A Death in Vienna

12 JERUSALEM

THE LIGHTS OF Ben-Gurion Airport pricked the darkness of the Coastal Plain. Gabriel leaned his head against the window and watched the runway rising slowly to meet him. The tarmac shone like glass in the night rain. As the plane slowed to a stop, Gabriel spotted the man from King Saul Boulevard, sheltering beneath an umbrella at the foot of the stairs. He made certain he was the last passenger to leave the plane.

They entered the terminal through a special doorway used by senior government officials and visiting dignitaries. The man from headquarters was a disciple of Lev, corporate and high-tech, with a boardroom bearing and a belief that men of the field were simply blunt objects to be manipulated by higher beings. Gabriel walked one step ahead of him.

“The boss wants to see you.”

“I’m sure he does, but I haven’t slept in two days, and I’m tired.”

“The boss doesn’t care if you’re tired. Who the hell do you think you are, Allon?”

Gabriel, even in the sanctuary of Ben-Gurion Airport, did not appreciate the use of his real name. He wheeled around. The headquarters man held up his palms in surrender. Gabriel turned and kept walking. The headquarters man had the good sense not to follow.

Outside, rain was hammering against the pavement. Lev’s doing, no doubt. Gabriel sought shelter beneath the taxi stand and thought about where to go. He had no residence in Israel; the Office was his only home. Usually he stayed at a safe flat or Shamron’s villa in Tiberias.

A black Peugeot turned into the traffic circle. The weight of the armor made it ride low on the heavy-duty suspension. It stopped in front of Gabriel, the bulletproof rear window slid down. Gabriel smelled the bitter, familiar scent of Turkish tobacco. Then he saw the hand, liver-spotted and blue-veined, gesturing wearily for him to come out of the rain.

THE CAR LURCHED forward even before Gabriel could close the door. Shamron was never one for standing still. He crushed out his cigarette for Gabriel’s sake and lowered the windows for a few seconds in order to clear the air. When the windows were closed again, Gabriel told him of Lev’s hostile reception. He spoke to Shamron in English at first; then, remembering where he was, he switched to Hebrew.

“Apparently, he wants to have a word with me.”

“Yes, I know,” Shamron said. “He’d like to see me as well.”

“How did he find out about Vienna?”

“It seems Manfred Kruz paid a courtesy call on the embassy after your deportation and threw something of a fit. I’m told it wasn’t pretty. The Foreign Ministry is furious, and the entire top floor of King Saul Boulevard is baying for my blood-and yours.”

“What can they do to me?”

“Nothing, which is why you’re my perfect accomplice-that and your obvious talents, of course.”

The car sped out of the airport and turned onto the highway. Gabriel wondered why they were heading toward Jerusalem, but was too exhausted to care. After a while, they began to climb into the Judean Mountains. Soon the car was filled with the scent of eucalyptus and wet pine. Gabriel looked out the rain-spattered window and tried to remember the last time he had set foot in his country. It was after he had hunted down Tariq al-Hourani. He’d spent a month in a safe flat just outside the walls of the Old City, recovering from a bullet wound in his chest. That was more than three years ago. He realized that the threads that bound him to this place were fraying. He wondered whether he, like Francesco Tiepolo, would die in Venice and suffer the indignity of a mainland burial.

“Something tells me Lev and the Foreign Ministry are going to be slightly less annoyed with me when they find out what’s inside this.” Shamron held up an envelope. “Looks like you were a very busy boy during your brief stay in Vienna. Who’s Ludwig Vogel?”

Gabriel, his head propped against the window, told Shamron everything, beginning with his encounter with Max Klein, and ending with his tense confrontation with Manfred Kruz in his hotel room. Shamron was soon smoking again, and though Gabriel could not see his face clearly in the back of the darkened limousine, the old man was actually smiling. Umberto Conti may have given Gabriel the tools to become a great restorer, but Shamron was responsible for his flawless memory.

“No wonder Kruz was so anxious to get you out of Austria,” Shamron said. “The Islamic Fighting Cells?” He emitted a burst of derisive laughter. “How convenient. The government accepts the claim of responsibility and sweeps the affair under the rug as an act of Islamic terror on Austrian soil. That way the trail doesn’t get too close to Austrians-or to Vogel and Metzler, especially so near to the election.”

“But what about the documents from the Staatsarchiv? According to them, Ludwig Vogel is squeaky clean.”

“So why did he plant a bomb in Eli’s office and murder Max Klein?”

“We don’t know if he did either one of those things.”

“True, but the facts certainly suggest that’s a possibility. We might not be able to prove it in court, but the story would sell a lot of newspapers.”

“You’re suggesting a leak?”

“Why don’t we light a fire under Vogel and see how he reacts?”

“Bad idea,” Gabriel said. “Remember Waldheim and the revelations about his Nazi past? They were dismissed as foreign agitation and outside interference in Austrian affairs. Ordinary Austrians closed ranks around him, as did the Austrian authorities. The affair also raised the level of anti-Semitism inside the country. A leak, Ari, would be a very bad idea.”

“So what do you suggest we do?”

“Max Klein was convinced that Ludwig Vogel was an SS man who committed an atrocity at Auschwitz. According to the documents in the Staatsarchiv, Ludwig Vogel was too young to be that man – and he was in the Wehrmacht, not the SS. But assume for argument’s sake that Max Klein was right.”

“That would mean that Ludwig Vogel is someone else.”

“Exactly,” Gabriel said. “So let’s find out who he really is.”

“How do you intend to do that?”

“I’m not sure,” Gabriel said, “but the things in that envelope, in proper hands, might yield some valuable clues.”

Shamron nodded thoughtfully. “There’s a man at Yad Vashem who you should see. He’ll be able to help you. I’ll set up an appointment first thing in the morning.”

“There’s one more thing, Ari. We need to get Eli out of Vienna.”

“My thoughts exactly.” Shamron removed the telephone from the console and pressed a Speed-dial button. “This is Shamron. I need to speak to the prime minister.”

YAD VASHEM, located atop Mount Herzel in the western portion of Jerusalem, is Israel ’s official memorial to the six million who perished in the Shoah. It is also the world’s foremost center for Holocaust research and documentation. The library contains more than one hundred thousand volumes, the largest and most complete collection of Holocaust literature in the world. Stored in the archives are more than fifty-eight million pages of original documents, including thousands of personal testimonies, written, dictated, or videotaped by survivors of the Shoah in Israel and around the world.

Moshe Rivlin was expecting him. A rotund, bearded academic, he spoke Hebrew with a pronounced Brooklyn accent. His special area of expertise resided not with the victims of the Shoah but with its perpetrators-the Germans who served the Nazi death machine and the thousands of non-German helpers who willingly and enthusiastically took part in the destruction of Europe ’s Jews. He served as a paid consultant for the U.S. Justice Department’s Office of Special Investigations, compiling documentary evidence against accused Nazi war criminals and scouring Israel for living witnesses. When he was not searching the archives of Yad Vashem, Rivlin could usually be found among the survivors, looking for someone who remembered.

Rivlin led Gabriel inside the archives building and into the main reading room. It was a surprisingly cramped space, brightly lit by large floor-to-ceiling windows overlooking the hills of west Jerusalem. A pair of scholars sat hunched over open books; another stared transfixed into the screen of a microfilm reader. When Gabriel suggested something a bit more private, Rivlin led him into a small side room and closed the thick glass door. The version of events Gabriel provided was well sanitized, but thorough enough so that nothing important was lost in translation. He showed Rivlin all the material he had gathered in Austria: the Staatsarchiv file, the photograph, the wristwatch, and the ring. When Gabriel pointed out the inscription on the inside of the band, Rivlin read it and looked up sharply.

“Amazing,” he whispered.

“What does it mean?”

“I have to gather some documents from the archives.” Rivlin stood. “It’s going to take a little time.”

“How long?”

The archivist shrugged. “An hour, maybe a little less. Have you ever been to the memorials?”

“Not since I was a schoolboy.”

“Take a walk.” Rivlin patted Gabriel’s shoulder. “Come back in an hour.”

GABRIEL WALKED ALONG a pine-shaded footpath and descended the stone passage into the darkness of Children’s Memorial. Five candles, reflected infinitely by mirrors, created the illusion of a galaxy of stars, while a recorded voice read the names of the dead.

He emerged back into the brilliant sunlight and walked to the Hall of Remembrance, where he stood motionless before the eternal flame, flickering amid black basalt engraved with some of history’s most infamous names: Treblinka, Sobibor, Majdanek, Bergen-Belsen, Chelmo, Auschwitz…

In the Hall of Names, there were no flames or statues, just countless file folders filled with Pages of Testimony, each bearing the story of a martyr: name, place and date of birth, name of parents, place of residence, profession, place of death. A gentle woman named Shoshanna searched the computer database and located the Pages of Testimony for Gabriel’s grandparents, Viktor and Sarah Frankel. She printed them out and handed them sadly over to Gabriel. At the bottom of each page was the name of the person who had supplied the information: Irene Allon, Gabriel’s mother.

He paid a small surcharge for the printouts, two shekels for each, and walked next door to the Yad Vashem Art Museum, home of the largest collection of Holocaust art in the world. As he roamed the galleries, he found it nearly impossible to fathom the undying human spirit that managed to produceart under conditions of starvation, slavery, and unimaginable brutality. Suddenly, his own work seemed trivial and utterly without meaning. What did dead saints in a museum of a church have to do with anything? Mario Delvecchio, arrogant, egotistical Mario Delvecchio, seemed entirely irrelevant.

In the final room was a special exhibit of children’s art. One image seized him like a choke hold, a charcoal sketch of an androgynous child, cowering before the gigantic figure of an SS officer.

He glanced at his watch. An hour had passed. He left the art museum and hurried back to the archives to hear the results of Moshe Rivlin’s search.

HE FOUND RIVLIN pacing anxiously in the sandstone forecourt of the archives building. Rivlin seized Gabriel by the arm and led him inside to the small room where they had met an hour before. Two thick files awaited them. Rivlin opened the first and handed Gabriel a photograph: Ludwig Vogel, in the uniform of an SS Sturmbannführer.

“It’s Radek,” Rivlin whispered, unable to contain his excitement. “I think you may have actually found Erich Radek!”

13 VIENNA

HERR KONRAD BECKER, of Becker amp; Puhl, Talstrasse 26, Zurich, arrived in Vienna that same morning. He cleared passport control with no delay and made his way to the arrivals hall, where he located the uniformed driver clutching a cardboard sign that read HERRBAUER. The client insisted on the added precaution. Becker did not like the client-nor was he under any illusions about the source of the account-but such was the nature of private Swiss banking, and Herr Konrad Becker was a true believer. If capitalism were a religion, Becker would be a leader of an extremist sect. In Becker’s learned opinion, man possessed the divine right to make money unfettered by government regulation and to conceal it wherever and however he pleased. Avoidance of taxation was not a choice but a moral duty. Inside the secretive world of Zurich banking, he was known for absolute discretion. It was the reason Konrad Becker had been entrusted with the account in the first place.

Twenty minutes later, the car drew to a stop in front of a graystone mansion in the First District. On Becker’s instructions, the driver tapped the horn twice and, after a brief delay, the metal gate swung slowly open. As the car pulled into the drive, a man stepped out of the front entrance and descended the short flight of steps. He was in his late forties, with the build and swagger of a downhill racer. His name was Klaus Halder.

Halder opened the car door and led Becker into the entrance hall. As usual, he asked the banker to open his briefcase for inspection. Then it was the rather degrading Leonardo pose, arms and legs spread wide, for a thorough going over with a hand-held magnetometer.

Finally he was escorted into the drawing room, a formal Viennese parlor, large and rectangular, with walls of rich yellow, and crown molding painted the color of clotted cream. The furniture was Baroque and covered in rich brocade. An ormolu clock ticked softly on the mantel. Each piece of furniture, each lamp and decorative object, seemed to complement its neighbor and the room as a whole. It was the room of a man who clearly possessed money and taste in equal amounts.

Herr Vogel, the client, was seated beneath a portrait that appeared, in the opinion of Herr Becker, to have been painted by Lucas Cranach the Elder. He rose slowly and extended his hand. They were a mismatched pair: Vogel, tall and Germanic, with his bright blue eyes and white hair; Becker, short and bald with a cosmopolitan assurance born of the varied nature of his clientele. Vogel released the banker’s hand and gestured toward an empty chair. Becker sat down and produced a leather-bound ledger from his attaché case. The client nodded gravely. He was never one for small talk.

“As of this morning,” Becker said, “the total value of the account stands at two and a half billion dollars. Roughly one billion of that is cash, equally divided between dollars and euros. The rest of the money is invested-the usual fare, securities and bonds, along with a substantial amount of real estate. In preparation for the liquidation and dispersal of the account, we are in the process of selling off the real estate holdings. Given the state of the global economy, it’s taking longer than we had hoped.”

“When will that process be complete?”

“Our target date is the end of the month. Even if we should fall short of our goal, dispersal of the monies will commence immediately upon receipt of the letter from the chancellor’s office. The instructions are very specific on this point. The letter must be hand-delivered to my office in Zurich, not more than one week after the chancellor is sworn in. It must be on the official stationery of the chancellery and above the chancellor’s signature.”

“I can assure you the chancellor’s letter will be forthcoming.”

“In anticipation of Herr Metzler’s victory, I’ve begun the difficult task of tracking down all those who are due payment. As you know, they are scattered from Europe to the Middle East, to South America and the United States. I’ve also had contact with the head of the Vatican Bank. As you might expect, given the current financial state of the Holy See, he was very pleased to take my call.”

“And why not? A quarter of a billion dollars is a great deal of money.”

From the banker, a vigilant smile. “Yes, but not even the Holy Father will know the true source of the money. As far as the Vatican is concerned, it is from a wealthy donor who wishes to remain anonymous.”

“And then there’s your share,” said Vogel.

“The bank’s share is one hundred million dollars, payable upon dispersal of all the funds.”

“One hundred million dollars, plus all the transaction fees you’ve collected over the years and the percentage you take from the annual profit. The account has made you an extremely wealthy man.”

“Your comrades provided generously for those who assisted them in this endeavor.” The banker closed the ledger with a muffled thump. Then he folded his hands and stared at them thoughtfully for a moment before speaking. “But I’m afraid there have been some unexpected…complications. ”

“What sort of complications?”

“It seems that several of those who were to receive money have died recently under mysterious circumstances. The latest was the Syrian. He was murdered in a gentlemen’s club in Istanbul, in the arms of a Russian prostitute. The girl was murdered, too. A terrible scene.”

Vogel shook his head sadly. “The Syrian would have been advised to avoid such places.”

“Of course, as the bearer of the account number and password, you will maintain control of any funds that cannot be dispersed. That is what the instructions stipulate.”

“How fortunate for me.”

“Let us hope that the Holy Father does not suffer a similar accident.” The banker removed his eyeglasses and inspected the lenses for impurities. “I feel compelled to remind you, Herr Vogel, that I am the only person with the authority to disperse the funds. In the event of my death, authority would pass to my partner, Herr Puhl. Should I die under violent or mysterious circumstances, the account will remain frozen until the circumstances of my death are determined. If the circumstances cannot be determined, the account will be rendered dormant. And you know what happens to dormant accounts in Switzerland.”

“Eventually, they become the property of the bank itself.”

“That’s correct. Oh, I suppose you could mount a court challenge, but that would raise a number of embarrassing questions about the provenance of the money-questions that the Swiss banking industry, and the government, would rather not have aired in public. As you might imagine, such an inquiry would be uncomfortable for all involved.”

“Then for my sake, please take care, Herr Becker. Your continued good health and safety are of the utmost importance to me.”

“I’m so pleased to hear that. I look forward to receiving the chancellor’s letter.”

The banker returned the account ledger to his attaché case and closed the lid.

“I’m sorry, but there is one more formality that slipped my mind. When discussing the account, it’s necessary for you to tell me the account number. For the record, Herr Vogel, will you recite it for me now?”

“Yes, of course.” Then, with Germanic precision: “Six, two, nine, seven, four, three, five.”

“And the password?”

“One, zero, zero, five.”

“Thank you, Herr Vogel.”

TEN MINUTES LATER, Becker’s car stopped outside the Ambassador Hotel. “Wait here,” the banker said to the driver. “I won’t be more than a few minutes.”

He crossed the lobby and rode the elevator to the fourth floor. A tall American in a wrinkled blazer and striped tie admitted him into Room 417. He offered Becker a drink, which the banker refused, then a cigarette, which he also declined. Becker never touched tobacco. Maybe he would start.

The American held out his hand toward the briefcase. Becker handed it over. The American lifted the lid and pried loose the false leather lining, exposing the microcassette recorder. Then he removed the tape and placed it into a small playback machine. He pressed REWIND, then PLAY. The sound quality was remarkable.

“For the record, Herr Vogel, will you recite it for me now?”

“Yes, of course. Six, two, nine, seven, four, three, five.”

“And the password?”

“One, zero, zero, five.”

“Thank you, Herr Vogel.”

STOP.

The American looked up and smiled. The banker looked as though he had just been caught betraying his wife with her best friend.

“You’ve done very well, Herr Becker. We’re grateful.”

“I’ve just committed more violations of the Swiss banking secrecy laws than I can count.”

“True, but they’re shitty laws. And besides, you still get a hundred million dollars.And your bank.”

“But it’s not my bank any longer, is it? It’syour bank now.”

The American sat back and folded his arms. He didn’t insult Becker with a denial.

14 JERUSALEM

GABRIEL HAD NO idea who Erich Radek was. Rivlin told him.

Erich Wilhelm Radek had been born in 1917 in the village of Alberndorf, thirty miles north of Vienna. The son of a police officer, Radek had attended a local gymnasium and showed a marked aptitude for mathematics and physics. He won a scholarship to attend the University of Vienna, where he studied engineering and architecture. According to university records, Radek was a gifted student who received high marks. He was also active in right-wing Catholic politics.

In 1937, he applied for membership in the Nazi Party. He was accepted and assigned the party number 57984567. Radek also became affiliated with the Austrian Legion, an illegal Nazi paramilitary organization. In March 1938, at the time of the Anschluss, he applied to join the SS. Blond and blue-eyed, with a lean athletic build, Radek was declared “pure Nordic” by the SS Racial Commission and, after a painstaking check of his ancestry, was deemed to be free of Jewish and other non-Aryan blood and accepted into the elite brotherhood.

“This is a copy of Radek’s party file and the questionnaires he filled out at the time of his application. It comes from the Berlin Documentation Center, the largest repository of Nazi and SS files in the world.” Rivlin held up two photographs, one a straight-on shot, the other a profile. “These are his official SS photographs. Looks like our man, doesn’t it?”

Gabriel nodded. Rivlin returned the photographs to the file and continued his history lesson:

By November of 1938, Radek had forsaken his studies and was working at the Central Office for Jewish Emigration, the Nazi institution that waged a campaign of terror and economic deprivation against Austria ’s Jews designed to compel them to leave the country “voluntarily.” Radek made a favorable impression on the head of the Central Office, who was none other than Adolf Eichmann. When Radek expressed a desire to go to Berlin, Eichmann agreed to help. Besides, Eichmann was ably assisted in Vienna by a young Austrian Nazi named Aloïs Brunner, who would eventually be implicated in the deportations and murders of 128,000 Jews from Greece, France, Romania, and Hungary. In May 1939, on Eichmann’s recommendation, Radek was transferred to the Reich Security Main Office in Berlin, where he was assigned to the Sicherheitsdienst, the Nazi security service known as the SD. He soon found himself working directly for the SD’s notorious chief, Reinhard Heydrich.

In June 1941, Hitler launched Operation Barbarossa, the invasion of the Soviet Union. Erich Radek was given command of SD operations in what became known as the Reichskommissariat Ukraine, a large swatch of the Ukraine that included the regions of Volhynia, Zhitomir, Kiev, Nikolayev, Tauria, and Dnepropetrovsk. Radek’s responsibilities included field security and antipartisan operations. He also created the collaborationist Ukrainian Auxiliary Police and controlled their activities.

