The Confessor ga-3 Read online

  "I know."

  "I used to think everything had changed for the better. Six

  months ago, someone put a coffin outside my father's synagogue.

  There was a swastika on the lid. Inside was a note. 'This coffin is

  for the Jews of Venice! The ones we didn't get the first time!'"

  "It's not real," Gabriel said. "At least, the threat isn't real."

  "It frightened the old ones. You see, they remember when it was real."

  She lifted her hand to her face and pushed a tear from her cheek. "Do you really think Beni had something else?"

  "I'd stake my life on it."

  "What else do we need? A bishop from the Vatican sat down with Martin Luther in 1942 and gave his blessing to the murder of millions. Sixty years later, Crux Vera killed your friend and many more to keep it a secret."

  "I don't want Crux Vera to succeed. I want to expose the secret, and I need more than Sister Regina's letter in order to do that."

  "Do you know what this will do to the Vatican?"

  "I'm afraid that's not my concern."

  "You'll destroy it," she said. "Then you'll go back to the Church of San Zaccaria and finish restoring your Bellini. You're a man of contradictions, aren't you?"

  "So I've been told."

  She lifted her head, resting her chin on his breastbone, and stared into his eyes. Her hair spilled over his cheeks. "Why do they hate us, Gabriel? What did we ever do to them?"

  The Peugeot was where they had left it, parked at the side entrance of the community center, glistening beneath a yellow streetlamp. Gabriel drove carefully through the wet streets. He skirted the city center on the Thomas Winner Ring, a broad boulevard encircling the heart of old Munich, then headed toward Schwabing on the Ludwigstrasse. At the entrance of a U-Bahn station, he saw a stack of blue fliers beneath the weight of a red brick. Chiara darted out, scooped up the papers, and brought them back to the car.

  Gabriel twice drove past Adalbertstrasse 68 before deciding it was safe to proceed. He parked around the corner, on the Barer-strasse, and killed the engine. A streetcar rattled past, empty but for a single old woman gazing hopelessly through the fogged glass.

  As they walked toward the entrance of the apartment house, Gabriel thought of his first conversation with Detective Axel Weiss. The tenants are very casual about who they let in. If someone presses the intercom and says "advertisements," they're routinely buzzed in.

  Gabriel hesitated, then simultaneously pushed two buttons. A few seconds later a sleepy voice answered, "Ja?" Gabriel murmured the password. The buzzer howled, and the door unlocked. They stepped inside and the door closed automatically behind them. Gabriel opened and closed it a second time for the benefit of anyone who might be listening. Then he placed the stack of fliers on the ground and crossed the foyer to the staircase--quickly, in case the old caretaker was still awake.

  They crept quietly up the stairs to the second-floor landing. The door to Benjamin's apartment was still marked with crime-scene tape, and an official-looking note on the door declared that it was off-limits. The makeshift memorial--the flowers, the notes of condolence--had been cleared away.

  Chiara crouched and went to work on the lock with a slender metal tool. Gabriel turned his back to her and watched the stairwell. Thirty seconds later, he heard the lock give way, and Chiara pushed open the door. They ducked beneath the crime-scene tape and went inside. Gabriel closed the door and switched on his flashlight.

  "Work quickly," he said. "Don't worry about making a mess."

  He led her into the large room overlooking the street--the room Benjamin had used as his office. The beam of Chiara's flashlight fell across the neo-Nazi graffiti on the wall. "My God," she whispered.

  "You start at that end," Gabriel said. "We'll search each room together, then we'll move to the next."

  They worked silently but efficiently. Gabriel tore the desk to pieces, while Chiara pulled every book from its shelf and thumbed through the pages. Nothing. Next, Gabriel went to work on the furniture, removing slipcovers, pulling apart cushions. Nothing. He turned over the coffee table and unscrewed the legs to check for hollow compartments. Nothing. Together, they turned over the rug and searched for a slit where documents might be concealed. Nothing. Gabriel got down on all fours and patiently checked every floorboard to see if one of them had been loosened. Chiara removed the covers from the heating vents.

  Hell!

  At one end of the room was a doorway leading to a small antechamber. Inside, Benjamin had stored more books. Gabriel and Chiara searched the room together and found nothing.

