Page 77 of The Order

“What’s that, Eli?”

“Our Olympic team should never have been assigned to this building. It was too isolated. We expressed our concerns to the Germans a few weeks before the Games began, but they assured us our athletes would be safe. Unfortunately, they neglected to tell us that German intelligence had already received a tip from a Palestinian informant that the Israeli team had been targeted.”

“It must have slipped their minds.”

“Why didn’t they warn us? Why didn’t they take steps to protect our athletes?”

“You tell me.”

“They didn’t tell us,” said Lavon, “because they didn’t want anything to spoil their postwar coming-out party, least of all a threat against the descendants of the same people they had tried to exterminate just thirty years before. Remember, the German intelligence and security services were founded by men like Reinhard Gehlen. Men who had worked for Hitler and the Nazis. Men of the right who hated communism and Jews in equal measure. It’s no wonder they were attracted to someone like Andreas Estermann.” He turned to Gabriel. “Did you happen to notice the last job he held before his retirement?”

“Head of Department Two, the counterextremism division.”

“So why is he spending so much time on the phone with the likes of Axel Brünner? And why does he have the private cell number of every far-right leader in Europe?” Lavon paused. “And why did he turn off his phone for three hours in Bonn the other night?”

“Maybe he has a girlfriend there.”

“Estermann? He’s a choirboy.”

“A doctrinaire choirboy.”

Lavon lifted his gaze once more toward the facade of the building. A light was burning in the window of apartment 1. “Do you ever imagine how differently our lives would have turned out if it hadn’t happened?”

“Munich?”

“No,” answered Lavon. “Allof it. Two thousand years of hatred. We’d be as numerous as all the stars in the sky and the sand on the seashore, just as God promised Abraham. I’d beliving in a grand apartment in the First District of Vienna, a leader in my field, a man of distinction. I’d spend my afternoons sipping coffee and eating strudel at Café Sacher, and my evenings listening to Mozart and Haydn. Occasionally, I’d visit an art gallery and see works by a famous Berlin painter named Gabriel Frankel, the son of Irene Frankel, the grandson of Viktor Frankel, perhaps the greatest German painter of the twentieth century. Who knows? Perhaps I might even be wealthy enough to purchase one or two of his works.”

“I’m afraid life doesn’t work that way, Eli.”

“I suppose not. But would it be too much to ask for them to stop hating us? Why is anti-Semitism on the rise again in Europe? Why is it not safe to be a Jew in this country? Why has the shame of the Holocaust worn off? Why won’t it ever end?”

“Nine words,” said Gabriel.

A silence fell between them. It was Lavon who broke it.

“Where do you suppose it is?”

“The Gospel of Pilate?”

Lavon nodded.

“Up a chimney.”

“How appropriate.” Lavon’s tone was uncharacteristically bitter. He started to light a cigarette but stopped himself. “It goes without saying that the Nazis were the ones who annihilated the Jews of Europe. But they could not have carried out the Final Solution unless Christianity had first plowed the soil. Hitler’s willing executioners had been conditioned by centuries of Church teachings about the evils of the Jews. Austrian Catholics made up a disproportionate share of the death camp officers, and the survival rates for Jews were far lower in Catholic countries.”

“But thousands of Catholics risked their lives to protect us.”

“Indeed, they did. They chose to act on their own initiative rather than wait for encouragement from their pope. As a result, they saved their Church from the moral abyss.” Lavon’s eyes searched the old Olympic Village. “We should be getting back to the safe house. It will be dark soon.”

“It already is,” said Gabriel.

Lavon finally lit his cigarette. “Why do you suppose he switched off his phone for three hours the other night?”

“Estermann?”

Lavon nodded.

“I don’t know,” answered Gabriel. “But I intend to ask him.”