The Confessor (18 page)

Gabriel took the photograph from Lavon and looked at it. A rodent of a man stared back at him: a slack face, thick glasses that magnified a pair of rheumy eyes. He handed the photo back to Lavon.

“Luther rose rapidly through the ranks of the Foreign Office, largely because of his slavish devotion to Ribbentrop. By 1940, he was chief of the
Abteilung Deutschland,
the Division Germany. That made Luther responsible for all Foreign Office business connected to Nazi Party affairs. Included in Luther’s
Abteilung Deutschland
was a department called D–Three, the Jewish desk.”

“So what you’re saying is that Martin Luther was in charge of Jewish matters inside the German Foreign Office.”

“Precisely,” Lavon said. “What Luther lacked in education and intelligence, he made up for in ruthlessness and ambition. He was interested in only one thing: increasing his own personal power. When it became clear to him that the annihilation of the Jews was a top priority of the regime, he set out to make certain that the Foreign Office wasn’t going to be left out of the action. His reward was an invitation to the most despicable luncheon in history.”

Lavon paused for a moment to leaf through the contents of the file. After a moment he found what he was looking for, removed it with a flourish, and laid it on the coffee table in front of Gabriel.

“This is the protocol from the Wannsee Conference, prepared and drafted by its organizer, none other than Adolf Eichmann. Only thirty copies were made. All were destroyed but one—copy number sixteen. It was discovered after the war during the preparation for the Nuremburg Trials and resides in the archives of the German Foreign Ministry in Bonn. This, of course, is a photocopy.”

Lavon picked up the document. “The meeting was held in a villa overlooking the Wannsee in Berlin on January 20, 1942. It lasted ninety minutes. There were fifteen participants. Eichmann served as host and made sure his guests were well fed. Heydrich served as master of ceremonies. Contrary to popular myth, the Wannsee Conference was not the place where the idea of the Final Solution was hatched. Hitler and Himmler had already decided that the Jews of Europe were to be exterminated. The Wannsee Conference was more like a bureaucratic planning session, a discussion of how the various departments of the Nazi Party and German government could work together to facilitate the Holocaust.”

Lavon handed the document to Gabriel. “Look at the list of participants. Recognize any of the names?”

Gabriel cast his eyes down the attendees:

Gabriel looked up at Lavon. “Luther was at Wannsee?”

“Indeed, he was. And he got exactly what he so desperately wanted. Heydrich mandated that the Foreign Office would play a pivotal role in facilitating deportations of Jews from countries allied with Nazi Germany and from German satellites such as Croatia and Slovakia.”

“I thought the SS handled the deportations.”

“Let me back up a moment.” Lavon leaned over the coffee table and placed his hands on the surface, as though it were a map of Europe. “The vast majority of Holocaust victims were from Poland, the Baltics, and western Russia—places conquered and ruled directly by the Nazis. They rounded up Jews and slaughtered them at will, without any interference from other governments, because there were no other governments.”

Lavon paused, one hand sliding over the imaginary map to the south, the other to the west. “But Heydrich and Eichmann weren’t satisfied with murdering only the Jews under direct German rule. They wanted
every
Jew in Europe—eleven million in all.” Lavon tapped his right forefinger on the table. “The Jews in the Balkans”—he tapped his left forefinger—“and the Jews in Western Europe. In most of these places, they had to deal with local governments to pry the Jews loose for deportation and extermination. Luther’s section of the Foreign Office was responsible for that. It was Luther’s job to deal with the local governments on a ministry-to-ministry basis to make certain that the deportations went smoothly and all diplomatic niceties were adhered to. And he was damned good at it.”

“For argument’s sake, let’s assume the old man was referring to this Martin Luther. What would he have been doing at a convent in northern Italy?”

Lavon shrugged his narrow shoulders. “It sounds to me as if the old man was trying to tell you that something happened at the convent during the war. Something that Mother Vincenza is trying to cover up. Something that Beni knew about.”

“Something that got him killed?”

Lavon shrugged. “Maybe.”

“Who would be willing to kill a man over a book?”

Lavon hesitated, taking a moment to slip the protocol of the Wannsee Conference back into the file. Then he looked up at Gabriel, eyes narrowed, and drew a deep breath.

