Events since then had traumatized the priest, but also purified his purpose. Lehmann felt Himmler’s end as a personal loss, yet it changed nothing. Subsequent news of Hitler’s suicide and the abject surrender—no, destruction—of German forces changed nothing. The Catholic war against Bolshevism continued, more urgently than ever. And he, Father Roberto Lehmann, commissioned by the noble Himmler himself, was central to it. The Road Out stretched from Vienna to the Plaza de Mayo in Buenos Aires. It would rescue the most stalwart enemies of the Kremlin atheists and set them up to continue the great crusade. At each point, from Vienna to Zagreb to Rome, Franciscans and other clerics stood ready and willing to shore up the passage. Thus, only months after the end of the war in Europe, the choir stalls of Casa dello Spirito Santo were crowded at Vespers with gray- or brown-robed men. Of the twenty-seven men in habits, only fourteen were actual monks.
The Croatians among them were true Franciscans and true fugitives, both. While Croatians were a lesser race, even if Himmler had declared them free of Slavic blood, Lehmann knew them as invaluable allies. Having survived the old war, they were ready for the new one. Indeed, the Croatian Catholic network was proving pivotal to his entire enterprise.
Casting his eyes about now, Lehmann could distinguish the impostor friars by the unpracticed diligence with which they moved their lips around the Latin syllables. Most wore spectacles, which were probably fake. Some had monkishly small beards. In addition to the Croatians, the company included Frenchmen, Germans, and Hungarians—men in flight from Allied search teams but also from vengeance-seeking mobs who knew them as Gestapo, Ustashe leaders, or Vichy officials. Lehmann did not know who they were or what their roles had been, nor did he care to know.
The chief Aussenweg tollkeeper operated from Vienna, a German whom Lehmann had met once, in the archbishop’s palace in Mainz. His rank of Reichsleiter had been clear to Lehmann from his distinctive gold lapel insignia. Now the Reichsleiter, presumably no longer in uniform, launched men on the secret pilgrimage, equipped with the necessary passwords and gold coins for bribes and with the understanding that everyone would be using a false name. Everyone but Lehmann, a fact in which he took due pride.
After Vespers and a light collation in the refectory, Lehmann went walking alone in the outer courtyard. Soon the friars would be at Compline, and then the great silence would fall. They would retire to their cells. The wind was howling and carried the damp odor of the fetid Tiber a few blocks distant. Above, the swifts of dusk soared like one creature in a great wheel.
At the monastery, Lehmann held the office of procurator, and he demonstrated that he stood apart from the friars, and above them, by this habitual opting out of the day’s final communal service. His postprandial walk kept him in the shadows of the cloister at one end and of the high blank wall at the other. In this way, like a lord surveying his demesne, he circled the sheds, the carts, the chicken coop, the automobile with its Vatican license plates, and the priest’s cottage, which he had taken for himself the year before.
Being removed from the monastic discipline in 1941, upon his assignment to the cathedral in Mainz, had meant Lehmann could care for his widowed mother. His father, a successful importer, had recently died of tuberculosis, but since then, Madre carried herself like a highborn war widow, her satins black. With Lehmann’s transfer, he brought her to Rome, rescuing her from the incessant Mainz bombing raids, but also ushering her into the social whirl of the papal court.
At the Casa, he might have been expected to resume his hemmed-in life as a Franciscan. If he declined, it was not mainly because of his mother—although he used her as an excuse. More important, he had to maintain his status as a priest of pontifical right, diplomatically credentialed in the Holy See, and he could not do that as a friar. He continued to keep his room in his mother’s apartment near the Piazza Navona, but he also valued the Casa’s distance from her. He spent three or four nights a week in his cottage here, a secret pleasure to be on his own, belonging neither to Madre nor to the cloister.
As he strolled along the arcade now, he preferred his polished shoes to common sandals, his fine black cassock and white linen shirt to a coarse brown habit stinking of body odor. He liked his cologne, his shirt’s double cuffs, his gold cufflinks, his gold signet ring stamped with the seal of the House of Habsburg.
