The Saint Peter’s Plot
Seeing him standing beside the fountain Maria Reubeni thought: “Now there’s a man.”
She walked up to him. “Good morning, Father.”
He smiled at her. “Good morning, my child.” His features were serene and yet it seemed to Maria that the serenity was a mask beneath which any extreme was possible.
He pointed at the fountain’s rocks set against the wall of the palace, at the statues of gods and goddesses and tritons, and the cascades of water spilling into the great bowl. “That water,” he said, “comes from Agrippa’s aqueduct, the Aqua Vergine, probably the sweetest water in all Rome. And do you know what the English used to do with it?”
She shook her head.
“Make tea.”
She laughed.
“Great people the English. A pity they never colonised Rome. If they had we might spend the rest of the day waiting for the sun to go down over the yard-arm instead —”
“Of waiting for the Germans to come.”
Father Benedetto sighed. “And come they will. Already the German Army is preparing to take over. We have a lot to do,” he said taking her arm. “Papers to forge, food to hide, escape hatches to oil.”
“But first,” she said, “the Jews in France, in Nice. How is it going, Father?”
“Slowly,” said the priest. “As you know, I’ve seen the Holy Father and sought his help. So far nothing’s happened but that was only thirteen days ago. These things take time. And the Holy Father is in a very difficult position,” he added.
“Very,” the girl said drily. “He finds it very difficult to acknowledge the existence of Jews. Particularly dead ones.”
“Now that,” said the Capuchin friar, “is not quite so. There are many factors involved. But this is no time for a debate about Papal diplomacy.” He led her from the little square in the direction of the Corso, gesturing with his free hand. “Palaces, basilicas, villas … We live in a museum. And there must be many dusty hiding places in a museum.”
“But will you be able to get the Jews out of France?” Maria asked.
“We hope to get in touch with London and Washington through the British and American representatives at The Holy See. The prisoners in The Vatican,” he said smiling. “Which reminds me,” tightening his grip on her arm, “I understand there was a very important visitor to The Holy See today.”
They reached the Corso, the windows of its elegant facades covered with dark-blue paper as an air-raid precaution. There were a few people around heading for the food queues; a kiosk opposite the Piazza Colunna displayed newspapers bearing nebulous headlines because editors were no longer sure what constituted good and bad news.
“Who was that?” Maria asked. “The Chief Rabbi?”
“On the contrary,” Father Benedetto said. “He was a German.”
“That doesn’t surprise me.”
“His name might.”
“Who was it, Hitler?”
“Not quite.” Benedetto bought a newspaper with a map of Sicily on the front page. The arrows on it seemed to indicate that the Enemy was winning. Or were they now the Allies? “His name is Dietrich.”
“Not Sepp Dietrich?”
“So it seems.”
“But what —”
“That is what we’d like to know,” the priest interrupted. “Why was Hitler’s favourite soldier-boy seeing the Holy Father?”
“Or why,” said the girl, “did the Pope grant an audience to a swine like that?”
“Whichever way you like to put it,” Father Benedetto said mildly. “Apparently it isn’t generally known that the audience took place.”
“How do you know?” She plunged her hands deep into the pockets of her skirt and began to walk slowly down the sidewalk, head bowed in thought.
“From our contact” — he corrected himself —” your contact in The Vatican. It seems,” tapping her on the shoulder with the rolled-up newspaper, “that you have a way with priests.”
“But why didn’t he contact me?”
“Apparently you were out of touch last night.”
“I suppose I was. I was having dinner with my father.” She took a pack of cigarettes from her handbag, then put it back because you didn’t smoke in the presence of a priest, certainly not walking in the street. “Who did he contact?”
“Angelo Peruzzi,” the priest told her and, because of her startled reaction, asked: “Why, does it matter?”
She said abruptly: “It might.”
“Well, you’d better go and see him,” said Father Benedetto uncertainly. “He’s a good man, isn’t he?”
“A good man, yes. But a weak man who disguises his weakness with bravado. If you’ll excuse me, Father, I’d better go to him now.”
“Very well, my child.” He touched her arm. “God be with you.”
