The Confessor (4 page)

The heavy wooden door opened with a deep groan. The nave was still in darkness. The priest switched on the lights and headed out into the flooded square once more, pausing briefly in the sanctuary to dip his fingers in holy water and make the sign of the cross.

The scaffolding was covered by a shroud. The restorer climbed up to his platform and switched on a fluorescent lamp. The Virgin glowed at him seductively. For much of that winter he had been engaged in a single-minded quest to repair her face. Some nights she came to him in his sleep, stealing into his bedroom, her cheeks in tatters, begging him to heal her.

He turned on a portable electric heater to burn the chill from the air and poured a cup of black coffee from the Thermos bottle, enough to make him alert but not to make his hand shake. Then he prepared his palette, mixing dry pigment in a tiny puddle of medium. When finally he was ready, he lowered his magnifying visor and began to work.

For nearly an hour he had the church to himself. Slowly, the rest of the team trickled in one by one. The restorer, hidden behind his shroud, knew each by sound. The lumbering plod of Francesco Tiepolo, chief of the San Zaccaria project; the crisp
tap-tap-tap
of Adriana Zinetti, renowned cleaner of altars and seducer of men; the conspiratorial shuffle of the ham-fisted Antonio Politi, spreader of malicious lies and gossip.

The restorer was something of an enigma to the rest of the San Zaccaria team. He insisted on keeping his work platform and the altarpiece shrouded at all times. Francesco Tiepolo had pleaded with him to lower the shroud so the tourists and the notoriously bitchy Venetian upper crust could watch him work. “Venice wants to see what you’re doing to the Bellini, Mario. Venice doesn’t like surprises.” Reluctantly, the restorer had relented, and for two days in January he worked in full view of the tourists and the rest of the Zaccaria team. The brief experiment ended when Monsignor Moretti, San Zaccaria’s parish priest, popped into the church for a surprise inspection. When he gazed up at the Bellini and saw half the Virgin’s face gone, he fell to his knees in hysterical prayer. The shroud returned, and Francesco Tiepolo never dared to raise the issue of removing it again.

The rest of the team found great metaphorical significance in the shroud. Why would a man go to such lengths to conceal himself? Why did he insist on setting himself apart from the others? Why did he decline their numerous invitations to lunch, their invitations to dinner and to the Saturday-night drinking sessions at Harry’s Bar? He had even refused to attend the cocktail reception at the Accademia thrown by the Friends of San Zaccaria. The Bellini was one of the most important paintings in all Venice, and it was considered scandalous that he refused to spend a few minutes with the fat American donors who had made the restoration possible.

Even Adriana Zinetti could not penetrate the shroud. This gave rise to rampant speculation that the restorer was a homosexual, which was considered no crime among the free spirits of Team Zaccaria and temporarily increased his sagging popularity among some of the boys. The theory was put to rest one evening when he was met at the church by a stunningly attractive woman. She had wide cheekbones, pale skin, green catlike eyes, and a teardrop chin. It was Adriana Zinetti who noticed the heavy scarring on her left hand. “She’s his other project,” Adriana speculated gloomily as the pair disappeared into the Venetian night. “Obviously, he prefers his women damaged.”

He called himself Mario Delvecchio, but his Italian, while fluent, was tinged by a faint but unmistakable accent. He explained this away by saying he had been raised abroad and had lived in Italy only for brief periods. Someone heard he had served his apprenticeship with the legendary Umberto Conti. Someone else heard that Conti had proclaimed his hands the most gifted he had ever seen.

The envious Antonio Politi was responsible for the next wave of rumors that rippled through Team Zaccaria. Antonio found the leisurely pace of his colleague infuriating. In less time than it had taken the great Mario Delvecchio to retouch the virgin’s face, Antonio had cleaned and restored a half dozen paintings. The fact that they all were of little or no significance only increased his anger. “The master himself painted her in an afternoon,” Antonio protested to Tiepolo. “But this man has taken all winter. Always running off to the Accademia to gaze at the Bellinis. Tell him to get on with it! Otherwise, we’re going to be here ten years!”

It was Antonio who unearthed the rather bizarre story about Vienna, which he shared with the rest of Team Zaccaria during a family dinner one snowy evening in February—coincidentally, at Trattoria alla Madonna. About ten years earlier, there had been a major cleaning and restoration project at St. Stephan’s Cathedral in Vienna. An Italian called Mario was part of that team.

“Our Mario?” Adriana wondered over a glass of
ripasso.

“Of course it was our Mario. Same snobbery. Same snail’s pace.”

According to Antonio’s source, the restorer in question had vanished without a trace one night—the same night a car bomb exploded in the old Jewish quarter.

“And what do you make of this, Antonio?” Again, it was Adriana, peering at him through the ruby
ripasso.
Antonio paused for dramatic effect, spearing a piece of grilled polenta and holding it aloft like a scepter. “Isn’t it obvious? Clearly, the man is a terrorist. I’d say he’s
Brigate Rossa
.”

“Or maybe he’s Osama bin Laden himself!”

Team Zaccaria erupted into such laughter that they were nearly asked to leave the restaurant. The theories of Antonio Politi were never again given any credence, although he never lost faith in them himself. Secretly, he hoped the quiet restorer behind the shroud would repeat his performance of Vienna and vanish without a trace. Then Antonio would step in and finish the Bellini, and his reputation would be made.

The restorer worked well that morning, and the time slipped rapidly away. Glancing at his wristwatch, he was surprised to see that it was already eleven-thirty. He sat down on the edge of the platform, poured more coffee, and looked up at the altarpiece. Painted by Bellini at the height of his powers, it was widely regarded by historians as the first great altarpiece of the sixteenth century. The restorer never tired of looking at it. He marveled at Bellini’s skillful use of light and space, the powerful pulling effect that drew his eye inward and upward, the sculptural nobility of the Madonna and child and the saints surrounding them. It was a painting of utter silence. Even after a long, tedious morning of work, the painting blanketed him with a sense of peace.

