The Conduct of Saints, page 14
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BRENDAN GAVE his name to the German religious sister who served as house secretary in the Collegio Teutonico, started to mount the spiral of stairs, and ran into a towering priest with a large nose and bright brown eyes. The man said, “Doherty, you’ve grown to be a tub!” He took Brendan’s hand in a crushing grip, withdrew it to probe his middle. “God forgive your self-indulgence, Doherty. Diet and exercise. What’s this I hear about you trying to do something for Herr Koch?”
“Do you know anyone who would speak on his behalf?”
“Probably, but I won’t ask. It’s too soon. I’m saving what influence I have for the top men, those coming to trial in the next eighteen months. Kappler’s my pet son of a bitch.” He had a singing Irish voice. “I’ll pray for your success, however. Diet and exercise. You must eat less, drink less, and take up tennis or golf. The latter is easy work, you make your own pace, and meet useful people—speaking of influence. I’ve heard about Koch’s conversion. Thank the Lord for that good news.”
Brendan said to Sergio Paolini in the bishop’s apartment, “I ran into O’Flaherty on the stairs and mentioned Koch. He says he’s unable to help.”
“He is persona non grata across the way. If His Holiness suspects he’s an ally of yours in this, he’ll freeze you out entirely. How are you getting on?”
“Not well.”
“You’ve been clumsy from what I hear.”
The new papal secretary was tall and aristocratic-looking: black hair, a bony, broad-cheeked, ascetic face. He had written a book on Vatican State law and two collections of sonnets published under a pseudonym by a press in Florence. He was the door to Pius’s presence, and petitioners understood the importance of having read some of the poems in order to be moved up on the list of those granted audience. His apartment, one of the largest in the school, was lined on two walls with books of law and legal commentary. It had its own bath. The bishop’s desk, under a window that looked out on the Hospice Santa Marta, was a plain deal table, a legal-size pad squared on it, a mechanical pencil across the pad. The bed, like Brendan’s at the Villa Carlotta, was narrow, its covers militarily taut. On the wall above the bed hung a painting of the Holy Family.
“That’s new here.”
“It was in a storage room. They were going to take it to the conservation and restoration people, pull it apart for the canvas and pigment. I rescued it. It’s said to be a Santos-Martini, but that’s doubtful.”
“To think he and Cézanne were contemporaries. Can’t they let you have something decent?”
“I like it. No one’s offered me a Raphael. Notice the expression in the Madonna’s eyes.”
“They look like poached eggs.”
Paolini said, “You’re looking overcooked yourself, Brendan, if you’ll allow me. Yellow. That’s liver.”
“Hugh O’Flaherty thinks I should take up golf because I’m fat.”
“He’s right, though golf ’s inappropriate to your position, as of course it is to his. Walking. Long walks and exercise with dumbbells in your quarters. How is your mother?”
“I’ve been getting infusions of cash from her. She surrounds herself with banking and investment priests. They’re in and out of the house at all hours, advising her, and drinking her whiskey. She invests, takes her profit, and turns it over to them, some for me too, of course. If there’s a loss, she absorbs it. I can’t tell you how she is, since I don’t read her letters.”
“Lilian Doherty is a good, generous woman, Brendan, and we’re indebted to her,” Paolini said. And then, mildly: “Have you any notion of the degree to which you presume on your position?”
Brendan said nothing.
“A call was made to the Information Office late this morning. An editor from Il Messaggero wanted to confirm the truth of an interview in which you told a reporter that His Holiness desires that Pietro Koch’s life be spared if he is found to be guilty at his trial.”
“He didn’t waste any time.”
“This editor always confirms with us. He’s a friend.”
“Not of mine, apparently.”
“Brendan, you know better. He has to confirm. You must be aware that you’ve crossed the line, just as you did when you pretended to represent us with the Germans in the case of the mass deportation of the Jews a year and a half ago.”
“His Holiness ought to have acted directly.”
“We will not revisit the matter of the Jews, Brendan.”
