The Confessor ga-3 Read online

  "Perhaps, Achille, but our conversation has been especially fruitful tonight. This one is on the Holy Father."

  "My thanks to the Holy Father." Bartoletti held up the photograph of the papal assassin. "And you can rest assured that if this tman gets within a hundred miles of him, he'll be arrested."

  Casagrande fixed a melancholy gaze on his dinner guest. "Actually, Achille, I would prefer he not be arrested."

  Bartoletti frowned thoughtfully. "I don't understand, General. What are you asking me to do?"

  Casagrande leaned forward across the table, his face close to the flame of the candle. "It would be better for everyone involved if he simply vanished."

  Achille Bartoletti slipped the photograph into his pocket.

  VIENNA

  Security at the vaguely named Wartime Claims and Inquiries had always been strict, long before the war in the territories. Located in a former apartment building in Vienna's old Jewish Quarter, its door was virtually unmarked and heavily fortified, and the windows overlooking the destitute interior courtyard were bulletproof. The executive director of the organization, a man called Eli Lavon, was not paranoid, just prudent. Over the years, he had helped track down a half dozen former concentration-camp guards and a senior Nazi official living comfortably in Argentina. For his efforts he had been rewarded with a constant stream of death threats.

  That he was Jewish was a given. That he was of Israeli origin Was assumed because of his non-German family name. That he had worked briefly for Israel's secret intelligence service was known by no one in Vienna and only a handful of people in Tel Aviv, most

  of whom had long since retired. During the Wrath of God operation, Lavon had been an ayin, a tracker. He had stalked members of Black September, learned their habits, and devised ways of killing them.

  Under normal circumstances, no one was admitted into the offices of Wartime Claims and Inquiries without a long-scheduled appointment and a thorough background check. For Gabriel, all formalities were waived and he was escorted directly to Lavon's office by a young female researcher.

  The room was classic Viennese in its proportions and furnishings: a high ceiling, polished wood floor, bookshelves bent beneath the weight of countless volumes and files. Lavon was kneeling on the floor, his back hunched over a line of aging documents. He was an archaeologist by training and had spent years digging in the West Bank before devoting himself fully to his present line of work. Now he was gazing at a sheet of tattered paper with the same wonder he felt while examining a fragment of pottery five millennia old.

  He looked up as Gabriel entered the room and greeted him with a mischievous smile. Lavon cared nothing of his appearance, and as usual he seemed to have dressed in whatever had been within easy reach when he rolled out of bed: gray corduroy trousers and a brown V-neck sweater with tattered elbows. His tousled gray hair gave him the appearance of a man who had just driven at high speed in a convertible. Lavon did not own a car and did almost nothing quickly. Despite his security concerns, he was a dutiful rider of Vienna's streetcars. Public transport did not bother him. Like the men he hunted, Lavon was skilled in the art of moving through city streets unseen.

  "Let me guess," Lavon said, dropping his cigarette into a coffee cup and struggling to his feet like a man suffering chronic pain-"Shamron

  pulled you in to investigate Beni's death. And now you're here, which means you've found something interesting."

  "Something like that."

  "Sit down," Lavon said. "Tell me everything."

  sprawled on Lavon's overstuffed green couch, feet propped on the arm, Gabriel gave him a careful account of his investigation, beginning with his visit to Munich and concluding with his meeting with Rabbi Zolli in the ghetto of Venice. Lavon walked back and forth along the length of the room, trailing cigarette smoke like a steam engine. He moved slowly at first, but as Gabriel's story wore on, his pace increased. When he finished, Lavon stopped walking and shook his head.

  "My goodness, but you've been a busy boy."

  "What does it all mean, Eli?"

  "Let's go back to the telephone call you received at the hotel in Brenzone. Who do you think it was?"

  "If I had to guess, it was the handyman at the convent, an old fellow named Licio. He came into the room while Sister Vincenza and I were speaking, and I think he was following me through the town after I left."

  "I wonder why he left an anonymous message instead of speaking to you."

  "Maybe he was frightened."

  "That would be the logical explanation." Lavon shoved his hands in his pockets and stared at the high ceiling. "You're sure about the name he told you? You're sure it was Martin Luther?"

