The Confessor (9 page)

“And you, the street-urchin pope from the Veneto, pretend to know the truth.”

“Only God knows the truth, Marco, but Thomas Aquinas wrote of a cultivated ignorance, an
ignorantia affectata
. A willful lack of knowledge designed to protect one from the harm. It is time to shed our
ignorantia affectata
. Our Savior said that he was the light of the world, but here in the Vatican, we live in darkness. I intend to turn on the lights.”

“My memory seems to be playing tricks on me, Holiness, but it is my recollection of the conclave that we elected a
Catholic
Pope.”

“You did, Eminence, but you also elected a human one.”

“If it were not for
me,
you would still be wearing red.”

“It is the Holy Spirit who chooses popes. We just cast his ballots.”

“Another example of your shocking naïveté.”

“Will you be at my side next week in Trastevere?”

“I believe I’m going to be suffering from the flu next week.” The cardinal stood up abruptly. “Thank you, Holiness. Another pleasant meal.”

“Until next Friday?”

“That remains to be seen.”

The Pope held out his hand. Cardinal Brindisi looked down at the fisherman’s ring shining in the lamplight, then turned around and walked out without kissing it.

FATHER DONATI
listened to the quarrel between the Holy Father and the cardinal from the adjoining pantry. When Brindisi had gone, he entered the dining room and found the Pope looking tired and drawn, eyes closed, thumb and forefinger squeezing the bridge of his nose. Father Donati sat in the cardinal’s chair and pushed away the half-drunk cup of espresso.

“I know that must have been unpleasant, Holiness, but it was necessary.”

The Pope finally looked up. “We have just disturbed a sleeping cobra, Luigi.”

“Yes, Holiness.” Donati leaned forward and lowered his voice. “Now let us pray that in its rage, the cobra makes a miscalculation and bites itself.”

G
ABRIEL SPENT THE BETTER PART
of the following morning trying to track down Doctor Helmut Berger, chairman of the department of modern history at Ludwig-Maximilian University. He left two messages on the professor’s home answering machine, a second on his cellular phone, and a third with a surly secretary in the department. Over lunch in the shadowed courtyard of the hotel, he considered waiting in ambush outside the professor’s office. Then the concierge appeared with a message slip in his hand. The good professor had agreed to meet with Herr Landau at six-thirty at a restaurant called the Gastätte Atzinger on the Amalienstrasse.

That left five hours to kill. The afternoon was clear and blustery, so Gabriel decided to take a walk. Leaving the hotel, he wandered up a narrow cobblestone street that led to the southern end of the English Gardens. He moved slowly along the footpaths, beside shaded streams, across broad sunlit lawns. In the distance the thousand-foot spire of the Olympia Tower sparkled against the crystalline blue sky. Gabriel lowered his gaze and kept walking.

Leaving the park, he drifted through Schwabing. In the Adalbertstrasse he saw Frau Ratzinger sweeping the steps of No. 68. He had no wish to speak to the old woman again, so he rounded a corner and headed in the opposite direction. Every few minutes he would look up and glimpse the tower, looming before him, growing larger by degrees.

Ten minutes later, he found himself at the southern edge of the village. In many ways Olympiapark was just that: a village, a vast residential area, complete with its own railway station, its own post office, even its own mayor. The cement-block bungalows and apartment houses had not aged gracefully. In an attempt to brighten up the place, many of the units had been painted in bright tie-dye patterns.

He came upon the Connollystrasse. It was not a street, really, but a pedestrian walkway lined with small three-story apartment houses. At No. 31 he stopped walking. On the second floor, a bare-chested teenager stepped onto the balcony to shake out a throw rug. Gabriel’s memory flashed. Instead of a young German, he saw a Palestinian in a balaclava. Then a woman emerged from the ground-floor apartment, pushing a stroller and clutching a child to her breast. For an instant, Gabriel saw Issa, leader of the Black September team, his face covered in boot polish, swaggering about in his safari suit and golf hat.

The woman looked at Gabriel as though she was used to strangers standing outside her home with disbelieving expressions on their faces.
Yes,
she seemed to be saying.
Yes, this is the place where it happened. But now it’s my home, so please go.
She seemed to sense something else in his gaze—something that unnerved her—and she quickly strapped the child into the stroller and headed toward a playground.

Gabriel climbed a grassy hillock and sat in the cool grass. Usually when the memories came, he tried desperately to push them away, but now he unchained the door and allowed them to enter.
Romano . . . Springer . . . Spitzer . . . Slavin . . .
the faces of the dead flashed through his memory. Eleven in all. Two killed in the takeover. Nine more during the bungled German rescue attempt at Fürstenfeldbruck. Golda Meir wanted revenge of Biblical proportions—an eye for an eye—and she ordered the Office to “send forth the boys” to hunt down the members of Black September who had plotted the attack. A brash operations officer named Ari Shamron was placed in charge of the mission, and one of the boys he came for was a promising young student at Jerusalem’s Betsal’el School of Art named Gabriel Allon.

Somehow, Shamron had come across the file from Gabriel’s unhappy compulsory service in the army. The child of Auschwitz survivors, Gabriel was found arrogant and selfish by his superiors; prone to periods of melancholia, but also highly intelligent and capable of taking independent action without waiting for guidance from commanding officers. He was also multilingual, an attribute that had little value in a frontline infantry unit but was much sought after by Ari Shamron. His war would not be fought in the Golan or the Sinai. It would be a secret war waged in the shadows of Europe. Gabriel had tried to resist him. Shamron left him no choice.

