Daniel Silva - The Fallen Angel

They didn’t dare rehearse in public, so they conducted countless miniature dry runs within the confines of the Wannsee safe house. In the beginning, Gabriel’s demeanor was businesslike, but as the practice sessions dragged on, his mood grew brittle. Mikhail feared he was suffering an operational hangover from the bombing in St. Moritz, or perhaps from the nightmare in the Empty Quarter. But Eli Lavon knew otherwise. It was Berlin, he said. For all of them, Berlin was a city of ghosts, but it was especially true for Gabriel. It had been the home of his maternal grandparents. And in all likelihood, it would have been Gabriel’s home, too, were it not for the band of murderers who had gathered in the lakeside villa just up the road.

And so they listened with admirable patience as he challenged every aspect of the plan for what seemed like the hundredth time. And they treated themselves to a small smile when he gave Yaakov and Oded a thorough dressing-down after a particularly dreadful final walk-through. And they were careful not to creep up on him when he was alone because, despite a lifetime in the trade, he was suffering from an unusual bout of nerves. And finally, on their last afternoon in Berlin, when they could bear his ill temper no more, they darkened his distinctive gray temples and concealed his unforgettable green eyes behind a pair of glasses. Then they bundled him in a coat and scarf and, with a gentle nudge, cast him out of the safe house to walk among the souls of the dead.

The field man in him wanted to see it all at least once with his own eyes—the embassy, the watch posts, the fallback positions, the snatch point. Afterward, he boarded an S-Bahn train that bore him across Berlin to the Brandenburg Gate. Now on the old East German side of the city, he made his way along the Unter den Linden, beneath the bare limbs of the lime trees. At the Friedrichstrasse, the center of Berlin’s debauched nightlife during the 1920s, he turned right and headed into the district known as Mitte. Here and there he glimpsed a relic of the neighborhood’s Stalinist past, but for the most part the architectural stains of communism had been scrubbed away. It was as if the Cold War, like the real war that preceded it, had never happened. In modern Mitte, there were no memories, only prosperity.

At the Kronenstrasse, Gabriel turned right again and followed the street eastward until he arrived at a modern apartment house with large square windows that shone like slabs of onyx. Long ago, before communism, before the war, the spot had been occupied by a handsome neoclassical building of gray stone. On the second floor had lived a German Expressionist painter named Viktor Frankel, his wife, Sarah, and their daughter, Irene, Gabriel’s mother. Gabriel had never seen a photograph of the apartment, but once, when he was a young boy, his mother had tried to sketch it for him before breaking down in tears. Here was the place where they had lived a charmed bourgeois life filled with art, music, and afternoons in the Tiergarten. And here was the place they had stayed as the noose tightened slowly around their necks. Finally, in the autumn of 1942, they were herded by their fellow countrymen aboard a cattle car and deported east to Auschwitz. Gabriel’s grandparents were gassed upon arrival, but his mother was sent to the women’s work camp at Birkenau. She never told Gabriel of her experiences. Instead, she committed them to paper and locked them away in the archives of Yad Vashem.

I will not tell all the things I saw. I cannot. I owe this much to the dead. . . .

Gabriel closed his eyes and saw the street as it had been before the madness. And then he saw himself as a child, coming to visit grandparents who had been allowed to grow old. And he imagined how different his life might have been had he been raised here in Berlin instead of the Valley of Jezreel. And then a cloud of acrid smoke blew across his face, like the smoke of distant crematoria, and he heard a familiar voice at his back.

“What were you hoping to find here?” asked Ari Shamron.

“Strength,” said Gabriel.

“Your mother gave you strength when she named you,” Shamron said. “And then she gave you to me.”

SHAMRON HAD REGISTERED AT THE ADLON under the name Rudolf Heller, one of his favorite European aliases. Gabriel wanted to avoid the security cameras of the famous old hotel, so they walked along the edge of the Tiergarten instead. The air had turned suddenly frigid, and the wind was whistling through the columns of the Brandenburg Gate. Shamron was wearing a cashmere overcoat, a fedora, and tinted eyeglasses that made him look like the sort of businessman who made money in shady ways and never lost at baccarat. He paused at Berlin’s new Holocaust memorial, a stark landscape of rectangular gray blocks, and frowned in consternation.

“They look like containers waiting to be loaded into a cargo ship.”

“The architect wanted to create an atmosphere of discomfort and confusion. It’s supposed to represent the orderly extermination of millions amid the chaos of war.”

“Is that what you see?”

“I see a small miracle that such a memorial even exists on this spot. They could have tucked it away in a field in the countryside. But they put it here, in the heart of a reunited Berlin, right next to the Brandenburg Gate.”

“You give them too much credit, my son. After the war, they all pretended they hadn’t noticed their neighbors disappearing in the middle of the night. It wasn’t until we captured the man who worked right over there that Germany and the rest of the world truly understood the horror of the Holocaust.”

He was pointing across the Tiergarten, in the general direction of the Kurfürstenstrasse. It was there, in an imposing building that had once housed a Jewish mutual aid society, that Adolf Eichmann had made his headquarters. Gabriel’s eyes, however, were still fixed on the gray boxcar-shaped stones of the memorial.

“You should write it all down.” He paused and looked at Shamron. “Before it’s too late.”

“I’m not going anywhere yet.”

“Even you won’t live forever, Ari. You should spend some time with a pen in your hand.”

“I’ve always found the memoirs of spies to be tedious reading. Besides, what good would it do?”

“It would remind the world why we live in Israel instead of Germany and Poland.”

“The world doesn’t care,” Shamron responded with a dismissive wave of his hand. “And the Holocaust isn’t the only reason we have a home in the Land of Israel. We’re there because it was ours in the beginning. We belong there.”

“Even some of our friends aren’t so sure of that anymore.”

“That’s because the Palestinians and their allies have managed to convince much of the world that we are appropriators of Arab land. They like to pretend that the ancient kingdoms of Israel were a myth, that the Temple of Jerusalem was nothing but a Bible story.”

“You sound like Eli.”

Shamron gave a brief smile. “In his own way, your friend Eli is waging war in those excavation trenches beneath the Western Wall. Our Muslim brothers have conveniently forgotten that their great Dome of the Rock and al-Aqsa Mosque are built on the ruins of the First and Second Jewish Temples. The political battle for Palestine is now a religious war for Jerusalem. And we have to prove to the world that we were there first.”

A gust of wind moaned amid the stones of the memorial. Shamron turned up his coat collar and rounded the corner into a street named for Hannah Arendt, the philosopher and political theorist who coined the phrase “the banality of evil” to describe Eichmann’s role in the extermination of six million European Jews. Shamron, who had spent hours alone with the murderer in a Buenos Aires safe house, regarded the characterization as misguided at best. He entered a coffeehouse, then, after noticing the No Smoking sign, sat at a table outside.