by Daniel Silva
At the far end of the building were four large stainless steel pools, approximately five feet in diameter and three feet in height. In the first three vats, there were bits of pottery, statuary, and other objects clearly visible in the reddish liquid. But in the fourth, the acid was opaque and very close to spilling over the side. Gabriel retrieved the spillo and inserted it gently into the liquid. Just beneath the surface, it collided with something soft and pliant.
“What is it?” asked Chiara.
“I could be wrong,” Gabriel said, wincing, “but I think we just found Roberto Falcone.”
10
PIAZZA DI SANT’IGNAZIO, ROME
IN THE HEART OF ROME, between the Pantheon and the Via del Corso, is a pleasant little square called the Piazza di Sant’Ignazio. On the northern side stands a church by the same name, best known for a glorious ceiling fresco painted by the Jesuit brother Andrea Pozzo. On the southern flank, across an expanse of gray paving stones, is an ornate palazzo with façades of creamy yellow and white. Two official flags fly from its third-floor balcony, and above the solemn entrance is the seal of the Carabinieri. A small plaque states that the premises are occupied by the Division for the Defense of Cultural Patrimony. But within the world of law enforcement, the unit is known simply as the Art Squad.
At the time of its formation in 1969, it was the only police organization anywhere in the world dedicated exclusively to combating the lucrative trade in stolen art and antiquities. Italy surely had need of such a unit, for it was blessed with both an abundance of art and countless professional criminals bent on stealing every last bit of it. During the next two decades, the Art Squad brought charges against thousands of people suspected of involvement in art crime and made numerous high-profile recoveries, including works by Raphael, Giorgione, and Tintoretto. Then the institutional paralysis began to set in. Manpower dwindled to a few dozen retirement-age officers—many of whom knew next to nothing about art—and inside the graceful palazzo, work proceeded at a decidedly Roman pace. It was said by the unit’s legion of detractors that more time was spent debating where to have lunch than searching for the museum’s worth of paintings that went missing in Italy each year.
That changed with the arrival of General Cesare Ferrari. The son of schoolteachers from the impoverished Campania region, Ferrari had spent his entire career battling the country’s most intractable problems. During the 1970s, a time of deadly terrorist bombings in Italy, he helped to neutralize the Communist Red Brigades. Then, during the Mafia wars of the 1980s, he served as a commander in the Camorra-infested Naples division. The assignment was so dangerous that Ferrari’s wife and three daughters were forced to live under twenty-four-hour guard. Ferrari himself was the target of numerous assassination attempts, including a letter bomb attack that claimed two of his fingers and his right eye. His ocular prosthesis, with its immobile pupil and unyielding gaze, left some of his underlings with the unnerving sense that they were staring into the all-seeing eye of God. Ferrari used the eye to great effect in coaxing low-level criminals to betray their superiors. One of the bosses Ferrari eventually brought down was the mastermind of the letter bombing. After the mafioso’s conviction, Ferrari made a point of personally escorting him to the cell at Naples’ festering Poggioreale prison where he would spend the rest of his life.
The posting to the Art Squad was supposed to be a reward for a long and distinguished career. “Shuffle paper for a few years,” the chief of the Carabinieri told him, “and then retire to your village in Campania and grow tomatoes.” Ferrari accepted the appointment and then proceeded to do exactly the opposite. Within days of arriving at the palazzo, he informed half the staff their services were no longer needed. Then he set about modernizing an organization that had been allowed to atrophy with age. He replenished the ranks with aggressive young officers, sought authority to tap the phones of known criminal operatives, and opened offices in the parts of the country where the thieves actually stole art, especially in the south. Most important, he adopted many of the techniques he had used against the Mafia during his days in Naples. Ferrari wasn’t much interested in the street-level hoods who dabbled in art theft; he wanted the big fish, the bosses who brought the stolen goods to market. It did not take long for Ferrari’s new approach to pay dividends. More than a dozen important thieves found themselves behind bars, and statistics for art theft, while still astonishingly high, showed improvement. The palazzo was no longer a retirement home; it was the place where many of the Carabinieri’s best and brightest went to make their name. And those who didn’t measure up found themselves in Ferrari’s office, staring into the unforgiving eye of God.
