The English Assassin

1

THE SOMETIMES-SOLVENT firm of Isherwood Fine Arts had once occupied a piece of fine commercial property on stylish New Bond Street in Mayfair. Then came London’s retail renaissance, and New Bond Street-or New Bondstrasse, as it was derisively known in the trade-was overrun by the likes of Tiffany and Gucci and Versace and Mikimoto. Julian Isherwood and other dealers specializing in museum-quality Old Masters were driven into St. Jamesian exile-the Bond Street Diaspora, as Isherwood was fond of calling it. He eventually settled in a sagging Victorian warehouse in a quiet quadrangle known as Mason’s Yard, next to the London offices of a minor Greek shipping company and a pub that catered to pretty office girls who rode motor scooters.

Among the incestuous, backbiting villagers of St. James’s, Isherwood Fine Arts was considered rather good theater. Isherwood Fine Arts had drama and tension, comedy and tragedy, stunning highs and seemingly bottomless lows. This was, in large measure, a consequence of its owner’s personality. He was cursed with a near-fatal flaw for an art dealer: he liked to possess art more than to sell it. Each time a painting left the wall of his exquisite exposition room, Isherwood fell into a raging blue funk. As a result of this affliction he was now burdened by an apocalyptic inventory of what is affectionately known in the trade as dead stock-paintings for which no buyer would ever pay a fair price. Unsellable paintings. Burned, as they liked to say in Duke Street. Toast. If Isherwood had been asked to explain this seemingly inexplicable failure of business acumen, he might have raised the issue of his father, though he made a point of never-And I mean never, petal-talking about his father.

He was up now. Afloat. Flush with funds. A million pounds, to be precise, tucked nicely into his account at Barclays Bank, thanks to a Venetian painter named Francesco Vecellio and the morose-looking art restorer now making his way across the wet bricks of Mason’s Yard.

Isherwood pulled on a macintosh. His English scale and devoutly English wardrobe concealed the fact that he was not-at least not technically speaking-English at all. English by nationality and passport, yes, but German by birth, French by upbringing, and Jewish by religion. Few people knew that his last name was merely a phonetic perversion of its original. Fewer still knew that he’d done favors over the years for a certain bullet-headed gentleman from a certain clandestine agency based in Tel Aviv. Rudolf Heller was the name the gentleman used when calling on Isherwood at the gallery. It was a borrowed name, borrowed like the gentleman’s blue suit and gentleman’s manners. His real name was Ari Shamron.

“One makes choices in life, doesn’t one?” Shamron had said at the time of Isherwood’s recruitment. “One doesn’t betray one’s adopted country, one’s college, or one’s regiment, but one looks out for one’s flesh and blood, one’s tribe, lest another Austrian madman, or the Butcher of Baghdad, try to turn us all into soap again, eh, Julian?”

“Hear, hear, Herr Heller.”

“We won’t pay you a pound. Your name will never appear in our files. You’ll do favors for me from time to time. Very specific favors for a very special agent.”

“Super. Marvelous. Where do I sign up? What sort of favors? Nothing shady, I take it?”

“Say I need to send him to Prague. Or Oslo. Or Berlin, God forbid. I’d like you to find legitimate work for him there. A restoration. An authentication. A consultation. Something appropriate for the amount of time he’ll be staying.”

“Not a problem, Herr Heller. By the way, does this agent of yours have a name?”

The agent had many names, thought Isherwood now, watching the man make his way across the quadrangle. His real name was Gabriel Allon, and the nature of his secret work for Shamron was betrayed by subtle things he did now. The way he glanced over his shoulder as he slipped through the passageway from Duke Street. The way that, in spite of a steady rain, he made not one but two complete circuits of the old yard before approaching the gallery’s secure door and ringing Isherwood’s bell. Poor Gabriel. One of the three or four best in the world at what he does, but he can’t walk a straight line. And why not? After what happened to his wife and child in Vienna… no man would be the same after that.

He was unexpectedly average in height, and his smooth gait seemed to propel him effortlessly across Duke Street to Green’s Restaurant, where Isherwood had booked a table for lunch. As they sat down, Gabriel’s eyes flickered about the room like searchlights. They were almond-shaped, unnaturally green, and very quick. The cheekbones were broad and square, the lips dark, and the sharp-edged nose looked as though it had been carved from wood. It was a timeless face, thought Isherwood. It could be a face on the cover of a glossy men’s fashion magazine or a face from a dour Rembrandt portrait. It was also a face of many possible origins. It had been a superb professional asset.

Isherwood ordered stuffed sole and Sancerre, Gabriel black tea and a bowl of consommé. He reminded Isherwood of an Orthodox hermit who subsisted on rancid feta and concrete flatbread, only Gabriel lived in a pleasant cottage on a remote tidal creek in Cornwall instead of a monastery. Isherwood had never seen him eat a rich meal, had never seen him smile or admire an attractive pair of hips. He never lusted after material objects. He had only two toys, an old MG motorcar and a wooden ketch, both of which he had restored himself. He listened to his opera on a dreadful little portable CD player stained with paint and varnish. He spent money only on his supplies. He had more high-tech toys in his little Cornish studio than there were in the conservation department of the Tate.

How little Gabriel had changed in the twenty-five years since they had first met. A few more wrinkles around those watchful eyes, a few more pounds on his spare frame. He’d been little more than a boy that day, quiet as a church mouse. Even then, his hair was streaked with gray, the stain of a boy who’d done a man’s job. “Julian Isherwood, meet Gabriel,” Shamron had said. “Gabriel is a man of enormous talent, I assure you.”

Enormous talent, indeed, but there had been gaps in the young man’s provenance-like the missing three years between his graduation from the prestigious Betsal’el School of Art in Jerusalem and his apprenticeship in Venice with the master restorer Umberto Conti. “Gabriel spent time traveling in Europe,” Shamron had said curtly. That was the last time the subject of Gabriel’s European adventures was ever raised. Julian Isherwood didn’t talk about what had happened to his father, and Gabriel didn’t talk about the things he had done for Ari Shamron, alias Rudolf Heller, from approximately 1972 to 1975. Secretly, Isherwood referred to them as the Lost Years.

Isherwood reached into the breast pocket of his jacket and withdrew a check. “Your share from the sale of the Vecellio. One hundred thousand pounds.”

Gabriel scooped up the check and pocketed it with a smooth movement of his hand. He had magician’s hands and a magician’s sense of misdirection. The check was there, the check was gone.

“How much was your share?”

“I’ll tell you, but you must first promise me that you won’t divulge the figure to any of these vultures,” Isherwood said, sweeping his hand across the dining room of Green’s.

Gabriel said nothing, which Isherwood interpreted as a blood oath of everlasting silence.

“One million.”

“Dollars?”

“Pounds, petal. Pounds.”

“Who bought it?”

“A very nice gallery in the American Midwest. Tastefully displayed, I assure you. Can you imagine? I picked it up for sixteen thousand from a dusty sale room in Hull on the hunch-the wild bloody hunch-that it was the missing altarpiece from the church of San Salvatore in Venice. And I was right! A coup like this comes along once in a career, twice if you’re lucky. Cheers.”

They toasted each other, stemmed wineglass to bone-china teacup. Just then a tubby man with a pink shirt and pink cheeks to match presented himself breathlessly at their table.

“Julie!” he sang.

“Hullo, Oliver.”

“Word on Duke Street is you picked up a cool million for your Vecellio.”

“Where the bloody hell did you hear that?”

“There are no secrets down here, love. Just tell me if it’s the truth or a dirty, seditious lie.” He turned to Gabriel, as if noticing him for the first time, and thrust out a fleshy paw with a gold-embossed business card wedged between the thick fingers. “Oliver Dimbleby. Dimbleby Fine Arts.”

Gabriel took the card silently.

“Why don’t you join us for a drink, Oliver?” said Isherwood.

Beneath the table Gabriel put his foot on Isherwood’s toe and pressed hard.

“Can’t now, love. That leggy creature in the booth over there has promised to whisper filth into my ear if I buy her another glass of champagne.”

“Thank God!” blurted Isherwood through clenched teeth.

Oliver Dimbleby waddled off. Gabriel released the pressure on Isherwood’s foot.

“So much for your secrets.”

“Vultures,” Isherwood repeated. “I’m up now, but the moment I stumble they’ll be hovering again, waiting for me to die so they can pick over the bones.”

“Maybe this time you should watch your money a little more carefully.”

“I’m afraid I’m a hopeless case. In fact-”

“Oh, God.”

“-I’m traveling to Amsterdam to have a look at a painting next week. It’s the centerpiece of a triptych, classified as artist unknown, but I have another one of my hunches. I think it may have come from the workshop of Rogier van der Weyden. In fact, I may be willing to bet a great deal of money on it.”

“Van der Weydens are notoriously difficult to authenticate. There are only a handful of works firmly attributed to him, and he never signed or dated any of them.”

“If it came from his workshop, his fingerprints will be on it. And if there’s anyone who can find them, it’s you.”

“I’ll be happy to take a look at it for you.”

“Are you working on anything now?”

“I just finished a Modigliani.”

“I have a job for you.”

“What kind of job?”

“I received a call from a lawyer a few days ago. Said his client has a painting that requires cleaning. Said his client wanted you to handle the job and would pay handsomely.”

“What’s the client’s name?”

“Didn’t say.”

“What’s the painting?”

“Didn’t say.”

“So how is it supposed to work?”

“You go to the villa, you work on the painting. The owner pays for your hotel and expenses.”

“Where?”

“ Zurich.”

Something flashed behind Gabriel’s green eyes, a vision, a memory. Isherwood frantically rifled through the file drawers of his own less reliable memory. Have I ever sent him to Zurich for Herr Heller?

“Is Zurich a problem?”

“No, Zurich is fine. How much would I be paid?”

“Twice what I’ve just given you-if you start right away.”

“Give me the address.”

GABRIEL did not have time to return to Cornwall to pick up his things, so after lunch he went shopping. In Oxford Street he purchased two changes of clothing and a small leather bag. Then he walked over to Great Russell Street and visited the venerable art supply store of L. Cornelissen amp; Son. A flaxen-haired angel called Penelope helped him assemble a traveling kit of pigments, brushes, and solvents. She knew him by his work name, and he flirted with her shamelessly in the faded accent of an Italian expatriate. She wrapped his things in brown paper and bound them with a string. He kissed her cheek. Her hair smelled of cocoa and incense.

Gabriel knew too much about terrorism and security to enjoy traveling by airplane, so he rode the Underground to Waterloo Station and caught a late-afternoon Eurostar to Paris. In the Gare de l’Est he boarded a night train for Zurich, and by nine o’clock the next morning he was strolling down the gentle sweep of the Bahnhofstrasse.

How gracefully Zurich conceals her riches, he thought. Much of the world’s gold and silver lay in the bank vaults beneath his feet, but there were no hideous office towers to mark the boundaries of the financial district and no monuments to moneymaking. Just understatement, discretion, and deception. A scorned woman who looks away to hide her shame. Switzerland.

He came upon the Paradeplatz. On one side of the square stood the headquarters of Credit Suisse, on the other the Union Bank of Switzerland. A burst of pigeons shattered the calm. He crossed the street.

Opposite the Savoy Hotel was a taxi stand. He climbed into a waiting car after first glancing at the registration number and committing it to memory. He gave the driver the address of the villa, doing his best to conceal the Berlin accent he had acquired from his mother.

Crossing the river, the driver switched on the radio. An announcer was reading the overnight news. Gabriel struggled to comprehend his Züridütsch. He tuned out the radio and focused on the task ahead. There were some in the art world who thought of restoration as tedious work, but Gabriel viewed each assignment as an adventure waiting to unfold; an opportunity to step through a looking glass into another time and place. A place where success or failure was determined by his own skills and nerve and nothing else.

He wondered what awaited him. The very fact that the owner had specifically requested him meant that the work was almost certainly an Old Master. He could also assume that the painting was quite dirty and damaged. The owner wouldn’t have gone to the trouble and expense of bringing him to Zurich if it required only a fresh coat of varnish.

So how long would he be here? Six weeks? Six months? Difficult to say. No two restorations were the same; much would depend on the condition of the painting. Isherwood’s Vecellio had required a year to restore, though he had taken a brief sabbatical in the middle of the job, courtesy of Ari Shamron.

THE Rosenbühlweg was a narrow street, just wide enough to accommodate two cars at once, and it rose sharply up the slope of the Zürichberg. The villas were old and big and huddled closely together. Stucco walls, tile roofs, small tangled gardens. All except the one where the taxi driver pulled to a stop.

It stood atop its own promontory and unlike its neighbors was set several meters back from the street. A high metal fence, like the bars of a jail cell, ran round the perimeter. At the level of the pavement there was a security gate, complete with a small surveillance camera. Beyond the gate rose a flight of stone steps. Then came the villa, a melancholy graystone structure with turrets and a towering front portico.

The taxi drove off. Below lay central Zurich and the lake. Cloud veiled the far shore. Gabriel remembered that it was possible to see the Alps on a clear day, but now they too were shrouded.

Mounted next to the gate on a stone wall was a telephone. Gabriel picked up the receiver, heard ringing at the other end of the line, waited. Nothing. He replaced the receiver, picked it up again. Still no answer.

He pulled out the lawyer’s fax that Julian Isherwood had given him in London. You are to arrive at precisely 9A.M. Ring the bell and you’ll be escorted inside. Gabriel looked at his watch. Three minutes after nine.

As he slipped the papers back into his pocket it began to rain. He looked around: no cafés where he might sit in comfort, no parks or squares where he might find some shelter from the weather. Just a desert of inherited residential wealth. If he stood on the pavement too long, he’d probably be arrested for loitering.

He pulled out his mobile phone and dialed Isherwood’s number. He was probably still on his way to the gallery. As Gabriel waited for the connection to go through, he had a mental image of Isherwood, hunched over the wheel of his shining new Jaguar motorcar, crawling along Piccadilly as if he were piloting an oil tanker through treacherous waters.

“Sorry, but I’m afraid there’s been a change in plan. The fellow who was supposed to meet you was apparently called out of town suddenly. An emergency of some sort. He was vague about it. You know how the Swiss can be, petal.”

“What am I supposed to do?”

“He sent me the security codes for the gate and the front door. You’re to let yourself in. There’s supposed to be a note for you on the table in the entrance hall explaining where you can find the painting and your accommodations.”

