The Confessor

by Daniel Silva

  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 pl
aying 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.

  IT HAD been a year since Gabriel had seen him last. Shamron had grown visibly older since that day. As they set off round the campo in the gathering darkness, Gabriel had to resist the urge to take him by the arm. His cheeks had hollowed, and the steel blue eyes—eyes that had once struck fear into his enemies and his allies alike—were clouded and wet. When he raised his Turkish cigarette to his lips, his right hand trembled.

  Those hands had made Shamron a legend. Shortly after he joined the Office in the 1950s, Shamron’s superiors noticed that he possessed an unusually strong grip for a man with such an ordinary physique. He was trained in the art of street snatches and silent killing and sent into the field. He preferred the garrote and used it with deadly efficiency from the cobbled streets of Europe to the filthy alleyways of Cairo and Damascus. He killed Arab spies and generals. He killed the Nazi scientists who were helping Nasser build rockets. And on a warm night in April 1960, in a town north of Buenos Aires, Ari Shamron leapt from the back of a car and seized Adolf Eichmann by the throat as he was waiting for a bus to take him home.

  Gabriel was the only person who knew one other salient fact about that night in Argentina: Adolf Eichmann had nearly escaped because Shamron had tripped over a loose shoelace. That same edge-of-disaster quality would mark his many stopovers in the executive suite at King Saul Boulevard. Prime ministers never knew quite what to expect when Shamron appeared outside their door—word of another shocking success or a secret confession of another humiliating failure. His willingness to take risks was both a potent operational strength and a crippling political weakness. Gabriel had lost count of how many times the old man had been cast into exile, then recalled to colors with great fanfare.

  Shamron’s hold on the executive suite had finally been broken, though his exile would never be permanent. He retained the dubious title of special administrative advisor, which gave him just enough entrée to make a general nuisance of himself, and from his fortresslike villa overlooking the Sea of Galilee he still exercised considerable clandestine power. Spies and generals regularly went there to kiss his ring, and no major decision regarding the security of the state could be taken without first running it past the old man.

  His health was a carefully guarded secret. Gabriel had heard rumors about prostate cancer, a mild heart attack, recurring problems with his kidneys. It was clear the old man didn’t have long to live. Shamron did not fear death—only that in his absence would spring complacency. And now, as they ambled slowly around the old ghetto, death walked beside them. Benjamin’s death. And Shamron’s. The nearness of death had made Shamron restless. He seemed like a man anxious to settle accounts. An old warrior, desperate for one last fight.

  “DID YOU go to the funeral?”

  Shamron shook his head. “Benjamin feared his academic achievements would be tainted if it ever became known he’d worked for us. My presence at the burial would only have raised uncomfortable questions, in Israel and abroad, so I stayed away. I have to admit I wasn’t anxious to attend. It’s difficult to bury a child.”

  “Was anyone there? He had no other family in Israel.”

  “I’m told there were some old friends from the overt world and a few members of the faculty from Hebrew.”

  “Who sent you here?”

  “What does it matter?”

  “It matters to me. Who sent you?”

  “I’m like a parolee,” Shamron said wearily. “I cannot move or act without the approval of the supreme tribunal.”

  “And who sits on this tribunal?”

  “Lev, for one. Of course, if it were up to Lev, I’d be locked in a room with an iron cot and bread and water. But fortunately for me, the other person on the tribunal is the prime minister.”

  “Your old comrade in arms.”

  “Let’s just say we share similar opinions about the nature of the conflict and the true intentions of our enemies. We speak the same language and enjoy each other’s company. He keeps me in the game, despite Lev’s best efforts to wrap me in my burial shroud.”

  “It’s not a game, Ari. It never was a game.”

  “You don’t need to remind me of that, Gabriel. You spend your time here in the playgrounds of Europe while every day the shaheeds are blowing themselves to bits on Ben Yehuda Street and Jaffa Road.”

  “I work here.”

  “Forgive me, Gabriel. I didn’t mean that to be as harsh as it sounded. What are you working on, by the way?”