“It was you mentioned it.”
“I regret doing so. It’s not your place to make such a statement, even to me, perhaps especially to me, and certainly not to anyone else. Now, as then, it is a matter of diplomacy, of managing what is manageable. We were speaking of Koch. The Holy Office has no opinion concerning his case one way or the other, not before the trial, probably not afterward either. If we want to bring influence to bear, you know we must do it indirectly and unofficially. I told the man it was nonsense, that we deny the story categorically, allowing him to think whatever he likes about the value of your word. His Holiness never said anything of the sort to you or others. Furthermore, he’s said nothing about objecting to appeasing Communists. He cannot at this point. Nor do we have anything like an official position concerning capital punishment. This is sensitive stuff.”
“As I’m aware.”
“I don’t think you are. His Holiness was close to despair concerning the caves. I have never seen him grieve so, but you must know the diplomatic razor’s edge it created. He is fond of you, yet you put him in an untenable position when you go before the public, in effect, and pretend he’s said something, when all you have is an idea that he believes it, which is very different. He may well believe this or that thing, Brendan, may even say something, but if he has said it privately, he has not said it.”
“I take your point.”
The bishop was silent, watching him. “I think you have too much regard for your impulses—your instinctive responses to events. I think you believe those responses come from God. They don’t. If you want to know what God expects of you, ask Him.”
“All right, Sergio. You sound like Bishop Ricci.”
“Who is that?”
“An impossible old Fascist who lives at the Villa Carlotta. He likes to torment me as you are doing.”
“In addition to everything else, there is the fact that you are standing in opposition to His Holiness’s wishes by questioning Maria Goretti’s most significant miracle at a moment when her beatification has been all but realized. There is some latitude concerning the minor miracles, but we are of one voice concerning the major one. Still we want the big one: it’s good press, to be plain. For reasons of your own, you expressed a desire to make the examination of the man Serenelli, and we gave our assent on condition that it be informal, its results non-binding. We’re not looking for obstructions at this point, a scant two years before the Congregation is required to come to its final understanding. The fact is, you abuse your position as an examiner in the Holy See. It’s as if you like to amuse yourself, to be subversive. None of this is for your entertainment, Brendan.”
“Does he say all that or is it something you feel he believes?”
“Not to the point, Brendan. I say it, if you like.”
“How do you know I question Serenelli’s miracle?”
“As I’ve told you, the superior at the cloister where he’s staying was my tutor more years ago than I like to remember. He sent me a note with his observations.”
“He’s not present at the interviews.”
“You said Alessandro’s a liar.”
“Certainly he’s a liar. So am I. When I question Serenelli, I express doubt. I try to trip him up. I ask him to look into himself, examine what he finds there, and report to me. I see that as being my job—to find out what we’re dealing with now, today, not ten or twenty years ago.”
The papal secretary said, “Brendan, as I’ve tried to make plain, Pius wants a saint for the young. Don’t misunderstand or understand too much. Take the man’s testimony, compose your report, go to His Holiness, and tell him you’re satisfied. Alternatively, if you decide Serenelli is a little off, a little mad, I’ll see to it that he’s interrogated by the Congregation appropriately, if at all. If you feel he can’t behave with correctness at the hearings or the ceremonies, tell me that, I’ll alert His Holiness, and we won’t summon him. According to figures supplied by the Information Bureau, our Italian youth has been straying from the Church in alarming numbers since the war. This is what you’re to keep in the forefront of your mind.”
Paolini had risen from his chair.
“Why did we postpone the beatification if we believe all is well with that particular miracle?” Brendan asked.
“His Holiness wants the city purged before the rites. When the Allied armies with their profanity and depravity are removed from our midst, that will be the time to present a young saint to the world. We have not got our Italian government yet—a constitution with laws to guide the people in their civil behavior. When that’s accomplished and the soldiers have left, and you have put your stamp of approval on this fellow, we’ll go forward. Did you bother to read the brief you were given?”
