Daniel Silva - The Confessor

When Casagrande was finished, he summoned Herr Becker. The little Swiss banker saw him out and bid him a pleasant evening. As Casagrande walked back up the Bahnhofstrasse, he found himself reciting the familiar and comforting words of the Act of Contrition.

Gabriel returned to Venice early the following morning. He left the Opel in the carpark adjacent to the train station and took a water taxi to the Church of San Zaccaria. He entered without greeting the other members of the team, then climbed his scaffolding and concealed himself behind the shroud. After an absence of three days, they were strangers to each other, Gabriel and his virgin, but as the hours slowly passed they grew comfortable in each other's presence. As always, she blanketed him with a sense of peace, and the concentration required by his work pushed the investigation of Benjamin's death into a quiet corner of his mind.

He took a break to replenish his palette. For a moment, his mind left the Bellini and returned to Brenzone. After taking breakfast that morning in his hotel, he had walked to the convent and rung the bell at the front gate to summon Mother Vincenza. When she

appeared, Gabriel had asked if he could speak to a woman called Sister Regina. The nun's face reddened visibly, and she explained that there was no one at the convent by that name. When Gabriel asked whether there had ever been a Sister Regina at the convent, Mother Vincenza shook her head and suggested that Signor Landau respect the cloistered nature of the convent and never return. Without another word, she crossed the courtyard and disappeared inside. Gabriel then spotted Licio, the groundskeeper, trimming the vines on a trellis. When he tried to summon him, the old man glanced up, then hurried away through the shadowed garden. At that moment Gabriel concluded that it was Licio who had followed him through the streets of Brenzone the previous night and Licio who had placed the anonymous call to his hotel room. Clearly, the old man was frightened. Gabriel decided that, for now at least, he would do nothing to make Licio's situation worse. Instead, he would focus on the convent itself. If Mother Vincenza were telling him the truth--that Jews had been sheltered at the convent during the war--then somewhere there would be a record of it.

Returning to Venice, he'd had a nagging impression that he was being followed by a gray Lancia. In Verona he left the autostrada and entered the ancient city center, where he performed a series of field-tested maneuvers designed to shake surveillance. In Padua he did the same thing. Half an hour later, racing across the causeway toward Venice, he was quite confident he was alone.

He worked on the altarpiece all afternoon and into the evening. At seven o'clock, he left the church and wandered over to Francesco Tiepolo's office in San Marco and found him sitting alone at the broad oak table he used as a desk, working his way through a stack of papers. Tiepolo was a highly skilled restorer in his own right, but had long ago set aside his brushes and palette to focus his attention on running his thriving restoration business. As Gabriel entered the room, Tiepolo smiled at him through his tangled black beard. On the streets of Venice, he was often mistaken by tourists for Luciano Pavarotti.

Over a glass of ripasso, Gabriel broke the news that he had to leave Venice again for a few days to take care of a personal matter. Tiepolo buried his big face in his hands and murmured a string of Italian curses before looking up in frustration.

"Mario, in six weeks the venerable Church of the San Zaccaria is scheduled to reopen to the public. If it docs not reopen to the public in six weeks, restored to its original glory, the superintendents will take me down to the cellars of the Doge's Palace for a ritual dis-embowelment. Am I making myself clear to you, Mario? If you don't finish that Bellini, my reputation will be ruined."

"I'm close, Francesco. I just need to sort out some personal affairs."

"What sort of affairs?"

"A death in the family."

"Really?"

"Don't ask any more questions, Francesco."

"You do whatever you need, Mario. But let me tell you this. If I think the Bellini is in danger of not being finished on schedule, I'll have no choice but to remove you from the project and give it to Antonio."

"Antonio's not qualified to restore that altarpiece, and you know it."

"What else can I do? Restore it myself? You leave me no choice."

Tiepolo's anger quickly evaporated, as it usually did, and he poured more ripasso into his empty glass. Gabriel looked up at the behind Tiepolo's desk. Amid photos of churches and scuolas

restored by Tiepolo's firm was a curious image: Tiepolo himself, strolling through the Vatican Gardens, with none other than Pope Paul VII at his side.

"You had a private audience with the Pope?"

"Not an audience really. It was more informal than that."

"Would you care to explain?"

Tiepolo looked down and shuffled his stack of paperwork. It did not take a trained interrogator to conclude that he was reluctant to answer Gabriel's question. Finally, he said, "It's not something I discuss frequently, but the Holy Father and I are rather good friends."

"Really?"

"The Holy Father and I worked very closely together here in Venice when he was the patriarch. He's actually something of an art historian. Oh, we used to have the most terrible battles. Now we get on famously. I go down to Rome to have supper with him at least once a month. He insists on doing the cooking himself. His specialty is tuna and spaghettini, but he puts so much red pepper in it that we spend the rest of the night sweating. He's a warrior, that man! A culinary sadist."

Gabriel smiled and stood up. Tiepolo said, "You won't let me down, will you, Mario?"

"A friend of Il papa} Of course not. Ciao, Francesco. See you in a couple days."

AN AIR of desertion hung over the old ghetto--no children playing in the campo, no old men sitting in the cafe, and from the tall apartment houses came no sounds of life. In a few of the windows, Gabriel saw lights burning, and for a fleeting instant he smelled meat and onion frying in olive oil, but for the most part he imagined himself a man coming home to a ghost town, a place where homes and shops remained but the inhabitants had long ago vanished.

The bakery where he had met with Shamron was closed. He walked a few paces to No. 2899. A small sign on the door read comunita ebraica di venezia. Gabriel rang the bell, and a moment later came the voice of a woman over an unseen intercom. "Yes, may I help you?"

"My name is Mario Delvecchio. I have an appointment to see the rabbi."

"Just a moment, please."

Gabriel turned his back to the door and surveyed the square. A moment stretched to two, then three. It was the war in the territories. It had made everyone jittery. Security had been tightened at Jewish sites across Europe. So far, Venice had been spared, but in Rome and in cities across France and Austria, synagogues and cemeteries had been vandalized and Jews attacked on the streets. The newspapers were calling it the worst wave of public anti-Semitism to sweep the continent since the Second World War. At times like these, Gabriel despised the fact that he had to conceal his Jewishness.

A buzzer finally sounded, followed by the click of an automatic lock giving way. He pushed back the door and found himself in a darkened passageway. At the end was another door. As Gabriel approached, it too was unlocked for him.

He entered a small, cluttered office. Because of the air of decline hanging over the ghetto, he had prepared himself for an Italian version of Frau Ratzinger--a formidable old woman shrouded in the black cloak of widowhood. Instead, much to his surprise, he was greeted by a tall, striking woman about thirty years old. Her hair Was dark and curly and shimmering with highlights of auburn and chestnut. Barely constrained by a clasp at the nape of her neck, it spilled riotously about a pair of athletic shoulders. Her eyes were the color of caramel and flecked with gold. Her lips looked as though they were attempting to suppress a smile. She seemed supremely aware of the effect her appearance was having on him.