“There was one government in particular that Eichmann and Luther were concerned about. It maintained diplomatic relations with both the Allies and Nazi Germany during the war. It had representatives in all of the countries where the roundups and deportations were taking place—representatives who could have made the task more difficult had they chosen to forcefully intervene. For obvious reasons, Eichmann and Luther considered it critical that this government not raise objections. Hitler considered this government so pivotal that he dispatched the second-ranking official at the Foreign Office, Baron Ernst von Weizäcker, to serve as his ambassador. Do you know which government I’m talking about, Gabriel?”

Gabriel closed his eyes. “The Vatican.”

“Indeed.”

“So who are the clowns that have been following me?”

“That’s a very good question.”

Gabriel crossed the room to Lavon’s desk, lifted the receiver of the telephone, and dialed a number. Lavon did not need to ask who Gabriel was calling. He could see it in the determined set of his jaw and the tension in his hands. When a man is being stalked by an enemy he does not know, it is best to have a friend who knows how to fight dirty.

THE MAN
standing on the steps of Vienna’s famed Konzerthaus radiated open-air Austrian good looks and Viennese sophistication. Had anyone spoken to him, he would have replied in perfect German, with the lazy inflection of a well-heeled young man who had spent many happy hours sampling the Bohemian delights of Vienna. He was not Austrian, nor had he been raised in Vienna. His name was Ephraim Ben-Avraham, and he had spent his childhood in a dusty settlement deep in the Negev, a place far removed from the world in which he moved now.

He glanced casually at his watch, then surveyed the expanse of the Beethoven Platz. He was on edge, more so than usual. It was a simple job: Meet an agent, deliver him safely to the communications room of the embassy. But the man he was meeting was no ordinary agent. The Vienna station chief had made the stakes clear to Ben-Avraham before dispatching him. “If you fuck it up, Ari Shamron will track you down and strangle you with one of his patented death grips. And whatever you do, don’t try to talk to the agent. He’s not the most approachable of men.”

Ben-Avraham stuck an American cigarette between his lips and ignited it. It was at that moment, through the dancing blue flame of his lighter, that Ben-Avraham saw the legend emerge from the darkness. He dropped his cigarette to the wet pavement and ground it out with the toe of his shoe, watching while the agent made two complete circuits of the square. No one was following him—no one but the disheveled little man with flyaway hair and a wrinkled coat. He was a legend too: Eli Lavon, surveillance artist extraordinaire. Ben-Avraham had met him once at the Academy when Lavon had been a guest lecturer at a seminar on man-to-man street work. He had kept the recruits up till three in the morning, telling war stories about the dark days of the Black September operation.

Ben-Avraham watched the pair in admiration for a moment as they drifted among the evening crowd like synchronized swimmers. Their routine was by the book, but it had a certain flair and precision that came from working together in situations where one misstep could cost one of them his life.

Finally, the young officer started down the steps toward his target. “Herr Mueller,” he called out. The legend looked up. “So good to see you.”

Lavon vanished as though stepping through a stage curtain. Ben-Avraham hooked his fingers inside the elbow of the legend and pulled him toward the darkened footpaths of the Stadt Park. They walked in circles for ten minutes, diligently checking their tail. He was smaller than Ben-Avraham expected, lean and spare, like a cyclist. It was difficult to imagine that this was the same man who had liquidated half of Black September—the same man who had walked into a villa in Tunis and gunned down Abu Jihad, the second-ranking leader of the PLO, in front of his wife and children.

The legend said nothing. It was as if he were listening for his enemies. His footfalls on the pavement of the pathways made no sound. It was like walking next to a ghost.

The car was waiting a block from the park. Ben-Avraham climbed behind the wheel and for twenty minutes wound his way around the city center. The station chief was right—he was not a man who invited small talk. Indeed the only time he spoke was to politely ask Ben-Avraham to extinguish his cigarette. His German had the hard edge of a Berliner.

Satisfied that no one was following, Ben-Avraham turned into a narrow street in northeast Vienna called the Anton Frankgasse. The building at No. 20 had been the target of numerous terror attacks over the years and was heavily fortified. It was also under constant surveillance by the Austrian secret services. As the car slipped into the entrance of the underground parking garage, the legend ducked below the dashboard. For an instant, his head pressed lightly against Ben-Avraham’s leg. His scalp was burning, like a man in the grip of a death fever.