The City of God

Book 8: Stefan Gillespie

by Michael Russell

Genres: Literary Fiction

Synopsis

1943. Garda Inspector Stefan Gillespie, on a diplomatic mission for the Irish government, takes a train from the chaos of German-occupied Rome to the Reich itself. Late at night he waits for a long-delayed connection at an empty station in neutral Switzerland. He sees a train no one is meant to see. A train that shouldn't be there. A beating from the train's SS guards, who shouldn't be there either, leaves him badly injured. Recovering at an Irish diplomat's home, the story of Stefan's journey to Rome reveals something else that was never meant to be known. The brutal murder of an idealistic young priest in a defeated city, and the dark underbelly of espionage, deception and betrayal that the corruption of war has injected into the City of God itself... the Vatican.
Praise for Michael Russell

'Complex but compelling . . . utterly vivid and convincing' Independent on Sunday

'A superb, atmospheric thriller' Irish Independent

'A thriller to keep you guessing and gasping' Daily Mail

'Atmospheric' Sunday Times

Read more

Release date: August 3, 2023

Publisher: Constable

Print pages: 100000

Sample

To begin with, the funeral Mass in the chapel of the Irish College in Rome was over. The man had been decently sprinkled with water and incensed and the choir had sung the Dies Irae and the Libera Me. At the close they had all sung the Irish national anthem, Amhrán na bhFiann, which brought tears to those eyes that had not yet shed them for the man in the coffin. Detective Inspector Stefan Gillespie didn’t follow the other mourners to the cemetery to see the body interred. There was a taxi waiting to bring him to the Stazione Termini, where he would take the train no one knew he was taking to Switzerland, instead of the one to the French border he was meant to be on. He registered that the big, black car was still outside the Irish College, as it had been when he’d arrived. The Gestapo made no secret about watching the funeral. It was a matter of interest, given the dead man’s connections, though they knew no one who really interested them would be there. A list of some of those who attended the Mass would go to the Gestapo offices in the Via Tasso, where it was likely to end up on the desk of the man Stefan knew as Hauptsturmführer Ritter. It was the last time he would be on such a list, for what it was worth. It wasn’t worth much. Stefan Gillespie was lucky to be alive, but there was a list of those who hadn’t been so lucky. If that wasn’t such a long list, it was one he might have been on. It was also one he had contributed to.

Stefan’s train arrived at Zurich’s Central Station around three in the morning. From Rome to Florence the train had stopped, intermittently, randomly, pulling into empty rural stations and isolated sidings for other trains to pass. Sometimes the wait might be ten minutes, sometimes an hour. A train would pass on the mainline, north or south, but mostly south towards the lines the German army still held against the Allies advancing through Italy. Wooden freight cars and cattle trucks, endlessly repeated; flat wagons carrying tarpaulined tanks and artillery; troop-packed carriages. The traffic was going to and from Germany, through the Salò Republic, the puppet state Hitler set up for Mussolini after Italy deposed him and surrendered to the Allies. When the other trains came close, he often saw the German Railways insignia, Deutsche Reichsbahn. But there was no Blitzkrieg about these passing locomotives, however many came and went; only the rhythm of increasingly empty necessity. It has to be done. It has to be done. Rails rattled with it and the wagons rumbled to it. The whistles of steam engines sounded bravely. The tracks were full of motion. Yet it was somehow almost sluggish.

The war in Italy was a German war now. The Italians still fighting were mostly on the other side. The only role for what was left of Axis Italy and the now decrepit Pact of Steel, that had so recently united Germany and Italy, was to stop the British and Americans. But Italy wasn’t an empty space. There was as much work policing the Italians as fighting Allied armies. As much brutality to expend on that as on holding back the enemy. Stefan had seen what that meant in Rome. Even if there was, quietly, cautiously, a sense, not only that the war could not be won, but that it could be lost, there was still faith in the crumbling New Order. There were still unbelievers to be punished; still those whose death the New Order demanded for reasons as inescapable as they were, ultimately, inexplicable. Didn’t the fact that the war was not being won as it had been, unstoppably, gloriously, triumphally, prove the necessity for faith above all else? Hadn’t it always been a war for survival? Hadn’t they been told that from the beginning? With enough determination, with the body-count ever-higher, wouldn’t the Allies be forced to negotiate? Wouldn’t they be at each other’s throats soon anyway? Wouldn’t Britain and America see the foe wasn’t Germany but Russia, not Hitler but Stalin?

