THE CONFESSOR.

By Daniel Silva.

For David Bull, il restauratore, and as always, for my wife Jamie and my children Lily and Nicolas

"Roma locuta est; causa finita est." Rome has spoken; the case is closed.

ST. AUGUSTINE OF HIPPO.

PART ONE.

AN APARTMENT IN MUNICH.

MUNICH.

THE APARTMENT HOUSE at Adalbertstrasse 68 was one of the few in the fashionable district of Schwabing yet to be overrun by Munich's noisy and growing professional elite. Wedged between two red brick buildings that exuded prewar charm, No. 68 seemed rather like an ugly younger stepsister. Her facade was a cracked beige stucco, her form squat and graceless. As a result her suitors were a tenuous community of students, artists, anarchists, and unrepentant punk rockers, all presided over by an authoritarian caretaker named Frau Ratzinger, who, it was rumored, had been living in the original apartment house at No. 68 when it was leveled by an Allied bomb. Neighborhood activists derided the building as an eyesore in need of gentrification. Defenders said it exemplified the very sort of Bohemian arrogance that had once made Schwabing the Montmartre of Germany--the Schwabing of Hesse and Mann and Lenin. And Adolf Hitler, the professor working in the second-floor window might have been tempted to add, but few in the old neighborhood liked to be reminded of the fact that the young Austrian outcast had once found inspiration in these quiet tree-lined streets too.

To his students and colleagues, he was Herr Doktorprofessor Stern. To friends in the neighborhood he was just Benjamin; to the occasional visitor from home, he was Binyamin. In an anonymous stone-and-glass office complex in the north of Tel Aviv, where a file of his youthful exploits still resided despite his pleas to have it burned, he would always be known as Beni, youngest of Ari Shamron's wayward sons. Officially, Benjamin Stern remained a member of the faculty at Hebrew University in Jerusalem, though for the past four years he had served as visiting professor of European studies at Munich's prestigious Ludwig-Maximilian University. It had become something of a permanent loan, which was fine with Professor Stern. In an odd twist of historical fate, life was more pleasant for a Jew these days in Germany than in Jerusalem or Tel Aviv.

The fact that his mother had survived the horrors of the Riga ghetto gave Professor Stern a certain dubious standing among the other tenants of No. 68. He was a curiosity. He was their conscience. They railed at him about the plight of the Palestinians. They gently asked him questions they dared not put to their parents and grandparents. He was their guidance counselor and trusted sage. They came to him for advice on their studies. They poured out their heart to him when they'd been dumped by a lover. They raided his fridge when they were hungry and pillaged his wallet when they were broke. Most importantly, he served as tenant spokesman in all disputes involving the dreaded Frau Ratzinger. Professor Stern was the only one in the building who did not fear her. They seemed to have a special relationship. A kinship. "It's Stockholm Syndrome," claimed Alex, a psychology student who lived on the top floor. "Prisoner and camp guard. Master and servant." But it was more than that. The professor and the old woman seemed to speak the same language.

The previous year, when his book on the Wannsee Conference had become an international bestseller, Professor Stern had flirted with the idea of moving to a more stylish building--perhaps one with proper security and a view of the English Gardens. A place where the other tenants didn't treat his flat as if it were an annex to their own. This had incited panic among the others. One evening they came to him en masse and petitioned him to stay. Promises were made. They would not steal his food, nor would they ask for loans when there was no hope of repayment. They would be more respectful of his need for quiet. They would come to him for advice only when it was absolutely necessary. The professor acquiesced, but within a month his flat was once again the de facto common room of Adalbertstrasse 68. Secretly, he was glad they were back. The rebellious children of No. 68 were the only family Benjamin Stern had left.

The clatter of a passing streetcar broke his concentration. He looked up in time to see it disappear behind the canopy of a chestnut tree, then glanced at his watch. Eleven-thirty. He'd been at it since five that morning. He removed his glasses and spent a long moment rubbing his eyes. What was it Orwell had said about writing a book? A horrible, exhausting struggle, life a long bout of some painful illness. Sometimes, Benjamin Stern felt as though this book might be fatal.

The red light on his telephone answering machine was blinking. He made a habit of muting the ringers to avoid unwanted interruptions. Hesitantly, like a bomb handler deciding which wire to cut, he reached out and pressed the button. The little speaker emitted a blast of heavy metal music, followed by a warlike yelp.

"I have some good news, Herr Doktorprofessor. By the end of the day, there will be one less filthy Jew on the planet! Wiedersehen, Herr Doktorprofessor."

click.

