The English Assassin

13

AN HOUR AFTER DAWN they crossed the Italian border. It had been a long time since Gabriel had been so glad to leave a place. He drove toward Milan while Anna slept. She was troubled by nightmares, tossing her head, waging private battles. When the dream finally released her, she woke and stared wide-eyed at Gabriel, as if startled by his presence. She closed her eyes and soon the struggle began again.

In a roadside café they ate silently, like famished lovers: omelets and bread, bowls of milky coffee. During the last miles before Milan, they talked through the plans one last time. Anna would fly to Lisbon; Gabriel would keep the Mercedes and drive on to Rome. At the airport, he pulled to the curb on the departure level and slid the car into park. “Before we continue, there’s one thing I have to know,” he said.

“You want to know why I didn’t tell the Zurich police about the missing paintings.”

“That’s right.”

“The answer is quite simple: I don’t trust them. It’s why I returned your phone call and why I showed you the missing collection in the first place.” She took his hand. “I don’t trust the Swiss police, Mr. Allon, and neither should you. Does that answer your question?”

“For now.”

She climbed out and disappeared into the terminal. Her scent lingered in the car for the remainder of the morning, like the simple question which ran ceaselessly round his head. Why would a band of professional art thieves go to the trouble of stealing Rolfe’s private collection but leave a Raphael hanging on the parlor wall?

ROME smelled of autumn: bitter coffee, garlic frying in olive oil, woodsmoke and dead leaves. Gabriel checked into a small hotel on the Corso d’Italia, opposite the Villa Borghese. His room overlooked a tiny courtyard with a still fountain and parasols bound for winter. He climbed into bed and immediately was asleep.

It had been a long time since he had dreamed of Vienna, but something he had seen in Zurich had set his subconscious aflame, and he dreamed of it again now. The dream began as it always did, with Gabriel buckling his son into the backseat of the car, unaware he is strapping him to a bomb planted by a Palestinian who has sworn to destroy him. He kisses his wife, says good night to her for the last time, walks away. Then the car explodes. He turns and begins to run. In his dream it takes several minutes for him to reach the car, even though it is only a few yards away. He finds his son, torn to pieces by the bomb. In the front seat is a woman, blackened by fire. Now, instead of Leah, the woman is Anna Rolfe.

Finally he forced the dream to end. He awoke in damp sheets, looked at his wristwatch. He had slept twelve hours.

He showered and dressed. Outside it was midmorning, puffy white clouds scudding across an azure sky, wind prowling the Corso d’Italia. Overnight it had stormed, and the gusts were making tiny whitecaps in large puddles on the pavement. He walked to the Via Veneto, bought the papers, and read them over breakfast in a café.

After an hour he left the café, walked to a telephone booth, and dialed a number from memory. Click… hum… click… Finally a voice, slightly distant, a bit of an echo. “Yes?”

Gabriel identified himself as Stevens, one of his old work names, and said he wished to have lunch with Mr. Baker at Il Drappo. A pause, another click, more humming, something that sounded like shattering china. Then the voice returned.

“Mr. Baker says lunch at Il Drappo is suitable.”

After that the line went dead.

FOR two days Gabriel waited. He rose early each morning and jogged the quiet footpaths of the Villa Borghese. Then he would walk to the Via Veneto for coffee at a counter tended by a pretty girl with auburn hair. On the second day, he noticed a priest in a black cassock whose face looked familiar to him. Gabriel searched his memory for the face but could not find it. When he asked the girl for his check, her telephone number was written on the back of it. He smiled apologetically and dropped it on the bar when he left. The priest stayed in the café.

That afternoon, Gabriel spent a long time checking his tail. He wandered through churches, studying frescoes and altarpieces until his neck ached. He could almost feel the presence of Umberto Conti at his side. Conti, like Ari Shamron, believed Gabriel was a man of special gifts, and he doted on Gabriel, just as Shamron had done. Sometimes he would come to Gabriel’s sagging pensione and drag him into the Venetian night to look at art. He spoke of paintings the way some men speak of women. Look at the light, Gabriel. Look at the technique, the hands, my God, the hands.

Gabriel’s neighbor in Venice had been a Palestinian called Saeb, a skinny intellectual who wrote violent poetry and incendiary tracts comparing the Israelis to the Nazis. He reminded Gabriel too much of a man named Wadal Adel Zwaiter, the Black September chief in Italy, whom Gabriel had assassinated in the stairwell of an apartment building in Rome ’s Piazza Annabaliano.

“I was part of a special unit, Miss Rolfe.”

“What kind of special unit?”

“A counterterrorism unit that tracked down people who committed acts of violence against Israel.”

“Palestinians?”

“For the most part, yes.”

“And what did you do to these terrorists when you found them?”

Silence…

“Tell me, Mr. Allon. What did you do when you found them?”

Late at night, Saeb would come to Gabriel’s room like Zwaiter’s ghost, always with a bottle of cheap red wine and French cigarettes, and he would sit cross-legged on the floor and lecture Gabriel on the injustices heaped upon the Palestinian people. The Jews! The West! The corrupt Arab regimes! All of them have Palestinian blood on their hands! Gabriel would nod and help himself to Saeb’s wine and another of his cigarettes. Occasionally he would contribute his own condemnation of Israel. The State could not last, Gabriel had said in one of his more memorable speeches. Eventually, it would collapse, like capitalism, beneath the weight of its inherent contradictions. Saeb was so moved he included a variation of the line in his next article.

During Gabriel’s apprenticeship Shamron had permitted Leah to visit him once each month. They would make love frantically, and afterward she would lie next to him on the single bed and beg him to come home to Tel Aviv. She posed as a German sociology student from Hamburg named Eva. When Saeb came to the room with his wine and cigarettes, she spoke in glowing terms of the Baader-Meinhof Gang and the PLO. Saeb declared her an enchantress. “Someday, you must come to Palestine and see the land,” he said. Yes, Leah had agreed. Someday.

GABRIEL ate each night in a small trattoria near his hotel. On the second night the owner treated him as though he was a regular who had been coming once a week for twenty years. Placed him at a special table near the kitchen and plied him with antipasti until Gabriel begged for mercy. Then pasta, then fish, then an assortment of dolci. Over coffee he handed Gabriel a note.

“Who left this?” said Gabriel.

He lifted his hands in a Roman gesture of befuddlement. “A man.”

Gabriel looked at the note: plain paper, anonymous script, no signature.

Church of Santa Maria della Pace. One hour.

THE night had turned colder, a gusty wind moving in the trees of the Villa Borghese. Gabriel walked for a time-along the Corso d’Italia, down the Via Veneto-then stopped a taxi and took it to the edge of the Centro Storico.

For twenty minutes he wandered through the narrow streets and quiet squares until confident he was not being followed. Then he walked to the Piazza Navona. The square was crowded in spite of the chill, cafés filled, street artists hawking cheap paintings.

Gabriel slowly circled the piazza, now pausing to gaze at an ornate fountain, now stopping to drop a few coins into the basket of a blind man strumming a guitar with just four strings. Someone was following him; he could feel it.

He started toward the church, then doubled back suddenly. His pursuer was now standing among a small group of people listening to the guitarist. Gabriel walked over and stood next to him.

“You’re clean,” the man said. “Go inside.”

THE church was empty, the smell of burning wax and incense heavy on the air. Gabriel moved forward through the nave and stood before the altar. Behind him the door opened and the sounds of the busy square filled the church. He turned to look, but it was only an old woman come to pray.

A moment later the doors opened again. A man this time, leather jacket, quick dark eyes-Rami, the old man’s personal bodyguard. He knelt in a pew and made the sign of the cross.

Gabriel suppressed a smile as he turned and gazed upon the altar. Again the doors opened, again the clamor of the piazza intruded upon the silence, but this time Gabriel didn’t bother to turn, because immediately he recognized the distinctive cadence of Ari Shamron’s walk.

A moment later Shamron was at his side, looking up at the altarpiece. “What is this, Gabriel?” he asked impatiently. Shamron had no capacity to appreciate art. He found beauty only in a perfectly conceived operation or the destruction of an enemy.

“These frescoes were painted, coincidentally, by Raphael. He rarely worked in fresco, only for popes and their close associates. A well-connected banker named Agostino Chigi owned this chapel, and when Raphael presented Chigi his bill for the frescoes, he was so outraged that he went to Michelangelo for a second opinion.”

“What was Michelangelo’s reaction?”

“He told Chigi he would have asked for more.”

“I’m sure I would have sided with the banker. Let’s take a walk. Catholic churches make me nervous.” He managed a terse smile. “A remnant of my Polish childhood.”

THEYwalked along the edge of the piazza, and the vigilant Rami shadowed them like Shamron’s guilty conscience, hands in his pockets, eyes on the move. Shamron listened silently while Gabriel told him about the missing collection.

“Did she tell the police?”

“No.”

“Why not?”

Gabriel told him what Anna had said when he asked her the same question.

“Why would the old man keep the paintings secret?”

“It’s not unprecedented. Perhaps the nature of the collection didn’t allow him to show it in public.”

“Are you suggesting he was an art thief?”

“No, not an art thief, but sometimes things are a little more complicated than that. It’s possible Rolfe’s collection didn’t have the most pristine provenance. We are talking about Switzerland, after all.”

“Meaning?”

“The bank vaults and cellars of Switzerland are filled with history’s booty, including art. It’s possible those paintings didn’t even belong to Rolfe. We can assume one thing: Whoever took them did it for a specific reason. They left behind a Raphael worth several million dollars.”

“Can they be recovered?”

“I suppose it’s possible. It depends on whether they’ve been sold yet.”

“Can works like those be sold quickly on the black market?”

“Not without raising quite a racket. But then again, it might have been a commissioned theft.”

“Meaning?”

“Someone paid someone else to pull off the job.”

“Was the murder of Rolfe included in the fee?”

“Good question.”

Shamron seemed suddenly tired. He sat on the edge of a fountain. “I don’t travel as well as I used to,” he said. “Tell me about Anna Rolfe.”

“If we had a choice, we’d never be involved with her. She’s unpredictable, volatile, and she smokes more than you do. But she plays the violin like no one else I’ve ever heard.”

“You’re good with people like that. Restore her.” Shamron began to cough, a violent cough that shook his entire body. After a moment he said, “Does she have any idea why her father made contact with us?”

“She says she doesn’t. They weren’t exactly close.”

This seemed to cause Shamron a moment of physical pain. His own daughter had moved to New Zealand. He telephoned her once a month, but she never returned his calls. His greatest fear was that she would not come home for his funeral or say kaddish for him. He took a long time lighting his next cigarette. “Do you have anything to go on?”

“One lead, yes.”

“Worth pursuing?”

“I think so.”

“What do you need?”

“The resources to mount a surveillance operation.”

“Where?”

“In Paris.”

“And the subject?”

14

THE MINIATURE supercardioid microphone held by the man dressed as a priest was no longer than an average fountain pen. Manufactured by an electronics firm in the Swiss industrial city of Zug, it allowed him to monitor the conversation conducted by the two men slowly circling the Piazza Navona. A second man sitting in the café on the opposite side of the square was armed with an identical piece of equipment. The man dressed as a priest was confident that between them they had recorded most of what was being said.

His assumptions were confirmed twenty minutes later when, back in his hotel room, he synchronized the two tapes in an audio playback deck and slipped on a pair of headphones. After a few minutes, he reached out suddenly, pushed the STOP button, then REWIND, then PLAY.

“Where?”

“In Paris.”

“And the subject?”

“An art dealer named Werner Müller.”

STOP. REWIND. PLAY.

“An art dealer named Werner Müller.”

STOP.

He dialed a number in Zurich and relayed the contents of the conversation to the man at the other end of the line. When he had finished, he treated himself to a cigarette and a split of champagne from the minibar, the reward for a job well done. In the bathroom, he burned the pages of his notebook in the sink and washed the ashes down the drain.

15

THE MÜLLER GALLERY stood at the bend of a small street between the rue Faubourg St. Honoré and the Avenue l’Opéra. On one side was a dealer of mobile telephones, on the other a boutique selling fine menswear that no man would wear. On the door was a sign, handwritten in neat blue script:BY APPOINTMENT ONLY. Behind the thick security glass of the window were two small decorative eighteenth-century works by minor French flower painters. Gabriel did not like the French flower painters. Three times he had agreed to restore a painting from the period. Each had been an exercise in exquisite tedium.

For his observation post Gabriel chose the Hôtel Laurens, a small hotel fifty yards north of the gallery on the opposite side of the street. He checked in under the name of Heinrich Kiever and was given a small garret that smelled of spilt cognac and stale cigarette smoke. He told the front-desk clerk that he was a German screenwriter. That he had come to Paris to rework a script for a film set in France during the war. That he would be working long hours in his room and wished not to be disturbed. He drank in the hotel bar and made boorish advances toward the waitress. He shouted at the chambermaids when they tried to clean his room. He screamed at the room service boys when they didn’t bring his coffee quickly enough. Soon, the entire staff and most of the guests at the Hôtel Laurens knew about the crazy Boche writer in the attic.

On the way to Paris he had stopped at the airport in Nice, dropped off the rented Mercedes, and collected a Renault. The rental agent was a man called Henri, a Provençal Jew whose family had survived the French Holocaust. In the lexicon of the Office, Henri was asayan, a volunteer helper. There were thousands of sayanim around the globe-bankers who could provide Office field agents with money, hotel clerks who could give them lodging, doctors who could quietly treat them if they were wounded or ill. In the case of Henri, he dispensed with the usual paperwork and issued the Renault to Gabriel in such a way that it could never be traced.

Shortly after his arrival in Paris, Gabriel reluctantly had made contact with the head of the local station, a man called Uzi Navot. Navot had strawberry-blond hair and the lumpy physique of a wrestler. He was one of Shamron’s devoted acolytes and was jealous of the old man’s affections toward Gabriel. As a result he hated Gabriel, in the way a second son hates an elder brother, and he had buried a knife in Gabriel’s back at every opportunity. Their meeting, on a bench next to the fountain in the Tuileries Gardens, had the cold formality of two opposing generals negotiating a cease-fire. Navot made it clear that he believed the Paris station could handle a simple surveillance job without the help of the great Gabriel Allon. He also wasn’t pleased that Shamron had kept him in the dark about why a Paris art dealer should warrant Office surveillance. Gabriel had remained stoically calm in the face of Navot’s quiet tirade, tossing bits of baguette to the pigeons and nodding sympathetically from time to time. When Navot stormed off across a gravel footpath twenty minutes later, Gabriel had arranged for everything he needed: watchers, radios with secure frequencies, cars, bugging equipment, a.22-caliber Beretta pistol.

FOR two days they watched him. It was not particularly difficult work; Müller, if he was a criminal, did not behave much like one. He arrived at the gallery each morning at nine forty-five, and by ten he was ready to receive customers. At one-thirty he would close the gallery and walk to the same restaurant on the rue de Rivoli, pausing once along the way to purchase newspapers from the same kiosk.

On the first day, a blunt-headed watcher called Oded followed him. On the second it was a reedy boy called Mordecai, who huddled outside at a freezing table on the sidewalk. After lunch he followed Müller back to the gallery, then came upstairs to Gabriel’s hotel room for a debriefing.

“Tell me something, Mordecai,” Gabriel said. “What did he have for lunch today?”

The watcher pulled his thin face into a disapproving frown. “Shellfish. An enormous platter. It was a massacre.”

“And what did you eat, Mordecai?”

“Eggs and pommes frites. ”

“How were they?”

“Not bad.”

In the evenings, another predictable routine. Müller would remain at the gallery until six-thirty. Before leaving, he would place a dark-green plastic rubbish bag at the curbside for the overnight pickup, then would walk through the crowds along the Champs-Élysées to Fouquet’s. On the first night it was Oded who collected the garbage and brought it to Gabriel’s room and Mordecai who followed the art dealer to Fouquet’s. On the second night, the two watchers reversed roles. As Müller sipped champagne with the film and literary crowd at Fouquet’s, Gabriel performed the unenviable task of sifting through the rubbish. It was as ordinary as Müller’s daily routine: discarded facsimiles in a half-dozen languages, unimportant mail, cigarette butts, soiled napkins, and coffee grounds.

After Fouquet’s, Müller would stroll through the quiet side streets of the eighth arrondissement, have a light supper in a bistro, then head up to his apartment. After two nights of the same thing, Oded grew rebellious. “Maybe he’s just a Swiss art dealer who doesn’t deal much art. Perhaps you’re wasting your time-and ours.”

But Gabriel was not deterred by the protestations of Oded and the rest of his small team. Shortly after midnight, he watched from the window of his room at the Hôtel Laurens as an unmarked van pulled to the curb outside the gallery. The next sequence unfolded with the fluidity of a choreographed dance. Two men emerged from the van. Twenty seconds later they had broken into the gallery and disarmed the alarm system. The work inside took less than a minute. Then the two men slipped out of the gallery and climbed back into the van. The headlights flashed twice and the van drove off.

Gabriel turned away from the window, picked up the telephone, and dialed the number for the gallery. After five rings, an answering machine picked up. Gabriel placed the receiver on the table next to the phone and turned up the volume on a small, handheld radio. A few seconds later he could hear the recording on the answering machine, the voice of Werner Müller explaining that his gallery would reopen for business at ten o’clock the following morning. Please telephone for an appointment.

