Daniel Silva - The Confessor

"We keep it for guests and emergencies," the girl said. "You're welcome to use it for a few hours. Through that door is a bathroom with a shower."

"I need to send a fax," Gabriel said. "There's one downstairs. I'll take you."

Gabriel followed her to a small office near the main reception area.

"Do you have a copier?"

"Of course. Right over there."

Gabriel removed Sister Regina Carcassi's letter from his jacket pocket and made a photocopy. Then he scribbled a few words on a separate piece of paper and handed them all to the girl. Gabriel recited the number from memory, and she fed the pages into the fax machine.

"Vienna?" she asked.

Gabriel nodded. He heard the squelch as the fax machine made!

If contact with Eli Lavon's office, then watched the pages slip through!

the feeder tray one by one. Two minutes after the transmission was complete, the fax machine rang and spit out a single page with two hastily scrawled words.

Documents received.

Gabriel recognized the handwriting as Lavon's.

"Do you need anything else?"

"Just a few hours of sleep."

"That I can't help you with." She smiled at him for the first time. "Can you find your way back upstairs?"

"No problem."

When he returned to the guest room, the curtains were tightly drawn. Chiara lay on one of the beds, knees pulled to her chest already asleep. Gabriel undressed and slid beneath the blanket of the second bed, quietly settling onto the creaking bedsprings so as not to wake her. Then he closed his eyes and tumbled into a dreamless sleep.

In Vienna Eli Lavon stood over his fax machine, cigarette between his lips, squinting at the document pinched between the tips of his nicotine-stained fingers. He walked back to his office where a man sat in the heavy afternoon shadows. Lavon waved the pages.

"Our hero and heroine have surfaced."

"Where are they?" asked Ari Shamron.

Lavon looked down at the fax and found the telephone number of the transmitting machine. "It appears they're in Munich."

Shamron closed his eyes. "Where in Munich?"

Lavon consulted the fax once more, and this time he was smiling when he looked up. "It looks as though our boy has found his way back to the bosom of his people."

"And the document?"

"I'm afraid Italian is not one of my languages, but based on the first line, I'd say he found Sister Regina."

"Let me see that."

Lavon handed the fax pages to Shamron. He read the first line aloud--"Mi chiamo Regina Carcassi.. ."--then looked up sharply at Lavon.

"Do you know anyone who speaks Italian?"

"I can find someone."

"Now, Eli."

When Gabriel woke the darkness was complete. He raised his wrist to his face and focused his gaze on the luminous dial of his watch. Ten o'clock. He reached down toward the floor and groped through his clothing until he found Sister Regina's letter. He breathed again.

Chiara lay next to him. At some point she had left her own bed and, like a small child, crawled into his. Her back was turned to him, and her hair lay across his pillow. When he touched her shoulder, she rolled over and faced him. Her eyes were damp.

"What's wrong?"

"I was just thinking."

"About what?"

A long silence, broken by the blare of a car horn outside their window. "I used to pop into the Church of San Zaccaria while you were working. I'd see you up there on your scaffolding, hidden behind your shroud. Sometimes, I'd peer around the edge and see you staring at the face of the Virgin."

"Obviously, I'm going to have to get a bigger shroud."

"It's her, isn't it? When you look at the Virgin, you see the face of your wife. You see her scars." When Gabriel made no response, Chiara propped her head on her elbow and studied his face, running her forefinger down the length of his nose, as though it were sculpture. "I feel so sorry for you."

"I have no one to blame but myself. I was a fool to bring her into the field."

"That's why I feel sorry for you. If you could blame someone else, it might be easier."

She laid her head on his chest and was silent for a moment. "God, but I hate this place. Munich. The place where it all started. Did you know Hitler had a headquarters a few streets over?"

"I know."

"I used to think everything had changed for the better. Six

months ago, someone put a coffin outside my father's synagogue.

There was a swastika on the lid. Inside was a note. 'This coffin is

for the Jews of Venice! The ones we didn't get the first time!'"

"It's not real," Gabriel said. "At least, the threat isn't real."

"It frightened the old ones. You see, they remember when it was real."

She lifted her hand to her face and pushed a tear from her cheek. "Do you really think Beni had something else?"

"I'd stake my life on it."

"What else do we need? A bishop from the Vatican sat down with Martin Luther in 1942 and gave his blessing to the murder of millions. Sixty years later, Crux Vera killed your friend and many more to keep it a secret."

"I don't want Crux Vera to succeed. I want to expose the secret, and I need more than Sister Regina's letter in order to do that."

"Do you know what this will do to the Vatican?"

"I'm afraid that's not my concern."

"You'll destroy it," she said. "Then you'll go back to the Church of San Zaccaria and finish restoring your Bellini. You're a man of contradictions, aren't you?"

"So I've been told."

She lifted her head, resting her chin on his breastbone, and stared into his eyes. Her hair spilled over his cheeks. "Why do they hate us, Gabriel? What did we ever do to them?"

The Peugeot was where they had left it, parked at the side entrance of the community center, glistening beneath a yellow streetlamp. Gabriel drove carefully through the wet streets. He skirted the city center on the Thomas Winner Ring, a broad boulevard encircling the heart of old Munich, then headed toward Schwabing on the Ludwigstrasse. At the entrance of a U-Bahn station, he saw a stack of blue fliers beneath the weight of a red brick. Chiara darted out, scooped up the papers, and brought them back to the car.

Gabriel twice drove past Adalbertstrasse 68 before deciding it was safe to proceed. He parked around the corner, on the Barer-strasse, and killed the engine. A streetcar rattled past, empty but for a single old woman gazing hopelessly through the fogged glass.

As they walked toward the entrance of the apartment house, Gabriel thought of his first conversation with Detective Axel Weiss. The tenants are very casual about who they let in. If someone presses the intercom and says "advertisements," they're routinely buzzed in.

Gabriel hesitated, then simultaneously pushed two buttons. A few seconds later a sleepy voice answered, "Ja?" Gabriel murmured the password. The buzzer howled, and the door unlocked. They stepped inside and the door closed automatically behind them. Gabriel opened and closed it a second time for the benefit of anyone who might be listening. Then he placed the stack of fliers on the ground and crossed the foyer to the staircase--quickly, in case the old caretaker was still awake.

They crept quietly up the stairs to the second-floor landing. The door to Benjamin's apartment was still marked with crime-scene tape, and an official-looking note on the door declared that it was off-limits. The makeshift memorial--the flowers, the notes of condolence--had been cleared away.

Chiara crouched and went to work on the lock with a slender metal tool. Gabriel turned his back to her and watched the stairwell. Thirty seconds later, he heard the lock give way, and Chiara pushed open the door. They ducked beneath the crime-scene tape and went inside. Gabriel closed the door and switched on his flashlight.

"Work quickly," he said. "Don't worry about making a mess."