During preparations for Barbarossa, Hitler had secretly ordered Heinrich Himmler to exterminate the Jews of the Soviet Union. As the Wehrmacht rolled across Soviet territory, four Einsatzgruppen mobile killing units followed closely behind. Jews were rounded up and transported to isolated sites-usually located near antitank ditches, abandoned quarries, or deep ravines-where they were murdered by machine-gun fire and hastily buried in mass graves.

“Erich Radek was well aware of the activities of the Einsatzgruppen units in the Reichskommissariat,” Rivlin said. “It was, after all, his turf. And he was no bureaucratic desk murderer. By all accounts, Radek actually enjoyed watching Jews being murdered by the thousands. But his most significant contribution to the Shoah still lay ahead.”

“What was that?”

“You have the answer to that question in your pocket. It’s engraved on the inside of that ring you took from the house in Upper Austria.”

Gabriel dug the ring from his pocket and read the inscription:1005, well done, Heinrich.

“I suspect that Heinrich is none other than Heinrich Müller, the chief of the Gestapo. But for our purposes, the most important information contained in the inscription are those four numbers at the beginning: one, zero, zero, five.”

“What do they mean?”

Rivlin opened the second file. It was labeled: AKTION1005.

IT BEGAN, oddly enough, with a complaint from the neighbors.

Early in 1942, spring runoff exposed a series of mass graves in the Warthegau district of western Poland along the Ner River. Thousands of corpses floated to the surface, and a horrible stench spread for miles around the site. A German living nearby sent an anonymous letter to the Foreign Office in Berlin complaining about the situation. Alarm bells sounded. The graves contained the remains of thousands of Jews murdered by the mobile gas vans then being used at the Chelmno extermination camp. The Final Solution, Nazi Germany’s most closely guarded secret, was in danger of being exposed by snowmelt.

The first reports of the mass killings of Jews had already begun reaching the outside world, thanks to a Soviet diplomatic cable that alerted the Allies to the horrors being carried out by German forces on Polish and Soviet soil. Martin Luther, who handled “Jewish affairs” on behalf of the German Foreign Office, knew that the exposed graves near Chelmno represented a serious threat to the secrecy of the Final Solution. He forwarded a copy of the anonymous letter to Heinrich Müller of the Gestapo and requested immediate action.

Rivlin had a copy of Müller’s response to Martin Luther. He laid it on the table, turned it so Gabriel could see, and pointed at the relevant passage:

The anonymous letter sent to the Foreign Office concerning the apparent solution of the Jewish question in the Warthegau district, which was submitted by you to me on 6 February 1942, I immediately transmitted for proper treatment. The results will be forthcoming in due course. In a place where wood is chopped, splinters must fall, and there is no avoiding this.

Rivlin pointed to the citations in the upper left-hand corner of the memo:IV B4 43/42 gRs [1005].

“Adolf Eichmann almost certainly received a copy of Müller’s response to Martin Luther. You see, Eichmann’s department of the Reich Security Main Office appears in the address line. The numbers ‘43/42’ represent the date: the forty-third day of 1942, or February twenty-eighth. The initialsg-R-s signify that the matter is Geheime Reichssache, a top-secret Reich matter. And here, in brackets at the end of the line, are the four numbers that would eventually be used as the code name for the top-secret Aktion, one, zero, zero, five.”

Rivlin returned the memo to the file.

“Shortly after Müller sent that letter to Martin Luther, Erich Radek was relieved of his command in the Ukraine and transferred back to the Reich Security Main Office in Berlin. He was assigned to Eichmann’s department and embarked on a period of intense study and planning. You see, concealing the greatest case of mass murder in history was no small undertaking. In June, he returned to the east, operating under Müller’s direct authority, and went to work.”

Radek established the headquarters of his Sonderkommando 1005 in the Polish city of Lodz, about fifty miles southeast of the Chelmno death camp. The exact address was Geheime Reichssache and unknown except to a few senior SS figures. All correspondence was routed through Eichmann’s department in Berlin.

Radek settled on cremation as the most effective method of disposing of the bodies. Burning had been attempted before, usually with flamethrowers, but with unsatisfactory results. Radek put his engineering training to good use, devising a method of burning corpses two thousand at a time in towering aerodynamic pyres. Thick wooden beams, twenty-three to twenty-seven feet in length, were soaked in petrol and placed atop cement blocks. The corpses were layered between the beams-bodies, beams, bodies, beams, bodies… Petrol-soaked kindling was placed at the base of the structure and set ablaze. When the fire died down, the charred bones would be crushed by heavy machinery and dispersed.

The dirty work was done by Jewish slave laborers. Radek organized the Jews into three teams, one team to open the burial pits, a second to carry the corpses from the pits to the pyre, and a third to sift the ashes for bones and valuables. At the conclusion of each operation, the terrain was leveled and replanted to conceal what had taken place there. Then the slaves were murdered and disposed of. In that way the secrecy of Aktion 1005 was preserved.

When work was completed at Chelmno, Radek and his Sonderkommando 1005 headed to Auschwitz to clean out the rapidly filling burial pits there. By the end of the summer of 1942, serious contamination and health problems had arisen at Belzec, Sobibor, and Treblinka. Wells near the camps, which supplied drinking water to guards and nearby Wehrmacht units, had been contaminated by the proximity of the mass graves. In some cases, the thin layer of covering soil had burst open, and noxious odors were spewing into the air. At Treblinka, the SS and Ukrainian murderers hadn’t even bothered to bury all the bodies. On the day camp commandant Franz Stangl arrived to take up his post, it was possible to smell Treblinka from twenty miles away. Bodies littered the road to the camp, and piles of putrefying bodies greeted him on the rail platform. Stangl complained that he couldn’t start work at Treblinka until someone cleaned up the mess. Radek ordered the burial pits to be opened and the bodies burned.

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.

15 JERUSALEM

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.

A plate of bread and hummus appeared, along with olives and a bottle of Golan wine. Gabriel relaxed instantly. Tziona Levin was the closest thing to a sibling he had. She had cared for him when his mother was working or was too sick from depression to get out of bed. Some nights he would climb out his window and steal next door into Tziona’s bed. She would caress and hold him in a way his mother never could. When his father was killed in the June war, it was Tziona who wiped away his tears.

The rhythmic, hypnotic sound of Ma’ariv prayers floated up from a nearby synagogue. Tziona added more lavender oil to the lamp. She talked of the matsav: the situation. Of the fighting in the Territories and the terror in Tel Aviv and Jerusalem. Of friends lost to the shaheed and friends who had given up trying to find work in Israel and had moved to America instead.

Gabriel drank his wine and watched the fiery sun sink into the Galilee. He was listening to Tziona, but his thoughts were of his mother. It had been nearly twenty years since her death, and in the intervening time, he had found himself thinking of her less and less. Her face, as a young woman, was lost to him, stripped of pigment and abraded, like a canvas faded by time and exposure to corrosive elements. Only her death mask could he conjure. After the tortures of cancer, her emaciated features had settled into an expression of serenity, like a woman posing for a portrait. She seemed to welcome death. It had finally given her deliverance from the torments raging inside her memory.

Had she loved him? Yes, he thought now, but she had surrounded herself with walls and battlements that he could never scale. She was prone to melancholia and violent mood swings. She did not sleep well at night. She could not show pleasure on festive occasions and could not partake of rich food and drink. She wore a bandage always on her left arm, over the faded numbers tattooed into her skin. She referred to them as her mark of Jewish weakness, her emblem of Jewish shame.

Gabriel had taken up painting to be closer to her. She soon resented this as an unwarranted intrusion on her private world; then, when his talents matured and began to challenge hers, she begrudged his obvious gifts. Gabriel pushed her to new heights. Her pain, so visible in life, found expression in her work. Gabriel grew obsessed with the nightmarish imagery that flowed from her memory onto her canvases. He began to search for the source.

In school he had learned of a place called Birkenau. He asked her about the bandage she wore habitually on her left arm, about the long-sleeved blouses she wore, even in the furnace like heat of the Jezreel Valley. He asked what had happened to her during the war, what had happened to his grandparents. She refused at first, but finally, under his steady onslaught of questions, she relented. Her account was hurried and reluctant; Gabriel, even in youth, was able to detect the note of evasion and more than a trace of guilt. Yes, she had been in Birkenau. Her parents had been murdered there on the day they arrived. She had worked. She had survived. That was all. Gabriel, hungry for more details about his mother’s experience, began to concoct all manner of scenarios to account for her survival. He too began to feel ashamed and guilty. Her affliction, like a hereditary disorder, was thus passed on to the next generation.

The matter was never discussed again. It was as if a steel door had swung shut, as if the Holocaust had never happened. She fell into a prolonged depression and was bedridden for many days. When finally she emerged, she retreated to her studio and began to paint. She worked relentlessly, day and night. Once Gabriel peered through the half-open door and found her sprawled on the floor, her hands stained by paint, trembling before a canvas. That canvas was the reason he had come to Safed to see Tziona.

The sun was gone. It had grown cold on the terrace. Tziona drew a shawl around her shoulders and asked Gabriel if he ever intended to come home. Gabriel mumbled something about needing to work, like Tziona’s friends who had moved to America.

“And who are you working for these days?”

He didn’t rise to the challenge. “I restore Old Master paintings. I need to be where the paintings are. In Venice.”

“ Venice,” she said derisively. “ Venice is a museum.” She raised her wineglass toward the Galilee. “This is real life.This is art. Enough of this restoration. You should be devoting all your time and energy to your own work.”

“There’s no such thing as my own work. That went out of me a long time ago. I’m one of the best art restorers in the world. That’s good enough for me.”

Tziona threw up her hands. Her bracelets clattered like wind chimes. “It’s a lie. You’re a lie. You’re an artist, Gabriel. Come to Safed and find your art. Find yourself. ”

Her prodding was making him uncomfortable. He might have told her there was now a woman involved, but that would have opened a whole new front that Gabriel was anxious to avoid. Instead, he allowed a silence to fall between them, which was filled by the consoling sound of Ma’ariv.

“What are you doing in Safed?” she finally asked. “I know you didn’t come all the way up here for a lecture from your Doda Tziona.”

He asked whether Tziona still had his mother’s paintings and sketches.

“Of course, Gabriel. I’ve been keeping them all these years, waiting for you to come and claim them.”

“I’m not ready to take them off your hands yet. I just need to see them.”

She held a candle to his face. “You’re hiding something from me, Gabriel. I’m the only person in the world who can tell when you’re keeping secrets. It was always that way, especially when you were a boy.”

Gabriel poured himself another glass of wine and told Tziona about Vienna.

SHE PULLED OPEN the door of the storeroom and yanked down on the drawstring of the overhead light. The closet was filled floor to ceiling with canvases and sketches. Gabriel began leafing through the work. He’d forgotten how gifted his mother was. He could see the influence of Beckmann, Picasso, Egon Schiele, and of course her father, Viktor Frankel. There were even variations on themes Gabriel had been exploring in his own work at the time. His mother had expanded on them, or, in some cases, utterly demolished them. She had been breathtakingly talented.

Tziona pushed him aside and came out with a stack of canvases and two large envelopes filled with sketches. Gabriel crouched on the stone floor and examined the works while Tziona looked on over his shoulder.

There were images of the camps. Children crowded into bunks. Women slaving over machinery in the factories. Bodies stacked like cordwood, waiting to be hurled into the fire. A family huddled together while the gas gathered round them.

The final canvas depicted a solitary figure, an SS man dressed head-to-toe in black. It was the painting he had seen that day in his mother’s studio. While the other works were dark and abstract, here she strove for realism and revelation. Gabriel found himself marveling at her impeccable draftsmanship and brushwork before his eyes finally settled on the face of the subject. It belonged to Erich Radek.

TZIONA MADE a bed for Gabriel on the living room couch and told him the midrash of the broken vessel.

“Before God created the world, there was only God. When God decided to create the world, God pulled back in order to create a space for the world. It was in that space that the universe was formed. But now, in that space, there was no God. God created Divine Sparks, light, to be placed back into God’s creation. When God created light, and placed light inside of Creation, special containers were prepared to hold it. But there was an accident. A cosmic accident. The containers broke. The universe became filled with sparks of God’s divine light and shards of broken containers.”

“It’s a lovely story,” Gabriel said, helping Tziona tuck the ends of a sheet beneath the couch cushions. “But what does it have to do with my mother?”

“The midrash teaches us that until the sparks of God’s light are gathered together, the task of creation will not be complete. As Jews, this is our solemn duty. We call it Tikkun Olam: Repair of the World.”

“I can restore many things, Tziona, but I’m afraid the world is too broad a canvas, with far too much damage.”

“So start small.”

“How?”

“Gather your mother’s sparks, Gabriel. And punish the man who broke her vessel.”

THE FOLLOWING MORNING, Gabriel slipped out of Tziona’s apartment without waking her and crept down the cobblestone steps in the shadowless gray light of dawn with the portrait of Radek beneath his arm. An Orthodox Jew, on his way to morning prayer, thought him a madman and shook his fist in anger. Gabriel loaded the painting into the trunk of the car and headed out of Safed. A bloodred sunrise broke over the ridge. Below, on the valley floor, the Sea of Galilee turned to fire.

He stopped in Afula for breakfast and left a message on Moshe Rivlin’s voice mail, warning him that he was coming back to Yad Vashem. It was late morning by the time he arrived. Rivlin was waiting for him. Gabriel showed him the canvas.

“Who painted it?”

“My mother.”

“What was her name?”

“Irene Allon, but her German name was Frankel.”

“Where was she?”

“The women’s camp at Birkenau, from January 1943 until the end.”

“The death march?”

Gabriel nodded. Rivlin seized Gabriel by the arm and said, “Come with me.”

RIVLIN PLACED GABRIEL at a table in the main reading room of the archives and sat down before a computer terminal. He entered the words “Irene Allon” into the database and drummed his stubby fingers impatiently on the keyboard while waiting for a response. A few seconds later, he scribbled five numbers onto a piece of scratch paper and without a word to Gabriel disappeared through a doorway leading to the storerooms of the archives. Twenty minutes later, he returned and placed a document on the table. Behind a clear plastic cover were the words YAD VASHEM ARCHIVES in both Hebrew and English, along with a file number: 03/812. Gabriel carefully lifted the plastic cover and turned to the first page. The heading made him feel suddenly cold: THE TESTIMONY OF IRENE ALLON, DELIVERED MARCH 19, 1957. Rivlin placed a hand on his shoulder and slipped out of the room. Gabriel hesitated a moment, then looked down and began to read.

16 THE TESTIMONY OF IRENE ALLON:

MARCH 19, 1957

I will not tell all the things I saw. I cannot. I owe this much to the dead. I will not tell you all the unspeakable cruelty we endured at the hands of the so-called master race, nor will I tell you the things that some of us did in order to survive just one more day. Only those who lived through it will ever understand what it was truly like, and I will not humiliate the dead one last time. I will only tell you the things that I did, and the things that were done to me. I spent two years in Auschwitz-Birkenau, two years to the very day, almost precisely two years to the hour. My name is Irene Allon. I used to be called Irene Frankel. This is what I witnessed in January 1945, on the death march from Birkenau.

To understand the misery of the death march, you must first know something of what came before. You’ve heard the story from others. Mine is not so different. Like all the others, we came by train. Ours set out from Berlin in the middle of the night. They told us we were going to the east, to work. We believed them. They told us it would be a proper carriage with seats. They assured us we would be given food and water. We believed them. My father, the painter Viktor Frankel, had packed a sketchpad and some pencils. He had been fired from his teaching position and his work had been declared “degenerate” by the Nazis. Most of his paintings had been seized and burned. He hoped the Nazis would allow him to resume his work in the east.

Of course, it was not a proper carriage with seats, and there was no food or water. I do not remember precisely how long the journey lasted. I lost count of how many times the sun rose and set, how many times we traveled in and out of the darkness. There was no toilet, only one bucket-one bucket for sixty of us. You can imagine the conditions we endured. You can imagine the unbearable smell. You can imagine the things some of us resorted to when our thirst pushed us over the edge of insanity. On the second day, an old woman standing next to me died. I closed her eyes and prayed for her. I watched my mother, Hannah Frankel, and waited for her to die, too. Nearly half our car was dead by the time the train finally screeched to a stop. Some prayed. Some actually thanked God the journey was finally over.

For ten years we had lived under Hitler’s thumb. We had suffered the Nuremberg Laws. We had lived the nightmare of Kristallnacht. We had watched our synagogues burn. Even so, I was not prepared for the sight that greeted me when the bolts slid back and the doors were finally thrown open. I saw a towering, tapered redbrick chimney, belching thick smoke. Below the chimney was a building, aglow with a raging, leaping flame. There was a terrible smell on the air. We could not identify it. It lingers in my nostrils to this day. There was a sign over the rail platform. Auschwitz. I knew then that I had arrived in hell.

“Juden, raus, raus!”An SS man cracks a whip across my thigh. “Get out of the car, Juden. ” I jump onto the snow-covered platform. My legs, weak from many days of standing, buckle beneath me. The SS man cracks his whip again, this time across my shoulders. The pain is like nothing I have ever felt before. I get to my feet. Somehow, I manage not to cry out. I try to help my mother down from the car. The SS man pushes me away. My father jumps onto the platform and collapses. My mother too. Like me, they are whipped to their feet.

Men in striped pajamas clamber onto the train and start tossing out our luggage. I think, Who are these crazy people trying to steal the meager possessions they had permitted us to bring? They look like men from an insane asylum, shaved heads, sunken faces, rotten teeth. My father turns to an SS officer and says, “Look there, those people are taking our things. Stop them!” The SS officer calmly replies that our luggage is not being stolen, just removed for sorting. It would be sent along, once we’d been assigned housing. My father thanks the SS man.

With clubs and whips they separate us, men from women, and instruct us to form neat rows of five. I did not know it then, but I will spend much of the next two years standing or marching in neat rows of five. I am able to maneuver myself next to my mother. I try to hold her hand. An SS man brings his club down on my arm, severing my grasp. I hear music. Somewhere, a chamber orchestra is playing Schubert.

At the head of the line is a table and a few SS officers. One in particular stands out. He has black hair and skin the color of alabaster. He wears a pleasant smile on his handsome face. His uniform is neatly pressed, his riding boots shine in the bright lights of the rail platform. Kid gloves cover his hands, spotless and white. He is whistling “The Blue Danube Waltz.” To this day, I cannot bear to hear it. Later, I will learn his name. His name is Mengele, the chief doctor of Auschwitz. It is Mengele who decides who is capable of work and who will go immediately to the gas. Right and left, life and death.

My father steps forward. Mengele, whistling, glances at him, then says pleasantly, “To the left, please.”

“I was assured I would be going to a family camp,” my father says. “Will my wife be coming with me?”

“Is that what you wish?”

“Yes, of course.”

“Which one is your wife?”

My father points to my mother. Mengele says, “You there, get out of line and join your husband on the left. Hurry, please, we haven’t got all night.”

I watch my parents walk away to the left, following the others. Old people and small children, that’s who goes to the left. Young and healthy are being sent to the right. I step forward to face the beautiful man in his spotless uniform. He looks me up and down, seems pleased, and wordlessly points to the right.

“But my parents went to the left.”

The Devil smiles. There is a gap between his two front teeth. “You’ll be with them soon enough, but trust me, for now, it’s better you go to the right.”

He seems so kind, so pleasant. I believe him. I go to the right. I look over my shoulder for my parents, but they have been swallowed by the mass of filthy, exhausted humanity trudging quietly toward the gas in neat rows of five.

I cannot possibly tell you everything that took place during the next two years. Some of it I cannot remember. Some of it I have chosen to forget. There was a merciless rhythm to Birkenau, a monotonous cruelty that ran on a tight and efficient schedule. Death was constant, yet even death became monotonous.

We are shorn, not just our heads, but everywhere, our arms, our legs, even our pubic hair. They don’t seem to care that the shears are cutting our skin. They don’t seem to hear our screams. We are assigned a number and tattooed on our left arm, just below the elbow. I cease to be Irene Frankel. Now I am a tool of the Reich known as 29395. They spray us with disinfectant, they give us prison clothing made from heavy rough wool. Mine smells of sweat and blood. I try not to breathe too deeply. Our “shoes” are wooden blocks with leather straps. We cannot walk in them. Who could? We are given a metal bowl and are ordered to carry it at all times. Should we misplace our bowl, we are told we will be shot immediately. We believe them.

