LITMIR.BIZ

      8

      PIAZZA DI SPAGNA, ROME

      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 New York Times, as well as the Web log of a well-known Catholic dissident. She seemed intrigued by the prospect of traveling to New Zealand and the west coast of Ireland. She suffered from chronic back pain. She wanted to lose ten pounds.

      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.