The Confessor

  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.

  31

  ROME

  ARI SHAMRON 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.”

  “I am not angry with you for bringing me this information, Mr. Shamron. As painful as these documents are, they must be made public
, so that they can be examined by historians and ordinary Jews and Catholics alike and placed in their proper context.”

  Shamron laid the documents in front of the Pope. “We have no desire to make them public. We leave them in your hands to do with them what you will.”

  The Pope tilted his head down at the papers, but his gaze was distant, his eyes lost in thought. “He was not as wicked as his enemies have made him out to be, our Pope Pius the Twelfth. But unfortunately, neither was he as virtuous as his defenders, the Church included, have claimed. He had his reasons for silence—fear of dividing German Catholics, fear of German retaliation against the Vatican, a desire to play a diplomatic role as a peacemaker—but we must face the painful fact that the Allies wanted him to speak out against the Holocaust and Adolf Hitler wanted him to remain silent. For whatever reason—his hatred of Communism, his love of Germany, the fact that he was surrounded by Germans in his papal household—Pius chose the course Hitler wanted, and the shadow of that choice hangs over us to this day. He wanted to be a statesman when what the world needed most was a priest—a man in a cassock to shout at the murderers at the top of his lungs to stop what they were doing, in the name of God and all that was decent.”

  The Pope looked up and studied the faces before him—first Lavon, then Gabriel, then finally Shamron, where his gaze lingered longest. “We must face the uncomfortable fact that silence was a weapon in the hands of the Germans. It allowed the roundups and deportations to go forward with a minimum of resistance. There were hundreds, perhaps thousands, of Catholics who took part in rescuing Jews. But had the priests and nuns of Europe received instructions or simply the blessing from their pope to resist the Holocaust, many more Catholics would have sheltered Jews, and many more Jews would have survived the war as a result. Had the German episcopacy spoken up against the murder of Jews early on, it is possible that the Holocaust might never have reached its feverish pitch. Pope Pius knew that the wholesale mechanized murder of the European Jews was under way, but he chose to keep that information largely to himself. Why did he not tell the world? Why did he not even tell his bishops in the countries where roundups were taking place? Was he honoring a covenant of evil reached on the shores of a lake?”

  The Pope reached for the pot in the center of the table. When Father Donati leaned forward to help him, he raised his hand, as if to say His Holiness still knew how to pour a cup of tea. He spent a moment reflectively stirring in the milk and sugar before resuming.

  “I’m afraid the behavior of Pius is only one aspect of the war that needs examination. We must face the uncomfortable truth that, among Catholics, there were many more killers than there were rescuers. Catholic chaplains ministered to the very German forces committing the slaughter of the Jews. They heard their confessions and provided them the sacrament of Holy Communion. In Vichy France, Catholic priests actually helped French and German forces round up Jews for deportation and death. In Lithuania, the hierarchy actually forbade priests to rescue Jews. In Slovakia, a country ruled by a priest, the government actually paid the Germans to take away their Jews to the death camps. In Catholic Croatia, clergymen actually took part in the killings themselves. A Franciscan nicknamed Brother Satan ran a Croatian concentration camp where twenty thousand Jews were murdered.” The Pope paused to sip his tea, as though he needed to remove a bitter taste from his mouth. “We must also face the truth that after the war, the Church sought leniency for the murderers and helped hundreds escape justice altogether.”

  Shamron stirred restlessly in his seat but said nothing.

  “Tomorrow, at the Great Synagogue of Rome, the Catholic Church will begin to confront those questions honestly for the first time.”

  “Your words are compelling, Your Holiness,” said Shamron, “but it might not be safe for you to venture across the river and say them aloud in a synagogue for the world to hear.”

  “A synagogue is the only place for these words to be spoken—especially the synagogue in the Roman ghetto, where the Jews were rounded up beneath the very windows of the Pope without so much as a murmur of protest. My predecessor went there once to begin this journey. His heart was in the right place, but I’m afraid many segments of the Curia were not with him, and so his journey stopped short of its destination. I will finish it for him, tomorrow, in the place where he started it.”

  “It appears you have something else in common with your predecessor, Holiness,” Shamron said. “There are elements within the Church—quite probably here in Rome—who do not support a candid examination of the Vatican’s role in the Holocaust. They have proven themselves willing to commit murder to keep the past a secret, and you should act on the assumption that your life is now in danger as well.”

  “You’re referring to Crux Vera?”

  “Does such an organization exist within the Church?”

