A Death in Vienna

1 VIENNA

THE OFFICE IS hard to find, and intentionally so. Located near the end of a narrow, curving lane, in a quarter of Vienna more renowned for its nightlife than its tragic past, the entrance is marked only by a small brass plaque bearing the inscription WAR TIME CLAIMS AND INQUIRIES. The security system, installed by an obscure firm based in Tel Aviv, is formidable and highly visible. A camera glowers menacingly from above the door. No one is admitted without an appointment and a letter of introduction. Visitors must pass through a finely tuned magnetometer. Purses and briefcases are inspected with unsmiling efficiency by one of two disarmingly pretty girls. One is called Reveka, the other Sarah.

Once inside, the visitor is escorted along a claustrophobic corridor lined with gunmetal-gray filing cabinets, then into a large typically Viennese chamber with pale floors, a high ceiling, and bookshelves bowed beneath the weight of countless volumes and file folders. The donnish clutter is appealing, though some are unnerved by the green-tinted bulletproof windows overlooking the melancholy courtyard.

The man who works there is untidy and easily missed. It is his special talent. Sometimes, as you enter, he is standing atop a library ladder rummaging for a book. Usually he is seated at his desk, wreathed in cigarette smoke, peering at the stack of paperwork and files that never seems to diminish. He takes a moment to finish a sentence or jot a loose minute in the margin of a document, then he rises and extends his tiny hand, his quick brown eyes flickering over you. “Eli Lavon,” he says modestly as he shakes your hand, though everyone in Vienna knows who runs Wartime Claims and Inquiries.

Were it not for Lavon’s well-established reputation, his appearance-a shirtfront chronically smeared with ash, a shabby burgundy-colored cardigan with patches on the elbows and a tattered hem-might prove disturbing. Some suspect he is without sufficient means; others imagine he is an ascetic or even slightly mad. One woman who wanted help winning restitution from a Swiss bank concluded he was suffering from a permanently broken heart. How else to explain that he had never been married? The air of bereavement that is sometimes visible when he thinks no one is looking? Whatever the visitor’s suspicions, the result is usually the same. Most cling to him for fear he might float away.

He points you toward the comfortable couch. He asks the girls to hold his calls, then places his thumb and forefinger together and tips them toward his mouth.Coffee, please. Out of earshot the girls quarrel about whose turn it is. Reveka is an Israeli from Haifa, olive-skinned and black-eyed, stubborn and fiery. Sarah is a well-heeled American Jew from the Holocaust studies program at Boston University, more cerebral than Reveka and therefore more patient. She is not above resorting to deception or even outright lies to avoid a chore she believes is beneath her. Reveka, honest and temperamental, is easily outmaneuvered, and so it is usually Reveka who joylessly plunks a silver tray on the coffee table and retreats in a sulk.

Lavon has no set formula for how to conduct his meetings. He permits the visitor to determine the course. He is not averse to answering questions about himself and, if pressed, explains how it came to be that one of Israel ’s most talented young archaeologists chose to sift through the unfinished business of the Holocaust rather than the troubled soil of his homeland. His willingness to discuss his past, however, goes only so far. He does not tell visitors that, for a brief period in the early 1970s, he worked for Israel ’s notorious secret service. Or that he is still regarded as the finest street surveillance artist the service has ever produced. Or that twice a year, when he returns to Israel to see his aged mother, he visits a highly secure facility north of Tel Aviv to share some of his secrets with the next generation. Inside the service he is still referred to as “the Ghost.” His mentor, a man called Ari Shamron, always said that Eli Lavon could disappear while shaking your hand. It was not far from the truth.

He is quiet around his guests, just as he was quiet around the men he stalked for Shamron. He is a chain smoker, but if it bothers the guest he will refrain. A polyglot, he listens to you in whatever language you prefer. His gaze is sympathetic and steady, though behind his eyes it is sometimes possible to detect puzzle pieces sliding into place. He prefers to hold all questions until the visitor has completed his case. His time is precious, and he makes decisions quickly. He knows when he can help. He knows when it is better to leave the past undisturbed.

Should he accept your case, he asks for a small sum of money to finance the opening stages of his investigation. He does so with noticeable embarrassment, and if you cannot pay he will waive the fee entirely. He receives most of his operating funds from donors, but Wartime Claims is hardly a profitable enterprise and Lavon is chronically strapped for cash. The source of his funding has been a contentious issue in certain circles of Vienna, where he is reviled as a troublesome outsider financed by international Jewry, always sticking his nose into places it doesn’t belong. There are many in Austria who would like Wartime Claims to close its doors for good. It is because of them that Eli Lavon spends his days behind green bulletproof glass.

On a snow-swept evening in early January, Lavon was alone in his office, hunched over a stack of files. There were no visitors that day. In fact it had been many days since Lavon had accepted appointments, the bulk of his time being consumed by a single case. At seven o’clock, Reveka poked her head through the door. “We’re hungry,” she said with typical Israeli bluntness. “Get us something to eat.” Lavon’s memory, while impressive, did not extend to food orders. Without looking up from his work, he waved his pen in the air as though he were writing-Make me a list, Reveka.

A moment later, he closed the file and stood up. He looked out his window and watched the snow settling gently onto the black bricks of the courtyard. Then he pulled on his overcoat, wrapped a scarf twice around his neck, and placed a cap atop his thinning hair. He walked down the hall to the room where the girls worked. Reveka’s desk was a skyline of German military files; Sarah, the eternal graduate student, was concealed behind a stack of books. As usual, they were quarreling. Reveka wanted Indian from a take-away just on the other side of the Danube Canal; Sarah craved pasta from an Italian café on the Kärntnerstrasse. Lavon, oblivious, studied the new computer on Sarah’s desk.

“When did that arrive?” he asked, interrupting their debate.

“This morning.”

“Why do we have a new computer?”

“Because you bought the old one when the Hapsburgs still ruled Austria.”

“Did I authorize the purchase of a new computer?”

The question was not threatening. The girls managed the office. Papers were placed beneath his nose, and usually he signed them without looking.

“No, Eli, you didn’t approve the purchase. My father paid for the computer.”

Lavon smiled. “Your father is a generous man. Please thank him on my behalf.”

The girls resumed their debate. As usual it resolved in Sarah’s favor. Reveka wrote out the list and threatened to pin it to Lavon’s sleeve. Instead, she stuffed it into his coat pocket for safekeeping and gave him a little shove to send him on his way. “And don’t stop for a coffee,” she said. “We’re starving.”

It was almost as difficult to leave Wartime Claims and Inquiries as it was to enter. Lavon punched a series of numbers into a keypad on the wall next to the entrance. When the buzzer sounded, he pulled open the interior door and stepped into the security chamber. The outer door would not open until the inner door had been closed for ten seconds. Lavon put his face to the bulletproof glass and peered out.

On the opposite side of the street, concealed in the shadows at the entrance of a narrow alleyway, stood a heavy-shouldered figure with a fedora hat and mackintosh raincoat. Eli Lavon could not walk the streets of Vienna, or any other city for that matter, without ritualistically checking his tail and recording faces that appeared too many times in too many disparate situations. It was a professional affliction. Even from a distance, and even in the poor light, he knew that he had seen the figure across the street several times during the last few days.

He sorted through his memory, almost as a librarian would sort through a card index, until he found references to previous sightings. Yes, here it is. The Judenplatz, two days ago. It was you who was following me after I had coffee with that reporter from the States. He returned to the index and found a second reference. The window of a bar along the Sterngasse. Same man, without the fedora hat, gazing casually over his pilsner as Lavon hurried through a biblical deluge after a perfectly wretched day at the office. The third reference took him a bit longer to locate, but he found it nonetheless. The Number Two streetcar, evening rush. Lavon is pinned against the doors by a florid-faced Viennese who smells of bratwurst and apricot schnapps. Fedora has somehow managed to find a seat and is calmly cleaning his nails with his ticket stub. He is a man who enjoys cleaning things, Lavon had thought at the time. Perhaps he cleans things for a living.

Lavon turned round and pressed the intercom. No response.Come on, girls. He pressed it again, then looked over his shoulder. The man in the fedora and mackintosh coat was gone.

A voice came over the speaker. Reveka.

“Did you lose the list already, Eli?”

Lavon pressed his thumb against the button.

“Get out! Now! ”

A few seconds later, Lavon could hear the trample of footfalls in the corridor. The girls appeared before him, separated by a wall of glass. Reveka coolly punched in the code. Sarah stood by silently, her eyes locked on Lavon’s, her hand on the glass.

He never remembered hearing the explosion. Reveka and Sarah were engulfed in a ball of fire, then were swept away by the blast wave. The door blew outward. Lavon was lifted like a child’s toy, arms spread wide, back arched like a gymnast. His flight was dreamlike. He felt himself turning over and over again. He had no memory of impact. He knew only that he was lying on his back in snow, in a hailstorm of broken glass. “My girls,” he whispered as he slid slowly into blackness. “My beautiful girls.”

2 VENICE

IT WAS Asmall terra-cotta church, built for a poor parish in thesestière of Cannaregio. The restorer paused at the side portal beneath a beautifully proportioned lunette and fished a set of keys from the pocket of his oilskin coat. He unlocked the studded oaken door and slipped inside. A breath of cold air, heavy with damp and old candle wax, caressed his cheek. He stood motionless in the half-light for a moment, then headed across the intimate Greek Cross nave, toward the small Chapel of Saint Jerome on the right side of the church. The restorer’s gait was smooth and seemingly without effort. The slight outward bend to his legs suggested speed and sure-footedness. The face was long and narrow at the chin, with a slender nose that looked as if it had been carved from wood. The cheekbones were wide, and there was a hint of the Russian steppes in the restless green eyes. The black hair was cropped short and shot with gray at the temples. It was a face of many possible national origins, and the restorer possessed the linguistic gifts to put it to good use. In Venice, he was known as Mario Delvecchio. It was not his real name.

The altarpiece was concealed behind a tarpaulin-draped scaffold. The restorer took hold of the aluminum tubing and climbed silently upward. His work platform was as he had left it the previous afternoon: his brushes and his palette, his pigments and his medium. He switched on a bank of fluorescent lamps. The painting, the last of Giovanni Bellini’s great altarpieces, glowed under the intense lighting. At the left side of the image stood Saint Christopher, the Christ Child straddling his shoulders. Opposite stood Saint Louis of Toulouse, a crosier in hand, a bishop’s miter atop his head, his shoulders draped in a cape of red and gold brocade. Above it all, on a second parallel plane, Saint Jerome sat before an open Book of Psalms, framed by a vibrant blue sky streaked with gray-brown clouds. Each saint was separated from the other, alone before God, the isolation so complete it was almost painful to observe. It was an astonishing piece of work for a man in his eighties.

The restorer stood motionless before the towering panel, like a fourth figure rendered by Bellini’s skilled hand, and allowed his mind to float away into the landscape. After a moment he poured a puddle of Mowolith 20 medium onto his palette, added pigment, then thinned the mixture with Arcosolve until the consistency and intensity felt right.

He looked up again at the painting. The warmth and richness of the colors had led the art historian Raimond Van Marle to conclude the hand of Titian was clearly in evidence. The restorer believed Van Marle, with all due respect, was sadly mistaken. He had retouched works by both artists and knew their brushwork like the sun lines around his own eyes. The altarpiece in the Church of San Giovanni Crisostomo was Bellini’s and Bellini’s alone. Besides, at the time of its production, Titian was desperately attempting to replace Bellini as Venice ’s most important painter. The restorer sincerely doubted Giovanni would have invited the young headstrong Titian to assist in so important a commission. Van Marle, had he done his homework, would have saved himself the embarrassment of so ludicrous an opinion.

The restorer slipped on a pair of Binomags and focused on the rose-colored tunic of Saint Christopher. The painting had suffered from decades of neglect, wild temperature swings, and the continuous onslaught of incense and candle smoke. Christopher’s garments had lost much of their original luster and were scarred by the islands ofpentimenti that had pushed their way to the surface. The restorer had been granted authority to carry out an aggressive repair. His mission was to restore the painting to its original glory. His challenge was to do so without making it look as though it had been churned out by a counterfeiter. In short, he wished to come and go leaving no trace of his presence, to make it appear as if the retouching had been performed by Bellini himself.

For two hours, the restorer worked alone, the silence broken only by the shuffle of feet outside in the street and the rattle of rising aluminum storefronts. The interruptions began at ten o’clock with the arrival of the renowned Venetian altar cleaner, Adrianna Zinetti. She poked her head around the restorer’s shroud and wished him a pleasant morning. Annoyed, he raised his magnifying visor and peered down over the edge of his platform. Adrianna had positioned herself in such a way that it was impossible to avoid gazing down the front of her blouse at her extraordinary breasts. The restorer nodded solemnly, then watched her slither up her scaffolding with feline assurance. Adrianna knew he was living with another woman, a Jewess from the old ghetto, yet she still flirted with him at every opportunity, as if one more suggestive glance, or one more “accidental” touch, would be the one to topple his defenses. Still, he envied the simplicity with which she viewed the world. Adrianna loved art and Venetian food and being adored by men. Little else mattered to her.

A young restorer called Antonio Politi came next, wearing sunglasses and looking hung over, a rock star arriving for yet another interview he wished to cancel. Antonio did not bother to wish the restorer good morning. Their dislike was mutual. For the Crisostomo project, Antonio had been assigned Sebastiano del Piombo’s main altarpiece. The restorer believed the boy was not ready for the piece, and each evening, before leaving the church, he secretly scaled Antonio’s platform to inspect his work.

Francesco Tiepolo, the chief of the San Giovanni Crisostomo project, was the last to arrive, a shambling, bearded figure, dressed in a flowing white shirt and silk scarf round his thick neck. On the streets of Venice, tourists mistook him for Luciano Pavarotti. Venetians rarely made such a mistake, for Francesco Tiepolo ran the most successful restoration company in the entire Veneto region. Among the Venetian art set, he was an institution.

“Buongiorno,”Tiepolo sang, his cavernous voice echoing high in the central dome. He seized the restorer’s platform with his large hand and gave it one violent shake. The restorer peered over the side like a gargoyle.

“You almost ruined an entire morning’s work, Francesco.”

“That’s why we use isolating varnish.” Tiepolo held up a white paper sack.“Cornetto?”

“Come on up.”

Tiepolo put a foot on the first rung of the scaffolding and pulled himself up. The restorer could hear the aluminum tubing straining under Tiepolo’s enormous weight. Tiepolo opened the sack, handed the restorer an almond cornetto, and took one for himself. Half of it disappeared in one bite. The restorer sat on the edge of the platform with his feet dangling over the side. Tiepolo stood before the altarpiece and examined his work.

“If I didn’t know better, I would have thought old Giovanni slipped in here last night and did the inpainting himself.”

“That’s the idea, Francesco.”

“Yes, but few people have the gifts to actually pull it off.” The rest of the cornetto disappeared into his mouth. He brushed powdered sugar from his beard. “When will it be finished?”

“Three months, maybe four.”

“From my vantage point, three months would be better than four. But heaven forbid I should rush the great Mario Delvecchio. Any travel plans?”

The restorer glared at Tiepolo over the cornetto and slowly shook his head. A year earlier, he had been forced to confess his true name and occupation to Tiepolo. The Italian had preserved that trust by never revealing the information to another soul, though from time to time, when they were alone, he still asked the restorer to speak a few words of Hebrew, just to remind himself that the legendary Mario Delvecchio truly was an Israeli from the Valley of Jezreel named Gabriel Allon.

