The Confessor

behind his head, staring up through the tinted glass of the moon roof. He passed the hours by mentally searching Benjamin's apartment for a second time. He opened books and desk drawers, closets and file cabinets. He planned expeditions into uncharted regions.
    Dawn arrived, gray and forbidding, now a siege of torrential rain, now an avalanche of biting Rhone Valley wind. It never seemed to get properly light, and the headlights of the Peugeot stayed on all morning. At the German border, Gabriel felt a sudden fever when the guard seemed to take an extra moment scrutinizing the false Canadian passport that Pazner had given him in Rome.
    They sped across a plain of sodden Swabian farmland, keeping pace with the high-speed traffic on the autobahn. In a town called Memmingen, Gabriel stopped for gas. Not far away was a shopping center with a small department store. He sent Chiara inside with a list. He fared better than he had in Cannes: two pairs of gray trousers, two button-down shirts, a black pullover sweater, a pair of black crepe-soled shoes, a quilted nylon raincoat. A second bag contained two flashlights and a pack of batteries, along with screwdrivers, pliers, and wrenches.
    Gabriel changed in the car while Chiara drove the final miles to Munich. It was mid-afternoon by the time they arrived. The sky was low and dark, and it was raining steadily. Operational weather, Shamron would have called it. A gift from the intelligence gods. Gabriel's head was throbbing with exhaustion, and his eyes felt as though there was sand beneath the lids. He tried to remember the
    last time he'd had a proper night's sleep. He looked at Chiara and saw that she was hanging on to the steering wheel as though it were the only thing keeping her upright. A hotel was out of the question. Chiara had an idea.
    JUST BEYOND the old city center, near the Reichenbachplatz, stands a rather drab, flat-fronted stucco building. Above the glass double doors is a sign. Judisches Einkaufszentrum von Munchen: Jewish Community Center of Munich. Chiara parked outside the front entrance and hurried inside. She returned five minutes later, drove around the corner, and parked opposite a side entrance. A girl was holding open the door. She was Chiara's age, heavy-hipped, with hair the color of a raven's wing. "How did you manage this?" Gabriel asked. "They called my father in Venice. He vouched for us." The interior of the center was modern and lit by harsh fluorescent light. They followed the girl up a staircase to the top floor, where they were shown into a small room with a bare linoleum floor and a pair of matching twin beds made up with beige spreads. To Gabriel, it seemed rather like a sick ward.
    "We keep it for guests and emergencies," the girl said. "You're welcome to use it for a few hours. Through that door is a bathroom with a shower."
    "I need to send a fax," Gabriel said. "There's one downstairs. I'll take you."
    Gabriel followed her to a small office near the main reception area.
    'Do you have a copier?" "Of course. Right over there."
    Gabriel removed Sister Regina Carcassi's letter from his jacket pocket and made a photocopy. Then he scribbled a few words on a separate piece of paper and handed them all to the girl. Gabriel recited the number from memory, and she fed the pages into the fax machine.
    "Vienna?" she asked.
    Gabriel nodded. He heard the squelch as the fax machine made!
    If contact with Eli Lavon's office, then watched the pages slip through!
    the feeder tray one by one. Two minutes after the transmission was complete, the fax machine rang and spit out a single page with two hastily scrawled words.
    Documents received.
    Gabriel recognized the handwriting as Lavon's.
    "Do you need anything else?"
    "Just a few hours of sleep."
    "That I can't help you with." She smiled at him for the first time. "Can you find your way back upstairs?"
    "No problem."
    When he returned to the guest room, the curtains were tightly drawn. Chiara lay on one of the beds, knees pulled to her chest already asleep. Gabriel undressed and slid beneath the blanket of the second bed, quietly settling onto the creaking bedsprings so as not to wake her. Then he closed his eyes and tumbled into a dreamless sleep.
    In Vienna Eli Lavon stood over his fax machine, cigarette between his lips, squinting at the document pinched between the tips of his nicotine-stained fingers. He walked back to his office
    II
    where a man sat in the heavy afternoon shadows. Lavon waved the