Professor Stern erased the message. He was used to them by now. He received two a week these days; sometimes more, depending on whether he had made an appearance on television or taken part in some public debate. He knew them by voice; assigned each a trivial, unthreatening nickname to lessen their impact on his nerves. This fellow called at least twice each month. Professor Stern had dubbed him Wolfie. Sometimes he told the police. Most of the time he didn't bother. There was nothing they could do anyway.

He locked his manuscript and notes in the floor safe tucked beneath his desk. Then he pulled on a pair of shoes and a woolen jacket and collected the rubbish bag from the kitchen. The old building had no elevator, which meant he had to walk down two flights of stairs to reach the ground floor. As he entered the lobby, a chemical stench greeted him. The building was home to a small but thriving cosmetic. The professor detested the beauty shop. When it was busy, the rancid smell of nail-polish remover rose through the ventilation system and enveloped his flat. It also made the building less secure than he would have preferred. Because the cosmetic had no separate street entrance, the lobby was constantly cluttered with beautiful Schwabinians arriving for their pedicures, facials, and waxings.

He turned right, toward a doorway that gave onto the tiny courtyard, and hesitated in the threshold, checking to see if the cats were about. Last night he'd been awakened at midnight by a skirmish over some morsel of garbage. There were no cats this morning, only a pair of bored beauticians in spotless white tunics smoking cigarettes against the wall. He padded across the sooty bricks and tossed his bag into the bin.

Returning to the entrance hall, he found Frau Ratzinger punishing the linoleum floor with a worn straw broom. "Good morning, Herr Doktorprofessor," the old woman snapped; then she added accusingly: "Going out for your morning coffee?"

Professor Stern nodded and murmured, "ja ja," Frau Ratzinger." She glared at two messy stacks of fliers, one advertising a free concert in the park, the other a holistic massage clinic on the Schelling-strasse. "No matter how many times I ask them not to leave these things here, they do it anyway. It's that drama student in 4B. He lets anyone into the building."

The professor shrugged his shoulders, as if mystified by the lawless ways of the young, and smiled kindly at the old woman. Frau Ratzinger picked up the fliers and marched them into the courtyard. A moment later, he could hear her berating the beauticians for tossing their cigarette butts on the ground.

He stepped outside and paused to take stock of the weather. Not too cold for early March, the sun peering through a gauzy layer of cloud. He pushed his hands into his coat pockets and set out. Entering the English Gardens, he followed a tree-lined path along the banks of a rain-swollen canal. He liked the park. It gave his mind a quiet place to rest after the morning's exertions on the computer. More importantly, it gave him an opportunity to see if today they were following him. He stopped walking and beat his coat pockets dramatically to indicate he had forgotten something. Then he doubled back and retraced his steps, scanning faces, checking to see if they matched any of the ones stored in the database of his prodigious memory. He paused on a humpbacked footbridge, as if admiring the rush of the water over a short fall. A drug dealer with spiders tattooed on his face offered him heroin. The professor mumbled something incoherent and walked quickly away. Two minutes later he ducked into a public telephone and pretended to place a call while carefully surveying the surroundings. He hung up the receiver.

Wiedersehen, Herr Doktorprofessor.

He turned onto the Ludwigstrasse and hurried across the university district, head down, hoping to avoid being spotted by any students or colleagues. Earlier that week, he had received a rather nasty letter from Dr. Helmut Berger, the pompous chairman of his department, wondering when the book might be finished and when he could be expected to resume his lecturing obligations. Professor Stern did not like Helmut Berger--their well-publicized feud was both personal and academic--and conveniently he had not found the time to respond.

The bustle of the Viktualienmarkt pushed thoughts of work from his mind. He moved past mounds of brightly colored fruit and vegetables, past flower stalls and open-air butchers. He picked out a few things for his supper, then crossed the street to Cafe Bar Eduscho for coffee and a Dingelbrot. Forty-five minutes later, as he set out for Schwabing, he felt refreshed, his mind light, ready for one more wrestling match with his book. His illness, as Orwell would have called it.

As he arrived at the apartment house, a gust of wind chased him into the lobby and scattered a fresh stack of salmon-colored fliers. The professor twisted his head so he could read one. A new curry takeaway had opened around the corner. He liked a good curry. He scooped up one of the fliers and stuffed it into his coat pocket.

The wind had carried a few of the leaflets toward the courtyard.

