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And there I go, Liam thought as he poured water into his dented aluminium teapot, seeing both sides of the argument again.
He poured himself a cup of tea and took a bourbon biscuit from a tin on top of the bookcase. Sitting on the edge of the bed, nibbling the biscuit and sipping the scalding tea, he tried to channel his thoughts in other directions — to his work for the Pontifìcia Commissione Assistenze (PCA), the Papal charity organisation for which he worked as an interpreter. But this time the Bible had failed him: his tortured train of thought continued its headlong progress.
Not only were Vatican officials engaged in dubious politics but many minor officials were involved in spying. They spied on the British and American representatives imprisoned in the Hospice Sant’ Marta, and on the Pope himself. Phones were tapped, cables deciphered, Vatican broadcasts monitored.
Many of the spies operated from ecclesiastical colleges and other Papal organisations outside The Vatican in the city of Rome. What disturbed Father Liam Doyle most acutely was that he was one of them. And that night he was going to meet the woman who had recruited him, Maria Reubeni.
* * *
Liam had met Maria through his work as an interpreter. He had lately mastered German and she worked as a Hebrew translator. In view of the plight of German Jewry it was inevitable that they should have met.
The meeting occurred in an open-air café beneath a green awning off the Via IV Novembre, near the ruined markets and forum of the Emperor Trajan, on June 2nd. The date was imprinted on Liam’s brain.
The purpose of the meeting was to question a Jewish refugee from Poland, who spoke Hebrew and Yiddish and a little German, in an effort to compile yet another dossier on Nazi atrocities, in order to provide The Vatican with the proof they continually demanded.
The refugee who had been smuggled across Europe to Marseilles and thence to Rome was so exhausted and scared that they had agreed on the telephone not to interrogate him in an office.
Instead of coffee or a glass of wine they gave him a lime-green water-ice. He was, after all, only twelve.
At first he spoke in small, shivering phrases but soon the warmth, the water-ice and the mellow antiquity of the place had their effect. And it was a familiar tale that he told the priest and the Jewess.
It dated back to November 23rd, 1939, when the Jews of Warsaw, where he lived, had been ordered to wear yellow stars. Then, eleven months later, confinement to the ghetto administered by a Jewish council. Famine, cold, deaths by the thousands.
Then in 1942, Endlosung, the Final Solution.
Fear halted the words of the little boy in the too-long shorts, shaven hair beginning to grow into a semblance of an American crew-cut. They bought him another water-ice, and waited. The girl pointed to a lizard, watched by a hungry cat, basking on a slab of ancient brick. The boy’s lips stopped trembling, he smiled.
And in a strange mixture of languages he delivered his adolescent version of the terrible facts that were leaking out from Eastern Europe. The beginning of the liquidation of the Warsaw ghetto, transportations to Treblinka death camp, gassings with carbon monoxide from diesel engines, followed by another gas (which Maria knew to be Zyklon B).
Horror froze around them in the sunshine.
Then the boy came to the revolt of the Warsaw Jews which began on April 18th, two months ago. He had been smuggled through the German lines in an empty water-cart during the fighting.
Maria leaned forward and spoke to him in Hebrew. The boy straightened his back and answered her firmly.
Liam asked Maria what she had said.
“I asked him if the Jews fought well.”
“And what did he say?”
“He said they fought like tigers.”
“And?”
She shrugged. “They were massacred.” She sipped her glass of wine. “But at least they fought. For the first time in nearly two thousand years they fought back as a people.”
Liam stared at her fascinated. When he had first seen her he had been aware of an instant physical reaction. But his emotions had been swamped by the sickening catalogue of inhumanity the child had carried with him across Europe.
Now the passion in her voice reawakened the feelings. He wanted to lean across the table and touch her hand. He was appalled.
She put away her notebook and said: “Well, there you are, Father, there’s your evidence. Do you believe it?”
“Of course I believe it.”
“But will anyone else inside your little haven believe it?”
He ran one finger under his clerical collar. “I cannot say,” lamely.
“So you, too, are a diplomat rather than a priest.”
He wanted to shout: “Not true.” To unburden his conscience to this beautiful, aggressive daughter of Rome.