IN the lexicon of the Office, the bug that had been planted in the Müller Gallery was known as a “glass.” Concealed within the electronics of the telephone, it provided coverage of Müller’s calls as well as conversations taking place inside the room. Because it drew its power from the telephone, it didn’t require a battery and therefore could remain in place indefinitely.

The next morning, Müller received no prospective buyers and no telephone calls. He made two calls himself, one to Lyons to inquire about the availability of a painting and one to his landlord to complain about the plumbing in his apartment.

At noon, he listened to news on the radio. He ate lunch in the same restaurant, at the same time, and returned to the gallery late in the afternoon. At five o’clock, a telephone call: female, Scandinavian-accented English, looking for sketches by Picasso. Müller politely explained that his collection contained no Picasso sketches-or works by Picasso of any kind-and he was kind enough to give her the names and addresses of two competitors where she might have more luck.

At six o’clock, Gabriel decided to place a telephone call of his own. He dialed the gallery and in rapid, boisterous French asked Herr Müller whether he had any floral still lifes by Cézanne.

Müller cleared his throat. “Unfortunately, monsieur, I don’t have any paintings by Cézanne.”

“That’s strange. I was told by a reliable source that you had a number of works by Cézanne.”

“Your reliable source was mistaken. Bonsoir, monsieur. ”

The line went dead. Gabriel replaced the receiver and joined Oded in the window. A moment later, the art dealer stepped out into the gathering dusk and peered up and down the little street.

“Did you see that, Oded?”

“He’s definitely got a serious case of the nerves.”

“Still think he’s just an art dealer who doesn’t sell many pictures?”

“He looks dirty, but why set him on edge with a phone call like that?”

Gabriel smiled and said nothing. Shamron called it slipping a stone into a man’s shoe. At first, it’s just an irritant, but before long it produces an open wound. Leave the stone there long enough, and the man has a shoe full of blood.

Five minutes later, Werner Müller locked up his gallery for the night. Instead of leaving his garbage bag in its usual place, he dropped it next door, in front of the clothing boutique. As he started off toward Fouquet’s, he looked several times over his shoulder. He did not notice the whisper-thin frame of Mordecai, trailing after him on the opposite side of the street. Werner Müller had a festering wound, thought Gabriel. Soon, he would have a shoe full of blood.

“Bring me his garbage, Oded.”

MÜLLER’S weekend was as predictable as his workweek. He owned a dog that barked incessantly. Oded, who was monitoring the bug from a van parked around the corner, suffered from a chronic headache. He asked Gabriel if he could borrow a Beretta to shoot the dog and be done with it. And when Müller took the dog for a walk along the river, Oded begged for authorization to toss the beast over the embankment.

The monotony was broken Saturday evening by the arrival of a high-priced whore called Veronique. She slapped him. He cried and called her “Mama.” The barking of the dog reached a feverish pitch. After two hours Oded, who considered himself something of a man of the world, had to leave the surveillance van for a bit of fresh air and a drink at the brasserie on the opposite side of the street. “A fuck for the ages,” he told Gabriel afterward. “A clinic of depravity. It will be required listening for the boys in Psych Ops at King Saul Boulevard.”

No one was more pleased than Oded when a gray and wet Monday dawned over Paris. Müller had one final quarrel with the dog before slamming the door of his apartment and heading into the street. Oded watched him through the blacked-out glass of the surveillance van, an expression of pure loathing on his face. Then he raised the radio to his lips to check in with Gabriel at the Hôtel Laurens. “Looks like Romeo’s heading to the gallery. He’s your problem now.”

And then the dog started up again, a few intermittent barks, like the crack of sniper fire, then an all-out artillery barrage. Oded removed his headphones and cradled his head in his hands.

16

THE ENGLISHMAN, like Gabriel Allon, came to Paris by way of the Côte d’Azur, having made the night passage from Corsica to the mainland on the Calvi-to-Nice ferry. Coincidentally, he also rented a car in Nice-not at the airport but on the boulevard Victor-Hugo, a few blocks from the water. It was a Ford Fiesta that pulled badly to the right, and it made his drive more challenging than he would have preferred.

One hour from Paris, he pulled into a roadside café and gas station and entered the men’s room. There he changed his clothing, trading his cotton trousers and woolen sweater for a sleek black suit. He used stage makeup to turn his sand-colored hair to platinum and slipped on a pair of rose-tinted eyeglasses. When he was finished, even he did not recognize the man in the mirror. He removed a Canadian passport from his bag and looked at the photograph: Claude Devereaux, two years until expiration. He slipped the passport into his jacket pocket and walked to the car.

It was late afternoon by the time he reached the outskirts of the city, the sky low and heavy, a half-hearted rain. He made his way to the fifth arrondissement, where he checked into a small hotel on the rue St-Jacques. He remained in his room throughout the early evening, had a brief nap, then went downstairs to the lobby, where he left his room key with the desk clerk and collected a stack of tourist maps and brochures. He smiled stupidly at the clerk-My first time in Paris.

Outside it was raining heavily. The Englishman dropped the maps and the brochures into a rubbish bin and made his way through the wet streets of the seventh to the Seine. And by nine o’clock he was sheltering beneath a dripping plane tree on the Quai d’Orleans, waiting for Pascal Debré.

A barge moved slowly past him, warm light glowing in the wheelhouse and the cabin. A short distance down the pier, three men were drinking wine from a bottle and night fishing by the light of a streetlamp. He pulled up the sleeve of his jacket and looked at the luminous face of his wristwatch. A few minutes past midnight. Where the hell was Debré? The rain picked up, slapping against the stone pier. He touched his hair. The platinum color was beginning to run.

Five minutes later he heard footsteps on the quay. He turned and saw a man walking toward him: polyester trousers, cheap boots, a waist-length leather jacket shiny with rain. He joined the Englishman beneath the tree and held out his hand. The last two fingers were missing.

“You picked a damned lousy spot to meet on a night like this, Pascal. What the hell took you so long?”

“I didn’t select it for the view, my friend.” He spoke patois with the accent of a southerner. With his two remaining fingers he pointed toward the three men drinking wine down the pier. “You see those boys? They work for me. And the barge that went past a moment ago? He works for me, too. We wanted to make sure you weren’t being followed.”

Debré shoved his hands into his pockets. The Englishman looked him over.

“Where’s the package?”

“At the warehouse.”

“You were supposed to bring it here.”

“The Paris police have been running spot checks all night. Something about a bomb threat. One of the Arab groups. Algerian, I think. It wasn’t safe to bring it with me now.”

The Englishman hadn’t seen any spot checks. “If there are spot checks, how am I going to get the package back into the city?”

“That’s your problem, my friend.”

“Where’s the warehouse?”

“The docks, a few miles down the river.” He cocked his head in the direction of the Latin Quarter. “I have a car.”

The Englishman didn’t like changes in plan, but he had no choice. He nodded and followed Debré up the stone steps, then across the Pont St-Louis. Above them Notre Dame burned with floodlight. Debré looked at the Englishman’s hair and turned down his lips into a very Gallic look of disapproval. “You look ridiculous, but it’s quite effective, I must say. I nearly didn’t recognize you.”

“That’s the point.”

“Nice clothes too. Very fashionable. You should be careful where you go dressed like that. Some of the boys might get the wrong idea about you.”

“Where’s the damned car?”

“Be patient, my friend.”

It stood on the Quai de Montebello, engine running. A big man sat behind the wheel smoking a cigarette. Debré said, “Sit up front. You’ll be more comfortable.”

“Actually, I prefer the backseat, and if you ask me to sit in the front again, I’ll be convinced that you’re leading me into a trap. And the last thing you want is for me to feel trapped, Pascal.”

“Suit yourself. Sit in the back if you like. I was just trying to be polite. Jesus Christ! ”

THEY drove for twenty minutes, wipers working steadily against the rain, heater roaring. The lights of central Paris faded, and soon they were in a gloomy industrial quarter bathed in yellow sodium lamps. Debré sang along with the American music on the radio. The Englishman had a headache. He lowered his window and the damp air sawed at his cheek.

He wished Debré would shut up. The Englishman knew all about Pascal Debré. He was a man who had failed to live up to his own expectations of himself. He had wanted to be an assassin, like the Englishman, but he had botched an important hit on a member of a rival criminal group. The mistake cost him two fingers and seriously impacted the course of his career. He was exiled to the extortion side of the business, where he was known for his crude but effective pitch-Give us money, or we will burn down your business. If you try to get the police involved, we’ll rape your daughter and then cut her into a hundred pieces.

They passed through a gate in a chain-link fence, then entered a soot-stained brick warehouse. The air was heavy with the stench of oil and the river. Debré led the way into a small office and switched on a light. A moment later he emerged, a large suitcase hanging from his good hand.

He swung the bag onto the hood of the car and popped the latches. “It’s a simple device,” Debré said, using his maimed hand as a pointer. “Here’s the timer. You can set it for one minute, one hour, one week. Whatever you want. Here’s the detonator, here’s the small explosive charge. These canisters contain the fuel. The bag is completely untraceable. Even if it happens to survive the fire-which is extremely unlikely-there’s nothing about it that will lead the police to you or to us.”

Debré closed the lid. The Englishman pulled out an envelope filled with francs and dropped it on the car next to the bag. He reached for the suitcase, but Debré put the two-fingered hand on his arm.

“I’m afraid the price has gone up, my friend.”

“Why?”

“Blame it on an unforeseeable market fluctuation.” Debré took out a gun and pointed it at the Englishman’s chest. The driver moved into position behind him. The Englishman assumed he had drawn his weapon too.

Debré smiled. “You know how these things go, my friend.”

“No, I don’t, actually. Why don’t you explain it to me?”

“After we spoke, I started to think.”

“That must have been a new experience for you.”

“Shut your fucking mouth!”

“Excuse me for interrupting, Pascal. Please continue.”

“I asked myself a simple question. Why does a man like my friend need a device like this? He always kills with a knife. Sometimes a pistol but usually a knife. Then the answer came to me. He needs a device like this because his employers have requested it. If I raise my price, it will make no difference to him, because he will simply pass the cost on to his employer.”

“How much do you want?”

“Two hundred.”

“We had a deal at one hundred.”

“The deal changed.”

“And if I refuse?”

“You’ll have to get your package somewhere else. If you do that, I might be tempted to call one of our friends on the police force, one of the ones we keep in wine and whores. I might tell this friend that you’re in town working.”

“Fine, I’ll pay your new price, but after I use this device, I’m going to place an anonymous call to the Paris police and tell them who gave it to me. Thanks to your stupidity, I’ll even be able to tell them where I got it. They’ll raid the place, you’ll be arrested, and your employers will take the rest of your fingers.”

Debré was nervous now, eyes wide, licking his lips, the gun trembling in his left hand. He was used to people reacting with fear when he made threats. He didn’t often deal with someone like the Englishman.

“All right, you win,” said Debré. “We go back to the original price. One hundred thousand francs. Take the damned thing and get out of here.”

The Englishman decided to push him some more. “How will I get back to Paris?”

“That’s your problem.”

“It’s a long ride. The taxi fare will be expensive.” He reached out and picked up the envelope. “Probably about one hundred thousand francs.”

“What the hell do you think you’re doing?”

“I’m taking the device and my money. If you try to stop me, I’ll tell the police about your warehouse, and this time your boss in Marseilles certainly won’t stop with your hand.”

Debré raised the gun. The Englishman had let the game go on long enough. Time to end things. His training took over. He grabbed Debré’s arm in a lightning-fast movement that caught the Frenchman off-guard. He twisted the arm violently, breaking it in several places. Debré screamed in agony, and the gun clattered to the warehouse floor.

Debré’s partner made his move. The Englishman calculated he wouldn’t fire his weapon because of Debré’s proximity, which left only one option: to try to disable the Englishman with a blow to the back of the head. The Englishman ducked, and the punch sailed over his head. Then he grabbed Debré’s gun and came up firing. Two shots struck the big man in the chest. He fell to the floor, blood pumping between his fingers. The Englishman fired two more rounds into his skull.

Debré was leaning against the hood of the car, clutching his arm, utterly defeated. “Take the damned money! Take the package! Just leave here!”

“You shouldn’t have tried to cross me, Pascal.”

“You’re right. Just take everything and leave.”

“You were right about one thing,” the Englishman said as the heavy trench knife with the serrated blade slipped from his forearm sheath into his palm. A moment later Pascal Debré was lying on the floor next to his partner, his face white as a sheet, his throat slashed nearly to the spine.

THE keys to Debré’s car were still in the ignition. The Englishman used them to open the trunk. Inside was another suitcase. He lifted the lid. A second bomb, a duplicate of the one resting on the hood of the car. He supposed the Frenchman had scheduled another job later that night. The Englishman had probably saved someone’s shop. He closed the lid of the suitcase, then softly lowered the trunk.

The floor was covered in blood. The Englishman walked around the corpses and stood over the hood of the car. He opened the suitcase and set the time for three minutes, then closed the lid and placed the case between the bodies.

He walked deliberately across the warehouse and opened the door. Then he went back to the car and climbed behind the wheel. When he turned the key, the engine coughed and died.Dear God, no-Pascal’s revenge. He turned it a second time, and the engine roared into life.

He backed out, turned around in the drive, and sped through the gate in the chain-link fence. When the bomb went off, the flash in his rearview mirror was so bright that for a moment he was blinded. He followed the river road back toward Paris, purple spots floating in his vision.

Ten minutes later, he parked Debré’s car in a tow zone near a Métro stop and got out. He removed the suitcase from the trunk and dropped the keys into a rubbish bin. Then he walked downstairs and boarded a train.

He thought about the oldsignadora back in his village on Corsica -her warning abut the mysterious man whom he should avoid. He wondered if Pascal Debré had been that man.

He got out at the Luxembourg stop and walked through the wet streets of the fifth, back to his hotel on the rue St-Jacques. Upstairs in his room it occurred to him that he hadn’t seen a single policeman during the trip home. Debré had definitely been lying about the checkpoints.

17

GABRIEL DECIDED it was time to talk to Werner Müller. The next morning, he rang the gallery.

“Müller.Bonjour. ”

“Do you speak German?”

“Ja.”

Gabriel switched from French to German.

“I saw a painting in the window of your gallery over the weekend that I’m interested in.”

“Which one was that?”

“The flower arrangement by Jean-Georges Hirn.”

“Yes, lovely, isn’t it?”

“Indeed, it is. I was wondering if I might be able to see it sometime today.”

“I’m afraid I’m rather busy today.”

“Oh, really?”

Gabriel had been monitoring all calls to the gallery for seventy-two hours and was quite certain Müller could find time for an appointment.

“Just let me get my book and have a look at the schedule. Can you hold on a moment?”

“Of course.”

“Yes, here it is. As it turns out, I’ve had an unexpected cancellation this afternoon.”

“How fortunate.”

“How quickly could you be here?”

“Actually, I’m in the neighborhood now. I could be there in ten or fifteen minutes.”

“Splendid. And your name?”

“Ulbricht.”

“I look forward to seeing you, Herr Ulbricht.”

Gabriel severed the connection. He packed quickly, tucked the Beretta into the waistband of his trousers, then took one last look around the room to make certain he’d left no trace of himself behind. Before leaving, he walked to the window and peered down at the gallery. A man was ringing the bell: medium height, dark hair, an attaché case in his right hand. Perhaps Müller’s appointment didn’t cancel after all. Gabriel quickly dug out his camera and used up the roll taking photographs of the unexpected visitor. Then he removed the film, slipped it in his pocket, and placed the camera in his bag.

At the front counter, the desk manager expressed elaborate sorrow that Herr Kiever was leaving so soon. He asked whether the work had gone well and Gabriel said that he would know soon enough.

Outside, rain fell softly on his face. The Renault was parked on the street around the corner from the hotel, two tickets pinned to the windshield by the wiper blade. Gabriel stuffed them into his pocket and tossed the bag into the trunk.

He glanced at his watch. Twelve minutes had passed since he and Müller had spoken on the telephone. He should be a few minutes late-the German would expect that. He walked around the block twice to see if he was being followed, then went to the gallery and rang the bell. Müller opened the door to him.

“Good morning, Herr Ulbricht. I was beginning to worry about you.”

“Actually, I had a bit of trouble finding the place again.”

“You don’t live in Paris?”

“I’m here on holiday, actually. I live in Düsseldorf.”

“I see.” Müller clapped his hands together theatrically. “So, you’d like to have a closer look at the Hirn. I don’t blame you. It’s an absolutely gorgeous painting. A fine addition to any collection. Let me remove it from the window. I’ll just be a moment.”

While Müller busied himself with the Hirn, Gabriel quickly looked around the room. Ordinary gallery, very ordinary paintings. At the end of the room was Müller’s desk, a hand-painted antique affair, and on the floor next to the desk was an attaché.

Müller lifted the painting from the display stand in the window. It was a small work, about eighteen inches by twelve, and Müller had no trouble handling the frame. He placed it on a felt-covered pedestal in the center of the room and switched on some additional lights.

