As Bellringer fell into step alongside Paparazzo, he greeted him and asked what he was planning to do now the war had ended. He told Paparazzo he intended to disappear into the abbey of Melk, where he would call himself Brother Adso. ‘Alas, Paparazzo, what willst become of thou?,’ Bellringer asked. ‘Look to yourself before the Amerikanski ferrets catch up with you.’
As they trudged along, Bellringer probed into Paparazzo’s past life (he had once been a member of the Gestapo so was good at this). Paparazzo told him he had been educated at a convent and then a Jesuit seminary in Munich. ‘Ach, das ist gut,’ Bellringer said. ‘und dost thou not know our beloved Fuhrer called our Reichsfuhrer his own Ignatius Loyola? Why dost not thou, too, make thyself a new career within Holy Mother Church?’
‘But which church?,’ Paparazzo naively asked. ‘The Church of Rome, naturlich,’ Bellringer replied. ‘Surely the equivocation of a Jesuit and the fanaticism of a Hitler Youth make you admirably suited for holy orders?’ Their conversation rambled on about famous Jesuits, and how they experienced many different callings and many different backgrounds.
Paparazzo asked Bellringer how he, with his life as a soldier, could become a priest. Bellringer replied by quoting the exemplum of the Jesuit Teilhard de Chardin, who argued that a Jesuit should experience every temptation and sin known to man. In this way de Chardin reasoned that he could become a machine-gunner, and hence commit mass murder. ‘But he was still a Jesuit priest’, Bellringer concluded, ‘und so everything is possible, vielleicht?’