The Fallen Angel ga-12 Page 25

  “You?” he asked.

  Gabriel shook his head.

  “Why not?”

  “Because if someone is trying to kill the Holy Father, I won’t have time to protect my eyes and ears.”

  Metzler hung a target on the line and ran it twenty yards down the range.

  “Farther,” said Gabriel.

  “How far?”

  “All the way.”

  Metzler did as he was told. Gabriel raised the gun in a classic triangular firing position and poured all fifteen rounds through the eyes, nose, and forehead of the target.

  “Not bad,” said Metzler. “Let’s see if you can do it again.”

  Metzler ran another target to the end of the range while Gabriel quickly reloaded the weapon. He emptied it in a matter of seconds. This time, instead of fifteen holes grouped around the face, there was just a single large hole in the center of the forehead.

  “Good Lord,” said Metzler.

  “Good gun,” said Gabriel.

  At midday, Gabriel would slip the bonds of the Vatican in the back of Donati’s official sedan and make his way to the Israeli Embassy to review the daily intelligence from King Saul Boulevard. Time permitting, he would return to the conservation lab for a few more hours of work. Then, at seven, he would join Donati and the pope for supper in the private papal dining room. Gabriel knew better than to raise the issue of security again, so he used the extraordinary opportunity to help prepare the pope for what would be one of the most important foreign trips of his papacy. The Secretariat of State, the rough equivalent of the Vatican foreign ministry, had written a series of predictably safe statements for the pope to issue at the various stops he planned to make in both Israel and the territories under Palestinian authority. But with each passing day, it became apparent that the pope intended to radically reshape the historically tense relationship between the Holy See and the Jewish State. The trip would be more than just a pilgrimage; it would be the culmination of the process the pope had set in motion almost a decade earlier with his act of contrition at the Great Synagogue of Rome.

  On the final night, Gabriel listened as the Holy Father wrestled with the remarks he intended to deliver at Yad Vashem, Israel’s museum and memorial to the Holocaust. Afterward, a restless Donati insisted on walking Gabriel back to his apartment. A detour brought them to one of the doorways leading to the Sistine Chapel. Donati hesitated before turning the latch.

  “It’s probably better if you go in without me this time.”

  “Who’s in there, Luigi?”

  “The one person in the world who can give Carlo the punishment he deserves.”

  Veronica Marchese was standing behind the altar, her arms folded defensively, her eyes on The Last Judgment. They remained there as Gabriel went quietly to her side.

  “Do you think it will look like this?” she asked.

  “The end?”

  She nodded.

  “I hope not. Otherwise, I’m in serious trouble.”

  She looked at him for the first time. He could see she had been crying. “How did it happen, Mr. Allon? How did a man like you become one of the world’s finest restorers of Christian art?”

  “It’s a long story.”

  “I think I need one,” she said.

  “I was asked to do things for my country that left me incapable of painting. So I learned how to speak Italian and went to Venice under an assumed identity to study restoration.”

  “With Umberto Conti?”

  “Who else?”

  “I miss Umberto.”

  “So do I. He had a ring of keys that could open any door in Venice. He used to drag me out of my bed late at night to look at paintings. ‘A man who is pleased with himself can be an adequate restorer,’ he used to say to me, ‘but only a man with a damaged canvas of his own can be a truly great restorer.’ ”

  “Have you managed to repair it?”

  “Portions,” Gabriel answered after a reflective silence. “But I’m afraid parts are beyond repair.”

  She said nothing.

  “Where’s Carlo?”

  “Milan. At least, I think he’s in Milan. Not long ago, I discovered that Carlo doesn’t always tell me the truth about where he is or who he’s meeting with. Now I understand why.”

  “How much did Donati tell you?”

  “Enough to know that my life as I knew it is now over.”

  A leaden silence fell between them. Gabriel recalled how Veronica had appeared that afternoon at the Villa Giulia museum, how she could have passed for a much younger woman. Now, suddenly, she looked every one of her fifty years. Even so, she was remarkably beautiful.

  “You must have realized your husband wasn’t what he appeared to be,” he said at last.

  “I knew Carlo made a great deal of money in ways I didn’t always understand. But if you’re asking whether I knew he was the head of an international criminal organization that controlled the trade in illicit antiquities . . .” Her voice trailed off. “No, Mr. Allon, I did not know that.”