  Closing the door on the way out, Gabriel detected a faint sound, something unfamiliar; not the squeak of a dry hinge, but a rustle of some sort. He put his hand on the knob, then opened and closed the door several times in quick succession. Open, close, open, close, open . . .

  The door was hollow, and it sounded as if there was something inside.

  He turned to Chiara. "Hand me that screwdriver." He knelt down and loosened the screws holding the latch to the door. When he finished, he separated the latch. Attached to one of them was a line of nylon filament, hanging into the interior of the door. Gabriel gently tugged on the filament, and up came a clear plastic bag with a zip-lock enclosure. Inside was a tightly folded batch of papers.

  "My God," Chiara said. "I can't believe you actually found it!"

  Gabriel pried open the Ziplock bag, then carefully removed the papers and unfolded them by the illumination of Chiara's flashlight. He closed his eyes, swore softly, and held the papers up ft Chiara to see.

  It was a copy of Sister Regina's letter.

  Gabriel got slowly to his feet. It had taken more than an hour to find something they already had. How much longer would it take I to find what they needed? He drew a deep breath and turned around.

  It was then that he saw the shadow of a figure, standing in the center of the room amid the clutter. He reached into his pocket, wrapped his fingers around the butt of the Beretta, and quickly drew it out. As his arm swung up to the firing position, Chiara illuminated the target with the beam of her flashlight. Fortunately, Gabriel managed to prevent his forefinger from pulling the trigger, because standing ten feet in front of him, with her hands shading her eyes, was an old woman wrapped in a pink bathrobe.

  THERE WAS a pathological neatness about Frau Ratzinger's tiny flat that Gabriel recognized at once. The kitchen was spotless and sterile, the dishes in her little china cabinet fastidiously placed. The knickknacks on the coffee table in her sitting room looked as; though they had been arranged and rearranged by an inmate in an asylum--which in many respects, thought Gabriel, she was.

  "Where were you?" he asked carefully, in a voice he might have used for a small child.

  "First Dachau, then Ravensbruck, and finally Riga." She paused for a moment. "My parents were murdered at Riga. They were shot by the Einsatzgruppen, the roving SS death squads, and buried along with twenty-seven thousand others in a trench dug by Russian prisoners-of-war."

  Then she rolled up her sleeve to show Gabriel her number--like the number that Gabriel's mother had tried so desperately to conceal. Even in the fierce summer heat of the Jezreel Valley, she would wear a long-sleeved blouse rather than allow a stranger to see her tattoo. Her mark of shame, she called it. Her emblem of Jewish weakness.

  "Benjamin was afraid he would be killed," she said. "They used to call him at all hours and say the most horrible things on his telephone. They used to stand outside the building at night to frighten him. He told me that if anything ever happened to him, men would come--men from Israel."

  She opened the drawer of her china cabinet and pulled out a white linen tablecloth. With Chiara's help, she unfolded it. Hidden inside was a legal-size envelope, the edges and flap sealed with heavy plastic packing tape.

  "This is what you were looking for, yes?" She held it up for Gabriel to see. "The first time I saw you, I thought you might be the one, but I didn't feel I could tru
st you. There were many strange things taking place in that apartment. Men coming in the middle of the night. Policemen carting off Benjamin's belongings. I was afraid. As you might imagine, I still do not trust German men in uniform."

  Her melancholy eyes settled on Gabriel's face. "You're not his brother, are you?"

  "No, I'm not, Frau Ratzinger."

  "I didn't think so. That's why I gave you the eyeglasses. If you Were the man Benjamin was talking about, I knew you would follow the clues, and that eventually you would find your way back to me. I had to be certain you were the right man. Are you the right man, Herr Landau?"

  "I'm not Herr Landau, but I am the right man."

  "Your German is very good," she said. "You are from Israel, aren't you?"

  "I grew up in the Jezreel Valley," Gabriel said, switching to Hebrew without warning. "Benjamin was the closest thing to a brother I ever had. I'm the man he would have wanted to see what's inside that envelope."

  "Then I believe this belongs to you," she responded in the same language. "Finish your friend's work. But whatever you do, don't come back here again. It's not safe for you here."

  Then she carefully placed the envelope in Gabriel's hands and touched his face.