That last thought floated in and out of Stefan’s head as the train travelled north and he watched the traffic of war from the carriage window. It surprised him how often he had heard it in Rome, and not only from Germans. But coming from Ireland, and knowing England, it wasn’t a bet he would have made himself. He had no horse in the race, of course, or at least his country didn’t, though neutrality didn’t always feel like that. If he watched from the outside, he had seen too much to be indifferent. What had taken him to Rome meant almost nothing, but what happened there was different. He carried away a scar. None of it should have surprised him. Irish as he was, his family was part-German. The signs were there, just unread. Perhaps all that was truly surprising was how little it surprised him.

If the scar was in his head, it was also in a briefcase that was, since he would enter Switzerland on a diplomatic passport, a diplomatic bag, and by all the diplomatic niceties unsearchable and untouchable. But the contents were not for the Irish ambassador in Berne. The papers were not on their way back to the Department of External Affairs in Dublin. No Irish diplomat knew what he carried. He was going to Zurich only to change trains for Geneva. As far as Irish diplomacy was concerned, he was off the radar. It was easy enough, on a continent at war, where returning to Ireland involved circuitous and uncertain routes, either through occupied France into Spain and Portugal or north through Germany to Sweden.

The train took its own time. After Florence there was less traffic, but it was dark. Near Bologna something else was in play. The sound of bombs came early, heard first in the distance, but getting louder and more frequent. They headed away from the city on winding rural tracks. The guard told him the Allies were bombing the marshalling yards in the city. For a time, looking into the darkness, Stefan could see the misty, ethereal light that came from the explosives and the smoke of the flares that showed the bombers the way. In moments of silence in the blacked-out train, moving slowly, almost tentatively into the night, he could hear the drone of planes and the pumping, irregular beat of anti-aircraft guns. The guns achieved nothing. But it was all there was. The Allies had long controlled Europe’s skies.

At Milan, most passengers got off. The train had not been crowded. There was little reason to travel unless your business was war. And along the platform, as the train waited, that business was evident again. German soldiers sat on packs or lay uncomfortably on blankets on cold stone, trying to sleep. Whether they were returning north from the front or heading south to fight was unclear. They looked different from the soldiers Stefan had seen in Germany two years earlier. It was hard to say what had changed. It was as if the men were unclear themselves.

A trio of black-shirted Fascist police moved through the carriages, checking the documents of the remaining passengers. They seemed more bullish than the German troops on the platform. They had a little authority and that was enough. The fact that it was only a shadow of the authority they and their comrades possessed so recently made it all the more precious, perhaps. They were puzzled by Stefan’s passport and began to fire questions at him. He spoke no Italian. He answered in German. As he had learned in Rome, good German was never wasted on bullying Italian policemen. The one Fascist who spoke German inspected his passport with a more professional demeanour, returned it to him and saluted stiffly.

The train travelled on in darkness, inside and out. Blinds were down and the only lights were so dim that it was impossible even to read. But they kept going now. There were no more delays. He was unsure what would happen at the Swiss border where he would change to a Swiss train. He had crossed several borders in the past month and his neutral status, though it attracted interest, had not been questioned. But he was closer to the heart of the war than he had been. There were a lot more people trying to escape German-controlled territory than to get in.