She lit a cigarette. “Don’t worry, Father. They will want more proof as always. And they will say, ‘We need more than the word of a child.’ As if anything more was needed,” patting the boy’s stubbly hair. “Another ice-cream?”
At that moment the cat pounced. But the lizard was too quick for it, disappearing in a blur of olive movement.
The boy laughed and said to Maria: “That’s how I escaped.”
“No more ice-cream?”
He shook his head.
“Then it’s time I took you home.”
“Where is he staying?” Liam asked.
“He has family here. That’s why he was brought to Rome. They thought it would be safe here. But now …” Her hands finished the sentence, Italian style.
“A Polish Jew has a family in Rome?”
“You wouldn’t understand,” the girl said. “He is a Jew. He has family everywhere.”
Liam wondered at her hostility. He guessed — hoped — that it related only to her attitude towards The Vatican. She stood up suddenly, every movement vital, and paid the bill. Then she took the boy’s hand. “Good-bye, Father, it has been pleasant meeting you,” in a voice that belied her words.
Liam stood up and, to his amazement, heard himself proposing another meeting, lying to himself and to the girl, concocting a story that they needed to compare notes to enable them to present convincing evidence to the Papal authorities, knowing that this was a lie within a lie because many dossiers and petitions had been presented to The Vatican with negligible results.
She looked at him quizzically. “Very well. I’m dining in Trastevere tonight. Perhaps we could meet there for a drink. You do take a glass of wine, Father?”
“Occasionally,” Liam told her.
They arranged to meet at a trattoria, and he watched her walk away holding the boy’s hand and he knew that he should never see her again, that he should run after her and cancel the appointment, but he didn’t move. And, as she passed out of sight, he knew, standing there among the ruins of imperial Rome, that his life, his creed, had been irrevocably changed, that he was about to embark on a struggle with temptation which would be the greatest test of his life.
They met that evening in a trattoria, in the Piazza D’ Mercanti in the artists’ quarter of Trastevere on the opposite bank of the Tiber.
Liam was disappointed to find that Maria had company. A young man with swaggering manners and, Liam suspected, many complexes, and a Sicilian who was never called by his name. Both men indulged in the sort of banter which many men employ to disguise their unease in the presence of clergy.
They drank from a carafe of red wine and smoked a lot, as did most of the other customers who crossed the river to find Bohemia. A musician in a grease-spotted black suit and open-necked white shirt was playing a violin, but only the occasional thin note penetrated the noise of Italians relaxing.
Liam and Maria completed the farce of comparing notes, then the swaggering young man named Angelo ordered more wine and topped up Liam’s glass, and Liam thought: “You’re trying to get me drunk, my young friend. What better joke than a drunken priest?”
“So, Father,” the Sicilian said, lighting a thin cigar, “what do you think of the latest events?”
“The war you mean?”
“What else? Your information must be good, Father. The best in Rome, eh?”
“I doubt if I know more than you,” Liam said, believing he told the truth.
“Come, Father, an American priest inside The Vatican. You must have access to much intelligence.”
Liam frowned. He couldn’t think of any particular intelligence that had come his way.
“Are you not in contact with Mr. Tittman, the American diplomatic representative?”
“I’ve met him,” Liam said.
“I’m told that he is angry because he doesn’t always have the same privileges as other diplomats.”
“That,” said Liam, “is because in the past the United States had barely recognised The Vatican diplomatically. It is only through the Holy Father’s kindness that he is there at all.”
“And Sir D’Arcy Osborne, the British envoy. Do you know him?”
“I’ve spoken to him,” Liam said. He realised that the Sicilian was showing off his knowledge. “Why?”
“They’re both still sending their coded messages on The Vatican radio. A lot of good that will do them — the Italian Fascists have cracked the code and passed it on to the Germans.”
“You seem very well informed,” Liam said, wondering where it was all leading.
A girl wearing a low-cut bodice and ankle-strap shoes passed the table and tweeked his ear. He blushed.
Maria Reubeni lit a cigarette. She smoked too much, Liam thought, noticing and averting his eyes from the thrust of her breasts against her blouse.
She said abruptly: “Do you know Bishop Alois Hudal?”
“The German bishop?”
‘Nazi bishop,” Angelo Peruzzi interrupted.
The Sicilian prodded his cigar towards Peruzzi. “Let the priest speak.”