“Once again, Jews are dying on German soil with their hands tied behind their backs,”
Shamron had said.
“Your parents survived, but how many didn’t? Their brothers and sisters? Their aunts and uncles? Grandparents? They’re all gone, aren’t they? Are you really going to sit here in Tel Aviv with your brushes and your paints and do nothing? You have gifts. Let me borrow them for a few months. Then you can do whatever you want with your life.”

The mission was code-named Operation Wrath of God. In the lexicon of the unit, Gabriel was an
aleph,
an assassin. The agents who tracked Black Septembrists and learned their habits were code-named
ayin
. A
qoph
was a communications officer. Benjamin Stern had been a
heth,
a logistician. His job was to procure transport and lodging in ways that could never be traced to the Office. Sometimes he doubled as a getaway driver. Indeed, Benjamin had been behind the wheel of the green Fiat that carried Gabriel away from the Piazza Annibaliano the night he assassinated Black September’s chief in Italy. On the way to the airport, Gabriel had forced Benjamin to pull to the side of the road so he could be sick. Even now, he could hear Benjamin shouting at him to get back into the car.

“Give me a minute.”

“You’ll miss your flight.”

“I said give me a minute!”

“What’s wrong with you? That bastard deserved to die!”

“You didn’t see his face, Beni. You didn’t see his fucking face.”

Over the next eighteen months, Shamron’s team assassinated a dozen members of Black September. Gabriel personally killed six men. When it was over, Benjamin resumed his academic career. Gabriel tried to go back to Betsal’el and do the same, but his ability to paint had been chased away by the ghosts of the men he had killed, so he left Leah behind in Israel and moved to Venice to study restoration with Umberto Conti. In restoration, he found healing. Conti, who knew nothing of Gabriel’s past, seemed to understand this. Late at night he would come to Gabriel’s room in a sagging pensione and drag him into the streets of Venice to look at art. One evening, standing before the great Titian altarpiece in the Frari church, he seized Gabriel by the arm.

“A man who is pleased with himself can be an adequate restorer but not a great restorer. Only a man with a damaged canvas of his own can truly be a great restorer. It is a meditation for you. A ritual. One day you will be a great restorer. You will be better than I am. I’m sure of it.”

And though Conti did not know it, those were the same words Shamron had said to Gabriel the night before he sent him to Rome to kill his first Palestinian.

GABRIEL WAS
standing outside the Gastätte Atzinger at six-thirty sharp. The first thing he saw of Professor Helmut Berger was the headlamp on his bicycle floating above the Amalienstrasse. Then his form appeared, legs pumping rhythmically, his thinning gray hair floating above his large ears like wings. A brown leather satchel hung across his back.

The endearing quality of the professor’s arrival evaporated in short order. Like many German intellectuals, Helmut Berger had the put-upon air of a man who had spent the day grappling with beings of inferior intelligence. He claimed to have time only for a small glass of beer, but he invited Gabriel to select something from the menu. Gabriel ordered only mineral water, which the German seemed to find deeply scandalous.

“I’m very sorry about your brother. Excuse me, your
half
brother. He was a valuable member of the faculty. His death was a shock to us all.” He spoke these lines without genuine emotion, as though they had been written for him by a graduate student. “How can I help you, Herr Landau?”

“Is it true that Benjamin was on a sabbatical at the time of his murder?”

“Yes, that’s correct. He was working on another book.”

“Do you know the subject of that book?”

“Actually, I don’t.”

“Really?” Gabriel was genuinely surprised. “Is it typical for someone to leave your department to work on a book without telling you the subject matter?”

“No, but Benjamin was very secretive about this project from the very beginning.”

Gabriel decided he could not press the issue. “Did you know anything about the kind of threats Benjamin received?”

“There were so many, it was hard to keep them straight. Benjamin’s theories about a collective German wartime guilt made him, shall we say, highly unpopular in many quarters.”

“It sounds to me as though you didn’t share Benjamin’s views.”

The professor shrugged. “A few years ago, I wrote a book on the role of the German Catholic Church during the war. Benjamin disagreed with my conclusions and said so in a very public manner. It was not a pleasant time for either of us.”

The professor looked at his watch. “I’m afraid I have another engagement. Is there anything else I can tell you? Perhaps something more relevant to your inquiries?”

“Last month, Benjamin made a trip to Italy. Do you happen to know why he went there? Was it connected to the book in any way?”

“I have no idea. You see, Doctor Stern didn’t make a habit of giving me advance warning about his travel plans.” The professor finished the last of his beer and stood up. Class dismissed. “Again, my condolences, Herr Landau. I wish you luck in your inquiries.”

Like hell you do,
thought Gabriel, as he watched Professor Berger walk outside and pedal away.

ON THE
way back to his hotel, Gabriel entered a large student bookstore on the southern edge of the university district. He gazed at the store directory for a moment, then climbed the stairs to the travel section, where he searched a display bin filled with maps until he came across one for northern Italy.

He spread it over a nearby table, then reached into his pocket and removed the postcard. The hotel where Benjamin had stayed was in a town called Brenzone. Judging from the photograph, the town was set on the shoreline of one of Italy’s northern lakes. He started in the west and worked his way slowly eastward, reading the names of the towns and villages surrounding each of the great northern lakes—first Maggiore, then Como, then Iseo, and finally Garda.
Brenzone.
There it was, on the eastern shore of the Lago di Garda, about halfway between the bulge at the southern end and the dagger-like northern tip.