In the end, crossing into Switzerland was easy enough. It was almost one in the morning. The Italian police and customs officers got on the train as it stopped before the border at Chiasso. They glanced at his passport and moved on quickly. They were gruff and irritable, but only because there were trains coming through so late. They were followed by two men in plain clothes who inspected passports and visas again. They were German. He couldn’t place them, but fine distinctions didn’t matter in their line of work. Gestapo or Sicherheitsdienst of one variety or another. They were more polite than the disgruntled Italians, once he answered them also in amiable German. If good German had a disarming effect on Italian Fascists, it had a different effect on the German military and security services. The better your German, the more obvious it was, neutral or not, that you must be on Germany’s side. Although the men examined some people’s papers in intimidating detail and questioned them at length, they asked Stefan nothing.

As the Italian and German officials disembarked, the train moved slowly along the tracks into Switzerland, where it stopped again and the inspection of documents was repeated. He walked across the platform to the waiting Swiss train. The windows of the carriages were bright, the blinds defiantly up. There was no need to travel in shadows. Even the smell of the train was somehow bright. No smoke or smut or steam; all the filth that went with the sticky sludge that passed for coal in Europe. The engine that would take him to Zurich was electric. It had no camouflage and it carried no men in uniform, except for a chatty conductor who was sitting at a table with three passengers, beginning a game of cards. And as Stefan Gillespie watched the blacked-out Italian train pushing back, shrouded in its cloud of grubby smoke, he felt, for the first time in weeks, that he was free of the cloying dark, that he had no need to examine every face, that he was unwatched.

The Swiss train pulled away from Chiasso. The carriage lights dimmed, but there were no instructions to close the blinds and shut out the night. Stefan shaded his eyes to block his own reflection and looked out at the high peaks of the mountains, marked out in white. Sometimes the track was hemmed in by tight stone cliffs, but the cuttings would open out abruptly and the white peaks would be there again, sitting on top of black slopes, one behind another, receding into what felt like endless space. And lower down, scattered against the darkness as randomly as the stars are scattered across the sky, there were the lights of farms and villages; small, reassuring points of warmth that gave a shape to all that space. Then, unexpectedly, it all disappeared. The train dived into the mountains themselves, at the Gotthard Pass, running beneath them on slow inclines for miles.

Two hours later he was standing under the great glass canopy of the Central Station in Zurich. He was almost alone. There were a few cleaners moving along the platforms and through the concourse. Other passengers who had missed connections sat on benches or stretched out on them and tried, unsuccessfully, to sleep. It was not so cold in Zurich yet, but it was cold enough if you’d just got off a train from Rome. A few people walked monotonously up and down, chain-smoking for something to do. A policeman walked across the concourse shortly after the train arrived. Nothing was open. No bars or cafés. The waiting rooms would not be unlocked for hours. He sat on a bench on the platform where his connection for Geneva was due to leave at six-thirty. Over three hours to wait.

‘Guten Morgen, mein Herr.’

He had almost dozed off. A man in a dark, heavy overcoat and a trilby was looking down at him. He saw, also, that further along the platform, the policeman he had noticed earlier was smoking a cigarette, self-consciously looking the other way. He didn’t need to register this not too nonchalant back-up to work out that the man in front of him was also a policeman. Well, a policeman of sorts, as he was a policeman of sorts. Stefan was out of place. The detective, in whatever passed for something like Special Branch in Zurich, already knew that.

‘Guten Morgen,’ he answered, smiling. ‘Eine miserable Tageszeit!’

‘Miserable indeed,’ said the Swiss detective. ‘You’ve come from Italy?’

‘I have. You’ll want to see this.’

‘Thank you.’ The man took the passport. He looked at it. He registered neither interest nor surprise, which was surprising in itself. An Irish diplomatic courier in the middle of the night couldn’t have been such a common occurrence.

‘Herr Gillespie. Stefan Gillespie. Irish.’

Stefan nodded.

‘Diplomat?’

‘Nothing so grand. A courier.’

‘And it’s Inspector Gillespie, is that right?’

‘It is. And what about you?’

The man looked puzzled. Stefan grinned.

‘I don’t know what you use here. Sergeant, Inspector, Captain?’

‘Captain. I’m Captain Batz.’

‘Did they call you from the border or are you just quick on the uptake?’

The Swiss policeman didn’t answer. He returned the passport.

