can believe it, and he scrawled it on her program. We have copied it and used it several times. Always works like a charm.”

  “The best defense is a good offense,” I said. “When do we leave?”

  “Within the hour. We need to get you down to Fiumicino before nightfall. It’s a little fishing village on the coast.”

  “Can you take four of us?” Kaz asked.

  “The princess?” May asked. Kaz nodded. “Yes, one more should be no problem.” That put a smile on Kaz’s face. We all dashed to Santa Marta to give Nini the good news. We found her in the refectory, but her response was not what Kaz expected.

  “I cannot leave with you,” she said, wringing her hands. “There is so much work with the refugees. And Hugh needs me. You know what it is like, Piotr. I have a duty, even though I am not in uniform. I am Italian, and so many of these are my people, Christian and Jew alike. I cannot leave them.”

  “You do not want to?” Kaz asked.

  “I wish to, with all my heart,” she said. “But I cannot.” She kissed me on the cheek, hugged Diana tearfully, then took Kaz by the hand and led him upstairs.

  We waited. It wasn’t like we had a lot of bags to pack. Diana was still wearing her expensive duds, and I had my coat on, so we were as ready as we needed to be. A half hour later, Kaz came downstairs alone. He didn’t say a word.

  John May didn’t ask about Nini. Maybe he’d known what her answer would be. He packed us in the back of a very old truck of indeterminate vintage, and threw blankets over empty crates shoved in front of us. He slapped the side of the vehicle, and a silent driver took us through the Sant’Anna Gate and out of the Vatican City State, into the unknown. I didn’t mind one bit.

  CHAPTER FORTY-FIVE

  “USCIRE QUI.” THE driver said after two hours of slow roads and one checkpoint. May had been right. We had been waved right through.

  “This is our stop,” Kaz translated. It was the first thing he had said since we’d left.

  We jumped from the back of the truck and stretched our stiff limbs. We were on a wharf, a scattering of fishing boats bobbing on the tide. The setting sun sparkled on the water. If we weren’t being smuggled out of enemy territory, it would have been downright pretty. The driver pointed to the most dilapidated craft in the harbor, at the far end of the wharf.

  Walking toward the fishing boat, I felt exposed. Anyone along the shore could spot us, and there was no cover, nowhere to run. Our footsteps echoed on the weathered planks, the only other sound coming from the gulls squabbling for fish guts.

  Our boat was thoroughly rusted, with what paint there was peeling off in great chunks. I saw movement in the cabin and wished I still had that Beretta.

  “That you, Billy?” A large shadow emerged from the boat.

  “Big Mike!” Diana said, running to give him a hug.

  “Quiet down out there!” a rumbling baritone echoed from below deck.

  “Come on,” Big Mike said, grinning as he helped Diana aboard. “We’re ready to shove off.”

  We cleared the harbor as the sun vanished below the horizon, the only light coming from the distant stars. At the wheel, Lieutenant John Hamilton checked his compass with a flashlight, its red filter protecting his night vision.

  “Will you tell this big lummox to stay out of the way?” Hamilton said. “I’m about ready to throw him overboard.” Hamilton had two crewmen along, Yugoslavian pirates by the look of them. They laughed, and I could tell it had become a running joke.

  “What are you doing here, Big Mike?” Diana asked after we settled into the small cabin.

  “I brought Billy his orders to go to Rome,” he said. “Then I figured I oughta hang around and make sure the OSS got him out okay.”

  “It’s the only reason we’re here,” Hamilton said, keeping his eyes on the horizon. “Because then Big Mike will go back to London and leave us alone.”

  “You look familiar,” Diana said to Hamilton. “Have we met before?” That got more laughs.

  “You’re looking at a real movie star,” Big Mike said. “Sterling Hayden himself.”

  “Never heard of him,” Diana said. Hamilton laughed loudest at that one.

  He explained we were only going about twenty miles out, to rendezvous with a British submarine. They’d taken the boat up from Anzio last night, mingling with the fishing vessels that the Germans allowed out along the coast. We had about two hours, and he wanted all hands on deck to watch for German patrol boats. This was a quiet sector, most of the action was down around Anzio, but that was no reason to take chances.

