Warburg in Rome

by James Carroll

  “The archbishop?”

  “Of Salzburg. Grubner. He protested the violation of cloister in the arrest. He indicated the Holy Father’s interest. Pavelic was mysteriously released. The cables are dated as of weeks ago.”

  Deane scanned the yellow cable forms she had spread on the case. “Can we know if the rumors are true,” he asked, “about his being here?”

  “Not likely in Vatican City itself. Croatians seem to be ensconced in the extraterritorial dependencies. They got to Rome first, snapped those places up. Have you discussed with Spellman what Warburg told you?”

  “Aussenweg? His Eminence waved it off as Tito’s propaganda. Croatia is Catholic to the core, and Tito is a Catholic-hating Bolshevik—period. And if there are Germans being credentialed by the Pontifical Commission, it’s because German Catholics, like Adenauer, resisted Hitler, and they should be supported now—also period. Besides, Germans, too, need compassion, and the vast majority of them were as much victims of the Nazi cabal as anyone.”

  “Do you believe that?”

  “Look,” Deane said, “if I was German, believing what Germans believed, would I have behaved so differently?”

  “The SS?”

  “Not the SS, no. I would not have behaved like that.”

  “So why the compassion?”

  “The Church judges and forgives. And then it helps. Sanctuary, Sister, is for the guilty. We may not like it, but there it is. The Vatican’s ancient instinct is to offer sanctuary. Is that bad?”

  “It depends, Monsignor. Wouldn’t you say it depends?”

  “Sister, Spellman is proud of the fact that it was he who insisted with General Marshall that Vatican visas not be overly scrutinized. Guards at American checkpoints don’t look twice if they see the seal with crossed keys. Visas are the new sanctuary. This whole thing depends on the Allies’ being loath to antagonize the Pope. Spellman spent all of Thursday afternoon with Tardini. And the next morning, all morning long, with Tisserant. Tisserant is pushing the innocent-Catholic line, too.”

  “Tisserant approved Vichy,” the nun said. “In his mind, the French criminals deserve protection, which he offers by protecting the Germans. Tisserant’s ties to Vichy are well known on the Third Floor. And he was just promoted to cardinal bishop. What does that tell you, Monsignor?”

  “Tells me the train is leaving the station, get aboard. Commies are the problem, not Nazis.” Deane took a small key from within the folds of his cassock and unlocked his briefcase. He withdrew a large manila envelope, unfastened the figure-eight tie, and spilled out its contents: photographs. “Take these,” he said.

  “The Germans?”

  “Yes. These are the big-fish candidates for Aussenweg, the photos to match with what you find in the visa application pool. These characters send in faked baptismal certificates—Catholics!—looking to get new names validated.”

  Sister Thomas flipped through the pictures, official Wehrmacht portraits for the most part, stern faces, sharply peaked hats with leather visors, the telltale eagle badges. Three or four wore the Waffen-SS hat with its skull. “Grim lookers,” she said. “The inner circle?”

  “Treblinka, Sobibor, Drancy. Like that.”

  “That’s what I meant—when you sang of sanctuary—by ‘it depends.’”

  “Yes.”

  “But I can promise you, Monsignor, no one wears hats with skull badges in the photographs that come across the visa desk.”

  “The photos they submit to the Holy See will be doctored to make them look like S-Bahn ticket takers,” Deane said. “But these eyes, these noses, these faces—same men.”

  Sister Thomas fingered the photos soberly. Then she asked, “Where does Mr. Warburg get these?”

  “From Jews,” Deane answered. “Not sure who. There may be Haganah units after these Nazis. Maybe Jewish renegades from the British Army. Polish fighters. Warburg won’t tell me.”

  She took in the photos for a moment, then said coldly, “Let’s assume the Nazis who’ve gone to ground are looking to get out. Safe assumption. If they expect to help one another, then yes, their names could have been compiled. At some organizing center. Vienna, you say? And interested Jewish groups might have gotten hold of the list. Plausible. It would be a simple matter to match names with German file photos. These. But not addresses. Traceable addresses would come into play only here at the Vatican, when the Germans submit false papers for authentication. They supply addresses because we have to be able to respond to them.”

