Lavon unconsciously smoothed his unruly hair. It was a habit when he was thinking. "There are two possibilities that spring to mind. I suppose we can rule out a certain German monk who turned the Roman Catholic Church on its ear. That would narrow the field to one. I'll be right back."

He disappeared into an adjoining room. For the next several minutes, Gabriel was treated to the familiar sound of his old friend rifling through file cabinets and cursing in several different languages. Finally, he returned with a thick accordion file bound by a heavy metal clasp. He laid the file on the coffee table in front of Gabriel and turned it so he could read the label.

MARTIN LUTHER: GERMAN FOREIGN OFFICE, 1938-1943.

LAVON OPENED the file and removed a photograph, holding it up for Gabriel to see. "The other possibility," he said, "is this Martin Luther. He was a high-school dropout and furniture mover who joined the Nazi Party in the twenties. By chance, he met the wife of Joachim von Ribbentrop during the redecoration of her villa in Berlin. Luther ingratiated himself with Frau von Ribbentrop, then her husband. When Ribbentrop became foreign minister in 1938, Luther got a job at the ministry."

Gabriel took the photograph from Lavon and looked at it. A rodent of a man stared back at him: a slack face; thick glasses that magnified a pair of rheumy eyes. He handed the photo back to Lavon.

"Luther rose rapidly through the ranks of the Foreign Office, largely because of his slavish devotion to Ribbentrop. By 1940, he was chief of the Abteilung Deutschland, the Division That made Luther responsible for all Foreign Office business connected to Nazi Party affairs. Included in Luther's Abteilung Deutschland was a department called D-Three, the Jewish desk."

"So what you're saying is that Martin Luther was in charge of Jewish matters inside the German Foreign Office."

"Precisely," Lavon said. "What Luther lacked in education and intelligence, he made up for in ruthlessness and ambition. He was interested in only one thing: increasing his own personal power. When it became clear to him that the annihilation of the Jews was a top priority of the regime, he set out to make certain that the Foreign Office wasn't going to be left out of the action. His reward was an invitation to the most despicable luncheon in history."

Lavon paused for a moment to leaf through the contents of the file. After a moment he found what he was looking for, removed it with a flourish, and laid it on the coffee table in front of Gabriel.

"This is the protocol from the Wannsee Conference, prepared and drafted by its organizer, none other than Adolf Eichmann. Only thirty copies were made. All were destroyed but one--copy number sixteen. It was discovered after the war during the preparation for the Nuremberg Trials and resides in the archives of the German Foreign Ministry in Bonn. This, of course, is a photocopy."

Lavon picked up the document. "The meeting was held in a villa overlooking the Wannsee in Berlin on January 20, 1942. It lasted ninety minutes. There were fifteen participants. Eichmann served a$ host and made sure his guests were well fed. Heydrich served as master of ceremonies. Contrary to popular myth, the Wannsee Conference was not the place where the idea of the Final Solution was hatched. Hitler and Himmler had already decided that the Jews of Europe were to be exterminated. The Wannsee Conference was  more like a bureaucratic planning session, a discussion of how the various departments of the Nazi Party and German government could work together to facilitate the Holocaust."

Lavon handed the document to Gabriel. "Look at the list of participants. Recognize any of the names?"

Gabriel cast his eyes down the attendees:

Gauleiter Dr. Meyer and Reichsamtleiter Dr. Leibbrandt,

Reich Ministry for the Occupied Eastern Territories Staatssekretar Dr. Stuckart, Reich Ministry of the

Interior Staatssekretar Neumann, Plenipotentiary for the Four

Year Plan

Staatssekretar Dr. Freisler, Reich Ministry of Justice Staatssekretar Dr. Buhler, Office of the General

Government Unterstaatssekretar Dr. Luther, Foreign Office

Gabriel looked up at Lavon. "Luther was at Wannsee?"

"Indeed, he was. And he got exactly what he so desperately wanted. Heydritch mandated that the Foreign Office would play a pivotal role in facilitating deportations of Jews from countries allied with Nazi Germany and from German satellites such as Croatia and Slovakia."

"I thought the SS handled the deportations."

"Let me back up a moment." Lavon leaned over the coffee table and placed his hands on the surface, as though it were a map of Europe. "The vast majority of Holocaust victims were from Poland, the Baltics, and western Russia--places conquered and ruled directly by the Nazis. They rounded up Jews and slaughtered them without any interference from other governments, because there were no other governments."

Lavon paused, one hand sliding over the imaginary map to the south, the other to the west. "But Heydrich and Eichmann weren't satisfied with murdering only the Jews under direct German rule. They wanted every Jew in Europe--eleven million in all." Lavon tapped his right forefinger on the table. "The Jews in the Balkans"-- he tapped his left forefinger--"and the Jews in Western Europe. In most of these places, they had to deal with local governments to pry the Jews loose for deportation and extermination. Luther's section of the Foreign Office was responsible for that. It was Luther's job to deal with the local governments on a ministry-to-ministry basis to make certain that the deportations went smoothly and all diplomatic niceties were adhered to. And he was damned good at it."

"For argument's sake, let's assume the old man was referring to this Martin Luther. What would he have been doing at a convent in northern Italy?"

Lavon shrugged his narrow shoulders. "It sounds to me as if the old man was trying to tell you that something happened at the convent during the war. Something that Sister Vincenza is trying to cover up. Something that Beni knew about."

"Something that got him killed?"

Lavon shrugged. "Maybe."

"Who would be willing to kill a man over a book?"

Lavon hesitated, taking a moment to slip the protocol of the Wannsee Conference back into the file. Then he looked up at Gabriel, eyes narrowed, and drew a deep breath.

"There was one government in particular that Eichmann and Luther were concerned about. It maintained diplomatic relations with both the Allies and Nazi Germany during the war. It had representatives

 in all of the countries where the roundups and deportations were taking place--representatives who could have made the task more difficult had they chosen to forcefully intervene. For obvious reasons, Eichmann and Luther considered it critical that this government not raise objections. Hitler considered this government so pivotal that he dispatched the second-ranking official at the Foreign Office, Baron Ernst von Weizacker, to serve as his ambassador. Do you know which government I'm talking about, Gabriel?"

Gabriel closed his eyes. "The Vatican."

"Indeed."

"So who are the clowns that have been following me?"

"That's a very good question."

Gabriel crossed the room to Lavon's desk, lifted the receiver of the telephone, and dialed a number. Lavon did not need to ask who Gabriel was calling. He could see it in the determined set of his jaw and the tension in his hands. When a man is being stalked by an enemy he does not know, it is best to have a friend who knows how to fight dirty.

THE MAN STANDING on the steps of Vienna's famed Konzerthaus radiated open-air Austrian good looks and Viennese sophistication. Had anyone spoken to him, he would have replied in perfect German, with the lazy inflection of a well-heeled young man who had spent many happy hours sampling the Bohemian delights of Vienna. He was not Austrian, nor had he been raised in Vienna. His name was Ephraim Ben-Avraham, and he had spent his childhood in a dusty settlement deep in the Negev, a place far removed from the world in which he moved now.