"About the Nazis." The room became silent, Saul had the sense that a log was about to be overturned, a monstrosity revealed.

26.

The revelation came slowly. In 1941, as the result of an anti-Nazi coup that overthrew the pro-German government of Yugoslavia, Hitler determined to punish Yugoslavia so severely that no other nation would be similarly tempted to try to secede from the Third Reich. Its capital, Belgrade, was destroyed by massive aerial bombardment. The

German army invaded, crushing all further rebellion. The country was subdivided, chunks of it annexed into Bulgaria, Albania, Hungary, and

Italy. The greater portion became a separate Nazi puppet-state called

Croatia. Hell was in season. The newly installed Croatian government instigated a policy of racial and religious purification so brutal that even seasoned SS officers were appalled. A fanatical group of

Croatians, called the Ustashi, became the government's instrument of purgation, hunting down Serbs, Jews, and gypsies. Victims were prodded to death in ponds; were made to kneel, their hands on the ground, while then- heads were sawn off; had sharp sticks shoved down their throats; had drills thrust up their rectums; were disemboweled, set on fire, sledge hammered trucked to mountaintops and thrown off cliffs, then blown apart by grenades. Those not killed where they were discovered endured the agony of concentration camps, dying slowly from starvation, dysentery, and exposure. The lucky ones were merely shot. At least six hundred thousand persons were slaughtered, perhaps as many as one and a quarter million. Father Krunoslav Pavelic--born and raised in

Yugoslavia--supported the Ustashi and their Nazi masters. Part of his motive was practical: to ally himself with the winning side. But part of his motive was also ideological: he firmly believed he was doing

God's work. Racial matters aside, be applauded the elimination of all religions except Roman Catholicism. The Jews and the gypsies were heathen as far as he was concerned, and the Serbs--primarily Greek

Orthodox Catholic--needed to be eliminated because of their break from the one true Faith. Not only did Father Pavelic support the Ustashi: he banded with them; he led them. Church officials were unaware of

Pavelic's personal holy war. But the inner circle did know about the massive Greek Orthodox murders in Croatia and knew as well about the even more massive Nazi slaughter of the Jews. With some exceptions.

Church officials did nothing to try to stop the slaughter. Their rationalization was that, to protect its existence, the Church had to remain neutral. If Hitler won the war and if he'd perceived the Church as his enemy, he would destroy it just as he had Yugoslavia. "Pray and wait" became the Church's motto. "Survive these desperate times as best we can." Following Hitler's defeat in 1945, one of the Church's methods of compensation was to assist refugees, particularly through the Red

Cross. By then. Father Pavelic had been transferred from Croatia to

Rome, where he arranged to be assigned to the Red Cross refugee program.

From there, he secretly passed word through his contacts in the Ustashi that he would help defeated followers of what he still believed to be a just cause to escape retribution for what the Allies were calling war crimes. He would do this for a fee--to assist the Church in its good works. The fee was the equivalent of the then considerable sum of two thousand dollars per fugitive. Only high ranking Nazi officials were able to plunder enough to afford such a price. As a consequence, Father

Pavelic's clients were among the most-hunted of war criminals, some of those directly responsible for the organization and perpetration of the

Holocaust Using Red Cross passports. Father Pavelic provided them with new identities and arranged for their safe passage to hiding places in

South America, Mexico, the United States, Canada, and the Middle East On occasion, he disguised his clients as priests, sequestered them in monasteries, waited until their hunters had lost the trail, and men used

Vatican passports to expedite their escape. But if his clients thought they'd heard the last of him when they reached safety, they were soon surprised to learn (hat he'd kept track of them--where they'd finally settled, how they earned their living--and demanded a yearly bonus payment from them in exchange for his silence. Failing that, he threatened he would expose them. He took a risk, he knew. If his clients refused to pay and he had to inform against them, those he'd betrayed would no doubt implicate him in their escape. But it never came to that; his clients were too afraid of being punished to refuse his demands. He took another risk as well--that his clients would try to kill him rather than pay their yearly tribute. To protect himself, he made sure they understood mat the documents about them were carefully hidden. If he were killed, a trusted associate would receive instructions about where the papers were, with orders to relay them to the authorities. His clients acquiesced. At first, their yearly payment was the same as what they'd paid initially--two thousand dollars. But as they prospered. Father Pavelic increased the amount. In total, he'd received millions. The money was not for his own use. He wasn't venal.

