The Confessor Read online

  “Why?” he asked. “Why do you want to do this?”

  “Did my father tell you that his grandparents were among the elderly Jews who were removed from that home in the ghetto and deported to Auschwitz? Did he tell you that they died there, along with all the others?”

  “He didn’t mention that.”

  “Do you know why he didn’t tell you? Because even now, even after all these years, he can’t bring himself to speak of it. He can recite the name of every Venetian Jew who died at Auschwitz, but he can’t bring himself to talk about his own grandparents.” She removed a Beretta from her jacket pocket and pulled the slide. “I’m coming with you to find that woman.”

  The Zodiac nudged against the stern of the motor yacht. Above them, a figure appeared on the deck and looked over the railing at them. Gabriel tied off the line and held the boat steady while Chiara pulled herself up the ladder. Then he followed after her. By the time he reached the deck, the captain was standing with his arms in the air and a look of utter disbelief on his face.

  “Sorry,” Gabriel said. “I’m afraid there’s been a slight change in our itinerary.”

  CHIARA HAD brought a syringe and a bottle of sedative. Gabriel led the captain down to one of the staterooms below deck and bound his wrists and ankles with a length of line. The man struggled for a few seconds as Chiara pulled up his sleeve, but when Gabriel pressed his forearm against the man’s throat, he relaxed and allowed Chiara to give him the injection. When he was unconscious, Gabriel checked the knots—tight enough to hold him, not tight enough to cut off the circulation to his hands and feet.

  “How long is the sedative supposed to last?”

  “Ten hours, but he’s big. I’ll give him another dose in eight.”

  “Just don’t kill the poor bastard. He’s on our side.”

  “He’ll be fine.”

  Chiara led the way up to the bridge. A chart of the waters off Italy’s western coast was spread on the table. She checked their position on the GPS display and quickly plotted a course. Then she powered up the engines and brought the yacht around to a proper heading. A moment later they were cruising north, toward the straits between Elba and Corsica.

  She turned and looked at Gabriel, who was watching in admiration, and said, “We’re going to need some coffee. Think you can handle that?”

  “I’ll do my best.”

  “Sometime tonight would be good.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  SHIMON PAZNER stood motionless on the beach, hands on his hips, shoes filled with seawater, trousers soaked to the knees, like a long-submerged statue being slowly revealed by the receding waters. He brought his radio to his lips and tried to raise Chiara one last time. Silence.

  She should have been back an hour ago. There were two possibilities, neither pleasant. Possibility one? Something had gone wrong and they were lost. Possibility two? Allon . . .

  Pazner hurled his radio into the surf in disgust, a look of pure loathing on his face, and trod slowly back to the van.

  THERE WAS just enough time for Eric Lange to catch the night train for Zurich. He directed Aziz to a quiet side street adjacent to the rail lines feeding out of the Stazione Termini and told him to shut down the engine. Aziz seemed puzzled. “Why do you want to be dropped here?”

  “At the moment every police officer in Rome is looking for Gabriel Allon. Surely, they’re watching the train stations and airports. It’s best not to show your face there unless it’s absolutely necessary.”

  The Palestinian seemed to accept this explanation. Lange could see a train easing out of the station. He waited patiently to take his leave.

  “Tell Husseini that I’ll contact him in Paris when things have cooled down,” Lange said.

  “I’m sorry we weren’t successful tonight.”

  Lange shrugged. “With a bit of luck, we’ll get another chance.”

  The train was suddenly next to them, filling the car with a metallic screeching. Lange saw his chance. He opened the door and stepped out of the car. Aziz leaned across the front seat and called out, but his words were drowned out by the sound of the train.

  “What?” Lange asked, cupping his ear. “I can’t hear you.”

  “The gun,” Aziz repeated. “You forgot to give me the gun.”

  “Ah, yes.”

  Lange removed the silenced Stechkin from his coat pocket and pointed it toward Aziz. The Palestinian reached out for it. The first shot pierced the palm of his hand before tearing into his chest cavity. The second left a neat circle above his right eye.

