The Fallen Angel

with rage, his arms outstretched. Gabriel took a lightning step to one side, leaving Carlo to careen over the balustrade. A hand reached out, flailing. Too late, Gabriel tried to grasp it. Then he seized Paola and covered her ears tightly so she couldn’t hear the sound of Carlo’s body colliding with the marble below. Only when General Ferrari had taken her out onto the roof terrace did Gabriel look over the side. There he saw the pope’s private secretary kneeling on the floor of the Basilica, his fingertips moving gently over Carlo’s forehead. Ego te absolvo . And then it was done.
     
     
    For the next two days, Gabriel remained a prisoner of his curtained little tomb at the far end of the restoration lab. The other members of the staff saw him rarely. He was there when they arrived in the morning, and he remained there, surrounded by a corona of brilliant halogen light, long after they left for the night. There were rumors of a disaster of some sort behind the shroud—an unexpected loss of Caravaggio’s original work, or perhaps a botched retouching. Enrico Bacci, still seething over his failure to secure the assignment, demanded a staff intervention, but Antonio Calvesi refused. Calvesi had heard the stories about the endless sessions before the canvas when the end was in sight. In fact, he had personally witnessed such an ordeal in Florence many years earlier, when Gabriel, then working under an assumed identity, had labored for twenty hours without a break to complete a Masaccio before his deadline. “There’s no problem,” Calvesi assured his faithless staff. “He’s just closing in on his target. Just be thankful it’s a painting and not a man.”
    And so it came to pass that on the morning of the third day, when the staff came trickling into the lab, they found the curtain of his workspace hanging open and the painting propped on an easel, looking as though it had just been completed by Caravaggio himself. The only thing missing was the man who had restored it. Calvesi spent an hour fruitlessly searching for him before heading up to the palace to personally deliver the news to Monsignor Donati. The Caravaggio was finally finished, he reported. And Gabriel Allon, renowned restorer of Old Master paintings, retired Israeli spy and assassin, and savior of the Holy Father, had vanished without a trace.

AUTHOR’S NOTE
     
    T he Fallen Angel is a work of fiction. The names, characters, places, and incidents portrayed in the story are the product of the author’s imagination or have been used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
    Those who have made the ascent to the dome of St. Peter’s Basilica will surely remember there is a wire suicide barrier along the edge of the viewing gallery. I removed it in order to make a murder, and an accidental fall, more plausible. The conservation laboratory of the Vatican Picture Gallery has been accurately rendered, though in no way do I mean to suggest there are any problems of provenance regarding the Vatican’s extraordinary collection of antiquities, even by today’s exacting curatorial standards. The Vatican Bank, however, has a long and well-documented history of financial transgressions. The latest occurred in September 2010, when Italian authorities conducting a money-laundering probe seized $30 million from the bank and placed two of its top officers under investigation. The following month, police in Sicily announced they had uncovered a money-laundering scheme that utilized the Vatican Bank account of a priest whose uncle had been convicted on charges of Mafia association.
    The headquarters of the Carabinieri’s Art Squad is in fact located in Rome’s Piazza di Sant’Ignazio, and the unit’s role in the investigation of convicted antiquities smuggler Giacomo Medici—and the recovery of the Euphronios Krater from New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art—has been faithfully portrayed. There is indeed an antiquities gallery on a picturesque square in St. Moritz, though I am quite confident it is in no way associated with the Shiite militant group Hezbollah. The Lebanon Byzantine Bank does not exist, but the Lebanese Canadian Bank does—and it is there, according to U.S. officials, that Hezbollah launders at least a portion of the money it earns through its global criminal fund-raising operations. It was an unnamed U.S. federal agent, speaking to the