“Rather unorthodox, don’t you think?”

“Consider yourself fortunate. It sounds as if you’re going to have the run of the place for a few days, and you won’t have anyone watching over your shoulder while you work.”

“I suppose you’re right.”

“Let me give you the security codes. Do you have paper and pen by any chance? They’re rather long.”

“Just tell me the numbers, Julian. It’s pouring rain, and I’m getting soaked out here.”

“Ah, yes. You and your little parlor tricks. I used to have a girl at the gallery who could do the same thing.”

Isherwood rattled off two series of numbers, each eight digits in length, and severed the connection. Gabriel lifted the receiver of the security phone and punched in the numbers. A buzzer sounded; he turned the latch and stepped through the gate. At the front entrance of the house he repeated the routine, and a moment later he was standing in the darkened front hall, groping for a light switch.

The envelope lay in a large glass bowl on a carved antique table at the foot of the staircase. It was addressed to Signore Delvecchio, Gabriel’s work name. He picked up the envelope and sliced it open with his forefinger. Plain dove-gray paper, heavy bond, no letterhead. Precise careful handwriting, unsigned. He lifted it to his nose. No scent.

Gabriel began to read. The painting hung in the drawing room, a Raphael, Portrait of a Young Man. A reservation had been made for him at the Dolder Grand Hotel, about a mile away on the other side of the Zürichberg. There was food in the refrigerator. The owner would return to Zurich the following day. He would appreciate it greatly if Signore Delvecchio could begin work without delay.

Gabriel slipped the note into his pocket. So, a Raphael. It would be his second. Five years ago he had restored a small devotional piece, a Madonna and Child, based on the renowned composition of Leonardo. Gabriel could feel a tingling sensation spreading over the tips of his fingers. It was a marvelous opportunity. He was glad he had taken the job, regardless of the unorthodox arrangements.

He stepped through a passageway into a large room. It was dark, no lights burning, the heavy curtains tightly drawn. Despite the gloom he had the sensation of Middle European aristocratic clutter.

He took a few steps forward. Beneath his feet the carpet was damp. The air tasted of salt and rust. It was an odor Gabriel had smelled before. He reached down, touched his fingers to the carpet, and brought them to his face.

He was standing in blood.

THE Oriental carpet was faded and very old, and so was the dead man sprawled in the center of it. He lay facedown, and in death he was reaching forward with his right hand. He wore a double-vented blue blazer, shiny with wear in the back, and gray flannel trousers. His shoes were brown suede. One shoe, the right, had a thickened heel and sole. The trousers had ridden up along his lower leg. The skin was shockingly white, like exposed bone. The socks were mismatched.

Gabriel squatted on his haunches with the casualness of someone who was at ease around the dead. The corpse had been a tiny man-five feet in height, no more. He lay in profile, the left side of the face exposed. Through the blood, Gabriel could see a square jaw and a delicate cheekbone. The hair was thick and snowy white. It appeared that the man had been shot once, through the left eye, and that the slug had exited the back of the skull. Judging from the size of the exit wound, the weapon was a rather large-caliber handgun. Gabriel looked up and saw that the slug had shattered the mirror above the large fireplace. He suspected the old man had been dead a few hours.

He supposed he should telephone the police, but then he imagined the situation from their point of view. A foreigner in an expensive home, a corpse shot through the eye. At the very least, he would be detained for questioning. Gabriel couldn’t allow that to happen.

He rose and turned his gaze from the dead man to the Raphael. A striking image: a beautiful young man in semi-profile, sensuously lit. Gabriel guessed it had been painted while Raphael was living and working in Florence, probably between 1504 and 1508. Too bad about the old man. It would have been a pleasure to restore such a painting.

He walked back to the entrance hall, stopped and looked down. He had tracked blood across the marble floor. There was nothing to be done about it. In circumstances like these he had been trained to leave quickly without worrying about making a bit of a mess or noise.

He collected his cases, opened the door, and stepped outside. It was raining harder now, and by the time he reached the gate at the end of the flagstone walk he was no longer leaving bloody footprints.

He walked quickly until he came to a thoroughfare: the Krähbühlstrasse. The Number 6 tram slithered down the slope of the hill. He raced it to the next stop, walking quickly but not running, and hopped on without a ticket.

The streetcar jerked forward. Gabriel sat down and looked to his right. Scrawled on the carriage wall, in black indelible marker, was a swastika superimposed over a Star of David. Beneath it were two words:

JUDEN SCHEISS.

THE tram took him directly to Hauptbahnhof. Inside the terminal, in an underground shopping arcade, he purchased an exorbitantly priced pair of Bally leather boots. Upstairs in the main hall he checked the departure board. A train was leaving for Munich in fifteen minutes. From Munich he could make an evening flight back to London, where he would go directly to Isherwood’s house in South Kensington and strangle him.

He purchased a first-class ticket and walked to the toilet. In a stall he changed from his loafers into the new boots. On the way out he dropped the loafers into a rubbish bin and covered them with paper towels.

By the time he reached the platform, the train was boarding. He stepped onto the second carriage and picked his way along the corridor until he came to his compartment. It was empty. A moment later, as the train eased forward, Gabriel closed his eyes, but all he could see was the dead man lying at the foot of the Raphael, and the two words scrawled on a streetcar:

JUDEN SCHEISS.

The train slowed to a stop. They were still on the platform. Outside, in the corridor, Gabriel heard footfalls. Then the door to his compartment flew back as though blown open by a bomb, and two police officers burst inside.

2

SIX HUNDRED MILES to the west, in the Basque town of Vitoria, an Englishman sat amid the cool shadows of the Plaza de España, sipping coffee at a café beneath the graceful arcade. Though he was unaware of the events taking place in Zurich, they would soon alter the course of his well-ordered life. For now, his attention was focused on the bank entrance across the square.

He ordered another café con leche and lit a cigarette. He wore a brimmed hat and sunglasses. His hair had the healthy silver sheen of a man gone prematurely gray. His sandstone-colored poplin suit matched the prevailing architecture of Vitoria, allowing him to blend, chameleonlike, into his surroundings. He appeared to be entranced by that morning’s editions of El País and El Mundo. He was not.

On the pale yellow stonework a graffiti artist had scrawled a warning: TOURISTS BEWARE! YOU ARE NOT INSPAIN ANY LONGER! THIS IS BASQUE COUNTRY! The Englishman did not feel any sense of unease. If for some reason he was targeted by the separatists, he was quite certain he would be able to look after himself.

His gaze settled on the door of the bank. In a few minutes, a teller called Felipe Navarra would be leaving for his midday break. His colleagues believed he went home for lunch and siesta with his wife. His wife believed he was meeting secretly with his Basque political associates. In reality, Felipe Navarra would be heading to an apartment house in the old town, just off the Plaza de la Virgen Blanca, where he would spend the afternoon with his mistress, a beautiful black-haired girl called Amaia. The Englishman knew this because he had been watching Navarra for nearly a week.

At one-fifteen Navarra emerged from the bank and headed toward the old town. The Englishman left a handful of pesetas on the table, enough to cover his tab along with a generous tip for the waiter, and trailed softly after him. Entering a crowded market street, he kept to a safe distance. There was no need to get too close. He knew where his quarry was going.

Felipe Navarra was no ordinary bank teller. He was an active service agent of the Euzkadi Ta Askatasuna (Basque Fatherland and Liberty) better known as ETA. In the lexicon of ETA, Navarra was a sleeping commando. He lived a normal life with a normal job and received his orders from an anonymous commander. A year ago he had been directed to assassinate a young officer of the Guardia Civil. Unfortunately for Navarra, the officer’s father was a successful winemaker, a man with plenty of money to finance an extensive search for his son’s killer. Some of that money now resided in the Englishman’s numbered Swiss bank account.

Among the terror experts of Europe, ETA had a reputation for training and operational discipline that rivaled that of the Irish Republican Army, a group with which the Englishman had dealt in the past. But based on the Englishman’s observations thus far, Felipe Navarra seemed a rather free-spirited agent. He walked directly toward the girl’s flat, taking no security precautions or countersurveillance measures. It was a miracle he’d managed to kill the Guardia Civil officer and escape. The Englishman thought he was probably doing ETA a favor by eliminating such an incompetent agent.

Navarra entered an apartment building. The Englishman walked across the street to a bakery, where he consumed two sugared pastries and drank another café con leche. He didn’t like to work on an empty stomach. He looked at his watch. Navarra had been inside for twenty minutes, plenty of time for the preliminaries of a sexual liaison.

Crossing the quiet street, he had an amusing thought. If he telephoned Navarra’s wife, a redhead with a fiery Basque temper, she would probably do the job for him. But, strictly speaking, that would be a breach of contract. Besides, he wanted to do it himself. The Englishman was happy in his work.

He entered the cool, dark foyer. Directly in front of him was the entrance to a shaded courtyard. To his right was a row of post boxes. He mounted the stairs quickly to the door of the girl’s flat on the fourth floor.

A television was playing, a senseless game show on Antena 3. It helped to cover the minimal sound the Englishman made while picking the lock. He entered the flat, closed the door, and locked it again. Then he padded into the bedroom.

Navarra was seated at the end of the bed. The woman was kneeling on the floor, her head moving rhythmically between his legs. Navarra’s fingers were entwined in her hair, and his eyes were closed, so he was unaware of the new presence in the room. The Englishman wondered why they were making love to a game show. To each his own, he thought.

The Englishman crossed the room quickly in three powerful strides, his footfalls covered by the sound of the television. A knife slipped from a sheath on his right forearm and fell into his palm. It was the weapon of a soldier, a heavy serrated blade, with a thick leather-bound grip. He held it the way he had been trained at the headquarters of his old regiment on a windswept moorland in the Midlands of England.

The natural inclination when stabbing a man is to do it from behind, so that the killer and victim are never face-to-face, but the Englishman had been trained to kill with a knife from the front. In this case it meant the element of surprise was lost, but the Englishman was a creature of habit and believed in doing things by the book.

He moved a few feet forward, so that he was standing behind the girl. Her hair spilled down a long,V – shaped back. His eye followed the line of her spinal column to the slender waist, to the rounded child-bearing hips and curved buttocks.

Navarra opened his eyes. Frantically he tried to push the girl out of the way. The assassin did it for him, taking a handful of her hair and tossing her across the room, so that she skidded along the hardwood floor on her backside and toppled a standing lamp.

Navarra, without taking his eyes from the intruder, reached backward across the rumpled sheets and beat his palm against a twisted pile of clothing. So, he had a gun. The Englishman stepped forward and took hold of the Basque’s throat with his left hand, squeezing his larynx to the breaking point. Then he pushed the man down onto the bed, settling atop him with one knee on his abdomen. Navarra writhed, struggling for air, the look on his face a combination of panic and utter resignation.

The Englishman thrust the knife into the soft tissue beneath the Basque’s rib cage, angling upward toward the heart. The man’s eyes bulged and his body stiffened, then relaxed. Blood pumped over the blade of the knife.

The Englishman removed the knife from the dead man’s chest and stood up. The girl scrambled to her feet. Then she stepped forward and slapped him hard across the face.

“Who the hell do you think you are?”

The Englishman didn’t know quite what to make of this woman. She had just watched him stab her lover to death, but she was acting as if he had tracked mud across her clean floor.

She hit him a second time. “I work for Aragón, you idiot! I’ve been seeing Navarra for a month. We were about to arrest him and take down the rest of his cell. Who sent you here? It wasn’t Aragón. He would have told me.”

She stood there, awaiting his reply, seemingly unashamed of her nudity.

“I work for Castillo.” He spoke calmly and in fluent Spanish. He didn’t know anyone called Castillo-it was just the first name that popped into his head. Where had he seen it? The bakery? Yes, that was it. The bakery across the street.

She asked, “Who’s Castillo?”

“The man I work for.”

“Does Castillo work for Aragón?”

“How should I know? Why don’t you call Aragón? He’ll call Castillo, and we’ll straighten this mess out.”

“Fine.”

“Call him on that telephone over there.”

“I will, you fucking idiot!”

“Just do it quietly, before you alert every tenant in the building that we’ve just killed a man.”

She folded her arms across her breasts, as if she was aware of her nakedness for the first time. “What’s your name?”

“I’m not telling you my name.”

“Why not?”

“How do I know you really work for Aragón? Maybe you work with lover boy here. Maybe you’re a member of his cell. Maybe you’re going to call some of his friends, and they’ll come here and kill me.”

He raised the bloody knife and ran his thumb across the blade. The girl scowled. “Don’t even think about trying it! Fucking idiot!”

“Get Aragón on the line. Then I’ll tell you my name.”

“You’re going to be in big trouble.”

“Just get Aragón on the phone, and I’ll explain everything.”

She sat down on the edge of the bed, snatched up the receiver, and violently punched in the number. The Englishman moved a step closer and placed his finger on the cradle, severing the connection.

“What do you think you’re doing? What’s your name?”

The assassin brought the blade across her throat in a slashing movement. He stepped back to avoid the initial geyserlike burst of blood; then he knelt before her and watched the life draining out of her eyes. As she slipped away he leaned forward and whispered his name into her ear.

THE Englishman spent the rest of the day driving: the fast road from Vitoria to Barcelona, then the coast highway from Barcelona across the border to Marseilles. Late that evening he boarded a passenger ferry for the night crossing to Corsica.

He was dressed like a typical Corsican man: loose-fitting cotton trousers, dusty leather sandals, a heavy sweater against the autumn chill. His dark brown hair was cropped short. The poplin suit and brimmed hat he’d worn in Vitoria were resting in the rubbish bin of a roadside café in Bordeaux. The silver wig had been tossed out the car window into a mountain gorge. The car itself, registered to a David Mandelson, one of his many false identities, had been returned to the rental agent in town.

He went below deck to his cabin. It was private, with its own shower and toilet. He left his small leather grip on the berth and went up to the passenger deck. The ferry was nearly empty, a few people gathering in the bar for a drink and a bite to eat. He was tired after the long drive, but his strict sense of internal discipline would not permit him to sleep until he had scanned the faces of the passengers.

He toured the deck, saw nothing alarming, then went into the bar, where he ordered a half-liter of red wine and fell into conversation with a Corsican named Matteo. Matteo lived in the northwest part of the island, like the Englishman, but two valleys to the south in the shadow of Monte d’Oro. It had been twenty years since he had been to the Englishman’s valley. Such was the rhythm of life on the island.

