The Fallen Angel - Страница 3
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Gabriel poured a tiny pool of Mowolith 20 medium onto his palette, added a few granules of dry pigment, and thinned the mixture with Arcosolve until it reached the desired consistency and intensity. Then he slipped on a magnifying visor and focused his gaze on the right hand of Christ. It hung in the manner of Michelangelo’s Pietà, with the fingers pointing allegorically toward the corner of the funerary stone. For several days, Gabriel had been attempting to repair a series of abrasions along the knuckles. He was not the first artist to struggle over the composition; Caravaggio himself had painted five other versions before finally completing the painting in 1604. Unlike his previous commission—a depiction of the Virgin’s death so controversial it was eventually removed from the church of Santa Maria della Scala—The Deposition was instantly hailed as a masterwork, and its reputation quickly spread throughout Europe. In 1797, the painting caught the eye of Napoléon Bonaparte, one of history’s greatest looters of art and antiquities, and it was carted over the Alps to Paris. It remained there until 1817, when it was returned to the custody of the papacy and hung in the Vatican.
For several hours, Gabriel had the lab to himself. Then, at the thoroughly Roman hour of ten, he heard the snap of the automatic locks, followed by Enrico Bacci’s lumbering plod. Next came Donatella Ricci, an Early Renaissance expert who whispered soothingly to the paintings in her care. After that it was Tommaso Antonelli, one of the stars of the Sistine Chapel restoration, who always tiptoed around the lab in his crepe-soled shoes with the stealth of a night thief.
Finally, at half past ten, Gabriel heard the distinctive tap of Antonio Calvesi’s handmade shoes over the linoleum floor. A few seconds later, Calvesi came whirling through the black curtain like a matador. With his disheveled forelock and perpetually loosened necktie, he had the air of a man who was running late for an appointment he would rather not keep. He settled himself atop a tall stool and nibbled thoughtfully at the stem of his reading glasses while inspecting Gabriel’s work.
“Not bad,” Calvesi said with genuine admiration. “Did you do that on your own, or did Caravaggio drop by to handle the inpainting himself?”
“I asked for his help,” Gabriel replied, “but he was unavailable.”
“Really? Where was he?”
“Back in prison at Tor di Nona. Apparently, he was roaming the Campo Marzio with a sword.”
“Again?” Calvesi leaned closer to the canvas. “If I were you, I’d consider replacing those lines of craquelure along the index finger.”
Gabriel raised his magnifying visor and offered Calvesi the palette. The Italian responded with a conciliatory smile. He was a gifted restorer in his own right—indeed, in their youth, the two men had been rivals—but it had been many years since he had actually applied a brush to canvas. These days, Calvesi spent most of his time pursuing money. For all its earthly riches, the Vatican was forced to rely on the kindness of strangers to care for its extraordinary collection of art and antiquities. Gabriel’s paltry stipend was a fraction of what he earned for a private restoration. It was, however, a small price to pay for the once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to clean a painting like The Deposition.
“Any chance you might actually finish it sometime soon?” Calvesi asked. “I’d like to have it back in the gallery for Holy Week.”
“When does it fall this year?”
“I’ll pretend I didn’t hear that.” Calvesi picked absently through the contents of Gabriel’s trolley.
“Something on your mind, Antonio?”
“One of our most important patrons is dropping by the museum tomorrow. An American. Very deep pockets. The kind of pockets that keep this place functioning.”
“And?”
“He’s asked to see the Caravaggio. In fact, he was wondering whether someone might be willing to give him a brief lecture on the restoration.”
“Have you been sniffing the acetone again, Antonio?”
“Won’t you at least let him see it?”
“No.”
“Why not?”
Gabriel gazed at the painting for a moment in silence. “Because it wouldn’t be fair to him,” he said finally.
“The patron?”
“Caravaggio. Restoration is supposed to be our little secret, Antonio. Our job is to come and go without being seen. And it should be done in private.”
“What if I get Caravaggio’s permission?”
“Just don’t ask him while he has a sword in his hand.” Gabriel lowered the magnifying visor and resumed his work.
“You know, Gabriel, you’re just like him. Stubborn, conceited, and far too talented for your own good.”
“Is there anything else I can do for you, Antonio?” asked Gabriel, tapping his brush impatiently against his palette.
“Not me,” Calvesi replied, “but you’re wanted in the chapel.”
“Which chapel?”
“The only one that matters.”
Gabriel wiped his brush and placed it carefully on the trolley. Calvesi smiled.
