Daniel Silva GABRIEL ALLON Novels 1-4 (92 page)

His search lasted nearly an hour. He flipped through the contents of every file and the pages of every book. Weiss appeared once in the doorway to check on his progress, then yawned and wandered back to the sitting room. Again, Gabriel made abundant notes for the benefit of the detective but found nothing linking Benjamin to the Office—and nothing that might explain why he was murdered.

He walked back to the sitting room. Weiss was watching the evening news on Benjamin’s television. He switched it off as Gabriel entered. “Finished?”

“Did Benjamin have a storage room in the building?”

The detective nodded. “German law requires landlords to provide tenants with one.”

Gabriel held out his hand. “May I have the key?”

IT WAS
Frau Ratzinger who took Gabriel down to the basement and led him along a corridor lined with narrow doorways. She paused at the one marked 2B, which corresponded to Benjamin’s flat. The old woman opened the door with a grunt and pulled down on the drawstring connected to the overhead light. A moth scattered, brushing Gabriel’s cheek. The woman nodded and receded silently down the hallway.

Gabriel peered into the storage room. It was little more than a closet, some four feet wide and six feet deep, and it reeked of linseed oil and damp. A rusted bicycle
frame with one wheel, a pair of ancient skis, unlabeled cardboard boxes stacked to a water-stained ceiling.

He removed the broken bicycle and the skis, and began searching through the boxes of Benjamin’s things. In several he found bound stacks of yellowing papers and old spiral notebooks, the flotsam of a lifetime spent in the lecture halls and libraries of academia. There were boxes of dusty old books—the ones, Gabriel supposed, he deemed too unimportant to place on the shelves in his flat. Several more held copies of
Conspiracy at Wannsee: A Reappraisal,
Benjamin’s last book.

The final box contained the purely personal. Gabriel felt like a trespasser. He wondered how he would feel if the roles were reversed, if Shamron had sent someone from the Office to rummage through his things. And what would they find? Only what Gabriel wanted them to see. Solvents and pigment, his brushes and his palette, a fine collection of monographs. A Beretta by his bedside.

He drew a long breath and proceeded. Inside a cigar box he found a pile of tarnished medals and tattered ribbons and remembered that Benjamin had been something of a star runner at school. In an envelope were family photographs. Benjamin, like Gabriel, was an only child. His parents had survived the horrors of Riga only to be killed in a car accident on the road to Haifa. Next he found a stack of letters. The stationery was the color of honey and still smelled of lilac. Gabriel read a few lines and quickly put the letters aside.
Vera…
Benjamin’s only love. How many nights had he lain awake in some wretched safe flat, listening to Benjamin complain about how the beguiling Vera had ruined him for all other women? Gabriel was quite certain he hated her more than Benjamin had.

The last item was a manila file folder. Gabriel lifted
the cover and inside found a stack of newspaper clippings. His eyes flickered over the headlines.
ELEVEN ISRAELI ATHLETES AND COACHES TAKEN HOSTAGE IN OLYMPIC VILLAGE
 . . .
TERRORISTS DEMAND RELEASE OF PALESTINIAN AND GERMAN PRISONERS
 . . .
BLACK SEPTEMBER
 . . .

Gabriel closed the file.

A black-and-white snapshot slipped out. Gabriel scooped it off the floor. Two boys, blue jeans and rucksacks. A pair of young Germans spending a summer roaming Europe, or so it appeared. It had been taken in Antwerp near the river. The one on the left was Benjamin, forelock of wavy hair in his eyes, mischievous smile on his face, his arm flung around the young man standing at his side.

Benjamin’s companion was serious and sullen, as though he couldn’t be bothered with something as trivial as a snapshot. He wore sunglasses, his hair was cropped short, and even though he was not much more than twenty years old, his temples were shot with gray. “The stain of a boy who’s done a man’s job,” Shamron had said. “Smudges of ash on the prince of fire.”