As Gabriel moved into position to view the canvas, he glanced out the front window of the gallery. Something caught his eye in the café across the street. Something familiar, a flash, nothing more.

He turned his attention to the canvas and murmured a few kind words about the quality of the brushwork and the draftsmanship. “You seem to know something about art, Herr Ulbricht,” Müller said.

“Just enough so that I spend all my money buying paintings I really can’t afford,” said Gabriel, and the two men shared a good-natured laugh.

Gabriel lifted his eyes from the Hirn and glanced out the window toward the café. There it was again, the sensation that he had seen something, or someone, before. He scanned the tables beneath the awning, and then he saw it. The man, folding his newspaper, standing up, walking away quickly. A man in a hurry, a man late for an important meeting. Gabriel had seen the man before.

The man who had just left the gallery…

Gabriel turned and glanced at the attaché. Then he looked out the window again, but the man had rounded a corner and was gone.

“Is there something wrong, Herr Ulbricht?”

Gabriel grabbed Müller’s forearm. “You have to get out of the gallery! Now!”

The art dealer twisted his arm and broke Gabriel’s grasp. He was surprisingly powerful.

“Get your hand off me, you madman!”

Gabriel grabbed Müller’s arm again, but once again he pulled away.

“Get out of here, or I’m going to call the police.”

Gabriel could have easily subdued Müller, but he guessed there wasn’t time. He turned and walked quickly toward the door. By the time he arrived, Müller had released the security locks. Gabriel stepped into the street and started walking in the direction of the hotel.

And then the bomb exploded-a deafening thunderclap that knocked Gabriel to his hands and knees. He stood and started walking again as the sound of the blast echoed along the graceful facades of the surrounding streets. Then there was something that sounded like a tropical downpour but it was only the glass, raining onto the pavement from a thousand shattered windows. He raised his hands to shield his face but after a few seconds his fingers ran red with his own blood.

The shower of glass ended, the echo of the explosion receded into the distance. Gabriel resisted the impulse to look over his shoulder at the devastation. He had seen the results of a street bomb before and could imagine the scene behind him. Burning cars, blackened buildings, a devastated café, bodies, and blood, the stunned looks on the faces of the survivors. So he removed his hands from his face and hid them in the pockets of his jacket, and he kept walking, head down, ears ringing with the awful silence.

18

PARIS HAD SUFFERED its unfair share of terrorist bombings over the years, and the French police and security services had become quite efficient at dealing with the aftermath. Within two minutes of the explosion, the first units arrived. Within five minutes, the surrounding streets were sealed. Gabriel’s car had been caught inside the cordon, so he had been forced to flee on foot. It was nearly dusk by the time he reached the sprawling rail yard on the southern edge of the city.

Now, sheltering in the loading bay of an abandoned factory, he took mental inventory of the things in the trunk. A suitcase, a few items of clothing, a camera, a tape recorder, the radio he had used to communicate with the surveillance team. If the car was not collected soon, the police would impound it, break open the trunk, and examine the contents. They would play the audiotape and discover that Werner Müller’s gallery and telephones had been bugged. They would develop exposed rolls of film and discover photographs of the gallery’s exterior. They would calculate the angle of the photographs and surmise that they had been taken from a window of the Hôtel Laurens. They would question the staff at the hotel and discover that the room in question had been occupied by a rude German writer.

Gabriel’s right hand began to throb. The strain was catching up with him. He’d stayed on the move after the bombing, ridden a dozen Métro trains, walked countless miles along the crowded boulevards. From a public telephone near the Luxembourg Gardens, he had made contact with Uzi Navot on the emergency channel.

Gabriel looked up now and saw two cars moving slowly along a narrow service road bordered by a sagging chain-link fence. The headlights were doused. The cars stopped about fifty yards away. Gabriel jumped down from the loading dock-the landing sent shock waves of pain through his hands-and walked toward them. The rear door of the first car flew open. Navot was slumped in the backseat. “Get in,” he grumbled. Clearly, he had watched too many American movies about the Mafia.

Navot had brought a doctor, one of Ari Shamron’s sayanim. He was sitting in the front passenger seat. He made an operating table of the center armrest, spreading a sterile cloth over it and switching on the dome light. The doctor cut away the dressing and examined the wound. He pulled his lips into a mild frown-Not so bad. You bring me here for this?“ Something for the pain?” he asked, but Gabriel shook his head. Another frown, another tip of the head-As you wish.

The doctor flushed the wound with an antiseptic solution and went to work. Gabriel, the restorer, watched him intently. Insert, pull, tug, snip. Navot lit a cigarette and pretended to look out the window. When the doctor had finished the suturing, he dressed the wound carefully and nodded that he was done. Gabriel laid his right hand upon the sterile towel. As the doctor cut away the dirty dressing, he emitted a very French sigh of disapproval, as if Gabriel had ordered the wrong wine for fish with saffron butter sauce. “This one will take a few minutes, yes?” Navot waved his hand impatiently.

The doctor didn’t care for Navot’s attitude, and he took his time about it. This time he didn’t bother to ask Gabriel whether he wanted anything for the pain. He simply prepared a syringe and injected an anesthetic into Gabriel’s hand. He worked slowly and steadily for almost a half-hour. Then he looked up. “I did the best I could, under the circumstances.” A hostile glance toward Navot-I do this for free, boy. Shamron is going to hear about this.“ You need proper surgery on that wound. The muscles, the tendons-” A pause, a shake of the head. “Not good. You’re likely to experience some stiffness, and your range of motion will never be quite the same.”

“Leave us,” Navot said. “Go to the other car and wait there.” Navot dismissed the driver too. When they were alone, he looked at Gabriel. “What the hell happened?”

“How many dead?” Gabriel asked, ignoring Navot’s question.

“Three, so far. Four more in bad shape.”

“Have you heard from the rest of the team?”

“They’ve left Paris. Shamron is bringing everyone home. This could get ugly.”

“The car?”

“We’ve got a man watching it. So far, the police haven’t made a move on it.”

“Eventually, they will.”

“What are they going to find when they do?”

Gabriel told him. Navot closed his eyes and swayed a bit, as though he had just been told of a death. “What about Müller’s apartment?”

“There’s a glass on his telephone.”

“Shit.”

“Any chance of getting inside and cleaning things up?”

Navot shook his head. “The police are already there. If they find your car and establish that Müller was under surveillance of some sort they’ll tear apart his flat. It won’t take them long to find the bug.”

“Any friends on the force that might be able to help us?”

“Not for something like this.”

“That bug is like a calling card.”

“I know, Gabriel, but I wasn’t the one who put it there.”

Gabriel fished the roll of film from his pocket and handed it to Navot. “I got a picture of the man who left the bomb at the gallery. Get it to King Saul Boulevard tonight. Tell the troglodytes in Research to run it through the database. Maybe they can put a name to his face.”

The film disappeared into Navot’s big paw.

“Contact Shamron and tell him to get a security detail up to Anna Rolfe’s villa right away.” Gabriel opened the car door and put his foot on the ground. “Which car is mine?”

“Shamron wants you to come home.”

“I can’t find the man who planted that bomb if I’m sitting in Tel Aviv.”

“You won’t be able to find him if you’re sitting in a French jail cell, either.”

“Which car is mine, Uzi?”

“All right! Take this one. But you’re on your own.”

“Someday, I’ll try to repay the favor.”

“Have a good time, Gabriel. I’ll stay here and clean up your fucking mess.”

“Just get the film to Tel Aviv. Good dog.”

ON the Costa de Prata, Anna Rolfe lowered her violin and switched off the metronome. Her practice room was in shadow, the breeze from the open window cool and moist with the Atlantic. A professional-quality microphone hung over her stool from a chrome-colored stand. It was connected to a German-made tape deck. Today she had recorded much of her practice session. She played back the tape while she packed the Guarneri into its case and straightened her sheet music.

As always, she found it uncomfortable to listen to herself play, but she did it now for a very specific reason. She wanted to know exactly how she sounded; which passages of the piece were acceptable and which needed additional attention. She liked much of what she heard but picked out three or four sections in the second and third movements where the effects of her long layoff were apparent to her highly critical ear. Tonight, in her second practice session, she would focus exclusively on those passages. For now, she needed to clear her mind.

She went to her bedroom, removed a pale yellow sweater from her dresser drawer, and wrapped it around her shoulders. Then she went downstairs. A moment later, she slipped through the gate of her villa and set out along the winding track down toward the village. At the halfway point, she spotted a tiny Fiat station wagon coming up the track through the trees. Inside were four men. They were not Portuguese. Anna stepped to the side to allow the car to pass, but it stopped instead, and the man seated in the front passenger seat got out.

“Miss Rolfe?”

“Who wants to know?”

“You are MissAnna Rolfe, aren’t you?”

She nodded.

“We’re friends of Gabriel’s.”

IN Marseille, the Englishman left his car near the Abbaye St-Victor and walked through the darkened streets to the ferry terminal. As the vessel slipped over the calm waters of the harbor, he went downstairs to his private cabin. He lay on the narrow bed, listening to the news on Marseille radio. The bombing of the Müller Gallery in Paris was the lead item. Pascal Debré’s bomb had caused innocent casualties, a fact which made him feel a good deal more like a terrorist than a professional. Tomorrow he would go see the old signadora, and she would chase away theocchju with her rituals and prayers and absolve him of his sins, the way she always did.

He switched off the radio. In spite of his fatigue, he wanted a woman. It was always that way after the completion of an assignment. He closed his eyes and Elizabeth appeared in his thoughts-Elizabeth Conlin, the pretty Catholic girl from the Ballymurphy housing estates, West Belfast, Northern Ireland. She’d had the instincts of a good professional. When it was safe for them to meet, she would hang a violet scarf in her bedroom window, and the Englishman would crawl through the window and into her bed. They would make love with excruciating slowness, so as not to wake the other members of her family. The Englishman would cover her mouth with the palm of his hand to smother her cries. Once she bit down on the flesh of his thumb and drew blood. It stained the sheets of her bed. Afterward, he would lie next to her in the dark and let her tell him again how she wanted to get away from Belfast -away from the bombs and the British soldiers, the IRA gunmen and the Protestant paramilitaries. And when she thought he was sleeping, she would whisper a rosary, her penance for succumbing to the temptations of the Englishman’s body. The Englishman never allowed himself to fall asleep in Elizabeth Conlin’s bed.

One night when he crawled through her window, Elizabeth Conlin had been replaced by her father and two IRA enforcers. Somehow they knew the truth about the Englishman. He was driven to a remote farmhouse for what promised to be a lengthy and painful interrogation, followed by his own execution. Unlike most who had found themselves in a similar situation, the Englishman managed to leave the farmhouse alive. Four IRA men did not.

Within hours the Englishman was safely out of the province. Elizabeth Conlin did not fare so well. Her body was found the following morning in the Belfast city cemetery, her head shaved, her throat slashed, the punishment for sleeping with a British agent.

The Englishman had never been able to trust a woman since. Anton Orsati understood this. Once a week he brought a girl up to the Englishman’s villa-not a Corsican girl, only French girls, specially flown in for the task of servicing the Englishman’s particular needs. And he would wait with the old paesanu down the valley road until the Englishman had finished. The Englishman found the act of making love to Orsati’s girls as cold and clinical as an assassination, but he endured it because he could not trust himself to choose a lover and was not yet prepared to live like a monastic hermit.

The assignment in Paris intruded on his thoughts. There was something that had been bothering him-the man who entered the gallery just before the bomb had exploded. The Englishman was the product of an elite unit and capable of spotting the influence in others: the light-footed gait; the subtle combination of absolute confidence and eternal vigilance. The man had been a soldier once-or perhaps something more complicated.

But there was something else. The Englishman had the nagging sensation he had seen the man somewhere before. And so he lay there for the next several hours, sorting through the countless faces stored in his memory, looking for him.

19

THE BOMBING of the Müller Gallery had done more than create a security problem for Gabriel in Paris. It had eliminated his only obvious lead in the case. Now he had to start over from the beginning, which is why, late the following morning, he was drifting across Mason’s Yard toward Julian Isherwood’s gallery through a gentle rain.

On the brick wall next to the door was a panel, and on the panel were two buttons and two corresponding names: LOCUSTRAVEL and ISHER OOFINEAR S. Gabriel pressed the second and waited. When the buzzer sounded, he pushed open the door and mounted the stairs: same threadbare brown carpet, same Rorschachesque stain on the third step where a hung-over Isherwood had spilled coffee the morning after Oliver Dimbleby’s drunken birthday bash at the Mirabelle. At the top landing were two doors, one leading to the gallery, the other to a small travel agency where a plain woman sat behind a headmasterly desk, surrounded by posters promising boundless excitement in exotic locales. She glanced up at Gabriel, smiled sadly, and returned to her needlepoint.

Though Julian Isherwood clung unwisely to the paintings in his inventory, he did not do the same with the girls who answered his telephones and kept his appalling files. He hired and drove them away with seasonal regularity. So Gabriel was surprised to see Irina, a black-haired leopard of a girl whom Isherwood had taken on six months ago, still at her post behind the desk in the anteroom.

The door separating the anteroom and Isherwood’s office stood slightly ajar. Isherwood was with a client. Gabriel could see a painting propped on the black, felt-covered viewing pedestal. Italian Old Master by the look of it; no one Gabriel recognized. Isherwood paced the carpet slowly behind it, hand on his chin, eyes on the floor, like a barrister awaiting an answer from a hostile witness.

“He’d like you to wait upstairs in the exhibition room,” the girl purred. “I assume you know the way.”

Gabriel entered the tiny lift and rode it upward. The exposition room was a place of shadows, quiet except for the rain pattering on the skylight. Large Old Masters canvases hung on each of the walls: a Venus by Luini, a nativity by del Vaga, a baptism of Christ by Bordone, a luminous landscape by Claude. Gabriel left the lights off and sank heavily onto the velvet-covered divan. He loved this room. It had always been a sanctuary; an island of peace. He had once made love to his wife in this room. Years later, he had plotted the death of the man who had taken her away from him.

The door of the lift opened and Isherwood entered.

“My God, Gabriel, but you look like complete hell.”

“Is that supposed to be a compliment?”

“What the hell’s going on? Why aren’t you in Zurich?”

“The owner of the painting you sent me to clean was a man named Augustus Rolfe. Ever heard of him?”

“Oh, good Lord-the one who was murdered last week?”

Gabriel closed his eyes and nodded. “I found his body.”

Isherwood noticed the bandages. “What happened to your hands?”

“You heard about the explosion at the gallery in Paris yesterday?”

“Of course-this place is buzzing about it. Surely you weren’t involved in that?”

“No, I just happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time. I’ll tell you everything, Julian, but first I need your help.”

“What sort of help?” Isherwood asked cautiously.

“Nothing like the old days. I just need you to explain why an aging Swiss banker might have kept a very impressive collection of French Impressionist and Modern paintings hidden from the world in an underground vault.”

Isherwood pressed the button on the intercom. “Irina, would you be a love and bring a pot of coffee up to the exposition room? And some of those biscuits too. The ones with the nuts. And hold all my calls, please. There’s a good girl.”

GABRIEL knew the basics about the Nazi rape of Europe ’s art treasures during the Second World War. Adolf Hitler had dreamed of building a massive Führermuseum in his hometown of Linz and filling it with the world’s finest collection of Old Masters and Northern European art. In 1938, he initiated a secret operation code-named Sonderauftrag Linz -Special Operation Linz-to acquire art for the Führermuseum by any means necessary. During the last months of peace, his agents secretly toured the museums, galleries, and private collections of Europe, selecting works for the future museum. When war broke out, Hitler’s art thieves followed hard on the heels of the Wehrmacht. Hundreds of thousands of paintings, sculptures and objets d’art quickly vanished, many of them Jewish-owned. Thousands of works, valued at roughly $30 billion, were still missing.

Gabriel knew that Julian Isherwood could fill in the rest of the details for him. Isherwood was an above-average art dealer who’d had his fair share of triumphs, but when it came to the Nazi plunder of Europe he was something of an expert. He had written dozens of articles for newspapers and trade publications and five years earlier had coauthored a well-received book on the subject. Despite the pleas of his publisher, he had steadfastly refused to reveal his personal motivation for pursuing the topic. Gabriel was among the handful of people who knew why: Julian Isherwood had lived through it.

“In 1940, London and New York didn’t matter,” Isherwood began. “ Paris was the center of the art world, and the center of the Paris art scene was the rue de la Boétie in the eighth arrondissement. The famous Paul Rosenberg had his gallery at number twenty-one. Picasso lived across a courtyard at number twenty-three with his wife, the Russian dancer Olga Koklova. Across the street stood the gallery of Étienne Bignou. Georges Wildenstein had his gallery at number fifty-seven. Paul Guillaume and Josse Hessel were also there.”

“And your father?”

“Isakowitz Fine Arts was next to Paul Rosenberg’s. We lived in a flat above the main exposition rooms. Picasso was ‘Uncle Pablo’ to me. I spent hours at his flat. Sometimes, he’d let me watch him paint. Olga used to give me chocolate and cake until I was sick. It was an enchanted existence.”

“And when the Germans came?”