  “He used you, Veronica. You were his door into the Vatican Bank.”

  “And my reputation in the antiquities world gave him a patina of respectability.” Her hair had fallen across her face. Deliberately, she moved it aside, as though she wanted Gabriel the restorer to assess the damage done by Carlo’s treachery.

  “Why did you marry him?” he asked.

  “Are you judging me, Mr. Allon?”

  “I wouldn’t dream of it. I was just wondering how you could choose a man like him after being in love with Luigi.”

  “You don’t know much about women, do you?”

  “So I’ve been told.”

  Her smile was genuine. It faded quickly as she listed the reasons why she had married a man like Carlo Marchese. Carlo was handsome. Carlo was exciting. Carlo was rich.

  “But Carlo wasn’t Donati,” Gabriel said.

  “No,” she replied, “there’s only one Luigi. And I would have had him all to myself if it wasn’t for Pietro Lucchesi.”

  Her tone was suddenly bitter, resentful, as though His Holiness were somehow to blame for the fact she had married a murderer.

  “It was probably for the better,” said Gabriel carefully.

  “That Luigi returned to the priesthood instead of marrying me?”

  He nodded.

  “That’s easy for you to say, Mr. Allon.” Then she added softly, “You weren’t the one who was in love with him.”

  “He’s happy here, Veronica.”

  “And what happens when they remove the Fisherman’s Ring from Lucchesi’s finger and place his body in the crypt beneath the Basilica? What will Luigi do then?” She quickly answered her own question. “I suppose he’ll teach canon law for a few years at a pontifical university. And then he’ll spend the last years of his life in a retirement home filled with aging priests. So lonely,” she added after a moment. “So terribly sad and lonely.”

  “It’s the life he chose.”

  “It was chosen for him, just like yours. You two are quite alike, Mr. Allon. I suppose that’s why you get along so well.”

  Gabriel looked at her for a moment. “You’re still in love with him, aren’t you?”

  “That’s not a question I care to answer—at least not in here.” She tilted her face toward the ceiling. “Did you know that Claudia called my office at the Villa Giulia the night of her death?”

  “At 8:47,” he said.

  “Then I assume you also know she placed a call to a different number one minute before that.”

  “I do know that. But we were never able to identify it.”

  “I could have helped you.”

  She handed him one of her business cards. The number Claudia had dialed was for Veronica’s mobile.

  “I’d left the office by the time she called me there, and I didn’t realize until the next day that she’d called my BlackBerry.”

  “Why not?”

  “Because it was missing all day. I found it
the next morning on the floor of my car. I didn’t think anything of it until the day you came to see me at the museum. Then I realized how Carlo had done it. After I left you standing in that downpour, I drove into the Villa Borghese and cried for an hour before going home. Carlo could see something was wrong.”

  “Why didn’t you tell me the night of the dinner party?”

  “I was afraid.”

  “Of what?”

  “That my husband would kill me, too.” She looked at Gabriel, then at The Last Judgment. “I hope it’s as beautiful as this.”

  “The end?”

  “Yes.”

  “Somehow,” said Gabriel, “I doubt we’ll be so lucky.”

  He told her as much as he could and then saw her to the Bronze Doors. As she melted into the colonnades, he imagined Donati walking beside her—not a Donati bound by vows of chastity, but Donati as he might have been had God not called him to become a priest. When she was gone, he started back toward his rooms, but something drew him back to the chapel. Alone, he stood motionless for several minutes, his eyes roaming over the frescoes, a single verse of scripture running through his thoughts. “The House which King Solomon built for the Lord was sixty cubits long, twenty cubits wide, and thirty cubits high . . .”

  39

  VATICAN CITY–JERUSALEM

  AS LEADER OF A SOVEREIGN country, the pope has a post office, a mint, a small army, a world-class state museum, and ambassadors stationed at embassies around the world. He does not, however, have an airplane. For that, he must rely on the kindness of Alitalia, Italy’s troubled national carrier. For the flight to Israel, it lent him a Boeing 767 and rechristened it Zion in honor of the trip. His private compartment had four executive swivel chairs, a coffee table piled with the morning papers, and a satellite television that allowed the pope to watch his departure from Fiumicino Airport live on RAI, the Italian television network.

