I sounded the horn and stepped out of the car. Geiger lit a cigarette and leaned back in his car seat to angle his debauched face in the last of the day’s sunshine. I looked up at the many windows of the monastery without seeing so much as a single curious head. The place appeared to be deserted. And yet there was a vague smell of cooking in the air.
“Perhaps they’re Trappists,” said Geiger.
“These are Franciscans,” I said. “Not Cistercians.”
“What’s the difference?”
“Don’t ask me, but there’s a difference.”
“Like the SS and the SD, perhaps,” offered Oehl.
“Well, whatever they are,” said Geiger, “maybe they’ve taken a vow of silence.”
“Let’s hope not,” I said. “Otherwise we might be here for some time.” I collected the file of photographs of Father Ladislaus and walked toward the main door.
“If all else fails,” said Geiger, following me, “I could fire this in the air.”
I turned and saw that he was still carrying the daddy.
“For Christ’s sake, leave that thing in the car.”
“Believe me, when it comes to ending a vow of silence, you can’t beat one of these bastards.”
“Nevertheless. Please.”
Geiger shook his head and handed the daddy to Oehl before following me up a short flight of limestone steps to a set of black wooden double doors with an elliptical transom. On the wall by the doors was a large iron cross and a picture of a sleeping monk holding a skull whom I took to be Saint Francis with a putto playing a lute above his head. I hauled twice on a large bellpull and at the same time peered through some light green sidelights.
“That’s not my idea of a vision,” said Geiger, looking at the picture. “I don’t often doze off with a skull in my hand.”
“I think the point might be that we’re all going to fall asleep and die one day. Like that kid you shot on the road today.”
“While we’re here I’ll light a candle for him, if it will make you feel any better.”
“You do that. But it certainly won’t make that boy feel any better.” Seeing movement behind the glass, I added, “We’ll want to see the abbot.”
The door opened to reveal a muscular-looking man wearing a brown habit with a bald head and a large gray beard. Speaking fluent Shtokavian — which Geiger had explained to me is a dialect of Croatian, Bosnian, Serbian, and Montenegrin — Geiger told him we urgently needed to see the abbot.
The monk bowed politely, asked us to accompany him, and we entered the monastery. This was an uncomfortable, hollow place of long echoes, semidarkness, hidden eyes, tangible silences, and the sour smell of baking bread. We walked the length of a long, uncarpeted corridor — which looked and felt more like a prison than a place where men lived by choice — that ran between damp walls painted two institutional tones of green and beige and past doors of plain wood that were without adornment of any sort. Bare lightbulbs hung from the plain ceiling. Another monk was sweeping the unvarnished floorboards with a rush broom, and somewhere a small bell in a clock was striking the hour. A door in some faraway chamber banged shut, but as Geiger and I marched behind the bearded monk our jackboots were the loudest thing in that building and sounded almost profane. We passed by the open door of a barely furnished refectory where forty or fifty men were silently eating bread and soup, and in a distant room a man began to loudly recite a monotonous prayer in Latin, which felt more superstitious than holy. I did not get the impression I was in a place of retreat and contemplation, more like some cold anteroom of purgatory that was a very long way from heaven. I shouldn’t like to have stayed there. Just to be in that place was to feel you were already dead, or in limbo, or worse.
The monk showed us into a plain room with a few comfortable but threadbare armchairs, bowed again, and asked us to wait while he went to fetch the abbot. He did not return. Geiger sat down and lit a cigarette. I stared out the grimy window at Sergeant Oehl, who appeared to have gone to sleep in the backseat of the Mercedes. After a while I sat down beside Geiger and lit one as well. If in doubt, smoke; that’s the soldier’s way.
Finally the abbot came to us. He was a largish man in his sixties — possibly older — with long gray hair, frosted eyebrows that were as big as fur stoles, a bloodhound’s face, and a boxing glove of a black beard. Keen blue eyes regarded us with justifiable suspicion. The SS may have been supporters of the Croatian fascist state — which itself supported the Roman Catholic Church — and yet no one who’d given his life to serving Christ could seriously have believed that serving Adolf Hitler was a better alternative.
He raised his hand in benediction, crossed the air above our heads, and said, “God bless all here.”
I stood up politely. Geiger stayed smoking in his armchair.
“Thank you for seeing us, Father Abbot. My name is Captain Gunther. And this is Captain Geiger.”
“What can our humble order do for you gentlemen?” he asked in impeccable German. His voice was measured and quiet and lacking all human emotion, as if he were speaking patiently to children.
“I’m looking for a priest who I believe is one of your order,” I said. “A monk called Father Ladislaus. Also known as Antun Djurkovic. I have an important letter for him that I have been ordered by my superiors in Berlin to deliver into his hands, personally. We have today driven all the way from Zagreb just to be here now.”
“Zagreb?” He pronounced the name of the city as if it had been Paris or London. “It’s many years since I was in Zagreb.”
“It’s much the same as ever,” said Geiger.
“Really? I heard there was a mosque now in Zagreb. With minarets. And a muezzin who calls the faithful to prayer.”
“True,” said Geiger.
The Father Abbot shook his head.
“Could I trouble you for a cigarette?” he asked Geiger.
“Certainly,” said Geiger.
The abbot puffed a cigarette into life happily and sat down.
“Those pistols you are carrying, gentlemen,” he said, clearly enjoying his cigarette very much. “I assume they are loaded.”
“There wouldn’t be much point in carrying them if they weren’t,” said Geiger.
The Father Abbot was silent for a minute or two and then said, “Cigarettes and bullets. Both of them so small and yet so efficient. If only we spent more time using one more than the other, life would be so much less complicated, don’t you think?”
“It might be less dangerous,” said Geiger.
“But. To answer your question. It’s true that for a while there was a man here called Father Ladislaus. And I believe his given name is Djurkovic. Happily he is no longer a member of our order and he has not lived in this monastery for several years. Even by the standards of this unhappy country, his views were extreme, to say the least. Most of us in this order practice our Catholic faith with prayer books and a cross. I’m afraid that Djurkovic believed it was necessary to practice it with bullets and bayonets, which is why I asked him to leave this monastery and also why any mail that was received for him here I ordered destroyed. Consequently he is dead, to us. Certainly his life as a priest is over.
“To the best of my knowledge he joined the Ustaše after he left us and his present whereabouts are unknown to me, as is his current occupation. I suggest that your best course would be to inquire after him at their headquarters in Banja Luka. To find the Ustaše building in the center of town you need only look for the Serbian Orthodox Cathedral of the Holy Trinity, which is currently being demolished by a punishment battalion of Jews, Serbs, and Roma using their bare hands.”