by Daniel Silva
“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.
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 museums and in the drawing rooms of the rich.
After completing the tour, Gabriel and Chiara dutifully returned the map and headed out to the parking lot, where Gabriel dialed Roberto Falcone’s number a second time. Once again, there was no answer.
“What now?” asked Chiara.
“Lunch,” replied Gabriel.
He walked over to the kiosk and bought a half-dozen premade sandwiches in plastic wrappers.
“Hungry?” Chiara asked.
“They’re not for us.”
They climbed into the car and headed back to Falcone’s villa.
9
CERVETERI, ITALY
WITHIN THE FRATERNITY OF WESTERN intelligence, Gabriel’s fear of dogs was as legendary as his exploits. It was not an irrational fear; it was supported by a vast body of empirical evidence gathered during violent encounters too numerous to count. It seemed there was something in Gabriel’s very appearance—his catlike demeanor, his vivid green eyes—that caused even the most docile of dogs to revert to the feral, prehistoric beasts from which they all had sprung. He had been stalked by dogs, bitten by dogs, mauled by dogs, and, once, in a snowbound valley in the mountains of Inner Switzerland, the Alsatian guard dog of a prominent banker had broken his arm. Gabriel had survived the attack only because he had shot the dog in the head with a Beretta pistol. Gunplay was surely not the preferred option here in Cerveteri, but the current agitated state of Falcone’s dog meant that Gabriel would not be able to rule it out entirely. The shepherd’s mood seemed to have deteriorated in the hour since they had last seen it. There was only one reason to keep such a disagreeable creature—Roberto Falcone was obviously hiding something on his property, and it was the dog’s assignment to keep the curious at bay. Fortunately for Gabriel, it appeared the animal had been mistreated, which meant he was ripe for recruitment. Thus the lar
ge bag of sandwiches from the café at the Etruscan necropolis.
“Maybe you should let me do it,” said Chiara.
Gabriel gave her a withering glance but said nothing.
“I was just thinking—”
“I know what you were thinking.”
Gabriel turned into the property and headed slowly up the pitted gravel drive. The dog set upon the car instantly—not the passenger side, of course, but Gabriel’s. It galloped alongside the front tire, pausing every now and again to drop into an aggressive crouch and bare its savage teeth. Then, when the car came to a stop, it launched itself toward Gabriel’s window like a missile and tried to bite him through the glass. Gabriel regarded the animal calmly, which incensed it even more. It had the pale yellow eyes of a wolf and was frothing at the mouth as though it were rabid.
“Maybe you should try talking to it,” suggested Chiara.
“I don’t believe in negotiating with terrorists.”
Gabriel sighed heavily and removed the plastic wrapper from one of the sandwiches. Then he cracked the window and quickly shoved the sandwich through the gap. Six inches of Parma ham, fontina, and bread disappeared in a single ravenous bite.
“He’s obviously not kosher,” said Chiara.
“Is that a good sign or bad?”
“Bad,” she replied. “Very bad.”
Gabriel slipped another sandwich through the window. This time, the dog’s incisor nicked the tip of his finger.
“Are you all right?”
“It’s a good thing I’m ambidextrous.” He quickly fed the dog three more of the sandwiches in assembly-line fashion.
“The poor thing is starving.”
“Let’s not start feeling sorry for the dog just yet.”
“Aren’t you going to give him the last one?”
“Better to keep it in reserve. That way I’ll have something to fling at him if he decides to go for my throat.”
Gabriel unlocked the door but hesitated.
“What are you waiting for?”
“A declaration of his intentions.”
He opened the door a few inches and put a foot on the ground. The dog growled low in its throat but remained motionless. The ears were up, which Gabriel supposed was a positive development. Usually, whenever a canine was attempting to tear him to shreds, the ears were always back and down, like the wings of an attack aircraft.
Gabriel placed the last sandwich on the ground and emerged slowly from the car. Then, with his eyes still fixed on the animal’s jaws, he instructed Chiara to get out. He did so in rapid Hebrew, so the dog wouldn’t understand. Partially satiated, it devoured the food at a more decorous pace, its yellow gaze fixed on Gabriel and Chiara as they made their way toward the back door of the house. Gabriel knocked twice but there was no answer. Then he tried the latch. It was locked.
He removed the small, thin metal tool he carried always in his wallet and worked it gently inside the lock until the mechanism gave way. When he tried the latch a second time, it yielded to his touch. Inside was a cluttered mudroom filled with old work clothes and tall rubber boots caked with earth. The utility sink was dry. So were the boots.
He motioned for Chiara to enter and led her into the kitchen. The counters were stacked with dirty dishes, and hanging in the air was the acrid stench of something burning. Gabriel walked over to the automatic coffeemaker. The power light was aglow, and on the bottom of the carafe was a patch of burnt coffee the color of tar. Clearly, the machine had been on for several days—the same number of days, Gabriel reckoned, the dog had gone without food.
“He’s lucky he didn’t burn the house down,” Chiara said.
“I’m not so sure about that.”
“About what?”
“The part about Falcone being lucky.”