GABRIEL WAS
not pleased about the file of newspaper clippings on the Munich massacre, but there was no way he could smuggle so large an item past Detective Weiss. The snapshot was different. He wedged it into Herr Landau’s expensive wallet and slipped the wallet into his coat pocket. Then he sidestepped his way out of the storage room and closed the door.

Frau Ratzinger was waiting in the corridor. Gabriel wondered how long she had been standing there but dared not ask. In her hand was a small padded shipping envelope. He could see that it was addressed to Benjamin and that it had been opened.

The old woman held it out to him. “I thought you might want these,” she said in German.

“What are they?”

“Benjamin’s eyeglasses. He left them at a hotel in Italy. The concierge was good enough to send them back. Unfortunately, they arrived after his death.”

Gabriel took the envelope from her, lifted the flap, and removed the eyeglasses. They were the spectacles of an academic: plastic and passé, chewed and scratched. He looked into the envelope once more and saw there was a postcard. He turned the envelope on end, and the postcard fell into his palm. The image showed an ocher-colored hotel on a sapphire lake in the north of Italy. Gabriel turned it over and read the note on the back.

Good luck with your book, Professor Stern.

Giancomo

DETECTIVE WEISS
insisted on driving Gabriel to his hotel. Because Herr Landau had never before been to Munich, Gabriel was forced to feign awe at the floodlit neoclassical glory of the city center. He also noted that Weiss skillfully made the trip last five minutes longer than necessary by missing several obvious turns.

Finally they arrived in a small cobbled street called the Annastrasse in the Lehel district of the city. Weiss stopped outside the Hotel Opera, handed Gabriel his card, and once more expressed condolences over Herr Landau’s loss. “If there’s anything else I can do for you, please don’t hesitate to ask.”

“There is one thing,” Gabriel said. “I’d like to speak to the chairman of Benjamin’s department at the university. Do you have his telephone numbers?”

“Ah, Doctor Berger. Of course.”

The policeman removed an electronic organizer from his pocket, found the numbers, and recited them. Gabriel made a point of jotting them down on the back of the detective’s card, even though, heard once, they were now permanently engraved in his memory.

Gabriel thanked the detective and went upstairs for the night. He ordered room service and dined lightly on an omelet and vegetable soup. Then he showered and climbed into bed with the file given to him that afternoon by the consular officer. He read everything carefully, then closed the file and stared at the ceiling, listening to the night rain pattering against the window.
Who killed you, Beni? A neo-Nazi?
No, Gabriel doubted that. He suspected the Odin Rune and Three Sevens painted on the wall were the equivalent of a false-flag claim of responsibility. But why was he killed? Gabriel had one working theory. Benjamin was on sabbatical from the university to write another book, yet inside the flat Gabriel could find no evidence that he was working on anything at all. No notes. No files. No manuscript. Just a note written on the back of a postcard from a hotel in Italy.
Good luck with your book, Professor Stern—Giancomo.

He opened his wallet and removed the photograph he’d taken from the storeroom. Gabriel had been cursed with a memory that allowed him to forget nothing. He could see Benjamin giving his camera to a pretty Belgian girl, feel Benjamin dragging him to the rail overlooking the river. He even remembered the last thing Benjamin had said before throwing his arm around Gabriel’s neck.

“Smile, you asshole.”

“This isn’t funny, Beni.”

“Can you imagine the look on the old man’s face if he saw us posing for a picture?”

“He’ll have your ass for this.”

“Don’t worry. I’ll burn it.”

Five minutes later, in the bathroom sink, Gabriel did just that.

DETECTIVE AXEL
Weiss lived in Bogenhausen, a residential district of Munich on the opposite bank of the Isar. He did not go there. Instead, after dropping the Israeli at his hotel, he parked in the shadows on an adjacent street and watched the entrance of the Hotel Opera. Thirty minutes later, he dialed a number in Rome on his cellular phone.

“This is the chief.” The words were spoken in English with a pronounced Italian accent. It was always the same.