  "That's right. 'Find Sister Regina and Martin Luther. Then You'll know the truth about what happened at the convent.'"

  Lavon unconsciously smoothed his unruly hair. It was a habit when he was thinking. "There are two possibilities that spring to mind. I suppose we can rule out a certain German monk who turned the Roman Catholic Church on its ear. That would narrow the field to one. I'll be right back."

  He disappeared into an adjoining room. For the next several minutes, Gabriel was treated to the familiar sound of his old friend rifling through file cabinets and cursing in several different languages. Finally, he returned with a thick accordion file bound by a heavy metal clasp. He laid the file on the coffee table in front of Gabriel and turned it so he could read the label.

  MARTIN LUTHER: GERMAN FOREIGN OFFICE, 1938-1943.

  LAVON OPENED the file and removed a photograph, holding it up for Gabriel to see. "The other possibility," he said, "is this Martin Luther. He was a high-school dropout and furniture mover who joined the Nazi Party in the twenties. By chance, he met the wife of Joachim von Ribbentrop during the redecoration of her villa in Berlin. Luther ingratiated himself with Frau von Ribbentrop, then her husband. When Ribbentrop became foreign minister in 1938, Luther got a job at the ministry."

  Gabriel took the photograph from Lavon and looked at it. A rodent of a man stared back at him: a slack face; thick glasses that magnified a pair of rheumy eyes. He handed the photo back to Lavon.

  "Luther rose rapidly through the ranks of the Foreign Office, largely because of his slavish devotion to Ribbentrop. By 1940, he was chief of the Abteilung Deutschland, the Division That made Luther responsible for all Foreign Office business connected to Nazi Party affairs. Included in Luther's Abteilung Deutschland was a department called D-Three, the Jewish desk."

  "So what you're saying is that Martin Luther was in charge of Jewish matters inside the German Foreign Office."

  "Precisely," Lavon said. "What Luther lacked in education and intelligence, he made up for in ruthlessness and ambition. He was interested in only one thing: increasing his own personal power. When it became clear to him that the annihilation of the Jews was a top priority of the regime, he set out to make certain that the Foreign Office wasn't going to be left out of the action. His reward was an invitation to the most despicable luncheon in history."

  Lavon paused for a moment to leaf through the contents of the file. After a moment he found what he was looking for, removed it with a flourish, and laid it on the coffee table in front of Gabriel.

  "This is the protocol from the Wannsee Conference, prepared and drafted by its organizer, none other than Adolf Eichmann. Only thirty copies were made. All were destroyed but one--copy number sixteen. It was discovered after the war during the preparation for the Nuremberg Trials and resides in the archives of the German Foreign Ministry in Bonn. This, of course, is a photocopy."

  Lavon picked up the document. "The meeting was held in a villa overlooking the Wannsee in Berlin on January 20, 1942. It lasted ninety minutes. There were fifteen participants. Eichmann served a$ host and made sure his guests were well fed. Heydrich served as master of ceremonies. Contrary to popular myth, the Wannsee Conference was not the place where the idea of the Final Solution was hatched. Hitler and Himmler had already decided that the Jews of Europe were
to be exterminated. The Wannsee Conference was more like a bureaucratic planning session, a discussion of how the various departments of the Nazi Party and German government could work together to facilitate the Holocaust."

  Lavon handed the document to Gabriel. "Look at the list of participants. Recognize any of the names?"

  Gabriel cast his eyes down the attendees:

  Gauleiter Dr. Meyer and Reichsamtleiter Dr. Leibbrandt,

  Reich Ministry for the Occupied Eastern Territories Staatssekretar Dr. Stuckart, Reich Ministry of the

  Interior Staatssekretar Neumann, Plenipotentiary for the Four

  Year Plan

  Staatssekretar Dr. Freisler, Reich Ministry of Justice Staatssekretar Dr. Buhler, Office of the General

  Government Unterstaatssekretar Dr. Luther, Foreign Office

  Gabriel looked up at Lavon. "Luther was at Wannsee?"

  "Indeed, he was. And he got exactly what he so desperately wanted. Heydritch mandated that the Foreign Office would play a pivotal role in facilitating deportations of Jews from countries allied with Nazi Germany and from German satellites such as Croatia and Slovakia."