Because his walk had taken him into the outer courtyard, he heard the knock on the main gate—a sound that, at such an hour, should have been heard by the watchman alone, but where was he? A watchman who sleeps! Lehmann again had the thought that he should not have kept the dolt on after the Cistercian sisters had at last evacuated the place. The knock was repeated. He went to the gate himself and pulled open the small, eye-level hatch. On the other side he saw a veiled figure, and at first he thought it was a religious sister. But then he recognized the black lace mantilla cloaking a woman’s head, a Roman lady—the look his mother had mastered. Though her face was obscure in the shadow, Lehmann sensed how fiercely her eyes were fixed upon him.
“Buona sera,” she said softly.
“Che cosa?” Lehmann asked.
“Il sacerdote.” The priest.
Lehmann hesitated, suddenly alert.
“Padre Antonio,” she said then. “I have come to see Padre Antonio. Père Antoine.”
“He is not here.”
“Per favore. Il mio confessore.” He is my confessor.
Lehmann’s first impulse was to close the hatch, the simplest and most truthful answer to the woman. Yet it seemed cruel. He opened the gate.
When she saw his cassock and collar, she said, “Buona sera, Padre.”
Lehmann shook his head. “I am sorry, Signora, Father Antonio is not here. He is gone.”
“I don’t understand.”
“More than a year, he is gone.” The shawl obscured her face somewhat, and she was still in shadows, but Lehmann sensed something familiar. She was tall. Her hair was dark, a cascade to her shoulders in line with the mantilla. She wore a cape, closed at her throat. Her left hand was at her cheek. He said, “Are you all right?” He nervously fingered his ring.
“I came to see Father Antonio. He is my friend. I was his student. Here, with the sisters.”
“The sisters are gone. This is a friary now. Religious men. Franciscans.”
“What?”
“You should not be here at this hour. Magnum silentium is soon to begin.”
“I am sorry, Father.”
“I know you. We’ve met. Where have we met?” Lehmann pulled the door wide. “Come in.”
“No, Father. No. I am sorry. I did not mean to intrude.” She lowered her eyes, demurely hugging herself. “I thought—”
“It’s all right.” Lehmann felt the pull of her predicament. And he caught the scent of her perfume, which underscored her allure. It hit him then, how beguiling she was. “Come in,” he said. “You can see the courtyard. It is as it was. You say you were a student? Would you like to see the courtyard?”
“But where can I find Father Antonio?”
“I do not know. The sisters were moved to the Convent of Santa Maria della Vittoria. Perhaps with them.” Lehmann knew very well that the sisters had jettisoned the old priest.
“But why are they gone?” she asked.
“Who are you?”
“I am Marguerite d’Erasmo.”
“I remember,” he said. “We met in the Vatican. An office in the Apostolic Palace. Briefly. Some time ago.”
“I do not recall. I was with Rome Red Cross. So perhaps the Pontifical Relief office.”
“Yes, that’s it. You wore a Red Cross cap.”
She said shyly, as if making an admission, “I have been away from Rome, in Geneva—the Red Cross Committee International. But I am returned now. Only as of today. I came here first.”
“Seeking your priest.”
“Yes. I should go now. Thank you, Father.”
But he stepped toward her, touching her arm, which was still wrapped around
her body, just below her breasts. “No, Signorina, one moment. You will be with the Red Cross in Rome—once more?”
“Yes.”
“That is good. I myself work with refugees, also for Vatican offices. Rome is more filled with lost ones than before. You will see. I consult the Red Cross. No doubt we will work together now that you are returned.”
“You have refugees here, in the Casa?” she asked.
“In a way. This is a place of prayer. A house for holy men. You know that the friars are an international order, and here have come monks driven into exile, enemies of Bolsheviks and Mensheviks and Chetniks. The Church once again has martyrs.”
“Chetniks from Croatia?”
“No, enemies of Chetniks.”