“I think we may have a problem.”

“Tell me everything.”

The detective gave a careful recitation of the events of that afternoon and evening. He was experienced at communicating over open phone systems and was careful not to make any specific references. Besides, the man at the other end knew the specifics.

“Do you have the resources to follow the subject?”

“Yes, but if he’s a professional—”

“Do it,” snapped the man in Rome. “And get a photograph.”

Then the connection went dead.

5
VATICAN CITY

“C
ARDINAL
B
RINDISI
. How pleasant to see you.”

“Your Holiness.”

Cardinal Secretary of State Marco Brindisi bent over the proffered fisherman’s ring. His lips did not linger long. He stood upright and stared directly into the Pope’s eyes with a confidence bordering on insolence. Thin, with a pinched face and skin like parchment, Brindisi seemed suspended above the floor of the papal apartments. His cassock was handmade by the same tailor near the Piazza della Minerva who made garments for the popes. The solid gold pectoral cross attested to the wealth and influence of his family and patrons. The glint of white light on the small, round spectacles concealed a pair of humorless pale-blue eyes.

As secretary of state, Brindisi controlled the internal functions of the Vatican city-state along with its government-to-government relations with the rest of the world. He was in effect the Vatican’s prime minister and the second most powerful man in the Roman Catholic Church. Despite his disappointing showing at the conclave, the doctrinaire cardinal maintained a
carefully cultivated core of support within the Curia that provided him with a power base rivaling even the Pope’s. Indeed, the Pope was not at all sure who would prevail in a showdown, himself or the taciturn cardinal.

The two men had a regular lunch date every Friday. It was the part of the Pope’s week he dreaded most. Some of his predecessors had relished the minutiae of Curial matters and had spent hours each day slaving over mountains of paperwork. During the reigns of Pius XII and Paul VI, the lights in the papal study had burned well past midnight. Lucchesi believed his time was better spent on spiritual matters and detested dealing with the day-to-day affairs of the Curia. Unfortunately, he did not yet have a secretary of state whom he trusted, which is why he never missed lunch with Cardinal Brindisi.

They sat across from each other in the simple dining room in the papal apartments, the Pope clad in a white soutane and white zucchetto, the cardinal in a black cassock with a scarlet fascia and zucchetto. As always, Brindisi seemed disappointed with the food. This pleased His Holiness. The Pope knew Brindisi was a gourmand who enjoyed spending his evenings partaking of the gastronomic delights of L’Eau Vive. As a result he always asked his nuns to prepare something particularly offensive to the palate. Today the menu consisted of a consommé of indeterminate origin, followed by overdone veal and boiled potatoes. Brindisi pronounced the food “inspired” and made a brave show of it.

For forty-five minutes, Brindisi held forth on a variety of Curial matters, each one more tedious than the last. A staff crisis in the Congregation for Divine Worship and the Discipline of the Sacraments. A dustup in the Pontifical Council for the Pastoral Care of Migrants and Itinerant People. A report on the monthly meeting of the Vatican Bank officers. Allegations a certain monsignor
from the Congregation for the Clergy was misusing his motor-pool privileges. Each time Brindisi paused for a breath, the Pope murmured, “Ah, how interesting, Eminence,” all the while wondering why he was being informed of a problem at the motor pool.

“I’m afraid I need to discuss a matter of some”—the fussy cardinal cleared his throat and patted his lips with his napkin—“shall we say, unpleasantness, Holiness. Perhaps now is as good a time as any.”

“Please, Eminence,” the Pope said quickly, eager for any change of subject that might soften the drumbeat of Curial monotony. “By all means.”

Brindisi laid down his fork like a man surrendering after a long siege and clasped his hands beneath his chin. “It seems our old friend from
La Repubblica
is up to no good again. In the course of preparing a long profile on Your Holiness for the newspaper’s Easter edition, he has uncovered some”—a reflective pause, a glance toward the heavens for inspiration—“some
inconsistencies
about your childhood.”