  Lange dropped the gun on the passenger seat and walked into the station. The Zurich train was boarding. He found his compartment in the first-class sleeper carriage and stretched out in the comfortable berth. Twenty minutes later, as the train slipped through the northern suburbs of Rome, he closed his eyes and was immediately asleep.

  21

  TIBERIAS, ISRAEL

  THE CALL FROM LEV did not awaken Shamron. Indeed, he had not closed his eyes since the first urgent flash from Rome that Gabriel and the girl were missing. He lay in bed, the telephone a few inches from his ear, listening to Lev’s histrionics while Ge’ulah stirred softly in her sleep. The indignity of aging, he thought. Not long ago, Lev was a green recruit, and Shamron was the one who did the screaming. Now, the old man had no choice but to hold his tongue and bide his time.

  When the tirade ended, the line went dead. Shamron swung his feet to the floor, pulled on a robe, and walked outside to his terrace overlooking the lake. The sky in the east was beginning to turn pale blue with the coming dawn, but the sun had not yet appeared over the ridge of the hills. He dug through the pockets of the robe, looking for cigarettes, hoping against hope that Ge’ulah hadn’t found them. It filled him with a sense of great personal victory when his stubby fingers came upon a crumpled packet.

  He lit one and savored the bite of the harsh Turkish tobacco on his tongue. Then he lifted his gaze and let it wander for a moment over the view. He never tired of it, this window on his private corner of the Promised Land. It was no accident the vista faced eastward. That way Shamron, the eternal sentinel, could keep watch on Israel’s enemies.

  The air smelled of a coming storm. Soon the rains would arrive, and once more the land would run with floodwater. How many more floods would he see? In his most pessimistic moments, Shamron wondered how many more the children of Israel would see. Like most Jews, he was gripped by an unwavering fear that his generation would be the last. A man much wiser than Shamron had called the Jews the ever-dying people, a people forever on the verge of ceasing to be. It had been Shamron’s mission in life to rid his people of that fear, to wrap them in a blanket of security and make them feel safe. He was haunted by the realization that he had failed.

  He scowled at his stainless-steel wristwatch. Gabriel and the girl had been missing for eight hours. It was Shamron’s affair, but it was blowing up in Lev’s face. Gabriel was getting closer to identifying the killers of Benjamin Stern, but Lev wanted no part of it. Little Lev, thought Shamron derisively. The craven bureaucrat. A man whose innate sense of caution rivaled the daring and audacity of Shamron.

  “Do I need this, Ari?” Lev had screamed. “The Europeans are accusing us of behaving like Nazis in the territories, and now one of your old killers is accused of trying to assassinate the Pope! Tell me where I can find him. Help me bring him in before this thing destroys this beloved service of yours once and for all.”

  Perhaps Lev was right, though it pained Shamron to even consider such a thought. Israel had enough problems at the moment. The shaheeds were turning markets into bloodbaths. The thief of Baghdad was still trying to forge his nuclear sword. Perhaps now was not the best time to pick a fight with the Roman Catholic Church. Perhaps now was not the best time to go wading in old waters. The water was dirty and filled with unseen hazards, potholes and rocks, hidden brush where a man could become entangled and drown.

  And then an image appeared in his thoughts. A muddy vill
age outside Kraków. A rampaging crowd. Shopwindows smashed. Homes set ablaze. Men beaten bloody with clubs. Women raped. Christ-killers! Jewish filth! Kill the Jews! A child’s village, a young child’s memories of Poland. The boy would be sent to Palestine to live with relatives on a settlement in the Upper Galilee. The parents would stay behind. The boy would join the Haganah and fight in Israel’s war of rebirth. When the new state was putting together an intelligence service, the boy, now a young man, would be invited to join. In a shabby suburb north of Buenos Aires, he would become an almost mythical figure by seizing the throat of the man who had sent his parents, and six million others, to the camps of death.

  Shamron found that his eyes were squeezed tightly shut and that his hands were gripping the top of the balustrade. Slowly, finger by finger, he relaxed his grip.

  A line of Eliot ran through his head: “In my beginning is my end.”

  Eichmann . . .