“Well, it all came crashing down, didn’t it? The invasion of the Low Countries started on May tenth. By June fourteenth, the Germans had entered Paris. Swastikas hung from the Eiffel Tower, and the German General Staff had set up shop at the Hôtel Crillon.”

“When did the looting start?”

“Two days after Hitler’s victory tour of Paris, he ordered all works of art owned by Jews to be transferred to German hands for so-called safekeeping. In reality, the plunder of France was on.”

“If I remember correctly, Hitler set up an organization to oversee the looting of France.”

“There were several, but the most important was a unit called the ERR: the Einsatzstab Reichsleiter Rosenberg. It was a formidable enterprise. It had its own intelligence service for hunting down works of art, a strike force for raids and seizures, and a staff of art historians and appraisers. My God, it even had its own carpenters for crating looted works for shipment to Germany.”

“The rue de la Boétie must have been their first stop.”

“The ERR went after the dealers and the collectors. The Rothschild collections were seized along with their residences. So were the collections of the Jewish banking magnate David David-Weill and Jacques Stern. All the Jewish-owned galleries on the rue de la Boétie were raided and their collections seized, including the inventory of Isakowitz Fine Arts.”

“Did your father manage to protect any of his works?”

“Most dealers, my father included, tried to protect their most important pieces. They hid them in remote chateaux or bank vaults or shipped them out of the country. But the unprotected works were quickly snatched up by the Germans. Before the invasion, during the drôle de guerre, my father rented a villa in Bordeaux and moved his most important pieces there. We fled there as the Germans closed in on Paris. When France was divided into the Occupied Zone and the Unoccupied Zone, we ended up on the Vichy side of the line. But in the autumn of 1940, an ERR strike force with a French police escort broke down the door of the villa and seized my father’s paintings.”

“How did the Germans find his collection?”

“He’d made the mistake of telling a French dealer what he planned to do with his paintings. The Frenchman turned over the information to the ERR in exchange for a payoff of five percent of the value of my father’s collection. C’est la vie. ”

Gabriel knew what had happened next, and he had no intention of allowing Isherwood to tell it again. Shortly after the Germans moved into the Unoccupied Zone late in 1942, the SS and their allies in the Vichy government began rounding up Jews for internment and deportation to the death camps. Isherwood’s father hired a pair of Basque smugglers to take young Julian over the Pyrenees into the sanctuary of Spain. His mother and father stayed behind in France. In 1943 they were arrested and sent to Sobibor, where they were immediately murdered.

Isherwood shivered once violently. “I’m afraid I feel a drink coming on. On your feet, Gabriel. Some fresh air will do us both some good.”

THEY walked around the corner to a wine bar in Jermyn Street and settled next to a hissing gas fire. Isherwood ordered a glass of Médoc. His eyes were on the flames, but his mind was still in wartime France. Like a child creeping into his parents’ room, Gabriel gently intruded on his memories.

“What happened to the paintings once they were seized?”

“The ERR commandeered the Musée Jeu de Paume and used it as a storage facility and sorting house. A large staff worked night and day to catalogue and appraise the massive amount of art that was falling into German hands. Those works deemed suitable for the Führer’s private collection, for the Linz project, or other German museums-mainly Old Masters and Northern European works-were crated and shipped off to the Fatherland.”

“And the rest of it? The Impressionists and the Modern works?”

“The Nazis considered them degenerate, but they weren’t about to let them get away without first extracting something in return. Most of the nineteenth- and twentieth-century works were sold off to raise cash or set aside to be used in exchanges.”

“What sort of exchanges?”

“Take Hermann Göring, for example. He owned a large hunting lodge south of Berlin called Carinhall in honor of his dead wife, a Swedish aristocrat named Carin von Fock. It contained one of the largest private collections in Europe, and Göring used his extraordinary power to enlarge it substantially during the war. He treated the storerooms of Jeu de Paume as though they were his private playground.”

Isherwood drained his glass and ordered another.

“Göring was a greedy bastard-he grabbed more than six hundred paintings from the Jeu de Paume alone-but he went to great lengths to make it appear as though his acquisitions were, on paper at least, legal purchases rather than outright thefts. If Göring wanted a work, he had it specially appraised at a ludicrously low level by a handpicked fonctionnaire. Then he would immediately take possession and promise to send the money into a special ERR account. In reality, he paid nothing for the paintings he took from Paris.”

“Did they end up in Carinhall?”

“Some, but not all. Göring shared Hitler’s disdain for Modern and Impressionist paintings, but he knew they could be sold off or traded for pieces more to his taste. One deal was carried out by Göring’s agents in Italy. In exchange for seven Italian Old Masters works and several other objets d’art, Göring handed over nine paintings seized from the Jeu de Paume. Van Gogh, Degas, Cézanne, Renoir, and Monet, just to name a few-all stolen from Jewish collections and galleries. Göring carried out several other similar exchanges involving dealers in Switzerland.”

“Tell me about the Swiss connection.”

“Neutrality left the dealers and collectors of Switzerland in a unique position to capitalize on the rape of Paris. The Swiss were permitted to travel throughout much of Europe, and the Swiss franc was the world’s only universally accepted currency. And don’t forget that places like Zurich were awash in the profits of collaborating with Hitler. Paris was the place to buy looted art, but Zurich, Lucerne, and Geneva were the places to unload it.”

“Or stash it?”

“But of course. The banking secrecy laws made Switzerland a natural dumping ground for looted art. So did the laws covering the receipt of stolen property.”

“Explain the laws to me.”

“They were brilliant, and thoroughly Swiss in subtlety. For example, if a person takes possession of an object in good faith, and that object happens to be stolen, it’s rightfully his after five years.”

“How convenient.”

“Wait, there’s more. If an art dealer finds himself in possession of a stolen work, it’s the responsibility of the true owner to reimburse the dealer in order to reclaim his painting.”

“So Swiss dealers and collectors could receive stolen works without any fear of the law or of losing money?”

“Exactly.”

“What happened after the war?”

“The Allies dispatched an art expert named Douglas Cooper to Switzerland to try to find the truth. Cooper determined that hundreds, if not thousands, of stolen works had entered Switzerland during the war. He was convinced that many of them were hidden in bank vaults and bonded warehouses. Paul Rosenberg went to Switzerland to have a look round for himself. In a gallery in Zurich, he was offered a Matisse that had been looted from his very own collection.”

“Remarkable,” Gabriel said. “What did the Swiss government do with this information?”

“It promised the Allies that it would cooperate in a thorough inquiry. It promised to freeze all German assets that had entered the country during the war and to conduct a nationwide census of all such assets. It implemented neither measure. Douglas Cooper suggested suspending the licenses of any dealer who traded in looted art. The Swiss government refused. Then the Swiss Federation of Art Dealers told its members not to cooperate. In short, the Swiss government did what it always does. It shielded its business and its citizens from the eyes of foreigners.”

“Did dealers like Paul Rosenberg try to reclaim their paintings in court?”

“A few tried, but the deck was stacked against them. The Swiss made it time-consuming and very expensive for a foreigner to try to reclaim property from a Swiss citizen. The Swiss usually took shelter behind a claim of good faith. And remember, most of the art in question was stolen by the Nazis in 1940. By 1945, under the five-year rule of Swiss law, the rightful owners no longer had a valid legal claim. Needless to say, most plaintiffs walked away empty-handed.”

“Do you think any of it’s still there?”

“In my opinion, Gabriel, most of it’s still there. From the little bit you’ve told me, it sounds as though some of those paintings may have been in the hands of Augustus Rolfe.”

“Not anymore.”

Isherwood finished the last of his wine, and his gaze drifted back to the fire. “I think it’s your turn to do the talking, Gabriel. Tell me everything. And no lies this time. I’m too old to be lied to anymore.”

OUTSIDE it was raining again. On the way back to the gallery they sheltered together beneath Isherwood’s umbrella like mourners in a cortege. Gabriel had told Isherwood everything, beginning with the discovery of Rolfe’s body and ending with the explosion at Werner Müller’s gallery in Paris. Isherwood had drunk two more glasses of Médoc, and his haphazard gait showed the effects.

“Shamron,” Isherwood said sotto voce, his voice dripping with scorn. “I should have known that bastard had something to do with this. I thought they’d finally put him out to pasture for good this time.”

“They always find a reason to bring him back.”

“They say she’s quite the diva, Anna Rolfe.”

“She has her moments.”

“If I can give you one piece of advice, my dear boy, assume at all times that she knows more about her father and his collection than she’s telling you. Daughters tend to be very protective of their fathers, even when they think their fathers are complete bastards.”

“I’ll try to keep that in mind.”

“It may just be an ordinary art theft.”

“They left a Raphael hanging on the wall of the parlor and blew up the art gallery belonging to the man who oversaw the collection. I don’t think there’s anything ordinary about what happened.”

“Point taken,” Isherwood said. “In fact, it sounds to me as if the only things you can trust in this whole wretched affair are the paintings themselves.”

“I hate to be the one to break this to you, Julian, but paintings can’t really talk. Besides, the collection is gone.”

“The paintings can’t talk, but their provenance can. Clearly, Augustus Rolfe took his collecting very seriously. Even if he acquired the paintings under less than perfect circumstances, he would have insisted on a provenance for each one of them. Provenance, after all, is everything.”

“And if I can get the provenance?”

“Then I’ll be able to tell you whether he was a legitimate collector or whether the old bastard was sitting atop a vault filled with looted art.”

GABRIEL had planned to leave him in Duke Street, but Isherwood took him by the elbow and pulled him through the passageway into Mason’s Yard. “Come with me. There’s one more thing I need to show you.”

As they entered the gallery, Irina recognized the telltale signs of a bottled lunch. She gave Isherwood a stack of telephone messages and went to work on a pot of coffee. Back in his office, Isherwood opened his private safe and withdrew two items, a sketch of a young boy and a photocopy of an old document several pages in length. He held up the sketch for Gabriel to see.

“Look familiar?”

“I can’t say it does.”

“The subject is me. The artist is Pablo Picasso. I carried it out of France with me.”

“And the document?”

“I carried that as well. My father gave it to me right before I set out with the Basques. It’s a detailed list of every painting in his private collection and professional inventory, written in his own hand. This is a copy, of course. The original’s in terrible shape now.”

He handed the list to Gabriel.

“I don’t know how far you plan to take this thing, but if you happen to come across any of these, you’ll let me know, won’t you, petal?”

Gabriel slipped the list into the breast pocket of his jacket.

“Where are you off to now?” Isherwood asked.

“I’m not sure.”

“There’s a man you should talk to in Lyons. He helped me with a few things when I was researching the book. If Augustus Rolfe has any dirt under his fingernails, this man will know about it.”

Isherwood flipped through the Rolodex and gave Gabriel the telephone numbers.

20

AROUND THE CORNER from Isherwood Fine Arts, in Jermyn Street, a fair-haired man sat behind the wheel of a Rover sedan listening to the radio. For five days he had been watching the art dealer. He had followed him to his drunken lunches. Followed him home at night to his house in South Kensington. He’d even posed as a potential buyer in order to conceal a pair of tiny transmitters in the dealer’s office. The transmitter broadcast a weak analog signal over an ordinary FM wavelength. The man was using the radio in the Rover to monitor the output. Ten minutes later, when the conversation inside ended, he picked up his cellular phone and dialed a number in Zurich.

“Our friend is on his way to Lyons to see the professor.”

21

PROFESSOR EMIL JACOBI was the self-appointed guilty conscience of Switzerland. He believed that in order to save his country he first had to tear it down, and he had devoted his life to unearthing and exposing the unsavory elements of Swiss history. His explosive book, The Myth, had ignited a firestorm by detailing the extensive economic and trade links between Nazi Germany and Switzerland throughout the Second World War. Jacobi outlined the process by which Swiss banks accepted looted gold-and gold ripped from the teeth of Jews on the way to the gas chambers-and converted it into the hard currency Hitler used to buy the raw materials needed to keep his war machine running. Professor Jacobi’s conclusion shocked the country and made him a national pariah: Switzerland and Nazi Germany were allies in everything but name, he wrote. Hitler could not have waged war without the help of Swiss bankers and arms-makers. If not for Switzerland, the Wehrmacht would have ground to a halt in the autumn of 1944. Millions of lives would have been spared but for the greed of Swiss bankers.

Soon after publication of The Myth, life for Professor Jacobi in Switzerland became increasingly uncomfortable. He received death threats, his telephones were tapped, and officers of the Swiss security service monitored his movements. Fearing for his safety, he resigned his professorship in Lausanne and accepted a position in the history department of the University of Lyons.

It took Gabriel the better part of the next day to track him down.

He left two messages on Jacobi’s answering machine at home and two more with his thoroughly unhelpful secretary at the university. At one-thirty in the afternoon, Jacobi called Gabriel on his cellular phone and agreed to a meeting. “Come by my flat at six this evening. We’ll talk then.” Then he rattled off the address and abruptly rang off. That left Gabriel several hours to kill. In a bookstore near the university he found a French-language copy of The Myth and spent the rest of the afternoon reading among the students in a café off the Place des Terreaux.

At six o’clock the professor was waiting in the foyer of his apartment building on the rue Lanterne. He wore a frayed tweed jacket, and his rimless spectacles were pushed up into a bird’s nest of unruly gray hair. There were clips on the legs of his trousers to keep the cuffs from becoming entangled in the chain of his bicycle. “Welcome to exile,” he said, leading Gabriel wearily up the staircase to his flat on the fourth floor. “We Swiss revere the right to free speech, but only if that speech refrains from criticism of Switzerland. I committed the mortal sin of a good Swiss, and so I find myself here, in the gilded cage of Lyons.”

On the landing outside his door, the professor spent a long moment digging in his saddlebag through loose papers and battered notebooks, searching for the keys to his flat. When finally he found them, they were admitted into a small, sparsely furnished apartment. Every flat surface was piled with books, documents, and newspapers. Gabriel smiled. He had come to the right place.

Jacobi closed the door and hung his saddlebag over the latch. “So you wish to discuss the murder of Augustus Rolfe? As it turns out, I’ve been following that case quite carefully.”

“I thought you might. I was wondering if we could compare notes.”

“Are you a historian as well, Mr. Allon?”

“Actually, I’m an art restorer, but in this matter I’m working for the government of Israel.”

“Well, this promises to be an interesting evening. Clear the things off that chair and sit down. I’ll see to the coffee.”

PROFESSOR Jacobi spent several minutes digging through his towering stacks of paper for the file on Augustus Rolfe. It was very slender.

“Herr Rolfe was a private banker in the truest sense of the word, Mr. Allon. I’m afraid much of what I’m going to tell you is based on conjecture and rumor.”

“I’ve often found that one can learn a great deal about a man by the rumors that swirl around him.”

“When one is dealing with a Swiss banker, especially a private banker like Augustus Rolfe, rumor is sometimes the best one can hope for.” The professor slipped on his glasses and opened the file. “There are very small private banks in Zurich, and there are extremely large ones. The giants like Union Bank of Switzerland and Credit Suisse both have private banking divisions, though they handle only very wealthy customers.”

“How large?”

“Usually, a minimum deposit of approximately five million dollars. It’s been reported that the intelligence agencies of your country utilized the private banking services of Credit Suisse.” The professor glanced at Gabriel over the open file. “But then, I’m sure you know nothing of that.”

Gabriel let the question sail by. “From what I know of Augustus Rolfe, he fell into the first category.”

“That’s right. The Rolfe bank was a small enterprise-Rolfe and a half-dozen employees, if that. If you wanted someone to hide your money or your belongings in Switzerland, Augustus Rolfe was your best friend. He was one of the most discreet and most influential bankers in Zurich. He had very powerful friends. That’s what makes his murder so baffling to me.”

“What else do you know about him?”

“He took over control of the family business from his father in the early thirties-not a good time for the banks of Switzerland. There was the worldwide depression, the German panic, a currency crisis in Austria that was sending shock waves through Zurich. Swiss banks were falling like dominoes. Many private banks were forced to merge with larger competitors to survive. Rolfe managed to hang on by his fingernails.”

Jacobi licked the tip of his finger and turned a page.

“Then Hitler comes to power in Germany and starts making trouble for the Jews. Jewish money and valuables flow into the private banks of Zurich -including Rolfe’s.”

“You know this to be fact?”

“Absolutely. Augustus Rolfe opened more than two hundred numbered accounts for German Jews.”

Jacobi turned over a few pages of the file.

“Here’s where the facts end and the rumors begin. In the late thirties, agents of the Gestapo start coming to Zurich. They’re looking for all the Jewish money that’s been spirited out of Germany and deposited in Swiss banks. It’s rumored that Rolfe cooperated with the Gestapo agents in violation of Swiss banking laws and revealed the existence of Jewish-held numbered accounts at his bank.”

“Why would he do that?”

“Would you like my theory?”

“Sure.”

“Because he knew that the money deposited by a few Jews was nothing compared to the riches that awaited him if he cooperated with Nazi Germany.”

“Is there evidence to suggest that he did?”

“Indeed,” Jacobi said, his eyebrows shooting up over the rims of his spectacles. “It’s a fact that Augustus Rolfe made frequent trips to Nazi Germany throughout the war.”