Liam told them he knew Hudal very well. He got the impression that they already knew this.
He had first met the diminutive, bespectacled bishop through his duties as interpreter. He had continued the association with the Austrian-born prelate for two reasons: to improve his German, and because Hudal seemed sympathetic to the Roman Jewry who might at any time suffer like the Jews all over Europe.
When he remarked on the bishop’s Jewish sentiments Angelo Peruzzi broke in. “You mean you believe all that shit?” stopping when Maria rounded on him and told him to clean his mouth out.
She turned to Liam. “I must apologise, Father, for Angelo. I will buy him a bar of soap on the Black Market.”
Liam smiled at her gratefully. But in the Bronx he had become accustomed to men who defiantly swore and blasphemed in the presence of a priest, especially when they had taken too much liquor.
The Sicilian examined the glowing tip of his thin cigar, somehow a sinister instrument in his thickly-furred hand. “What Angelo is saying,” as though Peruzzi spoke in a foreign tongue, “is that Hudal has expressed sympathy for the Jews for his own purposes.”
Laim looked puzzled.
Maria told him: “He means that Bishop Hudal doesn’t want the Germans to ship us to the death camps when they come. Not that he gives a damn — sorry, Father — not that he gives a jot about the Jews. But he thinks that such action would force The Vatican into denouncing the Nazis. If there was bad blood between Berlin and The Holy See it would destroy his precious dream.”
Liam wondered why they each interpreted for each other, perhaps the habit was catching. “What precious dream?” he asked, sipping the rough wine and grimacing.
The Sicilian said: “Hudal is a madman. He believes in a Holy Roman Empire. A partnership between the Nazis and the Church. A united front against Bolshevism.”
“He’s never mentioned it to me,” Liam said mildly.
“The bastard doesn’t know what side you’re on yet,” Angelo Peruzzi said, while the Sicilian pointed his thin cigar like a pistol and asked: “What side are you on, Father? And” — smiling his gold-toothed smile — “don’t say, ‘On God’s side’,” which was exactly what Liam had been about to reply.
Liam found the conversation bewildering. He thought the Sicilian looked like one of the debt-collectors who had called so regularly at premises near his church in the Bronx. Angelo looked like a homicidal psychopath. What was Maria Reubeni doing in such company?
“I am not on any side,” he said, glancing at Maria for support.
“Come now, Father,” the Sicilian urged him. “Even a man of the cloth must take sides. He must recognise evil.”
“But he needn’t participate.”
“But he always has,” the Sicilian observed. “At least in the history books I’ve read.”
Liam took another sip of wine. It didn’t taste quite so bad this time. “I cannot condone what the Germans have done,” he said after a while.
The violinist had moved up to their table and was playing Come Back to Sorrento. Liam would have liked to share the song with Maria, alone.
But the music hadn’t touched Maria’s heart. She asked: “Does The Vatican condone what the Germans have done, Father?”
Ah, the old, old controversy. He took another sip of wine, mustered his forces. “You mean the Holy Father?”
“That’s right,” Angelo Peruzzi said. “The Vicar of Christ, the boss.’
“Of course he doesn’t condone atrocities,” Liam told them. “His attitude is quite simple. He believes that if he denounced the persecution of the Jews they would suffer even more terribly.” Liam frowned, trying to put himself in the position of Eugenio Pacelli, the enigmatic Pope Pius XII. And probably” — no possibly — “he is right. In Holland the priests spoke out. The result? Seventy-nine per cent of all the Jews there — the highest proportion of any country — were deported to concentration camps. Furthermore,” Liam went on from his pulpit in the smokey trattoria, “he knows that Hitler is crazy enough to attack The Vatican if he spoke out against him. Destroy the fount of Christianity. Destroy the fount of humanitarianism. Perhaps destroy our civilisation …”
“I see,” said Maria as though she didn’t. “So Pacelli is really saving the Jews.”
“He is doing what he believes to be right,” Liam said.
“In other words he is doing nothing.”
“He is doing a lot,” Liam told her. “I know that from my work. Perhaps he is not saying a great deal …”
The Sicilian said: “Of course Pacelli was The Vatican’s man in Germany for a long time. He met the Nazi bishop there.”
Suddenly anger overcame Liam. “Are you suggesting there is some sort of conspiracy between Bishop Hudal and the Holy Father?”
