The Confessor

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 ageto. 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.
    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