We are taken to a barracks not fit for animals. The women who await us are something less than human. They are starving, their stares are vacant, their movements slow and listless. I wonder how long it will be before I look like them. One of these half-humans points me toward an empty bunk. Five girls crowd onto a wooden shelf with only a bit of bug-infested straw for bedding. We introduce ourselves. Two are sisters, Roza and Regina. The others are called Lene and Rachel. We are all German. We have all lost our parents on the selection ramp. We form a new family that night. We hold each other and pray. None of us sleeps.

We are awakened at four o’clock the next morning. I will wake at four o’clock every morning for the next two years, except on those nights when they order a special nighttime roll call and make us stand at attention in the freezing yard for hours on end. We are divided into kommandos and sent out to work. Most days, we march out into the surrounding countryside to shovel and sift sand for construction or to work in the camp agricultural projects. Some days we build roads or move stone from place to place. Not a single day passes that I am not beaten: a blow with a club, a whip across my back, a kick in the ribs. The offense can be dropping a stone or resting too long on the handle of my shovel. The two winters are bitterly cold. They give us no extra clothing to protect us from the weather, even when we are working outside. The summers are miserably hot. We all contract malaria. The mosquitoes do not discriminate between German masters and Jewish slaves. Even Mengele comes down with malaria.

They do not give us enough food to survive, only enough so that we would starve slowly and still be of service to the Reich. I lose my period, then I lose my breasts. Before long, I too look like one of the half-humans I’d seen that first day in Birkenau. For breakfast, it’s gray water they call “tea.” For lunch, rancid soup, which we eat in the place where we are working. Sometimes, there might be a small morsel of meat. Some of the girls refuse to eat it because it is not kosher. I do not abide by the dietary laws while I am at Auschwitz-Birkenau. There is no God in the death camps, and I hate God for abandoning us to our fate. If there is meat in my bowl, I eat it. For supper, we are given bread. It is mostly sawdust. We learn to eat half the bread at night and save the rest for the morning so that we have something in our stomachs before we march to the fields to work. If you collapse at work, they beat you. If you cannot get up, they toss you onto the back of a flatbed and carry you to the gas.

This is our life in the women’s camp of Birkenau. We wake. We remove the dead from their bunks, the lucky ones who perish peacefully in their sleep. We drink our gray tea. We go to roll call. We march out to work in neat rows of five. We eat our lunch. We are beaten. We come back to camp. We go to roll call. We eat our bread, we sleep and wait for it all to begin again. They make us work on Shabbat. On Sundays, their holy day, there is no work. Every third Sunday, they shave us. Everything runs on a schedule. Everything except the selections.

We learn to anticipate them. Like animals, our survival senses are highly tuned. The camp population is the most reliable warning sign. When the camp is too full, there will be a selection. There is never a warning. After roll call, we are ordered to line up on the Lagerstrasse to await our turn before Mengele and his selection team, to await our chance to prove we are still capable of work, still worthy of life.

The selections take an entire day. They give us no food and nothing to drink. Some never make it to the table where Mengele plays god. They are “selected” by the SS sadists long before. A brute named Taube enjoys making us do “exercises” while we wait so we will be strong for the selectors. He forces us to do push-ups, then orders us to put our faces in the mud and stay there. Taube has a special punishment for any girl who moves. He steps on her head with all his weight and crushes her skull.

Finally, we stand before our judge. He looks us up and down, takes note of our number. Open your mouth, Jew. Lift your arms. We try to look after our health in this cesspool, but it is impossible. A sore throat can mean a trip to the gas. Salves and ointments are too precious to waste on Jews, so a cut on the hand can mean the gas the next time Mengele is culling the population.

If we pass visual inspection, our judge has one final test. He points toward a ditch and says, “Jump, Jew.” I stand before the ditch and gather my last reserves of strength. Land on the other side and I will live, at least until the next selection. Fall in, and I will be tossed onto the back of a flatbed and driven to the gas. The first time I go through this madness, I think: I am a German-Jewish girl from Berlin from a good family. My father was a renowned painter. Why am I jumping this trench? After that, I think of nothing but reaching the other side and landing on my feet.

Roza is the first of our new family to be selected. She has the misfortune of being very sick with malaria at the time of a big selection, and there is no way to conceal it from Mengele’s expert eyes. Regina begs the Devil to take her too, so that her sister will not have to die alone in the gas. Mengele smiles, revealing his gapped teeth. “You’ll go soon enough, but you can work a little longer first. Go to the right.” For the only time in my life, I am glad not to have a sister.

Regina stops eating. She doesn’t seem to notice when they beat her at work. She has crossed over the line. She is already dead. At the next big selection, she waits patiently on the endless line. She endures Taube’s “exercises” and keeps her face in the mud so he will not crush her skull. When finally she reaches the selection table, she flies at Mengele and tries to stab him through the eye with the handle of her spoon. An SS man shoots her in the stomach.

Mengele is clearly frightened. “Don’t waste any gas on her! Throw her into the fire alive! Up the chimney with her!”

They toss Regina into a wheelbarrow. We watch her go and pray she dies before she reaches the crematorium.

In the autumn of 1944, we begin hearing the Russian guns. In September, the camp’s air raid sirens sound for the first time. Three weeks later they sound again, and the camp’s antiaircraft guns fire their first shots. That same day, the Sonderkommando at Crematorium IV revolt. They attack their SS guards with pickaxes and hammers and manage to set fire to their barracks and the crematoria before being machine-gunned. A week later, bombs fall into the camp itself. Our masters show signs of stress. They no longer look so invincible. Sometimes they even look a little frightened. This gives us a certain pleasure and a modicum of hope. The gassings stop. They still kill us, but they have to do it themselves. Selected prisoners are shot in the gas chambers or near Crematorium V. Soon they begin dismantling the crematoria. Our hope of survival increases.

The situation deteriorates throughout that autumn and winter. Food is in short supply. Each day, many women collapse and die of starvation and exhaustion. Typhus takes a terrible toll. In December, Allied bombs fall on the I.G. Farben synthetic fuel and rubber plant. A few days later, the Allies strike again, but this time several bombs fall on an SS sickbay barracks inside Birkenau. Five SS are killed. The guards grow more irritable, more unpredictable. I avoid them. I try to make myself invisible.

The New Year comes, 1944 turns to 1945. We can sense Auschwitz is dying. We pray it will be soon. We debate what to do. Should we wait for the Russians to free us? Should we try to escape? And if we manage to get across the wire? Where will we go? The Polish peasants hate us just as much as the Germans. We wait. What else can we do?

In mid-January, I smell smoke. I look out the barracks door. Bonfires are raging all over the camps. The smell is different. For the first time, they’re not burning people. They’re burning paper. They’re burning the evidence of their crimes. The ash drifts over Birkenau like snowfall. I smile for the first time in two years.

On January 17, Mengele leaves. The end is near. Shortly after midnight, there is a roll call. We are told the entire Auschwitz camp is being evacuated. The Reich still requires our bodies. The healthy will evacuate on foot. The sick will stay behind to meet their fate. We fall into rank and march out in neat rows of five.

At one o’clock in the morning, I pass through the gates of hell for the last time, two years to the day after my arrival, almost two years to the hour. I am not free yet. I have one more test to endure.

The snowfall is heavy and relentless. In the distance we can hear the thunder of an artillery duel. We walk, a seemingly endless chain of half-humans, dressed in our striped rags and our clogs. The shooting is as relentless as the snow. We try to count the shots. One hundred… two hundred… three… four… five… We stop counting after that. Each shot represents one more life extinguished, one more murder. We number several thousand when we set out. I fear we will all be dead before we reach our destination.

Lene walks on my left, Rachel on my right. We dare not stumble. Those who stumble are shot on the spot and thrown into a ditch. We dare not fall out of formation and lag behind. Those who do are shot, too. The road is littered with the dead. We step over them and pray we do not falter. We eat snow to quench our thirst. There is nothing we can do about the horrible cold. A woman takes pity on us and throws boiled potatoes. Those foolish enough to pick them up are shot dead.

We sleep in barns or in abandoned barracks. Those who cannot rise quickly enough when awakened are shot dead. My hunger seems to be eating a hole in my stomach. It is much worse than the hunger of Birkenau. Somehow, I summon the strength to keep placing one foot in front of the other. Yes, I want to survive, but it is also a matter of defiance. They want me to fall so they can shoot me. I want to witness the destruction of their thousand-year Reich. I want to rejoice in its death, just as the Germans rejoiced in ours. I think of Regina, flying at Mengele during the selection, trying to kill him with her spoon. Regina ’s courage gives me strength. Each step is rebellion.

On the third day, at nightfall, he comes for me. He is on horseback. We are sitting in the snow at the side of the road, resting. Lene is leaning on me. Her eyes are closed. I fear she is finished. Rachel presses snow to her lips to revive her. Rachel is the strongest. She had practically carried Lene all that afternoon.

He looks at me. He is a Sturmbannführer in the SS. After twelve years of living under the Nazis, I have learned to recognize their insignia. I try to make myself invisible. I turn my head and tend to Lene. He yanks on the reins of his horse and maneuvers himself into position so he can look at me some more. I wonder what he sees in me. Yes, I was a pretty girl once, but I am hideous now, exhausted, filthy, sick, a walking skeleton. I cannot bear my own smell. I know that if I interact with him, it will end badly. I put my head on my knees and feign sleep. He is too smart for that.

“You there,” he calls.

I look up. The man on horseback is pointing directly at me.

“Yes, you. Get on your feet. Come with me.”

I stand up. I am dead. I know it. Rachel knows it, too. I can see it in her eyes. She has no more tears to cry.

“Remember me,” I whisper as I follow the man on horseback into the trees.

Thankfully, he does not ask me to walk far, just to a spot a few meters from the side of the road, where a large tree had fallen. He dismounts and tethers his horse. He sits down on the fallen tree and orders me to sit next to him. I hesitate. No SS man has ever asked such a thing. He pats the tree with the palm of his hand. I sit, but several inches farther away than he had commanded. I am afraid, but I am also humiliated by my smell. He slides closer. He stinks of alcohol. I’m done for. It’s only a question of time.

I look straight ahead. He removes his gloves, then touches my face. In two years at Birkenau, no SS man had ever touched me. Why is this man, a Sturmbannführer, touching me now? I have endured many torments, but this is by far the worst. I look straight ahead. My flesh is ablaze.

“Such a shame,” he says. “Were you very beautiful once?”

I can think of nothing to say. Two years at Birkenau has taught me that in situations like these, there is never a right answer. If I answer yes, he’ll accuse me of Jewish arrogance and kill me. If I answer no, he’ll kill me for lying.

“I’ll share a secret with you. I’ve always been attracted to Jewesses. If you ask me, we should have killed the men and utilized the women for our own enjoyment. Did you have a child?”

I think of all the children I saw going to the gas at Birkenau. He demands a response by squeezing my face between his thumb and fingers. I close my eyes and try not to cry out. He repeats the question. I shake my head, and he releases his grip.

“If you’re able to survive the next few hours, you might someday have a child. Will you tell this child about what happened to you during the war? Or will you be too ashamed?”

A child? How could a girl in my position ever contemplate giving birth to a child? I have spent the last two years simply trying to survive. A child is beyond my comprehension.

“Answer me, Jew!”

His voice is suddenly harsh. I feel the situation is about to spin out of control. He takes hold of my face again and turns it toward him. I try to look away, but he shakes me, compelling me to look into his eyes. I have no strength to resist. His face is instantly chiseled into my memory. So is the sound of his voice and his Austrian-accented German. I hear it still.

“What will you tell your child about the war?”

What does he want to hear? What does he want me to say?

He squeezes my face. “Speak, Jew! What will you tell your child about the war?”

“The truth, Herr Sturmbannführer. I’ll tell my child the truth.”

Where these words come from, I do not know. I only know that if I am to die, I will die with a modicum of dignity. I think again of Regina, flying at Mengele armed with a spoon.

He relaxes his grip. The first crisis seems to have passed. He exhales heavily, as if exhausted by his long day of work, then removes a flask from the pocket of his greatcoat and takes a long pull. Thankfully, he does not offer me any. He returns the flask to his pocket and lights a cigarette. He does not offer me a cigarette. I have tobacco and liquor, he is telling me. You have nothing.

“The truth? What is the truth, Jew, as you see it?”

“Birkenau is the truth, Herr Sturmbannführer.”

“No, my dear, Birkenau is not the truth. Birkenau is a rumor. Birkenau is an invention by enemies of the Reich and Christianity. It is Stalinist, atheist propaganda.”

“What about the gas chambers? The crematoria?”

“These things did not exist at Birkenau.”

“I saw them, Herr Sturmbannführer. We all saw them.”

“No one is going to believe such a thing. No one is going to believe it’s possible to kill so many. Thousands? Surely, the death of thousands is possible. After all, this was war. Hundreds of thousands? Perhaps. But millions?” He draws on his cigarette. “To tell you the truth, I saw it with my own eyes, and even I cannot believe it.”

A shot crackles through the forest, then another. Two more girls gone. The Sturmbannführer takes another long pull at his flask of liquor. Why is he drinking? Is he trying to keep warm? Or is he steeling himself before he kills me?

“I’m going to tell you what you’re going to say about the war. You’re going to say that you were transferred to the east. That you had work. That you had plenty of food and proper medical care. That we treated you well and humanely.”

“If that is the truth, Herr Sturmbannführer, then why am I a skeleton?”

He has no answer, except to draw his pistol and place it against my temple.

“Recite to me what happened to you during the war, Jew. You were transferred to the east. You had plenty of food and proper medical care. The gas chambers and the crematoria are Bolshevik-Jewish inventions. Say those words, Jew.”

I know there is no escaping this situation with my life. Even if I say the words, I am dead. I will not say them. I will not give him the satisfaction. I close my eyes and wait for his bullet to carve a tunnel through my brain and release me from my torment.

He lowers the gun and calls out. Another SS man comes running. The Sturmbannführer orders him to stand guard over me. He leaves and walks back through the trees to the road. When he returns, he is accompanied by two women. One is Rachel. The other is Lene. He orders the SS man to leave, then places the gun to Lene’s forehead. Lene looks directly into my eyes. Her life is in my hands.

“Say the words, Jew! You were transferred to the east. You had plenty of food and proper medical care. The gas chambers and the crematoria are Bolshevik-Jewish lies.”

I cannot allow Lene to be killed by my silence. I open my mouth to speak, but before I can recite the words, Rachel shouts, “Don’t say it, Irene. He’s going to kill us anyway. Don’t give him the pleasure.”

The Sturmbannführer removes the gun from Lene’s head and places it against Rachel’s. “You say it, Jewish bitch.”

Rachel looks him directly in the eye and remains silent.

The Sturmbannführer pulls his trigger, and Rachel falls dead into the snow. He places the gun against Lene’s head, and once again commands me to speak. Lene slowly shakes her head. We say goodbye with our eyes. Another shot, and Lene falls next to Rachel.

It is my turn to die.

The Sturmbannführer points the gun at me. From the road comes the sound of shouting.Raus! Raus! The SS are prodding the girls to their feet. I know my walk is over. I know I am not leaving this place with my life. This is where I will fall, at the side of a Polish road, and here I will be buried, with nomazevoth to mark my grave.

“What will you tell your child about the war, Jew?”

“The truth, Herr Sturmbannführer. I’ll tell my child the truth.”

“No one will believe you.” He holsters his pistol. “Your column is leaving. You should join them. You know what happens to those who fall behind.”

He mounts his horse and jerks on the reins. I collapse in the snow next to the bodies of my two friends. I pray for them and beg their forgiveness. The end of the column passes by. I stagger out of the trees and fall into place. We walk that entire night, in neat rows of five. I shed tears of ice.

Five days after walking out of Birkenau, we come to a train station in the Silesian village of Wodzislaw. We are herded onto open coal cars and travel through the night, exposed to the vicious January weather. The Germans had no need to waste any more of their precious ammunition on us. The cold kills half of the girls on my car alone.

We arrive at a new camp, Ravensbrück, but there is not enough food for the new prisoners. After a few days, some of us move on, this time by flatbed truck. I end my odyssey in a camp in Neüstadt Glewe. On May 2, 1945, we wake to discover that our SS tormentors have fled the camp. Later that day, we are liberated by American and Russian soldiers.

It has been twelve years. Not a day passes that I don’t see the faces of Rachel and Lene-and the face of the man who murdered them. Their deaths weigh heavily upon me. Had I recited the Sturmbannführer’s words, perhaps they would be alive and I would be lying in an unmarked grave next to a Polish road, just another nameless victim. On the anniversary of their murders, I say mourner’s Kaddish for them. I do this out of habit but not faith. I lost my faith in God in Birkenau.

My name is Irene Allon. I used to be called Irene Frankel. In the camp I was known as prisoner number 29395, and this is what I witnessed in January 1945, on the death march from Birkenau.

17 TIBERIAS, ISRAEL

IT WAS SHABBAT. Shamron ordered Gabriel to come to Tiberias for supper. As Gabriel drove slowly along the steeply sloped drive, he looked up at Shamron’s terrace and saw gaslights dancing in the wind from the lake-and then he glimpsed Shamron, the eternal sentinel, pacing slowly amid the flames. Gilah, before serving them food, lit a pair of candles in the dining room and recited the blessing. Gabriel had been raised in a home without religion, but at that moment he thought the sight of Shamron’s wife, her eyes closed, her hands drawing the candlelight toward her face, was the most beautiful he’d ever seen.

Shamron was withdrawn and preoccupied during the meal and in no mood for small talk. Even now he would not speak of his work in front of Gilah, not because he didn’t trust her, but because he feared she would stop loving him if she knew all the things he had done. Gilah filled the long silences by talking about her daughter, who’d moved to New Zealand to get away from her father and was living with a man on a chicken farm. She knew Gabriel was somehow linked to the Office but suspected nothing of the true nature of his work. She thought him a clerk of some sort who spent a great deal of time abroad and enjoyed art.

She served them coffee and a tray of cookies and dried fruit, then cleared the table and saw to the dishes. Gabriel, over the sound of running water and clinking china emanating from the kitchen, brought Shamron up to date. They spoke in low voices, with the Shabbat candles flickering between them. Gabriel showed him the files on Erich Radek andAktion 1005. Shamron held the photograph up to the candlelight and squinted, then pushed his reading glasses onto his bald head and settled his hard gaze on Gabriel once more.

“How much do you know about what happened to my mother during the war?”

Shamron’s calculated look, delivered over the rim of a coffee cup, made it plain there was nothing he did not know about Gabriel’s life, including what had happened to his mother during the war. “She was from Berlin,” Shamron said. “She was deported to Auschwitz in January 1943 and spent two years in the women’s camp at Birkenau. She left Birkenau on a death march. Unlike thousands of others, she managed to survive and was liberated by Russian and American troops at Neüstadt Glewe. Am I forgetting anything?”

“Something happened to her on the death march, something she would never discuss with me.” Gabriel held up the photograph of Erich Radek. “When Rivlin showed me this at Yad Vashem, I knew I’d seen the face somewhere before. It took me awhile to remember, but finally I did. I saw it when I was a boy, on canvases in my mother’s studio.”

“Which is why you went to Safed, to see Tziona Levin.”

“How do you know?”

Shamron sighed and sipped his coffee. Gabriel, unnerved, told Shamron about his second visit to Yad Vashem that morning. When he placed the pages of his mother’s testimony on the table, Shamron’s eyes remained fixed on Gabriel’s face. And then Gabriel realized that Shamron had read it before. TheMemuneh knew about his mother. TheMemuneh knew everything.

“You were being considered for one of the most important assignments in the history of the Office,” Shamron said. His voice contained no trace of remorse. “I needed to know everything I could about you. Your army psychological profile described you as a lone wolf, egotistical, with the emotional coldness of a natural killer. My first visit with you provided confirmation of this, though I also found you unbearably rude and clinically shy. I wanted to know why you were the way you were. I thought your mother might be a good place to start.”

“So you looked up her testimony at Yad Vashem?”

He closed his eyes and nodded once.

“Why didn’t you ever say anything to me?”

