The Order (Gabriel Allon #20) - Daniel Silva Page 0,20
only sorry we didn’t do this a long time ago.”
The ice broken, she led them along a gallery hung with Italian Old Master paintings, all of museum quality. The works were but a small portion of her late husband’s collection.
“As you can see, I’ve made a few changes since your last visit.”
“Spring cleaning?” asked Gabriel.
She laughed. “Something like that.”
The exquisite Greek and Roman statuary that once had lined the gallery was gone. Carlo Marchese’s business empire, nearly all of it illegitimate, had included a brisk international trade in looted antiquities. One of his main partners had been Hezbollah, which supplied Carlo with a steady stream of inventory from Lebanon, Syria, and Iraq. In return, Carlo filled Hezbollah’s coffers with hard currency, which it used to purchase weapons and fund terrorism. Gabriel had taken down the network. Then, after making a remarkable archaeological discovery one hundred and sixty-seven feet beneath the surface of the Temple Mount, he had taken down Carlo.
“A few months after my husband’s death,” Veronica Marchese explained, “I quietly disposed of his personal collection. I gave the Etruscan pieces to my museum, which is where they belonged in the first place. Most are still in storage, but I’ve placed a few on public display. Needless to say, the placards make no mention of their provenance.”
“And the rest?”
“Your friend General Ferrari was good enough to take it off my hands. He was very discreet, which is unusual for him. The general likes good publicity.” She looked at Gabriel with genuine gratitude. “I suppose I have you to thank for that. If it had become public that my husband controlled the global trade in looted antiquities, my career would have been destroyed.”
“We all have our secrets.”
“Yes,” she said distantly. “I suppose we do.”
Veronica Marchese’s other secret waited in her formal drawing room, dressed in a cassock and a simar. Music played softly in the background. It was Mendelssohn’s Piano Trio no. 1 in D Minor. The key of repressed passion.
Donati opened a bottle of prosecco and poured four glasses.
“You’re rather good at that for a priest,” said Gabriel.
“I’m an archbishop, remember?”
Donati carried one of the glasses to the brocade-covered chair in which Veronica had settled. A trained observer of human behavior, Gabriel knew an intimate gesture when he saw one. Donati was clearly comfortable in Veronica’s drawing room. Were it not for the cassock and simar, a stranger might have presumed he was the man of the palazzo.
He sat down in the chair next to her, and an awkward silence ensued. Like an uninvited dinner guest, the past had intruded. For his part, Gabriel was thinking about his last encounter with Veronica Marchese. They were in the Sistine Chapel, just the two of them, standing before Michelangelo’s Last Judgment. Veronica was describing for Gabriel the life that awaited Donati when the Ring of the Fisherman was removed from Pietro Lucchesi’s finger for the last time. A teaching position at a pontifical university, a retirement home for aging priests. So lonely. So terribly sad and lonely … It occurred to Gabriel that Veronica, widowed and available, might have other plans.
At length, she complimented Chiara on her dress and pearls. Then she asked about the children and about Venice before lamenting the condition into which Rome, once the center of the civilized world, had fallen. These days, it was a national obsession. Eighty percent of the city’s streets were riddled with unrepaired potholes, making driving, even walking, a perilous undertaking. Children carried toilet paper in their bookbags because the school bathrooms had none. Rome’s buses ran perpetually behind schedule, if at all. An escalator at a busy subway stop had recently amputated the foot of a tourist. And then, said Veronica, there were the overflowing dumpsters and mounds of uncollected rubbish. The most popular website in the city was Roma Fa Schifo, “Rome Is Gross.”
“And who is to blame for this deplorable state of affairs? A few years ago, Rome’s chief prosecutor discovered that the Mafia had gained control of the municipal government and was steadily draining the city’s finances. A Mafia-owned company was awarded the contract to collect the garbage. The company didn’t bother to collect garbage, of course, because doing so would cost money and reduce its profit margin. The same was true of street repairs. Why bother to repair a pothole? Repairing potholes costs money.” Veronica shook her head slowly. “The Mafia is Italy’s curse.” Then, with a glance at Gabriel, she added, “Mine, too.”