The Confessor

missing. He lay in bed, the telephone a few inches from his ear, listening to Lev's histrionics while Ge'ulah stirred softly in her sleep. The indignity of aging, he thought. Not long ago, Lev was a green recruit, and Shamron was the one who did the screaming. Now, the old man had no choice but to hold his tongue and bide his time.
    When the tirade ended, the line went dead. Shamron swung his feet to the floor, pulled on a robe, and walked outside to his terrace overlooking the lake. The sky in the east was beginning to turn pale blue with the coming dawn, but the sun had not yet appeared over the ridge of the hills. He dug through the pockets of the robe, looking for cigarettes, hoping against hope that Ge'ulah hadn't found
    them. It filled him with a sense of great personal victory when his stubby fingers came upon a crumpled packet.
    He lit one and savored the bite of the harsh Turkish tobacco on his tongue. Then he lifted his gaze and let it wander for a moment over the view. He never tired of it, this window on his private corner of the Promised Land. It was no accident the vista faced eastward. That way Shamron, the eternal sentinel, could keep watch on Israel's enemies.
    The air smelled of a coming storm. Soon the rains would arrive, and once more the land would run with floodwater. How many more floods would he see? In his most pessimistic moments, Shamron wondered how many more the children of Israel would see. Like most Jews, he was gripped by an unwavering fear that his generation would be the last. A man much wiser than Shamron had called the Jews the ever-dying people, a people forever on the verge of ceasing to be. It had been Shamron's mission in life to rid his people of that fear, to wrap them in a blanket of security and make them feel safe. He was haunted by the realization that he had failed.
    He scowled at his stainless-steel wristwatch. Gabriel and the girl had been missing for eight hours. It was Shamron's affair, but it was blowing up in Lev's face. Gabriel was getting closer to identifying the killers of Benjamin Stern, but Lev wanted no part of it. Little Lev, thought Shamron derisively. The craven bureaucrat. A man whose innate sense of caution rivaled the daring and audacity of Shamron.
    "Do I need this, Ari?" Lev had screamed. "The Europeans are accusing us of behaving like Nazis in the territories, and now one of your old killers is accused of trying to assassinate the Pope! Tell me where I can find him. Help me bring him in before this thing destroys this beloved service of yours once and for all."
    Perhaps Lev was right, though it pained Shamron to even consider such a thought. Israel had enough problems at the moment. The shaheeds were turning markets into bloodbaths. The thief of Baghdad was still trying to forge his nuclear sword. Perhaps now was not the best time to pick a fight with the Roman Catholic Church. Perhaps now was not the best time to go wading in old waters. The water was dirty and filled with unseen hazards, potholes and rocks, hidden brush where a man could become entangled and drown.
    And then an image appeared in his thoughts. A muddy village outside Krakow. A rampaging crowd. Shop windows smashed. Homes set ablaze. Men beaten bloody with clubs. Women raped. Christ-Fillers! Jewish filth! Kill the Jews! A child's village, a young child's memories of Poland. The boy would be sent to Palestine to live with relatives on a settlement in the Upper Galilee. The parents would stay behind. The boy would join the Haganah and fight in Israel's war of rebirth. When the new state was putting together an intelligence service, the boy, now a young man, would be invited to join. In a shabby suburb north of Buenos Aires, he would become an almost mythical figure by seizing the throat of the man who had sent his parents, and six million others, to the camps of death.
    Shamron found that his eyes were squeezed tightly shut and that his hands were gripping the top of the balustrade. Slowly, finger by finger, he relaxed his grip.
    A line of Eliot ran through his head: "In my beginning is my end."
    Eichmann . . .
    How had this puppeteer of death, this murdering bureaucrat who made the trains of genocide run on time--how had it come to pass that he was living quietly in a hard scrabble suburb of Buenos Aires when six million had perished? Shamron knew the answer, of course, for every page of the Eichmann file was engraved in his
    memory. Like hundreds of other murderers, he had escaped