“It wasn’t my place,” Shamron said without sentiment. “Only your mother could tell you about such a thing. She obviously carried a terrible burden of guilt until the day she died. She didn’t want you to know. She wasn’t alone. There were many survivors, just like your mother, who could never bring themselves to truly confront their memories. In the years after the war, before you were born, it seemed as though a wall of silence had been erected in this country.The Holocaust? It was discussed endlessly. But those who actually endured it tried desperately to bury their memories and move on. It was another form of survival. Unfortunately, their pain was passed on to the next generation, the sons and daughters of the survivors. People like Gabriel Allon.”

Shamron was interrupted by Gilah, who poked her head into the room and asked whether they needed more coffee. Shamron held up his hand. Gilah understood they were discussing work and slipped back into the kitchen. Shamron folded his arms on the table and leaned forward.

“Surely you must have suspected she’d given testimony. Why didn’t that natural curiosity of yours lead you to Yad Vashem to have a look for yourself?” Shamron, greeted only by Gabriel’s silence, answered the question for himself. “Because, like all children of survivors, you were always careful not to disturb your mother’s fragile emotional state. You were afraid that if you pushed too hard, you might send her into a depression from which she might never return?” He paused. “Or was it because you feared what you might find? Were you actuallyafraid to know the truth?”

Gabriel looked up sharply but made no reply. Shamron contemplated his coffee for a moment before speaking again.

“To be honest with you, Gabriel, when I read your mother’s testimony, I knew that you were perfect. You work for me because of her. She was incapable of loving you completely. How could she? She was afraid she would lose you. Everyone she’d ever loved had been taken from her. She lost her parents on the selection ramp and the girls she befriended at Birkenau were taken from her because she would not say the words an SS Sturmbannführer wanted her to say.”

“I would have understood if she’d tried to tell me.”

Shamron slowly shook his head. “No, Gabriel, no one can truly understand. The guilt, the shame. Your mother managed to find her way in this world after the war, but in many ways her life ended that night on the side of a Polish road.” He brought his palm down on the table, hard enough to rattle the remaining dishes. “So what do we do? Do we wallow in self-pity, or do we keep working and see if this man is truly Erich Radek?”

“I think you know the answer to that.”

“Does Moshe Rivlin think it’s possible Radek was involved in the evacuation of Auschwitz?”

Gabriel nodded. “By January 1945, the work of Aktion 1005 was largely complete, since all of the conquered territory in the east had been overrun by the Soviets. It’s possible he went to Auschwitz to demolish the gas chambers and crematoria and prepare the remaining prisoners for evacuation. They were, after all, witnesses to the crime.”

“Do we know how this piece of filth managed to get out of Europe after the war?”

Gabriel told him Rivlin’s theory, that Radek, because he was an Austrian Catholic, had availed himself of the services of Bishop Aloïs Hudal in Rome.

“So why don’t we follow the trail,” Shamron said, “and see if it leads back to Austria again?”

“My thoughts exactly. I thought I’d start in Rome. I want to have a look at Hudal’s papers.”

“So would a lot of other people.”

“But they don’t have the private number of the man who lives on the top floor of the Apostolic Palace.”

Shamron shrugged. “This is true.”

“I need a clean passport.”

“Not a problem. I have a very good Canadian passport you can use. How’s your French these days?”

“Pas mal, mais je dois pratiquer l’accent d’un Quebecois.”

“Sometimes, you frighten even me.”

“That’s saying something.”

“You’ll spend the night here and leave for Rome tomorrow. I’ll take you to Lod. On the way we’ll stop at the American Embassy and have a chat with the local head of station.”

“About what?”

“According to the file from the Staatsarchiv, Vogel worked for the Americans in Austria during the occupation period. I’ve asked our friends in Langley to have a look through their files and see if Vogel’s name pops up. It’s a long shot, but maybe we’ll get lucky.”

Gabriel looked down at his mother’s testimony:I will not tell all the things I saw. I cannot. I owe this much to the dead…

“Your mother was a very brave woman, Gabriel. That’s why I chose you. I knew you came from excellent stock.”

“She was much braver than I am.”

“Yes,” Shamron agreed. “She was braver than all of us.”

BRUCE CRAWFORD’S REAL occupation was one of the worst-kept secrets in Israel. The tall, patrician American was the chief of the CIA’s Tel Aviv station. Declared to both the Israeli government and the Palestinian Authority, he often served as a conduit between the two warring sides. Seldom was the night Crawford’s telephone didn’t ring at some hideous hour. He was tired, and looked it.

He greeted Shamron just inside the gates of the embassy on Haraykon Street and escorted him into the building. Crawford’s office was large and, for Shamron’s taste, overdecorated. It seemed the office of a corporate vice president rather than the lair of a spy, but then that was the American way. Shamron sank into a leather chair and accepted a glass of chilled water with lemon from a secretary. He considered lighting a Turkish cigarette, then noticed the NO SMOKING sign prominently displayed on the front of Crawford’s desk.

Crawford seemed in no hurry to get down to the matter at hand. Shamron had expected this. There was an unwritten rule among spies: when one asks a friend for a favor, one must be prepared to sing for his supper. Shamron, because he was technically out of the game, could offer nothing tangible, only the advice and the wisdom of a man who had made many mistakes.

Finally, after an hour, Crawford said, “About that Vogel thing.”

The American’s voice trailed off. Shamron, taking note of the tinge of failure in Crawford’s voice, leaned forward in his chair expectantly. Crawford played for time by removing a paper clip from his special magnetic dispenser and industriously straightening it.

“We had a look through our own files,” Crawford said, his gaze downward at his work. “We even sent a team out to Maryland to dig through the Archives annex. I’m afraid we struck out.”

“Struck out?” Shamron considered the use of American sports colloquialisms inappropriate for a business so vital as espionage. Agents, in Shamron’s world, did not strike out, fumble the ball, or make slam dunks. There was only success or failure, and the price of failure, in a neighborhood like the Middle East, was usually blood. “What does this meanexactly?”

“It means,” Crawford said pedantically, “that our search produced nothing. I’m sorry, Ari, but sometimes, that’s the way it goes with these things.”

He held up his straightened paper clip and examined it carefully, as though proud of his accomplishment.

GABRIEL WAS WAITING IN the back seat of Shamron’s Peugeot.

“How did it go?”

Shamron lit a cigarette and answered the question.

“Do you believe him?”

“You know, if he’d told me that they’d found a routine personnel file or a security clearance background report, I might have believed him. Butnothing? Who does he think he’s talking to? I’m insulted, Gabriel. I truly am.”

“You think the Americans know something about Vogel?”

“Bruce Crawford just confirmed it for us.” Shamron glared at his stainless-steel watch. “Damn! It took him an hour to screw up the nerve to lie to me, and now you’re going to miss your flight.”

Gabriel looked down at the telephone in the console. “Do it,” he murmured. “I dare you.”

Shamron snatched up the telephone and dialed. “This is Shamron,” he snapped. “There’s an El Al flight leaving Lod for Rome in thirty minutes. It has just developed a mechanical problem that will require a one-hour delay in its departure. Understand?”

TWO HOURS LATER, Bruce Crawford’s telephone purred. He brought the receiver to his ear. He recognized the voice. It was the surveillance man he had assigned to follow Shamron. A dangerous game, following the former chief of the Office on his own soil, but Crawford was under orders.

“After he left the embassy, he went to Lod.”

“What was he doing at the airport?”

“Dropping off a passenger.”

“Did you recognize him?”

The surveillance man indicated that he did. Without mentioning the passenger’s name, he managed to communicate the fact that the man in question was a noteworthy Office agent, recently active in a central European city.

“Are you sure it was him?”

“No doubt about it.”

“Where was he going?”

Crawford, after hearing the answer, severed the connection. A moment later, he was seated before his computer, punching out a secure cable to Headquarters. The text was direct and terse, just the way the addressee liked it.

Elijah is heading to Rome. Arrives tonight on El Al flight from Tel Aviv.

18 ROME

GABRIEL WANTED TO meet the man from the Vatican someplace other than his office on the top floor of the Apostolic Palace. They settled on Piperno, an old restaurant on a quiet square near the Tiber, a few streets over from the ancient Jewish ghetto. It was the kind of December afternoon only Rome can produce, and Gabriel, arriving first, arranged for a table outside in a patch of warm, brilliant sunlight.

A few minutes later, a priest entered the square and headed toward the restaurant at a determined clip. He was tall and lean and as handsome as an Italian movie idol. The cut of his black clerical suit and Roman collar suggested that, while chaste, he was not without personal or professional vanity. And with good reason. Monsignor Luigi Donati, the private secretary of His Holiness Pope Paul VII, was arguably the second most powerful man in the Roman Catholic Church.

There was a cold toughness about Luigi Donati that made it difficult for Gabriel to imagine him baptizing babies or anointing the sick in some dusty Umbrian hilltown. His dark eyes radiated a fierce and uncompromising intelligence, while the stubborn set of his jaw revealed that he was a dangerous man to cross. Gabriel knew this to be true from direct experience. A year earlier, a case had led him to the Vatican and into Donati’s capable hands, and together they had destroyed a grave threat to Pope Paul VII. Luigi Donati owed Gabriel a favor. Gabriel was betting Donati was a man who paid his debts.

Donati was also a man who enjoyed nothing more than whiling away a few hours at a sunlit Roman café. His demanding style had won him few friends within the Curia and, like his boss, he slipped the bonds of the Vatican whenever possible. He had seized Gabriel’s invitation to lunch like a drowning man grasping hold of a lifeline. Gabriel had the distinct impression Luigi Donati was desperately lonely. Sometimes Gabriel wondered whether Donati regretted the life he had chosen.

The priest lit a cigarette with a gold executive lighter. “How’s business?”

“I’m working on another Bellini. The Crisostomo altarpiece.”

“Yes, I know.”

Before becoming Pope Paul VII, Cardinal Pietro Lucchesi had been the Patriarch of Venice. Luigi Donati had been at his side. His ties to Venice remained strong. There was little that happened in his old archdiocese that he didn’t know about.

“I trust Francesco Tiepolo is treating you well.”

“Of course.”

“And Chiara?”

“She’s well, thank you.”

“Have you two given any consideration to…formalizing your relationship?”

“It’s complicated, Luigi.”

“Yes, but what isn’t?”

“You know, for a moment there, you actually sounded like a priest.”

Donati threw back his head and laughed. He was beginning to relax. “The Holy Father sends his regards. He says he’s sorry he couldn’t join us. Piperno is one of his favorite restaurants. He recommends we start with the filetti di baccalà. He swears it’s the best in Rome.”

“Does infallibility extend to appetizer recommendations?”

“The pope is infallible only when he is acting as the supreme teacher on matters of faith and morals. I’m afraid the doctrine does not extend to fried codfish fillets. But he does have a good deal of worldly experience in these matters. If I were you, I’d go with thefiletti. ”

The white-jacketed waiter appeared. Donati handled the ordering. The frascati began to flow, and Donati’s mood mellowed like the soft afternoon. He spent the next few minutes regaling Gabriel with Curial gossip and stories of backstairs brawling and court intrigue. It was all very familiar. The Vatican was not much different from the Office. Finally, Gabriel guided the conversation round to the topic that had brought him and Donati together in the first place: the role of the Roman Catholic Church in the Holocaust.

“How is the work of the Historical Commission coming along?”

“As well as can be expected. We’re supplying the documents from the Secret Archives, they’re doing the analysis with as little interference from us as possible. A preliminary report of their findings is due in six months. After that, they’ll start work on a multivolume history.”

“Any indications which way the preliminary report is going to go?”

“As I said, we’re trying to let the historians work with as little interference from the Apostolic Palace as possible.”

Gabriel shot Donati a dubious glance over his wineglass. Were it not for the monsignor’s clerical suit and Roman collar, Gabriel would have assumed he was a professional spy. The notion that Donati didn’t have at least two sources on the Commission staff was insulting. Gabriel, between sips of frascati, expressed this view to Monsignor Donati. The priest confessed.

“All right, let’s say I’m not completely in the dark about the Commission.”

“And?”

“The report will take into account the enormous pressures on Pius, yet even so, I’m afraid it will not paint a terribly flattering portrait of his actions, or of the actions of the national churches in central and eastern Europe.”

“You sound nervous, Luigi.”

The priest leaned forward over the table and seemed to choose his next words carefully. “We’ve opened a Pandora’s box, my friend. Once a process like this is set in motion, it’s impossible to predict where it will end and what other areas of the Church it will affect. The liberals have seized on the Holy Father’s actions and are pleading for more: a Third Vatican Council. The reactionaries are screaming heresy.”

“Anything serious?”

Again, the monsignor took an inordinate amount of time before answering. “We’re picking up some very serious rumblings from some reactionaries in the Languedoc region of France -the sort of reactionaries who believe Vatican Two was the work of the Devil and that every pope since John the Twenty-third has been a heretic.”

“I thought the Church was full of people like that. I had my own run-in with a friendly group of prelates and laymen called Crux Vera.”

Donati smiled. “I’m afraid this group is cut from the same cloth, except, unlike Crux Vera, they don’t have a power base inside the Curia. They’re outsiders, barbarians beating at the gates. The Holy Father has very little control over them, and things have started to heat up.”

“Let me know if there’s something I can do to help.”

“Be careful, my friend, I might take you up on that.”

The filetti di baccalà arrived. Donati squeezed lemon juice over the plate and popped one of the fillets into his mouth whole. He washed down the fish with a drink of the frascati and sat back in his chair, his handsome features set in a look of pure contentment. For a priest working in the Vatican, the temporal world offered few delights more tantalizing than lunch on a sun-washed Roman square. He started on another filetti and asked Gabriel what he was doing in town.

“I guess you could say I’m working on a matter related to the work of the Historical Commission.”

“How so?”

“I have reason to suspect that shortly after the war ended, the Vatican may have helped a wanted SS man named Erich Radek escape Europe.”

Donati stopped chewing, his face suddenly serious. “Be careful with the terms you use and the assumptions you make, my friend. It’s quite possible this man Radek received help from someone in Rome, but it wasn’t the Vatican. ”

“We believe it was Bishop Hudal of the Anima.”

The tension in Donati’s face eased. “Unfortunately, the good bishop did help a number of fugitive Nazis. There’s no denying that. What makes you think he helped this man Radek?”

“An educated guess. Radek was an Austrian Catholic. Hudal was rector of the German seminary in Rome and father confessor to the German and Austrian community. If Radek came to Rome looking for help, it would make sense that he would turn to Bishop Hudal.”

Donati nodded in agreement. “I can’t argue with that. Bishop Hudal was interested in protecting fellow citizens of his country from what he believed were the vengeful intentions of the Allied victors. But that doesn’t mean that he knew that Erich Radek was a war criminal. How could he know? Italy was flooded with millions of displaced persons after the war, all of them looking for help. If Radek came to Hudal and told him a sad story, it’s likely he would have been given sanctuary and help.”

“Shouldn’t Hudal have asked a man like Radek why he was on the run?”

“Perhaps he should have, but you’re being naïve if you assume that Radek would have answered the question truthfully. He would have lied, and Bishop Hudal would have had no way of knowing otherwise.”

“A man doesn’t become a fugitive for no reason, Luigi, and the Holocaust was no secret. Bishop Hudal should have realized he was helping war criminals escape justice.”

Donati waited to respond while the waiter served a pasta course. “What you have to understand is that there were many organizations and individuals at the time who assisted refugees, inside the Church and outside. Hudal wasn’t the only one.”

“Where did he get the money to finance his operation?”

“He claimed it all came from the accounts of the seminary.”

“And you believe that? Each SS man Hudal assisted required pocket money, passage on a ship, a visa, and a new life in a foreign country, not to mention the cost of providing them sanctuary in Rome until they could be shipped off. Hudal is thought to have helped hundreds of SS men in this way. That’s a lot of money, Luigi-hundreds of thousands of dollars. I find it hard to believe the Anima had that kind of spare change lying around.”

“So you’re assuming he was given money by someone,” Donati said, expertly twirling pasta onto his fork. “Someone like the Holy Father, for example.”

“The money had to come from somewhere.”

Donati laid down his fork and folded his hands thoughtfully. “There is evidence to suggest that Bishop Hudaldid receive Vatican funds to pay for his refugee work.”

“They weren’t refugees, Luigi. Not all of them, at least. Many of them were guilty of unspeakable crimes. Are you telling me Pius had no idea Hudal was helping wanted war criminals escape justice?”

“Let us just say that, based on available documentary evidence and testimony from surviving witnesses, it would be very difficult to prove that charge.”

“I didn’t know you’d studied Canon Law, Luigi.” Gabriel repeated the question, slowly, with a prosecutorial emphasis on the relevant words. “Did the pope know Hudal was helping war criminals escape justice?”

“His Holiness opposed the Nuremberg trials because he believed they would only serve to further weaken Germany and embolden the Communists. He also believed the Allies were after vengeance and not justice. It’s quite possible the Holy Father knew Bishop Hudal was helping Nazis and that he approved. Proving that contention, however, is another matter.” Donati aimed the prongs of his fork at Gabriel’s untouched pasta. “You’d better eat that before it gets cold.”

“I’m afraid I’ve lost my appetite.”

Donati plunged his fork into Gabriel’s pasta. “So what is this Radek fellow alleged to have done?”

Gabriel gave a brief synopsis of Sturmbannführer Erich Radek’s illustrious SS career, beginning with his work for Adolf Eichmann’s Jewish emigration office in Vienna and concluding with his command of Aktion 1005. By the end of Gabriel’s account, Donati too had lost his appetite.

“Did they really believe they could conceal all the evidence of a crime so enormous?”

“I’m not sure whether they believed it was possible, but they succeeded to a large extent. Because of men like Erich Radek, we’ll never know how many people really perished in the Shoah.”

Donati contemplated his wine. “What is it you want to know about Bishop Hudal’s assistance to Radek?”

“We can assume that Radek needed a passport. For that, Hudal would have turned to the International Red Cross. I want to know the name on that passport. Radek would have also needed a place to go. He would have needed a visa.” Gabriel paused. “I know it was a long time ago, but Bishop Hudal kept records, didn’t he?”

Donati nodded slowly. “Bishop Hudal’s private papers are stored in the archives of the Anima. As you might expect, they are sealed.”

“If there’s anyone in Rome who can unseal them, it’s you, Luigi.”

“We can’t just barge into the Anima and ask to see the bishop’s papers. The current rector is Bishop Theodor Drexler, and he’s no fool. We’d need an excuse-a cover story, as they say in your trade.”

“We have one.”

“What’s that?”

“The Historical Commission.”

“You’re suggesting we tell the rector that the Commission has requested Hudal’s papers?”

“Precisely.”

“And if he balks?”

“Then we name-drop.”

“And who are you supposed to be?”

Gabriel reached into his pocket and produced a laminated identification card, complete with a photograph.

“Shmuel Rubenstein, professor of comparative religion at Hebrew University in Jerusalem.” Donati handed the card back to Gabriel and shook his head. “Theodor Drexler is a brilliant theologian. He’ll want to engage you in a discussion-perhaps something about the common roots of the two oldest religions in the western world. I’m quite confident you’ll fall flat on your face, and the bishop will see right through your little act.”

“It’s your job to see that doesn’t happen.”

“You overestimate my abilities, Gabriel.”

“Call him, Luigi. I need to see Bishop Hudal’s papers.”

“I will, but first, I have one question. Why? ”

Donati, having heard Gabriel’s answer, dialed a number on his mobile phone and asked to be connected to the Anima.

19 ROME

THE CHURCH OF Santa Maria dell’Anima is located in the Centro Storico, just to the west of the Piazza Navona. For four centuries it has been the German church in Rome. Pope Adrian VI, the son of a German shipbuilder from Utrecht and the last non-Italian pope before John Paul II, is buried in a magnificent tomb just to the right of the main altar. The adjoining seminary is reached from the Via della Pace, and it was there, standing in the cold shadows of the forecourt, where they met Bishop Theodor Drexler the following morning.

Monsignor Donati greeted him in excellent Italian-accented German, and introduced Gabriel as “the learned Professor Shmuel Rubenstein from Hebrew University.” Drexler offered his hand at such an angle that for an instant Gabriel wasn’t sure whether to shake it or kiss the ring. After a brief hesitation, he gave it one firm pump. The skin was as cool as church marble.