Every penny was given to the Church, to support the Faith. With the power that the money gave him, and with his talent for bureaucratic intrigue, he managed to attract supporters within the Vatican. Other

Curia members, who'd discovered the nature of his activities during and after the war, found that they too had to support him, for unless he was promoted, he threatened to embarrass the Church by implicating it in his rescue of Nazi war criminals. Here, too, he took a risk--his loyalty to the Church was such that he would never have created a scandal about it

But his enemies weren't aware of his scruples, and along with his supporters, they did promote him. By the age of thirty-five, he was both a cardinal and a junior member of the Church's governing body. Five years after that, he became a senior member, one of those responsible for administering the Church's finances. Saul, Drew, and Arlene learned all this from Father Dusseault. The priest's explanation wasn't coherent. They had to assemble the puzzle on their own. But when his portion of the interrogation was completed, they knew that Father

Dusseault, a member of the Fraternity assigned to the Vatican, using the cover of Cardinal Pavelic's assistant, had become suspicious about the source of some of the funds the cardinal was contributing to the Church.

Through resources available to him as a member of the Fraternity, Father

Dusseault discovered the cardinal's secret Outraged by the cardinal's participation in the Holocaust and his manipulation of the Church,

Father Dusseault determined to see justice finally done.

27.

Saul leaned even closer to Father Dusseault. Drew and Arlene had been told much of what they needed to know. Now it was his turn. Where was

Erika and her father? The priest's story about Nazis and Jews made him more convinced than ever that he was close to the truth. "What did you do about what you learned? How did you seek justice?"

"By telling the Jews."

"What Jews? Who did you tell?"

"Mossad."

"Who in the Mossad?"

"Ephraim Avidan." Saul's stunned reaction must have shown. Drew and

Arlene looked at him in wonder. Of course, he thought. They don't know about the cabin in the Alps that Erika and I visited. They don't know about the diary Avidan kept. "Why did you choose him?" Saul asked.

"He'd been in a camp... Wanted someone who'd act." Saul understood. In recent years, Israel had been much less assiduous in tracking down war criminals, preferring instead to create an image of restraint and balance, of being superior to the methods of its enemies.

Vengeance had been replaced by politics and the due process of law.

Impatient, Father Dusseault had used the resources of the Fraternity to find a Mossad operative who hated the Nazis for persecuting his family and himself as well as his race, whose background guaranteed direct reprisal in place of bureaucratic paralysis. "But Cardinal Pavelic discovered what you'd done?" Arlene asked. "Threatened me. Had to shoot him." The cardinal's body had been cremated just as many of his victims had been, a prudent and appropriate method of disposing of the cardinal's remains. An investigation into the cardinal's disappearance was less dangerous for Father Dusseault than an investigation into his murder. "Did you kill Father Victor?" Drew asked. Saul started to ask who Father Victor was, but Drew stopped him with a gesture. "Yes."

"Because he suspected you'd murdered the cardinal?" Drew asked. "No."

"Then why did you kill Father Victor?" Drew asked. "Discovered my attempts to destroy the Fraternity." A further layer was revealed. The priest had come to despise the militant philosophy of the order to which he belonged, convinced that God wanted peacemakers, not warriors.

As he'd felt obligated to cleanse the Church of Cardinal Pavelic's corruption, so he'd set out to excise the cancer of the Fraternity from the Church, sabotaging its operations whenever he could. When Father

Victor, an investigator for the Fraternity, had become too suspicious, his quarry had been forced to shoot him during a late-night meeting in the Vatican gardens. The pistol had been equipped with a silencer.

Nonetheless, its muffled noise had been heard by a guard who raised an alarm. Father Dusseault had to escape before he could dispose of the body as he had Cardinal Pavelic's. That explained why he'd chosen the greater silence of a knife when he'd gone after Drew in the gardens.

Saul was impatient. The priest had veered from what he needed to know.

"Does the name Joseph Bernstein mean anything to you?"

"No."

"My wife followed you into the gardens. Did you have someone there with you, as a backup? Do you know why she would have disappeared?"

"No." Saul rubbed his temples. He stared at his watch. "We've only got twenty minutes before Gallagher comes back to the other room," he told