Frau Ratzinger would be furious. As he trod softly up the stairs, she poked her head from her foxhole of a flat and spotted the mess. Predictably appalled, she glared at him with inquisitor's eyes. Slipping the key into his door lock, he could hear the old woman cursing as she dealt with this latest outrage.

In the kitchen, he put away the food and brewed himself a cup of tea. Then he walked down the hallway to his study. A man was standing at his desk, casually leafing through a stack of research. He wore a white tunic, like the ones worn by the beauticians at the cosmetic and was very tall with athletic shoulders. His hair was blond and streaked with gray. Hearing the professor enter the room, the intruder looked up. His eyes were gray too, cold as a glacier.

"Open the safe, Herr Doktorprofessor."

The voice was calm, almost flirtatious. The German was accented. It wasn't Wolfie--Professor Stern was sure of that. He had a flair for languages and an ear for local dialects. The man in the tunic was Swiss, and his Schwyzerdutsch had the broad singsong accent of a man from the mountain valleys.

"Who in the hell do you think you are?"

"Open the safe," the intruder repeated as the eyes returned to the papers on the desk.

"There's nothing in the safe of any value. If it's money you're--"

Professor Stern wasn't permitted to finish the sentence. In a swift motion, the intruder reached beneath the tunic, produced a silenced handgun. The professor knew weapons as well as accents. The gun was a Russian-made Stechkin. The bullet tore through the professor's right kneecap. He fell to the floor, hands clutching the wound, blood pumping between his fingers.

"I suppose you'll just have to give me the combination now," the Swiss said calmly.

The pain was like nothing Benjamin Stern had ever experienced. He was panting, struggling to catch his breath, his mind a maelstrom. The combination? God, but he could barely remember his name. "I'm waiting, Herr Doktorprofessor."

He forced himself to take a series of deep breaths. This supplied his brain with enough oxygen to permit him to access the combination to the safe. He recited the numbers, his jaw trembling with shock. The intruder knelt in front of the safe and deftly worked the tumbler. A moment later, the door swung open. The intruder looked inside, then at the professor. "You have backup disks. Where do you keep them?" "I don't know what you're talking about." "As it stands right now, you'll be able to walk with the use of a cane." He raised the gun. "If I shoot you in the other knee, you'll spend the rest of your life on crutches."

The professor was slipping from consciousness. His jaw was trembling. Don't shiver, damn you! Don't give him the pleasure of seeing your fear!

"In the refrigerator." "The refrigerator?"

"In case"--a burst of pain shot through him--"of a fire." The intruder raised an eyebrow. Clever boy. He'd brought a bag along with him, a black nylon duffel, about three feet in length. He reached inside and withdrew a cylindrical object: a can of spray paint. He removed the cap, and with a skilled hand he began to paint symbols on the wall of the study. Symbols of violence. Symbols of hate. Ludicrously, the professor found himself wondering what Frau Ratzinger would say when she saw this. In his delirium, he must have murmured something aloud, because the intruder paused for a moment to examine him with a vacant stare.

When he was finished with his graffiti, the intruder returned the spray can to his duffel, then stood over the professor. The pain from the shattered bones was making Benjamin Stern hot with fever. Blackness was closing in at the edges of his vision, so that the intruder seemed to be standing at the end of a tunnel. The professor searched the ashen eyes for some sign of lunacy, but he found nothing at all but cool intelligence. This man was no racist fanatic, he thought. He was a professional.

The intruder stooped over him. "Would you like to make a last confession, Professor Stern?"

"What are you"--he grimaced in pain--"talking about?"

"It's very simple. Do you wish to confess your sins?"

"You're the murderer," Benjamin Stern said deliriously.

The assassin smiled. The gun swung up again, and he fired two shots into the professor's chest. Benjamin Stern felt his body convulse but was spared further pain. He remained conscious for a few seconds, long enough to see his killer kneel down at his side and to feel the cool touch of his thumb against his damp forehead. He was mumbling something. Latin? Yes, the professor was certain of it.

"Ego te absolvo a peccatis tuis, in nomine Patris et Filii et Spiritus Sancti. Amen."

The professor looked into his killer's eyes. "But I'm a Jew," he murmured.

"It doesn't matter," the assassin said.

Then he placed the Stechkin against the side of Benjamin Stern's head and fired one last shot.

VATICAN CITY.