  “Do you really care?”

  “Of course I do. I wouldn’t have asked otherwise.”

  “The Bellini altarpiece in the Church of the San Zaccaria. It’s one of the most important paintings in Venice.”

  Shamron’s face broke into a genuine smile. “I would love to see the look on the patriarch’s face if he ever found out that his precious altarpiece was being restored by a nice Jewish boy from the Jezreel Valley.”

  Without warning, he stopped walking and coughed violently into a handkerchief. When he drew a few deep breaths to steady himself, Gabriel could hear a rattle in his chest. The old man needed to get out of the cold, but he was too stubborn ever to admit physical weakness. Gabriel decided to do it for him.

  “Do you mind if we sit down someplace? I’ve been standing on my scaffolding since eight o’clock this morning.”

  Shamron managed a weary smile. He knew he was being deceived. He led Gabriel to a bakery on the edge of the campo. It was empty except for a tall girl behind the counter. She served them without taking their order: cups of espresso, small bottles of mineral water, a plate of rugelach with cinnamon and nuts. As she leaned over the table, a mane of dark hair fell across the front of one shoulder. Her long hands smelled of vanilla. She covered herself in a bronze-colored wrap and went into the campo, leaving Gabriel and Shamron alone in the shop.

  Gabriel said, “I’m listening.”

  “That’s an improvement. Usually, you start off by yelling at me about how I’ve ruined your life.”

  “I’m sure we’ll get to that at some point.”

  “You and my daughter should compare notes.”

  “We have. How is she?”

  “Still living in New Zealand—on a chicken farm if you can believe that—and still refusing to take my telephone calls.” He took a long time lighting his next cigarette. “She resents me terribly. Says I was never there for her. What she doesn’t understand is that I was busy. I had a people to protect.”

  “It won’t last forever.”

  “In case you haven’t noticed, neither will I.” Shamron took a bite of rugelach and chewed it slowly. “How’s Anna?”

  “I suppose she’s fine. I haven’t spoken to her in nearly tw
o months.”

  Shamron lowered his chin and peered disapprovingly at Gabriel over his spectacles. “Please tell me you didn’t break that poor woman’s heart.”

  Gabriel stirred sugar into his coffee and looked away from Shamron’s steady stare. Anna Rolfe . . . She was a world-renowned concert violinist and the daughter of a wealthy Swiss banker named Augustus Rolfe. A year earlier, Gabriel had helped her track down the men who had murdered her father. Along the way he had also forced her to confront the unpleasant circumstances about her father’s wartime past and the source of his remarkable collection of Impressionist and Modern paintings. He had also fallen in love with the tempestuous virtuoso. After the operation, he’d lived for six months at her secluded villa on the Sintra coast of Portugal. Their relationship began to crumble when Gabriel confessed to her that each time they strolled the streets of the village it was the shadow of his wife Leah he saw at his shoulder—and that some nights, while they made love, Leah stood in their bedroom, a silent spectator to their contentment. When Francesco Tiepolo offered him the San Zaccaria altarpiece, Gabriel accepted without hesitation. Anna Rolfe did not stand in his way.

  “I’m very fond of her, but it would never have worked.”

  “Did she spend any time with you here in Venice?”

  “She performed at a benefit at the Frari. She stayed with me for two days. I’m afraid it only made things worse.”

  Shamron slowly crushed out his cigarette. “I suppose I’m partly to blame. I pushed you into it before you were ready.”

  As he always did on occasions such as these, Shamron asked if Gabriel had been to see Leah. Gabriel heard himself say that he had gone to the secluded psychiatric clinic in the south of England before coming to Venice; that he had spent an afternoon with her, pushing her about the grounds; that they had even had a picnic lunch beneath the bare limbs of a maple. But while he spoke, his mind was elsewhere: the tiny street in Vienna not far from the Judenplatz; the car bomb that killed his son; the inferno that destroyed Leah’s body and stole her memory.