A career in Italian government spanning some four decades had left the general with a limited capacity for surprise. Even so, he was admittedly taken aback to see the legendary Gabriel Allon stepping through the entrance of his office early that evening, trailed by his beautiful and much younger Venetian-born wife, Chiara. The chain of events that brought them there had been set in motion four hours earlier, when Gabriel, gazing down at the partially emulsified body of Roberto Falcone, came to the disheartening realization that he had stumbled upon a crime scene that could not possibly be fled. Rather than contact the authorities directly, he rang Donati, who in turn made contact with Lorenzo Vitale of the Vatican police. After an unpleasant conversation lasting some fifteen minutes, it was decided that Vitale would approach Ferrari, with whom he had worked on numerous cases. By late afternoon, the Art Squad was on the ground in Cerveteri, along with a team from the Lazio division’s violent crimes unit. And by sunset, Gabriel and Chiara, having been relieved of their weapons, were in the back of a Carabinieri sedan bound for the palazzo.
The walls of Ferrari’s office were hung with paintings—some badly damaged, some without frames or stretchers—that had been recovered from art thieves or dirty collectors. Here they would remain, sometimes for many weeks or months, until they could be returned to their rightful owners. On the wall behind his desk, aglow as if newly restored, hung Caravaggio’s Nativity with St. Francis and St. Lawrence. It was a copy, of course; the real version had been stolen from the Church of San Lorenzo in Palermo in 1969 and had never been seen since. Finding it was Ferrari’s obsession.
“Two years ago,” he said, “I thought I’d finally located it. A low-level art thief told me he knew the house in Sicily where the painting was being hidden. He offered to tell me in exchange for not sending him to prison for stealing an altarpiece from a village church near Florence. I accepted the offer and raided the property. The painting wasn’t there, but we found these.” Ferrari handed Gabriel a stack of Polaroid photographs. “Heartbreaking.”
Gabriel flipped through the Polaroids. They depicted a painting that had not fared well after more than forty years underground. The edges of the canvas were badly frayed—the result of the painting being cut from its stretcher with a razor—and deep cracks and abrasions marred the once glorious image.
“What happened to the thief who gave you the tip?”
“I sent him to prison.”
“But the information he gave you was good.”
“That’s true. But it wasn’t timely. And in this business, timing is everything.” Ferrari gave a brief smile that did not quite extend to his prosthetic eye. “If we do ever manage to find it, the restoration is obviously going to be difficult, even for a man of your skills.”
“I’ll make you a deal, General. If you find it, I’ll fix it.”
“I’m not in the mood for deals just yet, Allon.”
Ferrari accepted the Polaroids of the lost Caravaggio and returned them to their file. Then he stared contemplatively out the window in the manner of Bellini’s Doge Leonardo Loredan, as if debating whether to send Gabriel across the Bridge of Sighs for a few hours in the torture chambers.
“I’m going to begin this conversation by telling you everything I know. That way, you might be less tempted to lie to me. I know, for example, that your friend Monsignor Donat
i arranged for you to restore The Deposition of Christ for the Vatican Picture Gallery. I also know that he asked you to view the body of Dottoressa Claudia Andreatti while it was still in the Basilica—and that, subsequently, you undertook a private investigation of the circumstances surrounding her unfortunate death. That investigation led you to Roberto Falcone. And now it has landed you here,” Ferrari concluded, “in the palazzo.”
“I’ve been in far worse places than this.”
“And you will be again unless you cooperate.”
The general lit an American cigarette. He smoked it somewhat awkwardly with his left hand. The right, the one missing two fingers, was concealed in his lap.
“Why was the monsignor so concerned about this woman?” he asked.
