by Mick Hare
The driver felt a cold, hard metal press into his temple and a voice ordered, “Stop the car!”
When the car was stationery, Robert got out first and then ordered the driver out. First he instructed the driver to untie Lily and Friedrich and then he took him to the side of the road and shot him in the temple so that he fell into the roadside ditch. Lily and Friedrich brought the other corpse and tossed it into the ditch on top of its companion. In minutes they were driving away from the scene in the direction of Innsbruck across the border.
As they entered Innsbruck, Friedrich was at the wheel and Lily sat with Robert in back. They parked several blocks away from the Hauptbahnhoff and Lily walked arm in arm with Friedrich to reconnoitre the station and find out about the trains bound for Rome. Lily and Friedrich had the same feeling about Innsbruck. It was relatively undamaged, particularly in comparison to Munich, and they both experienced a fleeting nostalgia for their pre-war lives. At the station Friedrich discovered from the ticket desk that the train for Rome had been diverted to the Westbahnhoff, many blocks to the south, and they quickly made it back to the car.
“Why don’t we just drive into Italy?” asked Friedrich.
“You’re forgetting,” responded Robert. “Those SS men identified you both on the train. The identities we stole have been seen through.”
Friedrich and Lily looked at each other. Robert saw the look.
“What?” he asked.
Both were reluctant to reply.
“What?” repeated Robert. “Come on, I need to know.”
Friedrich spoke up at last, “Our identities held good,” he confessed. “They believed Lily’s papers and my uniform and explanation was enough to fool them. They were pretty useless at their jobs to be honest. But I gave us away. It was my stupid temper again. One of them accused a woman of being a Jewess and gun-butted her in the face. I took a swing at him. The two of them overpowered us and guessed who we were.”
“So you’re saying that they weren’t looking for you. They did not know to check for the linguist and his wife?”
“That’s right.”
“And those two are dead.”
“Right again.”
“So our identities are secure for now.”
Robert tapped his lips.
“All right then,” he said after a moment’s thought. “Drive on Friedrich. Let the SS guard take the linguist and his wife to Rome.”
Sixty
The linguist, his wife and their SS minder negotiated their way through German occupied northern Italy and arrived in Rome after two days hazardous travel. It gave them plenty of time to talk, though to get information from Robert was like pulling teeth.
Robert preferred to question Lily about her decision to turn.
“How could you suddenly ditch decades of belief, years of training and yet more years of waiting to be activated?”
Lily had no immediate answer, but Robert was not going to be put off by her silence.
“You were better than most,” he persisted. “You convinced me. You convinced Trubshaw. You passed his tests. Come on, Lily, I want to know why!”
“You know why,” she suddenly hissed.
“But I don’t,” he argued disingenuously.
“Yes you do,” she snapped but there was embarrassment in her tone too.
There was a silence and then, as if suddenly lighting upon a satisfactory answer to his questioning Lily stated, “Call it a Road to Damascus conversion.”
“You wouldn’t like to elaborate would you?” asked Robert with more than a hint of sarcasm.
“I had a school friend when I lived with my father in Berlin,” began Lily. “She was a devout Catholic. She made her confession every week on a Saturday and attended mass and took communion every Sunday. More than that, she went to benediction each Friday after school and said her rosary before going to bed. When she was sixteen her parents took up a three year contract in South Africa and they left her with her maternal Grandparents. Her mother had been brought up as a Lutheran and only converted in order to be able to marry my friend’s father. On the day she moved in with her Grandparents, who were of course still Lutherans, she immediately ceased her Catholic worship practices. Her Grandparents did not attend church regularly and it just seemed rude to inconvenience them by asking if she could go to her church. When I asked her how difficult it had been to deny her religious principles she said she had not given it a moment’s thought. She said it was as if they had never existed. She speculated that maybe her beliefs were just habit, held onto in the absence of anything else. As soon as her context changed, so did her principles.”
At this point Lily paused and turned to stare into Robert’s eyes.
“So in answer to your question,” she concluded, “Maybe my context changed.”
Robert said nothing in reply but looked at Lily for a long time as Friedrich guided their vehicle through the rocky alpine terrain.
Although Robert had been reluctant to communicate too much to the others about his plans, by the time they reached Rome this much was known by all three. Robert was going to assassinate O’Shea and they would make good their escape via the underground route to Argentina that was already established for senior Nazi collaborators who were beginning to doubt the survival of the Thousand Year Reich. What they didn’t know was that Robert had another motive for getting to Rome. He intended to find Grete, Lisa and David and take them away with him to Argentina.