“I must tell you that Serenelli denies direct knowledge of killing the child. He says he doesn’t remember the event, only its prelude and aftermath, that it required the testimony presented at his trial to tell him what he’d done.”
“We’ll have what we need out of him. The evidence concerning his crime, his guilt, is a matter for the state, and he won’t be questioned by us in that connection. I don’t understand you. Are you saying he’s mad?”
“Only that, as I’ve stated, he’s an experienced liar.” Brendan said. “This vision of his is nonsense, even when he amends it and tells me that now, pushed to the wall by my irritating persistence, he’s given me the truth.”
“Let’s suppose it’s not nonsense. Or let’s suppose he colors it in advancing her cause. It’s a true cause. You’re too severe, Brendan. Make sure his promotion of Maria Goretti is sincere, that he won’t embarrass us in court by diverging from his former depositions, and that he has in no way returned to his former violence and perversions of the flesh. He’s well over sixty by now. Is he presentable?”
“The court will like him.”
“Leave it there then. We have a couple of years to deal with the matter of his memory, if we decide to deal with it at all.” And after a moment: “I don’t suppose you missed the opportunity to ask Hugh O’Flaherty for his influence in regard to Koch.”
“He’s saving what he has for bigger game.”
“There. You see? These kinds of things are political. Emotion has no place. Apropos, my friend, there’s still another matter. A prison guard at the Coeli reports overhearing a conversation in which you told Pietro Koch you’d gone to a man named Volterra, an instructor of some sort at the police academy, and passed on a threat. Something to do with women and the fact that he had been in Koch’s employ, the quid pro quo being that he would influence someone on the High Court in Koch’s favor.”
Brendan’s depression, a sense of futility, which had been growing in him all day, made him want to sleep. He shrugged. “The man was one of Koch’s spies. He had been with the Cattolici Comunisti. Koch had him, tortured him, and let him go, like a man releasing a fish. I thought I could use the good will.”
“Blackmail. You amaze me. Don Isidro Consalves, the priest dealing with Koch’s instruction, came to me yesterday and said you told Koch that Pius would do everything in his power to prevent his death. ‘He is thinking of how he might be able to help.’ He did not say that, Brendan. Shame.”
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THEY SAT at a table with a paper cover in a courtyard behind the restaurant. When Brendan asked her on the telephone where she would like to meet, Dany Andretti had chosen this place near the prison.
“I like to be close,” she said, “and hidden places like this were his favorites. He said his friends, colleagues, whatever you call them, always lunched at the Excelsior or the Hassler—Kappler, Caruso, those people—and that he was expected to do so too, but he knew his enemies would look for him there. All the partisan groups had him at the top of their lists of those to be assassinated, so he felt safer in spots like these, and he knew the food was better anyhow. Not the wine, of course, but he didn’t care about wine one way or the other. I’ve made this my neighborhood now. I shop nearby, use the cafes, meet friends. As now.”
“How often do you see him?”
“Every day. I stay for an hour, an hour and a half, longer if Pietro can get around the guards. I spend most of that time just holding him. We do a kind of modified sex thing as well—an improvisation, whatever is manageable and more or less discreet. You can never be entirely private. It’s to get his mind off himself for a bit. Does that shock you?”
Brendan said, “I think it surprises me. I hadn’t thought it was possible under the circumstances. It never occurred to me.”
“He doesn’t like to do for himself as most men will. He’s fastidious about it. That’s not the right word. Strict. He’s a puritan. He wants to go by the rules, his own rules for preference, and a woman helping him out in that way is within the boundaries of the rules. In any case, I suppose I love him, if that doesn’t sound too old-fashioned. I’m a romantic.” She said, looking over a menu, “You could say I’m in love with him.”
It was hot. She wore a sleeveless summer dress of a crinkly fabric, white gloves, several necklaces, bracelets, and rings, a big straw hat. She had put her handbag on the ground beside her chair. He thought she had a trace of a Marseilles accent, a street way of talking. She held a cigarette between her lips, and it bobbed as she spoke. He liked the flat, white, feline face and Japanese-looking black eyes.
