Curtain of Death (Clandestine Operations 3)

“With a population of about eight hundred people. Now, my irreverent classmates pointed out to me, while this was certainly a good thing for the Roman Church, it also silenced criticism by the Church of Mussolini and his Fascists.

“They also pointed out to me that Hitler freely admitted that Mussolini was his inspiration for the Nazi Party. Which brings us to the Reichskonkordat of 1933.”

“I have to confess I don’t know what that is,” Winters said. “Which probably makes me look more stupid than I like to think I am.”

“I don’t know what that is, either,” Cronley confessed.

“There is a difference between ignorance and stupidity,” Fortin said. “I know Jim isn’t stupid, and I don’t think you are. But ignorant, yes. The both of you are ignorant of things you really should know in our line of business.”

Cronley thought: I have just been called ignorant. Why am I not pissed off?

Because ol’ Jean-Paul is right on the fucking money.

I’ve never heard of the Vatican Concordat or—what the hell did he say?—the Reichskonkordat—until just now.

“What’s the Reichskonkordat?”

“A treaty signed between what was by then the sovereign state of the Vatican and Germany in July of 1933, just as Hitler was coming to power. It did the same thing, basically, as the Vatican Concordat. The Germans agreed to recognize most of what the Vatican wanted recognized, and the Vatican shut off criticism of the Nazis by the clergy of the Roman Church in Germany.

“It was signed on behalf of the Vatican, or Pius the Eleventh, if you prefer, by Vatican Secretary of State Eugenio Cardinal Pacelli. He was later Papal Nuncio—ambassador—to the Thousand-Year Reich, and later, when Pius the Eleventh died in 1939, Cardinal Pacelli became Pope Pius the Twelfth.”

“Frankly, I never heard any of this before,” Winters said. “Either I was asleep during that history class at West Point . . .”

Cronley thought: Me, too. I did a lot of sleeping through classes at College Station.

“. . . or that wasn’t presented,” Winters went on. “The only time I thought about the Church and the Nazis was when I heard that Count von . . . Whatsisname? The blind-in-one-eye guy who put the bomb under Hitler’s table . . .”

“Von Stauffenberg,” Cronley furnished. “Colonel Count Claus von Stauffenberg.”

“. . . and just missed blowing the sonofabitch up was a devout Catholic. I wondered how he handled the ‘Thou Shalt Not Kill’ commandment.”

“I was probably asleep, too, during that class,” Cronley said. “I heard about von Stauffenberg from a friend of mine. Hitler hung—strangled—my friend’s father from a butcher’s hook for his involvement in the bomb plot.”

“Your friend?” Fortin asked.

“Hans-Peter von Wachtstein. Now the Graf von Wachtstein. He was a Luftwaffe fighter pilot. Now he’s a pilot for SAA.”

“For what?”

“South American Airways. Argentine. It’s a DCI asset.”

“You . . . we . . . have an airline?” Winters asked, visibly surprised.

“At the moment. Juan Domingo Perón, the Argentine strongman, is threatening to seize it.”

“So that’s how you’ve been getting people to Argentina. You own the Argentine airline,” Fortin said.

“Operative phrase ‘at the moment.’”

“I’d like to hear more about that, but right now”—he paused and then continued—“the argument advanced to justify the Vatican Concordat and the Reichskonkordat was that the Italian Fascists and the German Nazis would have been even nastier to the Italians and the Germans—and of course the Church—had there been no concords.

“I accepted that all through the war, until I came back to Strasbourg and learned what the Church had done, or had not done, with regard to my family.”

“I don’t understand,” Winters said.

“You didn’t tell him, Jim?” Fortin asked.

Cronley shook his head. “Not in detail. Just what happened to them.”