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.
37
VENICE
IT 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.
Ari Shamron monitored Gabriel’s recovery from Tel Aviv. Against Lev’s wishes, Shamron managed to tunnel his way back into King Saul Boulevard to head up what eventually became known as Team Leopard. The sole purpose of the group was to locate and neutralize the elusive terrorist thought to be responsible for the murder of Benjamin Stern and countless others. Shamron seemed rejuvenated by the new assignment. Those closest to him noticed a marked improvement in his appearance.
Unfortunately for those drafted onto his team, better health brought the return of his fiery temper, and he drove himself and his underlings to the point of exhaustion. No lead, no piece of gossip, was deemed too small to ignore. There was a
suspected sighting of the Leopard in Paris and another in Helsinki. There was a report that Czech police suspected the Leopard was behind a murder in Prague. His name surfaced in Moscow in connection with the murder of a senior intelligence official. An Office agent in Baghdad heard rumors that the Leopard had just signed a contract to work for the Iraqi secret service.
The clues were tantalizing, but eventually they all proved fruitless. In spite of the setbacks, the old man pleaded with his team not to lose faith. Shamron had his own theory about how the Leopard would be found. It was money that fueled him, Shamron told his team, and it would be money that would bring him down.
ONE WARM evening in the last days of May, a soccer ball bounded toward Gabriel as he walked in the Campo di Ghetto Nuovo with Chiara. He released her hand and lunged toward the moving ball with three swift steps. “Gabriel! Your head!” she shouted, but he did not listen. He drew back his foot and met the ball with a solid thump that echoed off the façade of the synagogue. It sailed through the air in a graceful arc and landed in the hands of a boy, about twelve years old, with a kippah clipped to his head of curly hair. The child stared at Gabriel for a moment, then smiled and ran off to rejoin his friends. Returning home, Gabriel telephoned Francesco Tiepolo and told him he was ready to go back to work.
HIS PLATFORM was as he had left it: his brushes and his palette, his pigment and his medium. He had the church to himself. The others—Adriana, Antonio Politi, and the rest of the San Zaccaria team—had completed their work and moved on long ago. Chiara never left the church while Gabriel was inside. With his back to the door, framed by the majestic altarpiece, he made an inviting target, so she sat at the base of his scaffolding while he worked, her dark eyes fixed on the door. She made only one demand—that he remove the shroud—and uncharacteristically he agreed.
He worked long hours, longer than he would have preferred under normal circumstances, but he was determined to finish as quickly as possible. Tiepolo stopped by once a day to bring food and check on his progress. Some days he would linger for a few minutes to keep Chiara company. Once he even hauled his lumbering frame up the scaffolding to consult with Gabriel on a difficult section of the apse.
Gabriel worked with renewed confidence. He had spent so much time studying Bellini and his works that some days he could almost feel the presence of the master standing next to him, telling him what to do next. He worked from the center outward—the Madonna and child, the saints and the donors, the intricate background. He thought about the case in much the same way. As he worked, he was troubled by two questions that ran incessantly through his subconscious. Who had given Benjamin the documents on the Garda covenant in the first place? And why?
ONE AFTERNOON late in June, Chiara looked up and saw him standing on the edge of the scaffolding, right hand on his chin, left hand supporting his right elbow, head tilted slightly down. He stood motionless for a long time, ten minutes by Chiara’s watch, his eyes traveling the length and breadth of the towering canvas. Chiara took the scaffolding in hand and shook it once, the way Tiepolo always did. Gabriel looked down at her and smiled.
“Is it finished, Signor Delvecchio?”
“Almost,” he said distantly. “I just need to talk to him one more time.”
“What on earth are you talking about?”
But Gabriel made no reply. Instead, he knelt down and spent the next several minutes cleaning his brushes and palette and packing away his pigments and medium in a flat rectangular case. He climbed off the scaffolding, took Chiara by the hand, and walked out of the church for the last time. On the way home, they stopped by Tiepolo’s office in San Marco. Gabriel told him that he needed to see the Holy Father. By the time they arrived home in Cannaregio, a message was waiting on the answering machine.
Bronze Doors, tomorrow evening, eight o’clock. Don’t be late.
38
VATICAN CITY
GABRIEL CROSSED ST. PETER’S SQUARE at dusk. Father Donati met him at the Bronze Doors. He shook Gabriel’s hand solemnly and remarked that he looked much better than he had the last time they had met. “The Holy Father is expecting you,” Father Donati said. “It’s best not to keep him waiting.”
The priest led Gabriel up the Scala Regia. A five-minute walk along an archipelago of looming corridors and darkened courtyards brought them to the Vatican Gardens. In the dusty sienna light it was easy to spot the Pope. He was walking along a footpath near the Ethiopian College, his white soutane glowing like an acetylene torch.