‘I assume we’re both in the same line, Captain, as policemen.’

‘Quite possibly, Herr Gillespie. But if we are, then it’s a line I’m qualified to pursue in Switzerland – and you, whether you’re a diplomat or a courier, are not.’

Stefan laughed.

‘Are you waiting for a train?’ continued the captain. ‘To where?’

‘For Geneva. I should have been here earlier this evening. There was a connection. But it turned into a long journey. What with one thing . . . and another.’

‘I can imagine.’ Batz took out a packet of cigarettes. He offered one.

Stefan Gillespie stood up. He bent as Batz lit the cigarette.

‘And your reason for travelling to Geneva?’

‘To see an old friend.’

‘I’m sure you know that under the present circumstances I have every reason, and naturally every right as well, to ask you for more detail than that. Your country has a consulate here in Zurich. I would have thought someone would be here to meet you. I’m sure your ambassador has the use of a car. Hanging about on a station platform in the early hours of the morning seems, well, if you were English rather than Irish, I might be tempted to use the word eccentric. Your passport is in order but it’s routine to check identity with your embassy in Berne.’

‘It’s a bit early in the morning. I doubt Mr Cremins will be up yet.’

‘Your old friend in Geneva, what’s his name?’

There was no choice but to say it.

‘Mr Lester. Seán Lester. You’ll know him, I imagine.’

Captain Batz showed no surprise, but he was more puzzled now.

‘Yes, the Secretary-General of the League of Nations.’

‘I’m stopping off to see him. Then France, Spain and back to Ireland.’

‘That seems an odd journey. The League of Nations, I mean.’

‘Does it?’

‘Not in the past, Inspector. But these days . . . it’s not a popular destination.’

‘No?’

‘No.’

‘Well, all the more reason he might like to see a friendly Irish face.’

The Swiss detective looked at Stefan for some seconds, more dissatisfied.

‘Is there a problem with me going to Geneva?’

Batz dropped his cigarette and looked down to stub it out. He looked up.

‘No. But noteworthy. It’s still a free country.’ He grinned. ‘More or less.’

‘More or less sounds just like home, Captain.’

As the Swiss policeman walked away, Inspector Gillespie stubbed out his cigarette and sat on the bench again. The uniformed policeman who had shadowed Batz walked past him and gave a curt nod. Stefan had drawn more attention to himself than he had wanted. Had the train kept even remotely to time, he would have arrived at a busy early evening Zurich Central Station and easily caught another train to Geneva. He had no doubt that now the Swiss police would contact the Irish embassy to check his identity. The ambassador had no idea he was in Switzerland. And he had no business being there without the ambassador knowing, even if he wanted to claim he was only travelling through Switzerland to make his way out of Europe and back to Ireland. A visit to Seán Lester at the now redundant and diplomatically isolated League of Nations wasn’t going to go down well, certainly not with the Department of External Affairs in Dublin. Lester had always been regarded as too anti-Nazi before the war. Now he was barely regarded at all. For Stefan to visit him was questionable. The fact that the visit was being conducted in secret would take considerable explaining.

For a moment Stefan smiled. He had spent several years wanting his boss in Garda Special Branch, Superintendent Gregory, to sack him from a job he had never had any love for. His requests for transfer had always been refused. Even his worst misdemeanours and infractions had been forgiven. Maybe because he was useful. Maybe because he knew too much. He wondered idly if he had pushed things too far now. Maybe someone higher up than Gregory, someone in the Department of External Affairs, would want him out. He smiled again. No such luck. A bollocking would be about it. A bollocking, then back to the bollocks.

Another hour passed. Stefan Gillespie was colder and he was hungry. The buffet would open eventually. There would be hot coffee. It might be real coffee. He had been told that Switzerland still had real coffee without recourse to the black market. He looked up, hearing the slight trembling of rails that came before the noise of an engine and the clatter of carriages. He watched the engine approaching, smoke hanging round it in the cold air. It pulled into the station slowly, across the track from him, on the other side of the opposite platform. A long, weary hiss of steam. It was a German train, black and wet and gleaming. He looked back towards the high, pitched arches of the glass roof. It must be raining now, raining hard.