Yes, she thought as she boarded a tram, Angelo was a good man. A brave man? Possibly. But bravery wasn’t necessarily strength, bravery didn’t embrace wisdom. How many acts of bravery had been committed for facile motives? Would Angelo kill just to prove himself to the rest of the partisani?
* * *
From the tram, jammed with rich and poor united by lack of gasoline, Maria gazed at churches and palaces opening their pores to the sun; at the sand-coloured walls of the Palazzo Venezia and its balcony from which Mussolini had declared war: at the white wedding cake across the square, the Vittorio Emanuele Monument.
In this square, when the overthrow of Mussolini had been announced, Maria had seen black-shirts flee for their lives as the crowd spat on a bronze bust of Mussolini. The euphoria had been sustained by the rumour that Hitler was dead.
Now the celebrants had retired and the Fascists were showing their noses again. Mussolini was still alive, the Germans would soon be here, and already in the streets you could see young men with bright blue eyes wearing combat clothes beneath civilian jackets.
Maria turned her attention to the stumps and roots of ancient Rome. The Allies had already bombed the city, wrecking the Basilica di San Lorenzo. How many more noble buildings would join the ruins of the Coliseum and the Forum before the war was finished? And who would destroy them — the Germans or the Allies? If only, Maria thought, the Italians could decide which was the enemy.
She alighted from the tram under a Fascist slogan, Many Enemies, Much Honour and made her way up the Via Cavour, a long and dreary street leading away from the sunlit ruins.
Here, in a small square reached by a flight of worn steps, Angelo Peruzzi had a one-roomed apartment. The tapestries of the square were underclothes and faded blouses hanging from the balconies. The only inhabitants at this time were starved cats that had escaped the stewpot.
Maria mounted the hollowed stairs and knocked on the door. No reply. She took the key to the room from her purse. Angelo had given her the key in the hope that she would join him in bed, but she had laughed at him and he had sulked for a week.
He was handsome enough with his brigand’s face and polished black hair; but he wasn’t a Jew, and in any case she had no respect for him.
The room smelled of stale tobacco smoke. On one side was an unmade camp bed. And he wanted me to share that! Opposite the bed a bookcase filled with innocuous volumes — these days you didn’t display either Fascist or Communist literature — and, on the walls, photographs of the Peruzzi family grouped round proud Papa who looked like an old-time Chicago barber.
Maria glanced at the papers lying on the table, one of its legs supported by a manual on firearms. She picked up an unlabelled bottle of red wine and smelled it. She grimaced. Gutrot! Angelo Peruzzi, aged twenty-eight, drank too much. It saddened her that she had to work with such men. But these days every willing hand was valuable, and Angelo was in contact with the most influential partisani, each group prepared to fight for its own rights in post-war Italy.
At first Maria had wondered why the more level-headed partisani bothered with Angelo. Then she had discovered that they used him because he liked to kill.
She was replacing the bottle when she noticed the sheaf of paper on which it had been resting. On the first sheet were scrawled three words in Angelo’s childish hand-writing: DIETRICH VATICAN HUDAL.
Slowly Maria lowered the bottle to the table. She glanced at her wrist-watch. It was 11.30 am. If Dietrich had been granted an audience with the Pope, then it would be over by now.
In two strides she was across the room, pulling back the bed, grimacing at the smell of unwashed sheets, pulling an old oak wedding chest from underneath. She tossed aside old magazines until she reached Angelo’s private armoury. A dismantled Thompson sub-machine gun, a Luger pistol and a stiletto with an elaborately carved handle.
All present and correct — except a German stick-grenade.
Maria ran out of the house into the square where the cats spat and arched their backs. Then she was in the Via Cavour running towards the centre of the city.
An old Lancia passed her, the driver — a fat man with a few strands of hair greased across his scalp — glanced at her over his shoulder. She waved and he smiled, winked and stopped the car.
“What’s the hurry, my pretty one?”
She jumped in beside him and told him to take her to the Piazza Navona as though she were addressing a taxi driver.
He shrugged, smiled, patted her knee and drove away.
“Urgent business?”
“Very.”
“Perhaps after this, ah, urgent business, we could meet and have a little drink. Perhaps in the sunshine on the Via Veneto …”
“Perhaps,” thinking: “If Angelo has ruined everything I’ll kill him.”