  "Go," she said.

  PART FOUR

  A SYNAGOGUE BY THE RIVER

  VATICAN CITY

  Benedetto Fó presented himself for work at the four-story office building near the entrance of Saint Peter's Square at the thoroughly reasonable Roman hour of ten-thirty. In a city filled with beautifully dressed men, Fó was clearly an exception. His trousers had long ago lost their crease, the toes of his black leather shoes were scuffed, and the pockets of his sport jacket had been misshapen by his habit of filling them with notepads, tape recorders, and batches of folded papers. The Vatican correspondent for La Repubblica, Fó did not trust a man who couldn't carry his possessions in his pockets.

  He picked his way through a pack of tourists queued up outside the souvenir shops on the ground floor and tried to enter the foyer. A blue-uniformed guard blocked his path. Fó sighed heavily and rummaged through his pockets until he found his press credentials.

  It was a wholly unnecessary ritual, for Benedetto Fó was the dean of the Vaticanisti and his face was as well known to the Press Office security staff as the one belonging to the Austrian bullyboy who ran the place. Forcing him to show his badge was just another form of subtle punishment, like banning him from the Pope's airplane for next month's papal visit to Argentina and Chile. Fó had been a naughty boy. Fó was on probation. He'd been placed on the rack and offered a chance to repent. One more misstep and they'd tie him to the stake and light a match.

  The Sala Stampa della Santa Sede, otherwise known as the Vatican Press Office, was an island of modernity in a Renaissance sea. Fó passed through a set of automatic glass doors, then crossed a floor of polished black marble to his cubicle in the press room. The Vatican inflicted a vow of poverty on those it deemed worthy of permanent credentials. Fó's office consisted of a tiny Formica desk with a telephone and a fax machine that was forever breaking down at the worst possible time. His neighbor was a Rubenesque blonde from Inside the Vatican magazine called Giovanna. She thought him a heretic and refused his repeated invitations to lunch.

  He sat heavily in his chair. A copy of L'Osservatore Romano lay on his desk, next to a stack of clippings from the Vatican News Service. The Vatican's version of Pravda and Tass. With a heavy heart, Fó began to read, like a Kremlinologist looking for hidden meaning in an announcement that a certain member of the Politburo was suffering from a heavy chest cold. It was the usual drivel. Fó pushed aside the papers and began the long deliberation about where to have lunch.

  He looked at Giovanna. Perhaps this would be the day her stoicism crumbled. He squeezed his way inside her cubicle. She was hunched over a bollettino, an official press release. When Fó peered over her shoulder, she covered it with her forearm like a schoolgirl hiding a test paper from the boy at the next desk.

  "What is it, Giovanna?"

  "They just released it. Go get your own and see for yourself."

  She shoved him into the hall. The touch of her hand on Fó's hip lingered as he made his way toward the front of the room, where a fierce-looking nun sat behind a wooden desk. She bore an uncomfortable resemblance to a teacher who used to beat him with a stick. She handed him a pair oibollettini joylessly, like a camp guard doling out punishment rations. Just to annoy her, Fó read them standing in front of the desk.

  The first dealt with a staff appointment at the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith. Hardly anything the readers of La Repubblica cared about. Fó would leave that one for Giovanna and her cohorts at the Catholic News Service. The second was far more interesting. It was issued in the form of an amendment to the Holy Father's schedule on Friday. He had cancelled an audience with a delegation from the Philippines and instead would pay a brief visit to the Great Synagogue of Rome to address the congregation.

  Fó looked up and frowned. A trip to the synagogue announced two days before the fact? Impossible! An event like that should have been on the papal schedule weeks ago. It didn't take an experienced Vatican hand to know something was up.

  Fó peered down a marble-floored corridor. At the end was an open door giving onto a pompous office. Seated behind a polished desk was a forbidding figure named Rudolf Gertz, the former Austrian television journalist who was now the head of the Vatican Press Office. It was against the rules to set foot in the corridor without permission. Fó decided on a suicide run. When the nun wasn't looking, he leapt down the hall like a springbok. A few steps from

  Gertz's door a burly priest seized Fó by his coat collar and lifted him off the floor. Fó managed to hold up the bollettino.