The rector led them upstairs into an unpresumptuous book-lined office. His soutane rustled as he settled himself into the largest chair in the seating area. His large gold pectoral cross shone in the sunlight slanting through the tall windows. He was short and well-fed, nearing seventy, with a gossamer halo of white hair and extremely pink cheeks. The corners of his tiny mouth were lifted perpetually into a smile-even now, when he was clearly unhappy-and his pale blue eyes sparkled with a condescending intelligence. It was a face that could comfort the sick and put the fear of God into a sinner. Monsignor Donati had been right. Gabriel would have to watch his step.

Donati and the bishop spent a few minutes exchanging pleasantries about the Holy Father. The bishop informed Donati that he was praying for the pontiff’s continued good health, while Donati announced that His Holiness was extraordinarily pleased with Bishop Drexler’s work at the Anima. He referred to the bishop as “Your Grace” as many times as possible. By the end of the exchange, Drexler was so buttered up that Gabriel feared he might slide off his chair.

When Monsignor Donati finally got around to the purpose of their visit to the Anima, Drexler’s mood darkened swiftly, as if a cloud had passed before the sun, though his smile remained firmly in place.

“I fail to see how a polemical investigation into Bishop Hudal’s work for German refugees after the war will aid the healing process between Roman Catholics and Jews.” His voice was soft and dry, his German Viennese-accented. “A fair and balanced investigation of Bishop Hudal’s activities would reveal that he helped a good many Jews as well.”

Gabriel leaned forward. It was time for the learned professor from Hebrew University to insert himself into the conversation. “Are you saying, Your Grace, that Bishop Hudal hid Jews during the Rome roundup?”

“Before the roundup and after. There were many Jews living within the walls of the Anima. Baptized Jews, of course.”

“And those who weren’t baptized?”

“They couldn’t be hidden here. It wouldn’t have been proper. They were sent elsewhere.”

“Forgive me, Your Grace, but how exactly did one tell a baptized Jew from an ordinary Jew?”

Monsignor Donati crossed his leg and carefully smoothed the crease in his trouser leg, a signal to cease and desist in this line of inquiry. The bishop drew a breath and answered the question.

“They might have been asked a few simple questions about matters of faith and Catholic doctrine. They might have been asked to recite the Lord’s Prayer or the Ave Maria. Usually, it became apparent quite quickly who was telling the truth and who was lying in order to gain sanctuary at the seminary.”

A knock at the door accomplished Luigi Donati’s goal of ending the exchange. A young novice entered the room, bearing a silver tray. He poured tea for Donati and Gabriel. The bishop drank hot water with a thin slice of lemon.

When the boy was gone, Drexler said, “But I’m sure you’re not interested in Bishop Hudal’s efforts to shield Jews from the Nazis, are you, Professor Rubenstein? You’re interested in the assistance he gave to German officers after the war?”

“Not German officers. Wanted SS war criminals.”

“He didn’t know they were criminals.”

“I’m afraid that defense strains credulity, Your Grace. Bishop Hudal was a committed anti-Semite and a supporter of Hitler’s regime. Does it not make sense that he would willingly help Austrians and Germans after the war, regardless of the crimes they had committed?”

“His opposition to Jews was theological in nature, not social. As for his support of the Nazi regime, I offer no defense. Bishop Hudal is condemned by his own words and his writings.”

“And his car, ” Gabriel added, putting Moshe Rivlin’s file to good use. “Bishop Hudal flew the flag of the united Reich on his official limousine. He made no secret of where his sympathies lay.”

Drexler sipped his lemon water and turned his frozen gaze on Donati. “Like many others within the Church, I had my concerns about the Holy Father’s Historical Commission, but I kept those concerns to myself out of respect for His Holiness. Now it seems the Anima is under the microscope. I must draw the line. I will not have the reputation of this great institution dragged through the mud of history.”

Monsignor Donati pondered his trouser leg for a moment, then looked up. Beneath the calm exterior, the papal secretary was seething at the rector’s insolence. The bishop had pushed; Donati was about to push back. Somehow, he managed to keep his voice to a chapel murmur.

“Regardless of your concerns on this matter, Your Grace, it is the Holy Father’s desire that Professor Rubenstein be granted access to Bishop Hudal’s papers.”

A deep silence hung over the room. Drexler fingered his pectoral cross, looking for an escape hatch. There was none; resignation was the only honorable course of action. He toppled his king.

“I have no wish to defy His Holiness on this matter. You leave me no choice but to cooperate, Monsignor Donati.”

“The Holy Father will not forget this, Bishop Drexler.”

“Nor will I, Monsignor.”

Donati flashed an ironic smile. “It is my understanding that the bishop’s personal papers remain here at the Anima.”

“That is correct. They are stored in our archives. It will take a few days to locate them all and organize them in such a fashion that they can be read and understood by a scholar such as Professor Rubenstein.”

“How very thoughtful of you, Your Grace,” said Monsignor Donati, “but we’d like to see them now. ”

HE LED THEM down a corkscrew stone stairway with timeworn steps as slick as ice. At the bottom of the stairs was a heavy oaken door with cast-iron fittings. It had been built to withstand a battering ram but had proved no match for a clever priest from the Veneto and the “professor” from Jerusalem.

Bishop Drexler unlocked the door and shouldered it open. He groped in the gloom for a moment, then threw a switch that made a sharp, echoing snap. A series of overhead lights burst on, buzzing and humming with the sudden flow of electricity, revealing a long subterranean passage with an arched stone ceiling. The bishop silently beckoned them forward.

The vault had been constructed for smaller men. The diminutive bishop could walk the passage without altering his posture. Gabriel had only to dip his head to avoid the light fixtures, but Monsignor Donati, at well over six feet in height, was forced to bend at the waist like a man suffering from severe curvature of the spine. Here resided the institutional memory of the Anima and its seminary, four centuries’ worth of baptismal records, marriage certificates, and death notices. The records of the priests who’d served here and the students who’d studied within the walls of the seminary. Some of it was stored in pinewood file cabinets, some in crates or ordinary cardboard boxes. The newer additions were kept in modern plastic file containers. The smell of damp and rot was pervasive, and from somewhere in the walls came the trickle of water. Gabriel, who knew something about the detrimental effects of cold and damp on paper, rapidly lost hope of finding Bishop Hudal’s papers intact.

Near the end of the passage was a small, catacomblike side chamber. It contained several large trunks, secured by rusted padlocks. Bishop Drexler had a ring of keys. He inserted one into the first lock. It wouldn’t turn. He struggled for a moment before finally surrendering the keys to “Professor Rubenstein,” who had no problem prying open the old locks.

Bishop Drexler hovered over them for a moment and offered to assist in their search of the documents. Monsignor Donati patted him on the shoulder and said they could manage on their own. The portly little bishop made the sign of the cross and padded slowly away down the arched passageway.

IT WAS GABRIEL, two hours later, who found it. Erich Radek had arrived at the Anima on March 3, 1948. On May 24, the Pontifical Commission for Assistance, the Vatican ’s refugee aid organization, issued Radek a Vatican identity document bearing the number 9645/99 and the alias “Otto Krebs.” That same day, with the help of Bishop Hudal, Otto Krebs used his Vatican identification to secure a Red Cross passport. The following week he was issued an entrance visa by the Arab Republic of Syria. He purchased second-class passage with money given to him by Bishop Hudal and set sail from the Italian port of Genoa in late June. Krebs had five hundred dollars in his pocket. A receipt for the money, bearing Radek’s signature, had been kept by Bishop Hudal. The final item in the Radek file was a letter, with a Syrian stamp and Damascus postmark, that thanked Bishop Hudal and the Holy Father for their assistance and promised that one day the debt would be repaid. It was signed Otto Krebs.

20 ROME

BISHOP DREXLER LISTENED to the audio tape one final time, then dialed the number in Vienna. “I’m afraid we have a problem.”

“What sort of problem?”

Drexler told the man in Vienna about the visitors to the Anima that morning: Monsignor Donati and a professor from Hebrew University in Jerusalem.

“What did he call himself?”

“Rubenstein. He claimed to be a researcher on the Historical Commission.”

“He was no professor.”

“I gathered that, but I was hardly in a position to challenge his bona fides. Monsignor Donati is a very powerful man within the Vatican. There’s only one more powerful, and that’s the heretic he works for.”

“What were they after?”

“Documentation about assistance given by Bishop Hudal to a certain Austrian refugee after the war.”

There was a long silence before the man posed his next question.

“Have they left the Anima?”

“Yes, about an hour ago.”

“Why did you wait so long to telephone?”

“I was hoping to provide you with some information that can be put to good use.”

“Can you?”

“Yes, I believe so.”

“Tell me.”

“The professor is staying at the Cardinal Hotel on the Via Giulia. And he’s checked into the room in the name of René Duran, with a Canadian passport.”

“I NEED YOU to collect a clock in Rome.”

“When?”

“Immediately.”

“Where is it?”

“There’s a man staying at the Cardinal Hotel on the Via Giulia. He’s registered in the name of René Duran, but sometimes he’s using the name of Rubenstein.”

“How long will he be in Rome?”

“Unclear, which is why you need to leave now. There’s an Alitalia flight leaving for Rome in two hours. A business-class seat has been reserved in your name.”

“If I’m traveling by plane, I won’t be able to bring the tools I’ll need for the repair. I’ll need someone to supply me those tools in Rome.”

“I have just the man.” He recited a telephone number, which the Clockmaker committed to memory. “He’s very professional, and most important, extremely discreet. I wouldn’t send you to him otherwise.”

“Do you have a photograph of this gentleman, Duran?”

“It will be coming over your fax machine momentarily.”

The Clockmaker hung up the phone and switched off the lights at the front of the shop. Then he entered his workshop and opened a storage cabinet. Inside was a small overnight bag, containing a change of clothing and a shaving kit. The fax machine rang. The Clockmaker pulled on an overcoat and hat while the face of a dead man eased slowly into view.

21 ROME

GABRIEL TOOK A table inside Doney the following morning to have coffee. Thirty minutes later, a man entered and went to the bar. He had hair like steel wool and acne scars on his broad cheeks. His clothing was expensive but worn poorly. He drank two espressos rapid-fire and kept a cigarette working the entire time. Gabriel looked down at hisLa Repùbblica and smiled. Shimon Pazner had been the Office man in Rome for five years, yet he had still not lost the prickly exterior of a Negev settler. Pazner paid his bill and went to the toilet. When he came out, he was wearing sunglasses, the signal that the meeting was on. He headed through the revolving door, paused on the pavement of the Via Veneto, then turned right and started walking. Gabriel left money on the table and followed after him.

Pazner crossed the Corso d’Italia and entered the Villa Borghese. Gabriel walked a little farther along the Corso and entered the park at another point. He met Pazner on a tree-lined footpath and introduced himself as René Duran of Montreal. Together they walked toward the Galleria. Pazner lit a cigarette.

“Word is you had a close shave up in the Alps the other night.”

“Word travels fast.”

“The Office is like a Jewish sewing circle, you know that. But you have a bigger problem. Lev has laid down the law. Allon is off limits. Allon, should he come knocking on your door, is to be turned into the street.” Pazner spat at the ground. “I’m here out of loyalty to the Old Man, not you, MonsieurDuran. This had better be good.”

They sat on a marble bench in the forecourt of the Galleria Borghese and looked in opposite directions for watchers. Gabriel told Pazner about the SS man Erich Radek who had traveled to Syria under the name Otto Krebs. “He didn’t go to Damascus to study ancient civilization,” Gabriel said. “The Syrians let him in for a reason. If he was close to the regime, he might show up in the files.”

“So you want me to run a search and see if we can place him in Damascus?”

“Exactly.”

“And how do you expect me to request this search without Lev and Security finding out about it?”

Gabriel looked at Pazner as though he found the question insulting. Pazner retreated. “All right, let’s say I might have a girl in Research who can have a quiet look through the files for me.”

“Just one girl?”

Pazner shrugged and tossed his cigarette onto the gravel. “It still sounds like a long shot to me. Where are you staying?”

Gabriel told him.

“There’s a place called La Carbonara on the northern end of the Campo dei Fiori, near the fountain.”

“I know it.”

“Be there at eight o’clock. There’ll be a reservation in the name of Brunacci for eight-thirty. If the reservation is for two, that means the search was a bust. If it’s for four, come to the Piazza Farnese.”

ON THE OPPOSITE bank of the Tiber, in a small square a few paces from St. Anne’s Gate, the Clockmaker sat in the cold late-afternoon shadows of an outdoor café, sipping a cappuccino. At the next table, a pair of cassocked priests were engaged in animated conversation. The Clockmaker, though he spoke no Italian, assumed them to be Vatican bureaucrats. A hunchbacked alley cat threaded its way between the Clockmaker’s legs and begged for food. He trapped the animal between his ankles and squeezed, slowly increasing the pressure, until the cat let out a strangled howl and scampered off. The priests looked up in disapproval; the Clockmaker left money on the table and walked away. Imagine, cats in a café. He was looking forward to concluding his business in Rome and returning to Vienna.

He walked along the edge of Bernini’s Colonnade and paused for a moment to peer down the broad Via della Conciliazione toward the Tiber. A tourist thrust a disposable camera toward him and pleaded, in some indecipherable Slavic tongue, for the Clockmaker to take his photograph in front of the Vatican. The Austrian wordlessly pointed toward his wristwatch, indicating he was late for an appointment, and turned his back.

He crossed the large, thunderous square just beyond the opening in the Colonnade. It bore the name of a recent pope. The Clockmaker, though he had few interests other than antique timepieces, knew that this pope was a rather controversial figure. He found the intrigue swirling about him rather amusing. So he did not help the Jews during the war. Since when was it the responsibility of a pope to help Jews? They were, after all, the enemies of the Church.

He turned into the mouth of a narrow street, leading away from the Vatican toward the base of the Janiculum park. It was deeply shadowed and lined with ocher-colored buildings covered in a powdery dust. The Clockmaker walked the cracked pavement, searching for the address he had been given earlier that morning by telephone. He found it but hesitated before entering. Stenciled to the sooty glass were the words ARTICOLIRELIGIOSI. Below, in smaller letters, was the name GIUSEPPE MONDIANI. The Clockmaker consulted the slip of paper where he’d written the address. Number 22 Via Borgo Santo Spirito. He had come to the right place.

He pressed his face to the glass. The room on the other side was cluttered with crucifixes, statues of the Virgin, carvings of long-dead saints, rosaries and medals, all certified to have been blessed by il papa himself. Everything seemed to be covered with the fine, flourlike dust from the street. The Clockmaker, though raised in a strict Austrian Catholic home, wondered what would compel a person to pray to a statue. He no longer believed in God or the Church, nor did he believe in fate, divine intervention, an afterlife, or luck. He believed men controlled the course of their lives, just as the wheelwork of a clock controlled the motion of the hands.

He pulled open the door and stepped inside, accompanied by the tinkle of a small bell. A man emerged from a back room, dressed in an amber V-neck sweater with no shirt beneath and tan gabardine trousers that no longer held a crease. His limp, thinning hair was waxed into place atop his head. The Clockmaker, even from several paces away, could smell his offensive aftershave. He wondered whether the men of the Vatican knew their blessed religious articles were being dispensed by so reprehensible a creature.

“May I help you?”

“I’m looking for Signor Mondiani.”

He nodded, as if to say the Clockmaker had found the man he was looking for. A watery smile revealed the fact that he was missing several teeth. “You must be the gentleman from Vienna,” Mondiani said. “I recognize your voice.”

He held out his hand. It was spongy and damp, just as the Clockmaker had feared. Mondiani locked the front door and hung a sign in the window that said, in English and Italian, that the shop was now closed. Then he led the Clockmaker through a doorway and up a flight of rickety wooden stairs. At the top of the steps was a small office. The curtains were drawn, and the air was heavy with the scent of a woman’s perfume. And something else, sour and ammonia-like. Mondiani gestured toward the couch. The Clockmaker looked down; an image flashed before his eyes. He remained standing. Mondiani shrugged his narrow shoulders-As you wish.

The Italian sat down at his desk, straightened some papers, and smoothed his hair. It was dyed an unnatural shade of orange-black. The Clockmaker, balding with a salt-and-pepper fringe, seemed to be making him more self-conscious than he already was.

“Your colleague from Vienna said you required a weapon.” Mondiani pulled open a desk drawer, removed a dark item with a flat metallic finish, and laid it reverently on his coffee-stained desk blotter, as though it were a sacred relic. “I trust you’ll find this satisfactory.”

The Clockmaker held out his hand. Mondiani placed the weapon in his palm.

“As you can see, it’s a Glock nine-millimeter. I trust you’re familiar with the Glock. After all, it is an Austrian-made weapon.”

The Clockmaker raised his eyes from the weapon. “Has this been blessed by the Holy Father, like the rest of your inventory?”

Mondiani, judging from his dark expression, did not find the remark humorous. He reached into the open drawer once again and produced a box of ammunition.

“Do you require a second cartridge?”

The Clockmaker did not intend to get into a gunfight, but still, one always felt better with a loaded spare cartridge in one’s hip pocket. He nodded; a second appeared on the blotter.

The Clockmaker broke open the box of ammunition and began thumbing rounds into the cartridges. Mondiani asked whether he required a silencer. The Clockmaker, his gaze down, nodded in the affirmative.

“Unlike the weapon itself, this is not manufactured in Austria. It was made right here,” Mondiani said with excessive pride. “In Italy. It is very effective. The gun will emit little more than a whisper when fired.”

The Clockmaker held the silencer to his right eye and peered through the barrel. Satisfied with the craftsmanship, he placed it on the desk, next to the other things.

“Do you require anything else?”

The Clockmaker reminded Signor Mondiani that he had requested a motorbike.

“Ah yes, the motorino, ” Mondiani said, holding a set of keys aloft. “It’s parked outside the shop. There are two helmets, just as you requested, different colors. I chose black and red. I hope that’s satisfactory.”

The Clockmaker glanced at his watch. Mondiani took the hint and moved things along. On a steno pad, with a chewed pencil, he prepared the invoice.

“The weapon is clean and untraceable,” he said, the pencil scratching across the paper. “I suggest you drop it into the Tiber when you’re finished. The Polizia di Stato will never find it there.”

“And the motorbike?”

Stolen, said Mondiani. “Leave it in a public place with the keys in the ignition-a busy piazza, for example. I’m sure that within a few minutes, it will find a new home.”

Mondiani circled the final figure and turned the pad around so the Clockmaker could see. It was in euros, thank God. The Clockmaker, despite the fact he was a businessman himself, had always loathed making transactions in lire.

“Rather steep, is it not, Signore Mondiani?”

Mondiani shrugged and treated the Clockmaker to another hideous smile. The Clockmaker picked up the silencer and screwed it carefully into the end of the barrel. “This charge here,” the Clockmaker said, tapping the steno pad with the forefinger of his free hand. “What is that for?”

“That is my brokerage fee.” Mondiani managed to say this with a completely straight face.

“You’ve charged me three times as much for the Glock as I would pay in Austria. That, Signor Mondiani, is your brokerage fee.”

Mondiani folded his arms defiantly. “It is the Italian way. Do you want your weapon or not?”

“Yes,” said the Clockmaker, “but at a reasonable price.”

“I’m afraid that’s the going rate in Rome at the moment.”

“For an Italian, or just for foreigners?”

“It might be better if you took your business elsewhere.” Mondiani held out his hand. It was trembling. “Give me the gun, please, and see yourself out.”

The Clockmaker sighed. Perhaps it was better this way. Signor Mondiani, despite the assurances of the man from Vienna, was hardly the type to inspire trust. The Clockmaker, in a swift movement, rammed a cartridge into the Glock and chambered the first round. Signor Mondiani’s hands came up defensively. The shots pierced his palms before striking his face. The Clockmaker, as he slipped out of the office, realized that Mondiani had been honest about at least one thing. The gun, when fired, emitted little more than a whisper.

HE LET HIMSELF out of the shop and locked the door behind him. It was nearly dark now; the dome of the Basilica had receded into the blackening sky. He inserted the key into the ignition of the motorbike and started the engine. A moment later he was speeding down the Via della Conciliazione toward the mud-colored walls of the Castel San Angelo. He sped across the Tiber, then made his way through the narrow streets of Centro Storico, until he came to the Via Giulia.

