The Confessor (46 page)

He came to rest atop the body of the woman and found himself staring into a pair of beautiful lifeless eyes. He lifted his head and saw the Leopard roar up the street and vanish into a church steeple.

Then he blacked out.

IN THE
turmoil of St. Peter’s Square, no one took notice of the old man making his way slowly across the timeworn paving stones. He glanced at a dying Swiss Guard, his vibrant uniform stained with blood. He paused briefly near the body of a young
carabiniere.
He saw a young American girl, screaming in the arms of her mother. In a few minutes, the horror would be amplified when news of the cardinal’s assassination was made public. The stones of St. Peter’s, awash in blood. A nightmare. Worse than that day in 1981, when the Pole was nearly killed.
I have wrought this,
thought Casagrande.
It is my doing.

He slipped through the colonnade and made for St. Anne’s Gate. He thought of what lay ahead. The inevitable exposure of the conspiracy. The unmasking of Crux Vera. How could Casagrande explain that he had actually saved the life of the Pope? Indeed, that he had saved the life of the Church itself by killing Cardinal Brindisi? The blood in St. Peter’s was necessary, he thought. It was a cleansing blood. But no one would believe him. He would die in shame, a disgraced man. A murderer.

He stopped outside the door of the Church of St. Anne. A Swiss Guard was standing watch. He had been hastily called to duty and was dressed in jeans and a windbreaker. He seemed surprised to see Casagrande climbing slowly up the steps.

“Is there anyone inside?” Casagrande asked.

“No, General. We cleared the church as soon as the shooting began. The doors are locked.”

“Unlock them, please. I need to pray.”

The tiny nave was in darkness. The Swiss Guard remained near the door, watching curiously as Casagrande made his way forward and fell to his knees in front of the altar. He prayed feverishly for a moment, then reached into his coat pocket.

The Swiss Guard sprinted forward up the center aisle, screaming, “No, General! Stop!” But Casagrande seemed not to hear him. He placed the gun in his mouth and pulled the trigger. A single shot echoed throughout the empty church. He remained balanced upon his knees for a few seconds, long enough for the Swiss Guard to hope that the general had somehow missed. Then the body slumped forward and collapsed onto the altar. Carlo Casagrande, savior of Italy, was dead.

PART FIVE"
A CHURCH IN VENICE

T
HERE ARE ROOMS
on the eleventh floor of the Gemelli Clinic that few people know. Spare and spartan, they are the rooms of a priest. In one there is a hospital bed. In another there are couches and chairs. The third contains a private chapel. In the hallway outside the entrance is a desk for the guards. Someone stands watch always, even when the rooms are empty.

In the days following the shootings at the Vatican, the rooms were occupied by a patient with no name. His injuries were severe: a fractured skull, a cracked vertebra, four broken ribs, abrasions and lacerations over much of his body. Emergency surgery relieved the life-threatening pressure caused by swelling of the brain, but he remained deep in a coma. Because of the terrible wounds on his back, he was placed on his stomach, his head turned toward the window. An oxygen mask obscured the swollen face. The eyelids, darkened by bruises, remained tightly closed.

There was a great deal of evidence to suggest he was a man of some importance. Father Luigi Donati, the papal secretary, called several times a day to check on his progress. A pair of bodyguards stood watch outside his door. Then there was the striking fact that he was in the room at all, for the suite on the eleventh floor of the Gemelli is reserved for only one man: the Supreme Pontiff of the Roman Catholic Church.

For the first four days, there were only two visitors: a tall, striking woman with long curly hair and black eyes, and an old man with a face like desert stone. The girl spoke Italian, the old man did not. The nursing staff assumed, wrongly as it turned out, that he was the patient’s father. The visitors made a base camp in the sitting room and never left.

The old man seemed concerned about the patient’s right hand, which struck the nursing staff as odd, since his other injuries were much more serious. A radiologist was summoned. X rays were taken. An orthopedic specialist concluded that the hand had come through the accident remarkably intact, though she did take note of a deep scar in the webbing between the thumb and forefinger, a recent wound that had never healed properly.

On the fifth day, a prie-dieu was placed at the bedside. The Pope arrived at dusk, accompanied by Father Donati and a single Swiss Guard. He spent an hour kneeling over the unconscious man, his eyes closed in prayer. When he was finished, he reached down and gently stroked the hand.

As the Pope rose to his feet, his gaze fell upon the large carved-wood crucifix above the bed. He stared at it for a moment before extending his fingers and making the sign of the cross. Then he leaned close to Father Donati and whispered into his ear. The priest reached over the bed and gently removed the crucifix from the wall.

Twenty-four hours after the Pope’s visit, the right hand began to move; the same motion, over and over again; a tap followed by three swift stroking movements.
Tap, stroke, stroke, stroke . . . Tap, stroke, stroke, stroke . . .

This development caused much debate among the team of doctors. Some dismissed it as spasmodic in nature. Others feared it was the result of a seizure. The tall girl with black eyes told them it was neither spasm nor seizure. “He’s just painting,” she assured them. “He’s coming back to us soon.”

The next day, one week after his arrival, the patient with no name briefly regained consciousness. He opened his eyes slowly, blinking in the sunlight, and looked quizzically at the old man’s face, as if he did not recognize him.

“Ari?”

“We’ve been worried about you.”

“I hurt everywhere.”

“I don’t doubt it.”