“I was in Croatia,” she said. “I knew Franciscans.” Vukas. She knew better than to say his name. “Are you Franciscan?”
Lehmann opened his arms wide, indicating his soutane, the getup of a secular priest. He bowed and, with a hint of self-mockery, said, “I am a delegate of the Sacred Congregation for Extraordinary Ecclesiastical Affairs. I am Father Lehmann.”
“You are German.”
“Yes. From the Rhineland, seat of resistance to the National Socialists. But I spent most of the war here in Rome, attached to the Vatican, working for peace. Now, instructed by the Holy Father, I minister to German-speaking prisoners held in camps throughout Italy. I am their poor priest. There are tens of thousands.”
“Yes. I know. Also hundreds of thousands of others.”
“Indeed. All children of the one merciful God. Do come in. See the courtyard. That, at least.”
At his gesture, she stepped over the portal frame and preceded him into the courtyard. Her heels gave her calves an arresting turn. She was wearing silk stockings with a perfectly aligned hem slicing up the back of each leg. She took a dozen steps, then stopped. In the half-light of evening, the roof lines were defined, and lights shone from several windows in the main building. Lehmann saw a movement in one of them, a dark form, a flash of white—someone watching. Only a few seconds passed, but the German priest took note of the woman’s hesitation, her focus. She had seen the dark form, too. The white glint flickered again, a handkerchief dabbing at a mouth. She turned away.
Because the priest’s cottage door was ajar, the wash of its interior light spilled out onto the packed dirt. Indicating the cottage, she said, without turning back to him, “This was where I took my lessons with mon père.”
“This is my house now.”
“Père Antoine is an old man,” she said. “He was frail. Is he all right, do you know?”
“I am sure he is fine.” Lehmann remained behind her. In the wind, the point of the mantilla fluttered at the small of her back. Had she worn that shawl, like a Roman noblewoman, as the feminine vestment for the sacrament of penance? “Signorina,” he said quietly, “did you want the priest for confession?” He spoke the words without breathing, a proposition.
She turned to face him. “Yes,” she said with surprising frankness. “I need a priest.”
“I am a priest.”
The silence hung between them.
Then Lehmann gestured with one upraised arm, pointing the way to the chapel.
But she turned toward the cottage. “Since this is where I met with Père Antoine . . .” She stepped toward the open door, with Lehmann following. She ducked her head slightly as she crossed into the small house. An oil lamp sat on the table, casting its flickering light around the space. As Lehmann followed her in, he pulled the door closed behind, conscious of the illicit air. If that watchman had awakened, he might be seeing this. The friars, though, were at Compline by now.
The woman drew one of the chairs away from the table and knelt before it, resting her elbows on the rough twine seat, her knees on the broad-planked wooden floor. Adjusting the mantilla forward, she lowered her head onto her hands. Lehmann moved the second chair and sat facing her shoulder, so that she had his profile.
“Benedicite, Signorina,” Lehmann said softly. The words came to his lips naturally, but otherwise he felt cut loose from his mooring. He was at the mercy less of this woman than of a threatening sexual arousal, which made him more conscious of himself, in fact, than of her.
Lehmann was a man with little intimate experience of women, but also one who lived to impress women whenever he encountered them. He was the favorite of every female circle to which his mother belonged, and even if those women were always older, that made them, if anything, more susceptible to his charms. Erotic implication with erotic unavailability—the lethal mix of his magnetism. His Latin good looks, his studied congeniality, the heat of his own affection for himself, these were dark stars in his personal night sky, and all at once they had been pulled into stunning alignment. Tonight.
She began to whisper, and though her words were barely audible, Lehmann recognized at once the act of contrition: “O my God, I am heartily sorry for having offended Thee . . .” She recited the formula slowly but precisely, right to its conclusion: “. . . with the help of Thy grace, nevermore to offend Thee, and to amend my life. Amen.”
When she fell silent, Lehmann was nonplussed. “But Signorina—your sins. You did not confess your sins.”
She said nothing.