“Who did he see there?”

“It’s not known, but his travels raised enough eyebrows that Rolfe came under investigation after the war.”

“What came of it?”

“Absolutely nothing. Rolfe melted back into the world of Zurich banking, never to be heard from again-until a week ago, of course, when someone walked into his villa on the Zürichberg and put a bullet in his head.”

Jacobi closed the file and looked at Gabriel.

“Would you care to pick up the story, Mr. Allon?”

WHEN Gabriel was finished, Professor Jacobi spent a long time polishing his spectacles on the fat end of his tie. Then he shoved them back onto his forehead and poured himself another cup of coffee. “It sounds as though you’ve run up against the great conspiracy of silence.”

“What do you mean by that?”

“When you’re dealing with Switzerland, Mr. Allon, it’s best to keep one thing in mind. Switzerland is not a real country. It’s a business, and it’s run like a business. It’s a business that is constantly in a defensive posture. It’s been that way for seven hundred years.”

“What does that have to do with Rolfe’s murder?”

“There are people in Switzerland who stand to lose a great deal if the sins of the past are exposed and the sewers of the Bahnhofstrasse are given the thorough flushing they so desperately need. These people are an invisible government, and are not to be taken lightly, which is why I live here instead of Lausanne. If you choose to pursue this matter, I suggest you watch your back.”

Ten minutes later Gabriel was walking down the stairs with his copy of The Myth tucked beneath his arm. He paused in the foyer for a moment to open the cover and read the words the professor had scrawled on the title page.

Beware the gnomes of Zurich -Emil Jacobi.

THAT image of Gabriel was captured by the man with a long-range digital camera standing in the window of the apartment house on the opposite side of the street. One hour earlier he had also snapped a photograph of Gabriel’s arrival. The pictures were not necessary, just a professional touch. Allon’s entire conversation with Emil Jacobi had been picked up by the pair of sensitive transmitters the man had planted in the professor’s apartment six months earlier. As Allon walked away, the surveillance artist fired off several more photographs. Then he sat down in front of his playback deck and listened to the tapes. After thirty minutes of steady work, he had completed a thorough transcript of the encounter. He spent ten more minutes checking the transcription for accuracy, then he encrypted the report and sent it via secure e-mail to Zurich, along with the photographs of Allon.

Thirty seconds after that, the information appeared on the computer screen of Gerhardt Peterson, who immediately picked up his telephone to request an urgent meeting with Herr Gessler. Gerhardt Peterson did not like Emil Jacobi, and neither did Herr Gessler. Jacobi’s one-man crusade against the financial oligarchy of Switzerland had become tiresome and costly. Both men agreed that it was time to deal with the meddlesome little professor.

The following morning, before leaving his flat for the office, Gerhardt Peterson made a telephone call from the privacy of his study. It lasted no more than two minutes. The fate of Emil Jacobi, the guilty conscience of Switzerland, had been sealed by a financial transaction, the transfer of two hundred thousand dollars into a numbered account in Geneva controlled by Anton Orsati. Gerhardt Peterson found that very fitting indeed.

22

WHEN GABRIEL ARRIVED at Anna Rolfe’s villa the following morning, he was pleased to see it being guarded by at least four men: one at the gate, a second at the base of the vineyards, a third on the tree line, and a fourth perched on the hilltop. Shamron had sent Rami, his taciturn personal bodyguard, to supervise the detail. He greeted Gabriel in the drive. When Gabriel asked how Anna was dealing with the team, Rami rolled his eyes-You’ll see soon enough.

He entered the villa and followed the sound of Anna’s violin up the staircase. Then he knocked on the door of her practice room and entered without waiting for permission. She spun round and berated him for interrupting her, then screamed at him for turning her home into an armed camp. As her tirade intensified, Gabriel looked down and fingered his bandages. A trickle of fresh blood had seeped through. Anna noticed this too. Immediately she fell silent and gently led him to her bedroom to change his dressings. He couldn’t help but look at her while she attended to him. The skin at the base of her neck was damp; the violin strings had left tiny valleys in the fingertips of her left hand. She was more beautiful then he remembered.

“Nice job,” he said, inspecting her work.

“I know something about bandaging hands, Mr. Allon. You have some things to tell me about my father, yes?”

“More questions than answers at this point. And please call me Gabriel.”

She smiled. “I have an idea, Gabriel. ”

INa nylon rucksack, Anna packed a picnic lunch of bread and cheese and cold chicken. Last she added a chilled bottle of wine, which she wrapped in a woolen blanket before placing it in the bag. Rami gave Gabriel a Beretta and a pair of boyish-looking bodyguards. On the shaded footpaths of the pine grove, with Rami’s chaperons in close attendance, Gabriel told Anna about Paris. He did not tell her about his conversations with Julian Isherwood and Emil Jacobi. That could wait.

The trees broke and the ruins appeared, perched on the face of a steep hillside. A wild goat hopped onto a granite boulder, bleated at them, then melted into the gorse. Gabriel shouldered the rucksack and followed Anna up the path.

He watched the muscles of her legs flexing with each stride, and thought of Leah. A hike on an autumn day like this, twenty-five years earlier-only then the hillside had been in the Golan and the ruins were Crusader. Leah had painted; Gabriel had just returned from Europe, and his desire to create had been chased away by the ghosts of the men he had killed. He had left Leah at her easel and climbed to the top of the hill. Above him had stood the military fortifications along the Syrian border; below stretched the Upper Galilee and the rolling hills of southern Lebanon. Lost in thought, he had not heard Leah’s approach. “They’re still going to come, Gabriel. You can sit there for the rest of your life looking at them, but they’re still going to come.” And without looking at her Gabriel had said: “If I used to live there, in the Upper Galilee, and now I lived up there, in a camp in Lebanon, I’d come too.”

The snap of Anna unfurling the picnic blanket shattered Gabriel’s memory. She spread the blanket over a patch of sunlit grass, as Leah had done that day, while Gabriel ritually uncorked the wine. Rami’s watchers took up their positions: one atop the ruins, one on the footpath below. As Anna pulled meat from the bones of the chicken, Gabriel showed her the photo of the man who had left the attaché-bomb at the gallery.

“Ever seen him before?”

She shook her head.

Gabriel put away the photo. “I need to know more about your father.”

“Like what?”

“Anything that can help me find out who killed him and took his collection.”

“My father was a Swiss banker, Gabriel. I know him as a man, but I know next to nothing about his work.”

“So tell me about him.”

“Where shall I start?”

“How about his age. You’re thirty-eight?”

“Thirty-seven.”

“Your father was eighty-nine. That’s a rather large age difference.”

“That’s easy to explain. He was married to someone before my mother. She died of tuberculosis during the war. He and my mother met ten years later. She was quite a gifted pianist. She could have played professionally, but my father wouldn’t hear of it. Musicians were one step above exhibitionists, in his opinion. Sometimes I wonder what brought them together in the first place.”

“Were there children from the first marriage?”

Anna shook her head.

“And your mother’s suicide?”

“I was the one who found her body.” She hesitated for a moment, then said: “One never forgets something like that. Afterward, my father told us she’d had a history of depression. I loved my mother dearly, Gabriel. We were extremely close. My mother did not suffer from depression. She wasn’t taking any medication, she wasn’t under the care of a psychiatrist. She was moody, she was temperamental, but she was not the kind of woman who commits suicide for no reason. Something or someone made her take her own life. Only my father knew what it was, and he kept it secret from us.”

“Did she leave a suicide note?”

“According to the inquest, there was no note. But I saw my father take something from her body that looked very much like a note. He never showed it to me, and apparently he never showed it to the police either.”

“And the death of your brother?”

“It happened a year later. My father wanted him to go to work in the bank and carry on the family tradition, but Max wanted to race bicycles. And that’s exactly what he did-quite well, in fact. He was one of the best riders in Switzerland and a top European professional. He was killed in an accident during the Tour of Switzerland. My father was devastated, but at the same time, I think he felt a certain vindication. It was as if Max had been punished for daring to contradict his wishes.”

“And you?”

“I was alone with him. The two people I loved most in the world were gone, and I was trapped with a man I loathed. I threw myself more deeply into violin. The arrangement seemed to suit both of us. As long as I was playing music, my father didn’t have to pay any attention to me. He was free to do what he loved most.”

“Which was?”

“Making money, of course. He thought his wealth absolved him of his sins. He was such a fool. From the beginning of my career, people thought I played with such fire. They didn’t realize that fire was fueled by hatred and pain.”

Gabriel broached the next subject cautiously. “What do you know about your father’s activities during the war?”

“Activities? That’s an interesting word. What are you trying to imply by that?”

“I meant nothing by it. I just need to know whether there was something in your father’s past that might have led to his murder.”

“My father was a banker in Switzerland during the Second World War.” Her voice had turned suddenly cold. “That doesn’t automatically make him a monster. But to be perfectly honest, I know virtually nothing about my father’s activities during the war. It was not something he ever discussed with us.”

Gabriel thought of information Emil Jacobi had given him in Lyons: Rolfe’s frequent trips to Nazi Germany; the rumors of Rolfe’s connection to important members of the Nazi hierarchy. Had Rolfe really managed to keep all these things secret from his daughter? Gabriel decided to push it a little further-gently.

“But you have your suspicions, don’t you, Anna? You’d have never taken me to Zurich if you didn’t have suspicions about your father’s past.”

“I only know one thing, Gabriel: My mother dug her own grave, climbed inside, and shot herself. It was a hateful, vengeful thing to do. And she did it for a reason.”

“Was he dying?”

The bluntness of this final question seemed to take her by surprise, for she looked up suddenly, as though prodded by a sharp object. “My father?”

Gabriel nodded.

“As a matter of fact, Gabriel, yes, my father was dying.”

WHEN the food was gone, Gabriel poured out the last of the wine and asked her about the provenance.

“They’re locked in the desk of my father’s study.”

“I was afraid you were going to say that.”

“Why do you want to see them?”

“I want to look at the chain of possession for each work. The provenance might tell us something about who took them and why your father was killed.”

“Or it might tell you nothing at all. And remember one thing: My father purchased all those paintings legally. They belonged to him, no matter what quirk you might find in the provenance.”

“I’d still like to see them.”

“I’ll show you where they are.”

“No, you’ll tell me where they are, and I’ll get them and bring them back here. You can’t come to Zurich now.”

“Why not?”

“Because it’s not safe. Which leads me to my next topic.”

“What’s that?”

“Your recital in Venice.”

“I’m not canceling it.”

“It’s not safe for you to perform in public now.”

“I don’t have a choice. If I don’t keep this engagement, my career is over.”

“The people who killed your father have made it abundantly clear that they’ll do anything to prevent us from finding their identity. That would include killing you too.”

“Then you’ll just have to make certain they don’t succeed, but I’m going to perform next week, and there’s nothing you can do to stop me.”

COLUMNS of gunmetal cloud had appeared over the sea and started their advance inland. A chill wind rose and moaned in the ruins. Anna shivered in the abrupt cold and folded her arms beneath her breasts, her eyes on the approaching weather. Gabriel packed up the remains of their lunch, and in the gathering darkness they ambled down the hill, shadowed by the two silent watchers. When they reached the footpaths of the pine grove it began to rain heavily. “Too late,” Anna shouted above the pounding. “We’re caught.” She took him by the arm and led him to the shelter of a towering pine. “We need to keep your bandages dry,” she said, a note of concern creeping into her voice. She dug a wrinkled nylon anorak from the pocket of the rucksack and held it over their heads, and there they huddled for the next twenty minutes like a pair of refugees, Rami’s watchers standing silently on either side of them like andirons. While they waited for the weather to break, Anna told Gabriel the security codes for the villa and the location of the provenance in her father’s files. When finally the rain moved off, Anna bound Gabriel’s hands in the anorak, and they proceeded carefully down the wet track to the villa. At the front gate, Gabriel relinquished her into the custody of Rami and climbed into his car. As he drove away, he took one last look over his shoulder and saw Anna Rolfe chasing Rami across the drive, shouting, “Bang, bang, Rami! You’re dead!”

23

MOTZKIN LIKED IT in Lisbon. He’d done the glamour postings. He’d done London. He’d done Paris and Brussels. He’d spent a nail-biting year in Cairo posing as a journalist from a newspaper in Ottawa. It was quiet in Lisbon these days, and that was fine with Motzkin. The odd surveillance job, a bit of liaison work. Just enough to keep him from going stir crazy. He had time for his books and his stamps and for long siestas with his girl in the Alfama.

He had just returned from her flat when the telephone on his desk rattled softly. Motzkin lifted the receiver and brought it cautiously to his ear. This was the time Ari Shamron usually chose to poke his head out of his foxhole and make life miserable for his katsas. But thankfully it wasn’t Shamron-just the guard down in the lobby. It seemed there was a visitor, a man who knew Motzkin’s name.

Motzkin rang off and punched up the lobby surveillance camera on his computer monitor. The station regularly fielded walk-ins of all shapes and sizes. Usually a quick once-over could determine whether the person should be seen or frog-marched to the gate.

As the image appeared on his screen, Motzkin murmured: “I’ll be damned.” Imagine, the living legend, walking into the embassy, looking like something the proverbial cat dragged in. Last Motzkin had heard, he was holed up in some English cottage with his paintings and his demons. “I’ll be damned,” he repeated as he clambered down the stairs. “Is it really you?”

IN the communications room, Motzkin established a secure link with Shamron’s office at King Saul Boulevard in Tel Aviv. Then he closed the soundproof door and watched Gabriel through the glass. It was an unpleasant conversation; that much Motzkin could tell. But then there were few people inside the Office who hadn’t crossed swords with the old man at one time or another, and the battles between Shamron and the great Gabriel Allon were the stuff of Office lore. Twenty minutes later, when Gabriel slammed down the telephone and stepped out of the room, his face was ashen.

“The old man is sending a report through in thirty minutes. I need a few things.”

Motzkin took Gabriel upstairs to the station and allowed him to shower and change into clean clothing. Then he arranged airline tickets and a car and gave him two thousand dollars from the petty-cash box.

By the time they returned to the communications room, the report was sliding off the secure fax machine. It had been compiled by Research Section at King Saul Boulevard and was based on information shared through standing agreements with British and French intelligence.

The subject was a man named Christopher Keller.

Gabriel scooped the pages from the tray, sat down at the table, and started to read.

BORNin London, the only son of two successful Harley Street physicians, Christopher Keller made it clear at an early age that he had no intention of following in the footsteps of his parents. Obsessed with history, especially military history, he wanted to become a soldier. His parents forbade him to enter the military, and he acceded to their wishes, at least for a time. He entered Cambridge and began reading history and Oriental languages. He was a brilliant student, but in his second year he grew restless and one night vanished without a trace. A few days later he surfaced at his father’s Kensington home, hair cut to the scalp, dressed in an olive-drab uniform. Keller had enlisted in the British Army.

After basic training, he joined his infantry regiment, but his intellect, physical prowess, and lone-wolf attitude quickly set him apart from his peers. Soon a recruiter from the Special Air Service came knocking. He had seen Keller’s file and spoken to his superiors. Keller was invited to the Regiment’s headquarters at Hereford to undergo the initial training course.

His performance was extraordinary. The instructors in the unarmed combat course wrote that they had never seen a man who possessed such an instinctual knack for the taking of human life. In the “killing house”-an infamous facility where recruits practice close-quarters combat, hostage rescue, and antiterrorist “room clearing” drills-Keller achieved the highest possible scores. On the final day of the course, he carried a fifty-five-pound rucksack and ten-pound assault rifle during a forty-mile march across the windswept moorland known as the Brecon Beacons, an endurance test that had left men dead. Keller completed the course thirty minutes faster than any man had ever done it before. He was accepted into the Regiment and assigned to a Sabre squadron specializing in mobile desert warfare.

Then the course of his career took an abrupt turn. Another man appeared on the scene, this time from military intelligence. He was looking for a unique brand of soldier capable of performing close observation and other special operations in Northern Ireland. He said he was impressed by Keller’s linguistic skills and his ability to improvise and think on his feet. Was Keller interested? That night he packed his kit and moved from Hereford to a secret base in the Scottish Highlands.

During his training Keller displayed a remarkable gift. For years, British security and intelligence forces had struggled with the myriad of accents in Northern Ireland. In Ulster, the opposing communities could identify each other by the sound of a voice. The accent of Catholic West Belfast is different from that of Protestant West Belfast; the accent of the Upper Falls Road is different from that of the Lower Falls. The way a man uttered a few simple phrases could mean the difference between life and an appalling death. Keller developed the ability to mimic the intonations perfectly. He could even shift accents at a moment’s notice-a Catholic from Armagh one minute, a Protestant from Belfast’s Shankill Road the next, then a Catholic from the Ballymurphy housing estates. He operated in Belfast for more than a year, tracking members of the IRA, picking up bits of useful gossip from the surrounding community. He worked alone, with almost no supervision from his case officer at military intelligence.

His assignment in Northern Ireland came to an abrupt end one night when he was kidnapped in West Belfast and driven to a remote farmhouse in County Armagh. There, he was accused of being a British spy. Keller knew the situation was hopeless, so he decided to fight his way out. By the time he left the farmhouse, four hardened terrorists from the Provisional Irish Republican Army were dead. Two had been virtually cut to pieces.

