He hung up. Now what? He had no choice but to wait and hope the detective called him back. There was no television in the room. The bedside table had a built-in radio, but the tuning knob was broken.

After one hour of paralyzing boredom, he dialed the number a second time. Once again the switchboard officer transferred him straight to Rossi's voice mail. Gabriel left a second message, identical to the first, but with a faint note of urgency in his voice.

At eleven-thirty, he placed a third call to Rossi's number. This time he was put through to a colleague who explained that the inspector was on assignment and would not be back in the office until late afternoon. Gabriel left a third message and hung up.

He decided to use the opportunity to get out of the room. In the streets around the Church of Santa Maria Maggiore he checked his tail for signs of surveillance and saw nothing. Then he walked down the Via Napoleone III. The March air was crisp and clear and scented with woodsmoke. He ate pasta in a restaurant near the Piazza Vittorio Emanuele II. After lunch, he walked along the looming western facade of the Stazione Termini, then wandered among! the classical edifices of Rome's government quarter until he found! the headquarters of the Polizia di Stato. In a cafe across the street,! he drank espresso and watched officers and secretaries filing in and out, wondering whether Rossi was among them.

At three o'clock, he started back toward the Pensione Abruzzi.

As he was crossing the Piazza di Repubblica, a crowd of about five hundred students entered the square from the direction of the Uni-versita Romana. At the head of the procession was an unshaven boy wearing a white headband. Around his waist were sticks of mock dynamite. Behind him a group of pseudo-mourners carried a coffin fashioned of cardboard. As they drew closer Gabriel could see that most of the demonstrators were Italian, including the boy dressed as a suicide bomber. They chanted "Liberate the land of Palestine!" and "Death to the Jews!"--not in Arabic but in Italian. A young Italian girl, no more than twenty, thrust a leaflet into Gabriel's hand. It depicted the Israeli prime minister dressed in the uniform of the SS with a Hitler Ian toothbrush mustache, the heel of his jackboot crushing the skull of a Palestinian girl. Gabriel squeezed the leaflet into a ball and dropped it onto the square.

He passed a flower stall. A pair of carabinieri were flirting shamelessly with the girl who worked there. They looked up briefly as Gabriel strode by and stared at him with undisguised interest before turning their attention once more to the girl. It could have been nothing, but something about the way they looked at him made sweat run over Gabriel's ribs.

He took his time walking back to the hotel, careful to make sure no one was following him. Along the way, he passed a bored cara-biniere on a motorcycle, parked in a patch of sunlight, watching the madness of a traffic circle with little interest. Gabriel seemed to intrigue him even less.

He entered the Pensione Abruzzi. The Spaniards had returned from the Wednesday audience in a state of great excitement. It seemed that one of them, a girl with a spiked haircut, had managed to touch the Pope's hand.

Upstairs in his room, Gabriel dialed Rossi's number.

 "Pronto."

"Inspector Rossi?"

"Si."

"My name is Heinrich Siedler. I called earlier today."

"Are you still at the Pensione Abruzzi?"

"Yes."

"Don't call here again."

Click.

NIGHT FELL and with it came a Mediterranean storm. Gabriel lay on his bed with the window open, listening to the rain smacking against the paving stones in the street below while the conversation with Alessio Rossi played over and over in his head like a loop of audio tape.

"Are you still at the Pensione Abruzzi?" Yes.

"Don't call here again."

Clearly the Italian detective wished to speak with him. It was also clear that he wanted no more contact with Herr Siedler on his office telephone. Gabriel had no choice but to wait him out and hope Rossi would make the next move.

At nine o'clock the telephone finally rang. It was the night manager.

"There's a man here to see you."

"What's his name?"

"He didn't say. Shall I send him away?"

"No, I'll be down in a minute."

Gabriel hung up the phone and stepped into the corridor, lock'ing the door behind him. Downstairs, he found the night manager seated behind the front desk. No one else was there. Gabriel looked at him and shrugged. The night manager pointed a sausage-like forefinger toward the common room. Gabriel entered but found the room deserted, except for the Croatian table-tennis players.

He went back to the front desk. The Italian threw his hands up in a gesture of surrender and turned his attention to a miniature black-and-white television. Gabriel climbed the stairs to his room. He unlocked the door and stepped inside.

He saw the blow coming, a glint of light on black metal, sweeping toward him in an arc, like a shimmering swath of wet paint across blank canvas. Too late, he raised his hands to shield his head. The butt of a pistol crashed against the base of his skull behind his left ear.

The pain was immediate. His vision blurred. His legs seemed suddenly paralyzed, and he felt himself corkscrewing downward. His attacker caught him and eased him soundlessly to the linoleum floor. He heard Peter Malone's warning one last time--"If they thinly you pose a threat, they won't hesitate to kill you"--and then only the sound of the table tennis match downstairs in the common room.

TAPa-TAP-a-TAP .. .

When Gabriel had awoken, his face was burning. He opened his eyes and found himself staring into a halogen bulb not more than an inch from his face. He closed his eyes and tried to turn his head. Pain shot through the back of his skull like a second Wow. He wondered how long he had been out. Long enough for his stacker to bind his mouth and wrists with packing tape. Long enough for blood to dry against the side of his neck.

The light was so close he could see nothing more of the room.

 He had the sense that he had not left the Abruzzi. This was confirmed when he heard shouting in Serbo-Croatian. He was on his own bed.

He tried to sit up. A gun barrel seemed to flow out of the light It pressed against his breastbone and pushed him back onto the mattress. Then a face appeared. Heavy shadows beneath the eyes, stubble on the square chin. The lips moved, sound reached Gabriel's ears. In his delirium, it seemed like a film out of sync, and his brain required a moment to process and comprehend the words he had just heard.

"My name is Alessio Rossi. What the fuck do you want?"

ROME

THE YOUNG MAN sitting astride the motorino on the Via Gioberti had an air of bored insolence typical of Roman teenagers. He was not bored, nor was he a teenager, but a thirty-year-old Vigilanza officer assigned to Carlo Casagrande's special section of the Vatican Security Office. His youthful appearance proved an asset in his present assignment: the surveillance of Inspector Alessio Rossi of the Polizia di Stato. The Vigilanza man knew only what he needed to know about Rossi. A troublemaker, the inspector. Poking his nose into places it didn't belong. At the end of each shift, the officer returned to the Vatican, then typed up a detailed report and left it on Casagrande's desk. The old general always read the Rossi reports the moment they came in. He had taken a special "interest in the case.

Rossi had been acting suspiciously. Twice that day--once in the again in the late afternoon--he'd driven an unmarked

 car from headquarters to the Via Gioberti and parked there. The Vigilanza man had observed Rossi staring at the Pensione Abruzzi like a man who suspected his wife was having an affair upstairs. After the second visit, the officer contacted an informant in Rossi's department, a pretty young girl who answered the telephones and handled the filing. The girl told him that Rossi had received several telephone calls that day from a guest at the Abruzzi offering information about a cold case. The guest's name? Siedler, the informant had answered. Heinrich Siedler.