“Signorina, Christ in His mercy requires the confession of sins. You must confess,” he said, intending to be stern.
But instead of enumerating her sins, she whispered, “Please forgive me, Father.”
Lehmann felt something like panic rising in his chest. “I cannot forgive what I do not know. The manifestation of conscience is required. You must tell me.”
“I have sinned. That is enough.”
“No. You must tell me.”
“Then I will go.” She shifted her weight and began to rise to her feet.
“Wait.” Lehmann turned in his chair to look directly at her. She met his gaze with naked plainness, and at once he was lost in the green depths of her eyes. But canon law makes it plain: if the sacramental norms are not observed, the guilt of the sinner is compounded by the guilt of the minister. She was asking him to join her in sin. And, as if she had exposed herself physically before him, he could not find it in himself to refuse. The norms be damned. He raised his hand, nearly touching her forehead with his fingertips. “Dominus noster Jesus Christus te absolvat et ego auctoritate ipsius te absolvo. . .”
No sooner had he completed the rote recitation, stirring the air above her head with the sign of the cross, than she seized his hand and pulled his fingers to her lips as if she were a peasant woman. She kissed him. He remembered that he, too, had once kissed her—in exactly the same place, her hand. Had she come here to reciprocate, this woman, so unlike the fawning Legionaries of Mary? The touch of her mouth to his flesh, even there, ignited an impulse on which, despite a lifetime’s sublimation, he might have acted. But before he could move, she was up from her knees, through the door, out into the black wind, and gone.
“Jesus H. Christ,” Deane said when Warburg told him that the War Refugee Board was being shut down.
They were sitting on a bench beneath the canopy of an artfully pruned pine tree, on the edge of what had once been the playing field of the Pontifical North American College. Now the grassy plain atop the Janiculum Hill was a crowded tent city, the college building and grounds, including the basketball court, having been given over to displaced persons months before.
As camps went, this one achieved a relative luxury, anchored by three large canvas structures braced by ropes stretched from towering cypress trees on either side of the field. Centered on those olive-drab behemoths were orderly rows of smaller brown tents supplied by the U.S. Army. Wood-framed structures were set aside for hygiene, medical services, a school, and cooking, and at all corners of the compound were sentry-manned checkpoints to keep bandits out. But the American pair were focused on neither the near scene nor the far. Instead, Warburg explained what had happened.
He did not know whether things would
have been different, he said, had Roosevelt lived. After all, the promises of the year before had been left unfulfilled, even for as long as FDR survived. Astonishingly, there had been no repeat of the Henry Gibbons. That first thousand refugees setting sail from Naples had been the last. At Fort Ontario, in upstate New York, they had been denied immigrant status, and remained in guarded barracks to this day, prisoners.
The WRB had succeeded in slowing deportations out of Budapest, with about twenty thousand Hungarian Jews successfully evacuated to the south and nearly two hundred thousand others provided safe haven in place long enough to live out the war. But an untold number were lost, and the Swedish diplomat Raoul Wallenberg had disappeared in the storm of the Soviet conquest of Budapest. From an appallingly safe distance, Warburg had done his part to preside over too little, too late, and he knew it.
And the horror was far from over. As the war had wound down in paroxysms of destruction, including the Allies’ springtime bombing of German cities, the floodgates of desperation had broken fully open, with millions of “dehoused” people driven out into the countryside, clogging the roads, having nothing to eat but weeds plucked from gullies. Across the continent, almost no one had clean water. Plague stalked the streets of Europe again.
Italy continued to be a destination for migrating Jews, and by now Jews from beyond the Alps made up the vast majority of those held in Italian camps. More arrived every day. Warburg’s charges had been made not only homeless but stateless, with no hope—or, for the most part, desire—of returning to former shtetls, towns, or neighborhoods. Therefore they were at the bottom of every relocation list—the Army’s, the Red Cross’s, and the UN’s. Relocate? Where? And what nation would sponsor what visa? The undocumented and undocumentable were condemned to a self-perpetuating limbo.
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