Warburg in Rome Read Online Free Page A

On Warburg’s other side, an eternal sleeper was pressed into the corner, hugging himself against the cold. Under his own blanket, Warburg wore the heavy olive parka that had been supplied as they boarded the plane in New Jersey, and under the parka, the gray suit and tie of his kind. Most of Warburg’s fellow passengers had spent the long transatlantic hours as intent on their stoic hunching as he was. Only bursts of steamy breath made clear that the otherwise impassive hulks were even alive.
    Before taking off from the Azores on this last leg of the flight, the laconic pilot had craned in from the cockpit to apologize for the temperature that was soon to plummet again, but saying, “Cargo’s what counts. This man’s army don’t give a shit for men,” he’d drawled, adding, “God help those bastards up in Cherbourg.”
    Warburg reached into the thickness of his clothing for a pack of cigarettes, but when he brought it out, he found that it was empty. He crushed the foil and cellophane, thought better of dropping it, and stuffed it back in his pocket. At that, the man on his left rose from his apparent stupor, leaning over with a pack in his fist, a magic trick. He shook it once, expertly producing a pair of cigarettes. They each took a light from Warburg’s match. “Thank you,” Warburg said.
    “Forget that cargo, the canned food,” the man said through the smoke-marbled steam of his breath. “The tins pop their seals when they freeze—salmonella here we come.” He snorted gruffly, a bear in his GI blanket coming out of hibernation. Warburg too, in his blanket, must have seemed oafish, when in fact he was as thin as he was tall. His neighbor was not a bear, Warburg thought, but a defensive tackle on the bench. For a man who had sat silently for so long, he was suddenly animated, as if he himself had popped a seal. “Think about those beaches,” he said. “Those Kraut pillboxes.”
    “Yes,” Warburg said. “Good luck to our guys.”
    “Amen,” the man said, and he patted the book in his lap, an odd act of punctuation. He took a drag on the cigarette, studied it while exhaling, then brought his eyes directly to Warburg’s. “What brings you across?”
    Warburg dropped his glance to the glowing ember of his cigarette. This was the first time he’d been asked to explain himself. “I’m with the Treasury Department,” he said, aiming to let it go at that.
    But the man pressed. “To Rome for the Allied occupation? Let me guess. ‘Eye Sea,’ isn’t that what they call it? Invasion currency. Legal tender to be used by civilian and/or military personnel in areas occupied by Allied forces. You giving out the funny money?” Such jovial gruffness seemed forced, but that may have been a function of the man’s having to speak above the roar of the engines. The image of a football player, however, no longer seemed apt. Warburg recognized the deliberate display of insider lingo, a standard bureaucratic gambit. Tag, you’re it.
    “Not exactly.” Warburg smiled, doing a bit of forcing himself, but staying with his cigarette. It was true that Treasury was tasked with providing specially printed military currency, and the black-and-blue banknotes had been rolling out of the Bureau of Engraving’s presses for weeks. But Warburg’s mission was far from that. Since the late-winter meeting in Morgenthau’s office, he’d counted the days until this one—while steadily moving the pins on his map and memorizing dispatches from Geneva, Lisbon, Budapest, and Istanbul. At night he’d slavishly bent over Berlitz manuals in Italian and Yiddish, ahead of quizzing by tutors early each morning.
    Janet Windsor had lost patience with his obsessive unavailability. He’d tried to describe what he was learning from the Riegner cables, occasionally reading them to her. One telegram began, “It is the eleventh hour of the reign of death,” but Janet interrupted him and left the room. For the first time, they quarreled,