Keller returned to Hereford for a long rest. He took punishing hikes on the Brecon Beacons and trained new recruits in the art of silent killing. But it was clear to the Regiment’s commanders and psychologists that Belfast had changed Keller.

Then in August 1990, Saddam Hussein invaded Kuwait. Five months later, Keller and his unit were roaming the western desert of Iraq, searching out and destroying the Scud missile launchers that were raining terror on Tel Aviv. On the night of January 28, Keller and his team located a launcher in the desert one hundred miles northwest of Baghdad. He passed along the coordinates to his commanders in Saudi Arabia. Ninety minutes later, a formation of Coalition fighter-bombers streaked low over the desert, but in a disastrous case of friendly fire, they attacked the SAS squadron instead of the Scud site. British officials concluded that the entire unit was lost, though no conclusive remains were ever found.

What came next was essentially a theory-again based on intelligence reports. Some months after the disaster in the Iraqi desert, a new and highly professional killer was reported to be working in Europe. Police informants spoke of a man known only as “the Englishman.” None could offer more than the vaguest descriptions of him. To date, the mysterious assassin was a suspect in at least twenty unsolved murders. British intelligence suspected that Christopher Keller and the Englishman were the same man.

The file concluded with two photographs. The first was the one Gabriel had taken of the man entering the gallery in Paris. The second showed a group of men on a deserted moorland. One of the faces was circled. Gabriel spent a long time comparing the two pictures. Then he picked up the telephone and called Shamron in Tel Aviv. “I have the strangest sensation I’ve actually met this man before,” Gabriel told him. He had expected Shamron to be surprised by the remark. Instead, the old man told him to stay near the fax machine, and then he rang off.

IN1988, Gabriel Allon carried out one of the most celebrated operations in the history of Israeli intelligence: the assassination of the PLO’s second-in-command, Abu Jihad. He had conducted a long and dangerous surveillance operation on the Palestinian’s villa in Tunis, and he had trained the hit team at a mockup in the Negev desert. Then, one warm night in April, he led a team of Sayaret commandos into the house and shot Abu Jihad to death in front of his wife and children. Thinking about that night now, he could still see the look of pure hatred in their dark eyes.

Eighteen months after the assassination, a team of British intelligence and SAS officers involved in the fight against IRA terror came to Tel Aviv to study the tactics of the Israelis. Ari Shamron summoned Gabriel to the Academy and compelled him to deliver a luncheon lecture on the Tunis operation. One of the men attending the lecture was an SAS lieutenant.

The item that came across the fax machine was a photograph. It had been taken after the luncheon to commemorate the spirit of cooperation between the secret warriors of the two countries. Gabriel, eternally camera-shy, wore sunglasses and a sun hat to conceal his identity. The man next to him stared directly into the camera lens. Gabriel carefully examined the face.

It was Christopher Keller.

24

THE COURIER WAS WAITING for Gabriel at the gate in Munich. He had hair the color of caramel and carried a sign that said MR.KRAMER -HELLER ENTERPRISES. Gabriel followed him through the terminal and across the carpark through blowing snow until they came to a dark-blue Mercedes sedan.

“There’s a Beretta in the glove box and some brisket on the backseat.”

“You bodlim think of everything.”

“We live to serve.” He handed Gabriel the keys.“Bon voyage.”

Gabriel climbed behind the wheel and started the engine. Ten minutes later he was speeding along the E54 motorway back to Zurich.

THE Swiss are an insular and tribal people, possessing an almost animal instinct to spot outsiders. Anything out of the ordinary is reported to the police, no matter how insignificant. Indeed, the Swiss citizenry is so vigilant that foreign intelligence agencies operating inside the country regard them as a second security service. With this fact in mind, Gabriel was careful to project an image of familiarity as he walked from his car to Augustus Rolfe’s villa.

He thought of an Office operation a few years earlier. A team of agents had been sent to Switzerland to bug the flat of a suspected Arab terrorist living in a small town outside Bern. An old lady spotted the team outside the Arab’s apartment house and telephoned the police to report a group of suspicious men in her neighborhood. A few minutes later the team was in custody, and the fiasco was reported around the world.

He climbed the slope of the Rosenbühlweg. The familiar silhouette of the Rolfe villa, with its turrets and its towering portico, rose above him. A car passed, leaving two ribbons of black in the fresh snow.

He punched in the code to the keyless entry system. The buzzer howled, the dead bolt snapped back. He pushed open the gate and climbed the steps. Two minutes later he was inside Rolfe’s villa, padding across the dark entrance hall, a small flashlight in one hand, a Beretta in the other.

ON the second-floor corridor, the darkness was absolute. Gabriel moved forward through the pencil-width beam of his flashlight. The study would be on his left, Anna had said-overlooking the street, first door past the bust. Gabriel turned the knob. Locked. But of course. He removed a pair of small metal tools from his coat pocket. God, how long had it been? The Academy, a hundred years earlier. He had been a green recruit, and Shamron had stood over him the entire time, shouting abuse in his ear. “You have fifteen seconds. Your teammates are dead unless you get that door open, Gabriel!”

He got down on one knee, slipped the tools into the lock, and went to work, flashlight between his teeth. A moment later, under Gabriel’s diligent assault, the old lock gave up the fight. He got to his feet, stepped inside, and closed the door behind him.

The room smelled of woodsmoke and dog and faintly of tobacco. He lifted the flashlight and played it about the interior. Its tiny pool of light meant that he experienced the room a few square feet at a time. A sitting area furnished with eighteenth-century armchairs. A Flemish Renaissance oak writing table. Bookshelves stretching from a burnished wood floor to a molded ceiling.

Augustus Rolfe’s desk.

Strange, but it didn’t seem like the desk of a powerful man. There was an air of donnish clutter: a stack of files, a faded leather blotter, a teacup filled with paper clips, a pile of antique books. Gabriel lifted the first cover with his index finger and was greeted by the scent of ancient paper and dust. He turned the light toward the first page. Goethe.

As he closed the volume, the light fell upon a large ashtray of cut glass. A dozen cigarette butts lay haphazardly, like spent cartridges, in a bed of ash. He examined the butts more carefully. Two different brands. Most were Benson amp; Hedges, but three were Silk Cuts. The old man probably had smoked the Benson amp; Hedges, but who had smoked the Silk Cuts? Anna? No, Anna always smoked Gitanes.

He turned his attention back to the provenance. Anna had said Rolfe kept them in the bottom right-hand desk drawer in a file labeled PERSONAL CORRESPONDENCE. The drawer, like the entrance to Rolfe’s study, was locked. This time he had a key. He pulled it open and began leafing through the personal papers of Augustus Rolfe.

He came across a file labeled MAXIMILIAN. He took it between his thumb and forefinger, then hesitated. Did he have any right? It felt too much like voyeurism. Like peering through a lighted window during an evening walk through a city and seeing a couple quarreling. Or an old man sitting alone in front of a television. But what might the file reveal? What sort of things had this man saved about his son? What might Gabriel learn from it about this man Augustus Rolfe?

He pulled out the file, laid it across the open drawer, lifted the cover. Photographs, magazine clippings from the sporting pages of European newspapers, tributes from teammates, a long piece from the Zurich newspaper on the cycling accident in the Alps-“He was a good man, and I was proud to call him my son,” Augustus Rolfe, a prominent Zurich banker, said in a statement issued by his lawyer. “I will miss him more than any words could ever express.” Crisply folded, meticulously dated and labeled. Augustus Rolfe may have disagreed with his son’s chosen profession, Gabriel concluded, but he was a proud father.

Gabriel closed the file, slipped it back in its proper place, and resumed the search for PERSONAL CORRESPONDENCE. Another file caught his eye: ANNA. Again he hesitated, then drew out the file. Inside were childhood photographs of Anna playing the violin, invitations to recitals and concerts, newspaper clippings, reviews of her performances and recordings. He looked more carefully at the photographs. There were definitely two Annas-before the suicide of her mother, and after. The difference in her appearance was striking.

Gabriel closed the file and slipped it back into the drawer. Time to get back to the business at hand. He flipped through the files until he came to the one marked PERSONAL CORRESPONDENCE. He removed it, placed it on Rolfe’s desk, and lifted the cover. Letters, some handwritten, some typed on professional stationery. German, French, Italian, English-the linguistic patchwork quilt that is Switzerland. Gabriel leafed through them quickly until he came to the end of the stack. Then he went back to the beginning and repeated the process more slowly. The result was the same.

The provenance were gone.

AS Gabriel played his flashlight beam about the study, he thought of a training drill he had undergone at the Academy. An instructor had led him into a room decorated like a hotel suite, handed him a document, and given him a minute to find five suitable hiding places. Had he been given the test in Rolfe’s study instead of an ersatz hotel room, he could have come up with a hundred places to hide a document. A false floorboard, a large book, beneath a carpet or floorboard, inside a piece of furniture, locked away in a concealed wall safe. And that was only in the study. There were thousands of places in the rambling villa for Rolfe to conceal a sheaf of documents. This was a man who had built an underground bunker for his secret art collection. If Rolfe wanted to hide something, the odds of Gabriel finding it were slim.

The thought of leaving Zurich empty-handed after so difficult and treacherous a journey was galling to Gabriel. There were two possible explanations for the missing documents. Number one: They had been removed, by Rolfe or someone like Werner Müller. Number two: Rolfe had somehow misplaced them. Surely it was possible. He was an old man. Old men make mistakes. Memories fade. File labels become harder to read.

Gabriel decided to search the desk thoroughly.

There were four file drawers, two on each side, and Gabriel started with the top left. He fell into a monotonous routine: remove a single file, carefully inspect the contents, replace it, move on to the next.

It took Gabriel thirty minutes to search all four drawers.

Nothing.

He pulled open the center drawer: pens, pencils, bits of scrap paper, a bottle of glue, a staple remover. A miniature tape recorder. Gabriel picked it up and inspected it with his flashlight. There was no tape inside. He searched the drawer carefully. A tape recorder, no tapes. Odd.

He closed the drawer, sat down in Rolfe’s chair, and stared at the desk. The center drawer… something wasn’t right. He pulled it open, looked inside, closed it again. Open, close. Open, close…

THE drawer itself was about four inches deep, but the storage space was shallower. Two inches, Gabriel calculated, perhaps even less. He tried to pull the drawer completely out of the desk, but a catch prevented it from coming out. He pulled harder. Same result.

He looked at his watch. He had been in the villa forty-five minutes, probably longer than was wise. Now, he had two choices: Walk away, or trust his instincts.

He stood up, grasped the drawer with both hands, and pulled as hard as he could. The catch gave way and the drawer tumbled onto the floor, spilling the contents.

Gabriel lifted the now-empty drawer and turned it over in his hands. Solid, well-crafted, abnormally heavy. He looked carefully at the base. It was quite thick-an inch perhaps.

Walk away, or trust your instincts?

There was no neat way to go about it, not if he was going to get his answer quickly. He leaned the drawer against the side of the desk and adjusted the angle. Then he raised his foot and slammed it down. Once, twice, a third time, until the wood began to splinter.

THE base of the drawer was constructed of not one piece of wood but two, identical in dimension, one laid atop the other. Between them was a large, rectangular envelope, yellow with age, the flap secured with a bit of frayed twine. The provenance? Seemed like an awfully elaborate scheme to conceal provenance. Gabriel separated the shattered bits of wood and held the envelope in his hand. A tremor shook his fingers as he unwound the twine and pried open the flap.

He removed the contents, a sheaf of ancient flimsies, and laid them on the desk. He sorted through them carefully, as though he feared they might crumble at his touch. Kronin… pesetas… escudos… pounds. The documents were copies of currency transactions and bank transfers carried out during the war. He looked at the dates. The first of the transactions, a transfer of several thousand Swiss francs to the Union Bank of Stockholm, had occurred in February 1942. The last, a transfer of funds to the Bank of Lisbon, had taken place in June 1944.

He set aside the flimsies. The next item was a single sheet of plain white paper with no letterhead. On the left side of the page was a list of names, all German. On the right side was a corresponding list of twelve-digit numbers. Gabriel read a few lines:

Karl Meyer 551829651318

Manfred König 948628468948

Josef Fritsch 268349874625

He gathered up the flimsies and lifted the flap of the envelope. He was about to slip the papers inside when he felt something caught in the bottom corner. He reached inside and drew the objects out.

A pair of photographs.

He looked at the first one: Augustus Rolfe, young, handsome, rich, sitting in a restaurant. Judging from the state of the table, a good deal of wine had been consumed. Seated next to him was a fleshy, decadent-looking man in civilian dress with dueling scars on his cheeks. Gabriel did not recognize him.

He turned his attention to the second photograph. The setting was a terrace in an Alpine home-Rolfe, standing at the balustrade, admiring the magnificent view, accompanied by two men in uniform. Gabriel recognized them both.

One was Heinrich Himmler. The other was Adolf Hitler.

GABRIEL slipped the photographs and the documents back into the envelope. It was legal-sized, too large to fit into a pocket, so he shoved it down the front of his trousers and secured it by zipping his leather jacket. He looked at the desk. Nothing to be done about the drawer; it was broken to bits. He pushed the fragments under the seating compartment with his foot and concealed them with Rolfe’s chair. The Beretta was lying on Rolfe’s leather blotter. He dropped it into his pocket and turned to leave.

He navigated by the beam of the weak penlight. Once again, he had the sensation of experiencing the room a fragment at a time, this time in reverse order. With each movement of the light, a new piece of information: the oak writing table, the eighteenth-century armchairs, a leather ottoman…

A man standing in the doorway, with a gun pointed at Gabriel’s heart.

25

GABRIEL TOSSED the flashlight across the room, drew his Beretta, and dropped to the floor. The man in the doorway fired. The gun was silenced, but the muzzle flash was visible in the darkness. The shot ripped through the air over Gabriel’s head and shattered the window behind Rolfe’s desk. Before the man could shoot again, Gabriel rose onto one knee and fired in the direction of the muzzle flash. The shots struck their target-Gabriel knew this because he could hear the rounds tearing through tissue and shattering bone. He got to his feet and ran forward, firing as he went, the way he had been trained at the Academy. The way he had done it so many times before. When he was standing over the man, he reached down, placed the barrel into his ear, and fired one last time.

The body convulsed, then went still.

Gabriel knelt and searched the dead man’s pockets: no billfold, no keys, no money. A Glock nine-millimeter lay on the floor a few feet from the body. Gabriel slipped it into his pocket and went into the corridor.

Next to the center stairwell was an alcove with a set of tall windows overlooking the street. Gabriel looked down and saw two men pounding up the front steps. He ran across the corridor to the windows overlooking the rear garden. Outside was another man, gun drawn, feet apart, talking on a handheld radio.

As Gabriel descended the curving staircase, he ejected the spent cartridge from his Beretta and inserted the backup. He retraced the route Anna had taken the night she showed him the secret vault: through the great dining room, through the kitchen, down the back staircase, through the wine cellar, into the cutting room.

He came to a doorway with a window of paned glass that led into the garden. Gabriel pushed open the door a few inches and peered out. The man with the radio and the gun was prowling the snowy terrace. The other team had entered the house-Gabriel could hear the trample of feet on the first floor above him.

He stepped outside and trotted across the garden directly toward the man with the gun. In rapid German, he said: “You there! Did you see which way that jackass went?” The man looked at him in utter confusion. Gabriel kept moving forward. “What’s wrong with you, man? Are you deaf? Answer me!”

When the man lifted his radio to his mouth, Gabriel’s arm swung up, and he started firing. Five shots, the last into his chest from three feet away.

Gabriel looked up toward the house. He could see flashlight beams playing over the drawn curtains. Then the curtains parted and a face appeared. A shout. Hammering on glass.

Gabriel turned and sprinted across the garden until he came to a wall-seven feet in height, he guessed, with a row of wrought-iron spikes across the top. Glancing over his shoulder, he spotted the two men from the house. One was kneeling over the dead man, the other scanning the garden by the beam of a powerful flashlight.

Gabriel jumped up and grabbed hold of the metal spikes at the top of the wall. The beam of light fell on him, and someone shouted in German. He pulled himself up, flailing his feet against the wall. A shot struck the stucco, then another. Gabriel could feel sutures tearing in his hands.

He threw his leg over the top and tried to drop onto the other side, but his coat had become tangled on a spike, and he dangled there helplessly, his head exposed, blinded by the flashlight. He twisted his body violently until the spike released him, and he fell into the opposing garden.

The envelope slipped through his coat and dropped into the snow. Gabriel scooped it up, shoved it back into his trousers, and started running.

A BURST of halogen lamplight turned the night electric white. Somewhere an alarm screamed. Gabriel ran along the side of the villa until he reached another wall, this one shielding the villa from the street. He scaled it quickly and dropped onto the other side.

He found himself in a narrow street. Lights were coming on in the neighboring villas-the Swiss and their legendary vigilance. As he ran down the street, Ari Shamron’s Eleventh Commandment played in his head: Thou shalt not get caught!

