Warburg in Rome

by James Carroll

  “I am so sorry, Sister,” he said, gesturing again at the paper.

  “Don’t call me Sister.” Her face was wrecked. Her free hand went to her lips, trembling. But her burning eyes challenged him.

  “I mean about . . .” But he could not say it. He gestured at the newspaper, the story it told. Deane felt as if he had been transported into some other reality, a dream state or hallucination. This was Thomas, his familiar friend, but this was also a hostile stranger who’d taken deep offense at him, as if he were the one who’d placed the Jerusalem bomb. But why was she dressed like this?

  “Will you sit?” he asked, indicating the nearby chair.

  At first she didn’t move. That he met her immobility with immobility of his own seemed to be what she required, and she sat. When he was seated, he put out his cigarette and raised a finger toward the waiter, saying to her, “Will you have coffee?”

  “No.” A firm refusal. To his surprise, she reached for his cigarettes and took one. She held it at her lips as he offered a match. Still her hand trembled. Something told him to make no comment. She inhaled expertly, an old habit. She put her hand on the newspaper. She said, “You told me it was Nazis who caused Father Lehmann’s death. It was these Jews. Here in Rome. The Jews who blew up our embassy.”

  “And now they’ve killed your Philip.”

  Surprise showed in her face, that he knew. All she said was “Please don’t call him that. He wasn’t mine.”

  “But tell me what has happened. You are . . .” He raised his hand, indicating her clothing, her cigarette. The thought vaulting into his mind was But you are beautiful.

  “I have left the order,” she said. “I will apply for dispensation from my vows. It all became very clear, very quickly. Not unlike seeing in an instant the key to a cipher. I should never have taken vows. I have been dishonest. That is what I just saw—yesterday, through the night.”

  “Because of Philip?”

  “I loved him, as I told you. When I couldn’t have him, I thought I would have God instead. It was an unworthy motive. My vocation was based on rejection. Like a rebound love affair. Nothing real about it.”

  “That’s not true. Whatever prompted it, your vocation became real. I saw that for myself.”

  “You do not understand, Monsignor.” At this, a faint smile crossed her face. “You do not see what’s real, right in front of you.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Our Sherlock Holmes bit, what we were trying to parse, you and I—what we found! The beeswax candles. Caggiano. Looted Croatian gold in the Holy See. Holy Mother the Church, in the end—how else to say it?—in bed with Nazis. Pavelic, Lehmann, Stangl the Treblinka commandant, for the love of God! Living in our religious houses. Nazis in monasteries and convents. Vichy collaborators protected. The protectors promoted. Gestapo killers with Vatican passports. The Church welcoming them in Argentina.”

  “We did parse it, you and I. And I am drafting a report, laying it out. All of it. It’s on my desk right now.”

  “A report to whom? They all know! Tardini knows. The Third Floor knows.”

  “A report to you. You were going to be my first reader.”

  “And probably your last,” she said. “There’s too much. Too much to be the work of functionaries, rogue priests, the odd Fascist bishop. This bile is the work of the Church. How can you be part of that?”

  “It isn’t ‘the Church.’ Members of the Church, yes. Even officials. But not ‘the Church.’ And I am not part of it, Sister.”

  She slammed her hand onto the table—“Don’t call me that!”—making the spoon jump off the saucer of Deane’s demitasse.

  He said, “I’m sorry, I—”

  But her fury was loose now. She snapped her cigarette toward the street. “That’s who these Jews should be blowing up, the fugitive Nazis! And the monasteries and convents where they are sheltered. Stangl, blow him up! Nazis! Not British soldiers! Not the valiant men who defeated Hitler! Why are the Jews blowing us up? Although if the Jews killed Lehmann, I say jolly good for them.” She shocked herself with that, and fell silent.

  Deane recalled her scruple from before, her not wanting to be party to revenge. The Jewish God of vengeance, she had said.

  But what if Jews were defending themselves? That’s what he should have answered her. Not revenge, but survival. He had no use for bombs, but clearly their war was not over. That was the point. It was in the Jerusalem news story:. . . retaliation for British raids. The Jews were still at war. Yet he had no way to speak of that with her.