“Are you an actress?”
“No such luck. I do modeling, which is why I’m recognized sometimes in the street. I haven’t the knack of acting. It’s not all big jaws and big eyes, you know. You need certain gifts as well, and a gymnast’s control of the body. Generally speaking, whores are better-looking than actresses. The successful ones.”
A waiter stood courteously nearby. People at other tables were in the midst of their luncheons. Dany asked for a sherry and a tomato and herb salad.
“Have a proper meal,” Brendan said.
She shrugged. “I’ve asked for what I want.”
He had veal, which was one of the things available in restaurants that month, and a half liter of the table wine.
“Does he speak to you about me?” she asked.
“He’s told me he’s fond of you,” Brendan said falsely. “Our talk mainly concerns the situation he’s in.”
“I know Pietro’s worried. He understands that the state—Italy—wants to kill him, and he’s sure the courts will agree. It hurts his feelings. He doesn’t blame them, of course. We’ve lost the battle, and he admits he has what they call innocent blood on his hands. You know, Monsignore, his conversion is real. He uses a joking tone when he talks about it, but he believes in Jesus as his savior. He says he continues to hope—not to avoid his own death, but for the strength to be faithful. He prays for that. What he fears about death is that it will bring dishonor to his mother because of the nature of the charges. I’m not religious myself. I only tell you what he tells me.”
Brendan said, “But do you really know what he’s done? Do you know that he had to move the prison on the Via Amadeo because the neighbors had had all they could take of the noise—the screaming? They complained to the German commander. It wasn’t bad during the day, they said, but it kept them awake at night. He was required to move. Are you aware of how many people he’s had killed? He claims he never touched them himself, but it’s not true.”
Dany opened the stub of her cigarette, and scattered the tobacco onto the soil where flowers grew in a plot next to their table. “Fertilizer.”
She said, “Listen, Monsignore. He did the job he was trained to do for a cause he more or less believed in. I don’t mind what he did, not at all. Make what you want of it. I’m like the woman in the Shakespeare play who urges her man to commit murder. Pietro is always quoting from it. I write poems about the things Pietro did. I write about his strength, which is the single thing I admire in a man. I don’t mind killing. It shows who has the final strength. It makes life precarious and therefore precious. And I’m no nationalist or racial hypocrite—about Jews and so on—like that idiot Hitler and the others, and I have no cause except Pietro. But I’m not afraid of killing once I’ve figured out who my enemy is and found a way to get at him. It’s my lover who regrets the blood he spilled, not me.”
Brendan said, “You’d have to admire his executioners then.”
“I’ll hate them, if it comes to it. What’s that—logic? You’re not a Jesuit, are you? I don’t like people of the mind. I told you I love him. didn’t say there was anything reasonable about it. Listen. I mean to save his life. I don’t care if he spends the rest of it in prison, so long as he’s alive. I don’t care if he would rather be shot. I won’t have it. He’s twenty-seven years old. Wherever he’s held, I’ll visit him every day for the next fifty years, and if they let him out and he’s gotten rid of that elephant of a wife, I’ll marry him.”
After a moment, she said in a businesslike voice: “I’ve spoken to Luca Visconti. I was with him yesterday and offered to get into bed with him, renew our affair on a one-time basis in exchange for something I needed. He said that whatever it was, bed wouldn’t be necessary, that in any case he was cutting down on women. It was as if he’d said he’d been smoking too much. He’s open about things like having boyfriends, unashamed. It was what attracted me to him before I fell in love with Pietro. When I told him what I wanted, his face lit up like a kid’s. He said he’s working on a screenplay and already doing preliminary filming—a kind of documentary, fact and fiction mixed up together, about the Nazi occupation. Which means, of course, it’s about Pietro among other things. The point is, he agreed to appear for the defense as a witness to Pietro’s character.”
