The Fallen Angel (31 page)

50

VATICAN CITY

D
ONATI RANG
C
ARLO
M
ARCHESE LATE
the following afternoon and said the Vicar of Christ wanted a word.

“When?” asked Carlo.

“Tonight.”

“I have something.”

“Cancel it.”

“What time?”

“Nine o'clock,” said Donati. “The Bronze Doors.”

The time had not been chosen at random, but Carlo appeared not to notice. Nor did he seem to think it was odd when he found Father Mark waiting to greet him. Carlo was the kind of man who didn't have to stop at the Permissions Desk on his way into the building. Carlo could find his own way from the Bronze Doors to the papal apartments.

“This way,” said Father Mark, taking Carlo's elbow with a grip that indicated he had been lifting more than just a communion chalice. He led him up the Scala Regia and into the Sistine Chapel. There they passed beneath Michelangelo's
Last Judgment
, with its swirling vision of the Apocalypse and the Second Coming of Christ, before heading down the gray-green tube to the Basilica. As they crossed to the other side of the soaring nave, Carlo began to show his first signs of agitation. It increased sharply when Father Mark informed him they would be taking the stairs to the dome rather than the elevator. The stairs were General Ferrari's idea. He wanted Carlo to suffer, even in a small way, on his way to absolution.

The climb took slightly more than five minutes. As they reached the landing at the top of the stairs, Carlo tried to pause in order to catch his breath, but Father Mark nudged him into the gallery of the dome. A raincoated figure stood at the balustrade, peering downward toward the floor of the Basilica. As Carlo entered, the figure turned and regarded him without a word. Carlo froze and then recoiled.

“Something wrong, Carlo? You look as though you just saw a ghost.”

Carlo spun round and saw Gabriel standing where Father Mark had been.

“What is this, Allon?”

“Judgment, Carlo.”

Gabriel went to Paola's side. She was staring downward again, as though oblivious to Gabriel's presence.

“This is where Claudia was standing when she died. Whoever murdered her approached her from behind and broke her neck before throwing her over the barrier to make it look like a suicide. That was the easy part. The hard part was getting her up to the gallery in the first place.” Gabriel paused. “But you managed to figure that out, didn't you, Carlo?”

“I had nothing to do with her death, Allon.”

Carlo's declaration of innocence echoed high in the dome before dying the death it deserved. His gaze was now fixed on Paola's neck. Gabriel placed a hand gently on her shoulder.

“She was scheduled to meet with Donati that night to tell him you were running your criminal empire from the Vatican Bank. But she canceled the meeting without explanation. She
canceled
it,” Gabriel added pointedly, “because someone told her to come to the dome of the Basilica. That person was going to give her the information she needed to destroy you. It was someone she trusted, someone she used to work with.” Gabriel paused again. “Someone like your wife.”

Carlo seemed to be trying to regain his composure, but Paola's presence wouldn't permit it. He was still staring at her neck. As a result, he didn't notice General Ferrari standing a few feet behind him.

“Sometime that evening,” Gabriel resumed, “Claudia received a text message from Veronica asking her to come here. She called Veronica's cell a few minutes before nine, but there was no answer. That's because Veronica didn't have her cell.
You
did, Carlo.”

“You can't prove any of this, Allon.”

“Remember where you're standing, Carlo.”

Paola gave Carlo an accusatory glare before setting off on a slow tour of the gallery.

“But who to trust with the job of actually killing your wife's best friend?” Gabriel asked. “It had to be someone who could get inside the Vatican without much trouble, someone who didn't have to stop at the Permissions Desk before entering the palace.” Gabriel smiled. “Know anyone like that, Carlo?”

“You don't really believe I killed that poor girl with my own hands.”

“I
know
you did. And so does she,” Gabriel added with a glance at Paola. “Help her soul find peace, Carlo. Tell her that you killed her sister to protect your position at the Vatican Bank. Confess your sins.”

Paola's presence had clearly lost its hold over Carlo. He was now staring at Gabriel with the same arrogant smile he had worn the night he tried to have Gabriel and Chiara killed. He was once again Carlo the untouchable, Carlo the man without physical fear.

“You are a member of a very small club,” Gabriel said. “You are the only person who ever tried to kill my wife who is still walking this earth. If you would like to remain here with us, I would advise you to tender your resignation at the Vatican Bank immediately. But first,” he added, glancing again toward Paola, “I want you to tell her why you murdered her sister.”

“You can have my resignation but—”

“Your wife already knows,” Gabriel said, cutting him off. “I told her everything before the Holy Father left for Jerusalem. She believed me, because she remembered that on the night of Claudia's death she couldn't find her mobile.”

To bring an opponent's wife into play violated Gabriel's personal code of ethics, but the tactic had its intended effect. Carlo's face was now crimson with rage. Gabriel pressed his advantage.

“She's going to leave you, Carlo. In fact, if I had to guess, she's probably been thinking about it for some time. After all, she never loved you the way she loved Donati.”

That was enough to push Carlo's anger past the point of control. He blundered toward Gabriel in a blind fury, his face unrecognizable 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
New York Times
in December 2011, who first described Hezbollah as “the Gambinos on steroids,” not Uzi Navot, the fictitious chief of Israeli intelligence.