  For a long time Deane matched her silence. Then he said, “I don’t think the Jews killed Lehmann. I think he killed himself.” Deane recalled her asking if Lehmann had been murdered, but he saw now, in the jolt of her reaction, that she had not thought of suicide. Her face softened, which prompted him to add, “Whatever Lehmann did or was doing—that’s still sad, if he killed himself. Don’t you think?”

  She nodded, chastened. “Yes. Very sad. I’m sorry for saying what I said. I’ve been . . . very upset.” She touched the newspaper. “Did you read this? The story says that on the radio in Palestine, the Irgun announced they would ‘mourn the Jewish victims, but not the British ones.’” She was shaking her head, as much from incomprehension as disapproval. She went on, but quietly, “How dare they! And what about the Arab victims? The largest number of dead at that hotel were Arabs who have nothing to do with the Jewish complaint against us.”

  Deane was mystified by her—a woman whom he knew so well yet who seemed a stranger, a woman enraged but also grief-stricken. One moment she seemed mad, railing at Jews, at the Church, at him; then an out-of-the-blue identification with Arabs. All tied to the harsh fact of Philip Morton’s death, and how could she possibly have reconciled her feelings to that?

  Deane knew that if he himself were to give vent to what was bottled inside him, his expressions would carve a similar arc from rage to desolation, with no more consistency or restraint than she was showing. But wait. Had she just advocated what he dreaded most that morning, a convent being blown up as long as bad men die? Jolly good for them! Deane himself had set Jewish warriors loose to kill the harelipped Ustashe priest—and to kill whom else? Again he asked himself: Were innocents to be slaughtered now because of him?

  And why shouldn’t such questions make a person mad? The difference between him and her was that she had thrown off the sanctifying cloak, literally uncovering herself, exposing the emaciation less of flesh than of virtue. Good Sister Thomas, with the dropping of a veil, was simply gone, replaced by this harried, tortured—and yes, anti-Jewish—woman. As for Monsignor Deane, he was still primly vested, his breviary squared neatly on the table with newspapers bearing the grotesque report from Jerusalem. His breviary his shield. Shielding him, but no one else.

  Shielding him from her.

  “Jane,” he said, but so tentatively that she might not have heard. He waited for her rebuke. When it did not come, he went on. “Tell me what you learned about Philip.”

  “A captain from Group Six came to my office yesterday. He brought the first cable they’d received, earlier.”

  “You read it at your desk.” Deane reached into his coat pocket and gave her the folded yellow paper. “I took it. It’s how I knew.”

  She opened the cable flat on the table, stared at it, saying, “Philip was officially attached to Signals. The bomb was shortly after noon. He was in his office, three floors above the basement room where they brought in the cans. Milk cans, can you believe it? Filled with chemical explosives, nitroglycerine probably. His office was in the dead center of the collapse. His body was one of the first identified.”

  “I am so sorry.”

  She looked at Deane, seeming entirely sane now. She said, “He lied to me.”

  “What?”

  “He told me, when we met here in Rome, that Edith was dead. I spoke of that to you.”

  “Edith?”

  “His wife. She was dead. Then yesterday th
e captain said Philip’s body was mangled but that his wife had come at once and identified it. ‘His wife?’ I said to the captain. ‘Yes,’ he said, ‘Edith Morton.’ She’d come from England to be with him. They lived a block from the King David, she heard the explosion, was there on the instant. Poor Edith. Philip had lied to me, thinking that I would be at his mercy if he were widowed. Thinking, pathetic woman that I am, that I would work for him, his lovesick Vatican spy.”

  “Good God, that’s—”

  But she went on, “What if I had said yes? How long would he have kept it up, the lie that Edith was dead? How would he have done that? Was such deceit peculiar to Philip, or is it universal now? Your fellow General Mates lying to you about Father Lehmann. The Jews lying about being mere victims. German lies—of course. But also British lies. American lies. Catholic lies. There you are. That’s the report on your desk. This continent awash in lies, swamping even the Church. That is why I went to Mother Superior last night, having seen my lie. I could not go on with it.”