  Diana and I went out on the bow and squinted into the blackness, watching for any shapes moving against the stars. Time passed, the sound of the motor blending into the night, the blackness encompassing us until it seemed as if we weren’t even moving, but floating in a watery dream.

  “How is Kaz taking it, do you think?” I asked in a whisper.

  “It is another loss. But not terrible, and perhaps temporary. They seem quite in love, don’t you think?”

  “Yes,” I said. “That was a tough choice she had to make.”

  “Every choice in war is a loss, one way or the other,” Diana said. She shivered, and I took off my coat and draped it around her shoulders. I wanted to tell her about the choice I had made and almost had to live with. I don’t know why, but it felt like a secret I shouldn’t keep from her. Guilt, maybe, as I thought of Bruzzone, his story spilling out of him like water over a dam.

  The sound of gunfire echoed across the water. It was distant, the dark sky to the south lit with faint red flashes. Destroyers or PT boats, maybe, too far away to cause us any trouble.

  “Sometimes it’s hard to know which loss is worse than the other,” I said. “Diana—”

  “Look!” She pointed off the port bow. White foam churned and a black shape blotted out the stars in front of us. I thought it was a whale, about to crush our flimsy craft.

  “Submarine!” Hamilton shouted. He slowed the boat and turned toward the sub. “Prepare to disembark.”

  Figures spilled from the conning tower, and launched a rubber raft in our direction.

  “We’re going home, Billy!” Diana shouted, her face wild with excitement as she hugged me. “What were you about to say?”

  “Nothing,” I said. Instead of talking, I kissed her. There, in hostile waters, bobbing on the bow of a fishing boat in the Mediterranean, with one of His Majesty’s submarines waiting for us as exploding shells created fireworks on the horizon, and with a pair of Yugoslavs shouting their encouragement, we kissed—a kiss of pleasure, joy, and forgetfulness.

  Some things are better left unsaid.

  Author’s Note

  Although Colonel Erich Remke of the German Abwehr (military intelligence) is a fictional character, the plots against Hitler and the Nazis orchestrated by that agency and its head, Admiral Wilhelm Canaris, are factual. This includes the use of the Vatican and Pope Pius XII as a conduit for passing information to the English and French about the German plans to invade France in 1940. The Pope did indeed help the anti-Nazi circle to contact the English and provide warnings of the invasion, but these efforts bore no fruit, perhaps because the English were too suspicious or shortsighted.

  The assassination attempt described by Remke is based on an actual plan that was to take place on March 11, 1944. Cavalry Captain Eberhard von Breitenbuch, an anti-Nazi conspirator, had offered to
smuggle a pistol into a planned meeting with Hitler and shoot him in the head. Convinced that the war would only bring about the complete destruction of Germany and that Hitler had to be stopped, he was willing to sacrifice his own life in the attempt. Breitenbuch, an aide to Field Marshal Ernst Busch, made it to the door of the conference room, only to be stopped by a duty sergeant, who explained that Hitler had suddenly ordered that no adjutants be admitted. As Remke said, Hitler did have the devil’s own luck when it came to avoiding assassinations.

  The Auschwitz Protocol is real, a document written in hand by two Slovakian Jews, Rudolf Vrba and Alfred Wetzler, who escaped Auschwitz in early 1944. Initially referred to as the Vrba-Wetzler report, the papers were combined with earlier documentation smuggled out of Auschwitz by Witold Pilecki, a member of the Polish underground (as described in Rag and Bone), and as such were referred to as the Auschwitz Protocols. The documents did make their way to the Vatican and other governments. The wide publicity given to these reports caused a halt to the deportation of Hungarian Jews to Auschwitz for a time. The deportations began again after a fascist coup in Hungary, but heavy diplomatic involvement of neutral embassies in Budapest as well as that of the Vatican’s papal representative, Angelo Rotta, saved tens of thousands of Jews from being transported to death camps. The Swedish Embassy alone, under the leadership of Raoul Wallenberg, saved an estimated 70,000 Jews in Budapest.

