The Confessor (34 page)
“Let me see that.”
Lavon handed the fax pages to Shamron. He read the first line aloud—
“Mi chiamo Regina Carcassi . . .”—
then looked up sharply at Lavon.
“Do you know anyone who speaks Italian?”
“I can find someone.”
“
Now,
Eli.”
WHEN GABRIEL
woke, the darkness was complete. He raised his wrist to his face and focused his gaze on the luminous dial of his watch. Ten o’clock. He reached down toward the floor and groped through his clothing until he found Sister Regina’s letter. He breathed again.
Chiara lay next to him. At some point she had left her own bed and, like a small child, crawled into his. Her back was turned to him, and her hair lay across his pillow. When he touched her shoulder, she rolled over and faced him. Her eyes were damp.
“What’s wrong?”
“I was just thinking.”
“About what?”
A long silence, broken by the blare of a car horn outside their window. “I used to pop into the Church of San Zaccaria while you were working. I’d see you up there on your scaffolding, hidden behind your shroud. Sometimes, I’d peer around the edge and see you staring at the face of the Virgin.”
“Obviously, I’m going to have to get a bigger shroud.”
“It’s her, isn’t it? When you look at the Virgin, you see the face of your wife. You see her scars.” When Gabriel made no response, Chiara propped her head on her elbow and studied his face, running her forefinger down the length of his nose, as though it were sculpture. “I feel so sorry for you.”
“I have no one to blame but myself. I was a fool to bring her into the field.”
“That’s why I feel sorry for you. If you could blame someone else, it might be easier.”
She laid her head on his chest and was silent for a moment. “God, but I hate this place.
Munich.
The place where it all started. Did you know Hitler had a headquarters a few streets over?”
“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 flyers 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 Barerstrasse, 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 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.
A SYNAGOGUE BY THE RIVER