Daniel Silva: The Fallen Angel

The two men looked up in unison and watched Gabriel crossing the nave at the side of the second-most powerful man in the Roman Catholic Church. Metzler was clearly displeased. He extended his hand toward Gabriel with the cold precision of a Swiss timepiece and nodded his head once in formal greeting. He was Donati’s equal in height and build but had been blessed by the Almighty with the jutting, angular face of a hound. He wore a dark gray suit, a white shirt, and a banker’s silver necktie. His receding hair was shorn to the length of stubble; small, rimless spectacles framed a pair of judgmental blue eyes. Metzler had friends inside the Swiss security service, which meant that he knew about Gabriel’s past exploits on the soil of his homeland. His presence in the Basilica was intriguing. Strictly speaking, dead bodies at the Vatican fell under the jurisdiction of the gendarmes, not the Swiss Guard—unless, of course, there was an element of papal security involved. If that were the case, Metzler would be free to poke his snout anywhere he pleased. Almost anywhere, thought Gabriel, for there were places behind the walls where even the commander of the palace guard was forbidden to enter.

Donati exchanged a look with Vitale, then instructed the police chief to remove the tarpaulin. It was obvious the body had fallen from a great height. What remained was a split sack of skin filled with shattered bone and organs. Remarkably, the attractive face was largely intact. So was the identification badge around the neck. It stated that the bearer was an employee of the Vatican Museums. Gabriel didn’t bother to read the name. The dead woman was Claudia Andreatti, a curator in the antiquities division.

Gabriel crouched next to the body with the ease of someone used to being in the presence of the newly dead and examined it as though it were a painting in need of restoration. She was dressed, like all the laywomen of the Vatican, professionally but piously: dark trousers, a gray cardigan, a white blouse. Her woolen overcoat was unbuttoned and had arranged itself across the floor like an unfurled cape. The right arm was draped across the abdomen. The left was extended in a straight line from the shoulder, the wrist slightly bent. Gabriel carefully lifted a few strands of the shoulder-length hair from the face, revealing a pair of eyes that remained open and vaguely watchful. The last time he had seen them, they had been appraising him in a stairwell of the museum. The encounter had occurred a few minutes before nine the previous evening. Gabriel was just leaving after a long session before the Caravaggio; Claudia was clutching a batch of files to her breast and heading back to her office. Her demeanor, though somewhat harried, was hardly that of a woman about to kill herself in St. Peter’s. In fact, thought Gabriel, it had been mildly flirtatious.

“You knew her?” asked Vitale.

“No, but I knew who she was.” It was a professional compulsion. Even in retirement, Gabriel couldn’t help but assemble a mental dossier on those around him.

“I noticed you were both working late last night.” The Italian managed to make it sound like an offhand remark, which it wasn’t. “According to the log at the security desk, you exited the museum at 8:47. Dottoressa Andreatti left a short time later, at 8:56.”

“By then, I’d already left the territory of the city-state via St. Anne’s Gate.”

“I know.” Vitale gave a humorless smile. “I checked those logs, too.”

“So I’m no longer a suspect in the death of my colleague?” Gabriel asked sardonically.

“Forgive me, Signor Allon, but people do have a way of dying whenever you show up at the Vatican.”

Gabriel lifted his gaze from the body and looked at Vitale. Though he was now in his early sixties, the police chief had the handsome features and permanent suntan of an aging Italian movie idol, the sort who drives down the Via Veneto in an open-top car with a younger woman at his side. At the Guardia di Finanza, he had been regarded as an unbending zealot, a crusader who had taken it upon himself to eliminate the corruption that had been the scourge of Italian politics and commerce for generations. Having failed, he had taken refuge behind the walls of the Vatican to protect his pope and his Church. Like Gabriel, he was a man used to being in the presence of the dead. Even so, he seemed incapable of looking at the woman on the floor of his beloved Basilica.

“Who found her?” asked Gabriel.

Vitale nodded toward a group of sampietrini standing halfway down the nave.

“Did they touch anything?”

“Why do you ask?”

“She’s barefoot.”

“We found one of her shoes near the baldacchino. The other was found in front of the Altar of St. Joseph. We assume they came off during the fall. Or . . .”

“Or what?”

“It’s possible she dropped them from the gallery of the dome before jumping.”

“Why?”

“Perhaps she wanted to see whether she really had the nerve to go through with it,” Metzler suggested. “A moment of doubt.”

Gabriel looked heavenward. Just above the Latin inscription at the base of the dome was the viewing platform. Running along the edge was a waist-high metal balustrade. It was enough to make suicide difficult, but not impossible. In fact, every few months, Vitale’s gendarmes had to prevent some poor soul from hurling himself into the blessed abyss. But late in the evening, when the Basilica was closed to the public, Claudia Andreatti would have had the gallery entirely to herself.

“Time of death?” asked Gabriel quietly, as though he were posing the question to the corpse itself.

“Unclear,” replied Vitale.

Gabriel looked around the interior of the Basilica, as if to remind the Italian of their whereabouts. Then he asked how it was possible there was no established time of death.

“Once each week,” Vitale answered, “the Central Security Office disables the cameras for a routine system reset. We do it in the evening when the Basilica is closed. Usually, it’s not a problem.”

“How long does the shutdown last?”

“Nine to midnight.”

“That’s quite a coincidence.” Gabriel looked at the body again. “What do you suppose the odds are that she decided to kill herself during the time the cameras were switched off?”

“Perhaps it wasn’t a coincidence at all,” said Metzler. “Perhaps she chose the time intentionally so there would be no video recording of her death.”

“How would she have known about the cameras being shut down?”

“It’s common knowledge around here.”

Gabriel shook his head slowly. Despite numerous outside threats, terrorist and otherwise, security inside the borders of the world’s smallest country remained startlingly lax. What’s more, those who worked behind the walls enjoyed extraordinary freedom of movement. They knew the doors that were never locked, the chapels that were never used, and the storerooms where it was possible to plot, scheme, or caress the flesh of a lover in complete privacy. They also knew the secret passageways leading into the Basilica. Gabriel knew one or two himself.

“Was there anyone else in the Basilica at the time?”

“Not that we’re aware of,” replied Vitale.

“But you can’t rule it out.”

“That’s correct. But no one reported anything unusual.”

“Where’s her handbag?”

“She left it up in the gallery before jumping.”

“Was anything missing?”

“Not that we know of.”

But there was something missing; Gabriel was certain of it. He closed his eyes and for an instant saw Claudia as she had been the previous evening—the warm smile, the flirtatious glance from her blue eyes, the batch of files she had been clutching to her breast.