The Confessor (48 page)

“Father Donati was waving a red flag in front of the bull,” Gabriel said. “And
you
were the red flag.”

“That’s right,” the Pope replied. “He was hoping he could goad Crux Vera into an act so repulsive that he could use it as justification to destroy them once and for all, and purge the group’s influence from the Curia.”

“A tale as old as time,” Gabriel said. “A Vatican intrigue, with your life hanging in the balance. And it worked out better than Father Donati could have hoped. Carlo Casagrande sent his assassin against Cardinal Brindisi and then killed himself. Then Father Donati rewarded Benedetto Foà by giving him the dirt on Crux Vera. The group is discredited and disgraced.”

“And the Curia is free of its poisonous influence, at least for the moment.” The Pope took hold of Gabriel’s hand and looked directly into his eyes. “And now I have a question for you. Will you grant me forgiveness for the murder of your friend?”

“It’s not mine to give, Holiness.”

The Pope lifted his gaze toward the river. “Some nights, when the wind is right, I swear I can still hear it. The rumble of the German trucks. The pleading for the Pope to do something. Sometimes now, when I look at my hands, I see blood. The blood of Benjamin. We used him to do our dirty work. It is because of us that he is dead.” He turned and looked at Gabriel. “I need your forgiveness. I need to sleep.”

Gabriel looked into his eyes for a moment, then nodded slowly. The Pope raised his right hand, fingers extended, but stopped himself. He placed his palms on Gabriel’s shoulders and pulled him to his breast.

FATHER DONATI
saw him out. At the Bronze Doors, he handed Gabriel an envelope. “Somehow, the Leopard managed to get into the papal study before he killed Cardinal Brindisi. He left this on the Pope’s desk. I thought you might like to see it.”

Then he shook Gabriel’s hand and disappeared into the palace once more. Gabriel crossed the deserted expanse of St. Peter’s Square as the bells of the Basilica tolled nine o’clock. An Office car was waiting near St. Anne’s Gate. There was still time to catch the night train for Venice.

He opened the envelope. The short, handwritten note was a photocopy. The nine-millimeter bullet was not.

This could have been yours, Holiness.

Gabriel crushed the note into a tight ball. A moment later, crossing the Tiber, he tossed it into the black water. The bullet he slipped into his jacket pocket.

T
HE SNOWS HAD COME EARLY
. Overnight, a November gale had swept over the spires of the Eiger and the Jungfrau and left a half-meter of downy powder on the slopes below Kleine Scheidegg. Eric Lange pushed himself clear of the chairlift, the last of the day, and floated gracefully down the slope through the lengthening shadows of late afternoon.

At the bottom of the slope, he turned off the trail and entered a stand of pine. The sun had slipped behind the massif, and the grove was deep in shadow. Lange navigated by memory, picking his way effortlessly between the trees.

His chalet appeared, perched at the edge of the wood, staring out over the valley toward Grindelwald. He skied to the back entrance, removed his gloves, and punched the security code into the keypad located next to the door.

He heard a sound. Footfalls on new snow. He turned and saw a man walking toward him. Dark blue anorak, short hair, gray at the temples. Sunglasses. Lange ripped open his ski jacket and reached inside for his Stechkin. It was too late. The man in the blue anorak already had a Beretta aimed at Lange’s chest, and he was walking faster now.

The Israeli . . .
Lange was sure of it. He knew the way they were trained to kill. Advance on the target while shooting. Keep shooting until the target is dead.

Lange seized the grip of the Stechkin and was trying to bring it into play when the Israeli fired—a single shot, which struck Lange perfectly in the heart. He toppled backward into the snow. The Stechkin slipped from his fingers.

The Israeli stood over him. Lange braced himself for the pain of more bullets, but the Israeli just pushed his sunglasses onto his forehead and stood there, watching Lange curiously. His eyes were a brilliant shade of green. They were the last thing Lange ever saw.

HE HIKED
down the valley through the gathering dusk. The car was waiting for him, parked at the edge of a rocky stream. The engine turned over as he approached. Chiara leaned across the passenger seat and pushed open the door. Gabriel climbed in and closed his eyes.
For you, Beni,
he thought.
For you.

The Confessor
is a work of fiction. The cardinals and clergy, spies and assassins, secret policemen and secret Church societies portrayed in this novel are products of the author’s imagination or have been used fictitiously. Any resemblance to any person, living or dead, is entirely coincidental. The Convent of the Sacred Heart in Brenzone does not exist. Martin Luther of the German Foreign Ministry was present at the Wannsee Conference, but the actions attributed to him in
The Confessor
are wholly fictitious. Pope Pius XII reigned from 1939 until his death in 1958. His public silence in the face of the annihilation of Europe’s Jews, despite repeated Allied requests to speak out, is, in the words of Holocaust scholar Susan Zuccotti, a fact that is “rarely contested, nor can it be.” So is the sanctuary and aid given by Church officials to Adolf Eichmann and other prominent Nazi murderers after the defeat of the Third Reich.

Defenders of Pius XII, including the Vatican itself, have portrayed him as a friend of the Jews whose tireless, quiet diplomacy saved hundreds of thousands of Jewish lives. His critics have portrayed him as a calculating politician who, at best, displayed a callous and near-criminal indifference to the plight of the Jews, or, at worst, was actually complicit in the Holocaust.

