Derek Lambert - The Saint Peter’s Plot

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?

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.