The conversation turned to the arson fire that had ravaged the Englishman’s valley the previous dry season. “Did they ever find out who did it?” Matteo asked, helping himself to some of the Englishman’s wine. When the Englishman told him the authorities suspected the separatists from the FLNC, the Corsican lit a cigarette and spit smoke at the ceiling. “Young hotheads!” he growled, and the Englishman nodded slowly in agreement.

After an hour he bid Matteo good night and returned to his cabin. In his suitcase was a small radio. He listened to the midnight newscast on a Marseilles station. After a few minutes of local news, there was a roundup of foreign stories. In the West Bank, there had been another day of fighting between Palestinian and Israeli forces. In Spain, two members of the Basque terror group ETA had been murdered in the town of Vitoria. And in Switzerland, a prominent banker named Augustus Rolfe had been found murdered in his home in an exclusive Zurich neighborhood. An unidentified man was in custody. The Englishman switched off the radio, closed his eyes, and was immediately asleep.

3

THE HEADQUARTERS of the Stadtpolizei Zurich was located only a few hundred meters from the train station on the Zeughausstrasse, wedged between the smoke-colored Sihl River and a sprawling rail yard. Gabriel had been led across a stone central courtyard into the aluminum-and-glass annex which housed the murder squad. There he was placed in a windowless interrogation room furnished with a table of blond wood and a trio of mismatched chairs. His luggage had been seized, along with his paints, brushes, and chemicals. So had his wallet, his passport, and his mobile telephone. They had even taken his wristwatch. He supposed they were hoping he would become disoriented and confused. He was confident that he knew more about the techniques of interrogation than the Zurich police did.

He had been questioned three times by three different officers: once briefly at the train station, before being taken into custody, and twice more in this room. Judging by clothing and age, the importance of his interrogators was getting progressively greater.

The door opened and a single officer entered the room. He wore a tweed coat and no tie. He called himself Sergeant-Major Baer. He sat down opposite Gabriel, placed a file on the table, and stared at it as if it was a chessboard and he was contemplating his next move.

“Tell me your name,” he blurted in English.

“It hasn’t changed since the last time I was asked.”

“Tell me your name.”

“My name is Mario Delvecchio.”

“Where do you reside?”

“Port Navas, Cornwall.”

“ England?”

“Yes.”

“You are an Italian, but you live in England?”

“That’s not a crime the last time I checked.”

“I didn’t say it was, but it is interesting, though. What do you do in Port Navas, England?”

“I told the first three officers who questioned me.”

“Yes, I know.”

“I’m an art restorer.”

“Why are you in Zurich?”

“I was hired to clean a painting.”

“At the villa on the Zürichberg?”

“Yes.”

“Who hired you to clean this painting? Clean? Is that the word you used? Peculiar word: clean. One thinks of cleaning floors, cleaning cars or clothing. But not paintings. Is that a common expression in your line of work?”

“Yes,” said Gabriel and the inspector seemed disappointed he did not elaborate.

“Who hired you?”

“I don’t know.”

“What do you mean?”

“I mean it was never made clear to me. The arrangements were made by a lawyer in Zurich and an art dealer in London.”

“Ah, yes-Julius Isherwood.”

“Julian.”

With a Germanic reverence for paperwork, the detective made a vast show of expunging the offending word and carefully penciling in the correction. When he had finished, he looked up triumphantly, as if awaiting applause. “Go on.”

“I was simply told to go to the villa. I would be met there and shown inside.”

“Met by whom?”

“That was never made clear to me.”

Isherwood’s fax was in the file. The detective slipped on a pair of half-moon glasses and held the fax up to the light. His lips moved as he read. “When did you arrive in Zurich?”

“You have the stub of my train ticket. You know that I arrived this morning.”

The detective pulled a frown that said he did not like suspects telling him what he did and didn’t know.

“Where did you go after you arrived?”

“Straight to the villa.”

“You didn’t check into your hotel first?”

“No, I didn’t know where I was staying yet.”

“Where were you planning to stay?”

“As you can see from the note that was left for me at the villa, arrangements had been made for me to stay at the Dolder Grand Hotel.”

Baer overlooked this seeming misstep and carried on.

“How did you get from Hauptbahnhof to the villa?”

“By taxi.”

“How much was the fare?”

“About fifteen francs.”

“What time did you arrive at the villa?”

“Two minutes after nine o’clock.”

“How can you be so certain of the time?”

“Look at the fax from Julian Isherwood. I was told to arrive at precisely nine o’clock. I don’t make a habit of being late for appointments, Sergeant-Major Baer.”

The detective smiled in admiration. He was a prompt man, and he appreciated punctuality and attention to detail in others, even if he suspected them of murder.

“And when you arrived at the villa?”

“I used the security phone, but no one answered. So I called Mr. Isherwood in London. He told me that the person who was supposed to meet me had been called out of town suddenly.”

“Is that what he said? ‘Called out of town’?”

“Something like that.”

“And this Mr. Isherwood gave you the codes?”

“Yes.”

“Who gave Mr. Isherwood the codes?”

“I don’t know. The man’s lawyer, I suppose.”

“Did you write the codes down?”

“No.”

“Why not?”

“It wasn’t necessary.”

“Why not?”

“Because I memorized the codes.”

“Really? You must have a very good memory, Signore Delvecchio.”

THE detective left the room for fifteen minutes. When he returned, he had a cup of coffee for himself and nothing for Gabriel. He sat down and resumed where he had left off.

“These arrangements seem peculiar to me, Signore Delvecchio. Is it customary that you are kept unaware of the artist until you arrive to begin work on a restoration?”

“No, it isn’t customary. In fact, it’s unusual.”

“Indeed.” He sat back and folded his arms, as though this admission were tantamount to a signed confession. “Is it also customary that you are not given the name of the owner of a painting you are restoring?”

“It’s not unheard of.”

“Rolfe.” He looked at Gabriel to see if the name produced any reaction, which it did not. “The person who owns the painting is named Augustus Rolfe. He is also the man you murdered in the villa.”

“I didn’t murder anyone, and you know it. He was killed long before I arrived in Zurich. I was still on the train when he was murdered. A hundred people can place me on that train.”

The detective seemed unmoved by Gabriel’s argument. He sipped his coffee. “Tell me what happened after you entered the villa.”

Gabriel recounted the chain of events in a dull monotone: the dark entrance hall, groping for the light switch, the unsigned letter in the bowl on the table, the strange odor in the air as he entered the drawing room, the discovery of the body.

“Did you see the painting?”

“Yes.”

“Before you saw the body or after?”

“After.”

“And how long did you look at it?”

“I don’t know. A minute or so.”

“You’ve just discovered a dead body, but you stop to look at a painting.” The detective didn’t seem to know what to make of this piece of information. “Tell me about this painter”-he looked down at his notes-“Raphael. I’m afraid I know little of art.”

Gabriel could tell he was lying but decided to play along. For the next fifteen minutes, he delivered a detailed lecture on the life and work of Raphael: his training and his influences, the innovations of his technique, the lasting relevance of his major works. By the time he had finished, the policeman was staring into the remains of his coffee, a beaten man.

“Would you like me to go on?”

“No, thank you. That was very helpful. If you did not kill Augustus Rolfe, why did you leave the villa without telephoning the police? Why did you try to flee Zurich?”

“I knew the circumstances would appear suspicious, so I panicked.”

The detective looked him over skeptically, as if he did not quite believe Mario Delvecchio was a man given to panic. “How did you get from the Zürichberg to the Hauptbahnhof?”

“I took the tram.”

Baer made a careful inspection of Gabriel’s seized possessions. “I don’t see a tram ticket among your things. Surely you purchased a ticket before you boarded the streetcar?”

Gabriel shook his head: guilty as charged. Baer’s eyebrows shot up. The notion that Gabriel had boarded a tram ticketless seemed more horrifying to him than the possibility that he had shot an old man in the head.

“That’s a very serious offense, Signore Delvecchio! I’m afraid you’re going to be fined fifty francs!”

“I’m deeply sorry.”

“Have you been to Zurich before?”

“No, never.”

“Then how did you know which tram would take you to the Hauptbahnhof?”

“It was a lucky guess, I suppose. It was heading in the right direction, so I got on.”

“Tell me one more thing, Signore Delvecchio. Did you make any purchases while you were in Zurich?”

“Purchases?”

“Did you buy anything? Did you do any shopping?”

“I bought a pair of shoes.”

“Why?”

“Because while I was waiting to get into the villa, my shoes became soaked in the rain.”

“You were panicked. You were afraid to go to the police, desperate to get out of Zurich, but you took time to get new shoes because your feet were wet?”

“Yes.”

He leaned back in his chair and knocked on the door. It opened, and an arm appeared, holding an evidence bag containing Gabriel’s shoes.

“We found these in a toilet at the Hauptbanhof, buried in a rubbish bin. I suspect they’re yours. I also suspect that they will match the set of bloody footprints we found in the entrance hall and the walkway of the villa.”

“I’ve already told you I was there. The footprints, if they do match those shoes, prove nothing.”

“Rather nice shoes to simply toss away in the toilet of a rail station. And they don’t look that wet to me.” He looked up at Gabriel and smiled briefly. “But then, I’ve heard it said that people who panic easily often have sensitive feet.”

IT was three hours before Baer entered the room again. For the first time he was not alone. It was obvious to Gabriel that the new man represented higher authority. It was also obvious that he was not an ordinary detective from the Zurich murder squad. Gabriel could see it in the small ways that Baer deferred to him physically, the way his heels clicked together when, like a headwaiter, he seated the new man at the interrogation table and moved unobtrusively into the background.

The man called himself Peterson. He provided no first name and no professional information. He wore an immaculately pressed suit of charcoal gray and a banker’s tie. His hair was nearly white and neatly trimmed. His hands, folded on the table in front of him, were the hands of a pianist. On his left wrist was a thick silver watch, Swiss-made of course, with a dark blue face, an instrument that could withstand the pressure of great depths. He studied Gabriel for a moment with slow, humorless eyes. He had the natural arrogance of a man who knows secrets and keeps files.

“The security codes.” Like Baer, he spoke to Gabriel in English, though almost without a trace of an accent. “Where did you write them down?”

“I didn’t write them down. As I told Sergeant-Major Baer-”

“I know what you told Sergeant-Major Baer.” His eyes suddenly came to life. “I’m asking you for myself. Where did you write them down?”

“I received the codes over the telephone from Mr. Isherwood in London, and I used them to open the security gate and the front door of the villa.”

“You committed the numbers to memory?”

“Yes.”

“Give them to me now.”

Gabriel recited the numbers calmly. Peterson looked at Baer, who nodded once.

“You have a very good memory, Signore Delvecchio.”

He had switched from English to German. Gabriel stared back at him blankly, as if he did not understand. The interrogator resumed in English.

“You don’t speak German, Signore Delvecchio?”

“No.”

“According to the taxi driver, the one who took you from the Bahnhofstrasse to the villa on the Zürichberg, you speak German quite well.”

“Speaking a few words of German and actually speaking German are two very different things.”

“The driver told us that you gave him the address in rapid and confident German with the pronounced accent of a Berliner. Tell me something, Signore Delvecchio. How is it that you speak German with the accent of a Berliner?”

“I told you-I don’t speak German. I speak a few words of German. I spent a few weeks in Berlin restoring a painting. I suppose I acquired the accent while I was there.”

“How long ago was that?”

“About four years ago?”

“About four years?”

“Yes.”

“Which painting?”

“I’m sorry?”

“The painting you restored in Berlin. Who was the artist? What was it called?”

“I’m afraid that’s confidential.”

“Nothing is confidential at this point, Signore Delvecchio. I’d like the name of the painting and the name of the owner.”

“It was a Caravaggio in private hands. I’m sorry, but I cannot divulge the name of the owner.”

Peterson held out his hand toward Baer without looking at him. Baer reached into his file folder and handed him a single sheet of paper. He reviewed it sadly, as if the patient did not have long to live.

“We ran your name through our computer database to see if there happened to be any outstanding arrest warrants for you in Switzerland. I’m pleased to announce there was nothing-not even a traffic citation. We asked our friends across the border in Italy to do the same thing. Once again, there was nothing recorded against you. But our Italian friends told us something more interesting. It seems that a Mario Delvecchio, born 23 September 1951, died in Turin twenty-three years ago of lymphatic cancer.” He looked up from the paper and fixed his gaze on Gabriel. “What do you think are the odds of two men having precisely the same name and the same date of birth?”

“How should I know?”

“I think they’re very long indeed. I think there is only one Mario Delvecchio, and you stole his identity in order to obtain an Italian passport. I don’t believe your name is Mario Delvecchio. In fact, I’m quite certain it isn’t. I believe your name is Gabriel Allon, and that you work for the Israeli secret service.”

Peterson smiled for the first time, not a pleasant smile, more like a tear in a scrap of paper.

“Twenty-five years ago, you murdered a Palestinian playwright living in Zurich named Ali Abdel Hamidi. You slipped out of the country an hour after the killing and were probably back home in your bed in Tel Aviv before midnight. This time, I’m afraid you’re not going anywhere.”

4

SOMETIME AFTER MIDNIGHT Gabriel was moved from the interrogation room to a holding cell in an adjacent wing of the building. It was small and institutional gray, with a bare mattress mounted on a steel frame and a rust-stained toilet that never stopped running. Overhead, a single lightbulb buzzed behind a mesh cage. His untouched dinner-a fatty pork sausage, some wilted greens, and a pile of greasy potatoes-sat on the ground next to the door like room service waiting to be collected. Gabriel supposed the pork sausage had been Peterson’s idea of a joke.

He tried to picture the events he knew were taking place outside these walls. Peterson had contacted his superior, his superior had contacted the Foreign Ministry. By now word had probably reached Tel Aviv. The prime minister would be livid. He had enough problems: the West Bank in flames, the peace process in tatters, his brittle coalition crumbling. The last thing he needed was a kidon, even a former kidon, behind bars in Switzerland -yet another Office scandal waiting to explode across the front pages of the world’s newspapers.

