The Fallen Angel

“Actually, it’s miserable. But that’s beside the point. I’m too busy to leave Rome.”

“So I’ve heard. I’ve also heard that your friend the monsignor asked you to have a look at the suicide in the Basilica while the body was still in situ.”

“Very impressive, Shimon. How did you know I was there?”

“Because Lorenzo Vitale told one of his old friends in the Guardia di Finanza. And that friend told one of his friends in the Italian security service. And the friend from the Italian security service told me. He also told me that if you step out of line, he’ll put you on the first plane out of town.”

“Tell him I’m living up to the letter and spirit of our agreement.”

“Is that why Donati’s assistant invited you to coffee this afternoon?”

“I see you’re monitoring my mobile phone again.”

“What makes you think I ever stopped?” Pazner walked in silence for a moment. “I don’t suppose that woman actually threw herself from the dome of the Basilica, did she?”

“No, Shimon, she didn’t.”

“Any idea why she was killed?”

“I have a theory, but I can’t pursue it without help.”

“What kind of help?”

“Forensic help,” replied Gabriel. “I need Unit 8200 to have a look under her fingernails.”

Unit 8200 was Israel’s signals intelligence service, the equivalent of the National Security Agency in the United States. Though formally under the command of the military chief of staff, it carried out tasks for all the Israeli intelligence and security agencies, including the Office. Its alumni included some of the most successful entrepreneurs in Israel’s thriving high-tech industry.

“Let me see if I understand this correctly,” Pazner said. “The State of Israel is currently facing existential threats too numerous to count, and you would like the Unit to expend valuable time and effort data-mining a dead Italian woman?”

Gabriel said nothing. Pazner exhaled heavily.

“How far back do you need them to go?”

“Six months. E-mails, browsing histories, data searches.”

Pazner ignited another cigarette and blew smoke at the moon. “If I had an ounce of common sense, I’d drop this down a very deep hole, and you with it. But now you owe me one, Gabriel. And I never forget a debt.”

“How can I ever possibly repay you, Shimon?”

“You can start by telling your wife to stop dropping my watchers when she’s running her errands. I put them there for her own good.”

“I’ll see what I can do. Anything else?”

“If you happen to spot a team of Hezbollah operatives walking around Rome, give me a call. But do me a favor, and leave your gun in your pocket. I have enough problems.”

8

PIAZZA DI SPAGNA, ROME

THEY APPROACHED THE CASE THE way they did most things in life, with the alert, operational calm of a covert team working in a hostile land. Their target was the killer of Claudia Andreatti. And now, with the arrival of her files from the Vatican, they had the means to begin their search. Still, they braced themselves for the prospect of disappointment. The files were a bit like intelligence. And Gabriel and Chiara knew that intelligence was often incomplete, contradictory, misleading, or a combination of all three.

They worked under the assumption that others were watching their every move, and conducted themselves accordingly. Gabriel in particular had no choice but to maintain his busy daily routine. He was a man of many faces and many different missions. To the youthful Swiss Guards who greeted him each morning at St. Anne’s Gate, he was a fellow soldier, a secret sentinel, and a sometime ally. To his colleagues in the restoration lab, he was the gifted but melancholic loner who spent his days behind his black curtain, alone with his Caravaggio and his demons. And to the Italian watchers who trailed him home each afternoon, he was a legendary operative with a past so tangled they knew only bits and pieces of the story. Upon entering the apartment, he would invariably find Chiara hunched over a stack of printouts. Gabriel would work by her side for several more hours before taking her into the streets of Rome for a late supper. They ate only in small restaurants frequented by locals and never spoke of the case outside the walls of the flat.

With each passing day, Claudia Andreatti slipped further from the public’s consciousness. The doubts surrounding the publicly stated circumstances of her death diminished, the stories disappeared from the newspapers, and even the most conspiracy-minded Web sites reluctantly concluded it was time to allow her troubled soul to rest in peace. But in the little apartment above the Spanish Steps, the questions persisted. Regrettably, the files given to Gabriel by Father Mark provided not a single answer. The institution they portrayed had been blessed by the fact that, for more than a millennium, the popes held direct sovereign rule over the Papal States, an archaeologically fertile land bursting with Etruscan, Greek, and Roman antiquities. Still, like traditional museums, the Vatican had supplemented its vast holdings by purchasing or inheriting private collections. Here was a potential area for trouble. What if, for example, a private collection contained material that had been illegally excavated or had no clear provenance? But after a thorough investigation, it appeared that Claudia had discovered nothing that would present the Vatican with any legal or ethical problems. In fact, according to the documents, the hands of the Holy See were remarkably clean.

