Daniel Silva - The Fallen Angel

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 Donati 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?”