A sudden downpour hammered on the roof of the church. From atop the platform, high in the apse of the chapel, it sounded like a drum roll. Tiepolo raised his hands toward the heavens in supplication.

“Another storm. God help us. They say the acqua alta could reach five feet. I still haven’t dried out from the last one. I love this place, but even I don’t know how much longer I can take it.”

It had been a particularly difficult season for high water. Venice had flooded more than fifty times, and three months of winter still remained. Gabriel’s house had been inundated so many times that he’d moved everything off the ground floor and was installing a waterproof barrier around his doors and windows.

“You’ll die in Venice, just like Bellini,” Gabriel said. “And I’ll bury you beneath a cypress tree on San Michele, in an enormous crypt befitting a man of your achievements.”

Tiepolo seemed pleased with this image, even though he knew that, like most modern Venetians, he would have to suffer the indignity of a mainland burial.

“And what about you, Mario? Where will you die?”

“With a bit of luck, it will be at the time and place of my own choosing. That’s about the best a man like me can hope for.”

“Just do me one favor.”

“What’s that?”

Tiepolo gazed at the scarred painting. “Finish the altarpiece before you die. You owe it to Giovanni.”

THE FLOOD SIRENS atop the Basilica San Marco cried out a few minutes after four o’clock. Gabriel hurriedly cleaned his brushes and his palette, but by the time he’d descended his scaffolding and crossed the nave to the front portal, the street was already running with several inches of floodwater.

He went back inside. Like most Venetians, he owned several pairs of rubber Wellington boots, which he stored at strategic points in his life, ready to be deployed at a moment’s notice. The pair he kept in the church were his first. They’d been lent to him by Umberto Conti, the master Venetian restorer with whom Gabriel had served his apprenticeship. Gabriel had tried countless times to return them, but Umberto would never take them back. Keep them, Mario, along with the skills I’ve given you. They will serve you well, I promise.

He pulled on Umberto’s faded old boots and cloaked himself in a green waterproof poncho. A moment later he was wading through the shin-deep waters of the Salizzada San Giovanni Crisostomo like an olive-drab ghost. In the Strada Nova, the wooden gangplanks known as passerelle had yet to be laid down by the city’s sanitation workers-a bad sign, Gabriel knew, for it meant the flooding was forecast to be so severe the passerelle would float away.

By the time he reached the Rio Terrà San Leonardo, the water was nearing his boot tops. He turned into an alley, quiet except for the sloshing of the waters, and followed it to a temporary wooden footbridge spanning the Rio di Ghetto Nuovo. A ring of unlit apartment houses loomed before him, notable because they were taller than any others in Venice. He waded through a swamped passageway and emerged into a large square. A pair of bearded yeshiva students crossed his path, tiptoeing across the flooded square toward the synagogue, the fringes of theirtallit katan dangling against their trouser legs. He turned to his left and walked to the doorway at No. 2899. A small brass plaque read COMUNITÀ EBRÀICA DIVENEZIA: JEWISH COMMUNITY OF VENICE. He pressed the bell and was greeted by an old woman’s voice over the intercom.

“It’s Mario.”

“She’s not here.”

“Where is she?”

“Helping out at the bookstore. One of the girls was sick.”

He entered a glass doorway a few paces away and lowered his hood. To his left was the entrance of the ghetto’s modest museum; to the right an inviting little bookstore, warm and brightly lit. A girl with short blond hair was perched on a stool behind the counter, hurriedly cashing out the register before the setting of the sun made it impossible for her to handle money. Her name was Valentina. She smiled at Gabriel and pointed the tip of her pencil toward the large floor-to-ceiling window overlooking the canal. A woman was on her hands and knees, soaking up water that had seeped through the allegedly watertight seals around the glass. She was strikingly beautiful.

“I told them those seals would never hold,” Gabriel said. “It was a waste of money.”

Chiara looked up sharply. Her hair was dark and curly and shimmering with highlights of auburn and chestnut. Barely constrained by a clasp at the nape of her neck, it spilled riotously about her shoulders. Her eyes were caramel and flecked with gold. They tended to change color with her mood.

“Don’t just stand there like an idiot. Get down here and help me.”

“Surely you don’t expect a man of my talent-”

The soaking white towel, thrown with surprising force and accuracy, struck him in the center of the chest. Gabriel wrung it out into a bucket and knelt next to her. “There’s been a bombing in Vienna,” Chiara whispered, her lips pressed to Gabriel’s neck. “He’s here. He wants to see you.”

THE FLOODWATERS LAPPED against the street entrance of the canal house. When Gabriel opened the door, water rippled across the marble hall. He surveyed the damage, then wearily followed Chiara up the stairs. The living room was in heavy shadow. An old man stood in the rain-spattered window overlooking the canal, as motionless as a figure in the Bellini. He wore a dark business suit and silver necktie. His bald head was shaped like a bullet; his face, deeply tanned and full of cracks and fissures, seemed to be fashioned of desert rock. Gabriel went to his side. The old man did not acknowledge him. Instead, he contemplated the rising waters of the canal, his face set in a fatalistic frown, as though he were witnessing the onset of the Great Flood come to destroy the wickedness of man. Gabriel knew that Ari Shamron was about to inform him of death. Death had joined them in the beginning, and death remained the foundation of their bond.

3 VENICE

IN THE CORRIDORS and conference rooms of the Israeli intelligence services, Ari Shamron was a legend. Indeed, he was the service made flesh. He had penetrated the courts of kings, stolen the secrets of tyrants, and killed the enemies of Israel, sometimes with his bare hands. His crowning achievement had come on a rainy night in May 1960, in a squalid suburb north of Buenos Aires, when he leapt from the back of a car and seized Adolf Eichmann.

In September 1972, Prime Minister Golda Meir had ordered him to hunt down and assassinate the Palestinian terrorists who had kidnapped and murdered eleven Israelis at the Munich Olympic Games. Gabriel, then a promising student at the Bezalel Academy of Art in Jerusalem, reluctantly joined Shamron’s venture, fittingly code-named Wrath of God. In the Hebrew-based lexicon of the operation, Gabriel was an Aleph. Armed only with a.22-caliber Beretta, he had quietly killed six men.

Shamron’s career had not been an unbroken ascent to greater glory. There had been deep valleys along the way and mistaken journeys into operational wasteland. He developed a reputation as a man who shot first and worried about the consequences later. His erratic temperament was one of his greatest assets. It struck fear into friends and enemies alike. For some politicians, Shamron’s volatility was too much to bear. Rabin often avoided his calls, fearing the news he might hear. Peres thought him a primitive and banished him into the Judean wilderness of retirement. Barak, when the Office was foundering, had rehabilitated Shamron and brought him back to right the ship.

Officially he was retired now, and his beloved Office was in the hands of a thoroughly modern and conniving technocrat called Lev. But among many quarters, Shamron would always be the Memuneh, the one in charge. The current prime minister was an old friend and fellow traveler. He’d given Shamron a vague title and just enough authority to make a general nuisance of himself. There were some at King Saul Boulevard who swore that Lev was secretly praying for Shamron’s rapid demise-and that Shamron, stubborn and steel-willed Shamron, was keeping himself alive merely to torment him.

Now, standing before the window, Shamron calmly told Gabriel what he knew about the events in Vienna. A bomb had exploded the previous evening inside Wartime Claims and Inquiries. Eli Lavon was in a deep coma in the intensive care ward of the Vienna General Hospital, the odds of survival one in two at best. His two research assistants, Reveka Gazit and Sarah Greenberg, had been killed in the blast. An offshoot of bin Laden’s Al Qaeda organization, a shadowy group called the Islamic Fighting Cells, had claimed responsibility. Shamron spoke to Gabriel in his murderously accented English. Hebrew was not permitted in the Venice canal house.

Chiara brought coffee and rugelach to the sitting room and settled herself between Gabriel and Shamron. Of the three, only Chiara was currently under Office discipline. Known as abat leveyha, her work involved posing as the lover or spouse of a case officer in the field. Like all Office personnel, she was trained in the art of physical combat and in the use of weaponry. The fact that she had scored higher than the great Gabriel Allon on her final firing range exam was a source of some tension in their household. Her undercover assignments often required a certain intimacy with her partner, such as showing affection in restaurants and nightclubs and sharing the same bed in hotel rooms or safe flats. Romantic relationships between case officers and escort agents were officially forbidden, but Gabriel knew that the close living quarters and natural stress of the field often drew them together. Indeed, he had once had an affair with hisbat leveyha while in Tunis. She’d been a beautiful Marseilles Jew named Jacqueline Delacroix, and the affair had nearly destroyed his marriage. Gabriel, when Chiara was away, often pictured her in the bed of another man. Though not prone to jealousy, he secretly looked forward to the day King Saul Boulevard decided she was too overexposed for fieldwork.

“Whoexactly are the Islamic Fighting Cells?” he asked.

Shamron made a face. “They’re small-time operators mainly, active in France and a couple of other European countries. They enjoy setting fire to synagogues, desecrating Jewish cemeteries, and beating up Jewish children on the streets of Paris.”

“Was there anything useful in the claim of responsibility?”

Shamron shook his head. “Just the usual drivel about the plight of the Palestinians and the destruction of the Zionist entity. It warns of continuous attacks against Jewish targets in Europe until Palestine is liberated.”

“Lavon’s office was a fortress. How did a group that usually uses Molotov cocktails and spray-paint cans manage to get a bomb inside Wartime Claims and Inquiries?”

Shamron accepted a cup from Chiara. “The Austrian Staatspolizei aren’t sure yet, but they believe it may have been concealed in a computer delivered to the office earlier that day.”

“Do we believe the Islamic Fighting Cells have the ability to conceal a bomb in a computer and smuggle it into a secure building in Vienna?”

Shamron stirred sugar violently into his coffee and slowly shook his head.

“So who did it?”

“Obviously, I’d like to know the answer to that question.”

Shamron removed his coat and rolled up his shirtsleeves. The message was unmistakable. Gabriel looked away from Shamron’s hooded gaze and thought of the last time the old man had sent him to Vienna. It was January 1991. The Office had learned that an Iraqi intelligence agent operating from the city was planning to direct a string of terrorist attacks against Israeli targets to coincide with the first Persian Gulf War. Shamron had ordered Gabriel to monitor the Iraqi and, if necessary, take preemptive action. Unwilling to endure another long separation from his family, Gabriel had brought his wife, Leah, and young son, Dani, along with him. Though he didn’t realize it, he had walked into a trap laid by a Palestinian terrorist named Tariq al-Hourani.

Gabriel, lost in thought for a long moment, finally looked up at Shamron. “Have you forgotten that Vienna is the forbidden city for me?”

Shamron lit one of his foul-smelling Turkish cigarettes and placed the dead match in the saucer next to his teaspoon. He pushed his eyeglasses onto his forehead and folded his arms. They were still powerful, braided steel beneath a thin layer of sagging suntanned skin. So were the hands. The gesture was one Gabriel had seen many times before. Shamron the unmovable. Shamron the indomitable. He’d struck the same pose after dispatching Gabriel to Rome to kill for the first time. He’d been an old man even then. Indeed, he’d never really been young at all. Instead of chasing girls on the beach at Netanya, he’d been a unit commander in the Palmach, fighting the first battle in Israel ’s war without end. His youth had been stolen from him. In turn he had stolen Gabriel’s.

“I volunteered to go to Vienna myself, but Lev wouldn’t hear of it. He knows that because of our regrettable history there, I’m something of a pariah. He reckoned the Staatspolizei would be more forthcoming if we were represented by a less polarizing figure.”

“So your solution is to send me?”

“Not in any official capacity, of course.” These days Shamron did almost nothing in an official capacity. “But I would feel much more comfortable if someone I trusted was keeping an eye on things.”

“We have Office personnel in Vienna.”

“Yes, but they report to Lev.”

“Heis the chief.”

Shamron closed his eyes, as if he were being reminded of a painful subject. “Lev has too many other problems at the moment to give this the attention it deserves. The boy emperor in Damascus is making troublesome noises. The mullahs of Iran are trying to build Allah’s bomb, and Hamas is turning children into bombs and detonating them on the streets of Tel Aviv and Jerusalem. One minor bombing in Vienna is not going to get the attention it deserves, even though the target was Eli Lavon.”

Shamron stared compassionately at Gabriel over the rim of his coffee cup. “I know you have no desire to go back to Vienna, especially after another bombing, but your friend is lying in a Viennese hospital fighting for his life! I would think you’d like to know who put him there.”

Gabriel thought of the half-completed Bellini altarpiece in the church of San Giovanni Crisostomo and could feel it slipping away from him. Chiara had turned away from Shamron and was eyeing him intently. Gabriel avoided her gaze.

“If I went to Vienna,” he said quietly, “I would need an identity.”

Shamron shrugged, as if to say there were ways-obvious ways, dear boy-of getting around a small problem such as cover. Gabriel had expected this would be Shamron’s response. He held out his hand.

Shamron opened his briefcase and handed over a manila envelope. Gabriel lifted the flap and poured the contents on the coffee table: airline tickets, a leather billfold, a well-traveled Israeli passport. He opened the cover of the passport and saw his own face staring back at him. His new name was Gideon Argov. He’d always liked the name Gideon.

“What does Gideon do for a living?”

Shamron inclined his head toward the billfold. Among the usual items-credit cards, a driver’s license, a health-club and video-club membership-he found a business card:

GIDEON ARGOV

WARTIME CLAIMS AND INQUIRIES

17 MENDELE STREET

JERUSALEM 92147

5427618

Gabriel looked up at Shamron. “I didn’t know Eli had an office in Jerusalem.”

“He does now. Try the number.”

Gabriel shook his head. “I believe you. Does Lev know about this?”

“Not yet, but I plan on telling him once you’re safely on the ground in Vienna.”

“So we’re deceiving the Austrians and the Office. That’s impressive, even for you, Ari.”

Shamron gave a sheepish smile. Gabriel opened the airline jacket and examined his travel itinerary.

“I don’t think it would be a good idea for you to travel directly to Vienna from here. I’ll accompany you back to Tel Aviv in the morning-separate seats, of course. You’ll turn around and catch the afternoon flight into Vienna.”

Gabriel lifted his gaze and stared at Shamron, his expression dubious. “And if I’m recognized at the airport and dragged into a room for some special Austrian attention?”

“That’s always a possibility, but it has been thirteen years. Besides, you’ve been to Vienna recently. I recall a meeting we had in Eli’s office last year concerning an imminent threat to the life of His Holiness Pope Paul the Seventh.”

“I have been back to Vienna,” Gabriel conceded, holding up the false passport. “But never like this, and never through the airport.”

Gabriel spent a long moment appraising the false passport with his restorer’s eye. Finally he closed the cover and slipped it into his pocket. Chiara stood and walked out of the room. Shamron watched her go, then looked at Gabriel.

“It seems I’ve managed to disrupt your life once again.”

“Why should this time be any different?”

“Do you want me to talk to her?”

Gabriel shook his head. “She’ll get over it,” he said. “She’s a professional.”