  The Pope and Father Donati exchanged a long look. Then the Pope’s gaze settled once more on Shamron. “I’m afraid Crux Vera does indeed exist, Mr. Shamron. The society was allowed to flourish during the thirties and throughout the Cold War because it proved to be an effective weapon in the fight against Bolshevism. Unfortunately, many of the excesses committed in the name of that fight can be laid directly at the feet of Crux Vera and its allies.”

  “And now that the Cold War is over?” asked Gabriel.

  “Crux Vera has adapted with the times. It has proved itself a useful tool for maintaining doctrinal discipline. In Latin America, Crux Vera has battled the adherents of liberation theology, sometimes resorting to ghastly violence to keep rebellious priests in line. It has waged a ceaseless fight against liberalism, relativism, and the tenets of the Second Vatican Council. As a result, many of those inside the Church who support the goals of Crux Vera have turned a blind eye to some of its more unseemly methods.”

  “Is Crux Vera also engaged in an effort to keep unpleasant Church secrets from coming to light?”

  “Without a doubt,” answered Father Donati.

  “Is Carlo Casagrande a member of Crux Vera?”

  “I suppose that in your line of work he would be known as the director of operations.”

  “Are there other members inside the Vatican itself?”

  This time it was the Pope who answered Gabriel’s question. “My secretary of state, Cardinal Marco Brindisi, is the leader of Crux Vera,” the Pope said gloomily.

  “If you know Brindisi and Casagrande are members of Crux Vera, why do you allow them to keep their jobs?”

  “Was it not Stalin who said keep your allies close but your enemies closer?” A smile flashed over the Pope’s face, then quickly evaporated. “Besides, Cardinal Brindisi is untouchable. If I tried to move against him, his allies in the Curia and the College of Cardinals would revolt and the Church would be hopelessly divided. I’m afraid that, for now, I’m stuck with him and his henchmen.”

  “Which brings us back to my original point, Holiness. Your security is being handled by men who oppose you and your mission. Under the circumstances, I think it would be wise for you to postpone your visit to the synagogue until a safer moment presents itself.”

  Then Shamron laid a file on the table and opened it—the dossier on the assassin codenamed the Leopard that he had taken from King Saul Boulevard. “We believe this man is working for Crux Vera. He is without a doubt one of the world’s most dangerous assassins. We’re virtually certain he was the man who killed Peter Malone in London. We suspect he also killed Benjamin Stern. We must assume that he will now try to kill you.”

  The Pope looked at the photographs, then at Shamron. “What you must remember, Mr. Shamron, is that I am under the protection of these men wherever I am, inside the Vatican walls or beyond them. The threat to me is the same whether I am standing in the papal apartments or in the Great Synagogue of Rome.”

  “Point taken, Holiness.”

  Father Donati leaned forward. “Once the Holy Father steps beyond the walls of the Vatican, onto Italian soil, his security is augmented by Italia
n police. Thanks to the false papal-assassin plot engineered by Carlo Casagrande, security for tomorrow’s event at the synagogue will be unprecedented. We believe that it is safe enough for His Holiness to make the appearance.”

  “And what if this man is a member of the Pope’s security contingent?”

  “The Holy Spirit will protect me during this journey,” the Pope replied.

  “With all due respect, Holiness, I would feel better if someone else was looking over your shoulder as well.”

  “You have a suggestion, Mr. Shamron?”

  “I do, Holiness.” Shamron put a rough hand on Gabriel’s shoulder. “I’d like Gabriel to accompany you and Father Donati into the synagogue. He’s an experienced officer who knows a thing or two about this sort of business.”

  The Pope looked at Father Donati. “Luigi? Surely, this can be accomplished, can it not?”

  “It can, Holiness. But there is one problem.”

  “You’re referring to the fact that Carlo Casagrande has portrayed Mr. Allon as a papal assassin?”

  “I am, Holiness.”

  “Obviously, the situation will have to be handled carefully, but if there’s one person the Swiss Guards will listen to, it’s me.” He looked at Shamron. “I will make this pilgrimage to the ghetto as scheduled, and you will be at my side, protecting me, as we should have been at yours sixty years ago. Quite fitting, don’t you think, Mr. Shamron?”

  Shamron gave a curt nod and an iron smile. Indeed, it was.

  TWENTY MINUTES later, the arrangements for the morning complete, Father Donati and the Pope left the safe flat and sped along the river toward the Vatican. At St. Anne’s Gate, the car braked to a halt. Father Donati lowered his window as a Swiss Guard stepped out of his sentry post.

  “Father Donati? What in the world is—”

  The guardsman fell silent as Pope Paul VII leaned into view. Then the Swiss Guard snapped to attention.