Read Warburg in Rome for Free Online Page B

by a leash, was a tall, lean dog. Even at that distance, Marguerite could sense the ferocity of its snarl—a Doberman pinscher. Each time the friar snapped the leash, the dog lunged forward.
    The friar conducted the selection as a maestro does a concert, waving with his free hand a white handkerchief, like a baton. Figures tumbled out of the backs of the trucks, and others lined them up. They were children, some very young, some teenagers. They were being put into rows by adults, some of whom were dressed in brown robes, other Franciscans, and some in the black uniforms of the Pavelic militia, with the telltale red-and-white-checkered crest emblazoned on their shoulders, on the peaks of their caps. Ustashe. The children were channeled toward a makeshift table, over which the large friar presided as if it were an altar. Marguerite adjusted the focus wheel on the binoculars, shifting to his face. The fissure in his mouth beaded with saliva. Vukas. The priest from Zagreb.
    She lowered the binoculars, but Carlo pushed them back toward her eyes. “No,” he commanded. “Watch!”
    Vukas directed the traffic, more policeman now than maestro. Each child was presented to him. First Vukas jerked the dog’s lead, sending it with flashing teeth at the child’s face. When the child responded with horror, the friar pulled the dog back. It seemed a test, a way of measuring the child. The friar then bent forward, performed an examination of some kind, seeming perversely to chuck the chins of the little angels. With a wave of that handkerchief he sent the child off one way or another—toward the shanties inside the oval or back onto the tarp-covered bed of an adjacent truck. Terrified of the dog, the children bolted away. From the distance, the priest, except for his dog, seemed almost to have a kindly air. Onto the heads of some he placed a hand, as if in blessing, but then Marguerite saw that those were the ones pulled aside and loaded again into the trucks. What, were the selected ones chosen by the blemished priest for being unblemished?
    The death race. Three trucks. No, four. Loaded with boys and girls, toddlers, teenagers. Soon the canvas rear flaps of each truck were stitched tightly closed, the cords fixed with rods. A length of firehose was attached to the exhaust pipe of each truck and fed into the bed.
    Still staring, Marguerite said, “Can’t you stop this?”
    Carlo replied, “I am stopping it. That is what I am doing.”
    But not this morning. Not this race. When at last the trucks lined up on the track, Vukas held his arm aloft, now using the handkerchief as a starter’s flag. His head fell back in laughter, and from his twisted mouth a great uproarious cry of triumph must have come. The flag fell and the trucks leapt forward, gunning up to full speed. Vukas let his dog go, and it began to chase after the trucks, to devour them. Because of the intimate view through the binoculars, it seemed Marguerite should have heard the roaring engines and the howling dog, but she did not. Indeed, the rigid silence from across the span of distance—the trucks, the laughing, the dog, and God knows what sounds being emitted by the throats of children—lent the scene its ghostly unreality.
    Around and around the trucks raced. At each pass, Vukas and the knot of his underlings could be seen to cheer like students at a football match. A soldier appeared with a tray of earthen-gray beer steins. Vukas seized one and held it aloft. All did the same, foam splashing. Vukas cried out some ritual phrase, and the others echoed it in reply. And all at once, maestro again, he began waving that white handkerchief, as if this were a rathskeller and the time had come for drinking songs.
    The friars’ brown robes swayed in time to the music, countered by the metronomes of rosary beads hanging from their cinctures. Ein Prosit, ein Prosit! As the trucks thundered around the deadly circuit, the priest and his cronies drank and sang. Laughed, drank,