Gabriel switched off the coffeemaker, and they moved into the dining room. The chandelier, like the coffeemaker, had been left on, and five of the eight bulbs had burned out. At one end of the rectangular table was a meal that had been abandoned. At the other end was a cardboard box with the name of a local winery printed on the side. Gabriel lifted one of the flaps and looked inside. The box was filled with objects carefully wrapped in sheets of the Corriere della Sera. It was a rather highbrow paper for a man like Falcone, he thought. Gabriel had him figured for the Gazzetta dello Sport.
“Looks like he left in a hurry,” Chiara said.
“Or maybe he was forced to leave.”
He removed one of the objects from the box and cautiously opened the newsprint wrapper. Inside was a concave fragment of pottery about the size of Gabriel’s palm, decorated with the partial image of a young woman in semi-profile. She wore a pleated gown and appeared to be playing a flute-like instrument. Her flesh and garment were depicted in the same terra-cotta color, but the background was a luminous solid black.
“My God,” said Chiara softly.
“It looks like a portion of a red-figure Attic vessel of some sort.”
Chiara nodded. “Judging from the shape and the imagery, I’d say it comes from the upper portion of a stamnos, a Greek vase used for transporting wine. The woman is clearly a maenad, a follower of Dionysus. The instrument is a two-reed pipe known as an aulos.”
“Could it be a Roman copy of a Greek original?”
“I suppose so. But in all likelihood, it was produced in Greece two and a half millennia ago specifically for export to the Etruscan cities. The Etruscans were great admirers of Greek vases. That’s why so many important pieces have been discovered in Etruscan tomb rooms.”
“What’s it doing in a cardboard box on Roberto Falcone’s dining room table?”
“That’s the easy part. He’s a tombarolo.”
A tomb robber.
“That would explain the dog,” said Gabriel.
“And the muddy boots at the back door. He’s obviously been doing some digging, probably quite recently.” She held up the newspaper. “It’s from last week.”
Gabriel reached into the box again and withdrew another bundle of newsprint. Inside was another section of the vase. The face of a second maenad was visible, along with the kylix, a shallow cup for drinking wine, she held in her hand. Gabriel examined the image in silence before looking at the newspaper. It contained a fragment, too—a fragment of a story about a Vatican curator who had committed suicide by hurling herself from the dome of St. Peter’s Basilica. The account neglected to mention that the curator had been conducting a secret inventory of the Vatican’s collection of antiquities. It appeared her inquiry had led her here, to the home of a tombarolo. Perhaps that alone had been enough to get her killed, but Gabriel suspected there had to be more.
He looked at the fragment of pottery again and lifted it to his nose. There was a trace of a chemical odor, not unlike the smell of the solvents he used to remove varnish from paintings. It suggested the fragment had recently been cleaned of soil and other encrustations, probably with a solution of nitrohydrochloric acid. Even an old man living alone in an unkempt house would find it difficult to be around such a smell for more than a few minutes. He would need to maintain a separate facility where objects could be left for long periods without fear of discovery.
Gabriel placed the fragment of pottery into his coat pocket and looked out the window toward the tumbledown outbuilding at the back of the property. Pacing outside, head down, ears back, was Falcone’s dog. Gabriel sighed heavily. Then he went into the kitchen, found a large mixing bowl, and began filling it with anything that looked remotely edible.
There were two padlocks, German made, rusted by rain. Gabriel picked them as the dog supped greedily on a casserole of canned tuna, fava beans, artichoke hearts, and condensed milk. When the door swung open, the animal looked up briefly but paid Gabriel and Chiara no heed as they slipped inside. Here the stench of acid was overwhelming. Gabriel groped blindly, one hand covering his nose and mouth, until he found the light switch. Overhead a row of fluorescent lamps flickered to life, revealing a professional-grad
e laboratory built for the care and storage of looted antiquities. Its neatness and order stood in stark contrast to the rest of the property. One object looked slightly out of place, a javelin-like iron pike suspended horizontally on a pair of hooks. Gabriel examined the traces of mud near the tip. It was the same color and consistency as the mud on the boots.
“It’s a spillo,” Chiara explained. “The tombaroli use it to probe for underground burial chambers. They insert it into the ground until they hear the telltale clank of a tomb room or a Roman villa. Then they bring in the shovels and the backhoes and grab whatever they can find.”
“And then,” said Gabriel, looking around, “they bring it here.”
He walked over to Falcone’s worktable. Clean and white, it was similar to the tables in the restoration lab at the Vatican Museums. At one end was a stack of scholarly monographs dealing with the antiquities of the Roman, Greek, and Etruscan empires—the same sort of books Gabriel had seen in Claudia Andreatti’s apartment. One of the volumes lay open to an image of a red-figure Attic stamnos vase decorated with maenads.
Gabriel snapped a photo of the open page with his BlackBerry before making his way over to Falcone’s storage shelves. Chrome and spotless, they were lined with antiquities arranged by type: pottery, household utensils, tools, weapons, and bits of iron that looked as though they had been extracted from the basement of time. It was evidence of looting on a massive scale. Unfortunately, it was a crime that could never be undone. Ripped from their original settings, these antiquities now said very little about the people who had made and used them.