The Conduct of Saints, page 16
Brendan climbed with difficulty into the passenger seat and held on as Tommy swung the little vehicle in a U-turn, and went off fast, his hand on the horn, the rush of air fierce, down the curve of Porta Pinciana to the Via Sistina, then left. Brendan shouted as they climbed the hill, “Make the next right and stop. Do you mind stopping a minute before we cross the bridge to the prison?”
When he yelled, “Here!” Costa turned right and pulled to the curb.
“Go on ahead to the cross street.”
Tommy went forward, stopped again, and turned the motor off. The street was as quiet and dark as if no one lived in it. There were no pedestrians. Brendan was still gripping the handhold.
“I guess you were concerned,” the younger man said. “I drive better when I’m half in the bag.”
“Don’t you put the headlights on?”
“Didn’t I?” He offered the bottle, which held a few inches of liquor, and Brendan raised a hand. “Let me know if you change your mind.” Tommy drank, then set the bottle on the wooden stowage box between the two seats. He said, “They offered Mike a new Jeep, but he turned it down for this thing. It’s been through battles, so Mike thinks people will believe he’s been through some too.”
“That RAF fellow wanted to fight you,” Brendan said.
“They’re not allowed to fight. That’s why I don’t provoke them.”
“I think you provoked him.”
“He wasn’t mad. They pretend to be drunker than they are, so they can say what they call amusing things.” He said, “Where the hell are we?”
“Via del Boccaccio and Rasella where the Resistance attack took place. You said you wanted to see it. At Alda’s party.”
“I didn’t think you heard me. This is it? I’ve been out to the caves. Mike won’t go. He says he saw enough of that at Anzio.”
“No doubt he did.”
“He didn’t. That’s what I’m telling you. He never saw anything. We were always well behind the lines. He likes to say things like that.”
They looked around the empty street and cross street. It could be seen now that lights shone dimly behind shutters in a few of the windows. The walls of the buildings were cratered with bullet and shrapnel marks, windows blown out, doors splintered. A few hills of stone and concrete rubble had been swept onto the sidewalks, weeds sprouting from them, not yet hauled away.
Brendan said, “The attack took place right here, as they marched up this hill. These were old-timers, a contingent from Bolzano—Hitler-lovers, arrogant as hell, marching through Rome once a day, first one way, then the other, a show of police power for the Romans, tough old cops shouting some German war song or other, showing off their power and disdain. They were marching back to their barracks when it happened. The Gappisti, the Communist Resistance fighters, set off their bomb, trapped them in here, and killed over thirty of them. The Germans who survived went crazy and began shooting everything in sight.” He indicated a frameless window in a deserted house, bullet gouges in the wall beneath it. “A young girl at the window there was killed.”
Tommy gave it a focused look. “That one?”
“I’m pretty sure. Yes. The German Commander, Malzer, came running down from his lunch at the Excelsior, napkin in his hand, half drunk from his bottle of wine. He had everyone on the street and in the cross street pulled out of their houses, out of the cafe there, and lined them up to be shot in retaliation—women, kids, old men. The Bozen SS police were all over the lot, blown apart, dead or dying, the rest of the soldiers wandering around like drunks, eardrums burst, covered with dust and blood. Somebody talked Malzer around, calmed him down, I don’t know how. They say that, like Hitler, he had a hell of a temper. Hitler wanted thirty Romans for each of his thirty soldiers killed here, and they finally got him to agree to ten. The Gestapo took three hundred men and boys out to the Ardeatine Caves, along with soldiers and a number of volunteers, passed out pistols, and shot them all in the back of the neck: three hundred plus; stood on the piles of bodies, shooting more, piling them on. It took all that day and half the night to get the job done. Some of the ones they shot didn’t die for hours, others were crushed to death. The executioners were Gestapo, but also army clerks, supply sergeants who knew nothing of killing. They were given brandy to keep their courage up, drunk as skunks, laughing, crying—Jesus!—slipping in the blood, falling on the dead.”
He stopped. “Do you hear that buzzing?”
“You’re drunk.”
