The Confessor

translation. If it conflicted with what was written in his notebook, he would make a vast show of expunging the offending passage. When Gabriel recounted his conversation with Peter Malone--and the words "Crux Vera" were mentioned for the first time--Donati shot a conspiratorial glance at the Pope, which the Pontiff pointedly ignored.
    For his part, the Pope remained silent. Sometimes his gaze was focused on his intertwined fingers; sometimes his eyes would close, as though he were at prayer. Only the deaths seemed to stir him from his reverie. With each killing--Benjamin Stern, Peter Malone, Alessio Rossi and the four carabinieri in Rome, the Crux Vera operative in the south of France--the Pope made the sign of the cross and murmured a few words of prayer. He never once looked at Gabriel or even at Father Donati. Only Shamron could capture his attention. The Pope seemed to find kinship with the old man. Perhaps it was the closeness of their age, or perhaps the Pope saw something reassuring in the fissures and ravines of Shamron's rugged face. But every few minutes, Gabriel would notice them staring at each other over the coffee table, as though it were a chasm of time and history.
    Gabriel handed Sister Regina's letter to Father Donati, who then read it aloud. The Pope wore an expression of grief on his face, his
    eyes tightly closed. To Gabriel it seemed like a remembered pain-- the pain of an old wound being torn open. Only once did he open his eyes, at the point Sister Regina wrote of the boy sleeping on her lap. He looked across the divide at Shamron, holding his gaze for a moment, before closing his eyes once more and returning to his private agony.
    Father Donati handed the letter back to Gabriel when he was finished. Gabriel told the Pope of his decision to return to Munich to search Benjamin's apartment a second time and of the document Benjamin had entrusted to the old caretaker, Frau Ratzinger.
    "It's in German," Gabriel said. "Would you like me to translate it, Your Holiness?"
    Father Donati answered the question for the Pope. "The Holy Father and I both speak German fluently. Please feel free to read the document in its original language."
    The memorandum from Martin Luther to Adolf Eichmann seemed to cause the Pope physical pain. At the halfway point, he reached out and took Father Donati's hand for support. When Gabriel finished, the Pope bowed his head and joined his hands beneath his pectoral cross. When he opened his eyes again, he looked directly at Shamron, who was holding Sister Regina's account of the meeting at the convent.
    "A remarkable document, is it not, Your Holiness?" Shamron asked in German.
    'I'm afraid I would use a different word," the Pope said, answering him in the same language. "'Shameful' is the first word that comes to mind."
    'But is it an accurate account of the meeting that took place at that convent in 1943?"
    Gabriel looked first at Shamron, then at the Pope. Father Donati
    opened his mouth to object, but the Pope silenced him by gently placing a hand on his secretary's forearm.
    "It's accurate except for one detail," said Pope Paul VII. "I wasn't really sleeping on Sister Regina's lap. I'm afraid I just couldn't bear to say another decade of the rosary."
    AND THEN he told them the story of a boy--a boy from a poor village in the mountains of northern Italy. A boy who found himself orphaned at the age of nine, with no relatives to turn to for support. A boy who made his way to a convent on the shores of a lake, where he worked in the kitchen and befriended a woman named Sister Regina Carcassi. The nun became his mother and his teacher. She taught him to read and write. She taught him to appreciate art and music. She taught him to love God and to speak German. She called him Ciciotto--little chubby one. After the war, when Sister Regina renounced her vows and left the convent, the boy left too. Like Regina Carcassi, his faith in the Church was shaken by the events of the war, and he found his way to Milan, where he scratched out an existence on the streets, picking pockets and stealing from shops. Many times, he was arrested and beaten up by police officers. One night he was beaten nearly to death by a gang of criminals and left for dead on the steps of a parish church. He was discovered in the morning by a priest and taken to a hospital. The priest visited him each day and saw to the bills. He discovered that the filthy street urchin had spent time in a convent, that he