Maria shook her head. “In fact we know that Papa Pacelli disapproves of Hudal.”
Liam smote the table. “I tell you that the Holy Father is doing what he believes to be right. I tell you that he has protested privately to Hitler. All he wants is peace.”
“And goodwill to all men including the Krauts,” said the Sicilian. He glanced at the heavy gold watch on his hairy wrist. “Time for us to go,” motioning to Angelo. “We’ll leave you together to discuss the fate of the Jews.”
“Aren’t you seeing me home?” Maria asked the Sicilian, and Liam heard himself saying: “Don’t worry, I’ll escort you,” like a college boy on his first date.
“Are you sure?”
“Quite sure.”
As the two men departed, Liam was overcome by a glow of pleasure untainted by physical desire. But for how long?
The torment of Father Liam Doyle was just beginning.
* * *
As Liam made his way to his assignation with Maria Reubeni on that July night six weeks later he noticed a group of tourists wandering past the columns of the Bernini colonnade. But they walked not as tourists, aimlessly and wonderingly; they walked stiffly with fists clenched and Liam, with his newly-found knowledge of intrigue, knew that they were Germans staking out The Vatican in case Benito Mussolini was hidden inside its walls.
Liam walked briskly over a bridge spanning the moonlit waters of the Tiber, absorbing the atmosphere of war-time Rome at night. Blacked-out windows, the ring of horses’ hooves on cobblestones and the tap of women’s high heels on the sidewalk. A woman smoking a cigarette approached him from a doorway on the opposite bank of the river, but withdrew smiling when she noticed his soutane.
As he walked Liam brooded about his relationship with Maria. For a while he had pretended that she merely wanted his help because, through the Papal charities, he could assist the Jews. And, deliciously and guiltily, he had considered the notion that perhaps she liked him for himself.
But soon logic asserted itself. The interest of the girl — and her unwholesome friends — was centred on his association with Bishop Hudal. They had known about the association from the beginning.
After their first meetings Maria had contented herself by asking apparently aimless questions. Then she had actively encouraged Liam’s friendship with Hudal “as you say he is so concerned about the Jews.”
When Liam was finally and hopelessly involved with her, she had made it clear that she wanted him to extract information from the German bishop. To spy.
But, being an intelligent girl, she had provided him with an escape route for his guilt: the information he provided was only being used in the interests of Roman Jewry if the Germans occupied Rome.
But Liam, now aware of the plotting within The Eternal City and The Vatican City, knew that far more was involved. He was being used by Maria’s friends, partisani, who were mustering their forces into an organised resistance movement. When the time came they would shoot, bomb, kill. Aided and abetted by Father Liam Doyle! Liam groaned aloud as he hurried towards his clandestine rendezvous with Maria. They met in a side street off the Largo Tassoni. The moonlight was in her hair and he could smell her perfume and he thought: “This is the last time,” but he knew it wasn’t.
“I’m glad you could come, Father,” she said.
Did she have any feeling for him at all? Or was he just a weakling to be exploited, a clerical courier to be used as she doubtless used other men.
“It is a fine night for a walk.”
“I have something important to ask you,” as they strolled beneath the stars.
“And what is that?” No longer my child.
“Sepp Dietrich visited the Pope yesterday.”
“Sepp Dietrich?”
She told him about the SS Commander.
“But why would a man like that seek an audience with the Pope?”
“That, Father, is what I would like you to find out.”
“From Bishop Hudal?”
“From the Nazi bishop,” she said, stopping and standing very close to him. “Will you do that For me?”
“I’ll try,” Liam said. And, hoping that she wouldn’t lie: “What has this to do with helping the Jews in Rome?”
Maria said: “The SS Special Action Units are responsible For massacring Jews. In Russia they’ve been killing 100,000 a month.”
But, from what she had told him, Liam had gathered that Dietrich was primarily a soldier. “You think he might organise a Special Action Unit in Rome?”
She nodded. “I do, Father.”
He knew she lied and it pained him.
V
But Liam Doyle was not destined to discover the reason for Sepp Dietrich’s visit to The Vatican from the German bishop, because the SS officer didn’t confide it to Hudal.
Dietrich distrusted priests. In particular eccentric priests trying to confuse pure National-Socialism with Christian doctrinaire.
