“I board in the guest quarters at the convent of the Church of Santa Cecilia.” There was no reason to lie. It was easy enough to verify, and boarding at a convent made sense, especially if it had been arranged by her brother, the priest. Still, she didn’t like shining any attention on the convent. She wasn’t the only one boarding there, or hiding there.
Something flickered across the captain’s face, as if he was a little surprised she’d answered truthfully.
“I thought you would live with your brother.”
“No. He is the assistant to Monsignor Luciano of the Curia. Monsignor Luciano and his sister are natives of the city, and they still own the family apartment they were raised in. Angelo would have lived in a religious college with other assistants and priests who work at the Vatican, but he wanted to be more accessible to Monsignor Luciano. Monsignor has had some health issues in recent years.” Her answer was very logical. Very smooth. Very reasonable. But her stomach twisted anxiously.
“I see.” The captain smiled and nodded amiably. “Where is that church, exactly? I am not terribly familiar with the city.”
“Just west of the Tiber, in Trastevere. Are you familiar at all with Trastevere?” So forthcoming. So conversational. No secrets from the boss.
“Ah, yes. Trastevere,” he said as if it were all making sense. “Isn’t that a Jewish neighborhood?”
Eva stared at him blankly, having anticipated his question. “I don’t think I’ve ever met a Jew. How would I know if I had? Everyone at the convent is Catholic.” She sounded simple. Stupid, even, and the captain laughed and patted her hand.
“That is a long way to work each day. Now that it is growing dark so early, I must remember and let you leave earlier so that you will arrive home before curfew.”
Angelo had said the very same thing the day before, worrying that she was not getting home before dark.
“That would be very generous of you. I have worried about getting detained.”
“Then that is what we will do. You may leave at four thirty today. That will be all.” She turned to leave, and he called out after her.
“Oh, Eva?” It was the first time he’d called her Eva and not Fräulein Bianco, and she stiffened at his familiarity but turned with a smile.
“If you are to see a Jew or hear of Jews in your neighborhood . . . you will tell me.” It wasn’t a request. “We will reward you, of course.”
Eva nodded, feeling bile rising in her throat. She left his office quickly. Just the day before she’d overheard soldiers talking about a Jewish girl in Rome who had reported dozens of her fellow Jews. Her favorite thing to do was walk through the marketplace at the busiest times of day or walk by ration lines and wave and call out to friends and community members, revealing their identities, only to have the SS men who followed her around swoop in and arrest the unfortunate people who’d been outed by one of their own. She was of great help to the SS, and they rewarded her with lire and freedom.
Eva wondered if the girl ever considered what would happen when she was the last Jew left, when she was of no more use to the Gestapo. Eva promised herself that if she ever discovered the girl’s identity, she would find a way to kill her. She’d told Angelo what she’d heard, and he could only shake his head in disgust, but he’d cautioned her to forgive, just like a good priest should.
“Your hate will only harm you,” he said.
“Just as long as I can harm her too. I would very much like to harm her.”
Angelo laughed at her fire and tweaked a lock of her hair, like they were children again.
“What if someone pointed me out on the street, and just that quickly I was gone? What then, Angelo? Would it be so easy for you to forgive?” she wondered aloud.
He had looked at her soberly, his smile fading.
“Remember when I told you not to come to the seminary anymore to visit me with Nonna?”
“Yes. You said I was not your sister or your cousin and you were too attached to me. You were very rude about it.” She was teasing him, but he had hurt her feelings.
“I was trying to protect you, Eva.”
“What does this have to do with forgiveness?”
“I told you not to come anymore because some of the boys had taken notice of you. They had started asking questions. They wanted to meet you. I refused. They thought you were my cousin and couldn’t understand why I was so protective.”
Eva laughed a little, but Angelo didn’t.
“I hit one of them. One of the boys. I split his lip and gave him a black eye because he said if he had a cousin like you, he would make sure he was alone with you as much as possible.”
Eva’s eyebrows rose faintly.
“Father Sebastiano thought they were taunting me about my leg. I let him believe it, but I recognized then that my feelings for you weren’t very brotherly. And that’s when I knew I would have to protect you . . . from me. My instincts, where you’re concerned, are to go to war. I don’t know that I could forgive someone who hurt you. But most of all, I would never forgive myself for not protecting you.”