  “That’s what the Jews want. Contact points. And they want advance notice of German plans to come through Rome. Rome, according to Warburg, is halfway between Vienna and Buenos Aires.” Deane fell silent for a beat, then said, “This all assumes that the Holy See has put itself at the service of men like these. Do you believe that?”

  Sister Thomas lifted one of the photos, a man with the face of a vulture. Slowly, she shook her head. “No. Not the Holy See. Lehmann, yes. Maybe the low-level clerics who sign off on the applications. Who knows what that Croatian gold is buying by now? But Tardini? Montini? They would never allow such a thing without His Holiness knowing about it.”

  “But Argentina,” Deane said. “Someone senior advanced the Red Hat for Caggiano. And where did that gold go? And why did it disappear right after I told Tardini about it? Meanwhile, shady people are going to Argentina. You yourself have seen those phony monks.”

  Deane’s agitation might have sparked hers. But the nun’s mind was stuck on something else. She said, “So if Warburg’s source is Haganah . . . what? I find a photo match for one of these Nazis, give you the monster’s new identity and an address, you pass it on to Warburg, and . . . then what? We become party to Jewish revenge? Assassination? Is that what you’re asking me to do?”

  Deane did not answer her.

  She said, “Isn’t that what makes us different, that we bring the criminals to trial? Isn’t vengeance a mark of the Jewish God, not ours? Don’t we have the law instead of revenge?”

  “The law, Sister,” Deane said, “that comes to us from the Jews.”

  “But these Jews blew up my nation’s embassy!” Sister Thomas’s cheeks had suddenly become as white as her wimple, the starched linen frame of her face. Her mouth was drawn thin with feeling. Her eyes were flint. “My brother was killed in the Blitz! And now the Jews blow us up! England’s embassy! These Jews are imitating Nazis.”

  Deane touched her arm. “Hold on. Hold on, Sister.”

  She checked herself and whispered, “I just need to know what you’re asking me to do.”

  He pressed her arm through the multilayered folds of her sleeve. Don’t compare them to Nazis, he wanted to say, they just want to prevent the bastards from escaping. But of course she was right. What, Warburg’s people would arrest the Nazis and send them off to the tribunal at Frankfurt? Not likely. Deane had allowed Warburg to steamroll him.

  He maintained his grip on her arm, and she did not resist it. He felt bone through the folds of her garment. Now he saw how thin her face was, thinner than before. “No,” he said, forcing himself to focus. “I’m not asking you to join in lawless revenge. I have another thought. Warburg is in over his head here. I’ve promised him nothing. What he laid out—significant and senior Vatican complicity with Nazis—I did not believe, and said so. It’s only now that I see what’s happened.”

  “So parse it for me.”

  “Aussenweg—that’s all Warburg and his friends care about. The Germans. But that means Croatians, which means Catholics, which means us. There is a needle’s eye here, Sister, and we have to thread it. You said the Americans had Ante Pavelic in custody in Salzburg. Did the cable say what Americans? What unit?”

  Sister Thomas turned to the stack of cables, removing her arm from his grip. The nun flipped through the stack until she found it. She read, then held it up. “‘CIC,’ the cable says. What’s that?”

  “Counter-Intelligence Corps,” Deane said. “It’s what replaced the OSS after Truman c
anned Donovan. The head of CIC in Rome is General Mates.”

  “The man you worked for.”

  “You could just as readily say he was working for me.”

  “But isn’t Mates the one who told you Lehmann was harmless? He investigated Lehmann and said he was free of German intrigue, but we know Lehmann is the linchpin of this entire bloody affair. And are we to believe your General Mates does not know what Lehmann is up to?”

  “Sister, he is not my General Mates. But if CIC is involved here—”

  “That means you will go back to him.”

  “Going to Mates instead of proceeding through the rogue Jews Warburg may be dealing with—that’s the point.”

  Sister Thomas said nothing.

  Deane said, “Which is complicated between us.”

  “Indeed so, since my own government’s Secret Intel Service is still waiting to connect with me.”

  “Your Philip.”

  “No. His Majesty the King. My country.”

