The Confessor (40 page)

Finally, they came to a darkened underground garage. A small Fiat sedan was waiting. The Vatican SCV license plates had been replaced by normal Italian tags. Francesco Tiepolo helped the Pope into the backseat and joined him there. Father Donati climbed behind the wheel and started the engine.

The Pope could not hide his alarm at this development. “When was the last time you drove a car, Luigi?”

“To be honest, Holiness, I can’t recall. It was certainly before we came to Venice.”

“That was eighteen years ago!”

“May the Holy Spirit protect us on our journey.”

“And all the angels and saints,” added the Pope.

Donati forced the car into gear and guided it timidly up a winding, darkened ramp. A moment later, the car emerged into the night. The priest hesitantly pushed the accelerator toward the floor and sped along the Via Belvedere toward St. Anne’s Gate.

“Duck down, Holiness.”

“Is that really necessary, Luigi?”

“Francesco, please help His Holiness conceal himself!”

“I’m sorry, Holiness.”

The big Venetian grabbed the Pope by the lapels of his overcoat and pulled him down into his lap. The Fiat sped past the Pontifical Pharmacy and the Vatican Bank. As they approached St. Anne’s Gate, Father Donati switched on his headlights and sounded his horn. A stunned Swiss Guard leapt out of the path of the speeding car. Father Donati made the sign of the cross as the car flashed through the gate and entered Rome proper.

The Pope looked up at Tiepolo. “May I sit up now, Francesco? This is most undignified.”

“Father Donati?”

“Yes, I think it’s safe now.”

Tiepolo helped the Pope sit up and straightened his overcoat.

IT WAS
Chiara, standing on the terrace of the safe flat, who spotted the Fiat entering the piazza. The car stopped in front of the building and three men climbed out. Chiara ducked into the sitting room. “There’s someone here,” she said. “Tiepolo and two other men. I think one of them might be him.”

A moment later there was a sharp knock. Gabriel quickly crossed the room and pulled open the door. He was greeted by the sight of Francesco Tiepolo and a priest in a clerical suit, flanking a small man in a long overcoat and a fedora hat. Gabriel stepped aside. Tiepolo and the priest ushered the man into the safe flat.

Gabriel closed the door. As he turned around, he saw the little man remove his fedora and hand it to the priest. Perched on his head was a white zucchetto. Next, he removed the fawn overcoat, revealing a soutane of brilliant white.

His Holiness Pope Paul VII said: “I’m told that you gentlemen have some important information you’d like to impart to me. I’m all ears.”

T
HE DOOR OF THE FLAT
opened to Lange’s touch, just as the Italian had said it would. He closed it again and pushed the dead bolt into place before switching on the lights. He was greeted by the sight of a single room with a bare floor and water-marked walls. There was a steel bed—more like a cot than a real bed—with a wafer-thin mattress. No pillow, a scratchy woolen blanket folded at the foot, stains.
Piss? Semen?
Lange could only guess. It was not unlike the room in Tripoli, where he had once spent a feverish fortnight waiting for his guide from the Libyan secret service to take him to the training camps in the south. There were distinct differences about this place, though, namely the large carved-wood crucifix hanging above the bed, adorned with a rosary and a length of dried palm leaf.

Next to the bed was a small chest. Lange wearily pulled open the drawers. He found underpants, balled black socks, and a dog-eared breviary. With some trepidation he ventured into the bathroom: a rust-stained basin with twin taps, a mirror that barely cast a reflection, a toilet with no seat.

He opened the closet. Two clerical suits hung from the rod. On the floor was a pair of black shoes, well worn but polished, the shoes of a poor man who took care of his appearance. Lange pushed the shoes out of the way with the toe of his loafer and saw the loose floorboard. He bent down and pried it up.

Reaching into the small space, he found a bundle of oilcloth. He unfolded the cloth: a Stechkin pistol, a silencer, two magazines of nine-millimeter ammunition. Lange rammed one magazine into the butt and slipped the Stechkin into the waistband of his trousers. The silencer and the second magazine he rewrapped in the oilcloth.

He reached into the compartment a second time and found two more items: a set of keys to the motorcycle parked outside the apartment house, and a leather billfold. He opened the billfold. Inside was a Vatican Security Office identification badge, quite obviously the real thing. Lange looked at the name—
MANFRED BECK
,
SPECIAL INVESTIGATIONS DIVISION
—then at the photograph. It was the one he had given Casagrande in the hotel room in Zurich. It was not him, of course, but the vague resemblance could easily be enhanced with a bit of preparation.

Manfred Beck, Special Investigations Division . . .

He returned the billfold to the compartment, then replaced the floorboard and covered it with the shoes. He looked around at the barren, lonely room. A priest’s room, this. A sudden memory overtook him: a winding cobblestone street in Fribourg, a young man in a black cassock drifting through the mist rising from the river Saane. A young man in crisis, Lange remembered. A tormented man. A man who could not bear the acute loneliness of the life that lay ahead of him. A man who wanted to be on the front lines. How odd that the path he had chosen had resulted in a life more lonely than a parish priest’s. How odd that it had led him back here, to this desperate room in Rome.

He went to the window and pushed open the glass. The wet night air washed over his face. The
Stazione Termini
stood in the distance, about a half kilometer away. Directly across the street lay a straggly, unkempt park. A woman was making her way along the puddled walkway. A streetlamp briefly caught the Breton red highlights in her hair. Something made her look up at the open window. Training. Instinct.
Fear.
Seeing his face, she smiled, and started across the road.