  “Philip’s death made you see how much he still meant to you? That you had always loved him?”

  “No. Not at all. I reckoned with Philip back when I said no to him, here in Rome. That was when I began to face the truth.”

  “What truth?”

  “It wasn’t Philip I loved. It certainly wasn’t God. It was you.”

  Deane could not think what to say. Opposite him, she was poised, stripped-down, decisive, lean. By contrast, Deane was hamstrung, tired, humbled by a lifetime of indirection. Around them people were paying their bills, heading off to jobs, boys with schoolbooks, trams in the street, a sharp smell of truck exhaust, a beggar approaching, and, in the distance, a pair of wing-hatted nuns crossing the square, unaware that the tortured priest and exclaustrated sister even existed.

  Finally Deane said, “Jane . . . May I call you that?”

  “Yes.”

  He said, “Our friendship has been so important to me. But it depended on neither of us using the word . . . love.”

  “I know. And I don’t use it expecting your reply.”

  “But lies everywhere . . . universal? Jane, have there been lies between us?”

  “No. No.”

  How relieved he was at that.

  She said, “I know what makes us different, you and me. You believe in God.”

  “Yes, I do,” Deane said, words that came from his very depth. He gently placed the flat of his hand on the black leather of his breviary, the wife.

  “And I do not,” Jane said. “God has nothing to do with me.”

  “That cannot be true.”

  She shrugged.

  God was in the eye of the bird, there, watching them. God was in the crust of bread on the waiter’s tray. God was in the water glass. God was in the corruptions that had seared this woman’s conscience. God was the breath that had shut itself up in Deane’s lungs, like a beast in its cage. God was terrible, which was how Deane knew that He was real.

  He said, “What do you need?”

  She laughed. “Nothing. Nothing at all. I have train fare to London. I have a hundred pounds. I have the rest of my life.” She lifted her bag. Then she asked, “And you, Monsignor, what do you need?”

  He stopped himself from saying “Nothing.” That, indeed, would have been his uncouth lie. He said, “I need for you to be well and happy.”

  “And for yourself?”

  “I need to be what I am.”

  “That’s happiness, then,” she said.

  “I suppose.”

  “If you need to be promoted to bishop, you’d better forget that Vatican scandal report you’re writing.”

  “I’m giving it to Mother Pascalina and to Cardinal Spellman.”

  “They will bury it.”

  “I know.”

  “And then you’ll be buried in some parish in—what’s that awful place in New York?”

  “The Bronx.”

  “Right.”

  “The Bronx, Jane . . . it’s the Irish Riviera. As for being bishop, why in the world would I want that now? I’m a priest. A priest, that’s all. I’ll do the sacraments. The Mass. Bread for the hungry, not the well fed. I know what it can be for people because I know what it is for me.”

  “Broken servant to a broken world.”

  “I guess so.”

  Jane’s red eyes welled as she looked at him. “What I see in you is wholeness.”

  He shook his head.

  “That you don’t see it makes it real.” She stood. “May I call you Kevin?”

  Deane did not move. “Yes,” he said.

  “Goodbye, Kevin.” She hoisted her bag, leaving the newspaper and its burdens behind.

  He watched her go until she disappeared.

  When Deane got back to his office, there was a message waiting on his desk: “Call Father Boyle at NAC.”

  Terry Boyle was the young Brooklyn priest Spellman had sent over from New York to manage the restoration of the North American College, once the refugees had been cleared out of it. Fumigation. Fresh paint. Kitchen refurbished. Lawns reseeded. Chapel reconsecrated. Now the college was up and running, the red-cheeked seminarians were back, reading Aquinas in Latin, and Boyle was the officially designated father procurator. Deane called him.

  “There are a couple of people here, Monsignor,” Boyle said. “They say they’re friends of yours. They are waiting to see you.” Boyle’s tone was respectful. Deane knew that Boyle had been one of the young jocks who’d called him Auntie behind his back a long time ago. Now Boyle went on, with a curl of disapproval in his voice, “The man is outside shooting baskets. The woman is watching him.”