  “But your contact would be Philip? He’s stayed in touch with you?”

  “Monsignor, if I’d heard from Philip, wouldn’t I have told you? Wasn’t that our agreement?”

  “Our agreement is why I am telling you about Mates, that I have to bring him into this. Our agreement matters to me, too.”

  Now it was Sister Thomas who put her hand on Deane’s arm. He did not move. Pathetic celibate gesture, he thought. Yet for them erotically charged. That’s what made it pathetic, of course.

  After a moment, Deane said, “But you do know how to contact him. Philip.”

  “Yes.”

  “Maybe you should. There are things happening here that should be stopped. Treblinka, Sobibor, Drancy, the skulls on their hats! Sister, these men are high on the Allied war criminal list. It’s Allied authorities who should be dealing with this, not assassins from Palestine. And not the Swiss Guard.”

  “But the Americans?” She removed her hand, began to pull the cables together, stacking them beside the photos. “Ante Pavelic in custody in Salzburg, then ‘mysteriously released.’ Doesn’t that suggest the CIC let him go?”

  “All the more reason for me to approach Mates. He’d be enraged to know that. Obviously the Americans in Austria had no idea who Pavelic was. But Mates ran the OSS Balkans operation. He knows the Ustashe. His operation supported Tito against Pavelic. If Pavelic is here, or in one of the Holy See dependencies, Mates would stop at nothing to get him.”

  “Nothing?”

  “That’s the problem, isn’t it?” Deane said. “Where is the morality in all of this? You and I have to protect the morality.”

  “Monsignor, perhaps first we should try to find it.” With this rebuke, she filled her satchel, buckled it, and made ready to go.

  How ridiculous he felt. A pompous, self-important cleric, knowing nothing: I kissed myself off. All at once he realized that he’d failed to take in the most pressing fact of the encounter that was about to end. The woman before him looked gaunt, almost sickly. Her arm was not bone, it was rope.

  “Sister?”

  “Monsignor?”

  “I have to ask. You seem . . . are you losing weight? Are you unwell?”

  She shook her head. “A fast, Monsignor. Fast and abstinence. This is a penitential season, wouldn’t you say?”

  Ten

  Nakam Means Revenge

  AS SOON AS Lehmann had left their small hotel room, Marguerite hurriedly douched herself, grimacing as always. She dressed, went downstairs, and, as always, paid the bill. But this time, she went as quickly as she could to a street off the Piazza Mattei, a narrow lane whose four- and five-story buildings kept it perpetually in shadow. The old buildings had been subdivided into lodging rooms and dormitories; no shops. The flats were transient hovels for indigents, Rome’s riffraff. Nothing done there but sleep and fornicate.

  Climbing up two grimy flights in a spiraling dark stairwell that reeked of urine, she came to a door, rapped softly, and waited. Moments later, the bolt of a lock was thrown, the door cracked. “It’s me,” she said, but even those two words carried a note of apology. She was not supposed to come here.

  Lionni pulled the door fully open. He wore trousers and a sleeveless undershirt that drooped, leaving most of his chest exposed. He held his cane but was not leaning on it, and she realized he’d readied it for use as a club. Exposed, his chest was hollow, his scant flesh hanging loose. He was stooped and looked old. His face was etched with disapproval.

  “I must talk.” She brushed by him and entered the room, which was cluttered with a cot on one wall and a small table by another. Clothes were piled in a corner. Papers and file-card boxes covered the table. Before Lionni could protest, Marguerite said, “I’ve just come from Lehmann. He told me there is a meeting of the Crusaders’ high council today at a monastery somewhere outside Rome. Pavelic will be there. Harelip is going. It’s the first time he will have left Spirito Santo. He is taking the Vatican car. We can follow him. He’ll lead us to Pavelic.”

  Lionni registered what she’d said, looked calmly at her for a moment, then slowly shook his head. “Not ‘we,’ cara.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “This is what Abel has been waiting for. He won’t permit you to come.”

  “You’ve discussed this?”

  Lionni fell into a fit of coughing, made his way to a pack of cigarettes, lit one, and inhaled deeply, an antidote. The cough was silenced. Finally he said, “Abel is the commander. And of course we have discussed this. Pavelic is a prize. He’s not one we simply watch, hoping for someone bigger. No one is bigger. You know that.”