  The pope’s Curial entourage and security detail sat directly behind him in the business-class section of the aircraft, while the Vatican press corps was confined to economy. As they clambered aboard laden with their cameras and luggage, several were wearing black-and-white-checkered Palestinian kaffiyehs as scarves. The second stop on the pope’s busy itinerary would be the refugee camp of Dheisheh. Apparently, the Vaticanisti felt it was important to make a favorable impression on their hosts.

  Despite the early-morning departure, Alitalia served a sumptuous in-flight lunch. The priests and bishops devoured the meal as if they had not seen food in days, but Gabriel was far too preoccupied to eat. Seated next to Alois Metzler, he reviewed the protection plans one final time, making a mental list of everything that could possibly go wrong. When the number of nightmare scenarios reached twenty, he closed the briefing book and stared out the window as the aircraft swept low over the Mediterranean toward Israel’s verdant Coastal Plain. Five minutes later, as the wheels thudded onto the runway at Ben Gurion Airport, a member of the Vaticanisti shouted, “Welcome to Occupied Palestine!” To which a doctrinaire archbishop from the Secretariat of State murmured, “Amen to that.” Clearly, thought Gabriel, there were some within the Curia who were unhappy over the pope’s decision to spend Eastertide in a Holy Land controlled by Jews.

  At Donati’s direction, Gabriel was to be part of the pope’s core protection unit, meaning he would never be more than a few feet from the pontiff’s side. And so it was that, as His Holiness Pope Paul VII, the Bishop of Rome, Pontifex Maximus, and successor to St. Peter, stepped off his borrowed airplane, he was trailed by the only child of Holocaust survivors from the Valley of Jezreel. Following in the tradition set by his predecessor, the pope immediately lowered himself to his hands and knees and kissed the tarmac. Rising, he walked over to the waiting Israeli prime minister and gave him a vigorous handshake. The two men exchanged pleasantries for a few minutes, surrounded by concentric rings of security. Then the prime minister escorted the pope to a helicopter. Gabriel climbed in after him and sat between Donati and Alois Metzler.

  “So far, so good,” Donati said as the helicopter rose swiftly into the air.

  “Yes,” said Gabriel. “But now the fun begins.”

  They headed eastward into the Judean Hills, above the winding staircase-like gorge separating Jerusalem from the sea. Gabriel pointed out some of the villages that had seen the worst fighting during Israel’s War of Independence; then Jerusalem appeared before them, floating, as though held aloft by the hand of God. The pope peered intently out his window as they crossed the city from west to east, new to old. As they passed over the Temple Mount, the golden Dome of the Rock sparkled in the midday sun. Gabriel showed the pope the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, the Church of the Dormition, and the Garden of Gethsemane.

  “And your son?” asked the pope.

  “There,” said Gabriel as they passed over the Mount of Olives.

  The helicopter banked gently to the south and flew along the 1949 Green Line, now commonly referred to as the pre-1967 border. From the air, it was plain to see how the border had effectively dissolved after more than forty years of Israeli occupation. In the span of a few seconds, they passed over the mixed Jerusalem neighborhood of Abu Tor, the small West Bank Jewish settlement of Har Homa, and the Arab village of Beit Jala. Adjacent to Beit Jala was Bethlehem. Manger Square was easily visible from the distance, for it was crammed with several thousand people, each one waving a small Palestinian flag. On the roads leading into the city, not a car moved, only the trucks and jeeps of the IDF.

  “This is where things are going to get political,” Gabriel told Donati. “It’s important to keep things moving, especially since the guest of honor will be the only male dressed entirely in white from head to toe.”

  As the helicopter set down, President Mahmoud Abbas and the leadership of the Palestinian Authority waited on a dais outside the Church of the Nativity. “Welcome, Your Holiness, to the ancient land of Palestine,” Abbas exclaimed, loudly enough for the remark to be heard by the reporters standing nearby. “And welcome to Bethlehem and Jerusalem, the eternal and indivisible capital of Palestine.” The pope responded with a noncommittal nod and then greeted the rest of the delegation. Most were clearly pleased to be in his presence, but one, Yasser Abed Rabbo, a former leader of the terrorist Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, seemed far more intrigued by the bodyguard who never strayed more than a few inches from the pope’s shoulder.

