Lange seized the grip of the Stechkin and was trying to bring it into play when the Israeli fired--a single shot, which struck Lange perfectly in the heart. He toppled backward into the snow. The Stechkin slipped from his fingers.
The Israeli stood over him. Lange braced himself for the pain of more bullets, but the Israeli just pushed his sunglasses onto his forehead and stood there, watching Lange curiously. His eyes were a brilliant shade of green. They were the last thing Lange ever saw.
He hiked down the valley through the gathering dusk. The car was waiting for him, parked at the edge of a rocky stream. The engine turned over as he approached. Chiara leaned across the passenger seat and pushed open the door. Gabriel climbed in and closed his eyes. For you, Beni, he thought. For you.
AUTHOR'S NOTE
The Confessor is a work of fiction. The cardinals and clergy, spies and assassins, secret policemen and secret Church societies portrayed in this novel are products of the author's imagination or have been used fictitiously. Any resemblance to any person, living or dead, is entirely coincidental. The Convent of the Sacred Heart in Brenzone does not exist. Martin Luther of the German Foreign Ministry was present-at the Wannsee Conference, but the actions attributed to him in The Confessor are wholly fictitious. Pope Pius XII reigned from 1939 until his death in 1958. His public silence in the face of the annihilation of Europe's Jews, despite repeated Allied requests to speak out, is, in the words of Holocaust scholar Susan Zuccotti, a fact that is "rarely contested, nor can it be." So is the sanctuary and aid given by Church officials to Adolf Eichmann and other prominent Nazi murderers after the defeat of the Third Reich. «
Defenders of Pius XII, including the Vatican itself, have portrayed him as a friend of the Jews whose tireless, quiet diplomacy saved hundreds of thousands of Jewish lives. His critics have portrayed him as a calculating politician who, at best, displayed a callous and near-criminal indifference to the plight of the Jews, or, at worst, was actually complicit in the Holocaust.
A more complete portrait of Pope Pius XII might be drawn from documents concealed in the Vatican Secret Archives, but more than a half-century after the end of the war, the Holy See still refuses to open its repository of records to historians in search of the truth. Instead, it insists that historians may review only the eleven volumes of archival material, mainly wartime diplomatic traffic, published between 1965 and 1981. These records, known as Acteset Documents du Saint Siege relatifs a la Seconde Guerre Mondiale, have contributed to many of the unflattering historical accounts of the war--and these are the documents the Vatican is willing to let the world see.
What other damning material might reside in the Secret Archives? In October 1999, in a bid to calm the controversy swirling about its beleaguered Pope, the Vatican created a commission of six independent historians to assess the conduct of Pius XII and the Holy See during the war. After reviewing those documents already made public, the commission concluded: "No serious historian could accept that the published, edited volumes could put us at the end of the story." It submitted to the Vatican a list of forty-seven questions, along with a request for supporting documentary evidence from the Secret Archives--records such as "diaries, memoranda, appointment books, minutes of meetings, draft documents" and the personal papers of senior wartime Vatican officials. Ten months passed without a response. When it became clear the Vatican had no intention
of releasing the documents, the commission disbanded, its work unfinished. The Vatican angrily accused the three Jewish members of "clearly incorrect behavior" and of waging a "slanderous campaign" against the Church, though it leveled no such accusations against the three Catholic members. According to sources quoted by The Guardian newspaper, access to the Secret Archives "was blocked by a cabal led by the Vatican's secretary of state, Cardinal Angelo Sodano." Cardinal Sodano, it was suggested, opposes opening the Archives because it would set a terribly dangerous precedent and leave the Vatican vulnerable to other historical investigations, such as the relationship between the Holy See and the murderous military regimes of Latin America.
Clearly, there are those within the Church who would like the Vatican to offer a more complete accounting of its wartime actions, coupled with a more energetic admission of guilt for the Church's persecution of the Jews. Archbishop Rembert Weakland of Milwaukee appears to be one of them. "We Catholics through the centuries acted in a fashion contrary to God's law toward our Jewish brothers and sisters," Archbishop Weakland told Congregation Shalom in Fox Point, Wisconsin, in November 1999. "Such actions harmed the Jewish community through the ages in both physical and psychological ways."
The archbishop then made the following remarkable statement: "I acknowledge that we Catholics--by preaching a doctrine that the Jewish people were unfaithful, hypocritical and God-killers-- reduced the human dignity of our Jewish brothers and sisters and created attitudes that made reprisals against them seem like acts of conformity to God's will. By doing so, I confess that we Catholics contributed to the attitudes that made the Holocaust possible."