  How had this puppeteer of death, this murdering bureaucrat who made the trains of genocide run on time—how had it come to pass that he was living quietly in a hardscrabble suburb of Buenos Aires when six million had perished? Shamron knew the answer, of course, for every page of the Eichmann file was engraved in his memory. Like hundreds of other murderers, he had escaped via “the convent route”—a chain of monasteries and Church properties stretching from Germany to the Italian port of Genoa. In Genoa, he had been given shelter by Franciscans and, through the auspices of Church charitable organizations, was provided with false papers describing him as a refugee. On June 14, 1950, he emerged from the shelter of the Franciscan convent long enough to board the Giovanna C, bound for Buenos Aires. Bound for a new life in the New World, thought Shamron. The leader of the Church had not been able to find the words to condemn the murder of six million, but his bishops and priests had given comfort and sanctuary to the greatest mass killer in history. This was a fact that Shamron could never comprehend, a sin for which there was no absolution.

  He thought of Lev’s voice screeching down the secure line from Tel Aviv. No, thought Shamron, I will not help Lev find Gabriel. Quite the opposite, he was going to help him discover what happened in that convent by the lake—and who killed Benjamin Stern.

  He walked back into the house, his step crisp and surefooted, and went to his bedroom. Ge’ulah was lying in bed watching television. Shamron packed a suitcase. Every few seconds, she would glance up from the screen and look at him, but she did not speak. It had been this way for more than forty years. When his bag was packed, Shamron sat on the bed next to her and held her hand.

  “You’ll be careful, won’t you, Ari?”

  “Of course, my love.”

  “You won’t smoke cigarettes, will you?”

  “Never!”

  “Come home soon.”

  “Soon,” Shamron said, and he kissed her forehead.

  THERE WAS an indignity to his visits to King Saul Boulevard that Shamron found deeply depressing. He had to sign the logbook at the security station in the lobby and attach a laminated tag to his shirt pocket. No longer could he use his old private elevator—that was reserved for Lev now. Instead, he crowded into an ordinary lift filled with desk officers and boys and girls from the file rooms.

  He rode up to the fourth floor. His ritual humiliation did not end there, for Lev still had a few more ounces of flesh to extract. There was no one to bring him coffee, so he was forced to fend for himself in the canteen, coaxing a cup of weak brew from an automated machine. Then he walked down the hall to his “office”—a bare room, not much larger than a storage closet, with a pine table, a folding steel chair, and a chipped telephone that smelled of disinfectant.

  Shamron sat down, opened his briefcase, and removed the surveillance photograph from London—the one snapped by Mordecai outside Peter Malone’s home. Shamron sat over it for several minutes, elbows on the table, knuckles pressed to his temples. Every few seconds, a head would poke around the edge of the door and a pair of eyes would stare at him as if he were some exotic beast. Yes, it’s true. The old man is roaming the halls of Headquarters once more. Shamron saw none of it. He had eyes only for the man in the photograph.

  Finally, he picked up the telephone and dialed the extension for Research. It was answered by a girl who sounded as though she was barely out of high school.

  “This is Shamron.”

  “Who?”

  “Sham-RON,” he said irritably. “I need the file on the Cyprus kidnapping case. It was 1986, if I remember correctly. That’s probably before you were born, but do your best.”

  He slammed down the phone and waited. Five minutes later, a bleary-eyed boy called Yossi appeared in Shamron’s ignoble door. “Sorry, boss. The girl is new.” He held up a bound file. “You wanted to see this?”

  Shamron held out his hand, like a beggar.

  IT HAD not been one of Shamron’s prouder moments. In the summer of 1986, Israeli Justice Minister Meir Ben-David set sail from Tel Aviv for a three-week Mediterranean cruise aboard a private yacht along with twelve other guests and a crew of five. On day nine of their holiday, in the harbor at Larnaca, the yacht was seized by a team of terrorists claiming to represent a group called the Fighting Palestinian Cells. A rescue attempt was ruled out, and the Cypriots wanted the messiness resolved as quickly and as quietly as possible. That left the Israeli government with no choice but to negotiate, and Shamron opened a channel of communication with the German-speaking team leader. Three days later, the siege ended. The hostages were released, the terrorists were granted safe passage, and a month later a dozen hard-core PLO killers were released from Israeli jails.