They had had time to agree a plan of sorts. As the papers they carried had held good so far they intended to keep these identities. The one weakness in that plan was the position of Friedrich as an SS officer. He would not be expected to remain with the linguist and his wife now that they had arrived in Rome. Therefore he had to put away his uniform and SS identity. Maybe it would come in handy later on, but for now he had to acquire another identity and all three of them put their minds to this. Robert and Lily quickly agreed that they would venture out after dark and ambush a likely candidate, steal his clothes and his papers. Luckily, in German occupied Italy, everyone had to carry papers. Friedrich surprised them, however, when he objected to this plan.
“Don’t you have any feelings of guilt about the last people we did this to; the linguist and his family? Do we know where they are now?”
Both Robert and Lily looked at each other, suddenly shocked to realise that they had come so far along the road they had chosen to travel that no such thought had entered their minds. Their cold, uncaring approach caused them both to take pause.
“What do you suggest, Friedrich?” Lily asked.
“I suggest that we at least take a little trouble to select a deserving case. Someone in league with the Nazis; a bureaucrat or a collaborator.”
“All right,” grimaced Robert. “We’ll do what we can.”
“And listen,” interjected Friedrich. “I can’t be an Italian. I will be exposed the moment I open my mouth.”
“Now you are getting too choosy!”
Lily and Robert sat drinking Austrian beer in a café beside the corner of Via Veneto and Via Boncompagni. It was early evening but already dark and the passing trade from office workers on their way home was dwindling away. They had already taken in a beer near the Teatro delle Arti. They had been asked for their papers there and after finishing their beers had made an unhurried exit. No one suitable so far!
Aware that lingering too long in any one place would attract unwanted attention, they drained their glasses and decided to give up on their task for the evening.
It was as they walked back through the unlit streets towards Via Cavour and the Stazione Centrale on their way back to the southern district where their lodgings were located that an opportunity arose. Their attention was drawn to the perimeter of the classical ruins of the Baths of Diocletian by the sound of raised voices. The voices echoed menacingly in the relative emptiness of the night and Lily and Robert had no problem locating the source.
Silhouetted against the ruins of the
Baths, two off-duty German soldiers were laying into an old man with drunken fury. The man took the first two or three blows to the head and kept his feet, but several more and a brutal push saw him fall and crack his head on the stone wall behind him. The soldiers took to kicking him and he very soon ceased moving.
Lily had reached out and grabbed Robert’s arm when he had instinctively made a move to go to the man’s aid.
“You can’t get involved,” she hissed. “It could blow our cover! Look! Over there! Several spectators are taking an interest. There will be a crowd here soon.”
The soldiers continued to abuse the lifeless figure saying that that would teach him to call them Nazi scum. One yelled to the other, “He’s a very good Bolshevik now, isn’t he. Yes because he’s a dead Bolshevik!” And the two of them laughed at their own wit.
Eventually, even in their drunken state, the soldiers arrived at the conclusion that they were wasting their energy. This man was not going to feel pain ever again. Pausing to bend and get their breath they picked up their caps which had fallen due to their exertions, and headed off, arm in arm, singing a victory song.
Lily held tightly onto Robert’s arm. Beneath her hand she could feel the flexing and tensing of his muscles as he fought with himself not to get involved.
“Get over there!” whispered Robert. “Quickly, before that crowd gets too close. Get his papers! Wait till I come back.”
Lily grabbed his shoulders.
“No! No! No! Robert you can’t.”
But by the strength Robert applied to the grip he took on her forearms, Lily knew there was no way of reasoning with him. There was almost a pleading in his eyes when he said, matter-of-factly, “I’ve got to.”
Once the main action had subsided, the crowd slowly drifted off and Lily was left alone with the corpse. She managed to move him into a shadowy corner of the ruins. She relieved the man of his papers. He would not need them now. She had the corpse half undressed when Robert returned. She could not help noticing the blood on his hands and something bulging under his overcoat. More than that, she could see in his face that he was facing his demons again. The act of killing had worked its trick of part dismantling his sense of self. She would need to look out for him over the next few days.
With a suit of clothes and a set of papers they hurried away from the site of the Ancient Roman Baths and burrowed into the residential area to the south. In an alleyway somewhere behind them, two representatives of the invincible Wehrmacht lay in their underwear, on their backs each presenting two gaping smiles to the leaden sky.