Gabriel told him about the review of the Vatican’s antiquities.
“I was led to believe it was nothing more than a routine inventory.”
“It might have started that way. But it appears that somewhere along the line, Claudia uncovered something else.”
“Do you know what?”
“No.”
Ferrari scrutinized Gabriel as if he didn’t quite believe him. “Why were you sniffing around Falcone’s place?”
“Dr. Andreatti was in contact with him shortly before her death.”
“How do you know this?”
“I found his phone number in her records.”
“She called him from her office at the Vatican?”
“From her mobile,” said Gabriel.
“How were you, a foreigner residing in this country temporarily, able to obtain the mobile phone records of an Italian citizen?”
When Gabriel made no reply, Ferrari eyed him over the tip of his cigarette like a marksman lining up a difficult shot.
“The most logical explanation is that you called upon friends in your old service to retrieve the records for you. If that’s the case, you violated your agreement with our security authorities. And that, I’m afraid, places you in a very precarious position indeed.”
It was a threat, thought Gabriel, but only a mild one.
“Did you ever speak to Falcone yourself?” the general asked.
“I tried.”
“And?”
“He wasn’t answering his phone.”
“So you decided to break into his property?”
“Out of concern for his safety.”
“Oh, yes, of course,” said Ferrari sarcastically. “And once inside, you discovered what appeared to be a large cache of antiquities.”
“Along with a tombarolo simmering in a pot of hydrochloric acid.”
“How did you get past the locks?”
“The dog was more of a challenge than the locks.”
The general smiled, one professional to another, and tapped his cigarette thoughtfully against his ashtray. “Roberto Falcone was no ordinary tombarolo,” he said. “He was a capo zona, the head of a regional looting network. The low-level looters brought him their goods. Then Falcone moved the product up the line to the smugglers and the crooked dealers.”
“You seem to know a great deal about a man whose body was discovered just a few hours ago.”
“That’s because Roberto Falcone was also my informant,” the general admitted. “My very best informant. And now, thanks to you, he’s dead.”
“I had nothing to do with his death.”
“So you say.”
A uniformed aide knocked discreetly on Ferrari’s door. The general waved him away with an imperious gesture and resumed his doge-like pose of solemn deliberation.
“As I see it,” he said at last, “we have two distinct options before us. Option one, we handle everything by the book. That means throwing you to the wolves at the security service. There might be some negative publicity involved, not only for your government but for the Vatican as well. Things could get messy, Allon. Very messy indeed.”
“And the second option?”
“You start by telling me everything you know about Claudia Andreatti’s death.”
“And then?”
“I’ll help you find the man who killed her.”
11
PIAZZA DI SANT’IGNAZIO, ROME
AMONG THE PERQUISITES OF WORKING at the palazzo was Le Cave. Regarded as one of the finest restaurants in Rome, it was located just steps from the entrance of the building, in a quiet corner of the piazza. In summer the tables stood in neat rows across the cobbles, but on that February evening they were stacked forlornly against the outer wall. General Ferrari arrived without advance warning and was immediately shown, along with his two guests, to a table at the back of the room. A waiter brought a plate of arancini di riso and red wine from Ferrari’s native Campania. The general made a toast to a marriage that, for the moment, had yet to be consummated. Then, as he picked at one of the risotto croquettes, he spoke disdainfully of a man named Giacomo Medici.