THERE WERE MOMENTS of Gabriel’s life, fragments of time, which he rendered on canvas and hung in the cellar of his subconscious. To this gallery of memory he added Chiara as he saw her now, seated astride his body, bathed in a Rembrandt light from the streetlamps beyond their bedroom window, a satin duvet bunched at her hips, her breasts bared. Other images intruded. Shamron had opened the door to them, and Gabriel, as always, was powerless to push them back. There was Wadal Adel Zwaiter, a skinny intellectual in a plaid jacket, whom Gabriel had killed in the foyer of an apartment house in Rome. There was Ali Abdel Hamidi, who had died by Gabriel’s hand in a Zurich alley, and Mahmoud al-Hourani, older brother of Tariq al-Hourani, whom Gabriel had shot through the eye in Cologne as he lay in the arms of a lover.

A mane of hair fell across Chiara’s breasts. Gabriel reached up and gently pushed it away. She looked at him. It was too dark to see the color of her eyes, but Gabriel could sense her thoughts. Shamron had trained him to read the emotions of others, just as Umberto Conti had taught him to mimic the Old Masters. Gabriel, even in the arms of a lover, could not suspend his ceaseless search for the warning signs of betrayal.

“I don’t want you to go to Vienna.” She placed her hands on Gabriel’s chest. Gabriel could feel his heart beating against the cool skin of her palm. “It’s not safe for you there. Of all people, Shamron should know that.”

“Shamron is right. It was a long time ago.”

“Yes, it was, but if you go there and start asking questions about the bombing, you’ll rub up against the Austrian police and security services. Shamron is using you to keep his hand in the game. He doesn’t have your best interests in mind.”

“You sound like a Lev man.”

“It’s you I care about.” She bent down and kissed his mouth. Her lips tasted of blossom. “I don’t want you to go to Vienna and become lost in the past.” After a moment’s hesitation, she added, “I’m afraid I’ll lose you.”

“To who?”

She lifted the duvet to her shoulders and covered her breasts. Leah’s shadow fell between them. It was Chiara’s intention to let her into the room. Chiara only talked about Leah in bed, where she believed Gabriel would not lie to her. Gabriel’s entire life was a lie; with his lovers he was always painfully honest. He could make love to a woman only if she knew that he had killed men on behalf of his country. He never told lies about Leah. He considered it his duty to speak honestly of her, even to the women who had taken her place in his bed.

“Do you have any idea how hard this is for me?” Chiara asked. “Everyone knows about Leah. She’s an Office legend, just like you and Shamron. How long am I supposed to live with the fear that one day you’ll decide you can’t do this anymore?”

“What do you want me to do?”

“Marry me, Gabriel. Stay in Venice and restore paintings. Tell Shamron to leave you alone. You have scars all over your body. Haven’t you given enough to your country?”

He closed his eyes. Before him opened a gallery door. Reluctantly he passed through to the other side and found himself on a street in the old Jewish quarter of Vienna with Leah and Dani at his side. They have just finished dinner, snow is falling. Leah is on edge. There had been a television in the bar of the restaurant, and all the meal they had watched Iraqi missiles raining down on Tel Aviv. Leah is anxious to return home and telephone her mother. She rushes Gabriel’s ritual search of his car’s undercarriage.Come on, Gabriel, hurry. I want to talk to my mother. I want to hear the sound of her voice. He rises, straps Dani into his car seat, and kisses Leah. Even now he can still taste the olives on her mouth. He turns and starts back to the cathedral, where, as part of his cover, he is restoring an altarpiece depicting the martyrdom of Saint Stephen. Leah turns the key. The engine hesitates. Gabriel spins round and screams at her to stop, but Leah can’t see him because the windshield is dusted with snowfall. She turns the key again…

He waited for the images of fire and blood to dissolve into blackness; then he told Chiara what she wanted to hear. When he returned from Vienna, he would go to see Leah in the hospital and explain to her that he had fallen in love with another woman.

Chiara’s face darkened. “I wish there were some other way.”

“I have to tell her the truth,” Gabriel said. “She deserves nothing less.”

“Will she understand?”

Gabriel shrugged his shoulders. Leah’s affliction was psychotic depression. Her doctors believed the night of the bombing played without break in her memory like a loop of videotape. It left no room for impressions or sound from the real world. Gabriel often wondered what Leah saw of him on that night. Did she see him walking away toward the spire of the cathedral, or could she feel him pulling her blackened body from the fire? He was certain of only one thing. Leah would not speak to him. She had not spoken a single word to him in thirteen years.

“It’s for me,” he said. “I have to say the words. I have to tell her the truth about you. I have nothing to be ashamed of, and I’m certainly not ashamed of you.”

Chiara lowered the duvet and kissed him feverishly. Gabriel could feel tension in her body and taste arousal on her breath. Afterward he lay beside her, stroking her hair. He could not sleep, not the night before a journey back to Vienna. But there was something else. He felt as though he had just committed an act of sexual betrayal. It was as if he had just been inside another man’s woman. Then he realized that, in his mind, he was already Gideon Argov. Chiara, for the moment, was a stranger to him.

4 VIENNA

PASSPORT, PLEASE.”

Gabriel slid it across the countertop, the emblem facing down. The officer glanced wearily at the scuffed cover and thumbed the folio pages until he located the visa. He added another stamp-with more violence than was necessary, Gabriel thought-and handed it over without a word. Gabriel dropped the passport into his coat pocket and set out across the gleaming arrivals hall, towing a rolling suitcase behind him.

Outside, he took his place in line at the taxi stand. It was bitterly cold, and there was snow in the wind. Snatches of Viennese-accented German reached his ears. Unlike many of his countrymen, the mere sound of spoken German did not set him on edge. German was his first language and remained the language of his dreams. He spoke it perfectly, with the Berlin accent of his mother.

He moved to the front of the queue. A white Mercedes slid forward to collect him. Gabriel memorized the registration number before sliding into the back seat. He placed the bag on the seat and gave the driver an address several streets away from the hotel where he’d booked a room.

The taxi hurtled along the motorway, through an ugly industrial zone of factories, power plants, and gasworks. Before long, Gabriel spotted the floodlit spire of St. Stephen’s Cathedral, looming over the Innere Stadt. Unlike most European cities, Vienna had remained remarkably unspoiled and free of urban blight. Indeed, little about its appearance and lifestyle had changed from a century earlier, when it was the administrative center of an empire stretching across central Europe and the Balkans. It was still possible to have an afternoon cake and cream at Demel’s or to linger over coffee and a journal at the Landtmann or Central. In the Innere Stadt, it was best to forsake the automobile and move about by streetcar or on foot along the glittering pedestrian boulevards lined with Baroque and Gothic architecture and exclusive shops. Men still wore loden-cloth suits and feathered Tyrolean caps; women still found it fashionable to wear a dirndl. Brahms had said he stayed in Vienna because he preferred to work in a village. It was still a village, thought Gabriel, with a village’s contempt for change and a village’s resentment of outsiders. For Gabriel, Vienna would always be a city of ghosts.

They came to the Ringstrasse, the broad boulevard encircling the city center. The handsome face of Peter Metzler, the candidate for chancellor from the far-right Austrian National Party, grinned at Gabriel from the passing lamp posts. It was election season, and the avenue was hung with hundreds of campaign posters. Metzler’s well-funded campaign had clearly spared no expense. His face was everywhere, his gaze unavoidable. So was his campaign slogan: EINENEUEORDNUNGFÜREINNEUESÖSTERREICH!:A NEW ORDER FOR A NEW AUSTRIA! The Austrians, thought Gabriel, were incapable of subtlety.

Gabriel left the taxi near the state opera house and walked a short distance to a narrow street called the Weihburggasse. It appeared no one was following him, though from experience he knew expert watchers were almost impossible to detect. He entered a small hotel. The concierge, upon seeing his Israeli passport, adopted a posture of bereavement and murmured a few sympathetic words about “the terrible bombing in the Jewish Quarter.” Gabriel, playing the role of Gideon Argov, spent a few minutes chatting with the concierge in German before climbing the stairs to his room on the second floor. It had wood floors the color of honey and French doors overlooking a darkened interior courtyard. Gabriel drew the curtains and left the bag on the bed in plain sight. Before leaving, he placed a telltale in the doorjamb that would signal whether the room had been entered in his absence.

He returned to the lobby. The concierge smiled as if they had not seen each other in five years instead of five minutes. Outside it had begun to snow. He walked the darkened streets of the Innere Stadt, checking his tail for surveillance. He paused at shop windows to glance over his shoulder, ducked into a public telephone and pretended to place a call while scanning his surroundings. At a newsstand he bought a copy ofDie Presse, then, a hundred meters farther on, dropped it into a rubbish bin. Finally, convinced he was not being followed, he entered the Stephansplatz U-Bahn station.

He had no need to consult the brightly lit maps of the Vienna transport system, for he knew it from memory. He purchased a ticket from a vending machine, then passed through the turnstile and headed down to the platform. He boarded a carriage and memorized the faces around him. Five stops later, at the Westbahnhof, he transferred to a northbound train on the U6 line. Vienna General Hospital had its own station stop. An escalator bore him slowly upward to a snowy quadrangle, a few paces from the main entrance at Währinger Gürtel 18-20.

A hospital had occupied this plot of ground in west Vienna for more than three hundred years. In 1693, Emperor Leopold I, concerned by the plight of the city’s destitute, had ordered the construction of the Home for the Poor and Invalid. A century later, Emperor Joseph II renamed the facility the General Hospital for the Sick. The old building remained, a few streets over on the Alserstrasse, but around it had risen a modern university hospital complex spread over several city blocks. Gabriel knew it well.

A man from the embassy was sheltering in the portico, beneath an inscription that read:SALUTI ETSOLATIOAEGRORUM: TO HEAL AND COMFORT THE SICK. He was a small, nervous-looking diplomat called Zvi. He shook Gabriel’s hand and, after briefly examining his passport and business card, expressed his sorrow over the death of his two colleagues.

They stepped into the main lobby. It was deserted except for an old man with a sparse white beard, sitting at one end of a couch with his ankles together and his hat on his knees, like a traveler waiting for a long-delayed train. He was muttering to himself. As Gabriel walked past, the old man looked up and their eyes met briefly. Then Gabriel entered a waiting elevator, and the old man disappeared behind a pair of sliding doors.

When the elevator doors opened on the eighth floor, Gabriel was greeted by the comforting sight of a tall, blond Israeli wearing a two-piece suit and a wire in his ear. At the entrance of the intensive care unit stood another security man. A third, small and dark and dressed in an ill-fitting suit, was outside the door of Eli’s room. He moved aside so Gabriel and the diplomat could enter. Gabriel stopped and asked why he wasn’t being searched.

“You’re with Zvi. I don’t need to search you.”

Gabriel held up his hands. “Search me.”

The security man tilted his head and consented. Gabriel recognized the frisk pattern. It was by the book. The crotch search was more intrusive than necessary, but then Gabriel had it coming. When it was over, he said, “Search everyone who comes into this room.”

Zvi, the embassy man, watched the entire scene. Clearly, he no longer believed the man from Jerusalem was Gideon Argov of Wartime Claims and Inquiries. Gabriel didn’t much care. His friend was lying helpless on the other side of the door. Better to ruffle a few feathers than to let him die because of complacency.

He followed Zvi into the room. The bed was behind a glass partition. The patient didn’t look much like Eli, but then Gabriel wasn’t surprised. Like most Israelis, he had seen the toll a bomb can take on a human body. Eli’s face was concealed behind the mask of a ventilator, his eyes bound by gauze, his head heavily bandaged. The exposed portion of his cheeks and jaw showed the aftereffects of glass exploding into his face.

A nurse with short black hair and very blue eyes was checking the intravenous drip. She looked into the visitors’ room and briefly held Gabriel’s gaze before resuming her work. Her eyes betrayed nothing.

Zvi, after giving Gabriel a moment to himself, walked over to the glass and brought him up to date on his colleague’s condition. He spoke with the precision of a man who had watched too many medical dramas on television. Gabriel, his eyes fastened on Eli’s face, heard only half of what the diplomat was saying-enough to realize that his friend was near death, and that, even if he lived, he might never be the same.

“For the moment,” Zvi said in conclusion, “he’s being kept alive by the machines.”

“Why are his eyes bandaged?”

“Glass fragments. They were able to get most of them, but he still has a half-dozen or so lodged in his eyes.”

“Is there a chance he’ll be blind?”

“They won’t know until he regains consciousness,” Zvi said. Then he added pessimistically, “Ifhe regains consciousness.”

A doctor came into the room. He looked at Gabriel and Zvi and nodded once briskly, then opened the glass door and stepped into the ward. The nurse moved away from the bedside, and the doctor assumed her place. She came around the end of the bed and stood before the glass. For a second time, her eyes met Gabriel’s, then she drew the curtain closed with a sharp jerk of her wrist. Gabriel walked into the hall, followed by Zvi.

“You all right?”

“I’ll be fine. I just need a minute to myself.”

The diplomat went back inside. Gabriel clasped his hands behind his back, like a soldier at ease, and drifted slowly along the familiar corridor. He passed the nurses’ station. The same trite Vienna streetscape hung next to the window. The smell was the same, too-the smell of disinfectant and death.

He came to a half-open door bearing the number 2602-C. He pushed it gently with his fingertips, and the door swung silently open. The room was dark and unoccupied. Gabriel glanced over his shoulder. There were no nurses about. He slipped inside and closed the door behind him.

He left the lights off and waited for his eyes to grow accustomed to the dark. Soon the room came into focus: the empty bed, the bank of silent monitors, the vinyl-covered chair. The most uncomfortable chair in all of Vienna. He’d spent ten nights in that chair, most of them sleepless. Only once had Leah regained consciousness. She’d asked about Dani, and Gabriel unwisely told her the truth. Tears spilled onto her ruined cheeks. She never spoke to him again.

“You’re not supposed to be in here.”

Gabriel, startled, turned quickly around. The voice belonged to the nurse who’d been at Eli’s side a moment earlier. She spoke to him in German. He responded in the same language.

“I’m sorry, I just-”

“I know what you’re doing.” She allowed a silence to fall between them. “I remember you.”

She leaned against the door and folded her arms. Her head fell to one side. Were it not for her baggy nurse’s uniform and the stethoscope hanging around her neck, Gabriel would have thought she was flirting with him.

“Your wife was the one who was involved in the car bombing a few years back. I was a young nurse then, just starting out. I took care of her at night. You don’t remember?”

Gabriel looked at her for a moment. Finally, he said, “I believe you’re mistaken. This is my first time in Vienna. And I’ve never been married. I’m sorry,” he added hastily, heading toward the door. “I shouldn’t have been in here. I just needed a place to gather my thoughts.”

He moved past her. She put her hand on his arm.

“Tell me something,” she said. “Is she alive?”

“Who?”

“Your wife, of course.”

“I’m sorry,” he said firmly, “but you have me confused with someone else.”

She nodded-As you wish.Her blue eyes were damp and shining in the half-light.

“He’s a friend of yours, Eli Lavon?”

“Yes, he is. A very close friend. We work together. I live in Jerusalem.”

“ Jerusalem,” she repeated, as though she liked the sound of the word. “I would like to visit Jerusalem sometime. My friends think I’m crazy. You know, the suicide bombers, all the other things…” Her voice trailed off. “I still want to go.”

“You should,” Gabriel said. “It’s a wonderful place.”

She touched his arm a second time. “Your friend’s injuries are severe.” Her tone was tender, tinged with sorrow. “He’s going to have a very tough time of it.”

“Is he going to live?”

“I’m not allowed to answer questions like that. Only the doctors can offer a prognosis. But if you want my opinion, spend some time with him. Tell him things. You never know, he might be able to hear you.”