He pulled aside the shroud. The sun was out, the nave was filled with light streaming through the stained-glass windows. As he finished the last of his coffee, his attention was drawn by a movement at the entrance of the church. It was a boy, about ten years old, with long curly hair. His shoes were soaked from the water in the square. The restorer watched him intently. Even after ten years, he could not look at a young boy without thinking of his son.

The boy went first to Antonio, who waved him on without looking up from his work. Next he made his way up the long center aisle to the high altar, where he received a more friendly reception from Adriana. She smiled at him, touched the side of his face, then pointed in the direction of the restorer’s scaffold. The child stopped at the foot of the platform and wordlessly passed the restorer a slip of paper. He unfolded it and found a few words, scrawled like the last plea of a desperate lover. The note was unsigned, but the hand was as plain as the brushstrokes of Bellini.

Ghetto Nuovo. Six o’clock.

The restorer crushed the paper and slipped it into his pocket. When he looked down again the child was gone.

AT FIVE-THIRTY
, Francesco Tiepolo entered the church and lumbered slowly across the nave. With his tangled beard, flowing white shirt, and silk scarf knotted at his throat, the immense Italian looked as though he had just stepped from a Renaissance workshop. It was a look he carefully cultivated.

“All right, everyone,” he sang, his voice echoing among the apses and the columns. “That’s all for today. Pack up your things. Doors close in five minutes.” He seized the restorer’s work platform in his bearlike paw and shook it once violently, rattling his lights and brushes. “You too, Mario. Give your lady a kiss good night. She’ll be all right without you for a few hours. She’s managed for five hundred years.”

The restorer methodically wiped off his brushes and palette and packed his pigments and solvents into a rectangular case of varnished wood. Then he switched off the lamp and hopped down from the scaffolding. As always, he left the church without saying a word to the others.

With his case beneath his arm, he struck out across the Campo San Zaccaria. He had a smooth gait that seemed to propel him effortlessly across the square, though his unimpressive height and lean physique made him easy to miss. The black hair was cropped short and shot with gray. The angular face, with its deeply cleft chin and full lips, gave the impression of having been carved from wood. The most lasting impression of the face was the eyes, which were almond-shaped and a shocking shade of emerald green. Despite the demanding nature of his work—and the fact that he had recently celebrated his fifty-first birthday—his vision remained perfect.

Passing through an archway, he came to the Riva della Schiavoni, the broad quay overlooking the Canale di San Marco. In spite of the chill March weather, there were many tourists about. The restorer could make out a half-dozen different languages, most of which he could speak. A phrase of Hebrew reached his ears. It diminished quickly, like music on the wind, but left the restorer with an unyielding ache to hear the sound of his real name.

A No. 82
vaporetto
was waiting at the stop. He boarded and found a place along the railing from which he could see the face of every passenger getting on and off. He dug the note from his pocket and read it one last time. Then he dropped it over the side of the boat and watched it drift away on the silken waters of the lagoon.

IN THE
fifteenth century, a swampy parcel of land in the
sestieri
of Cannaregio was set aside for the construction of a new brass foundry, known in the Venetian dialect as a
geto
. The foundry was never built, and a century later, when the rulers of Venice were looking for a suitable spot to confine the city’s swelling population of unwanted Jews, the remote parcel known as Ghetto Nuovo was deemed the ideal place. The
campo
was large and had no parish church. The surrounding canals formed a natural moat, which cut off the island from the neighboring communities, and the single bridge could be guarded by Christian watchmen. In 1516, the Christians of Ghetto Nuovo were evicted and the Jews of Venice were forced to take their place. They could leave the ghetto only after sunrise, when the bell tolled in the campanile, and only if they wore a yellow tunic and hat. At nightfall they were required to return to the island, and the gates were chained. Only Jewish doctors could leave the ghetto at night. At its height, the population of the ghetto was more than five thousand. Now, it was home to only twenty Jews.

The restorer crossed a metal footbridge. A ring of apartment buildings, unusually tall for Venice, loomed before him. He entered a
sottoportego
and followed it beneath the apartment houses, emerging a moment later into a square, the Campo di Ghetto Nuovo. A kosher restaurant, a Jewish bakery, a bookstore, a museum. There were two old synagogues as well, virtually invisible except to a trained eye. Only the five windows on the second story of each—the symbol for the five books of the Pentateuch—gave away their locations.

A half-dozen boys were playing football between the long shadows and the puddles. A ball bounced toward the restorer. He gave it a deft kick with the instep of his right foot and sent it expertly back toward the game. One of the boys took it squarely in the chest. It was the one who had come to San Zaccaria that morning.

The child nodded in the direction of the
pozzo,
the wellhead in the center of the square. The restorer turned and saw a familiar figure leaning there, smoking a cigarette. Gray cashmere overcoat, gray scarf wound tightly around his neck, a bullet-shaped head. The skin of his face was deeply tanned and full of cracks and fissures, like desert rock scored by a million years of sun and wind. The spectacles were small and round and inadvertently fashionable. The expression was one of perpetual impatience.

As the restorer approached, the old man lifted his head, and his lips curled into something between a smile and a grimace. He seized the restorer by the arm and inflicted a bone-crushing handshake. Then, tenderly, he kissed his cheek.

“You’re here because of Benjamin, aren’t you?”

The old man closed his crumpled eyelids and nodded. Then he hooked two stubby fingers inside the restorer’s elbow and said, “Walk with me.” For an instant the restorer resisted the pull, but there was no escaping it. There had been a death in the family, and Ari Shamron was never one for sitting
shivah.