Daniel Silva - The Heist

“To what?”

“To show the world the real Gabriel Allon. The Gabriel Allon who cares for the works of the great masters. The Gabriel Allon who can paint like an angel.”

“I only talk to journalists as a last resort. And I would never dream of talking to one about myself.”

“You’ve lived an interesting life.”

“That’s putting it mildly.”

“Perhaps it’s time for you to come out from behind the shroud.”

“And then what?”

“You can spend the rest of your days here in Venice with us. You always were a Venetian at heart, Gabriel.”

“It’s tempting.”

“But?”

With his expression, Gabriel made it clear he wished to discuss the matter no further. Then, turning to the canvas, he asked, “Have you received any other phone calls I should know about?”

“Just one,” answered Tiepolo. “General Ferrari of the Carabinieri is coming into town later this morning. He’d like a word with you in private.”

Gabriel turned sharply and looked at Tiepolo. “About what?”

“He didn’t say. The general is far better at asking questions than answering them.” Tiepolo scrutinized Gabriel for a moment. “I never knew that you and the general were friends.”

“We’re not.”

“How do you know him?”

“He once asked me for a favor, and I had no choice but to agree.”

Tiepolo made a show of thought. “It must have been that business at the Vatican a couple of years ago, that girl who fell from the dome of the Basilica. As I recall, you were restoring their Caravaggio at the time it happened.”

“Was I?”

“That was the rumor.”

“You shouldn’t listen to rumors, Francesco. They’re almost always wrong.”

“Unless they involve you,” Tiepolo responded with a smile.

Gabriel allowed the remark to echo unanswered into the heights of the chancel. Then he resumed his work. A moment earlier, he had been using his right hand. Now he was using his left, with equal dexterity.

“You’re like Titian,” Tiepolo said, watching him. “You are a sun amidst small stars.”

“If you don’t leave me in peace, the sun is never going to finish this painting.”

Tiepolo didn’t move. “Are you sure you’re not him?” he asked after a moment.

“Who?”

“Mario Delvecchio.”

“Mario is dead, Francesco. Mario never was.”

THE REGIONAL HEADQUARTERS OF THE Carabinieri, Italy’s national military police force, was located in the sestiere of Castello, not far from the Campo San Zaccaria. General Cesare Ferrari emerged from the building promptly at one. He had forsaken his blue uniform with its many medals and insignia and was wearing a business suit instead. One hand clutched a stainless steel attaché case; the other, the one missing two fingers, was thrust into the pocket of a well-cut overcoat. He removed the hand long enough to offer it to Gabriel. His smile was brief and formal. As usual, it had no influence upon his prosthetic right eye. Even Gabriel found its lifeless, unyielding gaze difficult to bear. It was like being studied by the all-seeing eye of an unforgiving God.

“You’re looking well,” said General Ferrari. “Being back in Venice obviously agrees with you.”

“How did you know I was here?”

The general’s second smile lasted scarcely longer than his first. “There isn’t much that happens in Italy that I don’t know about, especially when it concerns you.”

“How did you know?” Gabriel asked again.

“When you requested permission from our intelligence services to return to Venice, they forwarded that information to all relevant ministries and divisions of law enforcement. One of those places was the palazzo.”

The palazzo to which the general was referring overlooked the Piazza di Sant’Ignazio in the ancient center of Rome. It housed the Division for the Defense of Cultural Patrimony, which was better known as the Art Squad. General Ferrari was its chief. And he was right about one thing, thought Gabriel. There wasn’t much that happened in Italy the general didn’t know about.

The son of schoolteachers from the impoverished Campania region, Ferrari had long been regarded as one of Italy’s most competent and accomplished law enforcement officials. During the 1970s, a time of 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 the letter-bomb attack that claimed his eye and two fingers.

The posting to the Art Squad was supposed to be a reward for a long and distinguished career. It was assumed Ferrari would merely follow in the footsteps of his lackluster predecessor, that he would shuffle papers, take long Roman lunches, and, occasionally, find one or two of the museum’s worth of paintings that were stolen in Italy each year. Instead, he immediately set about modernizing a once-effective unit that had been allowed to atrophy with age and neglect. Within days of his arrival, he fired half the staff and quickly replenished the ranks with aggressive young officers who actually knew something about art. He gave them a simple mandate. He 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 didn’t take long for Ferrari’s new approach to pay dividends. More than a dozen important thieves were now behind bars, and statistics for art theft, while still astonishingly high, were beginning to show improvement.

“So what brings you to Venice?” Gabriel asked as he led the general between the temporary ponds in the Campo San Zaccaria.

“I had business in the north—Lake Como, to be specific.”

“Something got stolen?”

“No,” replied the general. “Someone got murdered.”

“Since when are dead bodies the business of the Art Squad?”

“When the decedent has a connection to the art world.”

Gabriel stopped walking and turned to face the general. “You still haven’t answered my question,” he said. “Why are you in Venice?”

“I’m here because of you, of course.”

“What does a dead body in Como have to do with me?”

“The person who found it.”

The general was smiling again, but the prosthetic eye was staring blankly into the middle distance. It was the eye of a man who knew everything, thought Gabriel. A man who was not about to take no for an answer.

They entered the church through the main doorway off the campo and made their way to Bellini’s famed San Zaccaria altarpiece. A tour group stood before it while a guide lectured sonorously on the subject of the painting’s most recent restoration, unaware that the man who had performed it was among his audience. Even General Ferrari seemed to find it amusing, though after a moment his monocular gaze began to wander. The Bellini was San Zaccaria’s most important piece, but the church contained several other notable paintings as well, including works by Tintoretto, Palma the Elder, and Van Dyke. It was just one example of why the Carabinieri maintained a dedicated unit of art detectives. Italy had been blessed with two things in abundance: art and professional criminals. Much of the art, like the art in the church, was poorly protected. And many of the criminals were bent on stealing every last bit of it.