The Confessor Page 23

  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 part 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 Ziploc 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 for 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 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 trust 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

  25

  VATICAN CITY

  BENEDETTO FOÀ 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, Foà 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, Foà 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. Foà sighed heavily and rummaged through his pockets until he found his press credentials. It was a wholly unnecessary ritual, for Benedetto Foà 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. Foà had been a naughty boy. Foà 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. Foà 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. Foà’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, Foà 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. Foà 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 Foà 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 Foà’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 of bollettini joylessly, like a camp guard doling out punishment rations. Just to annoy her, Foà 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. Foà 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 canceled 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.

  Foà 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.

  Foà 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. Foà 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 Foà by his coat collar and lifted him off the floor. Foà 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. Foà 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 Foà back to the press room and deposit him at his cubicle.

  Foà 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. Foà 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 Foà, 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 Foà’s call.

  “We had an agreement, Luigi,” Foà 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 you. 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. Foà 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 Shiloh, 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 Jerusalem. A compact woman with short dark hair knocked on the doorjamb 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 Foà. A hurried search of Foà’s files had produced his notes on the matter. A summary of those notes was contained in the report.

  The Villa Galatina appeared, perched on its own mountain, glowering at the valley below. Casagrande glimpsed one of Roberto Pucci’s guards high among the batt
lements, a rifle slung over his shoulder. The front gate was open. A tan-suited security man glanced at the SCV license plates and waved the car onto the property.

  Roberto Pucci greeted Casagrande in the entrance hall. He was dressed in riding breeches and knee-length leather boots, and smelled of gun smoke. Obviously, he had spent the morning shooting. Don Pucci often said that the only thing he loved more than his collection of guns was making money—and the Holy Mother Church, of course. The financier escorted Casagrande down a long, gloomy gallery into a cavernous great room overlooking the garden. Cardinal Marco Brindisi was already there, a thin figure perched on the edge of a chair in front of the fire, a teacup balanced precariously on his cassocked thigh. Light reflected off the lenses of the cardinal’s small round spectacles, turning them to white discs that obscured his eyes. Casagrande dropped to one knee and kissed the proffered ring. Brindisi extended the first two fingers of his right hand and solemnly offered his blessing. The cardinal, thought Casagrande, had exquisite hands.

  Casagrande sat down, worked the combination locks on his attaché, and lifted the lid. Brindisi held out his hand and accepted a single sheet of typescript on Vatican Security Office letterhead, then looked down and began to read. Casagrande folded his hands across his lap and waited patiently. Roberto Pucci paced the floor, a restless hunter looking for a target of opportunity.

  A moment later, Cardinal Brindisi stood and took a few teetering steps toward the fireplace. He dropped the report on the flames and watched it curl and disintegrate, then turned and faced Casagrande and Pucci, his eyes hidden behind the two white discs of light. Brindisi’s uomini di fiducia—his men of trust—awaited the verdict, though for Casagrande there was little suspense, because he knew the course that Brindisi would choose. Brindisi’s Church was in mortal danger. Drastic measures were in order.