Protocols of the Elders of Rome

By YAEL GOLDSTEIN

THE CONFESSOR
By Daniel Silva.
400 pages. Putnam. $25.95.

"The Jews are a frightened people," Israel Zangwill, the turn of the century novelist and Zionist, once said. "Nineteen centuries of Christian love have broken their nerves." Zangwill would have gotten a real kick out of Daniel Silva's fearless Jews, who remain fearless in the face of a Christian love as nerve-rending as anything Torquemada cooked up. Murder, intrigue, a secret pact with the Nazis: Silva's is not a rosy picture of the contemporary Church. In the past Silva's spy thrillers have taken on such large topics as the Middle East peace process and Switzerland's behavior during World War II. Now, in The Confessor, he sets his sights on the Vatican and tries to answer the question: why was Pope Pius XII silent in the face of the greatest mass murder in history?

To even pose this question requires a not uncontroversial view of Church history, because Pius XII's silence is far from established fact. Silva's book is not a work of historical scholarship but a novel of international intrigue, and so perhaps he should not be faulted for glossing over the evidence in the Pope's favor. (The evidence he slights, though, is considerable, and can be found in most compelling form in Ronald J. Rychlak's 2000 book Hitler, the War, and the Jews.)

As a novel (if not as an accurate piece of historical writing), the book works brilliantly, and in Silva's deft hands what begins as a simple murder investigation explodes into an epic face-off between two of the world's oldest religions. Gabriel Allon, famed art restorer and Mossad legend, is called away from his work on a Bellini masterpiece in Venice to investigate the murder of his friend, Professor Benjamin Stern. At the crime scene Allon is struck by a single glaring fact: although Stern was known to be writing a book at the time of his death, there is nothing in his apartment to indicate the nature of his research–no notes, no dog-eared tomes, no computer files.

Realizing that the key to identifying Stern's murderer lies in discovering the topic of his interrupted book project, Allon sets off on a search that leads him all over Western Europe, into the arms of a beautiful Venetian Jewess, and into the deepest bowels of Vatican City. Through expert deductions and action-movie-worthy stunts, he manages to uncover what Professor Stern uncovered before him: the existence of Crux Vera, a secret cabal within the Catholic church, which since the 1930's has been bent on returning the Church to its medieval glory by whatever means necessary. The cabal is at the root of a great deal of the twentieth century's evils, including the Holocaust, and, of course, Stern's death, and they are now bent on killing the liberal and saintly new Pope as well because of the threat he poses to their world-dominating plans.

As in his previous books, Silva's strongest suit is his characters, who combine the irresistible largeness of great action heroes with the depth of many of the best characters of contemporary literary fiction. Allon has "the hands of a conjurer" and the uncanny ability to see "the underdrawings and layers of base paint" in both his restoration and spy work, but he is also possessed of a troubled past that gives rise to moments of subtle pondering as he jumps nimbly between adventures. Silva's villains, too, are not only richly drawn, but reluctantly almost likable. The world-famous assassin known as the Leopard is captivating for his pure simplicity of purpose and his lack of any comforting self-delusions, and Silva shows a chilling psychological acuity in narrating this monster's internal monologue. At one point the professional murderer reflects of his one longstanding human relationship, "Because they had killed together, he could make love to her without inhibitions." My favorite character by far, though, is the nefarious Crux Vera member and head of Vatican intelligence Carlo Casagrande, whose deep but divided faith leads him both to vile acts and small but significant redemptions. By the end of the book, I was beginning to think of the story as belonging to him much more than to the suave and self-assured Allon.

Yet despite richly drawn characters, crisp, graceful prose, and an intricately conceived plot, I found it difficult to lose myself entirely in the book because of just how far Silva takes the vilification of the Church traditionalists as exemplified by Crux Vera. A group of powerful coreligionists plotting in secret to take over the world? Where have I heard that one before?