The Fallen Angel

of the neighborhood’s Stalinist past, but for the most part the architectural stains of communism had been scrubbed away. It was as if the Cold War, like the real war that preceded it, had never happened. In modern Mitte, there were no memories, only prosperity.
    At the Kronenstrasse, Gabriel turned right again and followed the street eastward until he arrived at a modern apartment house with large square windows that shone like slabs of onyx. Long ago, before communism, before the war, the spot had been occupied by a handsome neoclassical building of gray stone. On the second floor had lived a German Expressionist painter named Viktor Frankel, his wife, Sarah, and their daughter, Irene, Gabriel’s mother. Gabriel had never seen a photograph of the apartment, but once, when he was a young boy, his mother had tried to sketch it for him before breaking down in tears. Here was the place where they had lived a charmed bourgeois life filled with art, music, and afternoons in the Tiergarten. And here was the place they had stayed as the noose tightened slowly around their necks. Finally, in the autumn of 1942, they were herded by their fellow countrymen aboard a cattle car and deported east to Auschwitz. Gabriel’s grandparents were gassed upon arrival, but his mother was sent to the women’s work camp at Birkenau. She never told Gabriel of her experiences. Instead, she committed them to paper and locked them away in the archives of Yad Vashem.
    I will not tell all the things I saw. I cannot. I owe this much to the dead. . . .
    Gabriel closed his eyes and saw the street as it had been before the madness. And then he saw himself as a child, coming to visit grandparents who had been allowed to grow old. And he imagined how different his life might have been had he been raised here in Berlin instead of the Valley of Jezreel. And then a cloud of acrid smoke blew across his face, like the smoke of distant crematoria, and he heard a familiar voice at his back.
    “What were you hoping to find here?” asked Ari Shamron.
    “Strength,” said Gabriel.
    “Your mother gave you strength when she named you,” Shamron said. “And then she gave you to me.”

29
     
    BERLIN
     
    S HAMRON HAD REGISTERED AT THE A DLON under the name Rudolf Heller, one of his favorite European aliases. Gabriel wanted to avoid the security cameras of the famous old hotel, so they walked along the edge of the Tiergarten instead. The air had turned suddenly frigid, and the wind was whistling through the columns of the Brandenburg Gate. Shamron was wearing a cashmere overcoat, a fedora, and tinted eyeglasses that made him look like the sort of businessman who made money in shady ways and never lost at baccarat. He paused at Berlin’s new Holocaust memorial, a stark landscape of rectangular gray blocks, and frowned in consternation.
    “They look like containers waiting to be loaded into a cargo ship.”
    “The architect wanted to create an atmosphere of discomfort and confusion. It’s supposed to represent the orderly extermination of millions amid the chaos of war.”
    “Is that what you see?”
    “I see a small miracle that such a memorial even exists on this spot. They could have tucked it away in a field in the countryside. But they put it here, in the heart of a reunited Berlin, right next to the Brandenburg Gate.”
    “You give them too much credit, my son. After the war, they all pretended they hadn’t noticed their neighbors disappearing in the middle of the night. It wasn’t until we captured the man who worked right over there that Germany and the rest of the world truly understood the horror of the Holocaust.”
    He was pointing across the Tiergarten, in the general direction of the Kurfürstenstrasse. It was there, in an imposing building that had once housed a Jewish mutual aid society, that Adolf Eichmann had made his headquarters. Gabriel’s eyes, however, were still fixed on the gray boxcar-shaped stones of the memorial.
    “You should write it all down.” He paused and looked at Shamron. “Before it’s too late.”
    “I’m not going anywhere yet.”
    “Even you won’t live forever, Ari. You should spend some time with a pen in your hand.”
    “I’ve always found the memoirs of spies to be tedious reading. Besides, what good would it do?”
    “It would remind the world why we live in Israel instead of Germany and Poland.”
    “The world doesn’t care,” Shamron responded with a dismissive wave of his hand.