THEY APPROACHED THE CASE THE way they did most things in life, with the alert, operational calm of a covert team working in a hostile land. Their target was the killer of Claudia Andreatti. And now, with the arrival of her files from the Vatican, they had the means to begin their search. Still, they braced themselves for the prospect of disappointment. The files were a bit like intelligence. And Gabriel and Chiara knew that intelligence was often incomplete, contradictory, misleading, or a combination of all three.
They worked under the assumption that others were watching their every move, and conducted themselves accordingly. Gabriel in particular had no choice but to maintain his busy daily routine. He was a man of many faces and many different missions. To the youthful Swiss Guards who greeted him each morning at St. Anne’s Gate, he was a fellow soldier, a secret sentinel, and a sometime ally. To his colleagues in the restoration lab, he was the gifted but melancholic loner who spent his days behind his black curtain, alone with his Caravaggio and his demons. And to the Italian watchers who trailed him home each afternoon, he was a legendary operative with a past so tangled they knew only bits and pieces of the story. Upon entering the apartment, he would invariably find Chiara hunched over a stack of printouts. Gabriel would work by her side for several more hours before taking her into the streets of Rome for a late supper. They ate only in small restaurants frequented by locals and never spoke of the case outside the walls of the flat.
With each passing day, Claudia Andreatti slipped further from the public’s consciousness. The doubts surrounding the publicly stated circumstances of her death diminished, the stories disappeared from the newspapers, and even the most conspiracy-minded Web sites reluctantly concluded it was time to allow her troubled soul to rest in peace. But in the little apartment above the Spanish Steps, the questions persisted. Regrettably, the files given to Gabriel by Father Mark provided not a single answer. The institution they portrayed had been blessed by the fact that, for more than a millennium, the popes held direct sovereign rule over the Papal States, an archaeologically fertile land bursting with Etruscan, Greek, and Roman antiquities. Still, like traditional museums, the Vatican had supplemented its vast holdings by purchasing or inheriting private collections. Here was a potential area for trouble. What if, for example, a private collection contained material that had been illegally excavated or had no clear provenance? But after a thorough investigation, it appeared that Claudia had discovered nothing that would present the Vatican with any legal or ethical problems. In fact, according to the documents, the hands of the Holy See were remarkably clean.
“I suppose there’s a first for everything,” Chiara said. “It looks as though the Vatican has the only museum in the world without a stolen statue hidden somewhere in its basement.”
“They have enough other problems,” said Gabriel.
“So what do we do now?”
“We wait for the Unit to fill in the missing pieces of the puzzle.”
It would not be a long wait. Indeed, the following evening, one of Shimon Pazner’s underlings drew alongside Gabriel on the Via Condotti and handed over a flash drive containing six months’ worth of e-mail from Claudia Andreatti’s accounts. The next night, it was the browsing history from her IP address, along with a complete list of her Internet searches. The material provided a shockingly intimate window into the life of a woman whom Gabriel had known only in passing—news stories she had read, video clips she had watched, the secret desires she had confessed to the little white box of Google. They could see that she preferred French undergarments to Italian, that she enjoyed the music of Diana Krall and Sara Bareilles, and that she was a regular reader of the
Wherever possible, Gabriel and Chiara averted their eyes, but for the most part, they pored over her online musings as though they were fragments of stone tablets from a lost civilization. They found nothing to suggest that she was contemplating suicide or that anyone might want her dead—no jealous lovers, no debts, no personal or professional crises of any kind. Claudia Andreatti, it seemed, was the most contented woman in all of Rome.
The final batch of material from the Unit contained the records from Claudia’s mobile phone. They revealed that during the final weeks of her life, she placed several calls to a number in Cerveteri, a midsize Italian town north of Rome known for its Etruscan tombs. Perhaps not coincidentally, it was just a few miles inland from the seaside resort of Ladispoli. At Gabriel’s request, the Unit tracked down the name and address of the person associated with the number: Roberto Falcone, 22 Via Lombardia.
Late the following morning, Gabriel and Chiara walked to the bustling Stazione Termini and boarded a train to Venice. One minute before departure, they calmly exited the carriage and returned to the crowded ticket hall. As expected, the two watchers who had followed them from the Piazza di Spagna were gone. Now free of surveillance, they made their way to a nearby parking garage where Shimon Pazner kept an Office Mercedes sedan on permanent standby. Twenty minutes elapsed before the car finally came squealing up the steep ramp, though Gabriel uttered not a word of protest. To be a motorist in Rome was to suffer minor indignities in silence.
After crossing the river, Gabriel followed the walls of the Vatican to the entrance of the Via Aurelia. It bore them westward, past mile after mile of tired-looking apartment blocks, to the A12 Autostrada. From there it was only a dozen miles to Cerveteri. Gabriel spent much of the drive glancing into his rearview mirror.
“Anyone following us?” asked Chiara.
“Just five of the worst drivers in Italy.”
“What do you think is going to happen when that train arrives in Venice and we’re not on it?”
“I suspect there will be recriminations.”
“For them or us?”
A road sign warned that the turnoff for Cerveteri was approaching. Gabriel exited the motorway and spent several minutes driving through the town’s ancient center before making his way to the house located just beyond the city limits at 22 Via Lombardia. It was a modest two-level villa, set back from the road, with a flaking ocher exterior and faded green shutters that hung at a slightly drunken angle. On one side was an orchard; on the other, a small vineyard pruned for winter. Behind the villa, next to a tumbledown outbuilding, was a battered station wagon with dust-covered windows. A German shepherd snapped and snarled at them from the trampled front garden. It looked as though it hadn’t eaten in several days.
“All in all,” said Gabriel, staring morosely at the dog, “it’s not the sort of place one would normally expect to find a museum curator.”
He dialed Falcone’s number from his mobile phone. After five rings without an answer, he severed the connection.
“What now?” asked Chiara.
“We give him an hour. Then we come back.”
“Where are we going to wait?”
“Somewhere we won’t stick out.”
“That’s not so easy in a town like this,” she said.
“Any suggestions?”
“Just one.”
The Necropoli della Banditaccia lay to the north of the city, at the end of a long, narrow drive lined with cypress pine. In the car park was a kiosk-style coffee bar and café. A few steps away, in a featureless building that looked oddly temporary, were an admissions office and a small gift shop. The lone attendant, a birdlike woman with enormous spectacles, seemed startled to see them. Evidently, they were the first visitors of the day.
Gabriel and Chiara surrendered the modest admission fee and were given a handwritten map, which they were expected to return at the end of their visit. Playing the role of tourists, they descended into the first tomb and gazed at the cold, empty burial chambers. After that, they remained on the surface, wandering the labyrinth of beehive-shaped tombs, alone in the ancient city of the dead.
To help pass the time, Chiara lectured quietly on the subject of the Etruscans—a mysterious people, deeply religious but rumored to be sexually decadent, who treated men and women as social equals. Highly advanced in the arts and sciences, Etruscan craftsmen taught the Romans how to pave their roads and construct their aqueducts and sewers, a debt the Romans repaid by wiping the Etruscans from the face of the earth. Now little remained of their once-flourishing civilization other than their tombs, which is precisely what they had intended. The Etruscans had fashioned their homes of transitory materials, but their necropolises were built to last forever. In the rooms of the dead they had placed vessels, utensils, and jewelry—treasures that now were displayed in the world’s