“What is the, ah, nature of this urgent business? It isn’t usual to see beautiful girls running on a hot day in Rome.” He glanced sideways at her. “You looked as though you were running for your life.”
“I’ll tell you about it later,” she said. “When we’re having that drink. And maybe after that …” managing a smile at the fat Fascist black-marketeer beside her. “Could we go a little quicker?”
“Nothing easier.” He stamped on the accelerator. “There’s no traffic on the roads. Not many of us are lucky enough to have cars these days. I have lots of beautiful things I could show you.”
As they neared the Piazza Navona Maria told him to stop.
“But I thought —”
“This will do,” she snapped.
As she climbed out she turned on him. “I know your face now, you fat pig. You’d better watch out.”
She lifted her skirts and ran through the narrow streets arriving at S. Maria dell’ Anima just as a black Mercedes was pulling up outside.
She saw Angelo Peruzzi in his clerical clothes as he was reaching into the leather briefcase. She threw herself at him, grabbing his hand inside the briefcase.
He swore and tried to push her away. She pressed her body against him, trapping the briefcase between them.
He pushed again with his free hand but she clung to him. He thrust his hand under her chin: “Get away from me or I’ll break your neck.”
She could feel his strength overcoming her; all she needed was a few moments more.
“Get away …”
Her head was bending backwards. Another fraction of an inch and the bones of her neck would snap. She gave way and fell to the ground, just as the door closed behind the bulky figure in the ill-fitting grey suit.
Angelo’s lips were trembling. With shaking hands he slipped home the tongue of the strap over the spring-clip on the case.
“You bitch,” he said.
III
The inquiry into the Dietrich episode was held in a cellar in the Borgo — a grenade’s throw from The Vatican, as Angelo Peruzzi had once put it.
But this evening Angelo Peruzzi was not in joking mood. He was trying desperately to maintain his prestige which is difficult when you have been all but overpowered by a woman.
Angelo’s prestige had been based on his willingness, and proven ability, to kill. And it owed its strength to the smallness of the group at a time when the partisani were an inchoate force of splinter groups which would only become a unified resistance movement when the Germans occupied Rome, and the British and Americans invaded the Italian mainland.
Angelo also drew his strength from Maria which had not been fully realised by the other members of the group. Until now.
The cellar was lit by a naked bulb hanging from the ceiling. The three men — the two who had stalked Dietrich, and Angelo Peruzzi — sat on packing cases sharing a bottle of grappa while Maria sat on the table swinging her long legs as her agitation increased.
Angelo’s only possible ally was the younger man with the frost-bitten brain, but he was no match for Maria’s passionate eloquence or the menacing presence of the Sicilian.
Angelo was saying: “I still think I should have killed him.”
Carlo, the younger man, said: “What kind of partisani are we if we fail to kill a big fish like Dietrich when he’s handed to us on a plate?” By now he was asking questions instead of making statements. He looked at the Sicilian who shrugged. “If you had seen men like that in Russia …” Carlo always produced Russia and they forgave him a lot because of what he had been through.
The Sicilian drank from the bottle of grappa and handed it to Angelo Peruzzi. “And what about the things the Russians did to the Germans? What about the story of the gold?”
“What gold?” Angelo asked, happy for any diversion.
“It seems the SS were searching for gold in some village. They threatened to arrest the entire population — and by arrest they meant murder — if the gold wasn’t produced. They left four men in charge. Next day they returned and in one of the buildings they found a box marked GOLD.” The Sicilian paused for effect. “When they opened it they found it contained the heads of the four men they had left behind.”
“Sometimes,” Carlo said, “I wonder whose side you’re on.”
The Sicilian gave a gold-toothed smile. “Mine,” he said.
“You should be in Sicily fighting the Germans.”
The Sicilian closed his smile, took a knife from his belt and tested its blade with his thumb. “My place is here in Rome. Here I have contacts. Family contacts,” he emphasised. “Sicily will fall within a month. And when the Germans march into Rome there will be much work to do,” throwing the knife at a photograph of Mussolini on the wall.
Maria lit a cigarette, blowing the smoke into the aureole of light around the naked bulb. “If Angelo had killed Dietrich we wouldn’t be in any position to fight the Germans.”
