Daniel Silva - A Death in Vienna

In the spring of 1943, the advance of the Red Army compelled Radek to turn his attention from the extermination camps of Poland to the killing sites farther east, in occupied Soviet territory. Soon he was back on his home turf in the Ukraine. Radek knew where the bodies were buried, quite literally, because two years earlier he had coordinated the operations of the Einsatzgruppen killing squads. In late summer, the Sonderkommando 1005 moved from the Ukraine to Byelorussia, and by September, it was active in the Baltic states of Lithuania and Latvia, where entire Jewish populations had been wiped out.

Rivlin closed the file and pushed it away in disgust.

“We’ll never know how many bodies Radek and his men disposed of. The crime was far too enormous to conceal completely, but Aktion 1005 managed to efface much of the evidence and make it virtually impossible after the war to arrive at an accurate estimate of the dead. So thorough was Radek’s work that, in some cases, the Polish and Soviet commissions investigating the Shoah could findno traces of the mass graves. At Babi Yar, Radek’s cleanup was so complete that, after the war, the Soviets were able to turn it into a park. And now, unfortunately, the lack of physical remains of the dead has given inspiration to the lunatic fringe who claim the Holocaust never happened. Radek’s actions haunt us to this day.”

Gabriel thought of the Pages of Testimony in the Hall of Names, the only gravestones for millions of victims.

“Max Klein swore that he saw Ludwig Vogel at Auschwitz in summer or early autumn of 1942,” Gabriel said. “Based on what you’ve told me, that’s entirely possible.”

“Indeed, assuming, of course, that Vogel and Radek are in fact the same man. Radek’s Sonderkommando 1005 was definitely active in Auschwitz in 1942. Whether Radek was there or not on a given day is probably impossible to prove.”

“How much do we know about what happened to Radek after the war?”

“Not much, I’m afraid. He attempted to flee Berlin disguised as a Wehrmacht corporal. He was arrested on suspicion of being an SS man and was interned at the Mannheim POW camp. Sometime in early 1946, he escaped. After that, it’s a mystery. It appears he managed to get out of Europe. There were alleged sightings in all the usual places- Syria, Egypt, Argentina, Paraguay – but nothing reliable. The Nazi hunters were after big fish like Eichmann, Bormann, Mengele, and Müller. Radek managed to fly below the radar. Besides, the secret of Aktion 1005 was so well kept that the subject barely arose at the Nuremberg trials. No one really knew much about it.”

“Who ran Mannheim?”

“It was an American camp.”

“Do we know how he managed to escape Europe?”

“No, but we should assume that he had help.”

“The ODESSA?”

“It might have been the ODESSA, or one of the other secret Nazi aid networks.” Rivlin hesitated, then said, “Or it might have been a highly public and ancient institution based in Rome that operated the most successful Ratline of the postwar period.”

“The Vatican?”

Rivlin nodded. “The ODESSA couldn’t hold a candle to the Vatican when it came to financing and running an escape route from Europe. Because Radek was an Austrian, he would almost certainly have been assisted by Bishop Hudal.”

“Who’s Hudal?”

“Aloïs Hudal was an Austrian native, an anti-Semite, and a fervent Nazi. He used his position as rector of the Pontificio Santa Maria dell’Anima, the German seminary in Rome, to help hundreds of SS officers escape justice, including Franz Stangl, the commandant of Treblinka.”

“What kind of assistance did he provide them?”

“For starters, a Red Cross passport in a new name and an entrance visa to a country far away. He also gave them a bit of pocket money and paid for their passage.”

“Did he keep records?”

“Apparently so, but his papers are kept under lock and key at the Anima.”

“I need everything you have on Bishop Aloïs Hudal.”

“I’ll assemble a file for you.”

Gabriel picked up Radek’s photograph and looked at it carefully. There was something familiar about the face. It had been clawing at him throughout Rivlin’s briefing. Then he thought of the charcoal sketches he’d seen that morning at the Holocaust art museum, the child cowering before an SS monster, and he knew at once where he’d seen Radek’s face before.

He stood suddenly, toppling his chair.

“What’s wrong?” Rivlin asked.

“I know this man,” Gabriel said, eyes on the photo.

“How?”

Gabriel ignored the question. “I need to borrow this,” he said. Then, without waiting for Rivlin’s answer, he slipped out the door and was gone.

IN THE OLD days he would have taken the fast road north through Ramallah, Nablus, and Jenin. Now, even a man with the survival skills of Gabriel would be foolhardy to attempt such a run without an armored car and battle escort. So he took the long way round, down the western slope of the Judean Mountains toward Tel Aviv, up the Coastal Plain to Hadera, then northeast, through the Mount Carmel ridge, to El Megiddo: Armageddon.

The valley opened before him, stretching from the Samarian hills in the south to the slopes of the Galilee in the north, a green-brown patchwork of row crops, orchards, and forestlands planted by the earliest Jewish settlers in Mandate Palestine. He headed toward Nazareth, then east, to a small farming town on the edge of the Balfour Forest called Ramat David.

It took him a few minutes to find the address. The bungalow that had been built for the Allons had been torn down and replaced by a California-style sandstone rambler with a satellite dish on the roof and an American-made minivan in the front drive. As Gabriel looked on, a soldier stepped from the front door and walked briskly across the front lawn. Gabriel’s memory flashed. He saw his father, making the same journey on a warm evening in June, and though he had not realized it then, it would be the last time Gabriel would ever see him alive.

He looked at the house next door. It was the house where Tziona had lived. The plastic toys littering the front lawn indicated that Tziona, unmarried and childless, did not live there anymore. Still, Israel was nothing if not an extended, quarrelsome family, and Gabriel was confident the new occupants could at least point him in the right direction.

He rang the bell. The plump young woman who spoke Russian-accented Hebrew did not disappoint him. Tziona was living up in Safed. The Russian woman had a forwarding address.

JEWS HAD BEEN living in the center of Safed since the days of antiquity. After the expulsion from Spain in 1492, the Ottoman Turks allowed many more Jews to settle there, and the city flourished as a center of Jewish mysticism, scholarship, and art. During the war of independence, Safed was on the verge of falling to superior Arab forces when the besieged community was reinforced by a platoon of Palmach fighters, who stole into the city after making a daring night crossing from their garrison on Mount Canaan. The leader of the Palmach unit negotiated an agreement with Safed’s powerful rabbis to work over Passover to reinforce the city’s fortifications. His name was Ari Shamron.

Tziona’s apartment was in the Artists’ Quarter, at the top of a flight of cobblestone steps. She was an enormous woman, draped in a white caftan, with wild gray hair and so many bracelets that she clanged and clattered when she threw her arms around Gabriel’s neck. She drew him inside, into a space that was both a living room and potter’s studio, and sat him down on the stone terrace to watch the sunset over the Galilee. The air smelled of burning lavender oil.