The train was made of two passenger carriages and a line of half a dozen cattle trucks, the battered wooden workhorses that carried everything, everywhere. For a moment nothing happened. There was another hiss of steam from under the engine and the train shuddered to a second halt. Stefan looked up and down the platform. He looked towards the concourse. It felt as if he was alone in this great space. The cleaners had gone. The porter who had pushed a trolley full of mail sacks past him minutes before had gone. The wandering policeman had gone too.

Then there were voices. They came from the cattle trucks across the tracks from him. Men were shouting. The noise was muffled. He looked, for a moment almost idly. There were more shouts. He heard no words, but it was Italian. Then another sound. The doors of the carriages. German soldiers jumped on to the platform. A line of them, running the length of the train. They had their backs to him, facing the goods wagons. They didn’t hold rifles, but rifles were on their shoulders. Stefan recognised the uniform. The all-pervasive field grey was enough, but they weren’t ordinary soldiers. They were Waffen SS. There was nothing remarkable, until it struck him that there was. This was neutral Switzerland.

The shouting was growing louder. Stefan heard more Italian and some German. A tall, thin officer and a heavy-set NCO strode rapidly along the train. The NCO hammered on the cattle-truck doors, snapping out irritated commands in German. The officer followed, echoing them in quieter but equally petulant Italian.

‘Quiet, you Eyetie fuckers! Keep it shut in there!’

It didn’t change anything, but the noise was surly rather than angry now.

‘We move in ten minutes! There’ll be food in Germany!’

Stefan Gillespie took out a cigarette and lit it slowly, unmoving.

By one of the wagons the officer and the NCO stopped. There was more noise coming from this than any of the others. The NCO banged and shouted. There was some kind of conversation going on, through the doors. They were talking to the men inside. The NCO shook his head. The officer shrugged. The conversation, unheard by the Irish policeman on another platform, continued. The officer beckoned two soldiers. A pin was pulled from a bolt on the cattle door of the goods wagon. The soldiers heaved it sideways. The door opened a few feet. And now there were rifles in the hands of some of the Germans. Stefan could see the men in the wagon too, crowding round the opening, pushing at one another.

‘Get back, you bastards,’ shouted the NCO, holding a pistol.

Soldiers pointed the barrels of their guns towards the doors.

Stefan simply watched. The men in the doorway were Italian soldiers. The uniforms were ragged and filthy, but he had no doubt what they were. Then there was movement. Some of the Italians stepped back. Through the gap came a body, manhandled down to German soldiers on the platform. A man was dead. The SS soldiers laid him on the platform with some alacrity. The officer and the NCO stood over him. No one seemed keen to stand close to the body.

The officer bent down. He stood up, shaking his head, laughing.

Stefan Gillespie stood and dropped the stub of his cigarette. He walked closer to the edge of the platform, trying to hear something. He didn’t need to hear. But he was drawn to it. Everyone by the train, across the tracks, was drawn to it.

There were a few more words and then the officer walked away.

‘It’s not typhus!’ shouted the NCO. ‘Non è tifo! Got it? No typhus!’

Most of the shouting had died down. Indistinct words came from some of the other wagons. The soldiers lined up along the platform were looking away, talking, lighting cigarettes. Their concentration had gone. Then, with the doors of the cattle truck almost closed, a man, dark and thin, leapt out. He was through the gap in the line of soldiers instantly. He was down on the tracks, running to the opposite platform. He was trying to pull himself up. But the energy he had found was gone. He was clawing at the stone lip, pulling, pulling and now not moving.

The Germans by the train had turned. In a line as before, but facing the Italian, who was still clawing at the platform. There was a roar of voices from the train. The Italian soldiers inside were shouting, cheering. Some of them could see something. They hammered on the walls of the cattle trucks.

The officer pushed his way through the line of men.

‘No shooting! Under no circumstances shoot! You hear me!’