  "I thought the SS handled the deportations."

  "Let me back up a moment." Lavon leaned over the coffee table and placed his hands on the surface, as though it were a map of Europe. "The vast majority of Holocaust victims were from Poland, the Baltics, and western Russia--places conquered and ruled directly by the Nazis. They rounded up Jews and slaughtered them without any interference from other governments, because there were no other governments."

  Lavon paused, one hand sliding over the imaginary map to the south, the other to the west. "But Heydrich and Eichmann weren't satisfied with murdering only the Jews under direct German rule. They wanted every Jew in Europe--eleven million in all." Lavon tapped his right forefinger on the table. "The Jews in the Balkans"-- he tapped his left forefinger--"and the Jews in Western Europe. In most of these places, they had to deal with local governments to pry the Jews loose for deportation and extermination. Luther's section of the Foreign Office was responsible for that. It was Luther's job to deal with the local governments on a ministry-to-ministry basis to make certain that the deportations went smoothly and all diplomatic niceties were adhered to. And he was damned good at it."

  "For argument's sake, let's assume the old man was referring to this Martin Luther. What would he have been doing at a convent in northern Italy?"

  Lavon shrugged his narrow shoulders. "It sounds to me as if the old man was trying to tell you that something happened at the convent during the war. Something that Sister Vincenza is trying to cover up. Something that Beni knew about."

  "Something that got him killed?"

  Lavon shrugged. "Maybe."

  "Who would be willing to kill a man over a book?"

  Lavon hesitated, taking a moment to slip the protocol of the Wannsee Conference back into the file. Then he looked up at Gabriel, eyes narrowed, and drew a deep breath.

  "There was one government in particular that Eichmann and Luther were concerned about. It maintained diplomatic relations with both the Allies and Nazi Germany during the war. It had representatives

  in all of the countries where the roundups and deportations were taking place--representatives who could have made the task more difficult had they chosen to forcefully intervene. For obvious reasons, Eichmann and Luther considered it critical that this government not raise objections. Hitler considered this government so pivotal that he dispatched the second-ranking official at the Foreign Office, Baron Ernst von Weizacker, to serve as his ambassador. Do you know which government I'm talking about, Gabriel?"

  Gabriel closed his eyes. "The Vatican."

  "Indeed."

  "So who are the clowns that have been following me?"

  "That's a very good question."

  Gabriel crossed the room to Lavon's desk, lifted the receiver of the telephone, and dialed a number. Lavon did not need to ask who Gabriel was calling. He could see it in the determined set of his jaw and the tension in his hands. When a man is being stalked by an enemy he does not know, it is best to have a friend who knows how to fight dirty.

  THE MAN STANDING on the steps of Vienna's famed Konzerthaus radiated open-air Austrian good looks and Viennese sophistication. Had anyone spoken to him, he would have replied in perfect German, with the lazy inflection of a well-heeled young man who had spent many happy hours sampling the Bohemian delights of Vienna. He was not Austrian, nor had he been raised in Vienna. His name was Ephraim Ben-Avraham, and he had spent his childhood in a dusty settlement deep in the Negev, a place far removed from the world in which he moved now.

  He glanced casually at his watch, then surveyed the expanse of the Beethoven Platz. He was on edge, more so than usual. It was a simple job: Meet an agent, deliver him safely to the communications room of the embassy. But the man he was meeting was no ordinary agent. The Vienna station chief had made the stakes clear to Ben-Avraham before dispatching him. "If you fuck it up, Ari Shamron will track you down and strangle you with one of his patented death grips. And whatever you do, don't try to talk to the agent. He's not the most approachable of men."

  Ben-Avraham stuck an American cigarette between his lips and ignited it. It was at that moment, through the dancing blue flame of his lighter, that Ben-Avraham saw the legend emerge from the darkness. He dropped his cigarette to the wet pavement and ground it out with the toe of his shoe, watching while the agent made two complete circuits of the square. No one was following him--no one but the disheveled little man with flyaway hair and a wrinkled coat. He was a legend too: Eli Lavon, surveillance artist extraordinaire. Ben-Avraham had met him once at the Academy when Lavon had been a guest lecturer at a seminar on man-to-man street work. He had kept the recruits up till three in the morning, telling war stories about the dark days of the Black September operation.

