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?
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