And so the lights were certainly burning with urgency tonight in the anonymous office block on Tel Aviv’s King Saul Boulevard. And Shamron? Had the call gone out to his lakeside fortress in Tiberias? Was he in or out these days? It was always hard to tell with Shamron. He’d been dug out of his precarious retirement three or four times, called back to deal with this crisis or that, tapped to serve on some dubious advisory panel or to sit in wizened judgment on a supposedly independent fact-finding committee. Not long ago he’d been appointed interim chief of the service, the position he’d held the first time he was sent into the Judean wilderness of retirement. Gabriel wondered whether that term had ended. With Shamron the word interim could mean a hundred days or a hundred years. He was Polish by birth but had a Bedouin’s elastic sense of time. Gabriel was Shamron’s kidon. Shamron would handle it, retired or not.

The old man…He’d always been “the old man,” even during his brief fling with middle age. Where’s the old man? Anyone seen the old man? Run for the hills! The old man is coming this way! Now he was an old man, but in Gabriel’s mind’s eye he always appeared as the menacing little figure who’d come to see him one afternoon in September 1972 between classes at Betsal’el. An iron bar of a man. You could almost hear him clanking as he walked. He had known everything about Gabriel. That he had been raised on an agricultural kibbutz in the Jezreel Valley and that he had a passionate hatred of farming. That he was something of a lone wolf, even though he was already married at the time to a fellow art student named Leah Savir. That his mother had found the strength to survive Auschwitz but was no match for the cancer that ravaged her body; that his father had survived Auschwitz too but was no match for the Egyptian artillery shell that blew him to bits in the Sinai. Shamron knew from Gabriel’s military service that he was nearly as good with a gun as he was with a paintbrush.

“You watch the news?”

“I paint.”

“You know about Munich? You know what happened to our boys there?”

“Yeah, I heard.”

“You’re not upset by it?”

“Of course, but I’m not more upset because they’re athletes or because it’s the Olympics.”

“You can still be angry.”

“At who?”

“At the Palestinians. At the Black September terrorists who walk around with the blood of your people on their hands.”

“I never get angry.”

And though Gabriel did not realize it at the time, those words had sealed Shamron’s commitment to him, and the seduction was begun.

“You speak languages, yes?”

“A few.”

“A few?”

“My parents didn’t like Hebrew, so they spoke the languages from Europe.”

“Which ones?”

“You know already. You know all about me. Don’t play games with me.”

And so Shamron decided to play his pickup line. Golda had ordered Shamron to “send forth the boys” to take down the Black September bastards who had carried out this bloodbath. The operation was to be called Wrath of God. It was not about justice, Shamron had said. It was about taking an eye for an eye. It was about revenge, pure and simple.

“Sorry, not interested.”

“Not interested? Do you know how many boys in this country would give anything to be part of this team?”

“Go ask them.”

“I don’t want them. I want you.”

“Why me?”

“Because you have gifts. You have languages. You have a clear head. You don’t drink, and you don’t smoke hash. You’re not a crazy who’s going to go off half-cocked.”

And because you have the emotional coldness of a killer, Shamron thought, although he didn’t say these words to Gabriel then. Instead, he told him a story, the story of a young intelligence officer who had been chosen for a special mission because he had a gift, an unusually powerful grip for so small a man. The story of a night in a Buenos Aires suburb, when this young intelligence officer had seen a man waiting at a bus stop. Waiting like an ordinary man, Gabriel. An ordinary pathetic little man. And how this young intelligence officer had leapt from a car and grabbed the man by the throat and how he had sat on him as the car drove away and how he had smelled the stink of fear on his breath. The same stink the Jews had emitted as this pathetic little man sent them off to the gas chambers. And the story worked, as Shamron had known it would. Because Gabriel was the only son of two Auschwitz survivors, and their scars were his.

He was suddenly very tired. Imagine, all those years, all those killings, and now he was behind bars for the first time, for a murder he did not commit. Thou shalt not get caught! Shamron’s Eleventh Commandment. Thou shalt do anything to avoid being arrested. Thou shalt shed the blood of innocents if necessary. No, thought Gabriel. Thou shalt not shed innocent blood.

He squeezed his eyes shut and tried to sleep but it was no good: Peterson’s incessant light. The lights were surely burning on King Saul Boulevard too. And a call would go out. Don’t wake him, thought Gabriel, because I don’t ever want to see his lying face again. Let him sleep. Let the old man sleep.

IT was a few minutes after 8A.M. when Peterson entered Gabriel’s cell. Gabriel knew this not because Peterson bothered to tell him but because he managed a glance at the face of Peterson’s big diver’s watch as Peterson tipped coffee into his mouth.

“I’ve spoken to your chief.”

He paused to see if his words provoked any response, but Gabriel remained silent. His position was that he was an art restorer, nothing more, and that Herr Peterson was suffering from a case of temporary insanity.

“He did me the professional courtesy of not trying to lie his way out of this situation. I appreciate the way he handled things. But it seems Bern has no appetite to pursue this matter further.”

“Which matter is that?”

“The matter of your involvement in the murder of Ali Hamidi,” Peterson said coldly. Gabriel had the impression he was struggling to control violent thoughts. “Since prosecuting you for your role in the Rolfe affair would inevitably reveal your sordid past, we have no choice but to drop charges against you in that matter as well.”

Peterson clearly disagreed with the decision of his masters in Bern.

“Your government has assured us that you are no longer a member of any branch of Israeli intelligence and that you did not come to Zurich in any official capacity. My government has chosen to accept these assurances at face value. It has no stomach for allowing Switzerland to become a stage for the Israelis and the Palestinians to relive the horrors of the past.”

“When do I get to leave?”

“A representative of your government will collect you.”

“I’d like to change my clothes. May I have my suitcase?”

“No.”

Peterson stood up, straightened his tie, and smoothed his hair. Gabriel thought it was an oddly intimate thing for one man to do in front of another. Then he walked to the door, knocked once, and waited for the guard to unlock it.

“I don’t like murderers, Mr. Allon. Especially when they kill for a government. One of the conditions of your release is that you never set foot in Switzerland again. If you come back here, I’ll see to it that you never leave.”

The door opened. Peterson started to leave, then turned and faced Gabriel.

“It’s a shame about what happened to your wife and son in Vienna. It must be very hard living with a memory like that. I suppose sometimes you wish it had been you in the car instead of them. Good day, Mr. Allon.”

IT was late afternoon by the time Peterson finally saw fit to release him. Sergeant-Major Baer escorted Gabriel from his holding cell, performing this task silently, as though Gabriel was bound for the gallows instead of freedom. Baer surrendered Gabriel’s suitcase, his restoration supplies, and a thick honey-colored envelope containing his personal effects. Gabriel spent a long moment taking careful inventory of his things. Baer looked at his watch as if pressing matters were tugging at him. The clothing in Gabriel’s suitcase had been dumped, searched, and stuffed haphazardly back into place. Someone had spilled a flask of arcosolve in his case. Baer tilted his head-Sorry, dear man, but these things happen when one bumps up against police officers.

Outside, in the misty courtyard, stood a black Mercedes sedan surrounded by a half-dozen uniformed officers. In the windows of the surrounding buildings stood policemen and secretaries come to see the Israeli assassin led away. As Gabriel approached the car, the rear door opened and a cloud of cigarette smoke billowed forth. A glimpse into the shadowed backseat established the source.

He stopped in his tracks, a move that seemed to take Baer completely by surprise. Then, reluctantly, he started walking again and climbed into the backseat. Baer closed the door, and the car immediately pulled away, the tires slipping over the wet cobblestones. Shamron didn’t look at him. Shamron was gazing out the window, his eyes on the next battlefield, his thoughts on the next campaign.

5

TO GET TO Kloten Airport it was necessary to make the ascent up the Zürichberg one more time. As they breasted the summit, the graceful villas receded and they entered a river flatland scarred by ugly modular strip malls. They moved slowly along a clogged two-lane commuter road as the afternoon sun tried to fight its way out of the clouds. A car was following them. The man on the passenger side could have been Peterson.

Ari Shamron had come to Zurich in an official capacity, but in dress and manner he had assumed the identity of Herr Heller, the cover he used for his frequent European travels. Herr Rudolf Heller of Heller Enterprises, Ltd., an international venture capital firm with offices in London, Paris, Berlin, Bern, and Nassau. His multitude of critics might have said that Heller Enterprises specialized in murder and mayhem, blackmail and betrayal. Heller Enterprises was an Old Economy firm, the critics said. What King Saul Boulevard needed to shake off its long winter of despair was a New Economy chief for the New Economy world. But Herr Heller clung to the keys of the executive suite with one of his patented vise grips, and few in Israel, prime ministers included, could muster the courage to wrest them away from him.

To his brotherhood of devoted acolytes, Shamron was a legend. Once Gabriel had been among them. But Shamron was also a liar, an unrepentant, unreconstructed liar. He lied as a matter of course, lied because he knew no other way, and he had lied to Gabriel time and time again. For a time their relationship had been like that of a father and a son. But the father became like a man who gambles or drinks or sleeps with many women and is forced to lie to his children, and now Gabriel hated him the way only a son can hate his father.

“What are you doing here? Why didn’t you just send someone from Bern station to pick me up?”

“Because you’re too important to entrust to someone from the station.” Shamron lit another one of his vile Turkish cigarettes and violently snapped the lighter closed. “Besides, Herr Peterson and his friends from the Foreign Ministry made my appearance here a condition of your release. The Swiss love to yell at me when one of our agents gets in trouble. I’m not sure why. I suppose it reinforces their superiority complex-makes them feel better for their past sins.”

“Who’s Peterson?”

“Gerhardt Peterson works for the Division of Analysis and Protection.”

“What the hell is that?”

“The new name for Switzerland ’s internal security service. It has responsibility for national security matters, counterintelligence, and investigating Swiss citizens suspected of treason. Peterson is the number-two man in the division. He oversees all operations.”

“How did you convince him to let me go?”

“I played the subservient Jew. I gave them the usual promises that we would not operate on Swiss soil without first consulting Herr Peterson and his superiors in the Swiss security service. I also told them about a certain Swiss arms-maker who’s flogging bomb triggers to terrorists on the open market. I suggested that they see to the situation themselves before someone takes matters into their own hands.”

“You always have an ace in the hole.”

“It’s been my experience that one can never be too prepared.”

“I thought your term was over.”

“It was supposed to end six months ago, but the prime minister asked me to stay on. Given the current situation in the territories, we both agreed that now was not the time for a change of leadership at King Saul Boulevard.”

Shamron had probably engineered the uprising himself, thought Gabriel. What better way to make himself indispensable? No, that was beyond even Shamron.

“My offer still stands.”

“Which offer is that?”

“Deputy director for operations.”

“No, thank you.”

Shamron shrugged. “Tell me what happened. I want to hear it all, from beginning to end.”

Gabriel so mistrusted Shamron that he considered giving him an abridged account of the affair, based on the theory that the less Shamron knew about anything, the better. But at least it would give them something new to talk about instead of refighting old wars, so Gabriel told him everything, starting with his arrival on the overnight train from Paris and ending with his arrest and interrogation. Shamron looked out the window as Gabriel spoke, turning over his lighter in his fingers: clockwise, counterclockwise, clockwise, counterclockwise…

“Did you see the body?”

“Very professional, one shot through the eye. He was probably dead before he hit the ground. A coup de grâce wasn’t necessary.”

“Did the police ever hit you?”

“No.”

Shamron seemed disappointed by this.

Gabriel said, “Peterson told me the case was dropped because of pressure from Bern.”

“Perhaps, but there was no way Peterson was ever going to hang the Ali Hamidi job on you. Prosecuting anyone on a twenty-five-year-old murder is hard enough. Prosecuting a professional-” He shrugged his shoulders, as if to say such things are just not done. “The Hamidi job was a work of art. No witnesses, no evidence.”

The movie-star-handsome face of Ali Abdel Hamidi flashed in Gabriel’s memory. Within the corridors of King Saul Boulevard, the amorous Palestinian has been known as the Swordsman of Allah. Writer of plays that graced no stage, seducer and manipulator of foolish young women. Would you mind delivering this package to this address for me? You’re flying to Tel Aviv? Would you mind taking a package to a friend? The packages would inevitably be filled with explosives, and his lovers would be blown to bits along with anyone else who happened to be nearby. One night in Zurich, Hamidi met a university student named Trude in a bar in the Niederdorf section. When the girl suggested they go back to her flat, Hamidi agreed. Five minutes later, she led him into the narrow alley where Gabriel was waiting with a.22-caliber Beretta. Even now, Gabriel could hear the sound of bullets tearing into Hamidi’s body.

“I suppose I should thank you for getting me out.”

“A show of gratitude isn’t necessary. In fact, I’m afraid I owe you an apology.”

“An apology? Whatever for?”

“Because if it wasn’t for me, you would have never been at Augustus Rolfe’s villa in the first place.”

RAMI, Shamron’s ever-present personal bodyguard, was behind the wheel of the car. Shamron told him to drive in circles at Kloten. For twenty minutes Gabriel watched the same parade of airline signs and departure gates marching past his window. In his mind he was seeing something else: flash frames of past operations, old colleagues and old enemies. His palms were damp, his heart was beating faster. Shamron. He had done it again.

“Rolfe sent a message to us through our embassy,” Shamron began. “He wanted to meet with someone from the Office. He didn’t say why, but when a man like Augustus Rolfe wants to talk, we usually try to accommodate him. He wanted the meeting to be handled with discretion. I looked into Rolfe’s background and discovered he was an art collector. Naturally, I thought you were the perfect man for the job, so I arranged for you to be hired to clean one of his paintings. A Rubens, if I’m not mistaken.”

“It was a Raphael.”

Shamron pulled a face, as if to say such distinctions were of no interest to him. Art, music, literature, the theater-these things bored him. He was a man of the real world.

“Did Isherwood know it was all a game?”

“Julian? No, I’m afraid I deceived him as well.”

“Why do it like this? Why didn’t you just tell me the truth?”

“Would you have done it?”

“No.”

A tilt of his bald head, another long pull from his Turkish cigarette-I rest my case. “I’m afraid the truth and I are somewhat estranged. I’m an old man, Gabriel. I’ve spent my entire life telling lies. To me, lies are more comfortable than the truth.”

“Let me out of the car! I don’t want to hear any more!”

“Let me finish.”

“Shut up! I don’t want to hear your voice.”

“Listen to me, Gabriel!” Shamron slammed his fist onto the console. “Augustus Rolfe, a Swiss banker, wanted to speak to us and for that he was murdered. I want to know what Rolfe was going to tell us, and I want to know who killed him for it!”