Brendan said, “I don’t remember buzzing from similar occasions. My Lieutenant Koch, as Renato calls him, was made responsible for a percentage of those to be shot at the caves in reprisal for the killings in this street. He filled most of his quota with derelicts and petty criminals from the civil wing at the Coeli, also partisans and Jews from the wing where the Nazis sent their prisoners. He took a few from his own cells on Via Romagna. The rest were men and boys pulled out of these houses at random.”
“I didn’t know about Malzer running down from the Excelsior. They say he was always half drunk.”
“Thirteen months. That’s all it’s been. I’ve made my pilgrimage to the caves twice. The dust is still settling in this place, and the stink at the caves will last forever.”
Tommy drank from the bottle, wiped its mouth on his sleeve, and offered it to Brendan. He said, “You want to swap horror stories, I have one. Alda said you might be willing to hear it.”
Brendan watched the younger man in the near darkness.
“I shot a kid. A noncombatant. I mean, of course he was a noncombatant. That was also just about a year ago. You talking about the girl at that window reminded me. It’s interesting. I mean, you’ll be interested, since it was in that town where they have the saint. I thought the boy was a combatant because of the helmet. I’m not Catholic, by the way, I mean except by birth.”
Brendan took the bottle, drank, and handed it back. “What did you just say?”
“I’m not a practicing Catholic. I’m only talking here. I mean the priest thing—in regard to your position.”
“Before that.”
“The place we burnt out in the drive to Rome. The Fifth did it. It’s where the little girl’s bones are.”
“What little girl? What fifth?”
“Army, Brendan. The Fifth, the Sixth. We destroyed the place. I came up afterward with General Courtland, and we saw what looked to us like a Wehrmacht sniper who got left behind. He had a gun. We thought it was a gun, but it was a stick. He was playing soldier. It’s the place where the girl is buried in the church, the girl your murderer raped and stabbed to death. It’s why I thought you’d be interested. If you’re not, say so, and we can go on talking about your own guilt.”
Brendan said, “You mean where Maria Goretti’s bones are. The sanctuary of the Passionist church in Nettuno.”
“Right. We’re in combat support,” Tommy said. “It’s what Mike Courtland and I do. We’re a service unit of the Quartermaster Corps. Collection-point Field Service. 58th Quartermaster Salvage. What it means is, among other things, we clean up the dead. We’re coming from Anzio, following the advance, the vultures. All these towns along the line of advance are rubble, bombed to shit. Our job is to pick up bodies—our guys, their guys they had to leave behind—put them in rubber bags, load them on trucks, take them to the rear to Graves Registration. The dogfaces do the work, of course, not us. We observe. We follow the advance and make sure everything’s done right. So, here we are in Courtland’s Jeep, climbing these mountains of rubble in what used to be the streets of the little towns, and Mike’s firing his pistol at everything he sees, like target shooting—rats, dogs. If it moves, he pops off at it. He’s got a dozen magazines in his kit bag. He’s having fun, being General Patton. Also, at this point, I probably don’t even have to say, he’s drunk as hell. He has a bottle of apple brandy between his knees. He’s driving with one hand, has his weapon in the other, puts the gun in his lap to take a drink, picks it up again. I’m sober, but he doesn’t let me drive. Four thousand Allied dead from Anzio beach and the advance on Rome, and Mike’s hunting rats or shooting at abandoned military vehicles, banging away. You have to like the boy in him, right? Of course, he’s a lousy shot and never hits anything smaller than a burnt-out Tiger tank. The only people we see are our own guys bagging bodies and salvaging gear—weapons. They’re under Courtland’s command, and they know who we are, only there’s no acknowledgment, because Mike’s a well-known prick and unpopular as hell. The few people left in these towns are in their cellars, or hiding in stone barns, or the old town hall, while Mike’s unleashing hellfire at starving cats. It’s flat country, as you no doubt know—marshland—you can see for miles, you can almost see the rear guard of the Sixth—Truscott, Mark Clark—twenty-five miles ahead, nearly at the city gates—Truscott and Clark going to Rome for Christ’s sake, doing what Hannibal couldn’t do—I could see the army’s dust up ahead, I swear. It’s practically the anniversary today.”
He stopped. “Shit! Can you believe it? A year.”