Father Donati left Gabriel at the Pope’s side and drifted slowly back toward the palace. The Pope took Gabriel’s arm and led him along the pathway. The evening air was warm and soft and heavy with the scent of pine.
“I’m pleased to see you looking so well,” the Pope said. “You’ve made a remarkable recovery.”
“Shamron is convinced it was your prayers that brought me out of the coma. He says he’ll testify to the miracle of the Gemelli Clinic at your beatification proceedings.”
“I’m not sure how many in the Church will support my canonization after the commission has finished its work.” He chuckled and squeezed Gabriel’s bicep. “Are you pleased with the restoration of the San Zaccaria altarpiece?”
“Yes, Holiness. Thank you for intervening on my behalf.”
“It was the only just solution. You started the restoration. It was fitting that you complete it. Besides, that altarpiece is one of my favorite paintings. It needed the hands of the great Mario Delvecchio.”
The Pope guided Gabriel onto a narrow pathway leading toward the Vatican walls. “Come,” he said. “I want to show you something.” They headed directly toward the spire of Vatican Radio’s transmission tower. At the wall, they mounted a flight of stone steps and climbed up to the parapet. The city lay before them, rustling and stirring, dusty and dirty, eternal Rome. From this angle, in this light, it was not so different from Jerusalem. All that was missing was the cry of the muezzin, calling the faithful to evening prayer. Then Gabriel’s eye traveled down the length of the Tiber, to the synagogue at the entrance of the old ghetto, and he realized why the Pope had brought him here.
“You have a question you wish to ask me, Gabriel?”
“I do, Holiness.”
“I suspect you want to know how your friend Benjamin Stern got the documents about the covenant at Garda in the first place.”
“You’re a very wise man, Holiness.”
“Am I? Look at what I have wrought.”
The Pope was silent for a moment, his gaze fixed on the towering synagogue. Finally he turned to Gabriel. “Will you be my confessor, Gabriel—metaphorically speaking, of course?”
“I’ll be whatever you want me to be, Holiness.”
“Do you know about the seal of confession? What I tell you here tonight must never be repeated. For a second time, I place my life in your hands.” He looked away. “The question is, whose hands are they? Are they the hands of Gabriel Allon? Or are they the hands of Mario Delvecchio, the restorer?”
“Which would you prefer?”
The Pope looked across the river once more, toward the synagogue, and leaving Gabriel’s question unanswered, he began to speak.
THE POPE told Gabriel of the conclave, the terrible night of agony at the Dormitory of St. Martha, when, like Christ in the Garden of Gethsemane, he had begged God to let this cup pass from his lips. How could a man with knowledge of the terrible secret of the Garda covenant be chosen to lead the Church? What would he do with such knowledge? The night before the final session of the conclave, he summoned Father Donati to his room and told the priest he would refuse the papacy if chosen. Then, for the first time, he told his trusted aide what had happened at the convent by the lake that night in 1942.
“Father Donati was horrified,” the Pope said. “He believed that the Holy Spirit had chosen me for a reason, and that reason was to confess the secret of the Garda covenant and cleanse the Church. But Father Donati is a very clever man and a skilled operative.
He knew the secret had to be revealed in such a way that it would not destroy my papacy in its infancy.”
“It had to be revealed by someone other than you.”
The Pope nodded. Indeed.
Father Donati went looking for Sister Regina Carcassi. In retrospect, it was probably Father Donati’s relentless search of Church records that alerted the hounds of Crux Vera. He found her living alone in a village in the north. He asked about her memories of that night in 1942, and she gave him a copy of a letter—a letter she had written the night before her wedding. Father Donati then asked whether she would be willing to speak publicly. Enough time had passed, Regina Carcassi said. She would do whatever Father Donati asked.
As powerful as Sister Regina’s letter was, Father Donati knew he needed more. There had been rumors inside the Curia for years that the KGB had been in possession of a document that had the power to inflict serious damage on the Church. According to the rumor mill, the document was almost leaked during the showdown with the Polish pope, but calmer heads inside the KGB prevailed, and it remained buried in the KGB archives. Father Donati traveled secretly to Moscow and met with the chief of the KGB’s successor, the Russian Foreign Intelligence Service. After three days of negotiation, he took possession of the document. Captured by advancing Russian forces in the final days of the war, it was a memorandum written by Martin Luther to Adolf Eichmann about a meeting at a convent on Lake Garda.
“When I read it, I knew the battle that lay ahead would be a difficult one,” the Pope said. “You see, the document contained two ominous words.”
“Crux Vera,” said Gabriel, and the Pope nodded in agreement. Crux Vera.