Angelo was protective. There was no doubt about that, and Eva spent the rest of the day worrying over how she would tell him that the captain had been curious about her address and whether or not she had seen or heard of any Jews in the area. Angelo was already worried about her association with him. As a priest, Angelo was immediately suspect, and by association, so was she.
Lieutenant Colonel Kappler, the head of the German SS in Rome, had become fixated on Monsignor O’Flaherty, convinced that he was the director of the underground in Rome. He was right, unfortunately. Lieutenant Colonel Kappler had established checkpoints on every street, and Vatican passports were receiving more and more scrutiny. One of Monsignor O’Flaherty’s helpers—an Italian priest—had recently been arrested under allegations of resistance work. He’d been tortured and executed.
As a result, O’Flaherty had limited his meetings with any of the helpers in his organization to within the Vatican walls so that he wouldn’t, by association, make them targets of the colonel as well. Since then, code names had been given, and O’Flaherty’s foot soldiers were on high alert. O’Flaherty said Angelo was his “foot soldier with one foot,” and as a result, his code name was O’Malley, after a famous Irish pirate.
Eva had met both Monsignor Luciano and Monsignor O’Flaherty when she’d first arrived in Rome and efforts were being made to collect the gold the Germans had squeezed out of the Jews. Monsignor O’Flaherty was rumored to be a bit of a ladies’ man because he attended every party and swanky soiree, but he joked that there was safety in numbers and that if he wanted to know what was going on in the city, he had to rub shoulders with the people who knew. He’d smiled widely and talked with her at length, and she’d liked him immediately, though she struggled a little with his Irish-flavored Italian. Monsignor Luciano had been decidedly less friendly. She had the feeling he didn’t approve of her. When he’d been introduced to Eva, he extended his arms, the way so many priests did, but he never touched her.
It was something Eva had noticed early on in many of the Catholic clergy, this embrace that was never consummated. It left her feeling bereft. Maybe Jews were more demonstrative, more physically affectionate. Or maybe that was just Camillo, just her family. Her father had kissed her cheeks whenever he greeted her, as if he didn’t see her every single day. Every single day until, one day, he was gone. Until he’d boarded the train, waving reassuringly, and he’d never come back.
Deep down, in that part of her soul where Eva kept painful truths tucked away, like grains of sand that chafed and bothered, she knew Camillo wasn’t coming home. And she prayed every day that he wasn’t suffering. That was another grain of sand, rubbing her raw when she allowed herself to think about him at all. If he were gone, she would learn to endure. She had learned to endure. But if he were suffering, that she couldn’t abide. Her loved ones were her Achilles’ heel. She supposed it was good that she had so few loved ones left. If she was going to be a spy, it made her less vulnerable.
In mid-December, charged with the task of emptying garbage cans and finding a crate of office supplies that had been delivered but that no one could account for, Eva stumbled across an out-of-the-way janitorial closet that wasn’t being used for cleaning supplies or paper, envelopes, or typewriter ribbon.
It wasn’t even locked.
Shoved in the corner, behind a small row of empty shelves, was a barrel overflowing with gold. Gold that had once belonged to Rome’s Jewish population, still in the very same container it had been collected in. Eva touched it in horrified disbelief, running her hands over it, sifting through the bracelets and the pins and ropes and chains. There were gold teeth and rare coins and wedding bands. She picked up a dainty ring and realized it was Giulia’s. Giulia had given her ring to keep Rome’s Jews from being slaughtered. But they’d been taken anyway, some of them reduced to ash, and Giulia’s ring sat in a closet at Via Tasso collecting dust—ignored, forgotten, and completely insignificant to the men who had extorted it.
Suddenly, Eva was crying, the tears sliding down her cheeks and falling into the barrel filled with the only remains of so many who were taken. It had all been a charade—a tactic—and the sheer, malevolent gall of the shakedown was almost more than she could bear. They hadn’t even needed the gold. They hadn’t even sent it back to Germany. It was inconsequential, as inconsequential as the Jews themselves.
Filled with fury, Eva shoved Giulia’s ring on her finger, determined to return it. Then she stuck her hands deep into the barrel, and sifted the pieces through her fingers, looking for something, anything, that might have belonged to her family. Augusto had given a gold watch chain, several tie pins, and a gold ring. Bianca had given much more than that. She opened her hands and looked at the treasure, her angry tears making it all run together in a shiny tangle, one piece indistinguishable from the next.