HE STAYED FOR another hour, staring at Eli’s motionless figure through the glass. The nurse returned. She spent a few minutes checking Eli’s vital signs, then motioned for Gabriel to come inside the room. “It’s against the rules,” she said conspiratorially. “I’ll stand watch at the door.”

Gabriel didn’t speak to Eli, just held his bruised and swollen hand. There were no words to convey the pain he felt at seeing another loved one lying in a Viennese hospital bed. After five minutes, the nurse came back, laid her hand on Gabriel’s shoulder, and told him it was time to leave. Outside, in the corridor, she said her name was Marguerite. “I’m working tomorrow night,” she said. “I’ll see you then, I hope.”

Zvi had left; a new team of guards had come on duty. Gabriel rode the elevator down to the lobby and went outside. The night had turned bitterly cold. He shoved his hands into his coat pockets and quickened his pace. He was about to head down the escalator into the U-Bahn station when he felt a hand on his arm. He turned around, expecting to see Marguerite, but instead found himself face to face with the old man who’d been talking to himself in the lobby when Gabriel arrived.

“I heard you speaking Hebrew to that man from the embassy.” His Viennese German was frantically paced, his eyes wide and damp. “You’re Israeli, yes? A friend of Eli Lavon’s?” He didn’t wait for an answer. “My name is Max Klein, and this is all my fault. Please, you must believe me. This is all my fault.”

5 VIENNA

MAX KLEIN LIVED a streetcar ride away, in a graceful old district just beyond the Ringstrasse. His was a fine old Biedermeier apartment building with a passageway leading to a big interior courtyard. The courtyard was dark, lit only by the soft glow of lights burning in the apartments overhead. A second passageway gave onto a small, neat foyer. Gabriel glanced at the tenant list. Halfway down he saw the words: M.KLEIN-3B. There was no elevator. Klein clung to the wood banister as he climbed stubbornly upward, his feet heavy on the well-trodden runner. On the third-floor landing were two wooden doors with peepholes. Gravitating toward the one on the right, Klein removed a set of keys from his coat pocket. His hand shook so badly the keys jingled like a percussion instrument.

He opened the door and went inside. Gabriel hesitated just beyond the threshold. It had occurred to him, sitting next to Klein on the streetcar, that he had no business meeting with anyone under circumstances such as these. Experience and hard lessons had taught him that even an obviously Jewish octogenarian had to be regarded as a potential threat. Any anxiety Gabriel was feeling quickly evaporated, however, as he watched Klein turn on practically every light in the apartment. It was not the action of a man laying a trap, he thought. Max Klein was frightened.

Gabriel followed him into the apartment and closed the door. In the bright light, he finally got a good look at him. Klein’s red, rheumy eyes were magnified by a pair of thick black spectacles. His beard, wispy and white, no longer concealed the dark liver spots on his cheeks. Gabriel knew, even before Klein told him, that he was a survivor. Starvation, like bullets and fire, leaves scars. Gabriel had seen different versions of the face in his farming town in the Jezreel Valley. He had seen it on his parents.

“I’ll make tea,” Klein announced before disappearing through a pair of double doors into the kitchen.

Tea at midnight, thought Gabriel. It was going to be a long evening. He went to the window and parted the blinds. The snow had stopped for now, and the street was empty. He sat down. The room reminded him of Eli’s office: the high Biedermeier ceiling, the haphazard way in which the books lay on the shelves. Elegant, intellectual clutter.

Klein returned and placed a silver tea service on a low table. He sat down opposite Gabriel and regarded him silently for a moment. “You speak German very well,” he said finally. “In fact, you speak it like a Berliner.”

“My mother was from Berlin,” Gabriel said truthfully, “but I was born in Israel.”

Klein studied him carefully, as if he too were looking for the scars of survival. Then he lifted his palms quizzically, an invitation to fill in the blanks. Where was she? How did she survive? Was she in a camp or did she get out before the madness?

“They stayed in Berlin and were eventually deported to the camps,” Gabriel said. “My grandfather was a rather well-known painter. He never believed that the Germans, a people he believed were among the most civilized on earth, would go as far as they did.”

“What was your grandfather’s name?”

“Frankel,” Gabriel said, again veering toward the truth. “Viktor Frankel.”

Klein nodded slowly in recognition of the name. “I’ve seen his work. He was a disciple of Max Beckmann, was he not? Extremely talented.”

“Yes, that’s right. His work was declared degenerate by the Nazis early on and much of it was destroyed. He also lost his job at the art institute where he was teaching in Berlin.”

“But he stayed.” Klein shook his head. “No one believed it could happen.” He paused a moment, his thoughts elsewhere. “So what happened to them?”

“They were deported to Auschwitz. My mother was sent to the women’s camp at Birkenau and managed to survive for more than two years before she was liberated.”

“And your grandparents?”

“Gassed on arrival.”

“Do you remember the date?”

“I believe it was January 1943,” Gabriel said.

Klein covered his eyes.

“Is there something significant about that date, Herr Klein?”

“Yes,” Klein said absently. “I was there the night those Berlin transports arrived. I remember it very well. You see, Mr. Argov, I was a violinist in the Auschwitz camp orchestra. I played music for devils in an orchestra of the damned. I serenaded the condemned as they trudged slowly toward the gas.”

Gabriel’s face remained placid. Max Klein was clearly a man suffering from enormous guilt. He believed he bore some responsibility for the deaths of those who had filed past him on the way to the gas chambers. It was madness, of course. He was no more guilty than any of the Jews who had toiled in the slave labor factories or in the fields of Auschwitz in order to survive one more day.

“But that’s not the reason you stopped me tonight at the hospital. You wanted to tell me something about the bombing at Wartime Claims and Inquiries?”

Klein nodded. “As I said, this is all my doing. I’m the one responsible for the deaths of those two beautiful girls. I’m the reason your friend Eli Lavon is lying in that hospital bed near death.”

“Are you telling me you planted the bomb?” Gabriel’s tone was intentionally heavy with incredulity. The question was meant to sound preposterous.

“Of course not!” Klein snapped. “But I’m afraid I set in motion the events that led others to place it there.”

“Why don’t you just tell me everything you know, Herr Klein? Let me judge who’s guilty.”

“Only God can judge,” Klein said.

“Perhaps, but sometimes even God needs a little help.”

Klein smiled and poured tea. Then he told the story from the beginning. Gabriel bided his time and didn’t rush the proceedings along. Eli Lavon would have played it the same way. “For the old ones, memory is like a stack of china,” Lavon always said. “If you try to pull a plate from the middle, the whole thing comes crashing down.”

THE APARTMENT HAD belonged to his father. Before the war, Klein had lived there along with his parents and two younger sisters. His father, Solomon, was a successful textile merchant, and the Kleins lived a charmed upper-middle-class existence: afternoon strudels at the finest Vienna coffeehouses, evenings at the theater or the opera, summers at the modest family villa in the south. Young Max Klein was a promising violinist-Not quite ready for the symphony or the opera, mind you, Mr. Argov, but good enough to find work in smaller Viennese chamber orchestras.

“My father, even when he was tired from working all day, rarely missed a performance.” Klein smiled for the first time at the memory of his father watching him play. “The fact that his son was a Viennese musician made him extremely proud.”

Their idyllic world had come to an abrupt end on March 12, 1938. It was a Saturday, Klein remembered, and for the overwhelming majority of Austrians, the sight of Wehrmacht troops marching through the streets of Vienna had been a cause for celebration. For the Jews, Mr. Argov… for us, only dread. The worst fears of the community were quickly realized. In Germany, the assault on the Jews had been a gradual undertaking. In Austria, it was instantaneous and savage. Within days, all Jewish-owned businesses were marked with red paint. Any non-Jew who entered was assaulted by Brownshirts and SS. Many were forced to wear placards that declared: I, Aryan swine, have bought in a Jewish shop. Jews were forbidden to own property, to hold a job in any profession or to employ someone else, to enter a restaurant or a coffeehouse, to set foot in Vienna ’s public parks. Jews were forbidden to possess typewriters or radios, because those could facilitate communication with the outside world. Jews were dragged from their homes and their synagogues and beaten on the streets.

“On March 14, the Gestapo broke down the door of this very apartment and stole our most prized possessions: our rugs, our silver, our paintings, even our Shabbat candlesticks. My father and I were taken briefly into custody and forced to scrub sidewalks with boiling water and a toothbrush. The rabbi from our synagogue was hurled into the street and his beard torn from his face while a crowd of Austrians looked on and jeered. I tried to stop them, and I was nearly beaten to death. I couldn’t be taken to a hospital, of course. That was forbidden by the new anti-Jewish laws.”

In less than a week, the Jewish community of Austria, one of the most vital and influential in all of Europe, was in tatters: community centers and Jewish societies shut down, leaders in jail, synagogues closed, prayer books burned on bonfires. On April 1, a hundred prominent public figures and businessmen were deported to Dachau. Within a month, five hundred Jews had chosen to kill themselves rather than face another day of torment, including a family of four who lived next door to the Kleins. “They shot themselves, one at a time,” Klein said. “I lay in my bed and listened to the whole thing. A shot, followed by sobs. Another shot, more sobs. After the fourth shot, there was no one left to cry, no one but me.”

More than half the community decided to leave Austria and emigrate to other lands. Max Klein was among them. He obtained a visa to Holland and traveled there in 1939. In less than a year, he would find himself under the Nazi jackboot once more. “My father decided to remain in Vienna,” Klein said. “He believed in the law, you see. He thought that if he just adhered to the law, things would be fine, and the storm would eventually pass. It got worse, of course, and when he finally decided to leave, it was too late.”

Klein tried to pour himself another cup of tea, but his hand was shaking violently. Gabriel poured it for him and gently asked what had become of his parents and two sisters.

“In the autumn of 1941, they were deported to Poland and confined in the Jewish ghetto in Lodz. In January 1942, they were deported one final time, to the Chelmno extermination camp.”

“And you?”

Klein’s head fell to one side-And me? Same fate, different ending. Arrested in Amsterdam in June 1942, detained in the Westerbork transit camp, then sent east, to Auschwitz. On the rail platform, half-dead from thirst and hunger, a voice. A man in prison clothing is asking whether there are any musicians on the arriving train. Klein latches onto the voice, a drowning man seizing a lifeline. I’m a violinist, he tells the man in stripes. Do you have an instrument? He holds up a battered case, the only thing he had brought from Westerbork. Come with me. This is your lucky day.

“My lucky day,” Klein repeated absently. “For the next two and a half years, while more than a million go up in smoke, my colleagues and I play music. We play on the selection ramp to help the Nazis create the illusion that the new arrivals have come to a pleasant place. We play as the walking dead file into the disrobing chambers. We play in the yard during the endless roll calls. In the morning, we play as the slaves file out to work, and in the afternoon, when they stagger back to their barracks with death in their eyes, we are playing. We even play before executions. On Sundays, we play for the Kommandant and his staff. Suicide continuously thins our ranks. Soon I’m the one working the crowd on the ramp, looking for musicians to fill the empty chairs.”

One Sunday afternoon-It is sometime in the summer of 1942, but I’m sorry, Mr. Argov, I cannot recall the exact date-Klein is walking back to his barracks after a Sunday concert. An SS officer comes up from behind and knocks him to the ground. Klein gets to his feet and stands at attention, avoiding the SS man’s gaze. Still, he sees enough of the face to realize that he has met the man once before. It was in Vienna, at the Central Office for Jewish Emigration, but on that day he’d been wearing a fine gray suit and standing at the side of none other than Adolf Eichmann.

“The Sturmbannführer told me that he would like to conduct an experiment,” Klein said. “He orders me to play Brahms’s Sonata No. 1 for Violin and Piano in G Major. I take my violin from its case and begin to play. An inmate walks past. The Sturmbannführer asks him to please name the piece I am playing. The inmate says he does not know. The Sturmbannführer draws his sidearm and shoots the inmate through the head. He finds another inmate and poses the same question. What piece is this fine violinist playing? And on it goes for the next hour. Those who can answer the question correctly are spared. Those who can’t, he shoots through the head. By the time he’s finished, fifteen bodies are lying at my feet. When his thirst for Jewish blood is quenched, the man in black smiles and walks away. I lay down with the dead and said mourner’s Kaddish for them.”

KLEIN LAPSED INTO a long silence. A car hissed past in the street. Klein lifted his head and began to speak again. He was not quite ready to make the connection between the atrocity at Auschwitz and the bombing of Wartime Claims and Inquiries, though by now Gabriel had a clear sense of where the story was headed. He continued chronologically, one china plate at a time, as Lavon would have said. Survival at Auschwitz. Liberation. His return to Vienna…

The community had numbered 185,000 before the war, he said. Sixty-five thousand had perished in the Holocaust. Seventeen hundred broken souls stumbled back into Vienna in 1945, only to be greeted by open hostility and a new wave of anti-Semitism. Those who’d emigrated at the point of a German gun were discouraged from returning. Demands for financial restitution were met by silence or were sneeringly referred to Berlin. Klein, returning to his home in the Second District, found an Austrian family living in the flat. When he asked them to leave, they refused. It took a decade to finally pry them loose. As for his father’s textile business, it was gone for good, and no restitution ever made. Friends encouraged him to go to Israel or America. Klein refused. He vowed to stay on in Vienna, a living, breathing, walking memorial to those who had been driven out or murdered in the death camps. He left his violin behind at Auschwitz and never played again. He earned his living as a clerk in a dry-goods store, and later as an insurance salesman. In 1995, on the fiftieth anniversary of the war’s end, the government agreed to pay surviving Austrian Jews approximately six thousand dollars each. Klein showed Gabriel the check. It had never been cashed.

“I didn’t want their money,” he said. “Six thousand dollars? For what? My mother and father? My two sisters? My home? My possessions?”

He tossed the check onto the table. Gabriel sneaked a glance at his wristwatch and saw it was two-thirty in the morning. Klein was closing in, circling his target. Gabriel resisted the impulse to give him a nudge, fearing that the old man, in his precarious state, might stumble and never regain his footing.

“Two months ago, I stop for coffee at the Café Central. I’m given a lovely table next to a pillar. I order a Pharisäer.” He paused and raised his eyebrows. “Do you know a Pharisäer, Mr. Argov? Coffee with whipped cream, served with a small glass of rum.” He apologized for the liquor. “It was the late afternoon, you see, and cold.”

A man enters the café, tall, well-dressed, a few years older than Klein. An Austrian of the old school, if you know what I mean, Mr. Argov. There’s an arrogance in his walk that causes Klein to lower his newspaper. The waiter rushes across the floor to greet him. The waiter is wringing his hands, hopping from foot to foot like a schoolboy who needs to piss.Good evening, Herr Vogel. I was beginning to think we wouldn’t see you today. Your usual table? Let me guess: an Einspänner? And how about a sweet? I’m told the Sachertorte is lovely today, Herr Vogel…

And then the old man speaks a few words, and Max Klein feels his spine turn to ice. It is the same voice that ordered him to play Brahms at Auschwitz, the same voice that calmly asked Klein’s fellow inmates to identify the piece or face the consequences. And here was the murderer, prosperous and healthy, ordering an Einspänner and a Sachertorte at the Central.

“I felt as though I was going to be sick,” Klein said. “I threw money on the table and stumbled into the street. I looked once through the window and saw the monster named Herr Vogel reading his newspaper. It was as if the encounter never happened at all.”