Massoud Rahimi, the Iranian intelligence officer who appears in
The Fallen Angel
, was created by the author, but his close ties to Hezbollah, a group often called the “A-team of terrorists,” are based entirely on fact. Hezbollah has carried out numerous acts of terror at Iran's behest and would surely play a prominent role in Iran's response to any attack on its nuclear weapons facilities. In fact, there is ample evidence to suggest Israel is already being targeted by Hezbollah for attempting to disrupt the Iranian nuclear program with acts of sabotage and assassination. In January 2012, authorities in Azerbaijan broke up a Hezbollah terror cell that had allegedly targeted the Israeli ambassador there and a rabbi from a local Jewish school. In February, Israeli diplomats in Georgia and India came under simultaneous attack. The next day, a bomb exploded in a Bangkok apartment, exposing an Iranian-Hezbollah cell that was preparing to kill Israeli diplomats in the Thai capital. But then, none of this should come as much of a surprise. In July 2006, Hossein Safiadeen, Hezbollah's representative in Tehran, announced the group intended to murder Israelis and Jews wherever it could find them, declaring ominously, “There will be no place they are safe.” Surely, the remark found favor with Iran's supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, who has called Israel a “cancerous tumor” that must be removed. This coming from a man who is seeking the capability to do just that with the push of a button.

The sacred plateau in Jerusalem referred to as the Temple Mount by Jews and the Haram al-Sharif by Muslims is indeed under the control of the Islamic Waqf. The southern retaining wall of the Mount did in fact develop a precarious bulge as a result of the construction of the Marwani Mosque, and the description of archaeologically rich debris being hurled into the Kidron Valley is, sadly, all too accurate. I utilized the work of the great British archaeologist Sir Charles Warren while writing the climax of the novel, though I granted myself much license to move my characters as needed. For example, the secret tunnel that Gabriel Allon and Eli Lavon used to gain access to the interior of the Mount was created by the author, and in no way was it based on truth.

Regrettably, the same cannot be said when it comes to the beliefs and opinions of some of those who serve as the caretakers of the most sacred parcel of land on earth. In 1999, Ekrima Sa'id Sabri, then the grand mufti of Jerusalem, declared that “the Jew” was plotting to destroy the Haram al-Sharif. “The Jew will get the Christian to do his work for him,” explained Sabri, who holds a doctorate from Cairo's al-Azhar University, Sunni Islam's most important center of study. “This is the way of the Jews. This is the way Satan manifests himself.” In 2000, shortly before Pope John Paul II made his historic pilgrimage to Israel that included a visit to the Temple Mount, Sabri denied the Holocaust had ever happened. “Six million Jews dead? No way. They were much fewer. Let's stop with this fairy tale exploited by Israel to capture international solidarity.” These were not the words of a fundamentalist cleric from an insignificant Salafist mosque. They were spoken by the man who controlled the third-holiest site in Islam.

It is little wonder, then, that Holocaust Denial is now mainstream thinking in the Arab and Islamic world, as is its first cousin, Temple Denial. Virtually the entire leadership of the Palestinian Authority—even some of those regarded as “moderates” in the West—deny there was ever an actual Jewish Temple atop the Temple Mount. At the Camp David summit in 2000, when President Bill Clinton worked tirelessly to negotiate a settlement to the Arab-Israeli conflict, Yasir Arafat baldly asserted the Temple had stood not in Jerusalem but in Nablus. His outburst stunned President Clinton, who responded, “As a Christian, I, too, believe that under the surface there are remains of Solomon's Temple.” Clinton's chief Middle East negotiator, Dennis Ross, would later say of Arafat's performance at the summit: “He created a new mythology by saying the Temple doesn't exist there. It was the only new idea he raised in fifteen days at Camp David.”

Clinton would make several more attempts to bring peace to the Middle East during the last days of his presidency, including the so-called Clinton Parameters, which he placed before the Israelis and Palestinians during a dramatic meeting in the Cabinet Room of the White House. A non-negotiable set of terms for a final agreement, the Parameters called for the creation of a Palestinian state in the Gaza Strip and 96 percent of the West Bank. The Temple Mount plateau, sacred to the three Abrahamic faiths, would have been included in the
Palestinian
state, while the Western Wall and Jewish Quarter of the Old City would have remained under Israeli control. Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak accepted the terms, but Yasir Arafat, after much dithering and equivocation, did not. In his memoirs, President Clinton was remarkably candid about his feelings toward the man whose “colossal mistake” had denied him a historic foreign policy achievement. “I am a failure,” he told Arafat during a bitter telephone conversation. “And you have made me one.”

But did the Temple of Solomon, as described in wondrous detail in Kings I and Chronicles, truly exist? The best way to answer that question would be to conduct a thorough but careful excavation of the entire Temple Mount plateau, with Israeli and Palestinian scholars working side by side, perhaps under United Nations supervision. Given Islamic sensitivities and current political realities, that is unlikely. So, too, is a settlement of the Arab-Israeli conflict, at least in the near future. At some point soon, Middle East watchers agree, there is likely to be another eruption of violence, a third intifada. Bombs will explode, bullets will fly, and children on both sides of the long and bloody contest over the twice-promised land will die. And to think it would have ended more than a decade ago if Yasir Arafat had only found the courage to speak a single word: “Yes.”