He came to Krähbühlstrasse, the wide boulevard where he had parked. He sprinted down the gentle curving slope of the street until he spotted his car. He skidded to a stop and came crashing to the pavement. Two men were peering into the interior with flashlights.

As he clambered to his feet, the men trained their flashlights on him. He turned in the opposite direction and headed back up the hill. Thou shalt do anything to avoid being arrested!

He drew the Glock he had taken from the man in the study and kept running. He was beginning to tire. The cold air was searing his lungs, and his mouth tasted of rust and blood. After a few steps, he saw headlights coming down the hill: a big Audi sedan, wheels spinning on the new snow.

He glanced over his shoulder down the hill. The two men were chasing him on foot. No side streets, no alleys-he was trapped. Thou shalt shed innocent blood if necessary!

The Audi was speeding directly toward him. He stopped running and leveled the Glock in his outstretched hands. When the car fishtailed and slid to a halt a few feet away, he took aim at the silhouette behind the wheel. Before he could fire, the passenger door flew open.

“Get in, Gabriel!” Anna Rolfe shouted. “Hurry.”

SHE drove with the same intensity with which she played the violin-one hand on the steering wheel, the other gripping the stick shift. Down the Zürichberg, across Limmat, into the quiet streets of the city center. Gabriel took a long look over his shoulder.

“You can slow down now.”

She eased off the gas.

“Where did you learn to handle a car like that?”

“I was a Zurich girl with a lot of money. When I wasn’t practicing the violin, I was tearing around the Zürichsee in one of my father’s cars. I’d wrecked three by the time I was twenty-one.”

“Congratulations.”

“Bitterness doesn’t suit you, Gabriel. My cigarettes are in the console. Do me a favor and light one.”

Gabriel opened the console and took out the pack of Gitanes. He lit it with the dashboard lighter. The smoke caught at the back of his throat and he nearly choked.

Anna laughed at him. “Imagine, an Israeli who doesn’t smoke.”

“What the hell are you doing here?”

“That’s all you have to say? If I hadn’t shown up, you’d have been arrested.”

“No, if you hadn’t shown up, I’d be dead. But I still want to know what the hell you’re doing here. Did Rami give you permission to leave the villa?”

“I suspect that by now he’s probably discovered that I’m not there.”

“How did you get away?”

“I went upstairs to my studio to practice. I rolled a tape on a particularly long piece. I suppose you can guess the rest.”

“How did you get off the grounds?”

“Carlos told Rami that he was going into the village to do some marketing. I was in the back beneath a blanket.”

“It’s safe to assume several dozen members of my service are now engaged in a frantic and pointless search for you. That was a very stupid thing to do. How did you get to Zurich?”

“I flew here, of course.”

“Directly from Lisbon?”

“Yes.”

“How long have you been here?”

“About two hours.”

“Did you go inside your father’s house?”

She shook her head. “When I arrived I saw two men waiting outside in a parked car. At first I thought they might be private security. Then I realized something was wrong.”

“What did you do?”

“I didn’t feel safe waiting in the car, so I drove around the neighborhood, hoping to find you before you tried to go in. I missed you, of course. Then I heard the alarms going off.”

“Did you tell anyone you were coming?”

“No.”

“Are you sure?”

“Of course I’m sure. Why?”

“Because it explains a lot of things. It means that the villa is under constant watch. It means that they know we came back here. It means they followed me to Rome. They’ve been following me ever since.”

“What happened inside my father’s house?”

WHEN Gabriel had finished, Anna said: “Did you get the provenance at least?”

“They were gone.”

“That’s not possible.”

“Someone must have gotten to them first.”

“Did you find anything else?”

I found a photograph of your father with Adolf Hitler and Heinrich Himmler, admiring the view from the Berghof at Berchtesgaden.

“No,” Gabriel said. “I didn’t find anything else.”

“Are you sure about that? You didn’t use the opportunity to rifle through any of my father’s personal papers?”

Gabriel ignored her. “Did your father smoke?”

“Why does that matter now?”

“Just answer the question, please. Did your father smoke?”

“Yes, my father smoked!”

“What kind of cigarettes?”

“Benson and Hedges.”

“Did he ever smoke Silk Cuts?”

“He was very set in his ways.”

“What about someone else in the household?”

“Not that I know of. Why do you ask?”

“Because someone was smoking Silk Cuts in your father’s study recently.”

They came to the lake. Anna pulled to the side of the street. “Where are we going?”

“You’re going back to Portugal.”

“No, I’m not. We do this together, or not at all.” She dropped the Audi into gear. “Where are we going?”

26

SOME MEN MIGHT be squeamish about installing a voice-activated taping system in their home. Professor Emil Jacobi was not one of them. His life was his work, and he had little time for anything else; certainly nothing that might cause him any embarrassment if it was captured on audiotape.

He received a steady stream of visitors to his flat on the rue Lanterne: people with unpleasant memories of the past; stories they had heard about the war. Just last week, an old woman had told him about a train that had stopped outside her village in 1944. She and a group of friends were playing in the meadow next to the tracks when they heard moans and scratches coming from the cargo cars. When they moved closer, they saw that there were people on the train: miserable, wretched people, begging for food and water. The old woman realized now that the people were Jews-and that her country had allowed the Nazis to use its railways to ship human cargo to the death camps in the East.

If Jacobi had tried to document her story by taking handwritten notes, he would have failed to capture it all. If he had placed a tape recorder in front of her, she might have become self-conscious. It had been Jacobi’s experience that most elderly were nervous around tape recorders and video cameras. And so they had sat in the cluttered comfort of his flat like old friends, and the old woman had told her story without the distraction of a notebook or a visible tape recorder. Jacobi’s secret system had caught every word of it.

The professor was listening to a tape now. As usual, the volume was set quite loud. He found it helped to focus his concentration by blocking out the noise from the street and the students who lived in the next flat. The voice emanating from his machine was not that of the old woman. It was the voice of a man: the man who had come the previous day. Gabriel Allon. An amazing story, this tale of Augustus Rolfe and his missing collection of paintings. Jacobi had promised the Israeli he would tell no one about their discussion, but when the story broke, as Jacobi knew it eventually would, he would be perfectly positioned to write about it. It would be yet another black eye for Jacobi’s mortal enemies, the financial oligarchy of Zurich. His popularity in his native country would sink to new depths. This pleased him. Flushing sewers was dirty work.

Emil Jacobi was engrossed in the story now, as he had been the first time he had heard it; so engrossed that he failed to notice the figure who had slipped into his flat-until it was too late. Jacobi opened his mouth to call out for help, but the man smothered his cry with an iron grip. The professor spotted the glint of a knife blade arcing toward him, then felt a searing pain across the base of his throat. The last thing he saw was his killer, picking up the tape player and slipping it into his pocket as he walked out.

27

ON THE WESTERN FRINGES of Vienna, Gabriel had to grip the wheel tightly to keep his hands from shaking. He had not been back to the city since the night of the bombing-since the night of fire and blood and a thousand lies. He heard a siren and was uncertain whether it was real or just memory until the blue lights of an ambulance flashed in his mirror. He pulled to the side of the road, his heart hammering against his ribs. He remembered riding with Leah in an ambulance and praying that she would be released from the pain of her burns, no matter what the price. He remembered sitting over the shattered body of his son while, in the next room, the chief of the Austrian security service screamed at Ari Shamron for turning central Vienna into a war zone.

He pulled back into the traffic. The discipline of driving helped to settle his turbulent emotions. Five minutes later, in the Stephansdom Quarter, he stopped outside a souvenir shop. Anna opened her eyes.

“Where are you going?”

“Wait here.”

He went inside, and returned to the car two minutes later with a plastic shopping bag. He handed it to Anna. She removed both items: a pair of large sunglasses and a baseball hat withVIENNA! stenciled across the crown.

“What am I supposed to do with these?”

“Do you remember what happened at the airport in Lisbon the night you showed me your father’s missing collection?”

“It’s been a long night, Gabriel. Refresh my memory.”

“A woman stopped you and asked for your autograph.”

“It happens all the time.”

“My point exactly. Put them on.”

She placed the sunglasses over her eyes and tucked her hair beneath the hat. She examined her own appearance in the vanity mirror for a moment, then turned to look at him.

“How do I look?”

“Like a famous person trying to hide behind a pair of large sunglasses and a stupid hat,” he said wearily. “But it will have to do for now.”

He drove to a hotel on the Weihburggasse called the Kaiserin Elisabeth and checked in under the name of Schmidt. They were given a room with floors the color of honey. Anna fell onto the bed, still wearing the hat and glasses.

Gabriel went into the bathroom and looked at his face for a long time in the mirror. He lifted his right hand to his nose, smelled gunpowder and fire, and saw the faces of the two men he had killed at the Rolfe villa in Zurich. He ran warm water into the basin, washed his hands and his neck. Suddenly the bathroom was filled with ghosts-pallid, lifeless men with bullet holes in their faces and their chests. He looked down and found that the basin was filled with their blood. He wiped his hands on a towel, but it was no good-the blood still was there. Then the room began to spin, and he fell to his knees over the toilet.

WHEN he returned to the bedroom, Anna’s eyes were closed. “Are you all right?” she murmured.

“I’m going out. Don’t go anywhere. Don’t open the door for anyone but me.”

“You won’t be long, will you?”

“Not too long.”

“I’ll wait up for you,” she said, drifting closer toward sleep.

“Whatever you say.”

And then she was asleep. Gabriel covered her with a blanket and went out.

DOWNSTAIRS in the lobby, Gabriel told the officious Viennese desk clerk that Frau Schmidt was not to be disturbed. The clerk nodded briskly, as if to give the impression that he would lay down his life to prevent anyone from interrupting Frau Schmidt’s rest. Gabriel pushed a few schilling across the counter and went out.

He walked in the Stephansplatz, checking his tail for surveillance, storing faces in his memory. Then he entered the cathedral and drifted through the tourists across the nave until he came to a side altar. He looked up at the altarpiece, a depiction of the martyrdom of Saint Stephen. Gabriel had completed a restoration of the painting the night Leah’s car was bombed. His work had held up well. Only when he cocked his head to create the effect of raked lighting could he tell the difference between his inpainting and the original.

He turned and scanned the faces of the people standing behind him. He recognized none of them. But something else struck him. Each one of them was transfixed by the beauty of the altarpiece. At least something good had come of his time in Vienna. He took one last look at the painting, then left the cathedral and headed for the Jewish Quarter.

ADOLF Hitler’s barbarous dream of ridding Vienna of its Jews had largely succeeded. Before the war some two hundred thousand had lived here, many of them in the warren of streets around the Judenplatz. Now there were but a few thousand left, mainly newer arrivals from the East, and the old Jewish Quarter had been transformed into a strip of boutiques, restaurants, and nightclubs. Among Viennese it was known as the Bermuda Triangle.

Gabriel walked past the shuttered bars along the Sterngasse, then turned into a winding walkway that ended in a staircase of stone. At the top of the stairs was a heavy studded door. Next to the door was a small brass plaque: WARTIME CLAIMS AND INQUIRIES -APPOINTMENTS ONLY. He pressed the bell.

“May I help you?”

“I’d like to see Mr. Lavon, please.”

“Do you have an appointment?”

“No.”

“Mr. Lavon doesn’t accept unscheduled visitors.”

“I’m afraid it’s an emergency.”

“May I have your name, please?”

“Tell him it’s Gabriel Allon. He’ll remember me.”

THE room into which Gabriel was shown was classic Viennese in its proportions and furnishings: a high ceiling, a polished wood floor catching the light streaming through the tall windows, bookshelves sagging beneath the weight of countless volumes and files. Lavon seemed lost in it. But then, disappearing into the background was Lavon’s special gift.

At the moment, however, he was balanced precariously atop a library ladder, flipping through the contents of a bulging file and muttering to himself. The light from the windows cast a greenish glow over him, and it was then Gabriel realized that the glass was bulletproof. Lavon looked up suddenly, tipping his head downward in order to see over the pair of smudged half-moon reading glasses perched at the end of his nose. Cigarette ash dropped into the file. He seemed not to notice, because he closed the file and slipped it back into its slot on the shelf and smiled.

“Gabriel Allon! Shamron’s avenging angel. My God, what are you doing here?”

He climbed down the ladder like a man with old pains. As always, he seemed to be wearing all his clothing at once: a blue button-down shirt, a beige rollneck sweater, a cardigan, a floppy herringbone jacket that seemed a size too large. He had shaved carelessly, and wore socks but no shoes.

He held Gabriel’s hands and kissed his cheek. How long had it been? Twenty-five years, thought Gabriel. In the lexicon of the Wrath of God operation, Lavon had been anayin, a tracker. An archaeologist by training, he had stalked members of Black September, learned their habits, and devised ways of killing them. He had been a brilliant watcher, a chameleon who could blend into any surroundings. The operation took a terrible physical and psychological toll on all of them, but Gabriel remembered that Lavon had suffered the most. Working alone in the field, exposed to his enemies for long periods of time, he had developed a chronic stomach disorder that stripped thirty pounds from his lean frame. When it was over, Lavon took an assistant professorship at Hebrew University and spent his weekends on digs in the West Bank. Soon he heard other voices. Like Gabriel, he was a child of Holocaust survivors. Searching for ancient relics seemed trivial when there was so much still to be unearthed about the immediate past. He settled in Vienna and put his formidable talents to work in another way: tracking down Nazis and their looted treasure.

“So, what brings you to Vienna? Business? Pleasure?”

“Augustus Rolfe.”

“Rolfe? The banker?” Lavon lowered his head and glared at Gabriel over his glasses. “Gabriel, you weren’t the one who-” He made a gun of his right hand.

Gabriel unzipped his jacket, removed the envelope he had taken from Rolfe’s desk, and handed it to Lavon. Carefully he pried open the flap, as if he were handling a fragment of ancient ceramic, and removed the contents. He glanced at the first photograph, then the second, his face revealing nothing. Then he looked up at Gabriel and smiled.

“Well, well, Herr Rolfe takes a lovely photograph. Where did you get these, Gabriel?”

“From the old man’s desk in Zurich.”

He held up the sheaf of documents. “And these?”

“Same place.”

Lavon looked at the photographs again. “Fantastic.”

“What do they mean?”

“I need to pull a few files. I’ll have the girls get you some coffee and something to eat. We’re going to be a while.”

THEY sat across from each other at a rectangular conference table, a stack of files between them. Gabriel wondered about the people who had come before him: old men convinced the man in the flat next door was one of their tormentors at Buchenwald; children trying to pry open a numbered account in Switzerland where their father had hidden his life savings before being shipped east into the archipelago of death. Lavon picked up one of the photographs-Rolfe seated in a restaurant next to the man with dueling scars on his cheeks-and held it up for Gabriel to see.

“Do you recognize this man?”

“No.”

“His name is Walter Schellenberg, Brigadeführer SS.” Lavon took the top file from the stack and spread it on the table before him. “Walter Schellenberg was the head of Department Four of the Reich Security Main Office. Department Four handled foreign intelligence, which effectively made Schellenberg the international spymaster of the Nazi Party. He was involved in some of the most dramatic intelligence episodes of the war: the Venlo Incident, the attempt to kidnap the Duke of Windsor, and the Cicero operation. At Nuremberg he was convicted of being a member of the SS, but he received a light sentence of just six years in prison.”

“Six years? Why?”

“Because during the last months of the war he arranged for the release of a few Jews from the death camps.”

“How did he manage that?”

“He sold them.”

“So why was the spymaster of the Nazi Party having dinner with Augustus Rolfe?”

“Intelligence services the world over have one thing in common: They all run on money. Even Shamron couldn’t survive without money. But when Shamron needs money, he just lays a hand on the shoulder of a rich friend and tells him the story of how he captured Eichmann. Schellenberg had a special problem. His money was no good anywhere outside Germany. He needed a banker in a neutral country who could provide him with hard currency and then transfer that money through a dummy company or some other front to his agents. Schellenberg needed a man like Augustus Rolfe.”

Lavon picked up the documents Gabriel had taken from Rolfe’s desk. “Take this transaction. Fifteen hundred pounds sterling, wired from the accounts of Pillar Enterprises Limited to the account of a Mr. Ivan Edberg, Enskilde Bank, Stockholm, the twenty-third of October, 1943.”

Gabriel inspected the document, then slid it back across the table.

“ Sweden was neutral, of course, and a hotbed of wartime intelligence,” Lavon said. “Schellenberg surely had an agent there, if not an entire network. I suspect Mr. Edberg was one of those agents. Perhaps the leader and paymaster of the network.”

Lavon slipped the transfer order back into the pile and removed another. He peered down at it through his reading glasses, squinting from the smoke of the cigarette between his lips.

“Another transfer order: one thousand pounds sterling from the account of Pillar Enterprises Limited to a Mr. Jose Suarez, care of the Bank of Lisbon.” Lavon lowered the paper and looked up at Gabriel. “ Portugal, like Sweden, was neutral, and Lisbon was an amusement park for spies. Schellenberg operated there himself during the Duke of Windsor affair.”

“So Rolfe was Schellenberg’s secret banker. But how does that explain the photograph of Rolfe at Berchtesgaden with Himmler and Hitler?”

