Daniel Silva GABRIEL ALLON Novels 1-4 (144 page)

Gabriel thought of the Pages of Testimony in the Hall of Names, the only gravestones for millions of victims.

“Max Klein swore that he saw Ludwig Vogel at Auschwitz in summer or early autumn of 1942,” Gabriel said. “Based on what you’ve told me, that’s entirely possible.”

“Indeed, assuming, of course, that Vogel and Radek are in fact the same man. Radek’s
Sonderkommando
1005 was definitely active in Auschwitz in 1942. Whether Radek was there or not on a given day is probably impossible to prove.”

“How much do we know about what happened to Radek after the war?”

“Not much, I’m afraid. He attempted to flee Berlin disguised as a Wehrmacht corporal. He was arrested on suspicion of being an SS man and was interned at the Mannheim POW camp. Sometime in early 1946, he escaped. After that, it’s a mystery. It appears he managed to get out of Europe. There were alleged sightings in all the usual places—Syria, Egypt, Argentina, Paraguay—but nothing reliable. The Nazi hunters were after big fish like Eichmann, Bormann, Mengele, and Müller. Radek managed to fly below the radar. Besides, the secret of
Aktion
1005 was so well kept that the subject barely arose at the Nuremberg trials. No one really knew much about it.”

“Who ran Mannheim?”

“It was an American camp.”

“Do we know how he managed to escape Europe?”

“No, but we should assume that he had help.”

“The ODESSA?”

“It might have been the ODESSA, or one of the other secret Nazi aid networks.” Rivlin hesitated, then said, “Or it might have been a highly public and ancient institution based in Rome that operated the most successful Ratline of the postwar period.”

“The Vatican?”

Rivlin nodded. “The ODESSA couldn’t hold a candle to the Vatican when it came to financing and running an escape route from Europe. Because Radek was an Austrian, he would almost certainly have been assisted by Bishop Hudal.”

“Who’s Hudal?”

“Aloïs Hudal was an Austrian native, an anti-Semite, and a fervent Nazi. He used his position as rector of the Pontificio Santa Maria dell’Anima, the German seminary in Rome, to help hundreds of SS officers escape justice, including Franz Stangl, the commandant of Treblinka.”

“What kind of assistance did he provide them?”

“For starters, a Red Cross passport in a new name and an entrance visa to a country far away. He also gave them a bit of pocket money and paid for their passage.”

“Did he keep records?”

“Apparently so, but his papers are kept under lock and key at the Anima.”

“I need everything you have on Bishop Aloïs Hudal.”

“I’ll assemble a file for you.”

Gabriel picked up Radek’s photograph and looked at it carefully. There was something familiar about the face. It had been clawing at him throughout Rivlin’s briefing. Then he thought of the charcoal sketches he’d seen that morning at the Holocaust art museum, the child cowering before an SS monster, and he knew at once where he’d seen Radek’s face before.

He stood suddenly, toppling his chair.

“What’s wrong?” Rivlin asked.

“I know this man,” Gabriel said, eyes on the photo.

“How?”

Gabriel ignored the question. “I need to borrow this,” he said. Then, without waiting for Rivlin’s answer, he slipped out the door and was gone.

15

JERUSALEM

I
N THE OLD days he would have taken the fast road north through Ramallah, Nablus, and Jenin. Now, even a man with the survival skills of Gabriel would be foolhardy to attempt such a run without an armored car and battle escort. So he took the long way round, down the western slope of the Judean Mountains toward Tel Aviv, up the Coastal Plain to Hadera, then northeast, through the Mount Carmel ridge, to El Megiddo: Armageddon.

The valley opened before him, stretching from the Samarian hills in the south to the slopes of the Galilee in the north, a green-brown patchwork of row crops, orchards, and forestlands planted by the earliest Jewish settlers in Mandate Palestine. He headed toward Nazareth, then east, to a small farming town on the edge of the Balfour Forest called Ramat David.