He parked outside the Cardinal Hotel, removed his helmet, and went into the lobby, then turned to the right and entered a small, catacomblike bar with walls fashioned of ancient Roman granite. He ordered a Coke from the bartender-he was confident he could accomplish this feat without betraying his Austrian-German accent-and carried the drink to a small table adjacent to the passageway between the lobby and the bar. To pass the time, he snacked on pistachio nuts and leafed through a stack of Italian newspapers.

At seven-thirty a man stepped out of the elevator: short dark hair, gray at the temples, very green eyes. He left his room key at the front desk and went into the street.

The Clockmaker finished his Coke, then went outside. He swung his leg over Signor Mondiani’s motorino and started the engine. The black helmet was hanging by its strap from the handlebars. The Clockmaker removed the red helmet from the rear storage compartment and put it on, then placed the black one into the compartment and closed the lid.

He looked up and watched the figure of the green-eyed man retreating steadily into the darkness of the Via Giulia. Then he pulled back on the throttle and eased slowly after him.

22 ROME

THE RESERVATION AT La Carbonara was for four. Gabriel walked to the Piazza Farnese and found Pazner waiting near the French Embassy. They walked to Al Pompière and took a quiet table in the back. Pazner ordered red wine and polenta and handed Gabriel a plain envelope.

“It took some time,” Pazner said, “but eventually they found a reference to Krebs in a report about a Nazi named Aloïs Brunner. Know much about Brunner?”

He was a top aide to Eichmann, Gabriel replied, a deportation expert, highly skilled in the art of herding Jews into ghettos and then to the gas chambers. He’d worked with Eichmann on the deportation of the Austrian Jews. Later in the war, he handled deportations in Salonika and Vichy France.

Pazner, clearly impressed, impaled a piece of polenta. “And after the war he escaped to Syria, where he lived under the name George Fischer and served as a consultant to the regime. For all intents and purposes, the modern Syrian intelligence and security services were built by Aloïs Brunner.”

“Was Krebs working for him?”

“So it would seem. Open the envelope. And, by the way, be sure you treat that report with the respect it deserves. The man who filed it paid a very high price. Take a look at the agent’s code name.”

“MENASHE”WAS THE code name of a legendary Israeli spy named Eli Cohen. Born in Egypt in 1924, Cohen had emigrated to Israel in 1957 and immediately volunteered to work for Israeli intelligence. His psychological testing produced mixed results. The profilers found him highly intelligent and blessed with an extraordinary memory for detail. But they also discovered a dangerous streak of “exaggerated self-importance” and predicted Cohen would take unnecessary risks in the field.

Cohen’s file gathered dust until 1960, when increasing tension along the Syrian border led the men of Israeli intelligence to decide they desperately needed a spy in Damascus. A long search of candidates produced no suitable prospects. Then the search was broadened to include those who had been rejected for other reasons. Cohen’s file was opened once more, and before long, he found himself being prepared for an assignment that would ultimately end in his death.

After six months of intensive training, Cohen, posing as Kamal Amin Thabit, was sent to Argentina to construct his cover story: a successful Syrian businessman who had lived abroad his entire life and wanted only to move to his homeland. He ingratiated himself with the large Syrian expatriate community of Buenos Aires and developed many important friendships, including one with Major Amin al-Hafez, who would one day become the president of Syria.

In January 1962, Cohen moved to Damascus and opened an import-export business. Armed with introductions from the Syrian community in Buenos Aires, he quickly became a popular figure on the Damascus social and political scene, developing friendships with high-level members of the military and the ruling Ba’ath party. Syrian army officers took Cohen on tours of military facilities and even showed him the fortifications on the strategic Golan Heights. When Major al-Hafez became president, there was speculation that “Kamal Amin Thabit” might be in line for a cabinet post, perhaps even the Ministry of Defense.

Syrian intelligence had no idea that the affable Thabit was in reality an Israeli spy who was sending a steady stream of reports to his masters across the border. Urgent reports were sent via coded Morse radio transmissions. Longer and more detailed reports were written in invisible ink, hidden in crates of damascene furniture, and shipped to an Israeli front in Europe. Intelligence provided by Cohen gave Israeli military planners a remarkable window on the political and military situation in Damascus.

In the end, the warnings about Cohen’s penchant for risk proved correct. He grew reckless in his use of the radio, transmitting at the same time each morning or sending multiple transmissions in a single day. He sent greetings to his family and bemoaned Israel ’s defeat in an international football match. The Syrian security forces, armed with the latest Soviet-made radio detection gear, starting looking for the Israeli spy in Damascus. They found him on January 18, 1965, bursting into his apartment while he was sending a message to his controllers in Israel. Cohen’s hanging, in May 1965, was broadcast live on Syrian television.

Gabriel read the first report by the light of a flickering table candle. It had been sent through the European channel in May 1963. Contained within a detailed report on internal Ba’ath party politics and intrigue was a paragraph devoted to Aloïs Brunner:

I met “Herr Fischer” at a cocktail party hosted by a senior figure in the Ba’ath party. Herr Fischer was not looking particularly well, having recently lost several fingers on one hand to a letter bomb in Cairo. He blamed the attempt on his life on vengeful Jewish filth in Tel Aviv. He claimed that the work he was doing in Egypt would more than settle his account with the Israeli agents who had tried to murder him. Herr Fischer was accompanied that evening by a man called Otto Krebs. I had never seen Krebs before. He was tall and blue-eyed, very Germanic in appearance, unlike Brunner. He drank whiskey heavily and seemed a vulnerable sort, a man who might be blackmailed or turned by some other method.

“That’s it?” Gabriel asked. “One sighting at a cocktail party?”

“Apparently so, but don’t be discouraged. Cohen gave you one more clue. Look at the next report.”

Gabriel looked down and read it.

I saw “Herr Fischer” last week at a reception at the Ministry of Defense. I asked him about his friend, Herr Krebs. I told him that Krebs and I had discussed a business venture and I was disappointed that I had not heard back from him. Fischer said that was not surprising, since Krebs had recently moved to Argentina.

Pazner poured Gabriel a glass of wine. “I hear Buenos Aires is lovely this time of year.”

GABRIEL AND PAZNER separated in the Piazza Farnese, then Gabriel walked alone on the Via Giulia toward his hotel. The night had turned colder, and it was very dark in the street. The deep silence, combined with the rough paving stones beneath his feet, made it possible for him to imagine Rome as it had been a century and a half earlier, when the men of the Vatican still ruled supreme. He thought of Erich Radek, walking this very street, waiting for his passport and his ticket to freedom.

But was it really Radek who had come to Rome?

According to Bishop Hudal’s files, Radek had come to the Anima in 1948 and had left soon after as Otto Krebs. Eli Cohen had placed “Krebs” in Damascus as late as 1963. Then Krebs reportedly moved on to Argentina. The facts had exposed a glaring and perhaps irreconcilable contradiction in the case against Ludwig Vogel. According to the documents in the Staatsarchiv, Vogel was living in Austria by 1946, working for the American occupation authority. If that were true, then Vogel and Radek couldn’t possibly be the same man. How then to explain Max Klein’s belief that he had seen Vogel at Birkenau? The ring Gabriel had taken from Vogel’s chalet in Upper Austria? 1005, well done, Heinrich… The wristwatch?To Erich, in adoration, Monica… Had another man come to Rome in 1948 posing as Erich Radek? And if so,why?

Many questions, thought Gabriel, and only one possible trail to follow:Fischer said that was not surprising, since Krebs had recently moved to Argentina. Pazner was right. Gabriel had no choice but to continue the search in Argentina.

The heavy silence was shattered by the insectlike buzz of amotorino. Gabriel glanced over his shoulder as the bike rounded a corner and turned into the Via Giulia. Then it accelerated suddenly and sped directly toward him. Gabriel stopped walking and removed his hands from his coat pockets. He had a decision to make. Stand his ground like a normal Roman or turn and run? The decision was made for him, a few seconds later, when the helmeted rider reached into the front of his jacket and drew a silenced pistol.

GABRIEL LUNGED INTO a narrow street as the gun spit three tongues of fire. Three rounds struck the cornerstones of a building. Gabriel lowered his head and started to run.

The motorino was traveling too fast to make the turn. It skidded past the entrance of the street, then wobbled around in an awkward circle, allowing Gabriel a few critical seconds to put some distance between himself and his attacker. He turned right, onto a street that ran parallel to the Via Giulia, then made a sudden left. His plan was to head for the Corso Vittorio Emanuale II, one of Rome ’s largest thoroughfares. There would be traffic on the street and pedestrians on the pavements. On the Corso he could find a place to conceal himself.

The whine of the motorino grew louder. Gabriel glanced over his shoulder. The bike was still following him and closing the distance at an alarming rate. He threw himself into a headlong sprint, hands clawing at the air, breath harsh and ragged. The headlamp fell upon him. He saw his own shadow on the paving stones in front of him, a flailing madman.

A second bike entered the street directly in front of him and skidded to a halt. The helmeted rider drew a weapon. So this is how it would be-a trap, two killers, no hope of escape. He felt like a target in a shooting gallery, waiting to be toppled.

He kept running, into the light. His arms rose, and he glimpsed his own hands, contorted and taut, the hands of a tormented figure in an Expressionist painting. He realized he was shouting. The sound echoed from the stucco and brickwork of the surrounding buildings and vibrated within his own ears, so that he could no longer hear the sound of the motorbike at his back. An image flashed before his eyes: his mother at the side of a Polish road with Erich Radek’s gun to her temple. Only then did he realize he was screaming in German. The language of his dreams. The language of his nightmares.

The second assassin leveled the weapon, then lifted the visor of the helmet.

Gabriel could hear the sound of his own name.

“Get down! Get down! Gabriel! ”

He realized it was the voice of Chiara.

He threw himself to the street.

Chiara’s shots sailed overhead and struck the oncoming motorino. The bike veered out of control and slammed into the side of a building. The assassin catapulted over the handlebars and tumbled along the paving stones. The gun came to rest a few feet from Gabriel. He reached for it.

“No, Gabriel! Leave it! Hurry! ”

He looked up and saw Chiara holding out her hand to him. He climbed on the back of the motorino and clung childlike to her hips as the bike roared up the Corso toward the river.

SHAMRON HAD A rule about safe flats: there was to be no physical contact between male and female agents. That evening, in an Office flat in the north of Rome, near a lazy bend in the Tiber, Gabriel and Chiara violated Shamron’s rule with an intensity born of the fear of death. Only afterward did Gabriel bother to ask Chiara how she had found him.

“Shamron told me you were coming to Rome. He asked me to watch your back. I agreed, of course. I have a very personal interest in your continued survival.”

Gabriel wondered how he had failed to notice he was being tailed by a five-foot-ten-inch Italian goddess, but then, Chiara Zolli was very good at her work.

“I wanted to join you for lunch at Piperno,” she said mischievously. “I didn’t think it was a terribly good idea.”

“How much do you know about the case?”

“Only that my worst fears about Vienna turned out to be true. Why don’t you tell me the rest?”

Which he did, beginning with his flight from Vienna and concluding with the information he had picked up earlier that night from Shimon Pazner.

“So who sent that man to Rome to kill you?”

“I think it’s safe to assume it was the same person who engineered the murder of Max Klein.”

“How did they find you here?”

Gabriel had been asking himself that same question. His suspicions fell upon the rosy-cheeked Austrian rector of the Anima, Bishop Theodor Drexler.

“So where are we going next?” Chiara asked.

“We?”

“Shamron told me to watch your back. You want me to disobey a direct order from the Memuneh?”

“He told you to watch me in Rome.”

“It was an open-ended assignment,” she replied, her tone defiant.

Gabriel lay there for a moment, stroking her hair. Truth was, he could use a traveling companion and a second pair of eyes in the field. Given the obvious risks involved, he would have preferred someone other than the woman he loved. But then, she had proven herself a valuable partner.

There was a secure telephone on the bedside table. He dialed Jerusalem and woke Moshe Rivlin from a heavy sleep. Rivlin gave him the name of a man in Buenos Aires, along with a telephone number and an address in the barrio San Telmo. Then Gabriel called Aerolineas Argentinas and booked two business-class seats on a flight the following evening. He hung up the receiver. Chiara rested her cheek against his chest.

“You were shouting something back there in that alley when you were running toward me,” she said. “Do you remember what you were saying?”

He couldn’t. It was as if he had awakened unable to recall the dreams that disturbed his sleep.

“You were calling out to her,” Chiara said.

“Who?”

“Your mother.”

He remembered the image that had flashed before his eyes during that mind-bending flight from the man on the motorino. He supposed it was indeed possible he had been calling out to his mother. Since reading her testimony he had been thinking of little else.

“Are you sure it was Erich Radek who murdered those poor girls in Poland?”

“As sure as onecan be sixty years after the fact.”

“And if Ludwig Vogel is actually Erich Radek?”

Gabriel reached up and switched off the lamp.

23 ROME

THE VIA DELLA Pace was deserted. The Clockmaker stopped at the gates of the Anima and shut down the engine of the motorino. He reached out, his hand trembling, and pressed the button of the intercom. There was no reply. He rang the bell again. This time an adolescent voice greeted him in Italian. The Clockmaker, in German, asked to see the rector.

“I’m afraid it’s not possible. Please telephone in the morning to make an appointment, and Bishop Drexler will be happy to see you. Buonanotte, signore.”

The Clockmaker leaned hard on the intercom button. “I was told to come here by a friend of the bishop’s from Vienna. It’s an emergency.”

“What was the man’s name?”

The Clockmaker answered the question truthfully.

A silence, then: “I’ll be down in a moment, signore.”

The Clockmaker opened his jacket and examined the puckered wound just below his right clavicle. The heat of the round had cauterized the vessels near the skin. There was little blood, just an intense throbbing and the chills of shock and fever. A small-caliber weapon, he guessed, most likely a.22. Not the kind of weapon to inflict serious internal damage. Still, he needed a doctor to remove the round and thoroughly clean the wound before sepsis set in.

He looked up. A cassocked figure appeared in the forecourt and warily approached the gate-a novice, a boy of perhaps fifteen, with the face of an angel. “The rector says it is not convenient for you to come to the seminary at this time,” the novice said. “The rector suggests that you find somewhere else to go tonight.”

The Clockmaker drew his Glock and pointed it at the angelic face.

“Open the gate,” he whispered. “Now.”

“YES, BUT WHY did you have to send him here?” The bishop’s voice rose suddenly, as if he were warning a congregation of souls about the dangers of sin. “It would be better for all involved if he left Rome immediately.”

“He can’t travel, Theodor. He needs a doctor and a place to rest.”

“I can see that.” His eyes settled briefly on the figure seated on the opposite side of his desk, the man with salt-and-pepper hair and the heavy shoulders of a circus strongman. “But you must realize that you’re placing the Anima in a terribly compromising position.”

“The position of the Anima will look much worse if our friend Professor Rubenstein is successful.”

The Bishop sighed heavily. “He can remain here for twenty-four hours, not a minute more.”

“And you’ll find him a doctor? Someone discreet?”

“I know just the fellow. He helped me a couple of years ago when one of the boys got into a bit of a scrape with a Roman tough. I’m sure I can count on his discretion in this matter, though a bullet wound is hardly an everyday occurrence at a seminary.”

“I’m sure you’ll think of some way to explain it. You have a very nimble mind, Theodor. May I speak with him a moment?”

The bishop held out the receiver. The Clockmaker grasped it with a bloodstained hand. Then he looked up at the prelate and, with a sideways nod of his head, sent him fleeing from his own office. The assassin brought the telephone to his ear. The man from Vienna asked what had gone wrong.

“You didn’t tell me the target was under protection. That’s what went wrong.”

The Clockmaker then described the sudden appearance of the second person on a motorcycle. There was a moment of silence on the line, then the man from Vienna spoke in a confessional tone.

“In my rush to dispatch you to Rome, I neglected to relay an important piece of information about the target. In retrospect, that was a miscalculation on my part.”

“An important piece of information? And what might that be?”

The man from Vienna acknowledged that the target was once connected to Israeli intelligence. “Judging from the events tonight in Rome,” he said, “those connections remain as strong as ever.”

For the love of God, thought the Clockmaker. An Israeli agent? It was no minor detail. He had a good mind to return to Vienna and leave the old man to deal with the mess himself. He decided instead to turn the situation to his own financial advantage. But there was something else. Never before had he failed to execute the terms of a contract. It wasn’t just a question of professional pride and reputation. He simply didn’t think it was wise to leave a potential enemy lying about, especially an enemy connected with an intelligence service as ruthless as Israel ’s. His shoulder began to throb. He looked forward to putting a bullet into that stinking Jew. And his friend.

“My price for this assignment just went up,” the Clockmaker said. “Substantially.”

“I expected that,” replied the man from Vienna. “I will double the fee.”

“Triple,” countered the Clockmaker, and after a moment’s hesitation, the man from Vienna consented.

“But can you locate him again?”

“We hold one significant advantage.”

“What’s that?”

“We know the trail he’s following, and we know where he’s going next. Bishop Drexler will see that you get the necessary treatment for your wound. In the meantime, get some rest. I’m quite confident you’ll be hearing from me again shortly.”

24 BUENOS AIRES

ALFONSO RAMIREZ SHOULD have been dead long ago. He was, without a doubt, one of the most courageous men in Argentina and all of Latin America. A crusading journalist and writer, he had made it his life’s work to chip away at the walls surrounding Argentina and its murderous past. Considered too controversial and dangerous to be employed by Argentine publications, he published most of his work in the United States and Europe. Few Argentines, beyond the political and financial elite, ever read a word Ramirez wrote.

He had experienced Argentine brutality firsthand. During the Dirty War, his opposition to the military junta had landed him in jail, where he spent nine months and was nearly tortured to death. His wife, a left-wing political activist, was kidnapped by a military death squad and thrown alive from an airplane into the freezing waters of the South Atlantic. Were it not for the intervention of Amnesty International, Ramirez would certainly have suffered the same fate. Instead, he was released, shattered and nearly unrecognizable, to resume his crusade against the generals. In 1983, they stepped aside, and a democratically elected civilian government took their place. Ramirez helped prod the new government into putting dozens of army officers on trial for crimes committed during the Dirty War. Among them was the captain who’d thrown Alfonso Ramirez’s wife into the sea.

In recent years, Ramirez had devoted his considerable skills to exposing another unpleasant chapter of Argentine history that the government, the press, and most of its citizenry had chosen to ignore. Following the collapse of Hitler’s Reich, thousands of war criminals-German, French, Belgian, and Croatian-had streamed into Argentina, with the enthusiastic approval of the Perón government and the tireless assistance of the Vatican. Ramirez was despised in Argentine quarters where the influence of the Nazis still ran deep, and his work had proven to be just as hazardous as investigating the generals. Twice his office had been firebombed, and his mail contained so many letter bombs that the postal service refused to handle it. Were it not for Moshe Rivlin’s introduction, Gabriel doubted Ramirez would have agreed to meet with him.

As it turned out, Ramirez readily accepted an invitation to lunch and suggested a neighborhood café in San Telmo. The café had a black-and-white checkerboard floor with square wooden tables arranged in no discernible pattern. The walls were whitewashed and fitted with shelves lined with empty wine bottles. Large doors opened onto the noisy street, and there were tables on the pavement beneath a canvas awning. Three ceiling fans stirred the heavy air. A German shepherd lay at the foot of the bar, panting. Gabriel arrived on time at two-thirty. The Argentine was late.

January is high summer in Argentina, and it was unbearably hot. Gabriel, who’d been raised in the Jezreel Valley and spent summers in Venice, was used to heat, but only a few days removed from the Austrian Alps, the contrast in climate took his body by surprise. Waves of heat rose from the traffic and flowed through the open doors of the café. With each passing truck, the temperature seemed to rise a degree or two. Gabriel kept his sunglasses on. His shirt was plastered to his spinal cord.