Gabriel resisted the impulse to ask how, after so long, Klein could be so certain that the man from Café Central was the same man who’d been at Auschwitz sixty years earlier. Whether Klein was right or not was not as important as what happened next.

“What did you do about it, Herr Klein?”

“I became quite the regular customer at the Café Central. Soon, I too was greeted by name. Soon, I too had a regular table, right next to the honorable Herr Vogel. We began to wish each other good afternoon. Sometimes, while we read our newspapers, we would chat about politics or world events. Despite his age, his mind was very sharp. He told me he was a businessman, an investor of some sort.”

“And when you’d learned as much as you could by having coffee next to him, you went to see Eli Lavon at Wartime Claims and Inquiries?”

Klein nodded slowly. “He listened to my story and promised to look into it. In the meantime, he asked me to stop going to the Central for coffee. I was reluctant. I was afraid he was going to slip away again. But I did as your friend asked.”

“And then?”

“A few weeks went by. Finally I received a call. It was one of the girls from the office, the American one named Sarah. She informed me that Eli Lavon had some news to report to me. She asked me to come to the office the next morning at ten o’clock. I told her I would be there, and I hung up the telephone.”

“When was that?”

“The same day of the bombing.”

“Have you told any of this to the police?”

Klein shook his head. “As you might expect, Mr. Argov, I’m not fond of Austrian men in uniform. I am also well aware of my country’s rather shoddy record when it comes to the prosecution of war criminals. I kept silent. I went to the Vienna General Hospital and watched the Israeli officials coming and going. When the ambassador came, I tried to approach him but I was pushed away by his security men. So I waited until the right person came along. You seemed like him. Are you the right person, Mr. Argov?”

THE APARTMENT HOUSE across the street was nearly identical to the one where Max Klein lived. On the second floor a man stood in the darkened window with a camera pressed to his eye. He focused the telephoto lens on the figure striding through the passageway of Klein’s building and turning into the street. He snapped a series of photographs, then lowered the camera and sat down in front of the tape recorder. In the darkness it took him a moment to find the PLAY button.

“So I waited until the right person came along. You seemed like him. Are you the right person, Mr. Argov?”

“Yes, Herr Klein. I’m the right person. Don’t worry, I’m going to help you.”

“None of this would have happened if it weren’t for me. Those girls are dead because of me. Eli Lavon is in that hospital because of me.”

“That’s not true. You did nothing wrong. But given what’s taken place, I’m concerned about your safety.”

“So am I.”

“Has anyone been following you?”

“Not that I can tell, but I’m not sure I would know it if they were.”

“Have you received any threatening telephone calls?”

“No.”

“Has anyone at all tried to contact you since the bombing?”

“Just one person, a woman named Renate Hoffmann.”

STOP. REWIND. PLAY.

“Just one person, a woman named Renate Hoffmann.”

“Do you know her?”

“No, I’ve never heard of her.”

“Did you speak to her?”

“No, she left a message on my machine.”

“What did she want?”

“To talk.”

“Did she leave a number?”

“Yes, I wrote it down. Hold on a minute. Yes, here it is. Renate Hoffmann, five-three-three-one-nine-zero-seven.”

STOP. REWIND. PLAY.

“Renate Hoffmann, five-three-three-one-nine-zero-seven.”

STOP.

6 VIENNA

THE COALITION FOR a Better Austria had all the trappings of a noble yet ultimately hopeless cause. It was located on the second floor of a dilapidated old warehouse in the Twentieth District, with sooty windows overlooking a railyard. The workspace was open and communal and impossible to heat properly. Gabriel, arriving the following morning, found most of the youthful staff wearing thick sweaters and woolen caps.

Renate Hoffmann was the group’s legal director. Gabriel had telephoned her earlier that morning, posing as Gideon Argov from Jerusalem, and told her about his encounter the previous evening with Max Klein. Renate Hoffmann had hastily agreed to a meeting with him, then broken the connection, as if she were reticent to discuss the matter on the telephone.

She had a cubicle for an office. When Gabriel was shown inside, she was on the telephone. She pointed toward an empty chair with the tip of a chewed pen. A moment later, she concluded the conversation and stood to greet him. She was tall and better dressed than the rest of the staff: black sweater and skirt, black stockings, flat-soled black shoes. Her hair was flaxen and did not reach her square, athletic shoulders. Parted on the side, it fell naturally toward her face, and she was holding back a troublesome forelock with her left hand as she shook hands firmly with Gabriel with her right. She wore no rings on her fingers, no makeup on her attractive face, and no scent other than tobacco. Gabriel guessed that she was not yet thirty-five.

They sat down again, and she asked a series of curt, lawyerly questions. How long have you known Eli Lavon? How did you find Max Klein? How much did he tell you? When did you arrive in Vienna? With whom have you met? Have you discussed the matter with the Austrian authorities? With officials from the Israeli embassy? Gabriel felt a bit like a defendant in the dock, yet his responses were as polite and accurate as possible.

Renate Hoffmann, her cross-examination complete, regarded him skeptically for a moment. Then she stood suddenly and pulled on a long, gray overcoat with very square shoulders.

“Let’s take a walk.”

Gabriel looked out the soot-smudged windows and saw that it was sleeting. Renate Hoffman shoved some files into a leather bag and slung it over her shoulder. “Trust me,” she said, sensing his apprehension. “It’s better if we walk.”

RENATE HOFFMANN, ON the icy footpaths of the Augarten, explained to Gabriel how she had become Eli Lavon’s most important asset in Vienna. After graduating at the top of her class from Vienna University, she had gone to work for the Austrian state prosecutor’s office, where she had served exceptionally for seven years. Then, five years ago, she’d resigned, telling friends and colleagues that she longed for the freedom of private practice. In truth, Renate Hoffman had decided she could no longer work for a government that showed less concern about justice than about protecting the interests of the state and its most powerful citizens.

It was the Weller case that forced her hand. Weller was a Staatspolizei detective with a fondness for torturing confessions out of prisoners and administering justice personally when a proper trial was deemed too inconvenient. Renate Hoffmann tried to bring charges against him after a Nigerian asylum-seeker died in his custody. The Nigerian had been bound and gagged and there was evidence he had been struck repeatedly and choked. Her superiors had sided with Weller and dropped the case.

Weary of fighting the establishment from the inside, Renate Hoffman had concluded that the battle was better waged from without. She’d started a small law firm in order to pay the bills but devoted most of her time and energy to the Coalition for a Better Austria, a reformist group dedicated to shaking the country out of its collective amnesia about its Nazi past. Simultaneously she also formed a quiet alliance with Eli Lavon’s Wartime Claims and Inquiries. Renate Hoffmann still had friends inside the bureaucracy, friends who were willing to do favors for her. These friends gave her access to vital government records and archives that were closed to Lavon.

“Why the secrecy?” Gabriel asked. “The reluctance to talk on the telephone? The long walks in the park when the weather is perfectly dreadful?”

“Because this is Austria, Mr. Argov. Needless to say, the work we do is not popular in many quarters of Austrian society, just as Eli’s wasn’t.” She caught herself using the past tense and quickly apologized. “The extreme right in this country doesn’t like us, and they’re well represented in the police and security services.”

She brushed some sleet pellets from a park bench and they both sat down. “Eli came to me about two months ago. He told me about Max Klein and the man he’d seen at Café Central: Herr Vogel. I was skeptical, to say the least, but I decided to check it out, as a favor to Eli.”

“What did you find?”

“His name is Ludwig Vogel. He’s the chairman of something called Danube Valley Trade and Investment Corporation. The firm was founded in the early sixties, a few years after Austria emerged from the postwar occupation. He imported foreign products into Austria and served as an Austrian front man and facilitator for companies wishing to do business here, especially German and American companies. When the Austrian economy took off in the 1970s, Vogel was perfectly positioned to take full advantage of the situation. His firm provided venture capital for hundreds of projects. He now owns a substantial stake in many of Austria ’s most profitable corporations.”

“How old is he?”

“He was born in a small village in Upper Austria in 1925 and baptized in the local Catholic church. His father was an ordinary laborer. Apparently, the family was quite poor. A younger brother died of pneumonia when Ludwig was twelve. His mother died two years later of scarlet fever.”

“Nineteen twenty-five? That would make him only seventeen years old in 1942, far too young to be a Sturmbannführer in the SS.”

“That’s right. And according to the information I uncovered about his wartime past, hewasn’t in the SS.”

“What sort of information?”

She lowered her voice and leaned closer to him. Gabriel smelled morning coffee on her breath. “In my previous life, I sometimes found it necessary to consult files stored in the Austrian Staatsarchiv. I still have contacts there, the kind of people who are willing to help me under the right circumstances. I called on one of those contacts, and this person was kind enough to photocopy Ludwig Vogel’s Wehrmacht service file.”

“Wehrmacht?”

She nodded. “According to the Staatsarchiv documents, Vogel was conscripted in late 1944, when he was nineteen, and sent to Germany to serve in defense of the Reich. He fought the Russians in the battle of Berlin and managed to survive. During the final hours of the war, he fled west and surrendered to the Americans. He was interned at a U.S. Army detention facility south of Berlin, but managed to escape and make his way back to Austria. The fact that he escaped from the Americans didn’t seem to count against him, because from 1946 until the State Treaty of 1955, Vogel was a civilian employee of the American occupation authority.”

Gabriel looked over at her sharply. “The Americans? What kind of work did he do?”

“He started as a clerk at headquarters and eventually worked as a liaison officer between the Americans and the fledgling Austrian government.”

“Married? Children?”

She shook her head. “A lifelong bachelor.”

“Has he ever been in trouble? Financial irregularities of any kind? Civil suits? Anything?”

“His record is remarkably clean. I have another friend at the Staatspolizei. I had him run a check on Vogel. He came up with nothing, which in a way is quite remarkable. You see, almost every prominent citizen in Austria has a Staatspolizei file. But not Ludwig Vogel.”

“What do you know about his politics?”

Renate Hoffmann spent a long moment surveying her surroundings before answering. “I asked that same question to some contacts I have on some of the more courageous Viennese newspapers and magazines, the ones that refuse to toe the government line. It turns out Ludwig Vogel is a major financial supporter of the Austrian National Party. In fact, he’s practically bankrolled the campaign of Peter Metzler himself.” She paused for a moment to light a cigarette. Her hand was shaking with cold. “I don’t know if you’ve been following our campaign here, but unless things change dramatically in the next three weeks, Peter Metzler is going to be the next chancellor of Austria.”

Gabriel sat silently, absorbing the information he had just been told. Renate Hoffmann took a single puff of her cigarette and tossed it into a mound of dirty snow.

“You asked me why we were going out in weather like this, Mr. Argov. Now you know.”

SHE STOOD without warning and started walking. Gabriel got to his feet and followed after her. Steady yourself, he thought. An interesting theory, a tantalizing set of circumstances, but there was no proof and one enormous piece of exculpatory evidence. According to the files in the Staatsarchiv, Ludwig Vogel couldn’t possibly be the man Max Klein had accused him of being.

“Is it possible Vogel knew Eli was investigating his past?”

“I’ve considered that,” Renate Hoffman said. “I suppose someone at the Staatsarchiv or the Staatspolizei might have tipped him off about my search.”

“Even if Ludwig Vogel really was the man Max Klein saw at Auschwitz, what’s the worst that could happen to him now, sixty years after the crime?”

“In Austria? Precious little. When it comes to prosecuting war criminals, Austria ’s record is shameful. In my opinion, it was practically a safe haven for Nazi war criminals. Have you ever heard of Doctor Heinrich Gross?”

Gabriel shook his head. Heinrich Gross, she said, was a doctor at the Spiegelgrund clinic for handicapped children. During the war, the clinic served as a euthanasia center where the Nazi doctrine of eradicating the “pathological genotype” was put into practice. Nearly eight hundred children were murdered there. After the war, Gross went on to a distinguished career as a pediatric neurologist. Much of his research was carried out on brain tissue he had taken from victims of Spiegelgrund, which he kept stored in an elaborate “brain library.” In 2000, the Austrian federal prosecutor finally decided it was time to bring Gross to justice. He was charged with complicity in nine of the murders carried out at Spiegelgrund and brought to trial.

“One hour into the proceedings, the judge ruled that Gross was suffering from the early stages of dementia and was in no condition to defend himself in a court of law,” Renate Hoffman said. “He suspended the case indefinitely. Doctor Gross stood, smiled at his lawyer, and walked out of the courtroom. On the courthouse steps, he spoke to reporters about his case. It was quite clear that Doctor Gross was in complete control of his mental faculties.”

“Your point?”

“The Germans are fond of saying that only Austria could convince the world that Beethoven was an Austrian and Hitler was a German. We like to pretend that we were Hitler’s first victim instead of his willing accomplice. We choose not to remember that Austrians joined the Nazi party at the same rate as our German cousins, or that Austria ’s representation in the SS was disproportionately high. We choose not to remember that Adolf Eichmann was an Austrian, or that eighty percent of his staff was Austrian, or that seventy-five percent of his death camp commandants were Austrian. ” She lowered her voice. “Doctor Gross was protected by Austria ’s political elite and judicial system for decades. He was a member in good standing of the Social Democratic party, and he even served as a court forensic psychiatrist. Everyone in the Viennese medical community knew the source of the good doctor’s so-called brain library, and everyone knew what he had done during the war. A man like Ludwig Vogel, even if he were exposed as a liar, could expect the same treatment. The chances of him ever facing trial in Austria for his crimes would be zero. ”

“Suppose he knew about Eli’s investigation? What would he have to fear?”

“Nothing, other than the embarrassment of exposure.”

“Do you know where he lives?”

Renate Hoffmann pushed a few stray hairs beneath the band of her beret and looked at him carefully. “You’re not thinking about trying to meet with him, are you, Mr. Argov? Under the circumstances, that would be an incredibly foolish idea.”

“I just want to know where he lives.”

“He has a house in the First District, and another in the Vienna woods. According to real estate records, he also owns several hundred acres and a chalet in Upper Austria.”

Gabriel, after taking a glance over his shoulder, asked Renate Hoffmann if he could have a copy of all the documents she’d collected. She looked down at her feet, as if she’d been expecting the question.

“Tell me something, Mr. Argov. In all the years I worked with Eli, he never once mentioned the fact that Wartime Claims and Inquiries had a Jerusalem branch.”

“It was opened recently.”

“How convenient.” Her voice was thick with sarcasm. “I’m in possession of those documents illegally. If I give them to an agent of a foreign government, my position will be even more precarious. If I give them to you, am I giving them to an agent of a foreign government?”

Renate Hoffmann, Gabriel decided, was a highly intelligent and street-smart woman. “You’re giving them to a friend, Miss Hoffmann, a friend who will do absolutely nothing to compromise your position.”

“Do you know what will happen if you’re arrested by the Staatspolizei while in possession of confidential Staatsarchiv files? You’ll spend a long time behind bars.” She looked directly into his eyes. “And so will I, if they find out where you got them.”

“I don’t intend to be arrested by the Staatspolizei.”

“No one ever does, but this is Austria, Mr. Argov. Our police don’t play by the same rules as their European counterparts.”

She reached into her handbag, withdrew a manila envelope, and handed it to Gabriel. It disappeared into the opening of his jacket and they kept walking.

“I don’t believe you’re Gideon Argov from Jerusalem. That’s why I gave you the file. There’s nothing more I can do with it, not in this climate. Promise me you’ll tread carefully, though. I don’t want the Coalition and its staff to suffer the same fate as Wartime Claims.” She stopped walking and turned briefly to face him. “And one more thing, Mr. Argov. Please don’t call me again.”

