each other across the courtyard. Then he gave her a single soldierly nod and drew the shutters closed with
an emphatic thump.
They greeted each other properly the next morning at breakfast. After an exchange of polite but cool
pleasantries, he said he had come to the Villa dei Fiori for the purposes of work. Once that work began,
he explained, noise and interruptions were to be kept to a minimum, though he neglected to say precisely
what sort of work he would be doing or how they would know whether it had commenced. He then
forbade Margherita to enter his rooms under any circumstances and informed a devastated Anna he would
be seeing to his own meals. When recounting the details of the meeting for the rest of the staff, Margherita
described his demeanor as “standoffish.” Anna, who took an instant loathing to him, was far less
charitable in her depiction. “Unbearably rude,” she said. “The sooner he’s gone, the better.”
His life quickly acquired a strict routine. After a spartan breakfast of espresso and dry toast, he
would set out on a long forced march around the estate. At first, he snapped at the dogs when they
followed him, but eventually he seemed resigned to their company. He walked through the olive groves
and the sunflowers and even ventured into the woods. When Carlos pleaded with him to carry a shotgun
because of the wild boar, he calmly assured Carlos that he could look after himself.
After his walk, he would spend a few moments tending to his quartersand laundry, then prepare a
light lunch-usually a bit of bread and local cheese, pasta with canned tomato sauce if he was feeling
particularly adventurous. Then, after a vigorous swim in the pool, he would settle in the garden with a
bottle of Orvieto and a stack of books about Italian painters. His car, a battered Volkswagen Passat,
gathered a thick layer of dust, for not once did he set foot outside the estate. Anna went to market for him,
resentfully filling her basket with the air of a virtuoso forced to play a child’s simple tune. Once, she tried
to slip a few local delights past his defenses, but the next morning, when she arrived for work, the food
was waiting for her on the kitchen counter, along with a note explaining that she had left these things in his
refrigerator by mistake. The handwriting was exquisite.
As the days ground gloriously past, the nonperson called Alessio Vianelli, and the nature of his
mysterious work on behalf of the Holy Father, became something of an obsession for the staff of the Villa
dei Fiori. Margherita, a temperamental soul herself, thought him a missionary recently returned from some
hostile region of the world. Anna suspected a fallen priest who had been cast into Umbrian exile, but then
Anna was inclined to see the worst in him. Isabella, the ethereal half Swede who oversaw the horse
operation, believed him to be a recluse theologian at work on an important Church document. Carlos, the
Argentine cowboy who tended the cattle, reckoned he was an agent of Vatican intelligence. To support
this theory, he cited the nature of Signore Vianelli’s Italian, which, while fluent, was tinged with a faint
accent that spoke of many years in foreign lands. And then there were the eyes, which were an unnerving
shade of emerald green. “Take a look into them, if you dare,” Carlos said. “He has the eyes of a man who
knows death.”
During the second week, there were a series of events that clouded the mystery further. The first was
the arrival of a tall young woman with riotous auburn hair and eyes the color of caramel. She called
herself Francesca, spoke Italian with a pronounced Venetian accent, and proved to be a much-needed
breath of fresh air. She rode the horses-
“Quite well, actually,”
Isabella informed the others-and
organized elaborate games involving the goats and the dogs. She secretly permitted Margherita to clean
Signore Vianelli’s rooms and even encouraged Anna to cook. Whether they were husband and wife was
unclear. Margherita, however, was sure of two things: Signore Vianelli and Francesca were sharing the
same bed, and his mood had improved dramatically since her arrival.
And then there were the delivery trucks. The first dispensed a white table of the sort found in
professional laboratories; the second, a large microscope with a retractable arm. Then came a pair of
lamps that, when switched on, made the entire villa glow with an intense white light. Then it was a case
of chemicals that, when opened, made Margherita feel faint from the stench. Other parcels arrived in
rapid succession: two large easels of varnished oak from Venice, a strange-looking magnifying visor,
bundles of cotton wool, woodworking tools, dowels, brushes, professional-grade glue, and several dozen
vessels of pigment.
Finally, three weeks after Signore Vianelli’s arrival in Umbria, a dark green panel van eased its way
slowly up the tree-lined drive, followed by an official-looking Lancia sedan. The two vehicles had no
markings, but their distinct SCV license plates spoke of links to the Holy See. From the back of the van
emerged a vast, ghastly painting depicting a man being disemboweled. It was soon propped on the two
large easels in Count Gasparri’s drawing room.
Isabella, who had studied art history before devoting her life to horses, recognized the canvas
immediately as
Martyrdom of St. Erasmus
by the French painter Nicolas Poussin. Rendered in the style
of Caravaggio, it had been commissioned by the Vatican in 1628 and resided now in the Pinacoteca at the
Vatican Museums. That evening, at the staff dinner, she announced that the mystery was solved. Signore
Alessio Vianelli was a famous art restorer. And he had been retained by the Vatican to save a painting.
His days took on a distinctly monastic rhythm. He toiled from dawn till midday, slept through the
heat of the afternoon, then worked again from dusk until dinner. For the first week, the painting remained
on the worktable, where he examined the surface with the microscope, made a series of detailed
photographs, and performed structural reinforcements on the canvas and stretcher. Then he transferred the
canvas to the easels and began removing the surface grime and yellowed varnish. It was a markedly
tedious task. First he would fashion a swab, using a blob of cotton wool and a wooden dowel; then he
would dip the swab in solvent and twirl it over the surface of the painting-
gently
, Isabella explained to
the others, so as not to cause any additional flaking of the paint. Each swab could clean about a square
inch of the painting. When it became too soiled to use any longer, he would drop it on the floor at his feet
and start the process over again. Margherita likened it to cleaning the entire villa with a toothbrush. “No
wonder he’s so peculiar,” she said. “His work drives him mad.”
