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