  Entering the church, the pope spent a few minutes in silent prayer at the Altar of the Nativity. Then he asked Abbas to show him the damage that had been done to the church in 2002, when a group of Palestinian terrorists seized the sacred Christian site in an effort to evade capture. At the conclusion of the ninety-three-day standoff, Israeli forces discovered forty explosive devices concealed within the church, while Franciscan clerics held hostage during the siege described how the Palestinian terrorists looted the church of gold icons and used pages of the Christian Bible for toilet paper. All this, however, was apparently news to Mahmoud Abbas. “The only damage done to the church,” he insisted, “was done by the Israelis. As you know, they are profoundly anti-Christian.”

  “If that is the case,” the pope replied coolly, “why has the Christian population of Bethlehem fallen from ninety-five percent to just one-third? And why are Christians fleeing the territory controlled by the Palestinian Authority at an alarming rate?”

  Abbas smiled weakly and looked at his wristwatch. “Perhaps, Your Holiness, it might be a good time to pay a visit to Dheisheh.”

  The camp was located about a mile to the south of Bethlehem on a patch of land leased from the Jordanian government after the conclusion of the War of Independence. Originally, some three thousand Palestinians, mainly from Jerusalem and Hebron, lived there in tents. Now, more than sixty years later, the tents had been replaced by cinderblock structures, and the population of the camp had grown to nearly thirteen thousand registered refugees. With unemployment rampant, most were permanent wards of the United Nations, an
d the camp was a hotbed of militant activity. Even so, the residents cheered the pope as he walked the narrow streets with Gabriel at his side.

  At the conclusion of the tour, in the camp’s dusty central square, the pope lamented what he described as “the terrible suffering of the Palestinian people.” But in an abrupt departure from his prepared text, he pointedly criticized the failure of three generations of Arab leadership to achieve a just and viable solution to the refugee crisis. “Those who would perpetuate human suffering in the service of politics,” he said solemnly, “must be condemned as strongly as those who would inflict it in the first place.”

  With that, the pope blessed the crowd with a sweeping sign of the cross and climbed into an armored limousine for the short drive to Jerusalem. Entering the Jewish Quarter through the Dung Gate, he inserted a plea for peace between the stones of the Western Wall before making his way on foot through the streets of the Muslim Quarter to the Chain Gate, one of the eastern entrances to the Haram al-Sharif. A sign posted by the chief rabbinate of Israel warned that, in its opinion, Jews were forbidden to set foot on the Mount due to its sacredness.

  “I never realized,” said the pope.

  “It’s complicated, Holiness,” said Gabriel. “But in Israel, most things are.”

  “Are you sure you want to come with me?”

  “I’ve been here before.”

  The pope smiled. “I shudder to think what would have happened to poor little Isaac if it wasn’t for you.”

  “It was God who spared the boy. The Archangel Gabriel was only his messenger.”

  “I hope he sees fit to spare me, too.”

  “He will as long as you listen to me,” said Gabriel. “Things can go wrong here in a hurry. If I see something I don’t like—”

  “We leave,” said the pope, cutting him off.

  “Quickly,” said Gabriel.

  Though the Waqf controlled the Noble Sanctuary itself, it did not control the entrances, which meant the Israeli government had been able to enforce the Vatican’s request that the Haram be closed for the pope’s brief visit. As a result, the delegation of Islamic dignitaries waiting on the steps leading to the Dome of the Rock numbered just forty. They included the Grand Mufti, the members of the Waqf’s Supreme Council, and several dozen armed security guards, many of whom had links to Palestinian and Islamic militant groups. Within minutes of the pope’s arrival, the mufti invited him to pray inside the Dome of the Rock, despite the fact the Waqf had assured the Vatican that no such invitation would be forthcoming. The pope diplomatically declined and then spent several minutes marveling at the building’s glorious mosaics and windows. Gabriel quietly pointed out the Arabic-language inscriptions that openly mocked Christian belief and invited all Christians to convert to Islam, which Muslims considered the final and decisive revelation of the word of God.