“I suppose there’s a first for everything,” Chiara said. “It looks as though the Vatican has the only museum in the world without a stolen statue hidden somewhere in its basement.”

“They have enough other problems,” said Gabriel.

“So what do we do now?”

“We wait for the Unit to fill in the missing pieces of the puzzle.”

It would not be a long wait. Indeed, the following evening, one of Shimon Pazner’s underlings drew alongside Gabriel on the Via Condotti and handed over a flash drive containing six months’ worth of e-mail from Claudia Andreatti’s accounts. The next night, it was the browsing history from her IP address, along with a complete list of her Internet searches. The material provided a shockingly intimate window into the life of a woman whom Gabriel had known only in passing—news stories she had read, video clips she had watched, the secret desires she had confessed to the little white box of Google. They could see that she preferred French undergarments to Italian, that she enjoyed the music of Diana Krall and Sara Bareilles, and that she was a regular reader of the New York Times, as well as the Web log of a well-known Catholic dissident. She seemed intrigued by the prospect of traveling to New Zealand and the west coast of Ireland. She suffered from chronic back pain. She wanted to lose ten pounds.

Wherever possible, Gabriel and Chiara averted their eyes, but for the most part, they pored over her online musings as though they were fragments of stone tablets from a lost civilization. They found nothing to suggest that she was contemplating suicide or that anyone might want her dead—no jealous lovers, no debts, no personal or professional crises of any kind. Claudia Andreatti, it seemed, was the most contented woman in all of Rome.

The final batch of material from the Unit contained the records from Claudia’s mobile phone. They revealed that during the final weeks of her life, she placed several calls to a number in Cerveteri, a midsize Italian town north of Rome known for its Etruscan tombs. Perhaps not coincidentally, it was just a few miles inland from the seaside resort of Ladispoli. At Gabriel’s request, the Unit tracked down the name and address of the person associated with the number: Roberto Falcone, 22 Via Lombardia.

Late the following morning, Gabriel and Chiara walked to the bustling Stazione Termini and boarded a train to Venice. One minute before departure, they calmly exited the carriage and returned to the crowded ticket hall. As expected, the two watchers who had followed them from the Piazza di Spagna were gone. Now free of surveillance, they made their way to a nearby parking garage where Shimon Pazner kept an Office Mercedes sedan on permanent standby. Twenty minutes elapsed before the car finally came squealing up the steep ramp, though Gabriel uttered not a word of protest. To be a motorist in Rome was to suffer minor indignities in silence.

After crossing the river, Gabriel followed the walls of the Vatican to the entrance of the Via Aurelia. It bore them westward, past mile after mile of tired-looking apartment blocks, to the A12 Autostrada. From there it was only a dozen miles to Cerveteri. Gabriel spent much of the drive glancing into his rearview mirror.

“Anyone following us?” asked Chiara.

“Just five of the worst drivers in Italy.”

“What do you think is going to happen when that train arrives in Venice and we’re not on it?”

“I suspect there will be recriminations.”

“For them or us?”

A road sign warned that the turnoff for Cerveteri was approaching. Gabriel exited the motorway and spent several minutes driving through the town’s ancient center before making his way to the house located just beyond the city limits at 22 Via Lombardia. It was a modest two-level villa, set back from the road, with a flaking ocher exterior and faded green shutters that hung at a slightly drunken angle. On one side was an orchard; on the other, a small vineyard pruned for winter. Behind the villa, next to a tumbledown outbuilding, was a battered station wagon with dust-covered windows. A German shepherd snapped and snarled at them from the trampled front garden. It looked as though it hadn’t eaten in several days.

“All in all,” said Gabriel, staring morosely at the dog, “it’s not the sort of place one would normally expect to find a museum curator.”

He dialed Falcone’s number from his mobile phone. After five rings without an answer, he severed the connection.

“What now?” asked Chiara.

“We give him an hour. Then we come back.”

“Where are we going to wait?”

“Somewhere we won’t stick out.”

“That’s not so easy in a town like this,” she said.