Day Of Confession

106

Bellagio. The car-ferry landing. Same time.

Harry watched the heavily armed carabinieri questioning the man and woman in the dark Lancia in front of them. Immediately the police ordered the man out of the car and walked with him as he opened the trunk. Finding nothing, the police waved the couple on. Then as the Lancia drove across the ramp and onto the ferry, the police turned toward them.

'Here we go,' Harry said under his breath, the sound of his own pulse deafening.

Five of them were in a white Ford van with Church of Santa Chiara neatly stenciled on the doors. Father Renato was at the wheel with Elena beside him. Harry, Danny, and a young, almost baby-faced priest, Father Natalini, sat in back. Elena was dressed in a business suit and wearing tortoiseshell glasses, her hair pulled back tightly and twisted in a bun. The priests were in their everyday black with white clerical collars. Danny wore glasses as well, and he and Harry, still bearded, were also in black. Long black coats buttoned to the throat with black zucchettos on their heads. They looked like rabbis, which was the idea.

'I know them,' Father Renato said quietly in Italian as the carabinieri came to either window.

ⁱBuon giorno, Alfonso. Massimo.'

'Padre Renato! Buongiorno.'' Alfonso, the first carabiniere, was tall and hulking and physically intimidating, but he smiled broadly as he recognized the van and Father Renato and then Father Natalini. Buon giorno, Padre.'

'Buon giorno.' Father Natalini smiled from where he sat beside Danny.

For the next ninety seconds Harry felt as though his heart was coming to full arrest as Father Renato and the policemen chatted in Italian. Once in a while he caught a word or phrase he understood. 'Rabbino.' 'Israele.' 'Conferenza Cristiano /giudea.'

The rabbi business had been Harry's idea. It was straight out of the movies. Crazy and preposterous. And sitting there, breathless, terrified, waiting for the carabinieri to suddenly stop talking and order them all out of the van the way they had the man in the Lancia, he wondered what the hell he must have been thinking. Still, they'd had to do something, and quickly, after Elena had come hurriedly into his room before dawn with Father Renato, saying her mother general had arranged a place for them to stay just over the border in Switzerland.

With the approval of his superior, Father Renato had agreed to help get them there – but he had no idea how. It was while Harry was dressing that he'd absently looked in the mirror and seen his growth of beard and remembered Danny's. It was nuts, but it might work, considering they had bluffed their way through police checkpoints twice before; and because Father Renato and Father Natalini were not only clergy but also locals who knew everyone, including the police.

And then there was the L.A. thing. Harry might have been Catholic, but one didn't move far in the entertainment business without having Jewish friends and clients. He'd been invited to Passover seders for years, had shared uncountable breakfasts at Nate and Al's deli in Beverly Hills, an oasis for Jewish writers and comedians; gone regularly with clients visiting relatives to the ethnic neighborhoods around Fairfax and Beverly, Pico and Robertson. More than once he'd marveled at the similarity of the yarmulke to the Catholic skullcap, the zucchetto, the black coats of the rabbis to those of bishops and priests. And now, for better or worse, he and Danny had become visiting rabbis from Israel, touring Italy as part of an ongoing discourse between Christians and Jews. Elena had become an Italian guide and translator from Rome, traveling with them. Though God forbid anyone should ask her, or them, to speak Hebrew.

Fuggitivo,' one of the carabinieri said sharply. Bringing Harry back with a rush.

'Fuggitivo,' Father Renato nodded, adding a succinct, fiery reply in Italian. Obviously both carabinieri agreed with what he said, because they suddenly stepped back, saluted, and waved the van forward.

Harry looked to Elena, then saw Father Renato shift into gear. Felt the van move forward. Up onto the ramp and across it into the hold of the ferry. Turning back, he saw the policemen advance on the next vehicle in line. Saw the occupants made to get out, show identification, while the vehicle itself was aggressively searched.

None in the van dared look at another. Just waited in silence for an agonizing ten minutes before the last car came on board, the gangway doors closed, and the ferry got under way.

Harry felt the sweat run down his neck, trickle from his armpits. How many more of these could they get away with? How long would their luck, if that's what it was, hold?

The ferry had been step one, sailing for Mennagio at seven fifty-six, exactly four minutes before the Italian Army sweep of the entire peninsula would begin, and fifteen minutes after Salvatore Belsito's farm truck had been found parked on a street a half mile from Santa Chiara. Father Natalini had left it there just before six, carefully wiping the steering wheel and gearshift clean of his fingerprints, then walking quickly back to Santa Chiara.

Step two, the crossing of the border from Italy into Switzerland, would have been more difficult, if not impossible, because neither Father Renato nor Father Natalini knew Gruppo Cardinale personnel at the border checkpoint. What saved them was that Father Natalini had grown up in Porlezza, a small town inland from Mennagio, and knew as only a native could know, the narrow country roads that wound and twisted through the hills and rose up into the Alps; roads that enabled them to bypass the Gruppo Cardinale checkpoint at Oria and brought them into Switzerland unmolested at ten twenty-two in the morning.