“Find someone else, Ari. Investigating murder cases was never my specialty. Actually, thanks to you, I excelled at quite the other thing.”

“Please, Gabriel, let’s not have this argument again.”

“You and Peterson seem to be very tight. If you play the subservient Jew again, I’m sure he’d be willing to keep you abreast of all the developments in his investigation.”

“Augustus Rolfe was killed because someone knew you were coming to Zurich -someone who didn’t want you to hear what Augustus Rolfe had to say. Someone who was willing to make it appear as though you were the killer.”

“If that was their intention, they did a damned lousy job of it. I was on the train from Paris at the time Rolfe was killed.” Gabriel was calmer now. He was furious with Shamron for deceiving him, but at the same time he was intrigued. “What do you know about Augustus Rolfe?”

“The Rolfe family has been stashing money beneath the Bahnhofstrasse for a couple of hundred years. They’re one of the most prominent banking families in Switzerland.”

“Who would want him dead?”

“A lot of dirty money has flowed through the numbered accounts of Rolfe’s bank. It’s safe to assume he’d made his fair share of enemies.”

“What else?”

“The family suffers from a legendary curse. Twenty-five years ago, Rolfe’s wife committed suicide. She dug her own grave in the garden of Rolfe ’s country chalet, climbed in, and shot herself. A few years after that, Rolfe’s only son, Maximilian, died in a cycling accident in the Alps.”

“Is there any family that’s alive?”

“His daughter, at least she was the last time anyone heard from her. Her name is Anna.”

“His daughter is Anna Rolfe?”

“So you know her? I’m impressed.”

“She’s only one of the most famous musicians in the world.”

“Do you still want to get out of the car?”

GABRIEL had been given two gifts that made him a great art restorer: a meticulous attention to detail and an unflagging desire to see every task, no matter how mundane, through to its conclusion. He never left his studio until his work space and supplies were spotless, never went to bed with dirty dishes in the sink. And he never left a painting unfinished, even when it was a cover job for Shamron. To Gabriel, a half-restored painting was no longer a work of art, just a bit of oil and pigment smeared on a canvas or a wood panel. The dead body of Augustus Rolfe, lying at the foot of the Raphael, was like a painting that had only been half-restored. It would not be whole again until Gabriel knew who had killed him and why.

“What do you want me to do?”

“Talk to her.”

“Why me?”

“Apparently, she has something of an artistic temperament.”

“From what I’ve read, that’s an understatement.”

“You’re an artist. You speak her language. Perhaps she’ll trust you enough to tell you what she knows about her father’s affairs. If you come up empty, you can go back to your studio, and I’ll never darken your door again.”

“Promises, promises.”

“There’s no need to be hurtful, Gabriel.”

“Last time you came into my life, I nearly got myself killed.”

“True, but at least it wasn’t boring.”

“Peterson says I can’t come back to Switzerland. How am I supposed to talk to Anna Rolfe?”

“Apparently she refuses to live in Switzerland.” Shamron handed him a slip of paper. “This is her management company in London. Give her a few days to bury her father. So you’ll do it?”

“Not for you. I want to know who tried to pin Rolfe’s murder on me. Who shall I be when I talk to Anna Rolfe?”

“I always prefer the subtle approach, but I’ll leave it to your discretion. Play it as you see fit.”

Gabriel slipped the address into his pocket. A thin smile appeared briefly on Shamron’s face. He had learned long ago that professional victories, even small ones, were to be savored.

The car pulled to the curb beneath a British Airways sign. Gabriel climbed out, collected his things from the trunk, then looked into Shamron’s window.

Shamron said, “We didn’t discuss your fee.”

“Don’t worry. It will be substantial.”

“You’re on expense account as of now, but remember, throwing money around never solved a case.”

“I’ll consider that pearl of wisdom while I’m flying first class back to London tonight.”

Shamron grimaced. “Stay in touch. Usual channels and methods. Do you remember?”

“How could I ever forget?”

“It was quite an accomplishment, don’t you think?”

“What was that?”

“Finding a man thirty minutes after he leaves the scene of a murder. I wonder how Herr Peterson managed to do that. He must be very good.”

6

WITHIN THE DIVISION of Analysis and Protection, Gerhardt Peterson was regarded as a man on the rise. Superiors handled him with care. Subordinates withered under his cold stare. His colleagues looked on in wonder and jealousy. How had the schoolteacher’s boy from Erstfeld risen to such heights? Look at him! Never a hair out of place! Never a loose tie! He wears power and success like his expensive aftershave. Peterson never made a move that wasn’t calculated to advance his career. His family life was as neat and orderly as his office. His sexual affairs were discreet and appropriate. Anyone foolish enough to stand in his way quickly discovered that Gerhardt Peterson was a man with powerful friends. Friends in Bern. Friends in the banks. He would be the chief soon-everyone agreed on that. Then a senior posting in the Federal Office for Police. Someday, perhaps, control of the entire Department of Justice and Police. Peterson did have friends in the banks. And they did do favors for him. The Swiss financial oligarchy had been like an invisible hand on his back, nudging him up each rung of the ladder of power. But it was not a one-way street. Peterson did favors for them, too, which is why he was behind the wheel of his Mercedes sedan, racing through the gloomy forest of the Kernwald.

At the base of the mountains, he came to a road marked PRIVATE. He followed the road until he came to an imposing black iron gate. Peterson knew the routine. As he slipped the Mercedes into park and lowered his window, a guard stepped out of a small hut. He had the smooth, precise walk of a man with a military background. Peterson could see the bulge of a weapon beneath his blue ski jacket.

Peterson poked his head out the window. “My name is Herr Köhler.”

“Are you here for the conference, Herr Köhler?”

“Actually, I’m the entertainment.”

“Follow the road to the house. Another man will meet you there.”

IT was a traditional Swiss chalet in conception but grotesque in its massive scale. Anchored to the side of the mountain, it stared out across the valley below with a look of deep satisfaction. Peterson was the last to arrive. The others were already there. They had come from Zurich and Zug, from Lucerne and Bern, and from Geneva and Basel. As was their custom, they had traveled separately and arrived at unevenly spaced intervals so as not to attract attention. They were all Swiss. Foreigners were not permitted. Foreigners were the reason the group existed.

As usual, the meeting would take place in the sprawling, glass-walled living room on the second level of the house. Had any of them bothered to stand in the windows, they would have been treated to a truly remarkable view: a carpet of wet lights on the valley floor, shrouded by a bridal veil of drifting snow. Instead, they huddled together in small groups, smoking, chatting quietly, sipping coffee or tea. Alcoholic beverages were never served at the house. The host, Herr Gessler, drank only tea and mineral water and was a vegetarian. He credited his strict diet for his remarkable longevity.

Despite the informal surroundings, Herr Gessler insisted on a boardroom approach to the meetings. The guests did not sit on the comfortable sofas and armchairs but at a long conference table. At precisely 6P.M., each man went to his assigned chair and stood behind it.

A moment later, a door opened and a man appeared. Thin and frail, with dark glasses and a gossamer layer of gray hair, he leaned on the arm of a young security man. When he had taken his seat at the head of the table, the others sat down too.

There was one empty chair, an unfortunate oversight. After a moment of embarrassed silence, the security guard lifted it by the back and carried it out.

IN the next room, Gerhardt Peterson stared directly into the lens of a video camera like a talk-show guest waiting to appear on a program by remote. It was always this way. Whenever Peterson had business before the Council, he spoke to them electronically from a distance. He had never seen Herr Gessler or any of the other men in the room-at least not in connection with the Council. Herr Gessler said the peculiar arrangement was for their protection-and, perhaps more important, his.

“Gerhardt, are you ready?”

It was the reedy voice of Herr Gessler, made even thinner by the tiny earpiece.

“Yes, I’m ready.”

“I hope we haven’t taken you away from any pressing state business, Gerhardt.”

“Not at all, Herr Gessler. Just an interdepartmental meeting on drug trafficking.”

“Such a waste of time, this silly war on narcotics.”

Gessler was infamous for his sudden digressions. Peterson folded his hands and bided his time.

“Personally, I’ve never seen the attraction of drugs, but then I’ve never seen the harm either. What someone puts in their body is none of my business. If they wish to destroy their life and their health with these chemicals, why should I care? Why should governments care? Why should governments spend untold resources combating a problem that is as old as human nature itself? After all, one could argue that Adam was the first substance abuser. God forbade young Adam the fruit, and he consumed it the first chance he got.”

“You make an interesting point, Herr Gessler.”

“Our detractors say that the drug trade has been very good to Switzerland. I’m afraid I would have to concur. I’m certain my own bank contains accounts of the so-called drug kingpins. But what is the harm? At least if the money is deposited in Switzerland it is put to good use. It is loaned to legitimate enterprises that produce goods and services and employment for millions of people.”

“So they can go out and buy more drugs?”

“If that’s what they wish. You see, there is a circular quality to life on earth. Nature is in harmony. So is the global financial system. But just as nature can be thrown out of balance by a seemingly small occurrence, so can business. Imagine the destructive consequences if the profits of the drug trade were not recirculated back into the world economy. The bankers of Switzerland are performing a valuable service.”

Gessler sipped his tea. Peterson could not see this but could hear it in the sensitive microphone used to amplify the old man’s weak voice.

“But I digress,” Gessler said, as his teacup rattled back into the saucer. “Back to the business at hand. It seems we have another complication concerning the Rolfe matter.”

“DOES this fellow strike you as the kind of man who will let the matter drop?” Gessler said when Peterson was finished with his briefing.

“No, Herr Gessler.”

“Then what do you suggest?”

“That we clean up the mess as quickly as possible and make certain there’s nothing for him to find.”

Gessler sighed. “It was never the purpose of this body to engage in violence-only to combat the violence that is being done to us.”

“In war there are casualties.”

“Surveillance and intimidation is one thing-killing is quite another. It’s critical we use someone who can’t be linked to the Council in any way. Surely, in your other line of work, you’ve come across people like this.”

“I have.”

The old man sighed.

Gerhardt Peterson pulled out the earpiece and headed back to Zurich.

7

THERE WAS an old joke on Corsica that the island’s notoriously treacherous roads had been designed jointly by Machiavelli and the Marquis de Sade. Yet the Englishman had never minded driving there. Indeed, he tore around the island with a certain fatalistic abandon that had earned him the reputation of being something of a madman. At the moment he was racing along a windswept highway on the western edge of the island through a thick blanket of marine fog. Five miles on, he turned inland. As he climbed into the hills, the fog gave way to a clear blue afternoon sky. The autumn sunlight brought out the contrasting shades of green in the olive trees and Laricio pine. In the shadow of the trees were dense patches of gorse and brier and rockrose, the legendary Corsican undergrowth known as the macchia that had concealed bandits and murderers for centuries. The Englishman lowered his window. The warm scent of rosemary washed over his face.

Ahead of him stood a hill town, a cluster of sand-colored houses with red-tile roofs huddled around a bell tower, half in shadow, half in brilliant sunlight. In the background rose the mountains, ice-blue snow on the highest peaks. Ten years ago, when he had first settled here, the children would point at him with their index fingers and pinkies, the Corsican way of warding off the evil eye of a stranger. Now they smiled and waved as he sped through the town and headed up the cul-de-sac valley toward his villa.

Along the way he passed a paesanu working a small patch of vegetables at the roadside. The man peered at the Englishman, black eyes smoldering beneath the brim of his broad hat, and signaled his recognition with an almost imperceptible wave of his first two fingers. The old paesanu was one of the Englishman’s adopted clansmen. Farther up the road, a young boy called Giancomo stepped into his path and waved his arms for the Englishman to stop.

“Welcome home. Was your trip good?”

“Very good.”

“What did you bring me?”

“That depends.”

“On what?”

“On whether you watched my villa for me while I was away.”

“Of course I did, just as I promised.”

“Did anyone come?”

“No, I saw no one.”

“You’re quite sure?”

The boy nodded. From his suitcase the Englishman removed a beautiful satchel, handmade of fine Spanish leather, and handed it to the boy. “For your books-so you won’t lose them on the way home from school anymore.”

The boy pulled the satchel to his nose and smelled the new leather. Then he said: “Do you have any cigarettes?”

“You won’t tell your mother?”

“Of course not!”

The men pretended to rule Corsica, but the real power lay in the hands of the mothers. The Englishman handed the boy a half-empty packet.

He slipped the cigarettes into his satchel. “One more thing.”

“What’s that?”

“Don Orsati wishes to speak with you.”

“When did you see him?”

“This morning.”

“Where?”

“At the café in the village.”

“Where is he now?”

“At the café in the village.”

Orsati lives a stressful life, thought the Englishman.

“Invite the don to my villa for lunch. But tell him that if he expects to eat, he should bring along some food.”

The boy smiled and scampered off, the leather satchel flailing behind him like a banner. The Englishman slipped the jeep into gear and continued up the road. About a half mile from his villa, he slammed on his brakes, and the jeep skidded to a stop amid a cloud of red dust.

Standing in the center of the narrow track was a large male goat. He had the markings of a palomino and a red beard. Like the Englishman, he was scarred from old battles. The goat detested the Englishman and blocked the road to his villa whenever it pleased him. The Englishman had dreamed many times of ending the conflict once and for all with the Glock pistol he kept in his glove box. But the beast belonged to Don Casabianca, and if he were ever harmed there would be a feud.

The Englishman honked his horn. Don Casabianca’s goat threw back his head and glared at him defiantly. The Englishman had two choices, both unpleasant. He could wait out the goat, or he could try to move him.

He took a long look over his shoulder to make sure no one was watching. Then he threw open his door and charged the goat, waving his hands and screaming like a lunatic, until the beast gave ground and darted into the shelter of the macchia. A fitting place for him, thought the Englishman-the macchia, the place where all thieves and bandits eventually reside.

He got back into his jeep and headed up the road to his villa, thinking about the terrible shame of it. A highly accomplished assassin, yet he couldn’t get to his own home without first suffering a humiliation at the hands of Don Casabianca’s wretched goat.

IThad never taken much to spark a feud on Corsica. An insult. An accusation of cheating in the marketplace. Dissolution of an engagement. The pregnancy of an unmarried woman. Once, in the Englishman’s village, there had been a forty-year feud over the keys to the church. After the initial spark, unrest quickly followed. An ox would be killed. The owner of the ox would retaliate by killing a mule or a flock of sheep. A prized olive tree would be chopped down. A fence toppled. A house would burn. Then the murders would start. And on it would go, sometimes for a generation or more, until the aggrieved parties had settled their differences or given up the fight in exhaustion.

