18

Mexico City, 1953

They drove down in the early evening to Cuernavaca, where Charlie said the air was eternally like spring. They traveled south first, along the Avenida de los Insurgentes, past the slab monoliths of the new University City and the fashionable new homes and the black lava soil of El Pedregal, before they began the long climb up the pass between the two mountains, Popocatépetl and Iztaccíhuatl, the Raging Man and the Sleeping Woman.

He had wanted to meet earlier, but Charlie assured him that the light was at its most beautiful at dusk, and he was right. The setting sun glinting spectacularly off the snowcapped mountain peaks, blue sky fading into flotillas of gold-tinged clouds. They were traveling on yet another brand-new, four-lane highway—this one, too, somehow named for Presidente Miguel Alemán—in a big new Lincoln Charlie had dug up somewhere. Beneficio, the same stocky, good-natured young Mayan who had picked Tom up at the airport, behind the wheel. The two of them lounging in the huge back seat, Charlie wearing a blue blazer and gray dress pants now, the air cooler in the evening, and growing cooler still as they climbed.

“Look at it back there!” Charlie said, exulting, pointing out the back window to where the Valley of Mexico receded behind them. “Did you ever see such a setting for a great city? You know, this is the way Cortés came, over four hundred years ago: ‘And some of our soldiers even asked whether the things that we saw were not a dream.’”

Tom nodded, his ears popping painfully as they continued to climb. They were driving along a desolate, rock-strewn stretch of the mountain pass that reminded him, all at once, of Italy.

Where the Germans had kept them stuck below that goddamned hill for so long. Where he found out about Jimmy . . .

“I strongly urge you to read Bernal Díaz del Castillo, The Discovery and Conquest of Mexico. It’s great source material—” Charlie was prattling happily, unbearably.

“Where’d you get the car, Charlie?” Tom asked, cutting him off.

“Hmm? It was a loan from Jorge Pasquel—”

“A loan? Or a gift?” Tom asked sharply.

“Well, he did tell me I could keep it as long as I want!” Charlie said, grinning sheepishly. “He’s a real gentleman. We’re going to do some business together—”

“You think that’s a good idea, Charlie? How d’ya think it’s gonna look? A man like that who has his fingers into everything.”

“Ah, don’t be that way, Tommy,” his brother told him, moving closer and looping an arm playfully around his neck. “It’s all on the up-an’-up. Besides, we’re on our way to Cuernavaca, where the air is ever like wine!”

They passed through a pine forest, the air suddenly crisp and fresh, then started down the pass to the next valley—“ten thousand feet up, and forty-five hundred down,” as Charlie made sure to tell him.

“You know, Dwight Morrow used to come out to Cuernavaca, back when he was ambassador to Mexico. You remember, Lindbergh’s father-in-law? He loved it out there. So did Josephus Daniels, who was ambassador under FDR,” he went on. “They stoned the windows of the embassy when he first came down, because Josephus was an old Wilson man, and they remember things down here. But he won them over, too.

“He used to love to sneak away to a festiva in some little village or other, an’ dance and dance. Already in his seventies by then, but there he’d be. The people would look around, an’ there was the American ambassador, dancing their village dances with ’em!”

He paused, then said reflectively, “You know, they’re not a hard people to love. And such a country.”

“It was reminding me of Italy,” Tom told him abruptly.

“Oh, God, Tommy, I’m sorry. That was a helluva time for you,” Charlie said, softening his exuberance.

“It’s not your fault.”

Trying to restrain the irrational anger growing in him toward his brother’s equally overweening sympathy. Unable to shake the feeling he’d had ever since he’d first arrived at El Ranchito—that somehow, he was being played.

“A helluva time for us all,” he said.

“It was a disaster right from the start,” Tom said grimly.

The part that stayed with him, that he could never quite believe, was how long it went on. From his first minute on the beach at Anzio, he was almost laughing in his horror and shock. Thinking: They can’t be serious. They can’t possibly expect this to continue. But they did. That was when he understood there was no natural end to it. That men would fight forever, that they would go on fighting until every one of them was dead, and the whole world destroyed.

Keeping his face flat in the muck for months, the shells falling incessantly. Then the endless slog up into the Apennines. When Charlie found him they had been trying to take the same hill just south of Bologna for two weeks. The Germans keeping them pinned down with their M34s and their eighty-eights—better weapons than anything they had. The shelling going on every day and night now, taking away any ability to sleep, driving them all mad . . .