And, after a silence: “What happened is, we’re in the main square of this town, and it’s Nettuno, what’s left of it. Mike’s hoping someone’s around to make us a sandwich and sell us a bottle of wine. Of course, no one’s there, or they’re hiding. By then we’re well ahead of the collection unit, and the dead are still on the streets and under collapsed buildings, the stink everywhere. It doesn’t bother Mike. Nothing does. He sees this bombed-out church, some neighborhood church, with its altar painting still intact. It’s out in the sunshine, exposed. ‘That could be worth something, Tommy. Get it.’ This is the art lover, the Italy lover. I say, ‘Fuck off, sir.’ So he pops one into the painting. Each time he fires, the pistol makes this huge noise, and I’m deaf from it. He sees someone in a window and yells, ‘Stop!’ He yells, ‘Sniper!’ I’m saying, ‘What?’ I can’t hear him. ‘Sniper!’ We get out and get behind the Jeep, and sure enough, there’s this soldier in his Wehrmacht helmet. He’s looking around the corner of a second floor window that’s bombed out of its frame, like this window here where you say the girl was shot, and his rifle is poked out over the sill. Courtland reaches in, gets his M1 he stole somewhere, and hands it to me. ‘You’re the marksman.’ Because I won a fucking badge in basic training, again excuse the language, and he was always fucking with me about it, teasing.
“Make a short story long. The German—this guy—looks around, his head poking out, his gun on the sill. I thought he raised a hand, but I wasn’t sure. I’m thinking, I don’t know why, this is no German. I thought that, then I shot him.”
Brendan said, “Okay.”
“He drops out of sight. ‘Let’s go and look,’ Mike says. I said no, but of course we go in, walking carefully—maybe there’s an army waiting with machine guns, or booby traps. I have the rifle, Court-land has his .45. We walked up—all the rubble from the broken walls, furniture everywhere in splinters, not a soul, not a sound. Then on the second story, in the front, we find this skinny black-haired kid, maybe fourteen. He’s on the floor with blood everywhere, the helmet, his fucking war souvenir, all the way across the room. The boy is still moving, like he’s having a fit. I’d hit him under the chin, and the slug went out the back of his head.
“His rifle was a stick, Brendan. He didn’t have shoes on, and his dirty feet kept pushing hard at nothing. He’s dying. His old pants were too big for him, and he’d shit and wet them—the village fool playing soldier. Mike said, ‘Look at the helmet, see if there’s a hole,’ but I wouldn’t look at it. ‘Take the helmet,’ he kept saying, but he wouldn’t touch it either.
“What he was doing, I guess, the kid, was waving at us, welcoming the Americans. Courtland was saying over and over, ‘Forget about it. It didn’t happen’—words to that effect. We’re in the Jeep headed to Rome, and we’re hurrying now to catch up with the Fifth, enter the eternal city. ‘It didn’t happen.’ If it didn’t happen, why do I dream about it every other night? Then he goes and hints at it in front of other people every time we have a fight, or he’s just being his usual son of a bitch self. He says to me, in effect, it didn’t happen, or he half looks at the event and says it was an honest mistake: an accident, what am I so upset about? It’s wartime. That’s it, as far as he’s concerned. It didn’t happen to him. The only difference to him, as far as I can see, he went on the wagon after the incident, which he’s done before for lesser cause, to drop a few pounds, and which is no doubt temporary. But he is fully aware I’m carrying this stone of guilt, and he uses it to get at me, keep his hold on me, which you saw at Alda’s. I mean, forget that. I don’t give a shit about that. It’s a side effect, something between Courtland and me. But the rest of it—I can’t sleep, or if I sleep, I dream. I won’t go into the dreams. Suffice it to say, they’re no fucking fun. In that half second, Brendan, the sights lined up, when I still had time, it flashed on me it wasn’t a German. I knew it.”
Brendan pulled his briefcase onto his lap, opened it, found paper and a pencil, wrote a name, then his own name, and a few words. “Here’s a man—the priest at Santa Maria dell’Anima, near Piazza Callisto. I think he’s one of the few people in Rome Alda doesn’t know. He confesses exceptional individuals—men and women with a functioning conscience, soldiers, people with secrets like yours. If you don’t belong to the Church, he listens and advises anyway. He worked with the Cattolici Comunisti in the Resistance. You’ll like him. He wears a mustache and goatee and thinks he’s the reincarnation of Leon Trotsky. Use my name and give him this note.”