When he finished removing the old varnish, he covered the canvas in a coat of isolating varnish and
began the final phase of the restoration, retouching those portions of the painting that had been lost to time
and stress. So perfect was his mimicry of Poussin that it was impossible to tell where the painter’s work
ended and his began. He even added faux craquelure, the fine webbing of surface cracks, so that the new
faded flawlessly into the old. Isabella knew enough of the Italian art community to realize Signore
Vianelli was no ordinary restorer. He was special, she thought. It was no wonder the men of the Vatican
had entrusted him with their masterpiece.
But why was he working here at an isolated farm in the hills of Umbria instead of the state-of-the-art
conservation labs at the Vatican? She was pondering this question, on a brilliant afternoon in early June,
when she saw the restorer’s car speeding down the tree-lined drive. He gave her a curt, soldierly wave as
he went hurtling past the stables, then disappeared behind a cloud of pale gray dust. Isabella spent the
remainder of the afternoon wrestling with a new question. Why, after remaining a prisoner of the villa for
five weeks, was he suddenly leaving for the first time? Though she would never know it, the restorer had
been summoned by other masters. As for the Poussin, he would never touch it again.
3 ASSISI, ITALY
Few Italian cities handle the crush of summer tourists more gracefully than Assisi. The packaged
pilgrims arrive in mid-morning and shuffle politely through the sacred streets until dusk, when they are
herded once more onto air-conditioned coaches and whisked back to their discount hotels in Rome.
Propped against the western ramparts of the city, the restorer watched a group of overfed German
stragglers tramp wearily through the stone archway of the Porto Nuova. Then he walked over to a
newspaper kiosk and bought a day-old copy of the
International Herald Tribune
. The purchase, like his
visit to Assisi, was professional in nature. The
Herald Tribune
meant his tail was clean. Had he
purchased
La Repubblica
, or any other Italian-language paper, it would have signified that he had been
followed by agents of the Italian security service, and the meeting would have been called off.
He tucked the newspaper beneath his arm, with the banner facing out, and walked along the Corso
Mazzini to the Piazza del Commune. At the edge of a fountain sat a girl in faded blue jeans and a gauzy
cotton top. She pushed her sunglasses onto her forehead and peered across the square toward the entrance
of the Via Portica. The restorer dropped the paper into a rubbish bin and set off down the narrow street.
The restaurant where he had been instructed to come was about a hundred yards from the Basilica di
San Francesco. He told the hostess he was meeting a man called Monsieur Laffont and was immediately
shown onto a narrow terrace with sweeping views of the Tiber River valley. At the end of the terrace,
reached by a flight of narrow stone steps, was a small patio with a single private table. Potted geraniums
stood along the edge of the balustrade and overhead stretched a canopy of flowering vines. Seated before
an open bottle of white wine was a man with cropped strawberry blond hair and the heavy shoulders of a
wrestler. Laffont was only a work name. His real name was Uzi Navot, and he held a senior post in the
secret intelligence service of the State of Israel. He was also one of the few people in the world who
knew that the Italian art restorer known as Alessio Vianelli was actually an Israeli from the Valley of
Jezreel named Gabriel Allon.
“Nice table,” said Gabriel as he took his seat.
“It’s one of the fringe benefits of this life. We know all the best tables in all the best restaurants in
Europe.”
Gabriel poured himself a glass of wine and nodded slowly. They did know all the best restaurants,
but they also knew all the dreary airport lounges, all the stinking rail platforms, and all the moth-eaten
transit hotels. The supposedly glamorous life of an Israeli intelligence agent was actually one of near-
constant travel and mind-numbing boredom broken by brief interludes of sheer terror. Gabriel Allon had
endured more such interludes than most agents. By association, so had Uzi Navot.
“I used to bring one of my sources here,” Navot said. “A Syrian who worked for the state-run
pharmaceutical company. His job was to secure supplies of chemicals and equipment from European
manufacturers. That was just a cover, of course. He was really working on behalf of Syria ’s chemical
and biological weapons program. We met here twice. I’d give him a suitcase filled with money and three
bottles of this delicious Umbrian sauvignon blanc and he’d tell me the regime’s darkest secrets.
Headquarters used to complain bitterly about the size of the checks.” Navot smiled and shook his head
slowly. “Those idiots in the Banking section would hand me a briefcase containing a hundred thousand
dollars without a second thought, but if I exceeded my meal allowance by so much as a shekel, the
heavens would open up. Such is the life of an accountant at King Saul Boulevard.”
King Saul Boulevard was the longtime address of Israel ’s foreign intelligence service. The service
had a long name that had very little to do with the true nature of its work. Men like Gabriel and Uzi Navot
referred to it as “the Office” and nothing else.
“Is he still on the payroll?”
“The Syrian?” Navot, playing the role of Monsieur Laffont, pulled his lips into a Parisian frown.
“I’m afraid he had something of a mishap a few years back.”
“What happened?” Gabriel asked cautiously. He knew that when individuals associated with the
Office had mishaps, it was usually fatal.
“A team of Syrian counterintelligence agents photographed him entering a bank in Geneva. He was
arrested at the airport in Damascus the next day and taken to the Palestine Branch.” The Palestine Branch
was the name of Syria ’s main interrogation center. “They tortured him viciously for a month. When they’d