“They were holed up in some ancient Etruscan temple on top of the hill. At least that’s what we were told it was: an ancient Etruscan temple, though I can’t say we ever got close enough to inspect its provenance. We called in the flyboys and they flattened it for us, but that just made it easier for them to defend the rubble.”

The aerial bombardment more terrifying and immobilizing than even the worst of the artillery barrages he had endured already. The ground bouncing and vibrating with each load of bombs, his eardrums nearly bursting. Unable to move, unable to shout out to the men right next to him, only to stare straight ahead and pray that the next bomb didn’t miss by a few hundred yards and blow them all to pieces. And when it was finally over, and all the smoke and dust had died down, and the noise had cleared a little . . . they could see the bright pinpoints of the German machine guns still flashing up the hill, like the twinkling lights on a Christmas tree. Firing at nothing, really. Just sending them the message that they would still have to come and get them, sooner or later . . .

“Each night, they would collect the dead if there wasn’t too much moon, and take them back down the hill by mule. The Italian muleskinners didn’t want the job. They wouldn’t walk next to the dead, so we had to do it,” Tom remembered. “We had to take ’em all the way down, men we had known an’ loved, dumped over some mule’s back like a sack of meat. Then pull them off for the burial detail, once we got back to the bottom of the hill. Men dead three, four days. Men we had known, pulled up face-to-face before us, so we could put ’em on the stretcher. Goddamn, but it wouldn’t stop. Day after day, the Jerries were still there, an’ we couldn’t get to the top of that hill, and it wouldn’t stop.”

“I know. I remember how you looked, kiddo,” Charlie said softly, patting his shoulder. “President Roosevelt sent me over the same summer you were there, an’ Jimmy was in France. Brought me into his office, made me a brigadier general and a minister in the State Department, all in the same day. Me, Charlie O’Kane from Lismirrane! A general and . . . a minister of state! Read me a letter from my boss at the investigation office: ‘In a nation of one hundred thirty-five million, why deprive me of Charlie O’Kane?’”

Tom smiled weakly at him. He would’ve found the boastful words unforgivable, if he had not understood they were said in genuine wonder—Charlie’s wonder that he could ever find himself in the company of presidents and generals.

“Oh, let me tell you, that kind of praise is heady wine, especially when it’s bein’ read to you by the president of the United States in his own office. Then I went over there, an’ saw the mess he’d given me to clean up! The railroads torn up, mines in all the fields, so you couldn’t bring in the harvest. Ports wrecked, so you couldn’t even ship food in. Half the population starvin’, or without a home. And the things the Germans did! Whole villages packed into churches an’ burned alive—men, women, an’ children. Machine-gunned, an’ sealed into the sacred catacombs, God help us. There was no purpose to it by then, not even the purpose of terrorizing the population. Just random madness.

“I telegraphed the President an’ threatened to resign. I told him, ‘I have no heart to preside over a national funeral!’ But bad as I felt for the poor Italians, my main idea was to find you. That’s all I wanted. And that’s when the word about Jimmy came.”

 

He remembered when he got the order. Wanting to feel guilty as he saw the savage looks from the other men in his platoon, but not really caring. Half of them replacements anyway by that time, but not caring what anyone thought by then. Certain he would never get out of the war alive. Just wanting a respite from that hill, for any reason, and no matter what happened to any of them in his stead.

The jeep from the staff headquarters took him directly to the villa where Charlie was staying, the driver in a crisp, new uniform and unstained boots, face daily shaven. Giving Tom the usual, cringing support-staff stare of shame mixed with revulsion. Tom knowing how he must have looked, how he must have smelled without a bath for weeks, covered in dried mud, his hair and beard grown wild. It was the first thing that made him smile since he’d gotten to Italy.

The staff corporal drove him up to the gates of the villa, not even trying to make any small talk, no doubt able to read the sheer exhaustion in his face and the slump of his body. Pulling up to where Charlie stood in his newly pressed general’s uniform and jacket, in front of the gorgeous, half-wrecked villa and grounds, and he would’ve laughed at the sheer ludicrousness of it, at the absurdity of his brother a general, and going halfway around the world to war and meeting up like this with him. Except that he saw the look on his brother’s face, and from that he divined at once that Jimmy must be dead, because he didn’t think that he himself quite was yet.