THE SURVEILLANCE VAN was parked on the edge of the Augarten, on the Wasnergasse. The photographer sat in the back, concealed behind one-way glass. He snapped one final shot as the subjects separated, then downloaded the pictures to a laptop computer and reviewed the images. The one that showed the envelope changing hands had been shot from behind. Nicely framed, well lit, a thing of beauty.

7 VIENNA

ONE HOUR LATER, in an anonymous neo-Baroque building on the Ringstrasse, the photograph was delivered to the office of a man named Manfred Kruz. Contained in an unmarked manila envelope, it was handed to Kruz without comment by his attractive secretary. As usual he was dressed in a dark suit and white shirt. His placid face and sharp cheekbones, combined with his habitual somber dress, gave him a cadaverous air that unnerved underlings. His Mediterranean features-the nearly black hair, the olive skin, and coffee-colored eyes-had given rise to rumors within the service that a gypsy or perhaps even a Jew lurked in his lineage. It was a libel, advanced by his legion of enemies, and Kruz did not find it amusing. He was not popular among the troops, but then he didn’t much care. Kruz was well-connected: lunch with the minister once a week, friends among the wealthy and the political elite. Make an enemy of Kruz and you could find yourself writing parking tickets in the backwoods of Carinthia.

His unit was known officially as Department Five, but among senior Staatspolizei officers and their masters at the Interior Ministry, it was referred to simply as “Kruz’s gang.” In moments of self-aggrandizement, a misdemeanor to which Kruz willingly pleaded guilty, he imagined himself the protector of all things Austrian. It was Kruz’s job to make certain that the rest of the world’s problems didn’t seep across the borders into the tranquil Österreich. Department Five was responsible for counter-terrorism, counter-extremism, and counter-intelligence. Manfred Kruz possessed the power to bug offices and tap telephones, to open mail and conduct physical surveillance. Foreigners who came to Austria looking for trouble could expect a visit from one of Kruz’s men. So could native-born Austrians whose political activities diverged from the prescribed lines. Little took place inside the country that he didn’t know about, including the recent appearance in Vienna of an Israeli who claimed to be a colleague of Eli Lavon from Wartime Claims and Inquiries.

Kruz’s innate mistrust of people extended to his personal secretary. He waited until she had left the room before prizing open the envelope and shaking the print onto his blotter. It fell facedown. He turned it over, placed it in the sharp white light of his halogen lamp, and carefully examined the image. Kruz was not interested in Renate Hoffmann. She was the subject of regular surveillance by Department Five, and Kruz had spent more time than he cared to remember studying surveillance photographs and listening to transcripts of proceedings inside the premises of the Coalition for a Better Austria. No, Kruz was more interested in the dark, compact figure walking at her side, the man who called himself Gideon Argov.

After a moment he stood and worked the tumbler on the wall safe behind his desk. Inside, wedged between a stack of case files and a bundle of scented love letters from a girl who worked in payroll, was a videotape of an interrogation. Kruz glanced at the date on the adhesive label-JANUARY1991-then inserted the tape into his machine and pressed the play button.

The shot rolled for a few frames before settling into place. The camera had been mounted high in the corner of the interrogation room, where the wall met the ceiling, so that it looked down upon the proceedings from an oblique angle. The image was somewhat grainy, the technology a generation old. Pacing the room with a menacing slowness was a younger version of Kruz. Seated at the interrogation table was the Israeli, his hands blackened by fire, his eyes by death. Kruz was quite certain it was the same man who was now calling himself Gideon Argov. Uncharacteristically, it was the Israeli, not Kruz, who posed the first question. Now, as then, Kruz was taken aback by the perfect German, spoken in the distinctive accent of a Berliner.

“Where’s my son?”

“I’m afraid he’s dead.”

“What about my wife?”

“Your wife has been severely injured. She needs immediate medical attention.”

“Then why isn’t she getting it?”

“We need to know some information first before she can be treated.”

“Why isn’t she being treated now? Where is she?”

“Don’t worry, she’s in good hands. We just need some questions answered.”

“Like what?”

“You can begin by telling us who you really are. And please, don’t lie to us anymore. Your wife doesn’t have much time.”

“I’ve been asked my name a hundred times! You know my name! My God, get her the help she needs.”

“We will, but first tell us your name. Your real name, this time. No more aliases, pseudonyms, or cover names. We haven’t the time, not if your wife is going to live.”

“My name is Gabriel, you bastard!”

“Is that your first name or your last?”

“My first.”

“And your last?”

“Allon.”

“Allon? That’s a Hebrew name, is it not? You’re Jewish. You are also, I suspect, Israeli.”

“Yes, I’m Israeli.”

“If you are an Israeli, what are you doing in Vienna with an Italian passport? Obviously, you’re an agent of Israeli intelligence. Who do you work for, Mr. Allon? What are you doing here?”

“Call the ambassador. He’ll know who to contact.”

“We’ll call your ambassador. And your foreign minister. And your prime minister. But right now, if you want your wife to get the medical treatment she so desperately needs, you’re going to tell us who you work for and why you’re in Vienna.”

“Call the ambassador! Help my wife, goddamn it!”

“Who do you work for!”

“You know who I work for! Help my wife. Don’t let her die!”

“Her life is in your hands, Mr. Allon.”

“You’re dead, you motherfucker! If my wife dies tonight, you’re dead. Do you hear me? You’re fucking dead!”

The tape dissolved to a blizzard of silver and black. Kruz sat for a long time, unable to take his eyes from the screen. Finally he switched his telephone to secure and dialed a number from memory. He recognized the voice that greeted him. They exchanged no pleasantries.

“I’m afraid we have a problem.”

“Tell me.”

Kruz did.

“Why don’t you arrest him? He’s in this country illegally on a forged passport, and in violation of an agreement made between your service and his.”

“And then what? Hand him over to the state prosecutor’s office so they can put him on trial? Something tells me he might want to use a platform like that to his advantage.”

“What are you suggesting?”

“Something a bit more subtle.”

“Consider the Israeli your problem, Manfred. Deal with it.”

“And what about Max Klein?”

The line went dead. Kruz hung up the phone.

IN A QUIET backwater of the Stephansdom Quarter, in the very shadow of the cathedral’s north tower, there is a lane too narrow for anything but pedestrian traffic. At the head of the lane, on the ground floor of a stately old Baroque house, there is a small shop that sells nothing but collector-quality antique clocks. The sign over the door is circumspect, the shop hours unpredictable. Some days it does not open for business at all. There are no employees other than the owner. To one set of exclusive clients, he is known as Herr Gruber. To another, the Clockmaker.

He was short of stature and muscular in build. He preferred pullovers and loose-fitting tweed jackets, because formal shirts and ties did not fit him particularly well. He was bald, with a fringe of cropped gray hair, and his eyebrows were thick and dark. He wore round spectacles with tortoise-shell frames. His hands were larger than most in his field, but dexterous and highly skilled.

His workshop was as orderly as an operating room. On the worktable, in a pool of clean light, lay a 200-year-old Neuchatel wall clock. The three-part case, decorated in floral-patterned cameos, was in perfect condition, as was the enamel dial with Roman numerals. The Clockmaker had entered the final stages of an extensive overhaul of the two-train Neuchatel movement. The finished piece would fetch close to ten thousand dollars. A buyer, a collector from Lyon, was waiting.

The bell at the front of the shop interrupted the Clockmaker’s work. He poked his head around the door frame and saw a figure standing outside in the street, a motorcycle courier, his wet leather jacket gleaming with rain like a seal’s skin. There was a package under his arm. The Clockmaker went to the door and unlocked it. The courier handed over the package without a word, then climbed onto the bike and sped away.

The Clockmaker locked the door again and carried the package to his worktable. He unwrapped it slowly-indeed, he did almost everything slowly-and lifted the cover of a cardboard packing case. Inside lay a Louis XV French wall clock. Quite lovely. He removed the casing and exposed the movement. The dossier and photograph were concealed inside. He spent a few minutes reviewing the document, then concealed it inside a large volume entitled Carriage Clocks in the Age of Victoria.

The Louis XV had been delivered by the Clockmaker’s most important client. The Clockmaker did not know his name, only that he was wealthy and politically connected. Most of his clients shared those two attributes. This one was different, though. A year ago he’d given the Clockmaker a list of names, men scattered from Europe to the Middle East to South America. The Clockmaker was steadily working his way down the list. He’d killed a man in Damascus, another in Cairo. He’d killed a Frenchman in Bordeaux and a Spaniard in Madrid. He’d crossed the Atlantic in order to kill two wealthy Argentines. One name remained on the list, a Swiss banker in Zurich. The Clockmaker had yet to receive the final signal to proceed against him. The dossier he’d received tonight was a new name, a bit closer to home than he preferred, but hardly a challenge. He decided to accept the assignment.

He picked up the telephone and dialed.

“I received the clock. How quickly do you need it done?”

“Consider it an emergency repair.”

“There’s a surcharge for emergency repairs. I assume you’re willing to pay it?”

“How much of a surcharge?”

“My usual fee, plus half.”

“For this job?”

“Do you want it done, or not?”

“I’ll send over the first half in the morning.”

“No, you’ll send it tonight.”

“If you insist.”

The Clockmaker hung up the telephone as a hundred chimes simultaneously tolled four o’clock.

8 VIENNA

GABRIEL HAD NEVER been fond of Viennese coffeehouses. There was something in the smell-the potion of stale tobacco smoke, coffee, and liqueur-that he found offensive. And although he was quiet and still by nature, he did not enjoy sitting for long periods, wasting valuable time. He did not read in public, because he feared old enemies might be stalking him. He drank coffee only in the morning, to help him wake, and rich desserts made him ill. Witty conversation annoyed him, and listening to the conversations of others, especially pseudo-intellectuals, drove him to near madness. Gabriel’s private hell would be a room where he would be forced to listen to a discussion of art led by people who knew nothing about it.

It had been more than thirty years since he had been to Café Central. The coffeehouse had proven to be the setting for the final stage of his apprenticeship for Shamron, the portal between the life he’d led before the Office and the twilight world he would inhabit after. Shamron, at the end of Gabriel’s training period, had devised one more test to see whether he was ready for his first assignment. Dropped at midnight on the outskirts of Brussels, paperless and without a centime in his pocket, he had been ordered to meet an agent the next morning in the Leidseplein in Amsterdam. Using stolen money and a passport he’d taken from an American tourist, he’d managed to arrive on the morning train. The agent he found waiting was Shamron. He relieved Gabriel of the passport and his remaining money, then told him to be in Vienna the following afternoon, dressed in different clothes. They met on a bench in the Stadtpark and walked to the Central. At a table next to a tall, arched window, Shamron had given Gabriel an airline ticket to Rome and the key to an airport locker where he would find a Beretta pistol. Two nights later, in the foyer of an apartment house in the Piazza Annabaliano, Gabriel had killed for the first time.

Then, as now, it was raining when Gabriel arrived at Café Central. He sat on a leather banquette and placed a stack of German-language newspapers on the small, round table. He ordered a Schlagobers, black coffee topped with whipped cream. It came on a silver tray with a glass of iced water. He opened the first newspaper, Die Presse, and began to read. The bombing at Wartime Claims and Inquiries was the lead story. The Interior Minister was promising swift arrests. The political right was demanding harsher immigration measures to prevent Arab terrorists, and other troublesome elements, from crossing Austria ’s borders.

Gabriel finished the first newspaper. He ordered another Schlagobers and opened a magazine called Profil. He looked around the café. It was rapidly filling with Viennese office workers stopping for a coffee or a drink on the way home from work. Unfortunately none bore even a remote resemblance to Max Klein’s description of Ludwig Vogel.

By five o’clock, Gabriel had drunk three cups of coffee and was beginning to despair of ever seeing Ludwig Vogel. Then he noticed that his waiter was wringing his hands with excitement and shifting his weight from foot to foot. Gabriel followed the line of the waiter’s gaze and saw an elderly gentleman coming through the door-An Austrian of the old school, if you know what I mean, Mr. Argov.Yes, I do, thought Gabriel. Good afternoon, Herr Vogel.

HIS HAIR WASnearly white, deeply receded, and combed very close to his scalp. His mouth was small and taut, his clothing expensive and elegantly worn: gray flannel trousers, a double-breasted blazer, a burgundy-colored ascot. The waiter helped him off with his overcoat and led him to a table, just a few feet from Gabriel’s.

“An Einspänner, Karl. Nothing more.”

Confident, baritone, a voice used to giving orders.

“Can I tempt you with a Sachertorte? Or an apple strudel? It’s very fresh tonight.”

A weary shake of the head, once to the left, once to the right.

“Not today, Karl. Just coffee.”

“As you wish, Herr Vogel.”

Vogel sat down. At that same instant, two tables away, his bodyguard sat, too. Klein hadn’t mentioned the bodyguard. Perhaps he hadn’t noticed him. Perhaps he was a new addition. Gabriel forced himself to look down at his magazine.

The seating arrangements were far from optimal. As luck would have it, Vogel was facing Gabriel directly. A more oblique angle would have allowed Gabriel to observe him without fear of being noticed. What’s more, the bodyguard was seated just behind Vogel, his eyes on the move. Judging from the bulge in the left side of his suit jacket, he was carrying a weapon in a shoulder holster. Gabriel considered changing tables but feared it would arouse Vogel’s suspicion, so he stayed put and sneaked glances at him over the top of his magazine.

And on it went for the next forty-five minutes. Gabriel finished the last of his reading material and started in on Die Presse again. He ordered a fourth Schlagobers. At some point he became aware that he too was being watched, not by the bodyguard but by Vogel himself. A moment later, he heard Vogel say, “It’s damned cold tonight, Karl. How about a small glass of brandy before I leave?”

“Of course, Herr Vogel.”

“And one for the gentlemen at that table over there, Karl.”

Gabriel looked up and saw two pairs of eyes studying him, the small, dull eyes of the fawning waiter, and Vogel’s, which were blue and bottomless. His small mouth had curled into a humorless smile. Gabriel didn’t know quite how to react, and Ludwig Vogel was clearly enjoying his discomfort.

“I was just leaving,” Gabriel said in German, “but thank you very much.”

“As you wish.” Vogel looked at the waiter. “Come to think of it, Karl, I think I’ll be going, too.”

Vogel stood suddenly. He handed the waiter a few bills, then walked to Gabriel’s table.

“I offered to buy you a brandy because I noticed you were looking at me,” Vogel said. “Have we ever met before?”

“No, I don’t think so,” Gabriel said. “And if I was looking at you, I meant nothing by it. I just enjoy looking at faces in Viennese coffeehouses.” He hesitated, then added, “One never knows whom one might run into.”

“I couldn’t agree more.” Another humorless smile. “Are you sure we’ve never met before? Your face seems very familiar to me.”

“I sincerely doubt it.”

“You’re new to the Central,” Vogel said with certainty. “I come here every afternoon. You might say I’m Karl’s best customer. I know I’ve never seen you here before.”

“I usually take my coffee at Sperl.”

“Ah, Sperl. Their strudel is good, but I’m afraid the sound of the billiards tables intrudes on my concentration. I must say, I’m fond of the Central. Perhaps we’ll see each other again.”

“Perhaps,” Gabriel said noncommittally.

