“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