It took him a few minutes to find the address. The bungalow that had been built for the Allons had been torn down and replaced by a California-style sandstone rambler with a satellite dish on the roof and an American-made minivan in the front drive. As Gabriel looked on, a soldier stepped from the front door and walked briskly across the front lawn. Gabriel’s memory flashed. He saw his father, making the same journey on a warm evening in June, and though he had not realized it then, it would be the last time Gabriel would ever see him alive.

He looked at the house next door. It was the house where Tziona had lived. The plastic toys littering the front lawn indicated that Tziona, unmarried and childless, did not live there anymore. Still, Israel was nothing if not an extended, quarrelsome family, and Gabriel was confident the new occupants could at least point him in the right direction.

He rang the bell. The plump young woman who spoke Russian-accented Hebrew did not disappoint him. Tziona was living up in Safed. The Russian woman had a forwarding address.

JEWS HAD BEEN living in the center of Safed since the days of antiquity. After the expulsion from Spain in 1492, the Ottoman Turks allowed many more Jews to settle there, and the city flourished as a center of Jewish mysticism, scholarship, and art. During the war of independence, Safed was on the verge of falling to superior Arab forces when the besieged community was reinforced by a platoon of Palmach fighters, who stole into the city after making a daring night crossing from their garrison on Mount Canaan. The leader of the Palmach unit negotiated an agreement with Safed’s powerful rabbis to work over Passover to reinforce the city’s fortifications. His name was Ari Shamron.

Tziona’s apartment was in the Artists’ Quarter, at the top of a flight of cobblestone steps. She was an enormous woman, draped in a white caftan, with wild gray hair and so many bracelets that she clanged and clattered when she threw her arms around Gabriel’s neck. She drew him inside, into a space that was both a living room and potter’s studio, and sat him down on the stone terrace to watch the sunset over the Galilee. The air smelled of burning lavender oil.

A plate of bread and hummus appeared, along with olives and a bottle of Golan wine. Gabriel relaxed instantly. Tziona Levin was the closest thing to a sibling he had. She had cared for him when his mother was working or was too sick from depression to get out of bed. Some nights he would climb out his window and steal next door into Tziona’s bed. She would caress and hold him in a way his mother never could. When his father was killed in the June war, it was Tziona who wiped away his tears.

The rhythmic, hypnotic sound of
Ma’ariv
prayers floated up from a nearby synagogue. Tziona added more lavender oil to the lamp. She talked of the
matsav
: the situation. Of the fighting in the Territories and the terror in Tel Aviv and Jerusalem. Of friends lost to the
sha-heed
and friends who had given up trying to find work in Israel and had moved to America instead.

Gabriel drank his wine and watched the fiery sun sink into the Galilee. He was listening to Tziona, but his thoughts were of his mother. It had been nearly twenty years since her death, and in the intervening time, he had found himself thinking of her less and less. Her face, as a young woman, was lost to him, stripped of pigment and abraded, like a canvas faded by time and exposure to corrosive elements. Only her death mask could he conjure. After the tortures of cancer, her emaciated features had settled into an expression of serenity, like a woman posing for a portrait. She seemed to welcome death. It had finally given her deliverance from the torments raging inside her memory.

Had she loved him? Yes, he thought now, but she had surrounded herself with walls and battlements that he could never scale. She was prone to melancholia and violent mood swings. She did not sleep well at night. She could not show pleasure on festive occasions and could not partake of rich food and drink. She wore a bandage always on her left arm, over the faded numbers tattooed into her skin. She referred to them as her mark of Jewish weakness, her emblem of Jewish shame.

Gabriel had taken up painting to be closer to her. She soon resented this as an unwarranted intrusion on her private world; then, when his talents matured and began to challenge hers, she begrudged his obvious gifts. Gabriel pushed her to new heights. Her pain, so visible in life, found expression in her work. Gabriel grew obsessed with the nightmarish imagery that flowed from her memory onto her canvases. He began to search for the source.