“There was an old man who used to come here often. He was about my age. We used to have lovely conversations. He hasn’t come for some time. I hope he’s all right. When one is old, things have a way of going wrong very quickly.”

Gabriel shrugged. “Maybe he’s just moved on to another coffeehouse.”

“Perhaps,” Vogel said. Then he wished Gabriel a pleasant evening and walked into the street. The bodyguard followed discreetly after him. Through the glass, Gabriel saw a Mercedes sedan slide forward. Vogel shot one more glance in Gabriel’s direction before lowering himself into the back seat. Then the door closed and the car sped away.

Gabriel sat for a moment, turning over the details of the unexpected encounter. Then he paid his check and walked into the frigid evening. He knew he had just been sent a warning. He also knew that his time in Austria was limited.

THE AMERICAN WAS the last to depart Café Central. He paused in the doorway to turn up the collar of his Burberry overcoat, doing his best to avoid looking like a spy, and watched the Israeli disappear into the darkened street. Then he turned and headed in the opposite direction. It had been an interesting afternoon. A ballsy move on Vogel’s part, but then that was Vogel’s style.

The embassy was in the Ninth District, a bit of a trek, but the American decided it was a good night for walking. He liked walking in Vienna. It suited him. He’d wanted nothing more than to be a spy in the city of spies and had spent his youth preparing himself. He’d studied German at his grandmother’s knee and Soviet policy with the brightest minds in the field at Harvard. After graduation, the doors to the Agency were thrown open to him. Then the Empire crumbled and a new threat rose from the sands of the Middle East. Fluent German and a graduate degree from Harvard didn’t count for much in the new Agency. Today’s stars were human action figures who could live off worms and grubs and walk a hundred miles with some hill tribesman without complaining of so much as a blister. The American had got Vienna, but the Vienna that awaited him had lost her old importance. She was suddenly just another European backwater, a cul-de-sac, a place to quietly end a career, not launch one.

Thank God for the Vogel affair. It had livened things up a bit, even if it was only temporary.

The American turned into the Boltzmanngasse and paused at the formidable security gate. The Marine guard checked his identification card and permitted him to enter. The American had official cover. He worked in Cultural. It only reinforced his feelings of obsolescence. A spy, working with Cultural cover in Vienna. How perfectly quaint.

He rode the lift up to the fourth floor and paused at a door with a combination lock. Behind it was the nerve center of the Agency’s Vienna station. The American sat down before a computer, logged on, and tapped out a brief cable to Headquarters. It was addressed to a man named Carter, the deputy director for operations. Carter hated chatty cables. He’d ordered the American to find out one simple piece of information. The American had done it. The last thing Carter needed was a blow-by-blow account of his harrowing exploits at Café Central. Once it might have sounded compelling. Not anymore.

He typed five words-Avraham is in the game-and fired it into the secure ether. He waited for a response. To pass the time, he worked on an analysis of the upcoming election. He doubted it would be required reading on the seventh floor at Langley.

His computer beeped. He had a message waiting. He clicked on it, and words appeared on the screen.

Keep Elijah under watch.

The American hastily tapped out another message: What if Elijah leaves town?

Two minutes later: Keep Elijah under watch.

The American logged off. He put aside the report on the election. He was back in the game, at least for now.

GABRIEL SPENT THE rest of that evening at the hospital. Marguerite, the night nurse, came on duty an hour after he arrived. When the doctor had completed his examination, she permitted him to sit at Eli’s bedside. For a second time, she suggested Gabriel talk to him, then she slipped from the room to give him a few moments of privacy. Gabriel didn’t know what to say, so he leaned close to Eli’s ear and whispered to him in Hebrew about the case: Max Klein, Renate Hoffmann, Ludwig Vogel… Eli lay motionless, his head bandaged, his eyes bound. Later, in the corridor, Marguerite confided to Gabriel that there had been no improvement in Eli’s condition. Gabriel sat in the adjoining waiting room for another hour, watching Eli through the glass, then took a taxi back to his hotel.

In his room he sat down at the desk and switched on the lamp. In the top drawer he found a few sheets of hotel stationery and a pencil. He closed his eyes for a moment and pictured Vogel as he had seen him that afternoon in Café Central.

“Are you sure we’ve never met before? Your face seems very familiar to me.”

“I sincerely doubt it.”

Gabriel opened his eyes again and started sketching. Five minutes later, Vogel’s face was staring up at him.What might he have looked like as a young man? He began to sketch again. He thickened the hair, removed the hoods and crinkles from the eyes. He smoothed the furrows from the forehead, tightened the skin on the cheeks and along the jawline, erased the deep troughs leading from the base of the nose to the corners of the small mouth.

Satisfied, he placed the new sketch next to the first. He began a third version of the man, this time with the high-collared tunic and peaked cap of an SS man. The image, when it was complete, set fire to the skin of his neck.

He opened the file Renate Hoffmann had given him and read the name of the village where Vogel had his country house. He located the village on a tourist map he found in the desk drawer, then dialed a rental car office and reserved a car for the morning.

He carried the sketches to the bed and, with his head propped on the pillow, stared at the three different versions of Vogel’s face. The last, the one of Vogel in the uniform of the SS, seemed vaguely familiar to him. He had the nagging sensation he had seen the man someplace before. After an hour, he sat up and carried the sketches into the bathroom. Standing at the sink, he burned the images in the same order he had sketched them: Vogel as prosperous Viennese gentleman, Vogel fifty years younger, Vogel as SS murderer…

9 VIENNA

THE FOLLOWING MORNING Gabriel went shopping in the Kärntnerstrasse. The sky was a dome of pale blue streaked with alabaster. Crossing the Stephansplatz, he was nearly toppled by the wind. It was an Arctic wind, chilled by the fjords and glaciers of Norway, strengthened by the icy plains of Poland, and now it was hammering against the gates of Vienna like a barbarian horde.

He entered a department store, glanced at the directory, and rode the escalator up to the floor that sold outerwear. There he selected a dark blue ski jacket, a thick fleece pullover, heavy gloves, and waterproof hiking boots. He paid for his things and went out again, strolling the Kärntnerstrasse with a plastic bag in each hand, checking his tail.

The rental car office was a few streets away from his hotel. A silver Opel station wagon awaited him. He loaded the bags into the back seat, signed the necessary papers, and sped away. He drove in circles for a half-hour, looking for signs of surveillance, then made his way to the entrance of the A1 motorway and headed west.

The clouds thickened gradually, the morning sun vanished. By the time he reached Linz, it was snowing heavily. He stopped at a gas station and changed into the clothing he’d bought in Vienna, then pulled back onto the A1 and made the final run into Salzburg.

It was midafternoon when he arrived. He left the Opel in a car park and spent the remainder of the afternoon wandering the streets and squares of the old city, playing the part of a tourist. He climbed the carved steps leading up the Mönchsberg and admired the view of Salzburg from the height of the church steeples. Then it was over to the Universitätsplatz to see the Baroque masterpieces of Fischer von Erlach. When darkness fell, he went back down to the old city and dined on Tyrolean ravioli in a quaint restaurant with hunting trophies on the dark-paneled walls.

By eight o’clock, he was behind the wheel of the Opel again, heading east out of Salzburg into the heart of the Salzkammergut. The snowfall grew heavier as the highway climbed steadily into the mountains. He passed through a village called Hof on the southern shore of the Fuschlsee; then, a few miles farther on, he came to the Wolfgangsee. The town for which it was named, St. Wolfgang, stood on the opposite shore of the lake. He could just make out the shadowed spire of the Pilgrimage Church. He remembered it contained one of the finest Gothic altarpieces in all of Austria.

In the sleepy village of Zichenbach, he made a right turn into a narrow lane that rose sharply up the slope of the mountain. The town fell away behind him. There were cottages along the road, with snow-covered roofs and smoke curling from the chimneys. A dog ran out from one of them and barked as Gabriel passed.

He drove across a one-lane bridge, then slowed to a stop. The road seemed to have given up in exhaustion. A narrower path, barely wide enough to accommodate a car, continued into a birch forest. About thirty meters farther on was a gate. He shut down the engine. The deep silence of the forest was oppressive.

He removed the flashlight from the glove compartment and climbed out. The gate was shoulder-high and fashioned of old timber. A sign warned that the property on the other side was private and that hunting and hiking were strictly verboten and punishable by fines and imprisonment. Gabriel put a foot on the middle slat, hauled himself over the top, and dropped into the downy blanket of snow on the other side.

He switched on the flashlight, illuminating the path. It rose at a sharp incline and curved off to the right, disappearing behind a wall of birch. There were no footprints and no tire tracks. Gabriel doused the light and hesitated a moment while his eyes grew accustomed to the darkness, then started walking again.

Five minutes later, he came upon a large clearing. At the top of the clearing, about a hundred meters away, stood the house, a traditional alpine chalet, very large, with a pitched roof and eaves that hung well beyond the outer walls of the structure. He paused for a moment, listening for any sign his approach had been detected. Satisfied, he circled the clearing, keeping to the tree line. The house was in complete darkness, no lights burning inside, none on the exterior. There were no vehicles.

He stood for a moment, debating whether he should commit a crime on Austrian soil by breaking into the house. The unoccupied chalet represented a chance to peer into Vogel’s life, a chance that would surely not come his way again anytime soon. He was reminded of a recurring dream. Titian wishes to consult with Gabriel on a restoration, but Gabriel keeps putting Titian off because he’s hopelessly behind schedule and can’t take the time for a meeting. Titian is terribly offended and rescinds the offer in a rage. Gabriel, alone before a limitless canvas, forges on without the master’s help.

He started across the clearing. A glance over his shoulder confirmed what he already knew-he was leaving an obvious trail of human footprints leading from the edge of the trees to the back of the house. Unless it snowed again soon, the tracks would remain visible for anyone to see. Keep moving. Titian is waiting.

He arrived at the rear of the chalet. The length of the exterior wall was stacked with firewood. At the end of the woodpile was a door. Gabriel tried the latch. Locked, of course. He removed his gloves and took out the thin metal strip that he habitually carried in his wallet. He worked it gently inside the keyhole until he felt the mechanism give way. Then he turned the latch and stepped inside.

HE SWITCHED ON the flashlight and found he was standing in a mudroom. Three pairs of Wellington boots stood at attention against the wall. A loden-cloth coat hung from a hook. Gabriel searched the pockets: some loose change, a wadded handkerchief, crinkled by an old man’s dried phlegm.

He stepped through a doorway and was confronted by a flight of stairs. He climbed swiftly upward, flashlight in hand, until he came to another door. This one was unlocked. Gabriel eased it open. The groan of the dry hinges echoed in the vast silence of the house.

He found himself in a pantry, which looked as though it had been looted by an army in retreat. The shelves were nearly bare and covered in a fine layer of dust. The adjoining kitchen was a combination of modern and traditional: German-made appliances with stainless-steel fronts, cast-iron pots hanging over a large open hearth. He opened the refrigerator: a half-drunk bottle of Austrian white wine, a lump of cheese green with mold, a few jars of ancient condiments.

He walked through a dining room into a large great room. He played the light around the room and stopped when it fell upon an antique writing table. There was one drawer. Warped by the cold, it was wedged tightly shut. Gabriel pulled hard and nearly tore it off the runners. He shone the light inside: pens and pencils, rusted paper clips, a stack of business stationery from Danube Valley Trade and Investment, personal stationery:

From the desk of Ludwig Vogel…

Gabriel closed the drawer and shone the light on the surface of the desk. In a wooden paper tray was a stack of correspondence. He leafed through the pages: a few private letters, documents that appeared to be related to Vogel’s business dealings. Attached to some of the documents were memoranda, all written in the same spidery script. He seized the papers, folded them in half, and pushed them down the front of his jacket.

The telephone was equipped with a built-in answering machine and digital display. The clock was set to the wrong time. Gabriel lifted the cover, exposing a pair of minicassettes. It had been his experience that telephone machines never completely erased tapes and that much valuable information was often left behind, easily accessible to a technician with proper equipment. He removed the cassettes and slipped them into his pocket. Then he closed the lid and pressed the redial button. There was a burst of dial tone, followed by the dissonant song of the automatic dialer. The number flashed across the display window:5124124. A Vienna number. Gabriel committed it to memory.

The next sound was the one-note ring of an Austrian telephone, followed by a second. Before the line could ring a third time, a man picked up.

“Hello… hello… Who’s there? Ludwig, is that you? Who is this?”

Gabriel reached down and severed the connection.

HE MOUNTED THE main staircase. How long did he have before the man at the other end of the line realized his mistake? How quickly could he marshal his forces and mount a counterattack? Gabriel could almost hear a clock ticking.

At the top of the stairs was an alcovelike foyer, furnished as a small seating area. Next to the chair was a stack of books, and resting on the books was an empty snifter. On each side of the alcove was a doorway leading to a bedroom. Gabriel entered the one to his right.

The ceiling was at an angle, reflecting the pitch of the roof. The walls were bare except for a large crucifix hanging over the unmade bed. The alarm clock on the nightstand flashed12:00… 12:00… 12:00… Coiled snakelike in front of the clock was a black-beaded rosary. A television set stood on a pedestal at the foot of the bed. Gabriel dragged his gloved fingertip across the screen and left a dark line in the dust.

There was no closet, only a large Edwardian-style wardrobe. Gabriel opened the door and played his flashlight around the interior: stacks of neatly folded sweaters, jackets, dress shirts, and trousers hanging from the rod. He pulled open a drawer. Inside was a felt-lined jewelry case: tarnished cufflinks, signet rings, an antique watch with a cracked black leather band. He turned over the watch and examined the backing. To Erich, in adoration, Monica. He picked up one of the rings, a heavy gold signet adorned with an eagle. It too was engraved, in tiny script that ran along the interior of the band:1005, well done, Heinrich. Gabriel slipped the watch and the signet ring into his pocket.

He left the bedroom, pausing in the alcove. A glance through the window showed no movement in the drive. He entered the second bedroom. The air was heavy with the unmistakable scent of attar of roses and lavender. A pale, soft rug covered the floor; a flowered eiderdown quilt lay over the bed. The Edwardian wardrobe was identical to the one in the first bedroom, except the doors were mirrored. Inside, Gabriel found the clothing of a woman. Renate Hoffmann had told him Vogel was a lifelong bachelor. So whom did the clothes belong to?

Gabriel went to the bedside table. A large leather-bound Bible stood atop a lace cloth. He picked it up by the spine and vigorously thumbed the pages. A photograph fluttered to the floor. Gabriel examined it by flashlight. It showed a woman, a teen-aged boy, and a middle-aged man, seated on a blanket in an alpine meadow in summer. They were all smiling for the camera. The woman had her arm around the man’s shoulder. Even though it had been taken thirty or forty years ago, it was clear the man was Ludwig Vogel. And the woman? To Erich, in adoration, Monica. The boy, handsome and neatly groomed, looked oddly familiar.

He heard a sound outside, a muffled rumble, and hurried over to the window. He parted the curtain and saw a pair of headlights rising slowly through the trees.

GABRIEL SLIPPED THE photograph into his pocket and hurried down the staircase. The great room already was lit by the glow of the vehicle’s headlights. He retraced his path-across the kitchen, through the pantry, down the back stairs-until he found himself in the mudroom once more. He could hear footfalls on the floor above him; someone was in the house. He eased the door open and slipped out, closing it quietly behind him.