  Publicly, Israel denied there had been a quid pro quo, though no one believed it. For Shamron, it had been a bitter herb indeed, and now, flipping through the pages of the file, he relived it all again. He came to a photograph, the one image they had managed to capture of the team leader. It was useless, really: a long-distance shot, grainy and muddled, a face concealed behind sunglasses and a hat.

  He placed the picture beside the surveillance photograph from London and spent several minutes comparing them. Same man? Impossible to tell. He picked up the phone and rang Research again. This time Yossi answered.

  “Yes, boss?”

  “Bring me the file on the Leopard.”

  HE WAS an enigma, an educated guess, a theory. Some said he was German. Some said Austrian. Some Swiss. One linguist who listened to the tapes of his conversations with Shamron, which were conducted in English, theorized that he was from the Alsace-Lorraine. It was the West Germans who had hung the code name Leopard on him; he had done a good deal of killing there and they wanted him the most. A terrorist for hire. A man who would work for any group, any cause, as long as it conformed to his core beliefs: Communist, anti-Western, anti-Zionist. It was the Leopard who was believed to have been behind the hijacking in Cyprus and the Leopard who had murdered three other Israelis in Europe on behalf of PLO commando Abu Jihad. Shamron had wanted him dead. His wish had gone unfulfilled.

  He leafed through the file, which was hopelessly thin. Here a report from the French service, here an Interpol dispatch, here a rumor of an alleged sighting in Istanbul. There were three photographs as well, though it was not clear whether any were really him. The shot from the yacht in Cyprus, a surveillance photo taken in Bucharest, another at Charles de Gaulle airport. Shamron laid the photo from London next to them and looked up at Yossi, who was watching over his shoulder.

  “That one and that one, boss.”

  Shamron pulled the Bucharest shot out of the lineup and laid it next to London. Same angle, head-on, chin slightly to the left, obscuring half the face.

  “I could be wrong, Yossi, but I think it’s possible that these are the same man.”

  “Hard to say, boss, but the computer may be able to tell us for sure.”

  “Run them,” Shamron said, then he picked up the files. “I want to keep these.”

  “You have to sign a chit.”

  Shamron lo
oked at Yossi over spectacles.

  Yossi said, “I’ll sign the chit for you.”

  “Good boy.”

  Shamron reached for the telephone one last time and dialed Travel. When he finished with his arrangements, he placed the files in his briefcase and headed downstairs. I’m coming, Gabriel, he thought. But where in God’s name are you?

  22

  THE MEDITERRANEAN SEA

  THE ROCKS OF CAP CORSE appeared at dawn. Chiara guided the yacht around the tip of the island and set it on a northwesterly heading. A line of gunpowder cloud stood before them, swollen with rain. The winds had increased by several knots, and it was suddenly much colder. “The mistral,” Chiara said. “It’s blowing hard today. I’m afraid the rest of the trip isn’t going to be so pleasant.”

  A ferry appeared off the port side, steaming out of L’Ile Rousse toward the French coast. “That one’s going to Nice,” she said. “We can follow his heading, then steer toward Cannes as we get closer to the coastline.”

  “How long?”

  “Five to six hours, maybe longer because of the mistral. Take the wheel for a while. I’ll go down to the galley and see if there’s anything for breakfast.”

  “Make sure Sleeping Beauty is still with us.”

  “I will.”

  Breakfast consisted of coffee, toasted bread, and a lump of hard cheese. They barely had time to eat, because thirty minutes after rounding Cap Corse, the storm closed in. For the next four hours, the boat was battered by a steady onslaught of wind-driven swells rolling out of the north, and sheets of rain that reduced visibility to less than a hundred meters. At some point they lost track of the ferry. It was no matter; Chiara simply navigated by compass and GPS.

  The rain quit at noon, but the wind blew ceaselessly. It seemed to grow stronger as they drew closer to the coast. Behind the storm was a mass of bitterly cold air, and for the last hour of the journey, the sun was in and out of the clouds, shining one minute, hidden the next. The color of the water changed with the sun, now gray-green, now deep blue.