“The villa wasn’t my idea, you know,” Charlie told him. “That was our dear cardinal—then still only a mere archbishop. I never liked those things, I refused to stay in ’em, even though all the other Allied liaisons did. Livin’ like the lord of the manor, when half the population would kill for a potato! It wasn’t right, but dear Francis was ridin’ high just then. He’d come over to help the cause, an’ he insisted on havin’ a villa everywhere he went, even if it belonged to one of the lesser Sforzas, with half the roof caved in.”

All he could remember was that it seemed like a cathedral, after so many weeks on the line. Wandering through it in a daze, after Charlie had greeted him at the gate, hugging and kissing him on both cheeks and telling him they’d talk later, once he got himself cleaned up and had some sleep. He staggered up to the second floor, where some ancient, desiccated servant who seemed to come with the place helped him out of his gear and into a hot bath—the plumbing still working, apparently, which was all that mattered. He didn’t know how long he lay in that tub, but when he got back to the little maid’s room the hollow-eyed butler guided him to, one of the few not ruined by their artillery, his uniform was there, miraculously brushed clean and pressed, mounted carefully on wooden hangers.

He had fallen into the maid’s bed, not big enough for him to sleep in without curling up his knees, but he lost consciousness instantly, nevertheless. Only his hunger awakening him, he didn’t know how many hours or days later. It was dark out now, and as if in a dream he carefully dressed himself and made his way back downstairs. Walking toward the smell of meat roasting on an open fire, the most enticing food he ever had or ever would smell in his life. Following it at last to a huge, open room.

It was a sumptuous, ancient room, rimmed with dark wooden panels, and bookcases, made to look all the larger because half of it had been blasted away. Closed up again only with makeshift wooden pilings—a thing once perfect in itself, now ruined, and never to be the same again, like so many of the ruined things and men he had seen. A huge room, a Christmas fantasy room, even in the summer heat. With a row of perfect toy soldiers lined up across one side, and a pig roasting on a spit over the fire, and Santa Claus himself, a little red, round beaming creature, sitting at the head of the table with a great gold cross around his neck, smiling benignly.

 

“You should’ve seen the look he gave you when you came down, the little fag. I thought he was gonna come all over his nice red robes,” Charlie said, chuckling. “Not that I wasn’t affected, either. You looked like a recruitin’ poster, lean an’ hard, an’ murderous, but I could see the pain of it in your eyes. It went to my heart, to see you there. The only thing I could think of was how much you looked like Jimmy.”

“Like the dead?”

“Ay, like the dead. So better idealized than the living.”

 

His own recollections of the moment were still clouded by the haze he was in at the time. He remembered his brother looking tired and wary, the same expression he usually had in the presence of the cardinal. Spellman beaming cherubically at him. A short, fussy man, plump and bald, save for a faint gray laurel around the top of his head. Sharp, restless eyes taking in everything through his gold wire-rimmed glasses.

He got up from his seat at the head of the table and walked straight over to Tom, guiding him into a massive, carved wooden chair from the Renaissance. Fat little fingers sharp as talons on his arm, seeing him into his chair, pouring him a glass of wine the color of his splendid robes. Still beaming like an idiot as he announced, “Now, here is our American fighting man!”

 

“It was his big moment,” Charlie remembered. “They’d always took him for a fool in Rome—when they thought of him a’tall. You remember what Cardinal O’Connell used to say about him? ‘Francis is what happens when you teach a bookkeeper how to read.’ They thought he was just one more idiot American.

“Then, all of a sudden, everything’s gone to hell and here he is: head of the richest archdiocese in the world, with the great army on earth behind him! It must’ve been the most frightening thing what ever happened to the Holy See since Alaric showed up with his Visigoths. Which is why I’m sure Roosevelt sent him over as an emissary. Who better to make a point about power than good old, tactless Frankie Spellman?”

 

The slices of roasted pig were as good as they smelled. So were the roasted potatoes, and some kind of real green vegetable, like nothing he had tasted in months. All served by the same hollowed butler he had seen before, with the help of some mess men tending the fire. The MPs on guard standing the whole meal with their legs spread, arms behind their backs. It made him sick, to see them all waiting on them, himself and his brother and the archbishop, like they were so many house servants. But he didn’t have the strength to do anything but keep slowly eating what was put in front of him. The glass in his hand the finest crystal. Their plates finely wrought silver, the utensils gold, the great table they were sitting about large enough to feed an army, and probably support one, too.

