The Fallen Angel

the painting propped on an easel, looking

and detonators that had been smuggled

“I’m a Jew from Russia. Positive thoughts aren’t in my nature.”

His small wireless spectacles lent a priestly gravity to his even features, and he was gesturing thoughtfully with a hand that had wielded no tool other than a Montblanc pen or a silver fork.

Only the faint shadow of loss fell across her face. It had been left there by the child she had miscarried while being held as ransom by the Russian oligarch and arms dealer Ivan Kharkov.

Chiara watched Gabriel intently as he selected one smeared with artichoke hearts and ricotta cheese and washed it down with the Sangiovese.

To that end,” he said, his arms spread wide, his amplified words echoing through the monuments of Yad Vashem, “we pledge to the people of Israel, our elder brothers, that this time, as you confront a challenge to your existence, the Roman Catholic Church will stand by you. We offer our prayers and, if you are willing to accept it, our counsel. We ask only that you proceed with the utmost caution, for your decisions will affect the entire world. The soil of this sacred city is filled with the remnants of empires that miscalculated. Jerusalem is the city of God. But it is also a gravestone to the folly of man.”

Their antiquities fill our museums, but all too often, we fail to learn from their mistakes. We are tempted to think that we have reached the end of history, that it can never happen again. But history is made every day, sometimes by men of evil. And all too often, history repeats itself.”

every turn that great empires and great civilizations can vanish in the blink of an eye.

There are some leaders who assure me that Israel can live with an Iran armed with a nuclear weapon,” the pope continued. “But to someone who lived through the madness of the Second World War, they sound too much like those who said the Jews had nothing to fear from a Germany led by Hitler and the Nazis. Here in this sacred city of Jerusalem, we are reminded at