A more complete portrait of Pope Pius XII might be drawn from documents concealed in the Vatican Secret Archives, but more than a half-century after the end of the war, the Holy See still refuses to open its repository of records to historians in search of the truth. Instead, it insists that historians may review only the eleven volumes of archival material, mainly wartime diplomatic traffic, published between 1965 and 1981. These records, known as
Actes et Documents du Saint Siège relatifs à la Seconde Guerre Mondiale,
have contributed to many of the unflattering historical accounts of the war—and these are the documents the Vatican is
willing
to let the world see.

What other damning material might reside in the Secret Archives? In October 1999, in a bid to calm the controversy swirling about its beleaguered Pope, the Vatican created a commission of six independent historians to assess the conduct of Pius XII and the Holy See during the war. After reviewing those documents already made public, the commission concluded: “No serious historian could accept that the published, edited volumes could put us at the end of the story.” It submitted to the Vatican a list of forty-seven questions, along with a request for supporting documentary evidence from the Secret Archives—records such as “diaries, memoranda, appointment books, minutes of meetings, draft documents” and the personal papers of senior wartime Vatican officials. Ten months passed without a response. When it became clear the Vatican had no intention of releasing the documents, the commission disbanded, its work unfinished. The Vatican angrily accused the three
Jewish
members of “clearly incorrect behavior” and of waging a “slanderous campaign” against the Church, though it leveled no such accusations against the three Catholic members. According to sources quoted by
The Guardian
newspaper, access to the Secret Archives “was blocked by a cabal led by the Vatican’s secretary of state, Cardinal Angelo Sodano.” Cardinal Sodano, it was suggested, opposes opening the Archives because it would set a terribly dangerous precedent and leave the Vatican vulnerable to other historical investigations, such as the relationship between the Holy See and the murderous military regimes of Latin America.

Clearly, there are those within the Church who would like the Vatican to offer a more complete accounting of its wartime actions, coupled with a more energetic admission of guilt for the Church’s persecution of the Jews. Archbishop Rembert Weakland of Milwaukee appears to be one of them. “We Catholics through the centuries acted in a fashion contrary to God’s law toward our Jewish brothers and sisters,” Archbishop Weakland told Congregation Shalom in Fox Point, Wisconsin, in November 1999. “Such actions harmed the Jewish community through the ages in both physical and psychological ways.”

The archbishop then made the following remarkable statement: “I acknowledge that we Catholics—by preaching a doctrine that the Jewish people were unfaithful, hypocritical and God-killers—reduced the human dignity of our Jewish brothers and sisters and created attitudes that made reprisals against them seem like acts of conformity to God’s will. By doing so, I confess that we Catholics contributed to the attitudes that made the Holocaust possible.”

This novel, like the previous two books in the series,
The Kill Artist
and
The English Assassin,
could not have been written without the guidance, support, and friendship of David Bull. Unlike the fictitious Gabriel Allon, David is truly one of the world’s finest art restorers. His encyclopedic knowledge of art history, along with his experiences working in the restoration community of Venice, proved invaluable and inspirational and for that I am eternally in his debt. He answered all my questions, no matter how tedious, read my manuscript for accuracy, and never failed to make me laugh.

Fred Francis, the award-winning NBC News correspondent, shared his experiences behind the walls of the Vatican and his memories of the turbulent years when Italy was caught in the grips of Red Brigades terror. Brian Ross, the brilliant ABC News investigative reporter, regaled me with stories about covering the less seemly side of the Vatican, including his infamous encounter with Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, which resulted in Brian’s actually being slapped by the Inquisitor. Columnist E. J. Dionne, who covered the Vatican for
The New York Times,
allowed me to pick his agile and analytical mind, as did Daniel Jonah Goldhagen. My cousins Axel Lorka and Stacey Blatt generously and humorously recounted their days at Adalbertstrasse 68, which allowed me to bring “an apartment in Munich” to life. Italian law enforcement authorities, who cannot be named, helped me to get the details of the country’s security and police agencies as accurate as possible. A special thanks to the Israeli officials in Rome who lent me assistance as well.

One of my dearest friends, journalist and author Louis Toscano, read my manuscript and, as always, made marked improvements. Columnist and MSNBC commentator Bill Press shared his memories of the School of Theology at the University of Fribourg and proofread my manuscript for accuracy on all things Catholic. Rabbi Mindy Portnoy of Temple Sinai in Washington, D.C., was an advisor and friend and managed to change my life for the better along the way.

The evidence of Europe’s new anti-Semitism is all too visible in Rome, where members of the Jewish community pray each evening in a synagogue surrounded by heavily armed
carabinieri
units. Like the Jews of Venice, they treated me kindly and provided me with experiences I will never forget. My tour guide in Venice, Valentina Ronzan of the
Museo Ebraico di Venezia,
showed me corners of the ancient ghetto no history book could reveal.

While writing
The Confessor,
I consulted dozens of books, articles, and websites dealing with the papacy of Pope Pius XII, the Shoah, and the history of the Roman Catholic Church. Among those writers whose work proved especially helpful were John Cornwell, Susan Zuccotti, Garry Wills, David I. Kertzer, James Carroll, Michael Phayer, Gitta Sereny, Guenter Lewy, Michael Novak, Ronald Rychlak, Robert S. Wistrich, Kevin Madigan, Carl Bernstein, Thomas Reese, Daniel Jonah Goldhagen, Mark Aarons and John Loftus, Peter Hebblethwaite, and Tad Szulc. Without their meticulous scholarship, it would not have been possible for me to construct this work of fiction.