Four hundred miles to the south, on a hillside in the heart of Rome, an old man strolled through the cold shadows of a walled garden, dressed in an ivory cassock and cloak. At seventy-two years of age, he no longer moved quickly, though he came to the gardens each morning and made a point of walking for at least an hour along the pine-scented footpaths. Some of his predecessors had cleared the gardens so they could meditate undisturbed. The man in the ivory cassock liked to see people--real people, not just the fawning Curial cardinals and foreign dignitaries who came to kiss his fisherman's ring each day. A Swiss Guard always hovered a few paces behind him, more for company than protection, and he enjoyed stopping for a brief chat with the Vatican gardeners. He was a naturally curious man and considered himself something of a botanist. Occasionally, he borrowed a pair of pruning shears and helped trim the roses. Once, a Swiss Guard had found him on his hands and knees in the garden. Assuming the worst, the guard had summoned an ambulance and rushed to his side, only to find that the Supreme Pontiff of the Roman Catholic Church had decided to do a bit of weeding.

Those closest to the Holy Father could see that something was troubling him. He had lost much of the good humor and easy charm that had seemed like a breath of spring breeze after the dour final days of the Pole. Sister Teresa, the iron-willed nun from Venice who ran his papal household, had noticed a distinct loss of appetite. Even the sweet biscotti she left with his afternoon coffee went untouched lately. She often entered the papal study on the third floor of the Apostolic Palace and found him lying face-down on the floor, deep in prayer, eyes closed as though he were in agony. Karl Brunner, the head of his Swiss Guard detail, had noticed the Holy Father frequently standing at the Vatican walls, gazing across the Tiber, seemingly lost in thought. Brunner had protected the Pole for many years and had seen the toll the papacy had taken on him. It was part of the job, he counseled Sister Teresa, the crushing burden of responsibility that falls on every pope. "It is enough to make even the holiest of men lose their temper from time to time. I'm certain God will give him the strength to overcome it. The old Pietro will be back soon."

Sister Teresa was not so sure. She was among the handful of people inside the Vatican who knew how much Pietro Lucchesi had not wanted this job. When he had arrived in Rome for the funeral of John Paul II, and the conclave that would choose his successor, the elfin, soft-spoken patriarch of Venice was not considered remotely papabile, a man possessed with the qualities necessary to be pope. Nor did he give even the slightest indication that he was interested. The fifteen years he had spent working in the Roman Curia were the unhappiest of his career, and he had no desire to return to the back-biting village on the Tiber, even as its lord high mayor. Lucchesi had intended to cast his vote for the archbishop of Buenos Aires, whom he had befriended during a tour of Latin America, and return quietly to Venice.

But inside the conclave, things did not go as intended. As their predecessors had done time and time again over the centuries, Lucchesi and his fellow princes of the church, one hundred thirty in all, entered the Sistine Chapel in solemn procession while singing the Latin hymn Veni Creator Spiritus. They gathered beneath Michelangelo's Last Judgment, with its humbling depiction of tormented souls rising toward heaven to face the wrath of Christ, and prayed for the Holy Spirit to guide their hand. Then each cardinal stepped forward individually, placed his hand atop the Holy Gospels, and swore an oath binding him to irrevocable silence. When this task was complete, the master of papal liturgical ceremonies commanded, "Extra Omnes"--Everyone out--and the conclave began in earnest.

The Pole had not been content to leave matters solely in the hands of the Holy Spirit. He had stacked the College of Cardinals with prelates like himself, doctrinaire hardliners determined to preserve ecclesiastical discipline and the power of Rome over all else. Their candidate was an Italian, a consummate creature of the Roman Curia: Cardinal Secretary of State Marco Brindisi.

The moderates had other ideas. They pleaded for a truly pastoral papacy. They wanted the occupant of the throne of St. Peter to be a gentle and pious man; a man who would be willing to share power with the bishops and limit the influence of the Curia; a man who could reach across the lines of geography and faith to heal those corners of the globe torn by war and poverty. Only a non-European suitable to the moderates. They believed the time had come for a Third World pope.

The first ballots revealed the conclave to be hopelessly divided, and soon both factions were searching for a way out of the impasse. On the final ballot of the day, a new name surfaced. Pietro Lucchesi, the patriarch of Venice, received five votes. Hearing his name read five times inside the sacred chamber of the Sistine Chapel, Lucchesi closed his eyes and blanched visibly. A moment later, when the ballots were placed into the nero for burning, several cardinals noticed that Lucchesi was praying.

That evening, Pietro Lucchesi politely refused an invitation to dine with a group of fellow cardinals, adjourning to his room at the Dormitory of St. Martha instead to meditate and pray. He knew how conclaves worked and could see what was coming. Like Christ in the Garden of Gethsemane, he pleaded with God to lift this burden from his shoulders--to choose someone else.