  Monsignor Hugh O’Flaherty is one of those true-life characters that a novelist could never invent. O’Flaherty and his organization hid an estimated 4,000 escaped prisoners of war and Jews, along with Italian antifascists and other refugees. In addition to his network, it is estimated that the Church hid about 5,000 Roman Jews in the Vatican and the surrounding areas, including thousands within the Pope’s summer residence, Castel Gandolfo. John May, butler to the English ambassador, also played his part as a master scrounger.

  Sterling Hayden, or John Hamilton, as he insisted on being called while serving in the military, is another larger-than-life character who nearly threatened to take over the story. Hayden was a sea captain and adventurer who happened to work in the movie business. He smuggled arms to Tito and the Partisan Army in Yugoslavia as described in these pages. He parachuted into the Balkans and received the Silver Star for gallantry and a commendation from Marshal Tito for his support of the Yugoslavian resistance.

  Monsignor Montini was a Vatican priest working to aid, feed, and hide refugees in Vatican extraterritorial properties. At the request of Pope Pius, he organized the Pontificia Commissione di Assistenza to provide assistance to escaped POWs, Jews, antifascists and others on the run in German-occupied Italy. In 1963, he began his pontificate as Pope Paul VI.

  Finally, much has been written about Pope Pius XII and his role in regards to the Holocaust. Many share the assumption that I held before I began my research: that Pius was vaguely complicit with the Nazis, or at least could have saved lives by speaking out. This view was supported by the text of Hitler’s Pope by John Cornwell, published in 1999. Cornwell charged that Pius was anti-Semitic and that he did not speak out enough about the Holocaust during the war. However, Cornwell’s views changed upon further research. In 2004, he stated, “I would now argue, in light of the debates and evidence … that Pius XII had so little scope of action that it is impossible to judge the motives for his silence during the war, while Rome was under the heel of Mussolini and later occupied by Germany.”

  The fragile neutrality of the Vatican City State during the Second World War must be understood in order to see the past through the eyes of those who lived it. The small state was only ten years old as a political entity at the start of the war, the Lateran Treaty of 1929 having guaranteed the independence and sovereignty of the Holy See. The threat of military invasion by the Germans to take Pius XII into protective custody was a real and present danger. The Pope felt he did need to maintain strict neutrality. Unfortunately, he was often neutral by omission, not publicly condemning the killing of 1.8 million Catholic Poles by the Nazis or one million by the Soviets either. When Pius XII did speak out, his diplomatic phraseology was so circuitous and convoluted, in the manner of the time, that his message was often robbed of any impact.

  There is also the real question of what would have come of any vociferous denunciation of Nazi genocide. The Pope did have moral authority and the threat of excommunication for Catholics, but it seems unlikely that those engaged in the killing machine of Nazi extermination would have cared much about what the Pope had to say.

  There is no way to know if Pius’s course was the right one. Pinchas Lapide, a Jewish theologian and Israeli diplomat and historian, has written the best summation I have found:

  When armed force ruled well-nigh omnipotent, and morality was at its lowest ebb, Pius XII commanded none of the former and could only appeal to the latter, in confronting, with bare hands, the full might of evil. A sounding protest, which might turn out to be self-thwarting—or quiet, piecemeal rescue? Loud words—or prudent deeds? The dilemma must have been sheer agony, for which ever course he chose, horrible consequences were inevitable.

  Acknowledgments

  Once again, I acknowledge the deep debt I owe to my wife Debbie Mandel for her unswerving support and assistance in the conception and writing of these stories in the form they appear here.

  Edie Lasner continues to provide invaluable help in the usage of the Italian language. Any errors should be chalked up to my lack of linguistic skills and any well-turned phrases are solely due to her expertise.

  I am grateful to Tom Mandel and Cathy D’Ignazio for their gracious hospitality in providing the use of their Block Island house as a writer’s retreat, where significant portions of this and other novels have been written during quiet winter weeks.

  The manuscript was also improved through the assiduous reading and editing of Michael Gordon, who has saved me from any number of mistakes in this and other books.