The Confessor (47 page)

Ari Shamron monitored Gabriel’s recovery from Tel Aviv. Against Lev’s wishes, Shamron managed to tunnel his way back into King Saul Boulevard to head up what eventually became known as Team Leopard. The sole purpose of the group was to locate and neutralize the elusive terrorist thought to be responsible for the murder of Benjamin Stern and countless others. Shamron seemed rejuvenated by the new assignment. Those closest to him noticed a marked improvement in his appearance.

Unfortunately for those drafted onto his team, better health brought the return of his fiery temper, and he drove himself and his underlings to the point of exhaustion. No lead, no piece of gossip, was deemed too small to ignore. There was a suspected sighting of the Leopard in Paris and another in Helsinki. There was a report that Czech police suspected the Leopard was behind a murder in Prague. His name surfaced in Moscow in connection with the murder of a senior intelligence official. An Office agent in Baghdad heard rumors that the Leopard had just signed a contract to work for the Iraqi secret service.

The clues were tantalizing, but eventually they all proved fruitless. In spite of the setbacks, the old man pleaded with his team not to lose faith. Shamron had his own theory about how the Leopard would be found. It was money that fueled him, Shamron told his team, and it would be money that would bring him down.

ONE WARM
evening in the last days of May, a soccer ball bounded toward Gabriel as he walked in the Campo di Ghetto Nuovo with Chiara. He released her hand and lunged toward the moving ball with three swift steps. “Gabriel! Your head!” she shouted, but he did not listen. He drew back his foot and met the ball with a solid
thump
that echoed off the façade of the synagogue. It sailed through the air in a graceful arc and landed in the hands of a boy, about twelve years old, with a
kippah
clipped to his head of curly hair. The child stared at Gabriel for a moment, then smiled and ran off to rejoin his friends. Returning home, Gabriel telephoned Francesco Tiepolo and told him he was ready to go back to work.

HIS PLATFORM
was as he had left it: his brushes and his palette, his pigment and his medium. He had the church to himself. The others—Adriana, Antonio Politi, and the rest of the San Zaccaria team—had completed their work and moved on long ago. Chiara never left the church while Gabriel was inside. With his back to the door, framed by the majestic altarpiece, he made an inviting target, so she sat at the base of his scaffolding while he worked, her dark eyes fixed on the door. She made only one demand—that he remove the shroud—and uncharacteristically he agreed.

He worked long hours, longer than he would have preferred under normal circumstances, but he was determined to finish as quickly as possible. Tiepolo stopped by once a day to bring food and check on his progress. Some days he would linger for a few minutes to keep Chiara company. Once he even hauled his lumbering frame up the scaffolding to consult with Gabriel on a difficult section of the apse.

Gabriel worked with renewed confidence. He had spent so much time studying Bellini and his works that some days he could almost feel the presence of the master standing next to him, telling him what to do next. He worked from the center outward—the Madonna and child, the saints and the donors, the intricate background. He thought about the case in much the same way. As he worked, he was troubled by two questions that ran incessantly through his subconscious. Who had given Benjamin the documents on the Garda covenant in the first place? And why?

ONE AFTERNOON
late in June, Chiara looked up and saw him standing on the edge of the scaffolding, right hand on his chin, left hand supporting his right elbow, head tilted slightly down. He stood motionless for a long time, ten minutes by Chiara’s watch, his eyes traveling the length and breadth of the towering canvas. Chiara took the scaffolding in hand and shook it once, the way Tiepolo always did. Gabriel looked down at her and smiled.

“Is it finished, Signor Delvecchio?”

“Almost,” he said distantly. “I just need to talk to him one more time.”

“What on earth are you talking about?”

But Gabriel made no reply. Instead, he knelt down and spent the next several minutes cleaning his brushes and palette and packing away his pigments and medium in a flat rectangular case. He climbed off the scaffolding, took Chiara by the hand, and walked out of the church for the last time. On the way home, they stopped by Tiepolo’s office in San Marco. Gabriel told him that he needed to see the Holy Father. By the time they arrived home in Cannaregio, a message was waiting on the answering machine.

Bronze Doors, tomorrow evening, eight o’clock. Don’t be late.

G
ABRIEL CROSSED
S
T
. P
ETER
’
S
S
QUARE
at dusk. Father Donati met him at the Bronze Doors. He shook Gabriel’s hand solemnly and remarked that he looked much better than he had the last time they had met. “The Holy Father is expecting you,” Father Donati said. “It’s best not to keep him waiting.”

The priest led Gabriel up the Scala Regia. A five-minute walk along an archipelago of looming corridors and darkened courtyards brought them to the Vatican Gardens. In the dusty sienna light it was easy to spot the Pope. He was walking along a footpath near the Ethiopian College, his white soutane glowing like an acetylene torch.

Father Donati left Gabriel at the Pope’s side and drifted slowly back toward the palace. The Pope took Gabriel’s arm and led him along the pathway. The evening air was warm and soft and heavy with the scent of pine.

“I’m pleased to see you looking so well,” the Pope said. “You’ve made a remarkable recovery.”

“Shamron is convinced it was your prayers that brought me out of the coma. He says he’ll testify to the miracle of the Gemelli Clinic at your beatification proceedings.”

“I’m not sure how many in the Church will support my canonization after the commission has finished its work.” He chuckled and squeezed Gabriel’s bicep. “Are you pleased with the restoration of the San Zaccaria altarpiece?”

“Yes, Holiness. Thank you for intervening on my behalf.”

“It was the only just solution. You started the restoration. It was fitting that you complete it. Besides, that altarpiece is one of my favorite paintings. It needed the hands of the great Mario Delvecchio.”