He drank cold water and chewed on a lemon rind, looking into the street. His gaze settled briefly on Chiara. She was sipping a Campari and soda and nibbling listlessly at a plate of empanada. She wore short pants. Her long legs stretched into the sunlight, and her thighs were beginning to burn. Her hair was twisted into a haphazard bun. A trickle of perspiration was inching its way down the nape of her neck, into her sleeveless blouse. Her wristwatch was on her left hand. It was a prearranged signal. Left hand meant that she had detected no surveillance, though Gabriel knew that even an agent of Chiara’s skill would be hard-pressed to find a professional in the midday crowds of San Telmo.

Ramirez didn’t arrive until three. He made no apology for being late. He was a large man, with thick forearms and a dark beard. Gabriel looked for the scars of torture but found none. His voice, when he ordered two steaks and a bottle of red wine, was affable and so loud it seemed to rattle the bottles on the shelves. Gabriel wondered whether steak and red wine was a wise choice, given the intense heat. Ramirez looked as though he found the question deeply scandalous. “Beef is the one thing about this country that’s true,” he said. “Besides, the way the economy is going-” The rest of his remark was drowned out by the rumble of a passing cement truck.

The waiter placed the wine on the table. It came in a green bottle with no label. Ramirez poured two glasses and asked Gabriel the name of the man he was looking for. Hearing the answer, the Argentine’s dark eyebrows furrowed in concentration.

“Otto Krebs, eh? Is that his real name, or an alias?”

“An alias.”

“How can you be sure?”

Gabriel handed over the documents he’d taken from the Santa Maria dell’Anima in Rome. Ramirez pulled a pair of greasy reading glasses from his shirt pocket and thrust them onto his face. Having the documents out in plain sight made Gabriel nervous. He cast a glance in Chiara’s direction. The wristwatch was still on her left hand. Ramirez, when he looked up from the papers, was clearly impressed.

“How did you get access to the papers of Bishop Hudal?”

“I have a friend at the Vatican.”

“No, you have a very powerful friend at the Vatican. The only man who could get Bishop Drexler to willingly open Hudal’s papers isil papa himself!” Ramirez raised his wineglass in Gabriel’s direction. “So, in 1948, an SS officer named Erich Radek comes to Rome and staggers into the arms of Bishop Hudal. A few months later, he leaves Rome as Otto Krebs and sets sail for Syria. What else do you know?”

The next document Gabriel laid on the wooden tabletop produced a similar look of astonishment from the Argentine journalist.

“As you can see, Israeli intelligence placed the man now known as Otto Krebs in Damascus as late as 1963. The source is very good, none other than Aloïs Brunner. According to Brunner, Krebs left Syria in 1963 and came here.”

“And you have reason to believe he still might be here?”

“That’s what I need to find out.”

Ramirez folded his heavy arms and eyed Gabriel across the table. A silence fell between them, filled by the hot drone of traffic from the street. The Argentine smelled a story. Gabriel had anticipated this.

“So how does a man named René Duran from Montreal get his hands on secret documents from the Vatican and the Israeli intelligence service?”

“Obviously, I have good sources.”

“I’m a very busy man, Monsieur Duran.”

“If it’s money you want-”

The Argentine held up his palm in an admonitory gesture.

“I don’t want your money, Monsieur Duran. I can make my own money. What I want is the story.”

“Obviously, press coverage of my investigation would be something of a hindrance.”

Ramirez looked insulted. “Monsieur Duran, I’m confident I have much more experience pursuing men like Erich Radek than you do. I know when to investigate quietly and when to write.”

Gabriel hesitated a moment. He was reluctant to enter into aquid pro quo with the Argentine journalist, but he also knew that Alfonso Ramirez might prove to be a valuable friend.

“Where do we start?” Gabriel asked.

“Well, I suppose we should find out whether Aloïs Brunner was telling the truth about his friend Otto Krebs.”

“Meaning, did he ever come to Argentina?”

“Exactly.”

“And how do we do that?”

Just then the waiter appeared. The steak he placed in front of Gabriel was large enough to feed a family of four. Ramirez smiled and started sawing away.

“Bon appétit, Monsieur Duran. Eat! Something tells me you’re going to need your strength.”

ALFONSO RAMIREZ DROVE the last surviving Volkswagen Sirocco in the western hemisphere. It might have been dark blue once; now the exterior had faded to the color of pumice. The windshield had a crack down the center that looked like a bolt of lightning. Gabriel’s door was bashed in, and it required much of his depleted reservoir of strength to pry it open. The air conditioner no longer worked, and the engine roared like a prop plane.

They sped along the broad Avenida 9 de Julio with the windows down. Scraps of notepaper swirled around them. Ramirez seemed not to notice, or to care, when several pages were sucked out into the street. It had grown hotter with the late afternoon. The rough wine had left Gabriel with a headache. He turned his face toward the open window. It was an ugly boulevard. The façades of the graceful old buildings were scarred by an endless parade of billboards hawking German luxury cars and American soft drinks to a populace whose money was suddenly worthless. The limbs of the shade trees hung drunkenly beneath the onslaught of pollution and heat.

They turned toward the river. Ramirez looked into the rearview mirror. A life of being pursued by military thugs and Nazi sympathizers had left him with well-honed street instincts.

“We’re being followed by a girl on a motor scooter.”

“Yes, I know.”

“If you knew, why didn’t you say anything?”

“Because she works for me.”

Ramirez took a long look into the mirror.

“I recognize those thighs. That girl was at the café, wasn’t she?”

Gabriel nodded slowly. His head was pounding.

“You’re a very interesting man, Monsieur Duran. And very lucky, too. She’s beautiful.”

“Just concentrate on your driving, Alfonso. She’ll watch your back.”

Five minutes later, Ramirez parked on a street running along the edge of the harbor. Chiara sped past, then swung round and parked in the shade of a tree. Ramirez killed the engine. The sun beat mercilessly on the roof. Gabriel wanted out of the car, but the Argentine wanted to brief him first.

“Most of the files dealing with Nazis in Argentina are kept under lock and key in the Information Bureau. They’re still officially off-limits to reporters and scholars, even though the traditional thirty-year blackout period expired long ago. Even if we could get into the storerooms of the Information Bureau, we probably wouldn’t find much. By all accounts, Perón had the most damaging files destroyed in 1955, when he was run out of office in a coup.”

On the other side of the street, a car slowed, and the man behind the wheel took a long look at the girl on the motorbike. Ramirez saw it, too. He watched the car in his rearview mirror for a moment before resuming.

“In 1997, the government created the Commission for the Clarification of Nazi Activities in Argentina. It faced a serious problem from the beginning. You see, in 1996, the government burned all the damaging files still in its possession.”

“Why create a commission in the first place?”

“They wanted credit for trying, of course. But in Argentina, the search for the truth can only go so far. A real investigation would have demonstrated the true depth of Perón’s complicity in the postwar Nazi exodus from Europe. It would also have revealed the fact that many Nazis continue to live here. Who knows? Maybe your man, too.”

Gabriel pointed at the building. “So what’s this?”

“The Hotel de Immigrantes, first stop for the millions of immigrants who came to Argentina in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The government housed them here, until they could find work and a place to live. Now, the Immigration Office uses the building as a storage facility.”

“For what?”

Ramirez opened the glove box and removed rubber surgical gloves and paper sterile masks. “It’s not the cleanest place in the world. I hope you’re not afraid of rats.”

Gabriel lifted the latch and threw his shoulder against the door. Across the street, Chiara killed the engine of her motorbike and settled in for the wait.

A BORED POLICEMAN stood watch at the entrance. A girl in uniform sat before a rotating fan at the registrar’s desk, reading a fashion magazine. She slid the logbook across the dusty desk. Ramirez signed and added the time. Two laminated tags with alligator clips appeared. Gabriel was No. 165. He affixed the badge to the top of his shirt pocket and followed Ramirez toward the elevator. “Two hours till closing time,” the girl called out, then she turned another page of her magazine.

They boarded a freight elevator. Ramirez pulled the screen shut and pressed the button for the top floor. The elevator swayed slowly upward. A moment later, when they shuddered to a stop, the air was so hot and thick with dust it was difficult to breathe. Ramirez pulled on his gloves and mask. Gabriel followed suit.

The space they entered was roughly two city blocks long, and filled with endless ranks of steel shelves sagging beneath the weight of wooden crates. Gulls were flying in and out of the broken windows. Gabriel could hear the scratching of tiny clawed feet and the mewing of a catfight. The smell of dust and decaying paper seeped through the protective mask. The subterranean archive of the Anima in Rome seemed a paradise compared to this squalid place.

“What are these?”

“The things Perón and his spiritual successors in the Menem government didn’t think to destroy. This room contains the immigration cards filled out by every passenger who disembarked at the Port of Buenos Aires from the 1920s to the 1970s. One floor down are the passenger manifests from every ship. Mengele, Eichmann, they all left their fingerprints here. Maybe Otto Krebs, too.”

“Why is it such a mess?”

“Believe it or not, it used to be worse. A few years ago, a brave soul named Chela alphabetized the cards year by year. They call this the Chela room now. The immigration cards for 1963 are over here. Follow me.” Ramirez paused and pointed toward the floor. “Watch out for the catshit.”

They walked half a city block. The immigration cards for 1963 filled several dozen of the steel shelves. Ramirez located the wooden boxes containing cards with passengers whose last name began withK, then he removed them from the shelf and placed them carefully on the floor. He found four immigrants with the last name Krebs. None had the first name Otto.

“Could it be misfiled?”

“Of course.”

“Is it possible someone removed it?”

“This is Argentina, my friend. Anything is possible.”

Gabriel leaned against the shelves, dejected. Ramirez returned the immigration cards to the box, and the box to its place on the steel shelf. Then he looked at his watch.

“We have an hour and forty-five minutes till they close up for the night. You work forward from 1963, I’ll work backward. Loser buys the drinks.”

A THUNDERSTORM MOVED down from the river. Gabriel, through a broken window, glimpsed heat lightning flickering amid the cranes of the waterfront. The heavy cloud blocked out the late-day sun. Inside the Chela room it became nearly impossible to see. The rain began like an explosion. It swept through the gaping windows and soaked the precious files. Gabriel, the restorer, pictured running ink, images forever lost.

He found the immigration cards of three more men named Krebs, one in 1965, two more in 1969. None bore the first name Otto. The darkness slowed the pace of his search to a crawl. In order to read the immigration cards, he had to lug the boxes near a window, where there was still some light. There he would crouch, his back to the rain, fingers working.

The girl from the registrar’s desk wandered up and gave them a ten-minute warning. Gabriel had only searched through 1972. He didn’t want to come back tomorrow. He quickened his pace.

The storm ceased as suddenly as it began. The air was cooler and washed clean. It was quiet, except for the sound of rainwater gurgling in the gutters. Gabriel kept searching: 1973… 1974… 1975…1976… No more passengers named Krebs. Nothing.

The girl returned, this time to chase them out for the night. Gabriel carried his last crate back to the shelf, where he found Ramirez and the girl chatting away in Spanish.

“Anything?” Gabriel asked.

Ramirez shook his head.

“How far did you get?”

“All the way. You?”

Gabriel told him. “Think it’s worth coming back tomorrow?”

“Probably not.” He put his hand on Gabriel’s shoulder. “Come on, I’ll buy you a beer.”

The girl collected their laminated badges and accompanied them down in the freight elevator. The windows of the Sirocco had been left open. Gabriel, depressed by failure, sat on the sodden car seat. The thunderous roar of the engine shattered the quiet of the street. Chiara followed as they drove away. Her clothing was drenched from the rain.

Two blocks from the archives, Ramirez reached into his shirt pocket and produced an immigration card. “Cheer up, Monsieur Duran,” he said, handing the card to Gabriel. “Sometimes, in Argentina, it pays to use the same underhanded tactics as the men in charge. There’s only one copier in that building, and the girl runs it. She would have made one copy for me and another for her superior.”

“And Otto Krebs, if he’s still in Argentina and still alive, might very well have been told we were looking for him.”

“Exactly.”

Gabriel held up the card. “Where was it?”

“Nineteen forty-nine. I suppose Chela stuck one in the wrong box.”

Gabriel looked down and began to read. Otto Krebs arrived in Buenos Aires in December 1963 on a boat bound from Athens. Ramirez pointed to a number written in hand at the bottom: 245276/62.

“That’s the number of his landing permit. It was probably issued by the Argentine consulate in Damascus. The ‘sixty-two’ at the end of the line is the year the permit was granted.”

“Now what?”

“We know he arrived in Argentina.” Ramirez shrugged his heavy shoulders. “Let’s see if we can find him.”

THEY DROVE BACK to San Telmo through the wet streets and parked outside an Italianate apartment house. Like many buildings in Buenos Aires, it had been beautiful once. Now its façade was the color of Ramirez’s car and streaked by pollution.

They climbed a flight of dimly lit stairs. The air inside the flat was stale and warm. Ramirez locked the door behind them and threw open the windows to the cool evening. Gabriel looked into the street and saw Chiara parked on the opposite side.

Ramirez ducked into the kitchen and came out holding two bottles of Argentine beer. He handed one to Gabriel. The glass was already sweating. Gabriel drank half of it. The alcohol took the edge off his headache.

Ramirez led him into his office. It was what Gabriel expected-big and shabby, like Ramirez himself, with books piled in the chairs and a large desk buried beneath a stack of papers that looked as though it was waiting for the match. Heavy curtains shut out the noise and the light of the street. Ramirez went to work on the telephone while Gabriel sat down and finished the last of his beer.

It took Ramirez an hour to come up with his first clue. In 1964, Otto Krebs had registered with the National Police in Bariloche in northern Patagonia. Forty-five minutes later, another piece of the puzzle: In 1972, on an application for an Argentine passport, Krebs had listed his address as Puerto Blest, a town not far from Bariloche. It took only fifteen minutes to find the next piece of information. In 1982, the passport was rescinded.

“Why?” Gabriel asked.

“Because the holder of the passport died.”

THE ARGENTINE SPREAD a dog-eared roadmap over a table and, squinting through his smudged reading glasses, searched the western reaches of the country.

“Here it is,” he said, jabbing at the map. “San Carlos de Bariloche, or just Bariloche for short. A resort in the northern lake district of Patagonia, founded by Swiss and German settlers in the nineteenth century. It’s still known as the Switzerland of Argentina. Now it’s a party town for the ski crowd, but for the Nazis and their fellow travelers, it was something of a Valhalla. Mengele adored Bariloche.”

“How do I get there?”

“The quickest way is to fly. There’s an airport and hourly service from Buenos Aires.” He paused, then added, “It’s a long way to go to see a grave.”

“I want to see it with my own eyes.”

Ramirez nodded. “Stay at the Hotel Edelweiss.”

“The Edelweiss?”

“It’s a German enclave,” Ramirez said. “You’ll find it hard to believe you’re in Argentina.”

“Why don’t you come along for the ride?”

“I’m afraid I’d be something of a hindrance. I’m persona non grata among certain segments of the Bariloche community. I’ve spent a little too much time poking around there, if you know what I mean. My face is too well known.”

The Argentine’s demeanor turned suddenly serious.

“You should watch your back, too, Monsieur Duran. Bariloche is not a place to make careless inquiries. They don’t like outsiders asking questions about certain residents. You should also know that you’ve come to Argentina at a tense time.”

Ramirez rummaged through the pile of paper on his desk until he found what he was looking for, a two-month-old copy of the international edition of Newsweek magazine. He handed it to Gabriel and said, “My story is on page thirty-six.” Then he went into the kitchen to fetch two more beers.

THE FIRST TO die was a man named Enrique Calderon. He was found in the bedroom of his townhouse in the Palermo Chico section of Buenos Aires. Four shots to the head, very professional. Gabriel, who could not hear of a murder without picturing the act, turned his gaze from Ramirez. “And the second?” he asked.

“Gustavo Estrada. Killed two weeks later on a business trip to Mexico City. His body was found in his hotel room after he failed to show up for a breakfast meeting. Again, four shots to the head.” Ramirez paused. “Good story, no? Two prominent businessmen, killed in a strikingly similar fashion within two weeks of each other. The kind of shit Argentines love. For a while, it took everyone’s mind off the fact that their life’s savings were gone and their money was worthless.”

“Are the murders connected?”

“We may never know for certain, but I believe they are. Enrique Calderon and Gustavo Estrada didn’t know each other well, but their fathers did. Alejandro Calderon was a close aide to Juan Perón, and Martín Estrada was the chief of the Argentine national police in the years after the war.”

“So why were the sons killed?”

“To be perfectly honest, I haven’t a clue. In fact, I don’t have a single theory that seems to make any sense. What I do know is this: Accusations are flying among the old German community. Nerves are frayed.” Ramirez took a long pull at his beer. “I repeat, watch your step in Bariloche, Monsieur Duran.”

They talked awhile longer as the darkness slowly gathered around them and the wet rush of the traffic filtered in from the street. Gabriel did not like many of the people he met in his work, but Alfonso Ramirez was an exception. He was only sorry he’d been forced to deceive him.

They talked of Bariloche, of Argentina, and the past. When Ramirez asked about the crimes of Erich Radek, Gabriel told him everything he knew. This produced a long, contemplative silence in the Argentine, as if he were pained by the fact that men such as Radek might have found sanctuary in a land he so loved.

They made arrangements to speak after Gabriel’s return from Bariloche, then parted in the darkened corridor. Outside, the barrio San Telmo was beginning to come alive in the cool of the evening. Gabriel walked for a time along the crowded pavements, until a girl on a red motorbike pulled alongside him and patted the back of her saddle.

25 BUENOS AIRES • ROME • VIENNA

THE CONSOLE OF sophisticated electronic equipment was of German manufacture. The microphones and transmitters concealed in the apartment of the target were of the highest quality-designed and built by West German intelligence at the height of the Cold War to monitor the activities of their adversaries in the east. The operator of the equipment was a native-born Argentine, though he could trace his ancestry to the Austrian village of Braunau am Inn. The fact that it was the same village where Adolf Hitler was born gave him a certain standing among his comrades. When the Jew paused in the entrance of the apartment house, the surveillance man snapped his photograph with a telephoto lens. A moment later, when the girl on the motorbike drew away from the curb, he captured her image as well, though it was of little value since her face was concealed beneath a black crash helmet. He spent a few moments reviewing the conversation that had taken place inside the target’s apartment; then, satisfied, he reached for the telephone. The number he dialed was in Vienna. The sound of German, spoken with a Viennese accent, was like music to his ears.

AT THE PONTIFICIO Santa Maria dell’Anima in Rome, a novice hurried along the second-floor corridor of the dormitory and paused outside the door of the room where the visitor from Vienna was staying. He hesitated before knocking, then waited for permission before entering. A wedge of light fell upon the powerful figure stretched out on the narrow cot. His eyes shone in the darkness like black pools of oil.

“You have a telephone call.” The boy spoke with his eyes averted. Everyone in the seminary had heard about the incident at the front gate the previous evening. “You can take it in the rector’s office.”

The man sat up and swung his feet to the floor in one fluid movement. The thick muscles in his shoulders and back rippled beneath his fair skin. He touched the bandage on his shoulder briefly, then pulled on a rollneck sweater.

The seminarian led the visitor down a stone staircase, then across a small courtyard. The rector’s office was empty. A single light burned on the desk. The receiver of the phone lay atop the blotter. The visitor picked it up. The boy slipped quietly from the room.

“We’ve located him.”

“Where?”

The man from Vienna told him. “He’s leaving for Bariloche in the morning. You’ll be waiting for him when he arrives.”

The Clockmaker glanced at his wristwatch and calculated the time difference. “How is that possible? There isn’t a flight from Rome until the afternoon.”

“Actually, there’s a plane leaving in a few minutes.”

“What are you talking about?”

“How quickly can you get to Fiumicino?”

THE DEMONSTRATORS WERE waiting outside the Hotel Imperial when the three-car motorcade arrived for a rally of the party faithful. Peter Metzler, seated in the back of a Mercedes limousine, looked out the window. He’d been warned, but he’d expected the usual sad-looking lot, not a brigade-strength band of marauders armed with placards and bullhorns. It was inevitable: the nearness of the election; the aura of invulnerability building around the candidate. The Austrian left was in full panic, as were their supporters in New York and Jerusalem.