On Corsica most men were all too willing to do their killing themselves. But there were always some who needed others to do the blood work for them: notables who were too squeamish to get their hands dirty or unwilling to risk arrest or exile; women who could not kill for themselves or had no male kin to do the deed on their behalf. People like these relied on professionals: the taddunaghiu. Usually they turned to the Orsati clan.

The Orsatis had fine land with many olive trees, and their oil was regarded as the sweetest in all of Corsica. But they did more than produce fine olive oil. No one knew how many Corsicans had died at the hands of Orsati assassins over the ages-least of all the Orsatis themselves-but local lore placed the number in the thousands. It might have been significantly higher if not for the clan’s rigorous vetting process. In the old days, the Orsatis operated by a strict code. They refused to carry out a killing unless satisfied that the party before them had indeed been wronged and blood vengeance was required.

Anton Orsati had taken over the helm of the family business in troubled times. The French authorities had managed to eradicate feuding and the vendetta in all but the most isolated pockets of the island. Few Corsicans required the services of the taddunaghiu any longer. But Anton Orsati was a shrewd businessman. He knew he could either fold his tent and become a mere producer of excellent olive oil or expand his base of operations and look for opportunities elsewhere. He decided on the second course and took his business across the water. Now, his band of assassins was regarded as the most reliable and professional in Europe. They roamed the continent, killing on behalf of wealthy men, criminals, insurance cheats, and sometimes even governments. Most of the men they killed deserved to die, but competition and the exigencies of the modern age had required Anton Orsati to forsake the old code of his ancestors. Every job offer that crossed his desk was accepted, no matter how distasteful, as long as it did not place the life of one of his assassins in unreasonable danger.

Orsati always found it slightly amusing that his most skilled employee was not a Corsican but an Englishman from Highgate in North London. Only Orsati knew the truth about him. That he had served in the famed Special Air Service. That he had killed men in Northern Ireland and Iraq. That his former masters believed him to be dead. Once, the Englishman showed Orsati a clipping from a London newspaper. His obituary. A very useful thing in this line of work, thought Orsati. People don’t often look for a dead man.

He may have been born an Englishman, but Orsati always thought he had been given the restless soul of a Corsican. He spoke the dialect as well as Orsati, mistrusted outsiders, and despised all authority. At night he would sit in the village square with the old men, scowling at the boys on their skateboards and grumbling about how the young had no respect for the old ways. He was a man of honor-sometimes too much honor for Orsati’s taste. Still, he was a superb assassin, the finest Orsati had ever known. He had been trained by the most efficient killers on the planet, and Orsati had learned much from him. He was also perfectly suited to certain assignments on the continent, which is why Anton Orsati came calling on the Englishman’s villa that afternoon with an armful of groceries.

ORSATI was a descendant of a family of notables, but in dress and appetite he was not much different than the paesanu working his patch down the valley road. He wore a bleached white shirt, unbuttoned to the center of his barrel chest, and dusty leather sandals. The “lunch” that he brought with him consisted of a loaf of coarse bread, a flask of olive oil, a chunk of aromatic Corsican ham, and a lump of strong cheese. The Englishman provided the wine. The afternoon was warm, so they ate outside on the terrace overlooking the cul-de-sac valley, in the dappled shade of a pair of towering Corsican pines.

Orsati handed the Englishman a check bearing the imprint of Orsati Olive Oil. All of Orsati’s assassins were officially employees of the company. The Englishman was a vice president for marketing, whatever that meant. “Your share of the fee for the Spain assignment.” Orsati swirled a piece of the bread in oil and shoved it into his mouth. “Any problems?”

“The girl was working for the Spanish security service.”

“Which girl?”

“The girl Navarra was seeing.”

“Oh, shit. What did you do?”

“She saw my face.”

Orsati contemplated this news while he sawed off a slice of the ham and placed it on the Englishman’s plate. Neither man liked collateral casualties. They were usually bad for business.

“How are you feeling?”

“I’m tired.”

“Still not sleeping well?”

“Not while I’m in a foreign country killing a man.”

“And here?”

“Better.”

“You should try to get some rest tonight instead of sitting up all hours with the old ones in the village.”

“Why?”

“Because I have another job for you.”

“I just finished a job. Give it to one of the others.”

“It’s too sensitive.”

“You have a dossier?”

Orsati finished his lunch and swam lazy laps in the pool while the Englishman read. When he finished, he looked up. “What has this man done to deserve to die?”

“Apparently, he stole something quite valuable.”

The Englishman closed the file. He had no compunction about killing someone who stole for a living. In the Englishman’s opinion, a thief was earth’s lowest life-form.

“So why does this job require me?”

“Because the contractors would like the target dead and his business destroyed. The men who trained you at Hereford taught you how to use explosives. My men are comfortable with more conventional weapons.”

“Where am I going to get a bomb?”

Orsati climbed out of the pool and vigorously toweled his thick silver hair. “Do you know Pascal Debré?”

Unfortunately, the Englishman did know Pascal Debré. He was an arsonist who did jobs for a Marseilles-based criminal enterprise. Debré would have to be handled carefully.

“Debré knows to expect you. He’ll give you whatever you need for the job.”

“When do I leave?”

8

BY ALL APPEARANCES the woman who had settled in the refurbished old monastery on the steep hill overlooking the sea had taken a vow to live the sequestered existence of an ascetic. For a long time no one in the village knew even her name. Senhora Rosa, the scandalmonger checkout clerk at the market, decided she was a woman scorned, and she inflicted her dubious theory on anyone unfortunate enough to pass by her register. It was Rosa who christened the woman Our Lady of the Hillside. The moniker clung to her, even after her real name became known.

She came to the village each morning to do her marketing, sweeping down the hill on her bright-red motor scooter, her blond ponytail flying behind her like a banner. In wet weather she wore a hooded anorak the color of mushrooms. There was a great deal of speculation about her country of origin. Her limited Portuguese was heavily accented. Carlos, the man who cared for the villa’s grounds and small vineyard, thought she had the accent of a German and the dark soul of a Viennese Jew. María, the pious woman who cleaned her home, decided she was Dutch. José from the fish market thought Danish. But Manuel, the owner of the café on the village square and the town’s unofficial mayor, settled the question, as he usually did. “Our Lady is not German, or Austrian, or Dutch, or Danish.” Then he rubbed his first two fingers against his thumb, the international symbol for money. “Our Lady of the Hillside is Swiss.”

Her days had a predictable rhythm. After her morning visit to the village, she could be seen swimming laps in her dark-blue pool, her hair tucked beneath a black rubber cap. Then she would walk, usually among the jagged granite outcroppings on the ridge of the hill or up the dusty track to the Moorish ruins. Beginning in the late afternoon, she would play the violin-exceptionally well, according to those who had heard her-in a bare room on the second floor of the villa. Once, María stole a glance inside and found Our Lady in a feverish state, her body rocking and pitching about, her hair damp, her eyes tightly closed. “Our Lady plays like she’s possessed by demons,” María said to Carlos. “And no sheet music. She plays from memory.”

Only once, during the festival of Santo António, did she take part in the social life of the village. Shortly after dark, as the men set fire to the charcoal grills and uncorked the wine, she traipsed down the hill in a sleeveless white dress and sandals. For the first time she was not alone. There were fourteen in all: an Italian opera singer, a French fashion model, a British film actor, a German painter-along with wives, girlfriends, mistresses, and lovers. The opera singer and the film actor had a contest to see who could consume the most grilled sardines, the traditional fare of the festival. The opera singer easily dispatched the actor, who then tried to console himself by making a clumsy pass at the fashion model. The actor’s wife slapped him silly in the center of the square. The Portuguese villagers, who had never seen a woman slapping a man, applauded wildly, and the dancing resumed. Afterward, all agreed that the band of gypsies from the villa on the hillside had made the festival the most enjoyable in memory.

Only Our Lady seemed to take no joy from it. To Carlos, she seemed an island of melancholia in a sea of wild debauchery. She picked at her food; she drank her wine as though it was something that was expected of her. When the handsome German painter planted himself at her side and showered her with attention, Our Lady was polite but clearly indifferent. The painter finally gave up and went in search of other prey.

At midnight, just as the festival reached fever pitch, Our Lady slipped away from the party and headed up the track alone to her villa on the hillside. Twenty minutes later, Carlos saw a light flare briefly in the room on the second floor. It was the room where Our Lady played her violin.

WITH little else to do that summer, the villagers set out to finally learn the name and occupation of the mysterious woman from the hillside. Carlos and María, the two people closest to her, were carefully interrogated but could offer little help. Once a month they received a check, sent by certified mail, from a company in London called European Artistic Management. Because of the barriers of language and class, their communication with the woman was restricted to the simplest of greetings. They were able to supply one piece of critical information: Our Lady was prone to sudden unexplained absences. Rosa of the market read much into this. She decided Our Lady was a spy and that European Artistic Management was nothing but a front. What else would explain her secretive nature? Her sudden disappearances and even more sudden returns? But once again, it was Manuel who settled this question. One evening, while the debate raged in his café, he reached beneath the bar and produced a compact disc recording of several Brahms violin sonatas. On the cover was a photograph of Our Lady. “Her name is Anna Rolfe,” Manuel said in triumph. “Our Lady of the Hillside is a very famous woman.”

She was also a woman prone to accidents. There was the afternoon she lost control of her motor scooter and Carlos found her by the roadside with a pair of broken ribs. A month later she slipped on the edge of the pool and cracked her head. Just two weeks after that, she lost her balance at the top of the stairs and tumbled down to the landing, coming to rest in María’s dustpan.

Carlos concluded that, for some reason, Our Lady simply lacked the ability to look after herself. She was not a reckless woman, just careless, and she seemed to learn nothing from her previous mistakes. “It will be very bad for the reputation of the village if something happened to so famous a woman,” Manuel concluded gravely. “She needs to be protected from herself.”

And so quietly, carefully, Carlos began to watch her.

In the mornings, when she swam laps in her pool, he would find work to do close by so he could monitor her progress. He conducted regular clandestine inspections of her motor scooter to make certain it was in good working order. In the tiny hamlets along the top of the ridge, he created a network of watchers, so that whenever Our Lady went for her afternoon expeditions, she was under constant surveillance.

His diligence paid off. It was Carlos who discovered that Our Lady was hiking on the ridge the afternoon a powerful gale swept in from the sea. He found her amid the wreckage of a rock slide with her hand pinned beneath a hundred-pound boulder, and carried her unconscious down to the village. Had it not been for Carlos, the doctors in Lisbon said, Anna Rolfe would surely have lost her famous left hand.

HER rehabilitation was long and painful-for everyone. For several weeks, her left arm was immobilized by a heavy fiberglass cast. Since she was no longer able to ride her motor scooter, Carlos was pressed into service as her driver. Each morning they climbed into her white Land Rover and rattled down the hill into the village. Our Lady remained silent during these trips, staring out the window, her bandaged hand in her lap. Once, Carlos tried to brighten her mood with Mozart. She removed the disc and hurled it into the passing trees. Carlos never again made the mistake of trying to play music for her.

The bandages became progressively smaller, until finally she required none at all. The severe swelling receded, and the shape of her hand returned to normal. Only the scars remained. Our Lady did her best to conceal them. She wore long-sleeved blouses with lacy cuffs. As she moved round the village doing her marketing, she tucked her hand beneath her right arm.

Her mood darkened further when she tried to play the violin again. Each afternoon for five consecutive days, she walked up to her practice room on the second floor of the villa. Each day she would attempt something elementary-a minor scale over two octaves, an arpeggio-but even that would be too much for her ruined hand. Before long there would be a scream of anguish, followed by shouting in German. On the fifth day, Carlos watched from the vineyard as Our Lady lifted her priceless Guarneri violin over her head and prepared to hurl it to the floor. Instead, she lowered it to her breast and hugged it as she wept. That evening, in the café, Carlos told Manuel about the scene he had witnessed. Manuel reached for the telephone and asked the operator for the number of a company called European Artistic Management in London.

Forty-eight hours later, a small delegation arrived. There was an Englishwoman named Fiona, an American called Gregory, and a dour German called Herr Lang. Each morning, Gregory forced Our Lady to do several hours of punishing exercises to regain the strength and mobility in her hand. In the afternoon, Herr Lang stood over her in her practice room, teaching her how to play her instrument again. Slowly her skills returned, though even Carlos the vineyard keeper could tell that she was not the same musician she had been before the accident.

By October the delegation was gone, and Our Lady was alone again. Her days assumed the predictable rhythm they’d had before the accident, though she took more care when riding her red motor scooter and never set out for the ridge without first checking the weather forecast.

Then, on All Souls Day, she vanished. Carlos took note of the fact that, as she climbed into her Range Rover and headed toward Lisbon, she carried only a black-leather garment bag and no violin. The next day he went to the café and told Manuel what he had seen. Manuel showed him a story in the International Herald-Tribune. The vineyard keeper could not read English, so Manuel handled the translation.

“The death of a father is a terrible thing,” Carlos said. “But murder… this is much worse.”

“Indeed,” said Manuel, folding the newspaper. “But you should hear what happened to that poor woman’s mother.”

CARLOS was working in the vineyard, preparing the vines for the onset of winter, when Our Lady returned from Zurich. She paused briefly in the drive to unclasp her hair and shake it loose in the sea wind, then disappeared into the villa. A moment later Carlos saw her flash past the window of her practice room. No lights. Our Lady always practiced in the dark.

As she began to play, Carlos lowered his head and resumed his work, his pruning shears snapping rhythmically, keeping time with the beating of the waves on the beach below. It was a piece she had played often-a mystical, haunting sonata, supposedly inspired by the Devil himself-but since the accident it had eluded her. He braced himself for the inevitable explosion, but after five minutes his shears fell silent, and he looked up the terraced hillside toward the villa. So skillful was her playing tonight that it seemed there were two violinists in the villa instead of one.

The air had turned colder, and a gauzy sea haze was creeping up the slope of the hill. Carlos set his pile of rubbish alight and squatted next to the flames. She was approaching a difficult section of the piece, a treacherous run of descending notes-a devilish passage, he thought, smiling. Once again he braced himself, but tonight only music exploded, a blistering descent that ended in the quiet resolution of the first movement.

