Daniel Silva - The Confessor

He led her into the large room overlooking the street--the room Benjamin had used as his office. The beam of Chiara's flashlight fell across the neo-Nazi graffiti on the wall. "My God," she whispered.

"You start at that end," Gabriel said. "We'll search each room together, then we'll move to the next."

They worked silently but efficiently. Gabriel tore the desk to pieces, while Chiara pulled every book from its shelf and thumbed through the pages. Nothing. Next, Gabriel went to work on the furniture, removing slipcovers, pulling apart cushions. Nothing. He turned over the coffee table and unscrewed the legs to check for hollow compartments. Nothing. Together, they turned over the rug and searched for a slit where documents might be concealed. Nothing. Gabriel got down on all fours and patiently checked every floorboard to see if one of them had been loosened. Chiara removed the covers from the heating vents.

Hell!

At one end of the room was a doorway leading to a small antechamber. Inside, Benjamin had stored more books. Gabriel and Chiara searched the room together and found nothing.

Closing the door on the way out, Gabriel detected a faint sound, something unfamiliar; not the squeak of a dry hinge, but a rustle of some sort. He put his hand on the knob, then opened and closed the door several times in quick succession. Open, close, open, close, open . . .

The door was hollow, and it sounded as if there was something inside.

He turned to Chiara. "Hand me that screwdriver." He knelt down and loosened the screws holding the latch to the door. When he finished, he separated the latch. Attached to one of them was a line of nylon filament, hanging into the interior of the door. Gabriel gently tugged on the filament, and up came a clear plastic bag with a zip-lock enclosure. Inside was a tightly folded batch of papers.

"My God," Chiara said. "I can't believe you actually found it!"

Gabriel pried open the Ziplock bag, then carefully removed the papers and unfolded them by the illumination of Chiara's flashlight. He closed his eyes, swore softly, and held the papers up ft Chiara to see.

It was a copy of Sister Regina's letter.

Gabriel got slowly to his feet. It had taken more than an hour to find something they already had. How much longer would it take I to find what they needed? He drew a deep breath and turned around.

It was then that he saw the shadow of a figure, standing in the center of the room amid the clutter. He reached into his pocket, wrapped his fingers around the butt of the Beretta, and quickly drew it out. As his arm swung up to the firing position, Chiara illuminated the target with the beam of her flashlight. Fortunately, Gabriel managed to prevent his forefinger from pulling the trigger, because standing ten feet in front of him, with her hands shading her eyes, was an old woman wrapped in a pink bathrobe.

THERE WAS a pathological neatness about Frau Ratzinger's tiny flat that Gabriel recognized at once. The kitchen was spotless and sterile, the dishes in her little china cabinet fastidiously placed. The knickknacks on the coffee table in her sitting room looked as; though they had been arranged and rearranged by an inmate in an asylum--which in many respects, thought Gabriel, she was.

"Where were you?" he asked carefully, in a voice he might have used for a small child.

"First Dachau, then Ravensbruck, and finally Riga." She paused for a moment. "My parents were murdered at Riga. They were shot by the Einsatzgruppen, the roving SS death squads, and buried along with twenty-seven thousand others in a trench dug by Russian prisoners-of-war."

Then she rolled up her sleeve to show Gabriel her number--like the number that Gabriel's mother had tried so desperately to conceal. Even in the fierce summer heat of the Jezreel Valley, she would wear a long-sleeved blouse rather than allow a stranger to see her tattoo. Her mark of shame, she called it. Her emblem of Jewish weakness.

"Benjamin was afraid he would be killed," she said. "They used to call him at all hours and say the most horrible things on his telephone. They used to stand outside the building at night to frighten him. He told me that if anything ever happened to him, men would come--men from Israel."

She opened the drawer of her china cabinet and pulled out a white linen tablecloth. With Chiara's help, she unfolded it. Hidden inside was a legal-size envelope, the edges and flap sealed with heavy plastic packing tape.

"This is what you were looking for, yes?" She held it up for Gabriel to see. "The first time I saw you, I thought you might be the one, but I didn't feel I could trust you. There were many strange things taking place in that apartment. Men coming in the middle of the night. Policemen carting off Benjamin's belongings. I was afraid. As you might imagine, I still do not trust German men in uniform."

Her melancholy eyes settled on Gabriel's face. "You're not his brother, are you?"

"No, I'm not, Frau Ratzinger."

"I didn't think so. That's why I gave you the eyeglasses. If you Were the man Benjamin was talking about, I knew you would follow the clues, and that eventually you would find your way back to me. I had to be certain you were the right man. Are you the right man, Herr Landau?"

"I'm not Herr Landau, but I am the right man."

"Your German is very good," she said. "You are from Israel, aren't you?"

"I grew up in the Jezreel Valley," Gabriel said, switching to Hebrew without warning. "Benjamin was the closest thing to a brother I ever had. I'm the man he would have wanted to see what's inside that envelope."

"Then I believe this belongs to you," she responded in the same language. "Finish your friend's work. But whatever you do, don't come back here again. It's not safe for you here."

Then she carefully placed the envelope in Gabriel's hands and touched his face.

"Go," she said.

Benedetto Fó presented himself for work at the four-story office building near the entrance of Saint Peter's Square at the thoroughly reasonable Roman hour of ten-thirty. In a city filled with beautifully dressed men, Fó was clearly an exception. His trousers had long ago lost their crease, the toes of his black leather shoes were scuffed, and the pockets of his sport jacket had been misshapen by his habit of filling them with notepads, tape recorders, and batches of folded papers. The Vatican correspondent for La Repubblica, Fó did not trust a man who couldn't carry his possessions in his pockets.

He picked his way through a pack of tourists queued up outside the souvenir shops on the ground floor and tried to enter the foyer. A blue-uniformed guard blocked his path. Fó sighed heavily and rummaged through his pockets until he found his press credentials.

It was a wholly unnecessary ritual, for Benedetto Fó was the dean of the Vaticanisti and his face was as well known to the Press Office security staff as the one belonging to the Austrian bullyboy who ran the place. Forcing him to show his badge was just another form of subtle punishment, like banning him from the Pope's airplane for next month's papal visit to Argentina and Chile. Fó had been a naughty boy. Fó was on probation. He'd been placed on the rack and offered a chance to repent. One more misstep and they'd tie him to the stake and light a match.

The Sala Stampa della Santa Sede, otherwise known as the Vatican Press Office, was an island of modernity in a Renaissance sea. Fó passed through a set of automatic glass doors, then crossed a floor of polished black marble to his cubicle in the press room. The Vatican inflicted a vow of poverty on those it deemed worthy of permanent credentials. Fó's office consisted of a tiny Formica desk with a telephone and a fax machine that was forever breaking down at the worst possible time. His neighbor was a Rubenesque blonde from Inside the Vatican magazine called Giovanna. She thought him a heretic and refused his repeated invitations to lunch.