Angelo started to speak but she held up her hand.
“If Angelo had thrown that grenade the Germans would be here now. They would be in The Vatican. We would have been finished before we started. They would have slaughtered hundreds of innocent men, women and children. Our movement would have been obliterated.”
“Our movement?” The Sicilian retrieved the knife from the Duce’s face, already slitted with many wounds. “What exactly are your priorities?” His parents had sent him to Rome to be educated and he spoke Italian like a Roman.
She swung her heart-breaking legs a little quicker. “Very well, it’s obvious that I am concerned with the Jews. But that doesn’t mean we cannot work together.”
“That is true,” the Sicilian agreed. He held up the bottle to determine how much grappa Angelo Peruzzi had swallowed. “And I tell you now that I agree that it was a mistake to try and kill Dietrich.”
It was then that Maria realised the strength of the Sicilian. To be strong you had to admit your mistakes; beside the Sicilian, Carlo and Angelo were actors, cowboys.
The Sicilian said to Angelo: “But don’t despair, my friend. You did what you thought was right,” and Maria realised that the Sicilian was taking over. I would never have said such a thing to Angelo.
And to the three of them the Sicilian said: “We must stop fighting among ourselves. We must make decisions and keep to them.” Your decisions, Maria thought. “And if anyone doesn’t …” He spoke with his hands. “In Sicily we have always had a way of dealing with such people.” He threw the knife which this time embedded itself in Mussolini’s throat.
The two younger men remained sulkily silent.
“You see,” the Sicilian said to Maria, “I thought it was you who had ordered the killing of Dietrich.”
And now, she thought, he has all of us.
“You think I’m such a fool?”
He shook his head, smiling. “But you are a woman. A woman is ruled by her heart.”
Anger flared. She stubbed out the cigarette in a saucer. “I am not a Sicilian woman.”
“You are a beautiful woman.”
The anger expanded, although she was pleased by the blatant flattery.
“You’re out of date. Times have changed. This isn’t just a man’s war. Perhaps,” she said more calmly, “things have changed forever. Maybe the war has given us that.”
“Maybe,” the Sicilian said, emptying the last of the grappa down his throat.
“So what do we do now?” Carlo asked.
The Sicilian said: “We have to get guns. We have to meet the other partisani. We have to get organised. But first,” he said to Maria, “there is something you must do — find out why Dietrich is here.”
“Perhaps he’s looking for Mussolini,” Maria said tentatively.
“Possibly. But I doubt it. Otto Skorzeny’s been put in charge of that. And Hitler wouldn’t risk a clash of personalities like that — Skorzeny and Dietrich. Christ, what a couple!” the Sicilian exclaimed, admiration in his tone. “But in any case, they’re all wasting their time in Rome. Mussolini was taken to Gaeta and then to the Pontine Islands.”
“It’s not just Mussolini they’re after,” said Angelo. “They want to get Badoglio, his ministers, the King, every one of the shit-heads,” said Angelo, whose hatred embraced all authority-
“Even Skorzeny will have his work cut out,” the Sicilian said. “They’re all nicely tucked away, a lot of them at the Macao barracks surrounded by half the Italian army.”
“Perhaps Dietrich brought a message from Hitler,” Maria ventured.
The Sicilian brushed aside the suggestion. “The German ambassador to The Holy See could have delivered that. Any number of Germans could have delivered it. The Führer,” sarcastically, “could have telephoned The Vatican himself. “No,” he said thoughtfully, “there was something more to it than that. I think Dietrich was on personal business. SS business.”
He stood up, one hand feeling the bald patch. He was not a tall man, but his muscles pushed against his open-necked white shirt. The undiscerning would have likened his face to that of a peasant, but there was authority there — family authority — and small refinements in the set of his brown eyes, the sensitivity of the line from nose to mouth. None of which diminished the overall impression of implacable brutality.
He turned to María. “Now you must get to work. After all, you have the best spy in The Vatican.” He took her arm. “Come, I’ll see you home. By the way,” he said as they reached the foot of the stone steps, “did you know it’s Mussolini’s sixtieth birthday today?”
IV
Maria Reubeni’s Vatican contact was praying. As usual his prayers were tortured.