  Ben-Avraham watched the pair in admiration for a moment as they drifted among the evening crowd like synchronized swimmers. Their routine was by the book, but it had a certain flair and precision that came from working together in situations where one misstep could cost one of them his life.

  Finally, the young officer started down the steps toward his tar-§etHerr

  "Mueller," he called out. The legend looked up. "So good to see you."

  Lavon vanished as though stepping through a stage curtain. Ben-Avraham hooked his fingers inside the elbow of the legend and pulled him toward the darkened footpaths of the Stadt Park. They walked in circles for ten minutes, diligently checking their tail. He was smaller than Ben-Avraham expected, lean and spare, like a cyclist. It was difficult to imagine that this was the same man who had liquidated half of Black September--the same man who had walked into a villa in Tunis and gunned down Abu Jihad, the second-ranking leader of the PLO, in front of his wife and children.

  The legend said nothing. It was as if he were listening for his enemies. His footfalls on the pavement of the pathways made no sound. It was like walking next to a ghost.

  The car was waiting a block from the park. Ben-Avraham climbed behind the wheel and for twenty minutes wound his way around the city center. The station chief was right--he was not a man who invited small talk. Indeed the only time he spoke was to politely ask Ben-Avraham to extinguish his cigarette. His German had the hard edge of a Berliner.

  Satisfied that no one was following, Ben-Avraham turned into a narrow street in northeast Vienna called the Anton Frankgasse. The building at No. 20 had been the target of numerous terror attacks over the years and was heavily fortified. It was also under constant surveillance by the Austrian secret services. As the car slipped into the entrance of the underground parking garage, the legend ducked below the dashboard. For an instant, his head pressed lightly against Ben-Avraham's leg. His scalp was burning, like a man in the grip of a death fever.

  THE SECURE communications room was located in a soundproof glass cubicle two levels below ground. It took several minutes for the operator in Tel Aviv
to patch the call through to Shamron's

  home in Tiberias. Over the scrambler, his voice sounded as if it was emanating from the bottom of a steel drum. In the background, Gabriel heard water running into a basin and the tinkle of cutlery against china. He could almost picture Shamron's long-suffering wife, Ge'ulah, washing dishes in the kitchen sink. Gabriel gave Shamron the same briefing he had given earlier to Lavon. When he finished, Shamron asked what he planned to do next.

  "I thought I'd go to London and ask Peter Malone why Beni called him from a hotel in Brenzone."

  "Malone? What makes you think he'll talk? Peter Malone is in business for himself. If he's actually got something, he'll sit on it harder than even poor Beni."

  "I'm working on a subtle way to make my approach."

  "And if he's not interested in opening his notebook to you?"

  "Then I'll try a not-so-subtle approach."

  "I don't trust him."

  "He's the only lead I have at the moment."

  Shamron sighed heavily. Despite the distance and the scrambler, Gabriel could hear an edgy rattle in his chest.

  "I want the meeting done the right way," Shamron said. "No more wandering into situations blind and without backup. He gets surveillance before and after. Otherwise, you can wash your hands of this thing and go back to Venice to finish your Bellini."

  "If you insist."

  "Helpful suggestions are not my way. I'll contact London station tonight and put a man on him. Keep me informed."

  Gabriel hung up the phone and stepped outside into the corridor. Ephraim Ben-Avraham was waiting. "Where now?" the young field man asked.

  Gabriel looked at his watch. "Take me to the airport."

  LONDON

  On his second day in London, Gabriel visited a used bookstore in the Charing Cross Road at dusk and purchased a single volume. He tucked it beneath his arm and walked to the Leicester Square underground station. At the entrance he removed the well-worn dust jacket and tossed it into a rubbish bin. Inside the station, he bought a ticket from the automated dispenser and rode the long escalator down to the Northern Line platform, where he endured an obligatory ten-minute delay. He used the time to leaf through the book. When he found the passage he was looking for, he circled it in red ink and folded the page to mark the place.