  “So they will kill him.”

  “Of course.”

  “But Abel needs us,” she insisted. “He does not know these men, what they are capable of.”

  “He knows the type. Knows it well.”

  “He thinks these monks are women. They wear long skirts. Therefore they threaten nothing.”

  “You yourself have reported on the German priest, his hollow core, his weakness.”

  “The Croatians are different. These monks especially so.”

  Lionni shrugged.

  “So you and I are left out?”

  Lionni did not answer her.

  “Only I am left out,” she said, not with surprise.

  “Not a woman’s task, cara.”

  “Vukas is my task, Jocko,” she declared. The image of the harelipped, brown-robed priest holding his handkerchief aloft, the starter’s flag, had never left Marguerite’s mind. Indeed, when she was with the German priest, but hiding from him in the space behind her closed eyes, she deliberately called it up: the scene at Sisak, the Franciscan with his hand over the heads of children, the ferocious dog, the trucks gunning around the track. She had regularly conjured the Croatian priest to avoid the German one, even as she went naked into the German’s arms.

  “We have left Vukas be, waiting for this,” Lionni said. “We will leave him be today. The job of Vukas is to lead us to the behemoths. Pavelic is one. Abel would never permit you to come.”

  “There is my point. Abel is a fool if Vukas, too, is not counted as a behemoth, a monster!” She drew closer to Lionni. “At Lavi I was trained to fight. No one in Galilee spoke of what was a woman’s task. Am I to take it now that a woman’s task is to open her legs? That’s all?”

  Lionni’s sad eyes were his unspoken response—that and the simple act of extending his arms. She went into his embrace, she who towered over him. He held her as she sobbed. The torrent broke through a year’s worth of steely numbness. He did not insult her with the obvious: We would be nowhere without what you bring us. She entrusted him with her self-lacerating shame, unburdening her soul not in the least. From Trieste to Fossoli to Galilee to the shabby hotel room. Yes, my open legs.

  Three hours later, Lionni was in the back seat of an innocuous black automobile, purring along the Via Cassia, the winding road that had carried travelers through the rough country north of Rome since the time of
the caesars. Tombs hewn out of craggy rock, a ruined amphitheater, scrub pines clinging to an escarpment, a running precipice. On either side of Lionni sat a stolid, quiet man, each with a short-stock automatic rifle discreetly at his feet. In front were the driver and, in the passenger’s seat, the only man whom Lionni knew, Abel, the commander.

  Not that Lionni knew him, really—Abel certainly not being his actual name. These were hard men from Palestine. They depended on Lionni for his contacts, his knowledge of Rome, and the weight of his local authority, but there was no pretense that he was one of them. Lionni had his eyes fixed on a target ahead, into and out of which the car they were following came and went, according to the curves of the winding mountain road. Intermittently, he could see the license plate, the defining SCV.

  From behind, it had been impossible to tell which of the four brown-robed friars was Vukas. Lionni’s car had simply fallen in after the larger, fancier one when those Vatican plates had appeared, coming out of the gate at the Casa dello Spirito Santo. The Franciscans’ driver was dressed in chauffeur’s black, and judging by the speed with which he was taking the coils of the snaky, cliff-hugging road, he had earned the uniform. To keep their pursuit from being obvious, Abel’s driver was staying back enough so that the car behind them pressed occasionally, its engine loud. More than once, whipping around a curve, the car behind had to brake. Mostly the road was too narrow for passing, which apparently made the following driver impatient. Lionni’s throat was dry. Something was not right.

  Perhaps the mistake was a function of the team’s having thought of its prey as religious men. Lionni recalled Marguerite’s warning: Abel is a fool if. . . If the Vatican limousine had been a military vehicle, would Abel have made a different calculation? A more discreet surveillance? Used a second trailing car? That Abel had rushed the matter, assuming the softness of a monastic convocation, was apparent to Lionni as soon as the first bump came from behind. Marguerite’s words had, in fact, never left his mind:. . . if Vukas, too, is not counted as a behemoth, a monster!