  Less than half an hour later, Deane was there. Because it was morning, the seminarians were all in class, and the public spaces of the former palazzo were deserted. Deane cut through the marble-rich first floor toward the French doors that marked the building’s far wall. He moved swiftly, a couple of brisk pivots around columns, as if the breviary under his arm were a football.

  When Warburg saw him approach, he ignored the basketball’s last bounce off the rim, went to the bench, took Marguerite’s elbow, and they walked toward Deane. In the distance, bright in the east across the Tiber, sunlight washed the panorama of bell towers and domes—a sight to which all three were now indifferent.

  They met on the lawn, not far from a freshly installed statue of Mary, a small shrine to Our Lady of Lourdes that Spellman had ordered erected in thanksgiving for his Red Hat. Arranged before Our Lady in a small semicircle were kneelers and benches. Deane was all business as they greeted one another. He gestured at the benches. They sat, Warburg and Marguerite on one bench, Deane facing them on another. “What happened?” he asked.

  “Vukas is dead,” Warburg answered.

  “An attack on the convent? What?” Deane could not keep the urgency out of his voice, an edge of panic. The headline he had imagined. Explosions.

  “I shot him,” a subdued Marguerite said, apparently understanding what Deane needed to know. “I acted alone. One shot.” She did not say she had loaded four bullets and left three behind in the rifle, on the floor, not caring whether she lived or died. Now she cared.

  “There were two guards,” Warburg said, “as you warned there would be. I ran one over with my car, shot the other. They’re both dead.”

  “Good God, David.” Deane had assumed he’d left surprise behind. Not so. “And the Irgun people?” he asked. “Haganah? Whoever the hell they are.”

  “They were not involved,” Marguerite said. “They were never told of the convent. Vukas now comes off their list. The Franciscans will have removed his body. The Church, wanting no notice drawn, will control the police.”

  Deane said, “But the Ustashe will notice. The Crusaders—whoever the hell they are.”

  “Which is why we have to leave,” Warburg said. “To make sure it ends here. As if none of this happened.”

  “But it did happen,” Deane said.

  “A lot happened, K
evin,” Warburg said. “You broke your leg.”

  “A long time ago. An innocent time.”

  “The time of Fossoli?” Warburg said. “Innocent? That was when the Vatican newspaper canceled its edition rather than mention Jews being slaughtered.”

  “Did you bring me up here to break my bones again?”

  “No. Only to report. To thank you, and to say goodbye.”

  “You know about Jerusalem,” Deane said. “The King David Hotel.”

  “Of course. It’s why we must go there now.”

  “What?”

  “Did you see the reaction from London?” Warburg asked. “Churchill deplored the bombing, but said it was time to let the Jews emigrate to Palestine.”

  “So you’re saying the King David bombing worked?”

  “No. It was a brutal, unnecessary, and criminal act. It must not be repeated. From what I hear of Jewish reaction, it will not be repeated. But the time for the Jewish nation has come. We’re going to be there.”

  “A Jewish nation born in blood?”

  “A nation, therefore, like every other nation, Kevin. That was always the only Zionist dream.” Warburg put his arm through Marguerite’s. “I sense your Catholic skepticism.”

  “No. If there’s one thing I’ve left behind, it’s the Wandering Jew bullshit. I’m with you as far as the Jewish homeland goes. Refugees deserve refuge. But”—he thought of Thomas, Jane Storrow—“the Brits brought trouble on themselves in Palestine. Not so the Arabs. What about them?”

  “The Arabs will be respected, Kevin.”

  “It would be lovely to think so, David. But the Arabs are screwed.”

  Warburg said nothing to that.

  Deane asked, “What about America?”

  “That’s a Jewish homeland too,” Warburg said. “Thank God for it.”

  “General Mates and all? Americans helping Nazis escape?”

  “Yes. Not so different, I gather, from the Catholic Church, Pope Pius and all. No question anymore of the Church’s being sinless. At least that’s cleared up.”

  “So the Church is”—Deane paused to let the word echo—“a homeland.”