Warburg in Rome Read Online Free Page B

and before long stopped seeing each other. There would be no wedding. After that, when he pictured Janet, readily conjuring her alluring figure, her moist lips with the sly hint of her tongue, he felt sad. But his fierce desire for her, once thwarted, had become tangled as much in relief as in grief. He regretted that his thoughts had turned back to her now.
    “And you?” Warburg asked, veering away from that thicket of loss.
    The man beside him dragged deeply on his cigarette. “I have Italian. It might help. I guess they need a lot of help.”
    “I guess they do,” Warburg said, though without being sure who “they” were. He had a “they” of his own. One report had put the number of displaced people in Italy alone at half a million, the number of orphaned children at twenty thousand. His . Warburg let his eyes fall to the man’s shoes. Civilian, black.
    The man said, “Churchill’s ‘soft underbelly of the Mediterranean’ turned out not to be so soft, eh? I thought I’d be back in Rome three months ago.”
    “Back?”
    “I went to school there.” When the man added, “Here’s hoping Normandy is no Anzio,” it was with the air of a man changing the subject.
    Warburg was grateful that the noise was too loud for further talk. Smokes extinguished, he and his bench-mate fell back into the lull of their mutual isolation. Hours later, the plane’s downward lurch snapped everyone alert, and the blackout shades on half a dozen small windows were lifted. At that, early-morning light divided the fuselage’s interior into bright wedges. Warburg lifted the shade behind his ear and pressed his face to the cold glass, taking in coastline, tidy landscape, church-centered villages, squares of forest, rolling grassland, a pastoral scene all pretty and seemingly innocent. Yet the lingering haze of dawn made everything gray, like film shot for a Movietone newsreel. As the C-54 went into its descent, circling what he took to be Ciampino Airport, he saw several AAF planes ahead of them, tracking the same spiral down. As they went lower, Warburg made room at the window for the man next to him.
    An amazing sight below—the airfield. Across the vast expanse of tarmac, aircraft and trucks vied with one another for space, with only the narrow crisscrossing runways clear of vehicles. Even there, the succession of planes, gliding in from alternating directions, was steady, so the landing strips were uncongested only by comparison.
    “Bedlam,” the man next to Warburg said, nodding at the airfield. Against the noise, the man was again speaking at the top of his voice. “Which is from ‘Bethlehem’—did you know that?”
    Warburg looked at him. As Warburg had done only moments before, the man was shrugging off the parka that, at altitude, had kept him warm. “Bedlam Royal Hospital,” the man continued. “The London insane asylum. Original name, Saint Mary’s of Bethlehem.”
    Warburg thought of taking up the etymology challenge, but let it go, answering only, “It does look like madness down there.”
    The man bent over, bunching his coat to stow it. When he straightened, it was to remove as well his black suit coat, exposing a collarless white shirt with French cuffs, the links of which sparkled gold. He bent over again, this time to draw out of his valise an odd black garment with slings into which he slipped both arms, like a plainclothes cop donning a shoulder holster. Or like a proper T-man.
    When the man reached behind his neck to snap a button, Warburg saw the clerical collar and realized he was witnessing the vesting of a Catholic priest. While he slipped his arms back into his suit coat, Warburg’s impulse was to look away. But the priest was grinning, as if he enjoyed being watched. He spread his arms and said, “From Clark Kent to Superman.” The way to cut off mockery is self-mockery. Warburg knew enough to see the small red tab at the collar as a sign of some rank. The priest put his hand out. “Also