“You share one other trait with your friend Caravaggio.”
“What’s that?”
“Paranoia.”
“Caravaggio had good reason to be paranoid. And so do I.”
3
THE SISTINE CHAPEL
THE 5,896 SQUARE FEET OF the Sistine Chapel are perhaps the most visited piece of real estate in Rome. Each day, several thousand tourists pour through its rather ordinary doors to crane their necks in wonder at the glorious frescoes that adorn its walls and ceiling, watched over by blue-uniformed gendarmes who seem to have no other job than to constantly plead for silenzio. To stand alone in the chapel, however, is to experience it as its namesake Pope Sixtus IV had intended. With the lights dimmed and the crowds absent, it is almost possible to hear the quarrels of conclaves past or to see Michelangelo atop his scaffolding putting the finishing touches on The Creation of Adam.
On the western wall of the chapel is Michelangelo’s other Sistine masterwork, The Last Judgment. Begun thirty years after the ceiling was completed, it depicts the Apocalypse and the Second Coming of Christ, with all the souls of humanity rising or falling to meet their eternal reward or punishment in a swirl of color and anguish. The fresco is the first thing the cardinals see when they enter the chapel to choose a new pope, and on that morning it seemed the primary preoccupation of a single priest. Tall, lean, and strikingly handsome, he was cloaked in a black cassock with a magenta-colored sash and piping, handmade by an ecclesiastical tailor near the Pantheon. His dark eyes radiated a fierce and uncompromising intelligence, while the set of his jaw indicated he was a dangerous man to cross, which had the added benefit of being the truth. Monsignor Luigi Donati, private secretary to His Holiness Pope Paul VII, had few friends behind the walls of the Vatican, only occasional allies and sworn rivals. They often referred to him as a clerical Rasputin, the true power behind the papal throne, or “the Black Pope,” an unflattering reference to his Jesuit past. Donati didn’t mind. Though he was a devoted student of Ignatius and Augustine, he tended to rely more on the guidance of a secular Italian philosopher named Machiavelli, who counseled that it is far better for a prince to be feared than loved.
Among Donati’s many transgressions, at least in the eyes of some members of the Vatican’s gossipy papal court, were his unusually close ties to the notorious spy and assassin Gabriel Allon. Theirs was a partnership that defied history and faith—Donati, the soldier of Christ, and Gabriel, the man of art who by accident of birth had been compelled to lead a clandestine life of violence. Despite those obvious differences, they had much in common. Both were men of high morals and principle, and both believed that matters of consequence were best handled in private. During their long friendship, Gabriel had acted as both the Vatican’s protector and a revealer of some of its darkest secrets—and Donati, the Holy Father’s hard man in black, had served as his willing accomplice. As a result, the two men had done much to quietly improve the tortured relationship between the world’s Catholics and their twelve million distant spiritual cousins, the Jews.
Gabriel stood wordlessly at Donati’s side and gazed up at The Last Judgment. Near the center of the image, adjacent to the left foot of Christ, was one of two self-portraits Michelangelo had hidden within the frescoes. Here he had depicted himself as St. Bartholomew holding his own flayed skin, perhaps a not-so-subtle rejoinder to contemporary critics of his work.
“I assume you’ve been here before,” said Donati, his sonorous voice echoing in the empty chapel.
“Just once,” said Gabriel after a moment. “It was in the autumn of 1972, long before the restoration. I was posing as a German student traveling Europe. I came here in the afternoon and stayed until the guards forced me to leave. The next day . . .”
His voice trailed off. The next day, with Michelangelo’s vision of the end times still fresh in his mind, Gabriel entered the foyer of a drab apartment building in the Piazza Annibaliano. Standing before the elevator, a bottle of fig wine in one hand and a copy of A Thousand and One Nights in the other, was a skinny Palestinian intellectual named Wadal Zwaiter. The Palestinian was a member of the terrorist group Black September, perpetrators of the Munich Olympics massacre, and for that he had been secretly sentenced to death. Gabriel had calmly asked Zwaiter to say his name aloud. Then he had shot him eleven times, once for each Israeli butchered at Munich. In the months that followed, Gabriel would assassinate five other members of Black September, the opening act of a distinguished career that lasted far longer than he ever intended. Working at the behest of his mentor, the legendary spymaster Ari Shamron, he had carried out some of the most fabled operations in the history of Israeli intelligence. Now, blown and battered, he had returned to Rome, to the place where it all began. And one of the few people in the world he could trust was a Catholic priest named Luigi Donati.
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