Free The Messenger by Daniel Silva Page B

and entered a darkened sottoportego . At the end of the passageway, a broad square opened before him, the Campo del Ghetto Nuovo, center of the ancient ghetto of Venice. More than five thousand Jews had once lived in the ghetto. Now it was home to only twenty of the city’s four hundred Jews, and most of those were elderly who resided in the Casa di Riposo Israelitica.
    He crossed the campo and stopped at Number 2899. A small brass plaque read COMUNITÀ EBRAICA DI VENEZIA —Jewish Community of Venice. He pressed the bell and quickly turned his back to the security camera over the doorway. After a long silence a woman’s voice, familiar to him, crackled over the intercom. “Turn around,” she said. “Let me have a look at your face.”

    H E WAITED WHERE she had told him to wait, on a wooden bench in a sunlit corner of the campo , near a memorial for the Venetian Jews who were rounded up in December 1943 and sent to their deaths at Auschwitz. Ten minutes elapsed, then ten minutes more. When finally she emerged from the office she took her time crossing the square, then stopped several feet away from him, as though she were afraid to come any closer. Gabriel, still seated, pushed his sunglasses onto his forehead and regarded her in the dazzling autumn light. She wore faded blue jeans, snug around her long thighs and flared at the bottom, and a pair of high-heeled suede boots. Her white blouse was tailored in such a way that it left no doubt about the generous figure beneath it. Her riotous auburn hair was held back by a chocolate-colored satin ribbon, and a silk scarf was wound round her neck. Her olive skin was very dark. Gabriel suspected she’d been to the sun recently. Her eyes, wide and Oriental in shape, were the color of caramel and flecked with gold. They tended to change color with her mood. The last time Gabriel had seen Chiara’s eyes they were nearly black with anger and streaked with mascara. She folded her arms defensively beneath her breasts and asked what he was doing in Venice.
    “Hello, Chiara. Don’t you look lovely.”
    The breeze took her hair and blew a few strands across her face. She brushed it away with her left hand. It was absent the diamond engagement ring Gabriel had given her. There were other rings on her fingers now and a new gold watch on her wrist. Gabriel wondered if they were gifts from someone else.
    “I haven’t heard from you since I left Jerusalem,” Chiara said in the deliberately even tone she used whenever she was trying to keep her emotions in check. “It’s been months. Now you show up here without warning and expect me to greet you with my arms open and a smile on my face?”
    “Without warning? I came here because you asked me to come.”
    “Me? What on earth are you talking about?”
    Gabriel searched her eyes. He could tell she was not dissembling. “Forgive me,” he said. “It seems I was brought here under false pretenses.”
    She toyed with the ends of her scarf, clearly enjoying his discomfort. “Brought here by whom?”
    Donati and Tiepolo, reckoned Gabriel. Maybe even His Holiness himself. He stood abruptly. “It doesn’t matter,” he said. “I’m sorry, Chiara. It was nice to see you again.”
    He turned and started to walk away, but she seized his arm.
    “Wait,” she said. “Stay for a moment.”
    “Are you going to be civil?”
    “Civility is for divorced couples with children.”
    Gabriel sat down again, but Chiara remained standing. A man in dark glasses and a tan blazer emerged from the sottoportego . He looked admiringly at Chiara, then crossed the campo and disappeared over the bridge that led to the pair of old Sephardic synagogues at the southern end of the ghetto. Chiara watched the man go, then tilted her head and scrutinized Gabriel’s appearance.
    “Has anyone ever told you that you bear more than a passing resemblance to the man who saved the Pope?”
    “He’s an Italian,” Gabriel said. “Didn’t you read about him in the