The Fallen Angel

after a moment. “It’s a deliberately long and cumbersome process designed to give the wayward priest ample opportunity to change his mind. But eventually I found myself back in Umbria, living alone in a village near Monte Cucco. I spent my days climbing the mountains. I suppose I was hoping to find God up there among the peaks. But I found Veronica instead.”

“She’s the kind of woman who could restore a man’s faith in the divine.”

“In a way, she did.”

“What was she doing in Umbria?”

“She’d just completed her doctorate and was excavating the ruins of a Roman villa. We bumped into each other quite by accident in the town market. Within days, we were inseparable.”

“Did you tell her you’d been a priest?”

“I told her everything, including what had happened in Salvador. She took it upon herself to heal my wounds and to show me the real world—the world that had passed me by while I was locked away in the seminary. Before long, we began talking about marriage. Veronica was going to teach. I was going to work as an advocate for human rights. We had everything planned.”

“So what happened?”

“I met a man named Pietro Lucchesi.”

Pietro Lucchesi was the given name of His Holiness Pope Paul VII.

“It was shortly after he was appointed Patriarch of Venice,” Donati continued. “He was looking for someone to serve as his private secretary. He’d heard about a former Jesuit who was living like a recluse in Umbria. He arrived unannounced and said he had no intention of leaving until I agreed to return to the priesthood. We spent a week together walking in the mountains, arguing about God and the mysteries of faith. Needless to say, Lucchesi prevailed. Breaking the news to Veronica was the hardest thing I’ve ever done. She is the only woman I ever loved, or ever will.”

“Any regrets?”

“One wonders from time to time, but, no, I have no regrets. I suppose it would have been easier if we’d never seen each other again, but it didn’t work out that way.”

“Please tell me you’re not romantically involved with her.”

“I take my vows seriously,” Donati said dismissively. “And so does Veronica. We are good friends, that’s all.”

“I take it she’s married.”

“Infamously. Her husband is Carlo Marchese. He’s one of the most successful businessmen in Italy.” Donati paused and looked at Gabriel gravely. “He’s also the reason Claudia Andreatti is dead.”

Somewhere beyond the walls of the Vatican a car backfired with the sharp report of a gunshot. A squadron of rooks whirled noisily in the trees before flying off in formation toward the dome of the Basilica. Gabriel watched them for a moment as he pieced together the implications of the story Donati had just told him. He felt as though he were wandering beneath the surface of an altarpiece, stumbling upon partial images concealed beneath layers of obliterating paint—here a woman lying dead on the floor of a church, here a tomb robber suffering for his sins in a cauldron of acid, here a fallen priest searching for God in the arms of his lover. He had questions, a thousand questions, but he knew better than to break the spell under which Donati had fallen. And so he walked at the monsignor’s shoulder with the austere silence of a confessor and waited for his friend to make a full accounting of his sins.

“Carlo descends from the Black Nobility,” Donati said, “the aristocratic Roman families who remained loyal to the pope after the conquest of the Papal States in 1870. His father was part of Pius the Twelfth’s inner circle. He was close to the CIA as well.”

“In what way?”

“He was involved in the Christian Democratic Party. After the Second World War, he worked with the CIA to prevent the Communists from taking control of Italy. Several million dollars’ worth of secret CIA funds flowed through his hands before the election in 1948. Carlo says they used to give his father suitcases filled with cash in the lobby of the Hassler Hotel.”

“It sounds as if you and Carlo are rather well acquainted.”

“We are,” Donati replied. “Like his father, Carlo is a member in good standing of the papal court. He also serves on the lay supervisory council of the Vatican Bank, which means he knows as much about Church finances as I do. Carlo is the kind of man who doesn’t need to stop at the Permissions Desk before entering the Apostolic Palace. He likes to remind me that he’ll still be at the Vatican long after I’m gone.”

“Who appointed him to the bank?”

“I did.”

“Why?”

“Because Veronica asked me to. And because Carlo appeared to be the perfect man for the job, a man with long-standing ties to the papacy who was regarded as one of the most honest businessmen in a country known for corruption. Unfortunately, that turned out not to be the case. Carlo Marchese controls the international trade in illicit antiquities. But that’s just the tip of the proverbial iceberg. He sits atop a global criminal empire that’s into everything from narcotics to counterfeiting to arms trafficking. And he’s laundering his dirty money at the Vatican Bank.”

“And you, the private secretary to His Holiness Pope Paul the Seventh, helped him get the job.”

“Unwittingly,” Donati said defensively. “But that small detail won’t matter if this explodes into yet another scandal.”

“When did you learn the truth about Carlo?”

“It wasn’t until I asked a talented curator to conduct a review of the Vatican’s collection of antiquities,” Donati said. “First she discovered that dozens of pieces had vanished from the Vatican Museums. Then she discovered a connection between the thieves and one Carlo Marchese.”

“Why did she want to see you the night of her death?”

“She told me she had evidence of Carlo’s involvement. The next morning, she was dead, and whatever evidence she had was gone.” Donati shook his head. “Carlo actually rang my office that afternoon to offer his condolences. He had the decency not to show his face at the funeral.”

“He had other matters to attend to.”

“Such as?”

“Killing a tombarolo named Roberto Falcone.”

They walked past St. John’s Tower and made their way to the helipad in the far southwest corner of the city-state. Donati stared at the walls for a moment, as though calculating how to scale them, before taking a seat on a bench at the edge of the tarmac. Gabriel sat next to him and began mentally sorting through the notes of his investigation. One entry stood out: Claudia Andreatti’s final telephone call on the night of her death. It had been placed to the Villa Giulia, to the wife of a man who didn’t need to stop at the Permissions Desk before entering the Apostolic Palace.

“How much does Veronica know about her husband?”

“If you’re asking whether she thinks Carlo is a criminal, the answer is no. She believes her husband is a descendant of an old Roman family who parlayed his modest inheritance into a successful business.”

“Does this successful businessman know you were engaged to his wife?”

Donati shook his head solemnly.

“You’re sure?”

“Veronica never breathed a word of it to him.”

“What about El Salvador?”

“He knows I served there and that, like most of the Jesuits, I had some trouble with the death squads and their friends in the military. But he has no idea I ever left the priesthood. In fact, very few people inside the Church know about my little sabbatical. Any mention of the affair was purged from my personnel files after I went to work for Lucchesi in Venice. It’s as if it never happened.”

“Almost like Claudia’s murder.”

Donati made no response.

“You lied to me, Luigi.”

“Mea culpa, mea culpa, mea maxima culpa.”