“And what did you come up with?” Cohen asked.
“How about,” Cronley said, “quote, the first duty of a Catholic priest is to protect the Holy Mother Church, unquote.”
“You want to explain that?” Cohen said.
Cronley nodded. “There was a priest in Strasbourg, a parish priest—more important, the priest from the parish in which our friend Kommandant Jean-Paul Fortin had been raised. When the Germans moved into Strasbourg, the priest promptly began to collaborate with them. That collaboration resulted in the torture, then deaths, of Fortin’s family, after which their bodies were thrown into the Rhine. The SS had learned that Fortin was in England, serving as an intelligence officer on De Gaulle’s staff, and the bastards wanted to send him—and Strasbourgers generally—a message.
“After the war, Fortin looked the priest up and demanded to know why he had done absolutely nothing to aid his family. The priest was unrepentant. He told Fortin sorry, his first duty as a priest was to protect the Holy Mother Church. And, as we know, Fortin put .22 caliber rounds in his elbows and knees before throwing him in the Rhine and watching him try to swim.”
Serov said, “I think we safely can assume that Pius XII thinks of himself as a priest with a similar first duty.”
“You aren’t suggesting,” Ginger said, more than a little unpleasantly, “that the Pope knowingly went along with hiding the Nazi money?”
“What I’m suggesting is several things, none of which suggests the Pope is anything but a devout servant of God. But I think we have to consider that he was in Germany for many years as papal nuncio, which means ‘speaker for the Pope.’ He speaks German fluently. During that period, he met many decent Germans who were both devout Catholics and opposed to Nazism. He also met many devout Catholics who were also devout Nazis, some of whom were in the SS.
“All of these people hated communism, as did the Pope. The Pope regarded—regards—communism as the greatest threat to the Holy Mother Church.”
“And it is,” Father McGrath said, thoughtfully.
“They thus became allies of the Church, the Vatican,” Serov went on. “And by 1945, it became clear to His Holiness that the Germans were about to lose the war. The Vatican has its own intelligence service—”
“Every priest is a Vatican special agent,” Cohen put in. “I’d say their intelligence service makes everybody else’s, including ours, look like bumbling amateurs.”
“That is not an exaggeration,” Serov said. “I think we can safely presume that Pius knew all about the mass murders in the extermination camps and, more important, about Odessa. And that as a man of God—now, this is pure conjecture—he was worried about the retribution the Allies—particularly, perhaps, the retribution of the Jews, but even more particularly that of the Soviet Union—were about to wreak on the Thousand-Year Reich.”
“If I can go off at a tangent, Colonel,” Father McGrath said, “how much do you think the Vatican—the Pope—knew about this heretical religion Himmler was trying to start?”
“Had started,” Serov corrected. “And, again, this is pure speculation. I’m sure he heard something about it and dismissed it as harmless Nazi nonsense. Like that elevator shaft they were digging to reach the underworld.”
“That was really loony tunes, wasn’t it?” McGrath said, chuckling.
“Father, with all due respect, if you really believe in something, it’s not—what was that charming phrase you just used?—loony tunes. That is what’s so dangerous about the religion of Saint Heinrich the Divine. They’re true believers, as devout as any monk in one of those mountaintop monasteries in Greece who spend eight hours a day on their knees praying.”
“You really believe that, Ivan?” Cronley asked.
“Devoutly,” Serov said.
Cronley sighed. “Okay. Let’s say your theory is right on the money. What do we do about it?”
“Odessa, like any organization, has routine expenses. They have to make withdrawals from their account at the Vatican Bank to pay them. One way they can do this is to send someone into Rome, into the Vatican. That would pose the problem for them of getting their agent back across the border with a briefcase, or even a suitcase, full of money.
“I think it far more likely that when one of their largest depositors needs to make a withdrawal, the Vatican Bank sends a courier to them with the funds.”
“A courier?” Cohen asked, dubiously.
“Perhaps a lowly priest whose luggage is unlikely to be searched by customs officials when he is crossing a border. But I think the courier is most likely to rank higher in the Vatican hierarchy. At first, I was thinking of a monsignor or a bishop, of whom there is a plethora in Rome, and especially within the Vatican bureaucracy. But then, letting my imagination run wild, I thought the couriers are probably red hats.”
“What are red hats?” Ginger asked.
“Cardinals,” Serov said.
“Cardinals?” Cohen parroted, dubiously.
“Cardinals,” Serov repeated. “Let your imagination run free, Colonel, after I propose this scenario: Let us suppose that Odessa needs some cash—say, a million dollars in U.S. or pounds or francs, or a mix thereof. But a briefcaseful? The Vatican Bank is notified, either by Odessa’s man in Rome—and I think we can presume they have one—or by other means. They don’t want it in Rome, of course, but in Berlin.”
“Why Berlin?” Cohen challenged.
“It seems logical to assume that Odessa’s leadership is there,” Serov said. “There’s a lot of places for them to hide. I’m not saying they have a headquarters in the normal sense. I think the head of Odessa at any time is a former senior SS officer. His deputy is the next-senior former SS officer. Und so weiter. They hold their staff meetings in the back room of a bar, or a bordello, never twice in the same place.”