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T he great unraveling commenced at ten the following morning when Vatican and Italian police jointly released the identity of the man who attempted to assassinate the Holy Father during the Sunday Angelus prayer service.

He was said to be Salvatore Alvaro, an unmarried electrician of thirty-six from Naples.

Authorities declined to say how they had determined Alvaro’s identity—or how he had managed to carry a loaded firearm into St. Peter’s Square.

Obviously, said the chief of the Vatican Gendarmerie, there had been a major breach of the city-state’s security.

It therefore came as something of a surprise when later that same day the Press Office announced that the Holy See had retained three powerful international accounting firms to conduct a thorough review of the Vatican’s byzantine finances.

The auditors would deliver their findings to a commission of prominent Catholic laypersons, all corporate lawyers or financial services professionals, who would in turn make recommendations to the Holy Father.

It was, wrote one respected commentator, the long-awaited papal shot across the bow of Vatican Incorporated.

The next unexpected turn of events came in Milan, where officers of the Carabinieri and Guardia di Finanza arrested Nico Ambrosi, a financier with close ties to the Vatican, on charges of embezzlement, fraud, and money laundering.

In a move that rattled investors around the world, Swiss police simultaneously raided the headquarters of SBL PrivatBank in Lugano and froze hundreds of suspect accounts.

Franco Tedeschi, the chief of SBL’s asset management division, received advance warning of the raid and attempted to flee the country.

He was taken into custody at Lugano Airport shortly after boarding the firm’s Dassault Falcon executive jet.

Swiss authorities seized the plane as well.

The following day brought shocking new details about the man who had attempted to kill the Holy Father.

It emerged that Salvatore Alvaro had been arrested several times in his youth, that he had spent time in prison for armed robbery and kidnapping, that he was known to use aliases, and that he had lived for many years in France, Spain, and Morocco.

Journalists who visited Alvaro’s hardscrabble neighborhood in Naples were met with blank stares and slammed doors, which gave rise to speculation that he was not, in point of fact, a humble tradesman.

Italy’s top crime reporter pointed out that all the countries where Alvaro had lived abroad had been infiltrated by the Camorra.

Alvaro, he wrote, was undoubtedly a Camorra soldier and assassin.

But why would a Camorra-linked gunman wish to kill the supreme pontiff?

And why had His Holiness, only two days removed from the attempt on his life, launched an unprecedented outside review of the Vatican’s finances?

During the Wednesday General Audience, his first public appearance since the shooting, he had nothing to say on the subject, choosing instead to once again address the Church’s obligation to help the poor and provide refuge to migrants.

Against the wishes of his security detail, he circulated through the massive crowd gathered in St. Peter’s Square in an open-sided popemobile.

Vatican spokesman Esteban Rodríguez used the word miracle while attempting to explain how the Holy Father had survived the attack unscathed.

The archconservative Cardinal Byrne, dispirited by the adoration shown to a pontiff he detested, acidly predicted the Holy Father would be declared a saint before his death.

But the video of the assassination attempt did not lie, and the questions continued unabated, especially after the Carabinieri launched a massive raid against the Camorra across the length and breadth of Campania.

By the time the operation was over, more than two hundred members of the criminal organization were in custody.

The top prosecutor in Naples called it the most devastating blow against the Camorra in years.

It was little wonder, then, that the Camorra made yet another attempt on the prosecutor’s life, this time with a bomb planted outside his heavily defended home.

His Holiness Luigi Donati condemned the attack during his next Sunday Angelus address, after which he received a preliminary report from the members of his special commission.

There was no record of what was said during the session.

But just twenty-four hours later, the Press Office issued a terse bollettino announcing the dismissal of Cardinal Matteo Bertoli, the Substitute for General Affairs of the Secretariat of State.

Missing from the bollettino was any reason for the abrupt firing of the third most powerful figure in the Roman Curia, which left the Vaticanisti no choice but to engage in unabashed speculation.

The timing suggested it was somehow connected to the Holy Father’s independent review of Vatican finances—a review the sostituto had reportedly opposed.

The theory gained momentum the following day when the Holy Father stripped the Secretariat of State of billions of euros’ worth of financial assets and real estate holdings and transferred them to the Vatican department known as Administration for the Patrimony of the Holy See, or APSA.

Not two hours later, a beleaguered Cardinal Bertoli was evicted from his lavish apartment in the Palazzo San Carlo.

He departed the Vatican that evening, a cardinal in name only, in the back of a humble Fiat 500 with no police escort.

The Press Office said he was embarking on a life of prayer and penance at a remote abbey in the mountains west of Turin.

“Better than being burned at the stake,” remarked one anonymous Vatican insider. “But only barely.”

But what sin had Bertoli committed to warrant so swift and severe a punishment?

The president of APSA provided a vital clue the next morning when he announced that the Vatican would in short order liquidate its interest in a retail-and-office block located in London’s New Bond Street.

A more fulsome explanation appeared three days later on the front page of La Repubblica .

Written by the paper’s respected Vatican correspondent and based on a trove of internal documents, the explosive exposé detailed how Cardinal Bertoli had enriched himself while at the same time losing more than two billion euros in Church funds.

Perhaps the story’s most damning allegation was that Bertoli had knowingly entered into a relationship with two criminal financiers—Nico Ambrosi and Franco Tedeschi—who were in the business of laundering money for the Camorra.

It all but accused the group of attempting to murder the Holy Father to prevent Bertoli’s dismissal and exposure of its lucrative money laundering empire.

The story, while electrifying, was incomplete.

It made no mention, for example, of an apprentice British art conservator named Penelope Radcliff.

Or the renowned Leonardist Giorgio Montefiore.

Or a museum guard named Ottavio Pozzi. Or a portrait of a young woman, oil on walnut panel, 78 by 56 centimeters, perhaps by Leonardo da Vinci, perhaps by a studio assistant or a later follower.

Nor was there any reference to the links between the Holy Father and the woman who had suffered a near-fatal gunshot wound to the chest while trying to protect him.

Three weeks to the day after the shooting, she left the Gemelli clinic and returned to her palazzo near the Via Veneto.

As for the painting, it had vanished without a trace.