one end of the rectangular table was a meal that had been abandoned. At the other end was a cardboard box with the name of a local winery printed on the side. Gabriel lifted one of the flaps and looked inside. The box was filled with objects carefully wrapped in sheets of the Corriere della Sera. It was a rather highbrow paper for a man like Falcone, he thought. Gabriel had him figured for the Gazzetta dello Sport.
“Looks like he left in a hurry,” Chiara said.
“Or maybe he was forced to leave.”
He removed one of the objects from the box and cautiously opened the newsprint wrapper. Inside was a concave fragment of pottery about the size of Gabriel’s palm, decorated with the partial image of a young woman in semi-profile. She wore a pleated gown and appeared to be playing a flute-like instrument. Her flesh and garment were depicted in the same terra-cotta color, but the background was a luminous solid black.
“My God,” said Chiara softly.
“It looks like a portion of a red-figure Attic vessel of some sort.”
Chiara nodded. “Judging from the shape and the imagery, I’d say it comes from the upper portion of a stamnos, a Greek vase used for transporting wine. The woman is clearly a maenad, a follower of Dionysus. The instrument is a two-reed pipe known as an aulos.”
“Could it be a Roman copy of a Greek original?”
“I suppose so. But in all likelihood, it was produced in Greece two and a half millennia ago specifically for export to the Etruscan cities. The Etruscans were great admirers of Greek vases. That’s why so many important pieces have been discovered in Etruscan tomb rooms.”
“What’s it doing in a cardboard box on Roberto Falcone’s dining room table?”
“That’s the easy part. He’s a tombarolo.”
A tomb robber.
“That would explain the dog,” said Gabriel.
“And the muddy boots at the back door. He’s obviously been doing some digging, probably quite recently.” She held up the newspaper. “It’s from last week.”
Gabriel reached into the box again and withdrew another bundle of newsprint. Inside was another section of the vase. The face of a second maenad was visible, along with the kylix, a shallow cup for drinking wine, she held in her hand. Gabriel examined the image in silence before looking at the newspaper. It contained a fragment, too—a fragment of a story about a Vatican curator who had committed suicide by hurling herself from the dome of St. Peter’s Basilica. The account neglected to mention that the curator had been conducting a secret inventory of the Vatican’s collection of antiquities. It appeared her inquiry had led her here, to the home of a tombarolo. Perhaps that alone had been enough to get her killed, but Gabriel suspected there had to be more.
He looked at the fragment of pottery again and lifted it to his nose. There was a trace of a chemical odor, not unlike the smell of the solvents he used to remove varnish from paintings. It suggested the fragment had recently been cleaned of soil and other encrustations, probably with a solution of nitrohydrochloric acid. Even an old man living alone in an unkempt house would find it difficult to be around such a smell for more than a few minutes. He would need to maintain a separate facility where objects could be left for long periods without fear of discovery.
Gabriel placed the fragment of pottery into his coat pocket and looked out the window toward the tumbledown outbuilding at the back of the property. Pacing outside, head down, ears back, was Falcone’s dog. Gabriel sighed heavily. Then he went into the kitchen, found a large mixing bowl, and began filling it with anything that looked remotely edible.
There were two padlocks, German made, rusted by rain. Gabriel picked them as the dog supped greedily on a casserole of canned tuna, fava beans, artichoke hearts, and condensed milk. When the door swung open, the animal looked up briefly but paid Gabriel and Chiara no heed as they slipped inside. Here the stench of acid was overwhelming. Gabriel groped blindly, one hand covering his nose and mouth, until he found the light switch. Overhead a row of fluorescent lamps flickered to life, revealing a professional-grade laboratory built for the care and storage of looted antiquities. Its neatness and order stood in stark contrast to the rest of the property. One object looked slightly out of place, a javelin-like iron pike suspended horizontally on a pair of hooks. Gabriel examined the traces of mud near the tip. It was the same color and consistency as the mud on the boots.
“It’s a spillo,” Chiara explained. “The tombaroli use it to probe for underground burial chambers. They insert it into the ground until they hear the telltale clank of a tomb room or a Roman villa. Then they bring in the shovels and the backhoes and grab whatever they can find.”
“And then,” said Gabriel, looking around, “they bring it here.”
He walked over to Falcone’s worktable. Clean and white, it was similar to the tables in the restoration lab at the Vatican Museums. At one end was a stack of scholarly monographs dealing with the antiquities of the Roman, Greek, and Etruscan empires—the same sort of books Gabriel had seen in Claudia Andreatti’s apartment. One of the volumes lay open to an image of a red-figure Attic stamnos vase decorated with maenads.
Gabriel snapped a photo of the open page with his BlackBerry before making his way over to Falcone’s storage shelves. Chrome and spotless, they were lined with antiquities arranged by type: pottery, household utensils, tools, weapons, and bits of iron that looked as though they had been extracted from the basement of time. It was evidence of looting on a massive scale. Unfortunately, it was a crime that could never be undone. Ripped from their original settings, these antiquities now said very little about the people who had made and used them.
At the far end of the building were four large stainless steel pools, approximately five feet in diameter and three feet in height. In the first three vats, there were bits of pottery, statuary, and other objects clearly visible in the reddish liquid. But in the fourth, the acid was opaque and very close to spilling over the side. Gabriel retrieved the spillo and inserted it gently into the liquid. Just beneath the surface, it collided with something soft and pliant.
“What is it?” asked Chiara.
“I could be wrong,” Gabriel said, wincing, “but I think we just found Roberto Falcone.”
10
PIAZZA DI SANT’IGNAZIO, ROME
IN THE HEART OF ROME, between the Pantheon and the Via del Corso, is a pleasant little square called the Piazza di Sant’Ignazio. On the northern side stands a church by the same name, best known for a glorious ceiling fresco painted by the Jesuit brother Andrea Pozzo. On the southern flank, across an expanse of gray paving stones, is an ornate palazzo with façades of creamy yellow and white. Two official flags fly from its third-floor balcony, and above the solemn entrance is the seal of the Carabinieri. A small plaque states that the premises are occupied by the Division for the Defense of Cultural Patrimony. But within the world of law enforcement, the unit is known simply as the Art Squad.
At the time of its formation in 1969, it was the only police organization anywhere in the world dedicated exclusively to combating the lucrative trade in stolen art and antiquities. Italy surely had need of such a unit, for it was blessed with both an abundance of art and countless professional criminals bent on stealing every last bit of it. During the next two decades, the Art Squad brought charges against thousands of people suspected of involvement in art crime and made numerous high-profile recoveries, including works by Raphael, Giorgione, and Tintoretto. Then the institutional paralysis began to set in. Manpower dwindled to a few dozen retirement-age officers—many of whom knew next to nothing about art—and inside the graceful palazzo, work proceeded at a decidedly Roman pace. It was said by the unit’s legion of detractors that more time was spent debating where to have lunch than searching for the museum’s worth of paintings that went missing