The Pope guided Gabriel onto a narrow pathway leading toward the Vatican walls. “Come,” he said. “I want to show you something.” They headed directly toward the spire of Vatican Radio’s transmission tower. At the wall, they mounted a flight of stone steps and climbed up to the parapet. The city lay before them, rustling and stirring, dusty and dirty, eternal Rome. From this angle, in this light, it was not so different from Jerusalem. All that was missing was the cry of the muezzin, calling the faithful to evening prayer. Then Gabriel’s eye traveled down the length of the Tiber, to the synagogue at the entrance of the old ghetto, and he realized why the Pope had brought him here.

“You have a question you wish to ask me, Gabriel?”

“I do, Holiness.”

“I suspect you want to know how your friend Benjamin Stern got the documents about the covenant at Garda in the first place.”

“You’re a very wise man, Holiness.”

“Am I? Look at what I have wrought.”

The Pope was silent for a moment, his gaze fixed on the towering synagogue. Finally he turned to Gabriel. “Will you be my confessor, Gabriel—metaphorically speaking, of course?”

“I’ll be whatever you want me to be, Holiness.”

“Do you know about the seal of confession? What I tell you here tonight must never be repeated. For a second time, I place my life in your hands.” He looked away. “The question is, whose hands are they? Are they the hands of Gabriel Allon? Or are they the hands of Mario Delvecchio, the restorer?”

“Which would you prefer?”

The Pope looked across the river once more, toward the synagogue, and leaving Gabriel’s question unanswered, he began to speak.

THE POPE
told Gabriel of the conclave, the terrible night of agony at the Dormitory of St. Martha, when, like Christ in the Garden of Gethsemane, he had begged God to let this cup pass from his lips. How could a man with knowledge of the terrible secret of the Garda covenant be chosen to lead the Church? What would he do with such knowledge? The night before the final session of the conclave, he summoned Father Donati to his room and told the priest he would refuse the papacy if chosen. Then, for the first time, he told his trusted aide what had happened at the convent by the lake that night in 1942.

“Father Donati was horrified,” the Pope said. “He believed that the Holy Spirit had chosen me for a reason, and that reason was to confess the secret of the Garda covenant and cleanse the Church. But Father Donati is a very clever man and a skilled operative. He knew the secret had to be revealed in such a way that it would not destroy my papacy in its infancy.”

“It had to be revealed by someone other than you.”

The Pope nodded.
Indeed.

Father Donati went looking for Sister Regina Carcassi. In retrospect, it was probably Father Donati’s relentless search of Church records that alerted the hounds of Crux Vera. He found her living alone in a village in the north. He asked about her memories of that night in 1942, and she gave him a copy of a letter—a letter she had written the night before her wedding. Father Donati then asked whether she would be willing to speak publicly. Enough time had passed, Regina Carcassi said. She would do whatever Father Donati asked.

As powerful as Sister Regina’s letter was, Father Donati knew he needed more. There had been rumors inside the Curia for years that the KGB had been in possession of a document that had the power to inflict serious damage on the Church. According to the rumor mill, the document was almost leaked during the showdown with the Polish pope, but calmer heads inside the KGB prevailed, and it remained buried in the KGB archives. Father Donati traveled secretly to Moscow and met with the chief of the KGB’s successor, the Russian Foreign Intelligence Service. After three days of negotiation, he took possession of the document. Captured by advancing Russian forces in the final days of the war, it was a memorandum written by Martin Luther to Adolf Eichmann about a meeting at a convent on Lake Garda.

“When I read it, I knew the battle that lay ahead would be a difficult one,” the Pope said. “You see, the document contained two ominous words.”

“Crux Vera,” said Gabriel, and the Pope nodded in agreement.
Crux Vera.

Father Donati began searching for the right man to bring these documents to the attention of the world. A man of passion. A man whose past work made him above reproach. Father Donati settled on an Israeli Holocaust historian attached to Ludwig-Maximilian University in Munich: Professor Benjamin Stern. Father Donati traveled to Munich and met with him secretly at his flat on the Adalbertstrasse. He showed Professor Stern the documents and promised full cooperation. Senior Vatican officials, who for obvious reasons could not be named, would attest to their authenticity. At the time of publication, the Vatican would refrain from public attacks on the book. Professor Stern accepted the offer and took possession of the documents. He secured a contract for the work from his publisher in New York and a leave of absence from his department at Ludwig-Maximilian. Then he began his work. At Father Donati’s suggestion, he did so under the utmost secrecy.

Three months later, the trouble began. Father Cesare Felici disappeared. Two days after that, Father Manzini vanished. Father Donati tried to warn Regina Carcassi, but it was too late. She too disappeared. He traveled to Munich to meet with Benjamin Stern and warn him that his life was in grave danger. Professor Stern promised to take precautions. Father Donati feared for the professor’s life and for his own stratagem. Skilled operative that he was, he began to prepare a backup plan.

“And then they killed Benjamin,” Gabriel said.

“It was a terrible blow. Needless to say, I felt responsible for his death.”

Father Donati was outraged by the murder, the Pope resumed. He vowed to use the secret of the Garda covenant to destroy Crux Vera—or, better still, to force Crux Vera to destroy itself. He hastily scheduled the appearance at the synagogue. He whispered secrets into the ears of known Crux Vera members—secrets he knew would eventually reach Carlo Casagrande and Cardinal Brindisi. He enlisted Benedetto Foà of
La Repubblica
to ask questions about the Pope’s childhood at the press office, which was run by Rudolf Gertz, a member of the society.