The archbishop dominating the conversation, as usual. His mood exultant, as he went on about his audience with the pope a few days before.

“Before the war, I wouldn’t have got the time of day. Now His Holiness and the papal nuncio were hanging on my every word! They came to me as—as . . . supplicants! With a hat full of requests and respectful questions about what I thought the president was going to do, and how the postwar world was going to look.”

“That’s terrific, Your Eminence,” Charlie told him glumly—but with his usual obliviousness Spellman failed to pick up on the mood in the room.

“Don’t you see where we are right now, Charlie?” he demanded instead, in his flat, grating Massachusetts accent. “We’re what Spain was for the Church, back in the sixteenth century. We’re the young Catholic nation on the march, the sword of the Church for this century. Taking over for the crumbling empires, holding back Russian communism, the next big fight—”

“A Catholic nation, Your Eminence?”

Spellman waved a hand furiously in dismissal. “Just a matter of time! Another generation—less!—and we’ll see a Catholic majority in the United States. We’ve been the outsiders for so long, but now we’re the young, virile, manly faith! The Protestants have had their day—all dried-up old bones. We are the faith that binds all the vigorous new races of the nation together. The Irish, the Italian, the Pole and the Latin and the Eastern Europeans!

“And like Spain was, we’re the richest country in the world. And it’s not a wealth that rests on some Mexican silver mines, or the gold of Peru. It comes from our ingenuity, our inventiveness, our minds,” he said, tapping his temple with a forefinger just in case someone didn’t understand.

“We were already the workingman’s faith, Charlie. Now our people are rising! Becoming doctors and lawyers, taking over whole corporations. And there’s only the Church to bring the workers and capital together. Just like this!” he said, standing up in his agitation, moving around the enormous table toward them and clenching his fat little hands together.

“You should see the investments we’ve made for the archdiocese over the last few years,” he said, gloating. “General Foods! Procter and Gamble! Westinghouse! Thirty million alone in aircraft stocks—Boeing, and Curtiss-Wright, and Lockheed! These are the companies of the future, in the nation of the future, and we’ve tied our fate to them.”

“You’ve done splendidly with the archdiocese, Your Eminence,” Charlie said politely. “You know they call you ‘the Great Builder.’”

“Ah, well, I don’t know about that,” Spellman said, sitting back down, obviously pleased. “I attribute it to all of the brilliant Catholic laymen we now have in business, whose expertise I can call on. You know, my father used to say, ‘Son, always associate with people smarter than yourself, and that shouldn’t be hard to do.’”

“Wise advice,” Charlie said. “Was he a scholar?”

“He was a grocer,” Spellman said contemptuously. “And my grandfather Patrick was a bootmaker, from Clonmel, in Tipperary. But this is a new generation, a new time for us, Charlie.”

He tore into a haunch, waving a golden knife at them.

“That’s what I’m trying to tell you, Charlie. We’re entering a new age, where America is the hinge of the world! And New York is going to be the capital of that world. Don’t you see what we need there is a good Catholic mayor? Not some red, half-Jew Episcopalian like we have now! Not a libertine, like Mr. Walker. But a good, pious, Catholic family man. A man who’s risen up from the working class and got himself an education. A man like yourself, Charlie O’Kane!”

“You flatter me, Your Eminence,” Charlie told him, smiling weakly. “Last time I was in Washington, the president told me I should consider running for governor, or senator. Seems everybody has a place picked out for me but myself.”

“All in good time, all in good time for that, Charlie,” Spellman said, waving his meat at him. “But don’t you see where the real power is? It’s right in the City, our city, the greatest city that ever was! The new Rome, the new Jerusalem, the new Byzantium, all rolled into one!”

“Yes, Your Eminence,” Charlie said wearily, but by then Tom wasn’t able to take any more. Lurching to his feet as the archbishop went on hectoring his brother. His head spinning from all the talk of the hinge of the world, and the new Jerusalems, and the young Catholic nation on the march, while Jimmy was dead, and he would have to go back out to that hill. Or maybe it was just the fresh roasted pork, turning in his stomach. All eyes on him now, his brother asking what was wrong and even Spellman’s attention turning to him now, the candlelight blurring and spinning, as he stumbled on over toward the fire and vomited into an exquisite Renaissance vase.