“Catholic Communists?”
“It’s a whore of a city, Tommy, capable of anything. Dante or somebody said it. You’ll like this priest. He’s a Resistance icon.”
“And that’s it? You’re sending me to someone? Referring me? Alda said you’d listen. She said you’re a good man.”
“I am. You are too. You talked, and I listened. But I won’t advise you.”
“Mike had to give up a valuable I.O.U. for this Pellegrino. How about some advice in exchange for that?”
Brendan said, “All right, since you’re no longer a Catholic. You feel bad? Feel bad. Don’t let anyone talk you out of it. Let Mike tease you. Hang on to your shame. It’ll keep you from killing the next boy.”
“Christ!”
After a moment, looking into the darkness of the descending street, Tommy said, “Christ,” again, drank, and passed the bottle. Brendan drank the last of the whiskey. His head hummed: again a sound like that of bees swarming, and now it seemed to tick as well. He turned his attention to the matter and found that the bloom of hope in him, which had begun with Dany Andretti saying Visconti would appear for the defense, had not faded. He felt sleepy and content. He became aware of the sound of traffic and voices on the Via delle Quattro Fontane, a woman’s voice carrying faintly from farther down the nearby alley, saying, “Good night, goodbye,” several times, and of a door closing. He thought: good night. As he waited, the night darkened. The insignia on the tunic of the other’s uniform winked. Brendan advanced a hand to the young man, as if to touch him, drew it back.
Costa said, “It’s three hundred dollars for the picture.”
“What? You’ve lost me, brother, and not for the first time tonight. You’re talking about the print? Those things don’t cost that kind of money. And I’m not in the market for an engraving of the Roman campagna. I don’t buy art. I don’t have the means.”
“The man wants it in dollars, if he can get it, but he’ll take lire. He’s poor, and he’s not well. Consider it charity.”
“I can’t afford that.”
“Up to you, Brendan.”
Tommy jerked the Jeep into gear, looked over his shoulder to reverse. He shouted above the engine noise, “You embarrassed hell out of me, you know that? I’m trying to say something—I’m confessing a crime! You tell me to talk to a priest. You’re a priest, for Christ’s sake! Some lousy priest.”
“Exactly. Headlights!”
In the rush of wind Brendan shouted, “If it’s of any use, I pity you!”
He caught a word.
“What?”
“Fuck pity!”
Tommy stopped the Jeep before the Regina Coeli’s visitors’ entrance.
“Pity’s not a negligible thing,” Brendan said. “Ask a child.”
HE LIFTED his bicycle out and watched the car drive off. It was past visiting hours. There were no demonstrators. The guard who looked at him through the slot in the locked gate recognized him and opened the inset door. Brendan said to the officer at the desk, who had turned the visitors’ book, “I’m not going to stay. I want this delivered to him now, at latest first thing in the morning.”
The officer said, “You can take it up yourself, Monsignore. He doesn’t sleep. Just go through. The night shift all know you.”
He did not want to do it.
“I was supposed to be at an address across the city an hour ago. Here, I’ve scribbled on the envelope. Whoever takes it up might point it out.” He had written: If you decide to sign this, V. will speak for the defense. Make sure Paterno returns it to the address on the envelope.
He said, “You know Avvocato Paterno, my friend?”
“Just go through, Monsignore,” the guard said. “Take a minute. He’ll be pleased to see you.”
The man was one of Koch’s friends in the prison.
“You yourself, Vito,” Brendan said. “Are you well?”
“Never better, Monsignore.”
Never better. His head ticked. “All right. Open up.”
“Excellent!” Koch said when he had understood the nature of the agreement. It was midnight, and he was wide awake, fully dressed, jacket buttoned, necktie in place. There was a wall between the visitors’ area and the cells, windows set into it, a corridor between, so that the prisoner might remain in his cell during an interview. Guards patrolled the corridor. If a visitor possessed a gift or document, it meant it had passed inspection in the offices below, and the guard would take it, and hand it over.