He raised his eyes toward the window. “
Yerushalayim?
”

“Rome.”

“Where?”

The old man told him. The injured man smiled weakly beneath the oxygen mask.

“Where’s . . . Chiara?”

“She’s here. She never left.”

“Did I . . . get him?”

But before Shamron could answer, Gabriel’s eyes closed and he was gone once more.

I
T WOULD BE A MONTH
before Gabriel was fit enough to return to Venice. They settled in a canal house in Cannaregio, with four floors and a tiny dock with a skiff. The entrance, flanked by a pair of ceramic pots overflowing with geraniums, opened onto a quiet courtyard that smelled of rosemary. The security system, installed by an obscure electronics firm based in Tel Aviv, was worthy of the Accademia.

Gabriel was in no condition to resume his battle with the Bellini. His vision remained blurred, and he could not stand for long without becoming dizzy. Most nights, he was awakened by a pounding headache. Seeing his back for the first time, Francesco Tiepolo thought he looked like a man who had been flayed. Tiepolo appealed to the superintendent in charge of Venice’s churches to delay the reopening of San Zaccaria for another month so that Signor Delvecchio could recover from his unfortunate motorcycle accident. The superintendent suggested in turn that Tiepolo scale the scaffolding himself and finish the Bellini on time.
The tourists are coming, Francesco! Am I supposed to hang a sign on the Church of San Zaccaria that says closed for remodeling?
In a highly unusual development, the Vatican intervened in the dispute. Father Luigi Donati fired off a blistering e-mail to Venice, expressing the wishes of the Holy Father that Signor Delvecchio be permitted to complete the restoration of the Bellini masterpiece. The superintendent quickly reversed his ruling. The next day, a box of Venetian chocolates arrived at the house, along with a note wishing Gabriel a speedy recovery.

While Gabriel healed, they behaved as typical Venetians. They ate in restaurants no tourists could find, and after supper each night they walked in the Ghetto Nuovo. Some nights, after
Ma’ariv,
Chiara’s father would join them. He would press them gently on the nature of their relationship and sound out Gabriel on his intentions. When it had gone on long enough, Chiara would swat him gently on the shoulder and say, “Papa,
please.
” Then she would take each man by the arm, and they would stroll the
campo
in silence, the soft evening air on their faces.

Gabriel never left the ghetto without first pausing at the Casa Israelitica di Riposo to gaze through the windows at the old ones watching their evening television. His stance never varied: right hand on his chin, left hand supporting his right elbow, head tilted slightly down. Chiara could almost imagine him perched atop his scaffolding, staring at a damaged painting, a brush between his teeth.

WITH LITTLE
else to do that spring but wait for Gabriel to heal, they followed developments at the Vatican with intense interest. As promised, Pope Paul VII set in motion his initiative by appointing a panel of historians and experts to reevaluate the role of the Vatican during the Second World War, along with the Church’s long history of anti-Semitism. There were twelve members in all: six Catholics, six Jews. Under the rules established at the outset, the historians would spend five years analyzing countless documents contained in the Vatican Secret Archives. Their deliberations would be conducted in the utmost secrecy. At the end of five years, a report would be written and forwarded to the pope for action, whoever the pope might be. From New York to Paris to Jerusalem, the response from the world’s Jewish community was overwhelmingly positive.

One month after convening, the commission submitted its first request for documents to the Secret Archives. Among the items contained in the initial batch was a memorandum written by Bishop Sebastiano Lorenzi of the Secretariat of State to His Holiness Pope Pius XII. The memo, once thought destroyed, contained details of a secret meeting that took place at a convent on Lake Garda in 1942. Members of the commission, true to the guidelines, said nothing about it in public.

The Pope’s initiative was quickly overshadowed, however, by what became known in the Italian press as the Crux Vera affair. In a series of incendiary exposés, Benedetto Foà, the Vatican correspondent for
La Repubblica,
revealed the existence of a secret Catholic society that had infiltrated the highest levels of the Holy See, the Rome government, and Italy’s financial world. Indeed, according to Foà’s shadowy sources, the tentacles of Crux Vera reached across Europe to the United States and Latin America. Cardinal Marco Brindisi, the slain Vatican secretary of state, was named as leader of Crux Vera, along with the reclusive financier Roberto Pucci and the former chief of the Vatican Security Office, Carlo Casagrande. Pucci issued a denial of the accusation through his lawyers, but not long after Foà’s article appeared, a Pucci-owned bank suffered a liquidity crisis and collapsed. The bank failure revealed the Pucci empire to be a financial house of cards, and within weeks it was a smoldering ruin. Pucci himself fled his beloved Villa Galatina and took up exile in Cannes.

As for the Vatican, publicly it clung to its theory that the gunman who wreaked havoc was a religious madman with no ties to any country, terrorist organization, or secret society. It strenuously denied the existence of a clandestine group called Crux Vera and reminded the
Vaticanisti
at every turn that secret societies and lodges were strictly forbidden by the Church. Still, it soon became apparent to the press corps and all those who followed Vatican affairs that Pope Paul VII was in the process of cleaning house. More than a dozen senior members of the Roman Curia were reassigned to pastoral duties or were retired, including the doctrinaire head of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith. Following the appointment of a replacement for Marco Brindisi, there were wholesale staff changes in the Secretariat of State. Press office chief Rudolf Gertz returned to Vienna.