The Fallen Angel

art who by accident of birth had been compelled to lead a clandestine life of violence. Despite those obvious differences, they had much in common. Both were men of high morals and principle, and both believed that matters of consequence were best handled in private. During their long friendship, Gabriel had acted as both the Vatican’s protector and a revealer of some of its darkest secrets—and Donati, the Holy Father’s hard man in black, had served as his willing accomplice. As a result, the two men had done much to quietly improve the tortured relationship between the world’s Catholics and their twelve million distant spiritual cousins, the Jews.
    Gabriel stood wordlessly at Donati’s side and gazed up at The Last Judgment . Near the center of the image, adjacent to the left foot of Christ, was one of two self-portraits Michelangelo had hidden within the frescoes. Here he had depicted himself as St. Bartholomew holding his own flayed skin, perhaps a not-so-subtle rejoinder to contemporary critics of his work.
    “I assume you’ve been here before,” said Donati, his sonorous voice echoing in the empty chapel.
    “Just once,” said Gabriel after a moment. “It was in the autumn of 1972, long before the restoration. I was posing as a German student traveling Europe. I came here in the afternoon and stayed until the guards forced me to leave. The next day . . .”
    His voice trailed off. The next day, with Michelangelo’s vision of the end times still fresh in his mind, Gabriel entered the foyer of a drab apartment building in the Piazza Annibaliano. Standing before the elevator, a bottle of fig wine in one hand and a copy of A Thousand and One Nights in the other, was a skinny Palestinian intellectual named Wadal Zwaiter. The Palestinian was a member of the terrorist group Black September, perpetrators of the Munich Olympics massacre, and for that he had been secretly sentenced to death. Gabriel had calmly asked Zwaiter to say his name aloud. Then he had shot him eleven times, once for each Israeli butchered at Munich. In the months that followed, Gabriel would assassinate five other members of Black September, the opening act of a distinguished career that lasted far longer than he ever intended. Working at the behest of his mentor, the legendary spymaster Ari Shamron, he had carried out some of the most fabled operations in the history of Israeli intelligence. Now, blown and battered, he had returned to Rome, to the place where it all began. And one of the few people in the world he could trust was a Catholic priest named Luigi Donati.
    Gabriel turned his back to The Last Judgment and gazed down the length of the rectangular chapel, past the frescoes by Botticelli and Perugino, toward the little potbellied stove where ballots were burned during papal conclaves. Then he recited, “ ‘The House which King Solomon built for the Lord was sixty cubits long, twenty cubits wide, and thirty cubits high.’ ”
    “Kings,” said Donati. “Chapter six, verse two.”
    Gabriel lifted his face toward the ceiling. “Your forefathers built this rather simple chapel to the exact dimensions of the Temple of Solomon for a reason. But why? Did they wish to pay tribute to their elder brothers the Jews? Or were they declaring that the old law had been superseded by the new law, that the ancient temple had been brought to Rome, along with the sacred contents of the Holy of Holies?”
    “Perhaps it was a little of both,” said Donati philosophically.
    “How diplomatic of you, Monsignor.”
    “I was trained as a Jesuit. Obfuscation is our strong suit.”
    Gabriel pondered his wristwatch. “It’s rather late in the morning for this place to be empty.”
    “Yes,” Donati said absently.
    “Where are the tourists, Luigi?”
    “For the moment, only the museums are open to the public.”
    “Why?”
    “We have a problem.”
    “Where?”
    Donati frowned and tilted his head toward the left.
     
     
    The stairwell leading from the glory of the Sistine Chapel to the most magnificent church in Christendom is decidedly ugly. A gray-green tube with slick cement walls, it deposited Gabriel and Donati into the Basilica, not far from the Chapel of the Pietà. In the center of the nave, a yellow tarpaulin was spread over the unmistakable form of a human corpse. Standing over it were two men. Gabriel knew them both. One was Colonel Alois Metzler, commandant of the Pontifical Swiss Guard. The other was Lorenzo Vitale, chief