Free Warburg in Rome by James Carroll

signal, Deane abruptly walked away from the crowd, got in on his side, giving the girl her space, and softly closed his door—no parting rebuke needed. He quietly commanded the driver, “ Vada! ”
    A few minutes later, out in the deserted countryside again, Deane ordered the vehicle stopped. The girl seemed in shock, slumped, as unmoving as marble, eyes shut. Deane, addressing Warburg over her head, said, “They call it pitchcapping here. Goes back to the days of witches. ‘ Puttana .’ Slept with some German. ‘Horizontal collaborator.’ I’m afraid there’ll be a lot of payback now. Especially from the Reds.”
    Deane got out, went back to the trunk, opened it, and opened his suitcase. He returned with a white garment over his arm. He gently told the girl to get out. When she did, he looked away while handing her the robe. Rousing herself, she donned it, the hem falling to her ankles, the pleated yoke settling on her shoulders. Once unfurled, the linen could be seen to be trimmed with lace and red piping. But for her bloodshot eyes, moist nostrils, and soiled cheeks, she looked all at once less the shorn victim than an uncoiffed angel—a nun in her undergarment.
    Moments later they were under way again. The girl was sitting in the front seat. Deane had instructed the driver to learn from her about friends or family who would take her in, either in Rome or on the way there. Warburg had his suit coat back. He was staring into his own reflection in the window. How ludicrous it seemed now, that quotation under glass on his desk back in D.C.: “Never did I feel so strongly the sense of abandonment, powerlessness and loneliness . . .” What did he know of such things? And who was he to have lectured poor Janet about them?
    Janet. It was she he was seeing in the window’s reflection—her gorgeous body, languid in the tanning sun by the swimming pool at her parents’ place. But not naked. She had never been naked with him. He felt a rush of chastened gratitude now, a belated appreciation of her modesty.
    “Real love, compared to fantasy”—Dostoyevsky’s line came to Warburg’s mind—“is a harsh and dreadful thing.” That Red Cross woman at the airport, he suddenly thought, she would know that. Her body, too, had struck him.
    “The poor girl,” Deane said.
    Warburg turned from the window, facing the priest. “Maudlin,” he said.
    “What?”
    “In the airplane you spoke of Bedlam. The other insane asylum in London is called Maudlin. The one for women. Original name, St. Mary Magdalen. Maud. Maudlin.”
    “How the hell do you know that?”
    “English major.” In a different context, Warburg might have grinned, making a crack about Russian novels, quoting goddamn Dostoyevsky. Instead he let his eyes drift to the girl in the front seat. Mary Magdalen. But this child was no whore. How unfair his associations were.
    Deane thought he saw a question in Warburg’s eyes, and answered it: “My surplice.”
    “Your what?”
    “A vestment for hearing confessions.” Deane might have laughed. But no. This was too sad.
    In any case, though there were questions in Warburg’s mind, the garb cloaking the girl was not one of them.
     
    Marguerite d’Erasmo was walking among the children at the Quirinal gardens. Dozens of children, perhaps hundreds, impossible to count—toddlers clinging to the hands of older siblings, adolescents, boys, girls, androgynous waifs. Empty-eyed and silent, except for the rattle of coughs and sniffles. The children wore the home-woven garments of peasants, tattered aprons, or the soiled plaids of school uniforms. Today the sun would burn, but the youngsters would remove none of their clothing for fear of losing it, because what they wore was all they owned. Mostly they were unshod, and many limped with pain from the sores on their bare feet. Some were sunburned, with flushed faces, and some were pale as toadstools. Some sat blank-faced and unmoving, others clustered around pits in