He walked around to the front of the house, keeping beneath the eaves. The vehicle, a four-wheel-drive sport utility, was parked a few meters from the front door. The headlamps were burning and the driver’s-side door hung open. Gabriel could hear the electronic pinging of an alarm. The keys were still in the ignition. He crept over to the vehicle, removed the keys, and hurled them into the darkness.

He crossed the meadow and started down the slope of the mountain. With the heavy boots and thick snow, it was something from his nightmares. The cold air clawed at his throat. As he rounded the final bend in the path, he saw that the gate was open and a man was standing next to his car, shining a flashlight through the window.

Gabriel did not fear a confrontation with one man. Two, however, was another thing altogether. He decided to go on the offensive, before the one up at the house could make his way down the mountain. He shouted in German, “You there! What do you think you’re doing with my car?”

The man turned around and shone his flashlight toward Gabriel. He made no movement that suggested he was reaching for a gun. Gabriel kept running, playing the role of an outraged motorist whose car has been violated. Then he removed the flashlight from his coat pocket and swung it toward the man’s face.

He raised his hand defensively, and the blow was absorbed by his heavy coat. Gabriel let go of the flashlight and kicked the man hard on the inside of his knee. He groaned in pain and threw a wild punch. Gabriel stepped away, easily avoiding it, careful not to lose his footing in the snow. His opponent was a large man, some six inches taller than Gabriel and at least fifty pounds heavier. If things deteriorated into a wrestling match, the outcome would be thrown into question.

The man threw another wild punch, a roundhouse that glanced off the front of Gabriel’s chin. He ended up off balance, leaning over to the left, with his right arm down. Gabriel seized the arm and stepped forward. He drew back his elbow and drove it twice into the man’s cheekbone, careful to avoid the killing zone in front of the ear. The man collapsed into the snow, dazed. Gabriel hit him in the head with the flashlight for good measure, and the man fell unconscious.

Gabriel looked over his shoulder and saw that there was no one on the track. He unzipped the man’s jacket and searched for a billfold. He found one in an interior breast pocket. Inside was an identification badge. The name did not concern him; the affiliation did. The man lying unconscious in the snow was a Staatspolizei officer.

Gabriel resumed his search of the unconscious man and found, in the breast pocket of his jacket, a small leather-bound policeman’s notepad. Written on the first page, in childlike block letters, was the registration number for Gabriel’s rental car.

10 VIENNA

NEXT MORNING, GABRIEL made two telephone calls upon his return to Vienna. The first was to a number located inside the Israeli embassy. He identified himself as Kluge, one of his many telephone names, and said he was calling to confirm an appointment with a Mr. Rubin in Consular. After a moment the voice at the other end of the line said, “The Opernpassage-do you know it?”

Gabriel indicated, with some irritation, that he did. The Opernpassage was a dingy, pedestrian thoroughfare beneath the Karlsplatz.

“Enter the passage from the north,” the voice said. “Halfway down, on your right side, you’ll see a hat shop. Walk past that shop at precisely ten o’clock.”

Gabriel broke the connection, then dialed Max Klein’s apartment in the Second District. There was no answer. He hung the receiver back on the hook and stood for a moment, wondering where Klein could be.

He had ninety minutes until his meeting with the courier. He decided to use the time productively by ridding himself of the rental car. The situation had to be handled carefully. Gabriel had taken the Staatspolizei officer’s notebook. If by some chance the policeman had managed to remember the registration number after being knocked unconscious, it would have taken him only minutes to trace the car to the rental agent in Vienna, and then to an Israeli named Gideon Argov.

Gabriel crossed the Danube and drove around the modern United Nations complex, looking for a parking space on the street. He found one, about a five-minute walk from the U-Bahn station, and pulled in. He raised the hood and loosened the battery cables, then climbed behind the wheel and turned the key. Greeted by silence, he closed the hood and walked away.

From a phone booth in the U-Bahn station he called the rental car office to inform them that their Opel had broken down and needed to be collected. He permitted a note of indignation to creep into his voice, and the attendant at the other end of the line was highly apologetic. There was nothing in the clerk’s voice to indicate the company had been contacted by the police concerning a burglary the previous evening in the Salzkammergut.

A train rolled into the station. Gabriel hung up and boarded the last carriage. Fifteen minutes later, he was entering the Opernpassage-from the north, just as the man from the embassy had instructed. It was filled with morning commuters spilling from the Karlsplatz U-Bahn station, the air thick with the stench of fast food and cigarettes. An Albanian with drugged eyes asked Gabriel for a euro to buy food. Gabriel slipped past without a word and made his way toward the hatter.

The man from the embassy was coming out as Gabriel approached. Blond and blue-eyed, he wore a mackintosh raincoat with a scarf wrapped tightly around his throat. A plastic bag bearing the name of the hatter hung from his right hand. They were known to each other. His name was Ben-Avraham.

They walked side by side toward the exit at the other end of the passage. Gabriel handed over an envelope containing all the material he had gathered since his arrival in Austria: the dossier given to him by Renate Hoffmann, the watch and the ring taken from Ludwig Vogel’s armoire, the photograph concealed in the Bible. Ben-Avraham slipped the envelope into the plastic bag.

“Get it home,” Gabriel said. “Quickly.”

Ben-Avraham nodded tersely. “And the receiving party at King Saul Boulevard?”

“It’s not going to King Saul Boulevard.”

Ben-Avraham raised an eyebrow suggestively. “You know the rules. Everything goes through Headquarters.”

“Not this,” Gabriel said, nodding toward the plastic bag. “It goes to the Old Man.”

They reached the end of the passage. Gabriel turned and started in the opposite direction. Ben-Avraham followed after him. Gabriel could see what he was thinking. Should he violate a petty Office dictum and risk the wrath of Lev-who loved nothing more than enforcing petty Office dictums-or should he perform a small favor for Gabriel Allon and Ari Shamron? Ben-Avraham’s deliberation did not last long. Gabriel had not expected it would. Lev was not the type to inspire personal devotion among his troops. Lev was the man of the hour, but Shamron was theMemuneh, and theMemuneh was eternal.

Gabriel, with a sideways movement of his eyes, sent Ben-Avraham on his way. He spent ten minutes pacing the length of the Opernpassage, searching for any sign of surveillance, then went back up to the street. From a public telephone he tried Max Klein’s number a second time. There was still no answer.

He climbed on a passing streetcar and rode it around the city center to the Second District. It took him a few moments to find Klein’s address. In the foyer, he pressed the buzzer for the apartment but received no response. The caretaker, a middle-aged woman in a flowered frock, poked her head from her apartment and eyed Gabriel suspiciously.

“Who are you looking for?”

Gabriel answered truthfully.

“He usually goes to the synagogue in the morning. Have you tried there?”

The Jewish Quarter was just on the other side of the Danube Canal, a ten-minute walk at most. As usual, the synagogue was under guard. Gabriel, despite his passport, had to pass through a magnetometer before being admitted. He took a kippah from the basket and covered his head before entering the sanctuary. A few elderly men were praying near the bimah. None of them was Max Klein. In the foyer he asked the security guard whether he’d seen Klein that morning. The guard shook his head and suggested Gabriel try the community center.

Gabriel walked next door and was admitted by a Russian Jew named Natalia. Yes, she told him, Max Klein often spends his morning at the center, but she hadn’t seen him today. “Sometimes, the old ones have coffee at the Café Schottenring,” she said. “It’s at Number Nineteen. You might find him there.”

There was indeed a group of elderly Viennese Jews having coffee at the Café Schottenring, but Klein wasn’t one of them. Gabriel asked if he’d been there that morning, and six gray heads shook in unison.

Frustrated, he walked back across the Danube Canal to the Second District and returned to Klein’s apartment building. He pressed the buzzer and once again received no response. Then he knocked on the door of the caretaker’s apartment. Seeing Gabriel for a second time, her face turned suddenly grave.

“Wait here,” she said. “I’ll get the key.”

THE CARETAKER UNLOCKED the door and, before stepping across the threshold, called out Klein’s name. Hearing no reply, they went inside. The curtains were drawn, the sitting room was in heavy shadow.

“Herr Klein?” she called out again. “Are you here? Herr Klein?”

Gabriel opened the double doors leading to the kitchen and peered inside. Max Klein’s dinner was sitting on the small table, untouched. He walked down the hallway, pausing once to peer into the empty bathroom. The bedroom door was locked. Gabriel hammered on it with his fist and called Klein’s name. There was no response.

The caretaker came to his side. They looked at each other. She nodded. Gabriel seized the latch with both hands and drove his shoulder into the door. The wood splintered, and he stumbled into the bedroom.

Here, as in the sitting room, the curtains were drawn. Gabriel ran his hand along the wall, groping in the gloom until he found a switch. A small bedside lamp threw a cone of light on the figure lying on the bed.

The caretaker gasped.

Gabriel eased forward. Max Klein’s head was covered by a clear plastic bag, and a gold-braided cord was wrapped around his neck. His eyes stared at Gabriel through the fogged plastic.

“I’ll call the police,” the caretaker said.

Gabriel sat at the end of the bed and buried his face in his hands.

IT TOOK TWENTY minutes for the first police to arrive. Their apathetic manner suggested an assumption of suicide. In a way this was fortunate for Gabriel, because suspicion of foul play would have significantly altered the nature of the encounter. He was interviewed twice, once by the uniformed officers who had first responded to the call, then again by a Staatspolizei detective called Greiner. Gabriel said his name was Gideon Argov and that he worked for the Jerusalem office of Wartime Claims and Inquiries. That he had come to Vienna after the bombing to be with his friend Eli Lavon. That Max Klein was an old friend of his father, and that his father suggested he look up Klein and see how the old man was getting on. He didn’t mention his meeting with Klein two nights earlier, nor did he inform the police of Klein’s suspicions about Ludwig Vogel. His passport was examined, as was his business card. Telephone numbers were written in small black notebooks. Condolences were offered. The caretaker made tea. It was all very polite.

Shortly after noon, a pair of ambulance attendants came to collect the body. The detective handed Gabriel a card and told him he was free to leave. Gabriel went out into the street and walked around the corner. In a shadowed alleyway, he leaned against the sooty bricks and closed his eyes. A suicide? No, the man who had survived the horrors of Auschwitz had not committed suicide. He had been murdered, and Gabriel couldn’t help but feel that he was partly to blame. He’d been a fool to leave Klein unprotected.

He started back toward his hotel. The images of the case played out in his mind like fragments of an unfinished painting: Eli Lavon in his hospital bed, Ludwig Vogel in the Café Central, the Staatspolizei man in the Salzkammergut, Max Klein lying dead with a plastic bag over his head. Each incident was like another weight being added to the pan of a scale. The balance was about to tip, and Gabriel suspected he would be the next victim. It was time to leave Austria while he still could.

He entered his hotel and asked the desk clerk to prepare his bill, then walked upstairs to his room. His door, despite the DO NOT DISTURB sign hanging from the latch, was ajar, and he could hear voices emanating from inside. He eased it open with his fingertips. Two men in plainclothes were in the process of lifting the mattress off the box spring. A third, clearly their superior, was sitting at the desk watching the proceedings like a bored fan at a sporting contest. Seeing Gabriel standing at the door, he stood slowly and put his hands on his hips. The last weight had just been added to the pan.

“Good afternoon, Allon,” said Manfred Kruz.

11 VIENNA

IF YOU’RE CONSIDERING the possibility of escape, you’ll find all the exits blocked and a very large man at the bottom of the stairs who’ll relish the opportunity to subdue you.” Kruz’s body was turned slightly. He gazed at Gabriel, fencerlike, over one shoulder and held up his palm in a placatory gesture. “There’s no need for this to get out of hand. Come inside and close the door.”

His voice was the same, underpowered and unnaturally calm, an undertaker helping a grieving relative to select a casket. He had aged in thirteen years-there were a few more wrinkles around his cunning mouth and a few more pounds on his slender frame-and, based on his well-cut clothing and arrogant demeanor, he had been promoted. Gabriel kept his gaze focused on Kruz’s dark eyes. He could feel the presence of another man at his back. He stepped across the threshold and swung the door shut behind him. He heard a heavy thud, then a curse muttered in German. Kruz held up a palm again. This time it was a command for Gabriel to stop.

“Are you armed?”

Gabriel shook his head wearily.

“Do you mind if I put my mind at ease?” Kruz asked. “You do have something of a reputation.”

Gabriel raised his hands above his shoulders. The officer who’d been behind him in the hall entered the room and conducted the search. It was professional and very thorough, starting with the neck and ending with the ankles. Kruz seemed disappointed by the results.

“Remove your coat and empty your pockets.”

Gabriel hesitated and was spurred on with a painful jab to the kidney. He unzipped his coat and handed it to Kruz, who searched the pockets and felt the lining for a false compartment.

“Turn out the pockets of your trousers.”

Gabriel complied. The result was a few coins and the stub of a streetcar ticket. Kruz looked at the two officers holding the mattress and ordered them to reassemble the bed. “Mr. Allon is a professional,” he said. “We’re not going to find anything.”

The officers plopped the mattress back onto the box spring. Kruz, with a wave of his hand, told them to leave the room. He sat down again at the desk and pointed toward the bed.

“Make yourself comfortable.”

Gabriel remained standing.

“How long have you been in Vienna?”

“You tell me.”

Kruz acknowledged the professional compliment with a terse smile. “You arrived on a flight from Ben-Gurion Airport the night before last. After checking into this hotel, you proceeded to Vienna General Hospital, where you spent several hours with your friend Eli Lavon.”

Kruz fell silent. Gabriel wondered how much else Kruz knew about his activities in Vienna. Did he know about the meetings with Max Klein and Renate Hoffmann? His encounter with Ludwig Vogel at the Café Central and his excursion to Salzkammergut? Kruz, if he did know more, was unlikely to say. He was not the kind to tip his hand for no reason. Gabriel imagined him a cold and emotionless gambler.

“Why didn’t you arrest me earlier?”

“I haven’t arrested you now.” Kruz lit a cigarette. “We were prepared to overlook your violation of our agreement because we assumed you’d come to Vienna to be at the side of your injured friend. But it quickly became apparent that you intended to conduct a private investigation of the bombing. For obvious reasons, I cannot allow that.”

“Yes,” Gabriel agreed, “for obvious reasons.”

Kruz spent a moment contemplating the smoke rising from the ember of his cigarette. “We had an agreement, Mr. Allon. Under no circumstances were you to return to this country. You’re not welcome here. You’re not supposed to be here. I don’t care if you’re upset about your friend Eli Lavon. This is our investigation, and we don’t need any help from you or your service.”

Kruz looked at his watch. “There’s an El Al flight leaving in three hours. You’re going to be on it. I’ll keep you company while you pack your bags.”

Gabriel looked around at his clothing strewn across the floor. He lifted the lid of his suitcase and saw that the lining had been cut away. Kruz shrugged his shoulders – What did you expect? Gabriel bent down and started picking up his belongings. Kruz looked out the French doors and smoked.

After a moment, Kruz asked, “Is she still alive?”

Gabriel turned slowly around and fixed his gaze on Kruz’s small, dark eyes. “Are you referring to my wife?”

“Yes.”

Gabriel shook his head slowly. “Don’t speak about my wife, Kruz.”

Kruz smiled humorlessly. “You’re not going to start making threats again, are you, Allon? I might be tempted to take you into custody for a more thorough questioning about your activities here.”

Gabriel said nothing.

Kruz crushed out his cigarette. “Pack your bags, Allon. You don’t want to miss your plane.”