She paused a few seconds, then began the second movement. Carlos turned and looked up the hillside. The villa was bathed in the orange light of sunset. María the housekeeper was outside on the terrace, sweeping. Carlos removed his hat and held it aloft, waiting for María to see him-shouting or noise of any kind was forbidden while Our Lady was practicing. After a moment María lifted her head, and her broom paused in midstroke. Carlos held out his hands. What do you think, María? Will it be all right this time? The housekeeper pressed her palms together and gazed up toward the heavens. Thank you, God.

Indeed, thought Carlos as he watched the smoke of his fire dancing on the evening wind. Thank you, God. Tonight, things are good. The weather is fine, the vineyards are ready for winter, and Our Lady of the Hillside is playing her sonata again.

FOUR hours later, Anna Rolfe lowered her violin and placed it in its case. Immediately she was overcome by the unique combination of exhaustion and restlessness she felt at the end of every practice session. She walked into her bedroom and lay atop the cool duvet, her arms spread wide, listening to the sound of her own breathing and to the night wind rustling in the eaves. She felt something else besides fatigue and restlessness; something she had not felt in a very long time. She supposed it was satisfaction. The Tartini sonata had always been her signature piece, but since the accident the wicked string crossings and demanding double-stops had been too much for her hand. Tonight she had played it exceptionally well for the first time since her recovery. She had always found that her mood was reflected in her playing. Anger, sadness, anxiety-all these emotions revealed themselves when she placed a bow against the strings of a violin. She wondered why the emotions unleashed by the death of her father would allow her to again play Tartini’s sonata.

Suddenly she required activity. She sat upright, pulled off her damp T-shirt, and slipped into a cotton sweater. For several minutes she wandered aimlessly through the rooms of her villa, here switching on a lamp, here closing a shutter. The smooth terra-cotta floors were cold against her bare feet. How she loved this place, with its whitewashed walls and comfortable sailcloth-covered furniture. It was so unlike the house on the Zürichberg where she was raised. The rooms were big and open instead of small and dark, the furnishings unpretentious and simple. This was an honest house, a house with no secrets. It was her house.

In the kitchen she poured herself a large glass of red wine. It was from a local vintner; indeed, some of her own grapes had been used in the blend. After a moment, the wine took the edge off her mood. It was a dirty little secret of the classical music world: the drinking. She had worked with orchestras that had come back from lunch breaks so medicated with alcohol it was a wonder anyone could play at all. She peered into the refrigerator. She had hardly eaten in Zurich and was famished. She sautéed mushrooms and tomatoes in olive oil and fresh local herbs, then stirred in three beaten eggs and added some grated cheese. After the nightmare of Zurich, this simple domestic task gave her an inordinate amount of pleasure. When the omelet was finished, she sat on a tall stool at the kitchen counter and ate it with the last of her wine.

It was then she noticed the light winking on her answering machine. There were four messages. Long ago she had switched off all the ringers on the telephones to avoid being disturbed while she was practicing. She forked a bite of the omelet into her mouth and pressed the PLAY button on the machine.

The first message was from her father’s lawyer in Zurich. It seemed he had some more papers for her to sign. “Would it be convenient to send them by overnight parcel to the villa?”

Yes, it would be, she thought. She’d telephone him in the morning.

The second call was Marco. A long time ago they had been engaged to be married. Like Anna, Marco was a gifted soloist, but he was little known outside Italy. He could never get over the fact that Anna was a star and he was not, and he had punished her by sleeping with half the women in Rome. After Marco she had taken a vow to never again fall in love with a musician.

“I read about your father in the papers, Anna darling. I’m so sorry, my love. What can I do? Do you need anything from me? I’ll get on the next plane.”

No, you won’t, she thought. She’d call Marco in the morning, after she finished with the lawyer. With a bit of luck, she’d get his machine and be spared the indignity of having to hear his voice in real time.

The third message was from Fiona Richardson. Fiona was the only person in the world Anna trusted completely. Each time she had stumbled, Fiona had been there to pull her back onto her feet. “Are you home yet, Anna? How was the funeral? Perfectly awful, I’m sure. They always are. I’ve been thinking about Venice. Perhaps we should postpone it. Zaccaria will understand, and so will your fans. No one can be expected to perform so soon after something like this. You need time to grieve, Anna-even if you did despise the old bastard. Call me.”

She would not be postponing her recital in Venice. She was surprised Fiona would even suggest it. She had canceled two coming-out appearances already. There had been rumblings in the press and among orchestra masters and concert promoters. If she canceled a third, the damage could be irreparable. She’d call Fiona in the morning and tell her she was going to Venice in two weeks.

The final message: Fiona again.

“One more thing, Anna. A very nice gentlemen from the Israeli embassy stopped by the office two days ago. Said he wanted to contact you. Said he had information about your father’s death. He seemed perfectly harmless. You might want to hear what he has to say. He left a number. Have a pen?”

Fiona recited the number.

CARLOS had laid a bed of olive wood in the fireplace. Anna set the kindling alight and stretched out on the couch, watched the flames spreading over the wood. In the firelight she studied her hand. The flickering shadows set her scars in motion.

She had always assumed the death of her father would bring some sort of inner peace-closure, as the Americans were so fond of saying. To be orphaned seemed more tolerable to Anna than did the alienation of estrangement. She might have been able to find that peace tonight if her father had died the usual death of an old man. Instead, he had been shot to death in his home.

She closed her eyes and saw his funeral. It had been held in the ancient Fraumünster church on the banks of the Limmat. The mourners looked like spectators at a shareholders’ conference. It seemed that all of the Zurich financial world was there: the young stars and financial sharps from the big banks and trading houses, along with the last of her father’s contemporaries-the old guard of the Zurich financial oligarchy. Some of them had been there twenty-five years earlier for her mother’s funeral.

As she had listened to the eulogies, Anna found herself hating her father for being murdered. It was as if he had conspired to commit one final act to make her life more painful. The press had dredged up stories of the Rolfe family tragedies: the suicide of her mother, the death of her brother in the Tour of Switzerland, the injury to her hand. “A Family Cursed” was the headline in the Neue Züricher Zeitung.

Anna Rolfe did not believe in curses. Things happened for a reason. She had injured her hand because she had been foolish enough to stay on the ridge when the sky turned black with storm clouds. Her brother had been killed because he had deliberately chosen a dangerous profession to spite his father. And hermother… Anna did not know exactly why her mother had killed herself. Only her father knew the answer to that question. Anna was certain of one thing. She had killed herself for a reason. It was not the result of a family curse.

Neither was her father’s murder.

But why was he murdered? The day before the funeral she had endured a long interview by the Zurich police and by an officer from the Swiss security service named Gerhardt Peterson. Did your father have enemies, Miss Rolfe? Do you know anyone who might have wanted to harm your father? If you know any information that might assist us in our investigation, please tell us now, Miss Rolfe. She did know things, but they were not the kind of things one tells the Swiss police. Anna Rolfe had always believed that they were part of the problem.

But who could she trust?

A very nice gentlemen from the Israeli embassy stopped by the office two days ago. Said he wanted to contact you.

She looked at the telephone number Fiona had given her.

Said he had information about your father’s death.

Why would a man from Israel claim to know anything about the murder of her father? And did she really want to hear what he had to say? Perhaps it would be better to leave things as they were. She could concentrate on her playing and get ready for Venice. She looked at the number one last time, committed it to memory, and dropped the paper onto the fire.

Then she looked at the scars on her hand. There is no Rolfe family curse, she thought. Things happen for a reason. Her mother killed herself. Twenty-five years later, her father was murdered. Why? Who could she trust?

He seemed perfectly harmless. You might want to hear what he has to say.

She lay there for a few minutes, thinking it through. Then she walked into the kitchen, picked up the receiver of the telephone, and dialed the number.

9

THE ROAD to Anna Rolfe’s villa wound along the shoulder of a hill overlooking the Atlantic. Sometimes the view was hidden: now by a stand of fir trees; now by an outcropping of smoke-colored granite. It was late afternoon, the sun was nearly touching the horizon, the water was the color of apricot and gold leaf. Giant rollers pummeled a narrow sand beach. When Gabriel lowered his window, cold air filled the car, heavy with the scent of the sea.

He turned toward the village, following the instructions she had given him. Left after the Moorish ruins, down the hill past the old winery, follow the track along the edge of the vineyard into the wood. The road turned to gravel, then to dirt and matted pine needles.

The track ended at a wooden gate. Gabriel got out and pulled it open wide enough to allow the car to pass, then drove onto the grounds. The villa rose before him, shaped like an L, with a terra-cotta roof and pale stone walls. When Gabriel killed the engine, he could hear the sound of Anna Rolfe practicing. He listened for a moment, trying to place the piece, but could not.

As he climbed out of the car, a man ambled up the hillside: broad-brimmed hat, leather work gloves, the stub of a hand-rolled cigarette hanging from the corner of his mouth. He patted the dirt from his gloves, then removed them as he inspected the visitor.

“You are the man from Israel, yes?”

Gabriel gave a small, reluctant nod.

The vineyard keeper smiled. “Come with me.”

THE view from the terrace was remarkable: the hillside and the vineyard, the sea beyond. From an open window above Gabriel’s head came the sound of Anna Rolfe’s playing. A housekeeper materialized; she left coffee and a stack of week-old German-language newspapers, then silently disappeared into the villa. In the Neue Züricher Zeitung he found an article on the investigation into Rolfe’s murder. Next to it was a long feature piece on the career of Anna Rolfe. He read it quickly, then set it aside. It told him nothing he did not already know.

Before Gabriel touched a painting, he first read everything he could about the artist. He had used the same approach for Anna Rolfe. She had begun playing the violin at the age of four and immediately showed uncommon promise. The Swiss master Karl Wehrli agreed to take her on as a pupil, and the two began a relationship that remained intact until his death. When Anna was ten, Wehrli requested that she be removed from school so she would have more time to devote to her music. Anna’s father reluctantly agreed. A private tutor came to the villa in Zurich two hours each day, and the rest of the time Anna played the violin.

At fifteen she made an appearance at the Lucerne International Music Festival that electrified the European music scene, and she was then invited to give a series of recitals in Germany and the Netherlands. The following year, she won the prestigious Jean Sibelius Violin Competition in Helsinki. She was awarded a large cash prize, along with a Guarneri violin, a string of concert appearances, and a recording contract.

Soon after the Sibelius competition, Anna Rolfe’s career took flight. She embarked on a grinding schedule of concert dates and recording sessions. Her physical beauty made her a cross-cultural phenomenon. Her photograph appeared on the covers of European fashion magazines. In America she performed on a holiday television special.

Then, after twenty years of relentless touring and recording, Anna Rolfe had suffered the accident that nearly destroyed her hand. Gabriel tried to imagine how he would feel if his ability to restore paintings was suddenly taken from him. He did not expect to find her in a good mood.

One hour after Gabriel arrived, she stopped playing. All that remained was the steady beat of a metronome. Then it too fell silent. Five minutes later she appeared on the terrace, dressed in a pair of faded blue jeans and a pearl-gray cotton pullover. Her hair was damp.

She held out her hand. “I’m Anna Rolfe.”

“It’s an honor to meet you, Miss Rolfe.”

“Please, sit down.”

IF Gabriel had been a portrait painter, he might have enjoyed a subject like Anna Rolfe. Her face displayed a technical brilliance: the wide even cheekbones, the catlike green eyes, the ample mouth and teardrop chin. But it was also a face of many layers. Sensuous and vulnerable, contemptuous and iron-willed. Somewhere a trace of sadness. But it was her energy-her restless, reckless energy-that intrigued him the most and would have been most difficult to capture on canvas. Her eyes flashed about him. Even after the long rehearsal session, her hands could not remain quiet. They set out on private journeys: toyed with a cigarette lighter, drummed on the glass tabletop, made repeated trips to her face to chase away the stray lock of hair which fell across her cheek. She wore no jewelry; no bracelets on her wrist or rings on her fingers, nothing around her neck.

“I hope you didn’t have to wait long. I’m afraid I’ve left strict instructions with Carlos and María not to interrupt me during my practice sessions.”

“It was my pleasure. Your playing was extraordinary.”

“Actually, it wasn’t, but that’s very kind of you to say.”

“I saw you perform once. It was in Brussels a few years ago. An evening of Tchaikovsky, if I’m not mistaken. You were amazing that night.”

“I couldn’t touch those pieces now.” She rubbed at the scars on her left hand. It seemed an involuntary gesture. She placed the hand in her lap and looked at the newspaper. “I see you’ve been reading about my father. The Zurich police don’t seem to know much about his murder, do they?”

“That’s hard to say.”

“Do you know something the Zurich police don’t know?”

“That’s also hard to say.”

“Before you tell me what it is you do know, I hope you don’t mind if I ask you a question first.”

“No, of course not.”

“Just who are you?”

“In this matter, I’m a representative of the government of Israel.”

“And which matter is that?”

“The death of your father.”

“And why is the death of my father of interest to the government of Israel?”

“Because I was the one to discover your father’s body.”

“The detectives in Zurich said my father’s body was discovered by the art restorer who came to clean the Raphael.”

“That’s true.”

“You’re the art restorer?”

“Yes.”

“And you work for the government of Israel?”

“In this matter.”

He could see her mind struggling to make the connections.

“Forgive me, Mr. Allon, but I’ve just finished an eight-hour practice session. Maybe my mind isn’t what it should be. Perhaps you should start from the beginning.”

GABRIEL told her the story Shamron had relayed to him in Zurich. That her father had contacted the Israeli government and requested a secret meeting. That he had given no details of why he wanted to meet. That Gabriel had been sent to Zurich to see him and that her father was dead by the time he arrived. Anna Rolfe listened to this account impassively, her hands toying with her hair.

“And what do you want from me, Mr. Allon?” she asked when Gabriel had finished.

“I want to know whether you have any idea why your father would want to meet with us.”

“My father was a banker, Mr. Allon. A Swiss banker. There were many things about his life, personal and professional, that he did not share with me. If you’ve read that newspaper account, then you know we were not particularly close, and that he never spoke to me about his work.”

“Nothing at all?”

She ignored this and asked: “Who’s us? ”

“What do you mean?”

“You said my father wanted to meet with ‘us.’ Who’s us? Who do you work for?”

“I work for a small agency connected to the Ministry of Defense.”

“The Ministry of Defense?”

“Yes.”