“You’ll have to be an Italian and that’s all there is to it,” declared Lily to an incredulous Friedrich. “You can’t use the papers of the dead soldiers. If you were stopped you’d have to explain why you were roaming the city.”
“But I don’t speak one word of the language.”
“Well there’s your answer then – don’t speak one word. Play dumb!”
This comment roused Robert from a bout of melancholy and with a humourless grin he muttered, “That will do us all a big favour.”
It was the first time he had spoken for a day and a half and Friedrich took the opportunity to try to engage him in conversation.
“Do you think you could explain to us why we are here risking our lives when our mission has been accomplished? Who is this O’Shea to you and why are we planning to assassinate him?”
Under Robert’s stare Friedrich looked to Lily but she, realising that Friedrich had already put his foot in it, looked away. A silence intensified until at last Robert spoke. Looking from Lily to Friedrich and back, he moved uncomfortably in his seat. He placed his hands on the table in front of him and leaned forward in his chair.
“It’s personal,” he muttered. “You two ought to make good your escape now and forget about me.”
“A bit late for that,” stated Friedrich matter-of-factly. “We are already here in Nazi occupied Rome.”
Suddenly Robert stood up, knocking his chair over backwards and shouted, “You know why, Lily. I’ve told you about my son. I haven’t told Friedrich my pathetic story. Perhaps you will fill him in on the details. All I can say is the man who abused my son is here in Rome and I’m not leaving while he lives. O’Shea – that man of God, that blessed disciple of Jesus, that devout Christian – O’Shea is the priest who abused my son.”
The shocked silence seemed to intensify Robert’s despair.
“O’Shea abused my son,” he repeated, his voice suddenly retreating to a whisper, “And I let it happen. Now he’s dead and he died thinking the world a terrible place. A young child should not have to think like that, even if we know it to be true.”
For an instant Robert was Sean again and became wracked with uncontrollable sobbing. Instinctively Lily moved towards Robert to enfold him in an embrace. Robert pushed her away and, grabbing his coat and hat, went out into the Roman night. Lily attempted to follow him but Friedrich restrained her. He held her like a child as she cried in his arms.
Sixty-one
Robert walked beneath the walls of the Vatican and crossed over to the ghetto. He had been here every morning since arriving in Rome. Looking over his shoulder he knew that the Pope’s living quarters were behind the windows above him. These were the windows Eugenio Pacelli had ordered shuttered when the Jews had been rounded up in October 1943. He had preferred not to witness the brutality of the regime that he had climbed into bed with.
Robert wondered what feverish activity was happening in there. From a safe distance he had observed frantic comings and goings in and out of Vatican City. Official German Mercedes cars filled with diplomats and generals sped to and fro between Wehrmacht headquarters and the Papal Throne room. But no announcement yet! No newspaper headlines screaming –“Pope Assassinated” – or –“Allies Murder Pius XII”.
The Germans were keeping a tight lid on the news. How to distance the Axis from the assassination would be exercising their minds. Maybe they were working on a modern resurrection to make the problem go away. This thought brought a half smile to Robert’s taut lips. But it slipped away suddenly as he turned his footsteps into the ghetto and an image of Grete entered his mind.
Many of the apartments and tenements were empty now. Gradually, poorer Italians were moving in to occupy vacated premises. Some even found themselves the proud occupiers of fully furnished rooms if the Nazi looters had failed to get round to the property left behind.
Robert had established for himself a mindless routine of door to door enquiries. He spoke broken Italian with a heavy German accent and was able to pass himself off as an official of the Reich administration. The replies he received varied.
“You should know – you took them all!”
“Why don’t you fuck off you bastard.”
“I’m so sorry my friend. I would love to help you but I know nothing.”
Robert was not that concerned with the verbal replies he received. As each individual responded he studied their faces intently. He was looking for some tell-tale sign that would give the respondent away. Some facial flicker that would signal to him that the name was familiar. After two or three hours of this he would give up, leave the ghetto and hang around St Peter’s Square, hoping to catch sight of O’Shea.
However, a few days previously he had made a breakthrough. Going from occupied house to occupied house, he had finally found someone who had known Grete and both of the children. The someone was an old Italian male who had married a Jewess and lived all his married life in the ghetto. He was alone now. His wife had been deported. No, he did not know where she was, but he lived in hope of hearing from her.