In school he had learned of a place called Birkenau. He asked her about the bandage she wore habitually on her left arm, about the long-sleeved blouses she wore, even in the furnacelike heat of the Jezreel Valley. He asked what had happened to her during the war, what had happened to his grandparents. She refused at first, but finally, under his steady onslaught of questions, she relented. Her account was hurried and reluctant; Gabriel, even in youth, was able to detect the note of evasion and more than a trace of guilt. Yes, she had been in Birkenau. Her parents had been murdered there on the day they arrived. She had worked. She had survived. That was all. Gabriel, hungry for more details about his mother’s experience, began to concoct all manner of scenarios to account for her survival. He too began to feel ashamed and guilty. Her affliction, like a hereditary disorder, was thus passed on to the next generation.

The matter was never discussed again. It was as if a steel door had swung shut, as if the Holocaust had never happened. She fell into a prolonged depression and was bedridden for many days. When finally she emerged, she retreated to her studio and began to paint. She worked relentlessly, day and night. Once Gabriel peered through the half-open door and found her sprawled on the floor, her hands stained by paint, trembling before a canvas. That canvas was the reason he had come to Safed to see Tziona.

The sun was gone. It had grown cold on the terrace. Tziona drew a shawl around her shoulders and asked Gabriel if he ever intended to come home. Gabriel mumbled something about needing to work, like Tziona’s friends who had moved to America.

“And who are you working for these days?”

He didn’t rise to the challenge. “I restore Old Master paintings. I need to be where the paintings are. In Venice.”

“Venice,”
she said derisively. “Venice is a museum.” She raised her wineglass toward the Galilee. “This is real life.
This
is art. Enough of this restoration. You should be devoting all your time and energy to your own work.”

“There’s no such thing as my own work. That went out of me a long time ago. I’m one of the best art restorers in the world. That’s good enough for me.”

Tziona threw up her hands. Her bracelets clattered like wind chimes. “It’s a lie. You’re a lie. You’re an artist, Gabriel. Come to Safed and find your art. Find
yourself.
”

Her prodding was making him uncomfortable. He might have told her there was now a woman involved, but that would have opened a whole new front that Gabriel was anxious to avoid. Instead, he allowed a silence to fall between them, which was filled by the consoling sound of
Ma’ariv.

“What are you doing in Safed?” she finally asked. “I know you didn’t come all the way up here for a lecture from your
Doda
Tziona.”

He asked whether Tziona still had his mother’s paintings and sketches.

“Of course, Gabriel. I’ve been keeping them all these years, waiting for you to come and claim them.”

“I’m not ready to take them off your hands yet. I just need to see them.”

She held a candle to his face. “You’re hiding something from me, Gabriel. I’m the only person in the world who can tell when you’re keeping secrets. It was always that way, especially when you were a boy.”

Gabriel poured himself another glass of wine and told Tziona about Vienna.

SHE PULLED OPEN the door of the storeroom and yanked down on the drawstring of the overhead light. The closet was filled floor to ceiling with canvases and sketches. Gabriel began leafing through the work. He’d forgotten how gifted his mother was. He could see the influence of Beckmann, Picasso, Egon Schiele, and of course her father, Viktor Frankel. There were even variations on themes Gabriel had been exploring in his own work at the time. His mother had expanded on them, or, in some cases, utterly demolished them. She had been breathtakingly talented.

Tziona pushed him aside and came out with a stack of canvases and two large envelopes filled with sketches. Gabriel crouched on the stone floor and examined the works while Tziona looked on over his shoulder.

There were images of the camps. Children crowded into bunks. Women slaving over machinery in the factories. Bodies stacked like cordwood, waiting to be hurled into the fire. A family huddled together while the gas gathered round them.

The final canvas depicted a solitary figure, an SS man dressed head to toe in black. It was the painting he had seen that day in his mother’s studio. While the other works were dark and abstract, here she strove for realism and revelation. Gabriel found himself marveling at her impeccable draftsmanship and brushwork before his eyes finally settled on the face of the subject. It belonged to Erich Radek.