“So you’re a spy?”

“No, I’m not a spy.”

“Did you murder my father?”

“Miss Rolfe, please. I came here looking for your help, not to play games.”

“Let the record show that the defendant failed to answer the question.”

“I didn’t murder your father, but I’d like to know who did. And if I knew why he wanted to meet with us in the first place, it might provide some answers.”

She turned her face toward the sea. “So you think he was killed because of what he might have said to you?”

“That would seem to be the case.” Gabriel allowed a silence to settle between them. Then he asked: “Do you know why your father wished to speak with us?” “I think I can guess.”

“Will you tell me?”

“That depends.”

“On what?”

“On whether I decide to involve you and the government of Israel in the private affairs of my family.”

“I can assure you that we will handle the matter with utmost discretion.”

“You sound very much like a Swiss banker, Mr. Allon-but then I suppose you’re not so very different.” Her green eyes settled on him but betrayed nothing of her intentions. “I need some time to think about your offer.”

“I understand.”

“There’s a café in the village square. It’s owned by a man named Manuel. He has a guest room upstairs. It’s not much, but you’ll be comfortable there for a night. I’ll give you my decision in the morning.”

10

THEY DROVE to Lisbon airport early the following afternoon. Anna Rolfe insisted on first class. Gabriel, traveling on Shamron’s parsimonious account, was relegated to economy. He trailed her through the Lisbon airport to make certain no one was following. As she neared the gate, a woman breathlessly thrust out a scrap of paper for an autograph. Anna obliged, smiled, and boarded the flight. Five minutes later, Gabriel followed. As he passed her seat she was sipping champagne. Gabriel trudged back to a middle seat in the twenty-third row. His back still ached from a sleepless night on Senhor Manuel’s beastly bed.

Gerhardt Peterson’s warning about not setting foot on Swiss soil still echoed in Gabriel’s ears, so instead of going directly to Zurich they went first to Stuttgart. There they engaged in a similar routine: Anna leaving the plane first, Gabriel following her through the terminal to a rental-car counter. She collected the keys and the paperwork for a small Mercedes sedan and rode a shuttle bus to the parking lot. Gabriel took a taxi to a nearby hotel and waited in the lobby bar. Twenty minutes later, he went outside and found Anna parked in the drive. She drove a short distance through the darkened streets, then pulled over and traded places with him. Gabriel turned onto the expressway and headed south. One hundred miles to Zurich. Anna reclined the front passenger seat, rolled her coat into the shape of a pillow, and tucked it beneath her head.

Gabriel said, “I enjoyed the piece that you were practicing yesterday.”

“It’s called ‘The Devil’s Trill.’ It was composed by Giuseppe Tartini. He said it was inspired by a dream. In the dream, he handed his violin to the Devil, and the Devil played a sonata that was more beautiful than anything he’d ever heard. Tartini claimed to have awoken in a feverish state. He had to possess the sonata, so he wrote down as much as he could remember.”

“Do you believe the story?”

“I don’t believe in the Devil, but I certainly understand the need to possess the piece. I spent three years learning how to play it properly. It was the piece that I played when I won the Sibelius competition. After that it became my signature piece. But technically, it’s very demanding. I’ve just started to play it again.”

“It sounded beautiful.”

“Not to me. I hear only the mistakes and the imperfections.”

“Is that why you canceled the two concert dates?”

“I didn’t cancel them-I postponed them.” Gabriel could feel her eyes on him. “I see you’ve done your homework.”

“Are you planning to play any time soon?”

“I am, actually. A recital in Venice ten days from now. The Venetians have always been very kind to me. I feel comfortable there. Do you know Venice?”

“I lived in Venice for two years.”

“Really? Why?”

“It’s where I learned how to restore paintings. I served an apprenticeship with an Italian restorer named Umberto Conti. It’s still one of my favorite cities in the world.”

“Ah, mine too. Once Venice is in your blood, it’s hard to live without her. I’m hoping Venice will work its magic for me.”

“Why did you postpone the other recitals?”

“Because my ability to play my instrument was still diminished by the injury to my hand. Because I didn’t want to become something of a freak show. I didn’t want to hear people say, ‘There’s Anna Rolfe. She plays the violin quite well for someone who nearly lost her hand.’ I want to stand on the stage as a musician and nothing more.”

“Are you ready?”

“We’ll find out in ten days. I only know one thing for certain: this time I’m not backing down.” She lit a cigarette. “So why did you try to leave Zurich without telling the police about my father’s murder?”

“Because I was afraid they wouldn’t believe that I had nothing to do with it,” Gabriel said.

“Is that the only reason?”

“I told you that I was there in an official capacity.”

“What sort of official capacity? What’s the name of this obscure agency that you work for? This agency connected to the Ministry of Defense.”

“I don’t work for them. I’m just performing a service for them.”

“Do they have a name?”

“It’s called the Institute for Coordination, but most of the people who work there call it the Office.”

“You’re a spy, aren’t you?”

“I’m not a spy.”

“Why do I know that you’re lying to me?”

“I’m an art restorer.”

“So why did we travel separately to Zurich? Why did we go to so much trouble at the airport in Stuttgart to avoid being seen together?”

“It was a precautionary measure. The Swiss police made it clear to me I’m no longer welcome.”

“Why would they take a step like that?”

“Because they were a little miffed that I’d fled the scene of a crime.”

“Why did you flee my father’s house?”

“I’ve told you that already.”

“You fled my father’s house because you’re a spy, and you were afraid of going to the police. I was watching you at the airport. You’re very good.”

“I’m not a spy.”

“Then what are you? And don’t tell me you’re just an art restorer who’s doing a favor for someone in some obscure agency called the Office, because I don’t believe you. And if you don’t tell me the truth right now, you might as well turn around and drive back to Stuttgart, because I’m not going to tell you a fucking thing.”

She tossed her cigarette out the window and waited for his answer. The legendary temper of Anna Rolfe.

IT was after midnight when they arrived in Zurich. An air of abandonment hung over the city center: the Bahnhofstrasse dark and still, pavements deserted, ice falling through the lights. They crossed the river; Gabriel drove carefully up the slick roads of the Zürichberg. The last thing he wanted was to get stopped for a traffic violation.

They parked on the street outside the villa. Anna dealt with the keyless locks at the gate and the front entrance. Gabriel saw enough to tell him that the codes had been changed since the murder.

The foyer was in darkness. Anna closed the door before switching on the lights. Without speaking she led him inside, passing the entrance to the large drawing room where Gabriel had discovered the body of her father. He glanced inside. The air was drenched with the scent of cleaning fluid. The Oriental carpet was gone, but the Raphael still hung on the wall.

The deep silence of the house was emphasized by the clatter of Anna’s heels over the bare floor. They passed through a large, formal dining room with an imposing table of polished dark wood and high-backed chairs; then a pantry; then a large kitchen.

Finally, they came to a flight of stairs. This time Anna turned on no lights. Gabriel followed her downward into the gloom. At the bottom was a wine cellar, alcoves filled with dusty bottles. Next to the wine cellar was a cutting room with a stone sink. Rusted gardening tools hung from hooks on the walls.

They passed through another doorway and followed a dark corridor. It ended at a door, which Anna pulled aside, revealing a small lift. It was barely big enough for one person, but they crowded in together. As the lift slowly descended, Gabriel could feel the heat of her body pressing against his, smell the scent of her shampoo, the French tobacco on her breath. She seemed perfectly at ease with the situation. Gabriel tried to look away, but Anna gazed directly into his eyes with an unnerving animal intensity.

The lift came to a stop. Anna opened the door and they stepped into a small foyer of black and white marble. A heavy steel door stood opposite the lift. On the wall next to the door was a keypad, and next to the keypad was a device that looked something like the magnifying visors in his studio. Gabriel had seen a device like this before; it was a biometric security mechanism used to scan the retina of anyone trying to enter the room. If the retina matched any of those recorded in the database, the person would be permitted to enter. If not, all hell would break loose.

Anna punched in the security code and placed her eyes against the scanning device. A few seconds later, a bolt snapped back and the great door slowly fell open. As they entered the room, lights automatically flickered to life.

A LARGE space, about fifty feet by thirty, polished wood floor, cream-colored walls. In the center were two ornate swivel chairs. Anna stood next to one and folded her arms. Gabriel scanned the blank walls.

“What is this?”

“My father had two collections. One that he allowed the world to see and one that used to hang here. It was for private viewing only.”

“What kind of paintings were they?”

“Nineteenth- and twentieth-century French-Impressionist, mainly.”

“Do you have a list of them?”

She nodded.

“Who else knew about this?”

“My mother and my brother, of course, but they’re both dead.”

“That’s all?”

“No, there was Werner Müller.”

“Who’s Werner Müller?”

“He’s an art dealer and my father’s chief adviser. He oversaw the design and construction of this place.”

“Is he Swiss?”

She nodded. “He has two galleries. One in Lucerne and the other in Paris near the rue de Rivoli. He spends most of his time there. Seen enough?”

“For now.”

“There’s something else I want to show you.”

Back up the elevator, another walk through the darkened villa to a windowless chamber of winking electronics and video monitors. Gabriel could see the villa from every angle: the street, the entrance, the gardens front and back.

“In addition to the security cameras, every inch of the property is covered by motion detectors,” Anna said. “The windows and doors all have trip wires and alarms. My father didn’t employ a full-time security guard, but the house was impenetrable and he could summon the police in a matter of seconds in the event of an intruder.”

“So what happened on the night of the murder?”

“The system failed inexplicably.”

“How convenient.”

She sat down in front of a computer terminal. “There’s a separate system for the room downstairs. It’s activated when the outer door opens. The time of entry is automatically logged, and inside the room two digital cameras begin recording still images every three seconds.”

She typed in a few characters on the keyboard, moved the mouse, clicked. “This is when we entered the room, twelve forty-nine a.m., and here we are inside.”

Gabriel leaned over her shoulder and peered into the computer monitor. A grainy color image of their visit appeared on the screen and then dissolved, only to be replaced by another. Anna worked the mouse again. A directory appeared.

“This is the master list of visits to that room for the past three months. As you can see, my father spent a great deal of time with the collection. He came down at least once a day, sometimes twice.” She touched the screen with her forefinger. “Here’s his last visit, shortly after midnight, the morning he was murdered. The security system shows no other entries after that.”

“Did the police give you an estimate of when they thought he was killed?”

“They said around three A.M.”

“So it stands to reason that the same people who killed your father also took the paintings and that it probably happened around three o’clock in the morning, six hours before I arrived at the villa.”

“Yes, that’s right.”

Gabriel pointed to the last entry on the screen. “Let me see that one.”

A MOMENT later, the images flickered onto the monitor. The camera angles did not reveal all the paintings, but Gabriel could see enough to realize that it was a remarkable collection. Manet, Bonnard, Toulouse-Lautrec, Cézanne, Pissarro, Degas, a nude by Renoir, a canal landscape by van Gogh, two street scenes by Monet, a large portrait of a woman painted by Picasso during his blue period. And seated in the center of the room, in a straight-backed wing chair, was an old man, gazing at his collection one last time before his death.

11

FOUR HOURS LATER, Gerhardt Peterson was sitting alone in his office, a grotto of pale Scandinavian wood overlooking the grimy inner courtyard of blackened brick. His computer screen was blank, his morning correspondence unopened, his morning coffee untouched, his outer door uncustomarily locked. A cigarette slowly turned to dust in his ashtray. Peterson did not notice. His gaze was downward, toward the three photographs that lay side by side on his leather blotter. Allon and Anna Rolfe, leaving the villa. Allon and Anna Rolfe, getting into a Mercedes sedan. Allon and Anna Rolfe, driving away. Finally he stirred, as if awakened from an unpleasant daydream, and fed the photographs into his shredder, one by one, watching with particular satisfaction as they turned to confetti. Then he picked up the telephone, dialed a number from memory, and waited for an answer. Twenty minutes later, his appointments for the rest of the day canceled, he climbed into his Mercedes sedan and raced down the shore of the Zürichsee toward Herr Gessler’s mountain chalet.

12

THE OLD signadora lived in a crooked house in the village, not far from the church. She greeted the Englishman as always, with a worried smile and a hand on his cheek. She wore a heavy black dress with an embroidered neck. Her skin was the color of flour, her white hair was pulled back and held in place by metal pins. Funny how the marks of ethnicity and national origin are diminished by time, thought the Englishman. If it wasn’t for her Corsican language and mystical Catholic ways she might have been his old Auntie Beatrice from Ipswich. “The evil has returned, my son,” she whispered, stroking his cheek. “I can see it in your eyes. Sit down. Let me help you.”

The old woman lit a candle as the Englishman sat down at the small, wooden table. In front of him she placed a china plate filled with water and a small bowl of oil. “Three drops,” she said. “Then we will see if my fears are correct.”

The Englishman dipped his forefinger in the oil; then he held it over the plate and allowed three drops to fall onto the water. By the laws of physics the oil should have gathered into a single globule, but instead it shattered into a thousand droplets, and soon there was no trace of it. The old woman sighed heavily and made the sign of the cross. There it was, undeniable proof that the occhju, the Evil Eye, had invaded the Englishman’s soul.

She took hold of the Englishman’s hand and prayed. After a moment she began to cry, a sign the occhju had passed from his body into hers. Then she closed her eyes and appeared to be sleeping. She opened her eyes a moment later and instructed him to repeat the trial of the oil and the water. This time, the oil coalesced into a single drop. The evil had been exorcised.

“Thank you,” he said, taking the old woman’s hand. She held it for a moment, then drew away, as if he had fever. The Englishman asked: “What’s wrong?”

“Are you going to remain in the valley for a time, or are you going away again?”

“I’m afraid I have to go away.”

“In the service of Don Orsati?”

The Englishman nodded. He kept no secrets from the old signadora.

“Do you have your charm?”

He opened his shirt. A piece of coral, shaped like a hand, hung by a leather cord from his neck. She took it in her fingers and stroked it, as if to ascertain whether it still contained the mystical power to ward off the occhju. She seemed satisfied but still concerned.

The Englishman asked, “Do you see something?”

“I see a man.”

“What’s this man like?”

“He’s like you, only a heretic. You should avoid him. You will do as I have instructed?”

“I always do.”

The Englishman kissed her hand, then slipped a roll of francs into her palm.

“It’s too much,” she said.

“You always say that.”

“That’s because you always give me too much.”