But the following morning, Lucchesi's support built, rising steadily toward the two-thirds majority necessary to be elected pope. On the final ballot taken before lunch, he was just ten votes short. Too anxious to take food, he prayed in his room before returning to the Sistine Chapel for the ballot that he knew would make him pope. He watched silently as each cardinal advanced and placed a twice-folded slip of paper into the golden chalice that served as a ballot box, each uttering the same solemn oath: "I call as my witness Christ the Lord, who will be my judge that my vote is given to the one whom before God I think should be elected."

The ballots were checked and rechecked before the tally was announced. One hundred fifteen votes had been cast for Lucchesi.

The camerlengo approached Lucchesi and posed the same question that had been put to hundreds of newly elected popes over two millennia.

"Do you accept your canonical election as Supreme Pontiff?" After a lengthy silence that produced much tension in the chapel, Pietro Lucchesi responded: "My shoulders are not broad enough to bear the burden you have given me, but with the help of Christ the Savior, I will try. Accepto."

"By what name do you wish to be called?"

"Paul the Seventh," Lucchesi replied.

The cardinals filed forward to embrace the new pontiff and offer obedience and loyalty to him. Lucchesi was then escorted to the scarlet chamber known as the camera lacrimatoria--the crying room--for a few minutes of solitude before being fitted with a white cassock by the Gammarelli brothers, the pontifical tailors. He chose the smallest of the three ready-made cassocks, and even then he seemed like a small boy wearing his father's shirt. As he filed onto the great loggia of St. Peter's to greet Rome and the world, his head was barely visible above the balustrade. A Swiss Guard brought forth a footstool, and a great roar rose from the stunned crowd in the square below. A commentator for Italian television breathlessly declared the new pope "Pietro the Improbable." Cardinal Marco Brindisi, the head of the hard-line Curial cardinals, privately christened him Pope Accidental I.

The Vaticanisti said the message of the divisive conclave was clear. Pietro Lucchesi was a compromise pope. His mandate was to run the Church in a competent fashion but launch no grand initiatives. The battle for the heart and soul of the Church, said the Vaticanisti, had effectively been postponed for another day.

But Catholic reactionaries, religious and lay alike, did not take such a benign view of Lucchesi's election. To militants, the new pope bore an uncomfortable resemblance to a tubby Venetian named Roncalli who'd inflicted the doctrinal calamity of the Second Vatican Council. Within hours of the conclave's conclusion, the websites and cyber-confessionals of the hardliners were bristling with warnings and dire predictions about what lay ahead. Lucchesi's sermons and public statements were scoured for evidence of un-orthodoxy. The reactionaries did not like what they discovered. Lucchesi was trouble, they concluded. Lucchesi would have to be kept under watch. Tightly scripted. It would be up to the mandarins of the Curia to make certain Pietro Lucchesi became nothing more than a caretaker pope.

But Lucchesi believed there were far too many problems confronting the Church for a papacy to be wasted, even the papacy of an unwilling pope. The Church he inherited from the Pole was a Church in crisis. In Western Europe, the epicenter of Catholicism, the situation had grown so dire that a recent synod of bishops declared that Europeans were living as though God did not exist. Fewer babies were being baptized; fewer couples were choosing to be married in the Church; vocations had plummeted to a point where nearly half the parishes in Western Europe would soon have no full-time priest. Lucchesi had to look no further than his own diocese to see the problems the Church faced. Seventy percent of Rome's two and a half million Catholics believed in divorce, birth control, and premarital sex--all officially forbidden by the Church. Fewer than ten percent bothered to attend mass on a regular basis. In France, the so-called "First Daughter" of the Church, the statistics were even worse. In North America, most Catholics didn't even bother to read his encyclicals before flouting them, and only a third attended Mass. Seventy percent of Catholics lived in the Third World, yet most of them rarely saw a priest. In Brazil alone, six hundred thousand people left the Church each year to become evangelical Protestants.

Lucchesi wanted to stem the bleeding before it was too late. He longed to make his beloved Church more relevant in the lives of its adherents, to make his flock Catholic in more than name only. But there was something else that had preoccupied him, a single question that had run ceaselessly around his head since the moment the conclave elected him pope. Why? Why had the Holy Spirit chosen him to lead the Church? What special gift, what sliver of knowledge, did he possess that made him the right pontiff for this moment in history? Lucchesi believed he knew the answer, and he had set in motion a perilous stratagem that would shake the Roman Catholic Church to its foundations. If his gambit proved successful, it would revolutionize the Church. If it failed, it might very well destroy it.