Kneeling beside his bed in his Vatican quarters he pressed his hands together and shut his eyes as he had done when he prayed as a child in the Bronx.
“Please, God, forgive me for my devious ways.” Consorting with the Nazi bishop and at the same time betraying his confidences.
“And for doubting the Holy Father.” Wondering why, despite his financial help to the Jews, the Pope had not been more outspoken in his condemnation of their persecutors.
“And” — bowing his head lower — “for the times I have doubted Your infinite wisdom.” For permitting this terrible war irrespective of whether its victims found ultimate salvation.
Here he paused, because he was about to seek forgiveness for a carnal sin that he knew he would repeat since he was powerless to prevent it.
“And forgive me for failing to sublimate desires of the flesh.” Maria Reubeni.
Father Liam Doyle, twenty-five years old, grey-eyed with wavy brown hair and keen, Celtic features already stamped with the conflict of innocence and knowledge, prayed a little longer before rising and going to the window of his frugally-furnished room, and staring bleakly across the shaven lawns of The Vatican gardens where children played and fountains splashed in the dusk.
He had felt confused ever since his arrival at The Vatican two years ago from the small church in New York. There his principles and his volition had seemed inviolate: to help the poor — there were enough of them in the Bronx — and to guide the congregation, mostly Irish like himself, in the ways of God.
But Liam Doyle, son of a policeman and a seamstress, one of eight children, had been blessed, or cursed, by a facility with languages. First he had become fluent in Latin and then he had mopped up Spanish and Italian so that he was much in demand in the ghettos. Word of his linguistic abilities reached St. Patrick’s Cathedral and he was dispatched to Rome as a young seminarian.
The honour frightened him, but delighted those who worshipped in his grimy little church with its anti-Papal graffiti on the outside walls. “Patrick Doyle’s boy going to join the Vicar of Christ. Now there’s a thing.” Their delight was heightened by the fact that he would take with him the sins to which they had confessed — he was much preferred in the Confessional to the Bible-faced Father O’Riley — those sins, that is, that had escaped the wrath of Patrolman Patrick Doyle.
Liam Doyle’s fear had been well justified. He could not equate the splendid isolation of The Holy See with Christian charity. When he explored its treasure troves he remembered the pawn shop across the street from his old church where women hocked their wedding rings for a dollar.
Nor could he understand the arrogance of some of the monsignori in a world addled with poverty, starvation and suffering. Blessed are the meek …
And he never felt at ease in this state within a city. These blessed one hundred and nine or so neutral acres bounded by St. Peter’s Square, The Vatican walls and the walls of the Palace of The Holy See, constituted by the Lateran Treaty in 1929, where less than one thousand people lived tax-free lives of privilege.
Was this the way Jesus, the son of a humble carpenter, would have wished it?
But perhaps the fault lies in myself, Father Doyle brooded as the dusk thickened and settled on the courtyards, chapels and museum; on the grocery, pharmacy and radio station of the minute state from which the spiritual lives of three hundred and seventy-five million Catholics were ruled. There has to be authority and it has to be garbed with spendour: it is a throne. And there has to be immunity from outside pressures: a regal purity, perhaps.
Liam Doyle sighed. My trouble, he decided, as a plump cardinal strode past in the lamplight beneath like a galleon in full sail, is that I see every side of an argument. I lack decision.
He decided to brew a pot of tea on the gas-ring beneath a Crucifix on the wall. And while he waited for the kettle to boil he read the worn Bible that his mother had given him twenty years ago, seeking as always answers to his confusion. From the testaments he found solace, but it was only temporary, and when he awoke in the morning the doubts were still there, fortified by sleep.
The war had not helped Liam’s state of mind. It wasn’t merely the mindless slaughter vented on the world by an insane dictator: it was the effect of the war on The Vatican. It seethed with rumour. It was haunted with fear that the Germans would occupy it — they wouldn’t be the first to sack Holy Rome — and there was even a story that Hitler planned to kidnap the Pope.
But it was the politics of the place that particularly unsettled Liam. The uneasy suspicion-that the Papal diplomats were more concerned with stemming the tide of Communism than with condemning Nazi Germany. But how could you condemn a nation that was locked in battle with Bolshevism, the greatest threat to Christianity the world had ever known?