The Fallen Angel

appeared that Claudia had spent the night in a hotel in Ladispoli, a drab seaside resort just north of Rome. Gabriel had passed through the town once in another lifetime. He recalled little of the place other than mediocre restaurants and a beach the color of asphalt. He returned the bill to its envelope and sat there for several minutes, a single question turning over in his mind. Why would a woman like Claudia Andreatti spend the night in a hotel on the Italian coast, just thirty minutes from her own apartment, in the middle of winter? He could think of only two possible explanations. The first involved love. The second was the reason she was dead.

7
     
    VATICAN CITY
     
    T HEY HELD THE FUNERAL MASS on the third day, in the Church of St. Anne. The Holy Father did not attend, but after much quiet debate, it was decided somewhere within the halls of the Apostolic Palace that the papal private secretary would officiate. Gabriel entered the church as Donati, cloaked in white vestments, led the mourners in the recitation of the Penitential Act. Paola Andreatti sat silently in the second row, her face expressionless. Her presence made Claudia’s colleagues visibly uneasy; it was as if the soul of the departed had decided to attend her own burial. At the conclusion of the mass, as she followed the casket slowly into the Via Belvedere, she passed Gabriel without a glance. A few seconds later, Donati did the same.
    The restoration lab was officially closed that day, but Gabriel decided to use the opportunity to spend a few uninterrupted hours alone with the Caravaggio. Shortly after four o’clock, he received a text message from Father Mark, Donati’s assistant, asking him to come to a café just beyond the walls of the Vatican on the Borgo Pio. When Gabriel arrived, the young priest was contemplating the screen of his BlackBerry at a table near the window. Father Mark was an American from Philadelphia. He had a face like an altar boy and the eyes of someone who never lost at cards, which was why he worked for Donati.
    “A gift from the monsignor,” he said, handing Gabriel a small plastic bag from the Vatican bookstore.
    “A collection of the Holy Father’s encyclicals?”
    Father Mark frowned. He didn’t like jokes about His Holiness. He didn’t like Gabriel much, either.
    “It’s all of Dr. Andreatti’s research into the entire antiquities collection, just as you requested.”
    “All in this little bag? How miraculous.”
    “Thumb drives,” the priest explained pedantically. Father Mark might have had a sense of humor once, but it had been scrubbed away by eight years of seminary training.
    “What about her phone records?”
    “I’m working on it.”
    “E-mail?”
    “This is the Vatican we’re talking about. These things take time.” Nothing registered on the young priest’s angelic face. Even Gabriel couldn’t tell whether he was holding a straight flush or a pair of deuces. “The monsignor would like to know how you intend to proceed with your inquiry,” he said, checking his BlackBerry.
    “The first thing I’m going to do is go blind reading several thousand pages of documentation regarding the provenance of your antiquities collection.”
    “And then?”
    “Tell the monsignor he’ll be the first to know.”
    The priest stood abruptly and, citing an urgent matter requiring his attention, headed back to the Vatican. Gabriel slipped the plastic bag into his coat pocket, hesitated for a moment, and then autodialed a number on his BlackBerry. A gruff male voice answered in Hebrew. Gabriel murmured a few words in the same language and quickly severed the connection before the man at the other end could object. Then he sat there as night fell over the narrow street, wondering whether he had just made his first mistake.
     
     
    There were few more thankless jobs than to be the declared chief of an Office station in Western Europe. Shimon Pazner, head of the generously staffed post inside the Israeli Embassy in Rome, had borne that burden longer than most. His tenure had coincided with a precipitous slide in Israel’s public standing among Europeans of every stripe. Where once his country was regarded as a minor irritant, Europeans now viewed the Zionist enterprise with almost universal contempt and scorn. Israel was no longer a beacon of democracy in a troubled Middle East; it was an illegitimate rogue, an occupier, and a threat to world peace. Famously undiplomatic, Pazner had done little