Though he bore no relation to the Florentine banking dynasty, Medici shared the family’s passion for the arts. A broker of antiquities based in Rome and Switzerland, he had quietly supplied high-quality pieces for decades to some of the world’s most prominent dealers, collectors, and museums. But in 1995, his lucrative business began to unravel when Italian and Swiss authorities raided his warehouse in the Geneva Freeport and found a treasure trove of unprovenanced antiquities, some of which had clearly been recently excavated. The discovery touched off an international investigation led by the Art Squad that would eventually ensnare some of the biggest names in the art world. In 2004, an Italian court convicted Medici of dealing in stolen antiquities and gave him the harshest sentence ever handed down for such a crime—ten years in prison and a ten-million-euro fine. Italian prosecutors then used the evidence against Medici to secure the return of looted artifacts from several prominent museums. Among the items was the renowned Euphronios krater, which New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art reluctantly agreed to return to Italy in 2006. Medici, who was accused of playing a key role in the vessel’s looting, had famously posed before its display case at the Met with his arms akimbo. General Ferrari had mimicked the pose on the day the krater was triumphantly placed in its new display case at Rome’s Villa Giulia museum.
“All told,” Ferrari continued, “Medici was responsible for the looting of thousands of antiquities from Italian soil. But he didn’t do it alone. His operation was like a cordata, a rope that stretched from the tombaroli to the capi zoni to the dealers and auction houses and, ultimately, to the collectors and museums. And let’s not forget our good friends in the Mafia,” Ferrari added. “Nothing came out of the ground without their approval. And nothing went to market without a payoff to the bosses.”
Ferrari spent a moment contemplating his ruined hand before resuming his briefing. “We didn’t spend ten years and millions of euros just to bring down one man and a few of his lieutenants. Our goal was to destroy a network that was slowly pillaging the treasures bequeathed to us by our ancestors. Against all odds, we managed to succeed. But I’m afraid our victory was only temporary. The looting continues. In fact, it’s worse than ever.”
“A new network has taken the place of Medici’s?”
Ferrari nodded and then indulged in a disciplined sip of wine. “Criminals are a bit like terrorists, Allon. If you kill a terrorist, a new terrorist is sure to take his place. And almost without fail, he is more dangerous than his predecessor. This new network is far more sophisticated than Medici’s. It’s a truly global operation. And, obviously, it’s far more ruthless.”
“Who’s running it?”
“I wish I knew. It could be a consortium, but my instincts tell me it’s one man. I’d be surprised if he has any overt links to the antiquities trade. That would be beneath him,” the general added quickly. “He’s a major criminal who’s into more than selling hot pots. And he has the muscle to keep everyone in line, which means he’s connected to the Mafia. This network has the ability to rip a statue out of the ground in Greece and sell it at Sotheby’s a few
months later with what appears to be an entirely clean provenance.” The general paused, then added, “He’s also getting product from your neck of the woods.”
“The Middle East?”
“Someone’s been supplying him with artifacts from places like Lebanon, Syria, and Egypt. There are some nasty people in that part of the world. One wonders where all the money is going.”
“Where did Falcone fit into the picture?”
“When we stumbled upon his operation a few years ago, I convinced him to go to work for me. It wasn’t difficult,” Ferrari added, “since the alternative was a long prison sentence. We spent several weeks debriefing him here at the palazzo. Then we sent him back to Cerveteri and allowed him to resume his wicked ways.”
“But now you were looking over his shoulder,” Chiara said.
“Exactly.”
“What would happen when a tombarolo brought him a vase or a statue that he’d found?”
“Sometimes we quietly took it off the market and put it away for safekeeping. But usually we allowed Falcone to sell it up the line. That way we could track it as it moved through the bloodstream of the illicit trade. And we wanted everyone in the business to think that Roberto Falcone was a man to be reckoned with.”
“Especially the man at the top of this new smuggling network.”
“You’ve obviously done this a time or two yourself,” the general said.
Gabriel ignored the remark. “How high were you able to get him into the network?” he asked.
“Only the first rung of the ladder,” Ferrari said, frowning. “This new network learned from the mistakes of its predecessor. The men at the top don’t talk to people like Roberto Falcone.”
“So why was Claudia Andreatti talking to him?”
“Clearly, she must have found something during her review of the Vatican’s collection that led her to Falcone’s door. Something dangerous enough to get her killed. The fact that Falcone was killed too suggests it had something to do with the network. Frankly, I wouldn’t be surprised if a few more bodies turn up in short order.”