  "What do you think you're playing at, Rudolf? Do you take us for idiots? How dare you drop this on us with two days' notice? We should have been briefed! Why's he going? What's he going to say?"

  Gertz looked up calmly. He had a skier's tan and was groomed for the evening news. Fó hung there helplessly, awaiting an answer he knew would never come, for somewhere during his journey from Vienna to the Vatican, Rudolf Gertz seemed to have lost the ability to speak.

  "You don't know why he's going to the synagogue, do you, Rudolf? The Pope is keeping secrets from the Press Office. Something is up, and I'm going to find out what it is."

  Gertz raised an eyebrow--"I wish you the best of luck." The burly priest took it as a signal to frog-march Fó back to the press room and deposit him at his cubicle.

  Fó shoved his things into his coat pockets and headed downstairs. He walked toward the river along the Via della Conciliazione, the bollettino still crumpled in his fist. Fó knew it was a signal of cataclysmic events to come. He just didn't know what they were. Against all better judgment, he had allowed himself to be used in a game as old as time itself: a Vatican intrigue pitting one wing of the Curia against the other. He suspected that the surprise announcement of a visit to the Great Synagogue of Rome was the culmination of that game. He was furious that he'd been blindsided like everyone else. He'd made a deal. The deal, in the opinion of Benedetto Fó, had been broken.

  He stopped in the piazza just outside the ramparts of the Castel Sant'Angelo. He needed to make a telephone call--a call that. couldn't be made from his desk in the Sala Stampa. From a public telephone, he dialed a number for an extension inside the Apostolic Palace. It was the private number of a man very close to the Holy Father. He answered as though he were expecting Fó's call.

  "We had an agreement, Luigi," Fó said without preamble. "You broke that agreement."

  "Calm down, Benedetto. Don't hurl accusations that you'll regret later."

  "I agreed to play your little game about the Holy Father's childhood in exchange for something special."

  "Trust me, Benedetto, something very special will be coming your way sooner than you think."

  "I'm about to be permanently banned from the Sala Stampa because I helped y
ou. The least you could have done is warn me that this trip to the synagogue was coming."

  "I couldn't do that, for reasons that will be abundantly clear to you in the coming days. As for your problems at the Sala Stampa, this too shall pass."

  "Why is he going to the synagogue?"

  "You'll have to wait until Friday, like everyone else."

  "You're a bastard, Luigi."

  "Please try to remember you're talking to a priest."

  "You're not a priest. You're a cutthroat in a clerical suit."

  "Flattery will get you nowhere, Benedetto. I'm sorry, but the Holy Father would like a word."

  The line went dead. Fó slammed down the receiver and headed wearily back to the Press Office.

  A SHORT distance away, in a barricaded diplomatic compound at the end of a tree-lined cul-de-sac called the Via Michle Mercati,

  Aaron Shilo, Israel's ambassador to the Holy See, was seated behind his desk, leafing his way through a batch of morning correspondence from the Foreign Ministry in Tel Aviv. A compact woman with short dark hair knocked on the door jamb and entered the room without waiting for permission. Yael Ravona, Ambassador Shiloh's secretary, dropped a single sheet of paper on his desk. It was a bulletin from the Vatican News Service.

  "This just came over the wire."

  The ambassador read it quickly, then looked up. "The synagogue? Why didn't they tell us something like this was coming? It makes no sense."

  "Judging from the tone of that dispatch, the Press Office and VNS were caught off-guard."

  "Put in a call to the Secretariat of State. Tell them I'd like to speak with Cardinal Brindisi."

  "Yes, ambassador."

  Yael Ravona walked out. The ambassador picked up his telephone and dialed a number in Tel Aviv. A moment later, he said quietly: "I need to speak to Shamron."

  AT THAT same moment, Carlo Casagrande was seated in the back of his Vatican staff car, speeding along the winding S4 motorway through the mountains northeast of Rome. The reason for his unscheduled journey lay in the locked attaché case resting on the seat next to him. It was a report, delivered to him earlier that morning, by the agent he had assigned to investigate the childhood of the Holy Father. The agent had been forced to resort to a black-bag operation--a break-in at the apartment of Benedetto Fó. A hurried search of files had produced his notes on the matter. A summary of those notes was contained in the report.