Dieter Graff, seated opposite Metzler on the jump seat, looked apprehensive. And why not? Twenty years he’d toiled to transform the Austrian National Front from a moribund alliance of former SS officers and neo-fascist dreamers into a cohesive and modern conservative political force. Almost single-handedly he’d reshaped the party’s ideology and airbrushed its public image. His carefully crafted message had steadily attracted Austrian voters disenfranchised by the cozy power-sharing relationship between the People’s Party and the Social Democrats. Now, with Metzler as his candidate, he stood on the doorstep of the ultimate prize in Austrian politics: the chancellery. The last thing Graff wanted now, three weeks before the election, was a messy confrontation with a bunch of left-wing idiots and Jews.

“I know what you’re thinking, Dieter,” said Metzler. “You’re thinking we should play it safe-avoid this rabble by using the back entrance.”

“The thought did cross my mind. Our lead is three points and holding steady. I’d rather not squander two of those points with a nasty scene at the Imperial that can easily be avoided.”

“By going in the back door?”

Graff nodded. Metzler pointed to the television cameramen and still photographers.

“And do you know what the headline will be tomorrow in Die Presse? Metzler beaten back by Vienna protesters! They’ll say I’m a coward, Dieter, and I’m not a coward.”

“No one’s ever accused you of cowardice, Peter. It’s just a question of timing.”

“We’ve used the back door too long.” Metzler cinched up his tie and smoothed his shirt collar. “Besides,chancellors don’t use the back door. We go in the front, with our head up and our chin ready for battle, or we don’t go in at all.”

“You’ve become quite a speaker, Peter.”

“I had a good teacher.” Metzler smiled and put his hand on Graff’s shoulder. “But I’m afraid the long campaign has started to take a toll on his instincts.”

“Why would you say that?”

“Look at those hooligans. Most of them aren’t even Austrian. Half the signs are in English instead of German. Clearly, this little demonstration has been orchestrated by provocateurs from abroad. If I’m fortunate enough to have a confrontation with these people, our lead will be five points by morning.”

“I hadn’t thought of it quite that way.”

“Just tell security to take it easy. It’s important that the protesters come across as the Brownshirts-and not us.”

Peter Metzler opened the door and stepped out. A roar of anger rose from the crowd, and the placards began to flutter.

Nazi pig!

Reichsführer Metzler!

The candidate strode forward as though oblivious to the turmoil around him. A young girl, armed with a rag soaked in red paint, broke free of the restraint. She hurled the rag toward Metzler, who avoided it so deftly that he barely seemed to break stride. The rag struck a Staatspolizei officer, to the delight of the demonstrators. The girl who had thrown it was seized by a pair of officers and hustled away.

Metzler, unruffled, entered the hotel lobby and made his way to the ballroom, where a thousand supporters had been waiting three hours for his arrival. He paused for a moment outside the doors to gather himself, then strode into the room to tumultuous cheers. Graff detached himself and watched his candidate wade into the adoring crowd. The men pressed forward to clutch his hand or slap his back. The women kissed his cheek. Metzler had definitely made it sexy to be a conservative again.

The journey to the head of the room took five minutes. As Metzler mounted the podium, a beautiful girl in a dirndl handed him a huge stein of lager. He raised it overhead and was greeted by a delirious roar of approval. He swallowed some of the beer-not a photo opportunity sip, but a good long Austrian pull-then stepped before the microphone.

“I want to thank all of you for coming here tonight. And I also want to thank our dear friends and supporters for arranging such a warm welcome outside the hotel.” A wave of laughter swept over the room. “What these people don’t seem to understand is that Austria is for Austrians and that we will choose our own future based on Austrian morals and Austrian standards of decency. Outsiders and critics from abroad have no say in the internal affairs of this blessed land of ours. We will forge our own future, an Austrian future, and that future begins three weeks from tonight!”

Pandemonium.

26 BARILOCHE, ARGENTINA

THE RECEPTIONIST AT theBarilocher Tageblatt eyed Gabriel with more than a passing interest as he stepped through the door and strode toward her desk. She had short dark hair and bright blue eyes set off by an attractive suntanned face. “May I help you?” she said in German, hardly surprising, since the Tageblatt, as the name implies, is a German-language newspaper.

Gabriel replied in the same language, though he adroitly concealed the fact that, like the woman, he spoke it fluently. He said he had come to Bariloche to conduct genealogical research. He was looking, he claimed, for a man he believed was his mother’s brother, a man named Otto Krebs. He had reason to believe Herr Krebs died in Bariloche in October 1982. Would it be possible for him to search the archives of the newspaper for a death notice or an obituary?

The receptionist smiled at him, revealing two rows of bright, even teeth, then picked up her telephone and dialed a three-digit extension. Gabriel’s request was put to a superior in rapid German. The woman was silent for a few seconds, then she hung up the phone and stood.

“Follow me.”

She led him across a small newsroom, her heels clicking loudly over the faded linoleum floor. A half-dozen employees were lounging in their shirtsleeves in various states of relaxation, smoking cigarettes and drinking coffee. No one seemed to take notice of the visitor. The door to the archives room was ajar. The receptionist switched on the lights.

“We’re computerized now, so all the articles are stored automatically in a searchable database. I’m afraid that goes back only as far as 1998. When did you say this man died?”

“I believe it was 1982.”

“You’re lucky. The obituaries are all indexed-by hand, of course, the old-fashioned way.”

She walked over to a table and lifted the cover of a thick, leather-bound ledger book. The ruled pages were filled with tiny handwritten notations.

“What did you say his name was?”

“Otto Krebs.”

“Krebs, Otto,” she said, flipping forward to the K s. “Krebs, Otto… Ah, here it is. According to this, it was November 1983. Still interested in seeing the obituary?”

Gabriel nodded. The woman wrote down a reference number and walked over to a stack of cardboard boxes. She ran a forefinger along the labels and stopped when she arrived at the one she was looking for, then asked Gabriel to remove the boxes stacked on top of it. She lifted the lid, and the smell of dust and decaying paper rose from the contents. The clips were contained in brittle, yellowing file folders. The obituary for Otto Krebs had been torn. She repaired the image with a strip of transparent tape and showed it to Gabriel.

“Is that the man you’re looking for?”

“I don’t know,” he said truthfully.

She took the clip back from Gabriel and read it quickly. “It says here that he was an only child.” She looked at Gabriel. “That doesn’t mean much. A lot of them had to erase their pasts to protect their families who were still in Europe. My grandfather was lucky. At least he got to keep his own name.”

She looked at Gabriel, searching his eyes. “He was from Croatia,” she said. There was an air of complicity in her tone. “After the war, the Communists wanted to put him on trial and hang him. Fortunately, Perón was willing to let him come here.”

She carried the clip over to a photocopier and made three duplicates. Then she returned the original to its file and the file to its proper box. She gave the copies to Gabriel. He read while they walked.

“According to the obituary, he was buried in a Catholic cemetery in Puerto Blest.”

The receptionist nodded. “It’s just on the other side of the lake, a few miles from the Chilean border. He managed a large estancia up there. That’s in the obituary, too.”

“How do I get there?”

“Follow the highway west out of Bariloche. It won’t stay a highway for long. I hope you have a good car. Follow the road along the lakeshore, then head north. You’ll go straight into Puerto Blest. If you leave now, you can get there before dark.”

They shook hands in the lobby. She wished him luck.

“I hope he’s the man you’re looking for,” she said. “Or maybe not. I suppose one never knows in situations like these.”

AFTER THE VISITOR was gone, the receptionist picked up her telephone and dialed.

“He just left.”

“How did you handle it?”

“I did what you told me to do. I was very friendly. I showed him what he wanted to see.”

“And what was that?”

She told him.

“How did he react?”

“He asked for directions to Puerto Blest.”

The line went dead. The receptionist slowly replaced the receiver. She felt a sudden hollowness in her stomach. She had no doubt what awaited the man in Puerto Blest. It was the same fate that had befallen others who had come to this corner of northern Patagonia in search of men who did not want to be found. She did not feel sorry for him; indeed, she thought him something of a fool. Did he really think he would fool anyone with that clumsy story about genealogical research? Who did he think he was? It was his own fault. But then, it was always that way with the Jews. Always bringing trouble down on their own heads.

Just then the front door opened and a woman in a sundress entered the lobby. The receptionist looked up and smiled.

“May I help you?”

THEY WALKED BACK to the hotel beneath a razor-edged sun. Gabriel translated the obituary for Chiara.

“It says he was born in Upper Austria in 1913, that he was a police officer, and that he enlisted in the Wehrmacht in 1938 and took part in the campaigns against Poland and the Soviet Union. It also says he was decorated twice for bravery, once by the Führer himself. I guess that’s something to brag about in Bariloche.”

“And after the war?”

“Nothing until his arrival in Argentina in 1963. He worked for two years at a hotel in Bariloche, then took a job on anestancia near Puerto Blest. In 1972, he purchased the property from the owners and ran it until his death.”

“Any family left in the area?”

“According to this, he was never married and had no surviving relatives.”

They arrived back at the Hotel Edelweiss. It was a Swiss-style chalet with a sloping roof, located two streets up from the lakeshore on the Avenida San Martín. Gabriel had rented a car at the airport earlier that morning, a Toyota four-wheel drive. He asked the parking attendant to bring it up from the garage, then ducked into the lobby to find a road map of the surrounding countryside. Puerto Blest was exactly where the woman from the newspaper had said, on the opposite side of the lake, near the Chilean border.

They set out along the lakeshore. The road deteriorated by degrees as they moved farther from Bariloche. Much of the time, the water was hidden by dense forest. Then Gabriel would round a bend, or the trees would suddenly thin, and the lake would appear briefly below them, a flash of blue, only to disappear behind a wall of timber once more.

Gabriel rounded the southernmost tip of the lake and slowed briefly to watch a squadron of giant condors circling the looming peak of the Cerro López. Then he followed a one-lane dirt track across an exposed plateau covered with gray-green thorn scrub and stands ofarrayán trees. On the high meadows, flocks of hardy Patagonian sheep grazed on the summer grasses. In the distance, toward the Chilean border, lightning flickered over the Andean peaks.

By the time they arrived in Puerto Blest, the sun was gone and the village was shadowed and quiet. Gabriel went into a café to ask directions. The bartender, a short man with a florid face, stepped into the street and, with a series of points and gestures, showed him the way.

JUST INSIDE THE CAFÉ, at a table near the door, the Clockmaker drank beer from a bottle and watched the exchange taking place in the street. The slender man with short black hair and gray temples he recognized. Seated in the passenger seat of the Toyota four-wheel drive was a woman with long dark hair. Was it possible she was the one who had put the bullet in his shoulder in Rome? It didn’t much matter. Even if she wasn’t, she would soon be dead.

The Israeli climbed behind the wheel of the Toyota and sped off. The bartender came back inside.

The Clockmaker, in German, asked, “Where are those two headed?”

The bartender answered him in the same language.

The Clockmaker finished the last of his beer and left money on the table. Even the smallest movement, such as fishing a few bills from his coat pocket, made his shoulder pulsate with fire. He went into the street and stood for a moment in the cool evening air, then turned and walked slowly toward the church.

THE CHURCH OF Our Lady of the Mountains stood at the western edge of the village, a small whitewashed colonial church with a bell tower to the left side of the portico. At the front of the church was a stone courtyard, shaded by a pair of broad plane trees and enclosed by an iron fence. Gabriel walked to the back of the church. The cemetery stretched down the gentle slope of a hill, toward a coppice of dense pine. A thousand headstones and memorial monuments teetered among the overgrown weeds like a ragged army in retreat. Gabriel stood there a moment, hands on hips, depressed by the prospect of wandering the graveyard in the gathering darkness looking for a marker bearing the name of Otto Krebs.

He walked back to the front of the church. Chiara was waiting for him in the shadows of the courtyard. He pulled on the heavy oaken door of the church and found it was unlocked. Chiara followed him inside. Cool air settled over his face, as did a fragrance he had not smelled since leaving Venice: the mixture of candle wax, incense, wood polish, and mildew, the unmistakable scent of a Catholic church. How different this was from the Church of San Giovanni Crisostomo in Cannaregio. No gilded altar, no marble columns or soaring apses or glorious altarpieces. A severe wooden crucifix hung over the unadorned altar, and a bank of memorial candles flickered softly before a statue of the Virgin. The stained-glass windows along the side of the nave had lost their color in the dying twilight.

Gabriel walked hesitantly up the center aisle. Just then, a dark figure emerged from the vestry and strode across the altar. He paused before the crucifix, genuflected, then turned to face Gabriel. He was small and thin, dressed in black trousers, a black short-sleeved shirt, and a Roman collar. His hair was neatly trimmed and gray at the temples, his face handsome and dark, with a hint of red across the cheeks. He did not seem surprised by the presence of two strangers in his church. Gabriel approached him slowly. The priest held out his hand and identified himself as Father Ruben Morales.

“My name is René Duran,” Gabriel said. “I’m from Montreal.”

At this the priest nodded, as though used to visitors from abroad.

“What can I do for you, Monsieur Duran?”

Gabriel offered the same explanation he had given to the woman at the Barilocher Tageblatt earlier that morning-that he had come to Patagonia looking for a man he believed was his mother’s brother, a man named Otto Krebs. While Gabriel spoke, the priest folded his hands and watched him with a pair of warm and gentle eyes. How different this pastoral man seemed from Monsignor Donati, the professional Church bureaucrat, or Bishop Drexler, the acid rector of the Anima. Gabriel felt badly about misleading him.

“I knew Otto Krebs very well,” Father Morales said. “And I’m sorry to say that he could not possibly be the man you’re searching for. You see, Herr Krebs had no brothers or sisters. He had no family of any kind. By the time he managed to work himself into a position to support a wife and children, he was…” The priest’s voice trailed off. “How shall I put this delicately? He was no longer such a fine catch. The years had taken their toll on him.”

“Did he ever talk to you about his family?” Gabriel paused, then added, “Or the war?”

The priest raised his eyebrows. “I was his confessor and his friend, Monsieur Duran. We discussed a great many things in the years before his death. Herr Krebs, like many men of his era, had seen much death and destruction. He had also committed acts for which he was deeply ashamed and in need of absolution.”

“And you granted that absolution?”

“I granted him peace of mind, Monsieur Duran. I heard his confessions, I ordered penance. Within the confines of Catholic belief, I prepared his soul to meet Christ. But do I, a simple priest from a rural parish, really possess the power to absolve such sins? Even I’m not sure about that.”

“May I ask you about some of the things you discussed?” Gabriel asked tentatively. He knew he was on shaky theological ground, and the answer was what he expected.

“Many of my discussions with Herr Krebs were conducted under the seal of confession. The rest were conducted under the seal of friendship. It would not be proper for me to relate the nature of those conversations to you now.”

“But he’s been dead for twenty years.”

“Even the dead have a right to privacy.”

Gabriel heard the voice of his mother, the opening line of her testimony: I will not tell all the things I saw. I cannot. I owe this much to the dead.

“It might help me determine whether this man is my uncle.”

Father Morales gave a disarming smile. “I’m a simple country priest, Monsieur Duran, but I’m not a complete fool. I also know my parishioners very well. Do you really believe you’re the first person to come here pretending to be looking for a lost relative? I’m quite certain that Otto Krebs could not possibly be your uncle. I’m less certain that you’re really René Duran from Montreal. Now, if you’ll excuse me.”

He turned to leave. Gabriel touched his arm.

“Will you at least show me his grave?”

The priest sighed, then looked up at the stained-glass windows. They had turned to black.

“It’s dark,” he said. “Give me a moment.”

He crossed the altar and disappeared into the vestry. A moment later he emerged wearing a tan windbreaker and carrying a large flashlight. He led them out a side portal, then along a gravel walkway between the church and the rectory. At the end of the path was a lych-gate. Father Morales lifted the latch, then switched on the flashlight and led the way into the cemetery. Gabriel walked at the priest’s side along a narrow footpath overgrown with weeds. Chiara was a step behind.

“Did you celebrate his funeral mass, Father Morales?”

“Yes, of course. In fact, I had to see to the arrangements myself. There was no one else to do it.”

A cat slipped out from behind a grave marker and paused on the footpath in front of them, its eyes reflecting like yellow beacons in the glow of the priest’s flashlight. Father Morales hissed, and the cat vanished into the tall grass.

They drew nearer the trees at the bottom of the cemetery. The priest turned left and led them through knee-deep grass. Here the path was too narrow to walk side by side, so they moved single file, with Chiara holding Gabriel’s hand for support.

Father Morales, nearing the end of a row of gravestones, stopped walking and shone his flashlight down at a 45-degree angle. The beam fell upon a simple headstone bearing the name OTTOKREBS. It listed the year of his birth as 1913 and the year of his death as 1983. Above the name, beneath a small oval of scratched and weathered glass, was a photograph.

GABRIEL CROUCHED AND, brushing away a layer of powdery dust, examined the face. Evidently it had been taken some years before his death, because the man it depicted was middle-aged, perhaps in his late forties. Gabriel was certain of only one thing. It was not the face of Erich Radek.

“I assume it’s not your uncle, Monsieur Duran?”

“Are you certain the photograph is of him?”

“Yes, of course. I found it myself, in a strongbox containing a few of his private things.”

“I don’t suppose you’d allow me to see his things?”

“I no longer have them. And even if I did-”

Father Morales, leaving the thought unfinished, handed Gabriel the flashlight. “I’ll leave you alone now. I can find my way without the light. If you would be so kind as to leave it at the rectory door on your way out. It was a pleasure meeting you, Monsieur Duran.”

With that, he turned and vanished among the gravestones.

Gabriel looked up at Chiara. “It should be Radek’s picture. Radek went to Rome and obtained a Red Cross passport in the name of Otto Krebs. Krebs went to Damascus in 1948, then emigrated to Argentina in 1963. Krebs registered with the Argentine police in this district. Thisshould be Radek.”

“Meaning?”

“Someone else went to Rome posing as Radek.” Gabriel pointed at the photograph on the gravestone. “It was this man. This is the Austrian who went to the Anima seeking help from Bishop Hudal. Radek was somewhere else, probably still hiding in Europe. Why else would he go to such lengths? He wanted people to believe he was long gone. And in the event someone ever went looking for him, they would follow the trail from Rome to Damascus to Argentina and then find the wrong man-Otto Krebs, a lowly hotel worker who’d scraped together enough money to buy a few acres along the Chilean border.”

“You still have one major problem,” Chiara said. “You can’t prove Ludwig Vogel is really Erich Radek.”

“One step at a time,” Gabriel said. “Making a man disappear is not so simple. Radek would have needed help. Someone else has to know about this.”

“Yes, but is he still alive?”

Gabriel stood and looked in the direction of the church. The bell tower appeared in silhouette. Then he noticed a figure walking toward them through the gravestones. For a moment he thought it was Father Morales; then, as the figure drew nearer, he could see that it was a different man. The priest was thin and small. This man was squat and powerfully built, with a quick, rolling gait that propelled him smoothly down the hill among the grave markers.

Gabriel raised the flashlight and shone it toward him. He glimpsed the face briefly before the man shielded it behind a large hand: bald, bespectacled, thick eyebrows of gray and black.

Gabriel heard a noise behind him. He turned and shone the flashlight toward the woods along the perimeter of the cemetery. Two men in dark clothing were coming out of the trees at a run, compact submachine guns in their hands.

Gabriel trained the beam once again on the man coming down through the headstones and saw that he was drawing a weapon from the inside of his jacket. Then, suddenly, the gunman stopped walking. His eyes were fixed not on Gabriel and Chiara but on the two men coming out of the trees. He stood motionless for no more than a second-then abruptly he put the gun away, turned, and ran in the other direction.

By the time Gabriel turned again, the two men with the submachine guns were a few feet away and coming hard on the run. The first collided with Gabriel, driving him down into the hard soil of the graveyard. Chiara managed to shield her face as the second gunman knocked her to the ground, too. Gabriel felt a gloved hand clamp across his mouth, then the hot breath of his attacker in his ear.

“Relax, Allon, you’re among friends.” He spoke English with an American accent. “Don’t make this difficult for us.”

Gabriel pulled the hand off his mouth and looked into his attacker’s eyes. “Who are you?”

“Think of us as your guardian angels. That man walking toward you was a professional assassin, and he was about to kill you both.”

“And what are you going to do with us?”

The gunmen pulled Gabriel and Chiara to their feet and led them out of the cemetery into the trees.