The NCO called several of the SS men across to him.

‘Any man who fires a shot,’ screamed the officer, ‘any man who shoots—’

Stefan stepped forward, to the edge of the platform. The Italian was only feet away. He bent down and stretched out his hand. The man cried out.

‘Hanno sparato ai – nostri – ufficiali – siamo schiavi!’

He was telling this stranger the Germans had killed their officers. They were being taken to Germany as slave labour. The words meant nothing to Stefan, except as the sounds of someone crying for help. As the man grasped his hand, he pulled him up onto the platform. The Italian looked at him for only a second. There was an arch next to the bench Stefan had been sitting on. The man saw it and ran. German soldiers were clambering on to the platform, four of them. Behind them their heavy-set NCO, screaming orders, breathing fire.

Stefan stood between the soldiers and the arch. He moved, unthinkingly, until he was almost blocking it. As one of the SS men ran towards the arch, he put out his foot. The man fell. It wasn’t something Stefan had intended to do. A mad instinct had taken over. He would give the Italian a few more seconds. Maybe it would be enough. The other SS men stopped, staring at the man in a coat and dark suit with surprise. One raised his rifle. The officer roared from the other platform.

‘A single shot and I’ll fucking shoot you! Just get the Italian!’

The NCO grabbed a rifle from one of his men. He swivelled it round and smashed the butt into Stefan’s head. As Stefan collapsed, the German he had tripped was getting up. For a few seconds none of the others moved, waiting to see what the NCO was going to do. He looked up, calm, and shrugged.

‘You heard the officer. Get the Eyetie and bring him back.’

The Waffen-SS men raced through the arch.

The NCO looked down. Stefan lay on his back, barely conscious.

‘You’re lucky, my friend,’ said the German. ‘My officer says no shooting.’ He kicked Stefan hard in the ribs, then he kicked again. He brought the rifle butt close and held it over Stefan’s outstretched hand. He slammed it down. ‘Arsehole!’

He lifted the rifle again, higher this time, but the blow didn’t fall.

‘Unlike you, I don’t have any orders not to shoot, Scharführer.’

The NCO turned to see a man, this one in an overcoat and a trilby. The detective who had questioned Stefan. He held a pistol. Behind him were two uniformed policemen, looking nervously across the tracks at the row of SS soldiers.

‘Your government isn’t going to thank you for a diplomatic incident.’

Captain Batz smiled. This was his territory. No one would thank him for a diplomatic incident either, but he wouldn’t be sent to a concentration camp for it.

‘Your choice. But I’d recommend you get back on the fucking train.’

The SS-Scharführer wanted to do what he was used to doing. In the world he had lived in for so many years, there was never anyone to stop that. He wasn’t angry. What he felt was surprise, even bewilderment. And he had lost face. His men would remember it too. That wasn’t how it should be. Something was wrong. In this small, insignificant moment something had changed. He looked from the Swiss detective to the SS officer watching from the opposite platform, silent, furious at the mess he might have to answer for and unable to clean it up the way these things were always cleaned up.

‘Scharführer! Get back over here, you clown!’

There was an unfamiliar sound. It wasn’t loud, but it could be heard. The cattle trucks were quiet. The station was quiet again too. Two Waffen-SS men approached their NCO from either end of the platform where the Swiss detective still held a gun on him. The other two emerged from the dark arch, empty-handed, more Swiss policemen walked behind them. The NCO looked at his men. They didn’t need to say anything. They hadn’t found the Italian. They wouldn’t say they’d been told to fuck off to their train, but that was the gist of it. They were waiting for some serious bollocking. But it didn’t come then. They had an unusual sense that it wouldn’t come at all. The SS-Scharführer crossed the tracks, back to the German transport. He didn’t look at the unconscious man with his bloodied head and broken hand. As he climbed up on to the other platform, his men were making their way to the carriages at the front of the train. Then the unfamiliar sound again. Quiet laughter. The Scharführer knew they were laughing at him.

Seán Lester stood whe. . .