THE SUN SLIPPED behind a bank of cloud, and a breath of cold March wind stirred the pine trees of the gardens. The Pope pulled his cloak tightly around his throat. He drifted past the Ethiopian College, then turned onto a narrow footpath that took him toward the dun-colored wall at the southwest corner of Vatican City. Stopping at the foot of the Vatican Radio tower, he mounted a flight of stone steps and climbed up to the parapet.

Rome lay before him, stirring in the flat overcast light. His gaze was drawn across the Tiber, toward the soaring synagogue in the heart of the old ghetto. In 1555, Pope Paul IV, a Pope whose name Lucchesi bore, ordered the Jews of Rome into the ghetto and compelled them to wear a yellow star to make them distinguishable from Christians. It was the intention of those who commissioned the synagogue to build it tall enough so that it could be seen from the Vatican. The message was unmistakably clear. We are here too. Indeed, we were here long before you. For Pietro Lucchesi, the synagogue spoke of something else. A treacherous past. A shameful secret. It spoke directly to him, whispering into his ear. It would give him no peace.

The Pope heard footfalls on the garden pathway, sharp and rhythmic, like an expert carpenter driving nails. He turned and saw a man marching toward the wall. Tall and lean, black hair, black clerical suit, a vertical line drawn with India ink. Father Luigi Donati: the Pope's private secretary. Donati had been at Lucchesi's side for twenty years. In Venice they had called him il doge because of his willingness to wield power ruthlessly and to go straight for the throat when it served his purposes or the needs of his master. The nickname had followed him to the Vatican. Donati did not mind. He followed the tenets of a secular Italian philosopher named Machiavelli, who counseled that it is better for a prince to be feared than loved. Every pope needed a son of a bitch, according to Donati; a hard man in black who was willing to take on the Curia with a whip and a chair and bend it to his will. It was a role he played with poorly disguised glee.

As Donati drew closer to the parapet, the Pope could see by the grim set of his jaw that something was wrong. He turned his gaze toward the river once more and waited. A moment later he could feel the reassuring presence of Donati at his side. As usual, il doge wasted no time on pleasantries or small talk. He leaned close to the Pope's ear and quietly informed him that earlier that morning Professor Benjamin Stern had been discovered murdered in his apartment in Munich. The Pope closed his eyes and lowered his chin to his chest, then reached out and held Father Donati's hand tightly. "How?" he asked. "How did they kill him?"

When Father Donati told him, the Pope swayed and leaned against the priest's arm for support. "Almighty God in Heaven, please grant us forgiveness for what we have done." Then he looked into the eyes of his trusted secretary. Father Donati's gaze was calm and intelligent and very determined. It gave the Pope the courage to go forward.

"I'm afraid we've terribly underestimated our enemies, Luigi. They are more formidable than we thought, and their wickedness knows no bounds. They will stop at nothing to protect their dirty secrets."

"Indeed, Holiness," Donati said gravely. "In fact, we must now operate under the assumption that they might even be willing to murder a pope."

Murder a pope? It was difficult for Pietro Lucchesi to imagine such a thing, but he knew his trusted secretary was not guilty of exaggeration. The Church was riddled with a cancer. It had been allowed to fester during the long reign of the Pole. Now it had metastasized and was threatening the life of the very organism in which it lived. It needed to be removed. Aggressive measures were required if the patient was to be saved.

The Pope looked away from Donati, toward the dome of the synagogue rising over the riverbank. "I'm afraid there's no one who can do this deed but me."

Father Donati placed his hand on the Pope's forearm and squeezed. "Only you can compose the words, Holiness. Leave the rest in my hands."

Donati turned and walked away, leaving the Pope alone at the parapet. He listened to the sound of his hard man in black pounding along the footpath toward the palace: crack-crack-crack-crack... To Pietro Lucchesi, it sounded like nails in a coffin.

VENICE.

The night rains had flooded the Campo San Zaccaria. The restorer stood on the steps of the church like a castaway. In the center of the square, an old priest appeared out of the mist, lifting the skirts of his simple black cassock to reveal a pair of knee-length rubber boots. "It's like the Sea of Galilee this morning, Mario," he said, digging a heavy ring of keys from his pocket. "If only Christ had bestowed on us the ability to walk on water. Winters in Venice would be much more tolerable."

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.