Daniel Silva GABRIEL ALLON Novels 1-4 (116 page)

Gabriel changed in the car while Chiara drove the final miles to Munich. It was mid-afternoon by the time they arrived. The sky was low and dark, and it was raining steadily. Operational weather, Shamron would have called it. A gift from the intelligence gods. Gabriel’s head was throbbing with exhaustion, and his eyes felt as though there was sand beneath the lids. He tried to remember the last time he’d had a proper night’s sleep. He looked at Chiara and saw that she was hanging on to the steering wheel as though it were the only thing keeping her upright. A hotel was out of the question. Chiara had an idea.

JUST BEYOND
the old city center, near the Reichen-bachplatz, stands a rather drab, flat-fronted stucco building. Above the glass double doors is a sign:
JÜDISCHESEINKAUFSZENTRUM VON MÜNCHEN
:
JEWISH COMMUNITY CENTER OF MUNICH
. Chiara parked outside the front entrance and hurried inside. She returned five minutes later, drove around the corner, and parked opposite a side entrance. A girl was holding open the door. She was Chiara’s age, heavy-hipped, with hair the color of a raven’s wing.

“How did you manage this?” Gabriel asked.

“They called my father in Venice. He vouched for us.”

The interior of the center was modern and lit by harsh fluorescent light. They followed the girl up a staircase to the top floor, where they were shown into a small room with a bare linoleum floor and a pair of matching twin beds made up with beige spreads. To Gabriel, it seemed rather like a sick ward.

“We keep it for guests and emergencies,” the girl said. “You’re welcome to use it for a few hours. Through that door is a bathroom with a shower.”

“I need to send a fax,” Gabriel said.

“There’s one downstairs. I’ll take you.”

Gabriel followed her to a small office near the main reception area.

“Do you have a copier?”

“Of course. Right over there.”

Gabriel removed Sister Regina Carcassi’s letter from his jacket pocket and made a photocopy. Then he scribbled a few words on a separate piece of paper and handed them all to the girl. Gabriel recited the number from memory, and she fed the pages into the fax machine.

“Vienna?” she asked.

Gabriel nodded. He heard the squelch as the fax machine made contact with Eli Lavon’s office, then watched the pages slip through the feeder tray one by one. Two minutes after the transmission was complete, the fax machine rang and spit out a single page with two hastily scrawled words.

Documents received.

Gabriel recognized the handwriting as Lavon’s.

“Do you need anything else?”

“Just a few hours of sleep.”

“That I can’t help you with.” She smiled at him for the first time. “Can you find your way back upstairs?”

“No problem.”

When he returned to the guest room, the curtains were tightly drawn. Chiara lay on one of the beds, knees pulled to her chest, already asleep. Gabriel undressed and slid beneath the blanket on the second bed, quietly settling onto the creaking bedsprings so as not to wake her. Then he closed his eyes and tumbled into a dreamless sleep.

IN VIENNA
, Eli Lavon stood over his fax machine, cigarette between his lips, squinting at the document pinched between the tips of his nicotine-stained fingers. He walked back to his office, where a man sat in the heavy afternoon shadows. Lavon waved the pages.

“Our hero and heroine have surfaced.”

“Where are they?” asked Ari Shamron.

Lavon looked down at the fax and found the telephone number of the transmitting machine. “It appears they’re in Munich.”

Shamron closed his eyes. “Where in Munich?”

Lavon consulted the fax once more, and this time he was smiling when he looked up. “It looks as though our boy has found his way back to the bosom of his people.”

“And the document?”

“I’m afraid Italian is not one of my languages, but based on the first line, I’d say he found Sister Regina.”

“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.