A
RI
S
HAMRON HAD DECIDED
that there would be no misleading the Vicar of Christ. Gabriel was to tell him everything, with no regard for protecting sources or methods. He also ordered Gabriel to give the account chronologically, for Shamron, a man who had briefed a half-dozen prime ministers, knew the value of a good story. He believed that the dirty details of how intelligence was acquired often made the conclusions more credible to the target audience—in this case the Supreme Pontiff of the Roman Catholic Church.

They settled themselves in the sitting room. The Pope sat in a comfortable armchair, knees together, hands folded. Father Donati sat next to him, a notebook open on his lap. Gabriel, Shamron, and Eli Lavon squeezed shoulder to shoulder on the couch, separated from the Pope and his secretary by a low coffee table and a pot of tea that no one touched. Chiara and Shimon Pazner stood watch on the balcony. Francesco Tiepolo, his work complete, kissed the papal ring and left for Venice in the back of an Office car.

Gabriel spoke to the Pope in his native tongue, while Father Donati took furious notes. Every few minutes, Donati would interrupt Gabriel by raising his silver pen and peering at him over his half-moon spectacles. Then he would force Gabriel to backtrack in order to clarify some seemingly mundane detail, or quibble with Gabriel on a point of translation. If it conflicted with what was written in his notebook, he would make a vast show of expunging the offending passage. When Gabriel recounted his conversation with Peter Malone—and the words “Crux Vera” were mentioned for the first time—Donati shot a conspiratorial glance at the Pope, which the Pontiff pointedly ignored.

For his part, the Pope remained silent. Sometimes his gaze was focused on his intertwined fingers; sometimes his eyes would close, as though he were at prayer. Only the deaths seemed to stir him from his reverie. With each killing—Benjamin Stern, Peter Malone, Alessio Rossi and the four
carabinieri
in Rome, the Crux Vera operative in the south of France—the Pope made the sign of the cross and murmured a few words of prayer. He never once looked at Gabriel or even at Father Donati. Only Shamron could capture his attention. The Pope seemed to find kinship with the old man. Perhaps it was the closeness of their age, or perhaps the Pope saw something reassuring in the fissures and ravines of Shamron’s rugged face. But every few minutes, Gabriel would notice them staring at each other over the coffee table, as though it were a chasm of time and history.

Gabriel handed Sister Regina’s letter to Father Donati, who then read it aloud. The Pope wore an expression of grief on his face, his eyes tightly closed. To Gabriel it seemed like a remembered pain—the pain of an old wound being torn open. Only once did he open his eyes, at the point when Sister Regina wrote of the boy sleeping on her lap. He looked across the divide at Shamron, holding his gaze for a moment, before closing his eyes once more and returning to his private agony.

Father Donati handed the letter back to Gabriel when he was finished. Gabriel told the Pope of his decision to return to Munich to search Benjamin’s apartment a second time and of the document Benjamin had entrusted to the old caretaker, Frau Ratzinger.

“It’s in German,” Gabriel said. “Would you like me to translate it, Your Holiness?”

Father Donati answered the question for the Pope. “The Holy Father and I both speak German fluently. Please feel free to read the document in its original language.”

The memorandum from Martin Luther to Adolf Eichmann seemed to cause the Pope physical pain. At the halfway point, he reached out and took Father Donati’s hand for support. When Gabriel finished, the Pope bowed his head and joined his hands beneath his pectoral cross. When he opened his eyes again, he looked directly at Shamron, who was holding Sister Regina’s account of the meeting at the convent.

“A remarkable document, is it not, Your Holiness?” Shamron asked in German.

“I’m afraid I would use a different word,” the Pope said, answering him in the same language. “ ‘Shameful’ is the first word that comes to mind.”

“But is it an accurate account of the meeting that took place at that convent in 1942?”

Gabriel looked first at Shamron, then at the Pope. Father Donati opened his mouth to object, but the Pope silenced him by gently placing a hand on his secretary’s forearm.

“It’s accurate except for one detail,” said Pope Paul VII. “I wasn’t really sleeping on Sister Regina’s lap. I’m afraid I just couldn’t bear to say another decade of the rosary.”

AND THEN
he told them the story of a boy—a boy from a poor village in the mountains of northern Italy. A boy who found himself orphaned at the age of nine, with no relatives to turn to for support. A boy who made his way to a convent on the shores of a lake, where he worked in the kitchen and befriended a woman named Sister Regina Carcassi. The nun became his mother and his teacher. She taught him to read and write. She taught him to appreciate art and music. She taught him to love God and to speak German. She called him
Ciciotto
—little chubby one. After the war, when Sister Regina renounced her vows and left the convent, the boy left too. Like Regina Carcassi, his faith in the Church was shaken by the events of the war, and he found his way to Milan, where he scratched out an existence on the streets, picking pockets and stealing from shops. Many times, he was arrested and beaten up by police officers. One night he was beaten nearly to death by a gang of criminals and left for dead on the steps of a parish church. He was discovered in the morning by a priest and taken to a hospital. The priest visited him each day and saw to the bills. He discovered that the filthy street urchin had spent time in a convent, that he could read and write and knew a great deal about Scripture and the Church. He convinced the boy to enter the seminary and study for the priesthood as a way to escape a life of poverty and prison. The boy agreed, and his life was forever changed.

Throughout the Pope’s account, Gabriel, Shamron, and Eli Lavon sat motionless and enthralled. Father Donati looked down at his notebook but his hands were still. When the Pope finished, a deep silence hung over the room, broken finally by Shamron.

“What you must understand, Your Holiness, is that it was not our intention to uncover the information about the Garda covenant or your past. We only wanted to know who killed Benjamin Stern and why.”