But one day Hudal and the other pro-Nazi clergy with Vatican connections — men like SS officer George Elling, a priest, ostensibly studying the life of St. Francis of Assisi — would be vital links in the plan code-worded Grey Fox.
At the moment Dietrich wasn’t telling. His visit to S. Maria dell’ Anima was merely a preliminary move.
As he dismounted from the black Mercedes-Benz on the morning of the 29th July he vaguely noticed a priest and a girl struggling across the street and dismissed the scene as yet another example of Italian hysteria.
In the presbytery flanked by the tomb of the last non-Italian Pope, Hadrian VI, adorned with figures representing Justice, Prudence, Force and Temperance, he was greeted enthusiastically by the little prelate.
“It is indeed a pleasure to meet you,” Hudal said holding out his hand.
“The pleasure is mine,” Dietrich said without enthusiasm.
They went into a book-lined room where Dietrich noticed a painting of the Crucifix and photographs of Pius XII and Adolf Hitler on the walls.
On May 1st, 1933, Dietrich recalled, Hudal had entertained seven hundred guests, including top Nazis, on the premises and the place had rung with the cry: ‘German unity is my strength, my strength is German might.’
Hudal handed Dietrich a glass of wine. “And what brings you to the Holy City?” he asked.
“Pleasure,” Dietrich told him. He sat down on a threadbare easy-chair and crossed his stocky legs. “My unit has been transferred from the Russian Front. I’ve always liked Rome,” he lied.
He had visited the city once before. On May 2nd, 1938, in company with his beloved Führer, Von Ribbentrop, Josef Goebbels and the imbecile Rudolph Hess who had flown to Britain in 1941. He had detested the place then — its climate, its monuments, the instability of its people and its soldiery. Dietrich had even been forced to witness the Italian troops’ ludicrous imitation of the Nazi marching step known as the passo Romano.
“I am always pleased to receive a friend of the Führer,” Hudal said. He clasped his hands. “How are things on the Russian Front?”
“Not good,” Dietrich told him.
Hudal looked anxious. “But only temporary set-backs, I trust.”
Dietrich shrugged. It was only that morning that he himself had admitted the possibility of defeat. “We fought well in the Belgorod-Kursk sector.
Hudal leaned forward expectantly. “And?”
Dietrich said heavily: “General Model ordered a withdrawal. A strategic withdrawal, of course! The Ivans are marching on Orel at the moment.”
“But ultimate victory will be ours,” Hudal said, “It is God’s will. The Bolsheviks must be crushed. They are our principal enemies.”
“Our enemies? Do you mean enemies of the Church or enemies of Germany?”
The Vatican, Dietrich thought, was obsessed with the threat of Communism. From the Pope downwards. Thank God! He smiled thinly: it was an appropriate setting to mark his appreciation. And one of the leaders of the anti-Marxist movement was the fanatical little priest sitting opposite him.
Now Dietrich put the bishop to the test. “What if Germany were defeated?”
“Unthinkable,” Hudal snapped.
“But just supposing.”
“Then we would fight on.”
“We?”
“All of us loyal to the cause of National-Socialism. And Christianity,” he added as an afterthought. “After all, we rose from the ashes of the First World War.”
“The Americans and British wouldn’t let that happen again,” Dietrich said.
“They couldn’t stop us.”
“I think,” Dietrich said carefully, “that if we were to rise again it would have to be somewhere else.”
“You mean in Italy?”
The last place on God’s earth! “No, not Italy. The British and Americans would keep a tight rein on the Black Shirts here.”
Hudal looked at him suspiciously. “You seem very fatalistic, Gruppenführer.”
“Merely anticipating every eventuality.”
“Where then, Spain?”
“I hardly think so,” Dietrich said. “Franco has refused to cooperate with the Führer.” He paused, staring at the photograph of Hitler. “No, I think it would have to be farther away than that. Brazil maybe, one of the South American countries.”
“That seems rather far-fetched.”
But Hudal was out of touch. He hadn’t seen the slaughters in Russia. He didn’t seem to realise that the Allies would soon be on the mainland of Italy. That soon they would be landing in France. Above all he couldn’t comprehend the atmosphere in Berlin where already some of Hitler’s trusted lieutenants were planning their escape routes.