Lavon prepared his next cup of coffee with the reverence of a true Viennese: a precise measure of heavy cream, just enough sugar to remove the bitter edge. Gabriel thought of Lavon in a safe flat in Paris, living on mineral water and weak tea because his ravaged stomach would tolerate nothing else.

“Everything changed inside Germany after Stalingrad. Even the true believers knew it was over. The Russians were coming from the east, the invasion from the west was inevitable. Anyone who’d accumulated wealth as a result of the war wanted desperately to hang onto that wealth. And where do you think they turned?”

“The bankers of Switzerland.”

“And Augustus Rolfe would have been in a unique position to capitalize on the changing tide of the war. Based on these documents, it appears as though he was an important agent of Walter Schellenberg. I suspect the Nazi bigwigs would have held Herr Rolfe in very high esteem.”

“Someone who could be trusted to look after their money?”

“Their money. Their stolen treasures. All of it.”

“What about the list of names and the account numbers?”

“I think it’s safe to assume that those are German clients. I’ll run them through our database and see if they correspond with known members of the SS and the Nazi Party, but I suspect they’re pseudonyms.”

“Would there be any other record of the accounts in the bank’s files?”

Lavon shook his head. “Typically, the real identities of holders of numbered accounts are known by only the top officers of a bank. The more notorious the customer, the fewer people who know the name attached to the account number. If these accounts belonged to Nazis, I doubt whether anyone knew about them but Rolfe.”

“If he kept the list after all these years, does it mean the accounts still exist?”

“I suppose it’s possible. It depends a great deal on who owned them. If the holder was able to get out of Germany at the end of the war, then I would doubt the account is still active. But if the holder was arrested by the Allies-”

“-then it’s possible his money and valuables are still in the vault of the Rolfe bank.”

“Possible, but unlikely.”

Lavon gathered up the documents and photographs and slipped them back into the envelope. Then he looked up at Gabriel and said, “I’ve answered all your questions. Now, it’s time for you to answer some of mine.”

“What do you want to know?”

“Just one thing, actually,” Lavon said, holding the envelope aloft. “I’d like to know what the hell are you doing with the secret files of Augustus Rolfe.”

LAVON liked nothing better than a good story. It had always been that way. During the Black September operation, he and Gabriel had shared a kinship of the sleepless: Lavon because of his stomach, Gabriel because of his conscience. Gabriel thought of him now, an emaciated figure sitting cross-legged on the floor, asking Gabriel what it felt like to kill. And Gabriel had told him-because he had needed to tell someone. “There is no God,” Lavon had said. “There is only Shamron. Shamron decides who shall live and who shall die. And he sends boys like you to wreak his terrible vengeance.”

Now, as then, Lavon did not look at Gabriel as he told his story. He stared down at his hands and turned over his cigarette lighter between his nimble little fingers until Gabriel had finished.

“Do you have a list of the paintings that were taken from the secret vault?”

“I do, but I’m not sure how accurate it is.”

“There’s a man in New York. He’s dedicated his life to the subject of Nazi art-looting. He knows the contents of every stolen collection, every transaction, every piece that’s been recovered, every piece that’s still missing. If anyone knows anything about the collecting habits of Augustus Rolfe, it’s him.”

“Quietly, Eli. Very quietly.”

“My dear Gabriel, I know of no other way.”

They pulled on their coats, and Lavon walked him across the Judenplatz.

“Does the daughter know any of this?”

“Not yet.”

“I don’t envy you. I’ll call you when I hear something from my friend in New York. In the meantime, go to your hotel and get some rest. You don’t look well.”

“I can’t remember the last time I slept.”

Lavon shook his head and laid his small hand on Gabriel’s shoulder. “You’ve killed again, Gabriel. I can see it in your face. It’s the stain of death. Go to your room and wash your face.”

“You be a good boy and watch your back.”

“I used to watch yours.”

“You were the best.”

“I’ll let you in on a little secret, Gabriel. I still am.”

And with that Lavon turned and vanished into the crowd on the Judenplatz.

GABRIEL walked to the little trattoria where he had eaten his last meal with his Leah and Dani. For the first time in ten years, he stood on the spot where the car had exploded. He looked up and saw the spire of Saint Stephen’s, floating above the rooftops. A wind rose suddenly; Gabriel turned up the collar of his coat. What had he expected? Grief? Rage? Hatred? Much to his surprise, he felt nothing much at all. He turned and walked back to the hotel in the rain.

A COPY of Die Presse had been slipped under the door and lay on the floor in the alcove. Gabriel scooped it up and entered the bedroom. Anna was still asleep. At some point, she had removed her clothing, and in the dim light he could see the luminous skin of her shoulder glowing against the bedding. Gabriel dropped the newspaper on the bed next to her.

Exhaustion pounced on him. He needed to sleep.But where? On the bed? Next to Anna? Next to the daughter of Augustus Rolfe? How much did she know? What secrets did her father keep from her? What secrets had she kept from Gabriel?

He thought of the words Julian Isherwood had said to him in London: “Assume at all times that she knows more about her father and his collection than she’s telling you. Daughters tend to be very protective of their fathers, even when they think their fathers are complete bastards.” No, he thought-he would not be sleeping next to Anna Rolfe. In the closet he found an extra blanket and a spare pillow, and he made a crude bed for himself on the floor. It was like lying on a slab of cold marble. He reached up and blindly patted the duvet, searching for the newspaper. Quietly, so as not to wake her, he opened it. On the front page was a story about the murder in Lyons of the Swiss writer Emil Jacobi.

28

IT WAS DUSK when Eli Lavon telephoned Gabriel’s hotel room. Anna stirred, then drifted back into an uneasy sleep. During the afternoon, she had kicked away her blankets, and her body lay exposed to the cold air seeping through the half-open window. Gabriel covered her and went downstairs. Lavon was sitting in the parlor, drinking coffee. He poured some for Gabriel and handed him the cup.

“I saw your friend Emil Jacobi on the television today,” Lavon said. “Seems someone walked into his apartment in Lyons and slashed his throat.”

“I know. What did you hear from New York?”

“It’s believed that between 1941 and 1944, Augustus Rolfe acquired a large number of Impressionist and Modern paintings from galleries in Lucerne and Zurich -paintings that a few years before had hung in Jewish-owned galleries and homes in Paris.”

“What a surprise,” Gabriel murmured. “A large number? How many?”

“Unclear.”

“He purchased them?”

“Not exactly. It’s thought that the paintings acquired by Rolfe were part of several large exchanges carried out in Switzerland by agents of Hermann Göring.”

Gabriel remembered things Julian Isherwood had told him about the ravenous collecting habits of the Reichsmarschall. Göring had enjoyed unfettered access to the Jeu de Paume, where the confiscated art of France was stored. He had taken possession of hundreds of Modern works to use as barter for the Old Masters works he preferred.

“It’s rumored that Rolfe was allowed to purchase the paintings for only a nominal sum,” Lavon said. “Something far below their fair value.”

“So if that were the case, the acquisitions would have been entirely legal under Swiss law. Rolfe could say that he purchased them in good faith. And even if the paintings were stolen property, he would be under no legal obligation to return them.”

“So it would appear. The question we should be asking is this: Why was Augustus Rolfe allowed to buy paintings that passed through the hands of Hermann Göring at bargain-basement prices?”

“Does your friend in New York have an answer to that question?”

“No, but you do.”

“What are you talking about, Eli?”

“The photographs and the bank documents you found in his desk. His relationship with Walter Schellenberg. The Rolfe family collected for generations. Rolfe was well connected. He knew what was going on across the border in France, and he wanted a piece of the action.”

“And Walter Schellenberg needed some way to compensate his private banker in Zurich.”

“Indeed,” Lavon said. “Payment for services rendered.”

Gabriel sat back in his chair and closed his eyes.

“What next, Gabriel?”

“It’s time to have a conversation I’ve been dreading.”

WHEN Gabriel went back upstairs to the room, Anna was beginning to awaken. He shook her shoulder gently, and she sat up with a start, like a child confused by strange surroundings. She asked for the time, and he told her it was early evening.

When she was fully conscious, he pulled a chair to the end of the bed and sat down. He left the lights off; he had no wish to see her face. She sat upright, her legs crossed, her shoulders wrapped in bedding. She was staring at him-even in the darkness, Gabriel could see her eyes locked on him.

He told her about the origins of her father’s secret collection. He told her the things he had learned from Emil Jacobi and that the professor had been killed the previous night in his apartment in Lyons. Finally, he told her about the documents he had found in her father’s desk-the documents linking him to Hitler’s spymaster, Walter Schellenberg.

When he was finished, he laid the photographs on the bed and went into the bathroom to give her a moment of privacy. He heard the click of the bedside lamp and saw light seeping beneath the bathroom door. He ran water in the sink and counted slowly in his head. When an appropriate amount of time had passed, he went back into the bedroom. He found her coiled into a ball, her body silently convulsing, her hand clutching the photograph of her father, admiring the view at Berchtesgaden with Adolf Hitler and Heinrich Himmler.

Gabriel pulled it from her grasp before she could destroy it. Then he placed his hand on her head and stroked her hair. Anna’s weeping finally became audible. She choked and began to cough, a heavy smoker’s cough that left her gasping for breath.

Finally, she looked up at Gabriel. “If my mother ever saw thatpicture -” She hesitated, her mouth open, tears streaming down her cheeks. “She would have-”

But Gabriel pressed the palm of his hand against her lips before she could utter the words. He didn’t want her to say the rest. There was no need. If her mother had seen that picture, she would have killed herself, he thought. She would have dug her own grave, put a gun into her mouth, and killed herself.

THIS time it was Anna’s turn to retreat into the bathroom. When she returned she was calm, but her eyes were raw, and her skin was without color. She sat at the end of the bed with the photographs and documents in her hand. “What’s this?”

“It looks like a list of numbered accounts.”

“Whose numbered accounts?”

“The names are German. We can only guess at who they really are.”

She studied the list carefully, brow furrowed.

“My mother was born on Christmas Day, 1933. Did I ever tell you that?”

“Your mother’s birth date has never come up between us, Anna. Why is it relevant now?”

She handed him the list. “Look at the last name on the list.”

Gabriel took it from her. His eyes settled on the final name and number: Alois Ritter 251233126.

He looked up. “So?”

“Isn’t it interesting that a man with the same initials as my father has an account number in which the first six digits match my mother’s birthday?”

Gabriel looked at the list again: Alois Ritter… AR… 251233… Christmas Day, 1933…

He lowered the paper and looked at Anna. “What about the last three numbers? Do they mean anything to you?”

“I’m afraid they don’t.”

Gabriel looked at the numbers and closed his eyes. 126… Somewhere, at some point, he was certain he had seen them in connection with this case. He had been cursed with a flawless memory. He never forgot anything. The brushstrokes he had used to heal the painting of Saint Stephen in the cathedral. The tune that had been playing on the radio the night he had fled the Niederdorf after killing Ali Hamidi. The smell of olives on Leah’s breath when he had kissed her good-bye for the last time.

Then, after a moment, the place where he had seen the number 126.

ANNA carried a picture of her brother always. It was the last photo ever taken of him-leading a stage of the Tour of Switzerland the afternoon of his death. Gabriel had seen the same photograph in the desk of Augustus Rolfe. He looked at the number attached to the frame of the bicycle and the back of his jersey: 126.

Anna said, “It looks like we’re going back to Zurich.”

“We have to do something about your passport. And your appearance.”

“What’s wrong with my passport?”

“It has your name in it.”

“And my appearance?”

“Absolutely nothing. That’s the problem.”

He picked up the telephone and dialed.

THE girl called Hannah Landau came to the hotel room at ten o’clock that night. She wore bangles on her wrists and smelled of jasmine. The case hanging from her arm was not unlike the one Gabriel used for his paintbrushes and pigments. She spoke to Gabriel for a moment, then drew Anna into the bathroom by the hand and closed the door.

One hour later, Anna emerged. Her shoulder-length blond hair had been cropped short and dyed black; her green eyes had been turned blue by cosmetic lenses. The transformation was truly remarkable. It was as though she were another woman.

“Do you approve?” Hannah Landau asked.

“Take the picture.”

The Israeli girl snapped a half-dozen photographs of Anna with a Polaroid camera and laid the prints on the bed for Gabriel to see. When they had finished developing, Gabriel said, “That one.”

Hannah shook her head. “No, I think that one.”

She snatched up the picture without waiting for Gabriel’s approval and returned to the bathroom. Anna sat down at the vanity and spent a long time examining her appearance in the mirror.

Twenty minutes later, Hannah came out. She showed her work to Gabriel, then walked across the room and dropped it on the vanity in front of Anna. “Congratulations, Miss Rolfe. You are now a citizen of Austria.”

29

HALFWAY BETWEEN the Hauptbahnhof and Zürichsee is the epicenter of Swiss banking, the Paradeplatz. The twin headquarters of Credit Suisse and the Union Bank of Switzerland glare at each other like prizefighters over the broad expanse of gray brick. They are the two giants of Swiss banking and among the most powerful in the world. In their shadow, up and down the length of the Bahnhofstrasse, are other big banks and influential financial institutions, their locations clearly marked by bright signs and polished glass doors. But scattered in the quiet side streets and alleys between the Bahnhofstrasse and Sihl River are the banks few people notice. They are the private chapels of Swiss banking, places where men can worship or confess their sins in absolute secrecy. Swiss law forbids these banks from soliciting for deposits. They are free to call themselves banks if they wish, but they are not required to do so. Difficult to locate, easy to miss, they are tucked inside modern office blocks or in the rooms of centuries-old town houses. Some employ several dozen workers; some only a handful. They are private banks in every sense of the word. This is where, the following morning, Gabriel and Anna Rolfe began their search.

She threaded her arm through Gabriel’s and pulled him along the Bahnhofstrasse. This was her town; she was in charge now. Gabriel watched the passing faces for signs of recognition. If Anna was going to be noticed anywhere in the world, it would be here. No one gave her a second look. Hannah Landau’s rapid makeover seemed to be working.

“Where do we start?” Gabriel asked.

“Like most Swiss bankers, my father maintained professional accounts in other Swiss banks.”

“Correspondent accounts?”

“Exactly. We’ll start with the ones where I know he’d done business in the past.”

“What if the account isn’t in Zurich? What if it’s in Geneva?”

“My father was a Zuricher through and through. He’d never even consider handing over his money or his possessions to a Frenchman in Geneva.”

“Even if we find the account, there’s no guarantee we’re going to have access to it.”

“That’s true. The bankers make the accounts only as secret as the account-holder wants. We may be allowed access with just a number. We may need a password. We might be shown the door. But it’s worth a try, isn’t it? Let’s start over there.”

Without warning she changed direction, darting across the Bahnhofstrasse in front of a speeding tram, pulling Gabriel by the hand. Then she led him into a smaller street, the Bärengasse, and stopped before a simple doorway. Above the doorway was a security camera, and mounted on the stone wall next to it was a brass plaque, so small it was nearly unnoticeable: HOFFMAN amp;WECK,BÄRENGASSE 43.

She pressed the bell and waited to be admitted. Five minutes later, they were back on the street again, walking to the next bank on Anna’s list. There the performance took slightly longer-seven minutes by Gabriel’s estimate-but the result was the same: back on the street, empty-handed.

And on it went. Each performance was a slight variation of the same theme. After enduring a moment of scrutiny through the security camera, they would be admitted into a vestibule, where an officer of the bank would greet them cautiously. Anna did all the talking, conducting each encounter in brisk but polite Züridütsch. Finally, they would be escorted to the sacristy, the hallowed inner office where the secret records were kept, and seated in chairs before the banker’s desk. After a few meaningless pleasantries, there would be a discreet clearing of the throat, a polite reminder that time was being wasted, and on the Bahnhofstrasse time was certainly money.

Then Anna would say: “I’d like access to the account of Herr Alois Ritter.” A pause, a few taps on a computer keyboard, a long gaze into a glowing monitor. “I’m sorry, but it appears we have no account in the name of Alois Ritter.”

“Are you certain?”

“Yes, quite certain.”

“Thank you. I apologize for wasting your valuable time.”

“Not at all. Take our card. Perhaps you’ll require our services in the future.”

“You’re very kind.”

After visiting eleven banks, they had coffee in a small restaurant called Café Brioche. Gabriel was getting nervous. They had been traipsing around the Bahnhofstrasse for nearly two hours. They could not go unnoticed for long.

The next stop was Becker amp; Puhl, where they were greeted by Herr Becker himself. He was starched and fussy and very bald. His office was drab and as sterile as an operating room. As he stared into his computer monitor, Gabriel could see the ghostly reflections of names and numbers scrolling across the polished lenses of his rimless spectacles.

After a moment of quiet contemplation, he looked up and said, “Account number, please.”

Anna recited it from memory: 251233126.

Becker tapped the keyboard. “Password?”

Gabriel felt his chest tighten. He looked up and noticed Herr Becker eyeing him over the computer terminal.

Anna cleared her throat gently and said: “Adagio.”

“Follow me, please.”

THE little banker escorted them from his office to a high-ceilinged conference room with paneled walls and a rectangular smoked-glass table. “Your privacy can be better assured this way,” he said. “Please, make yourself comfortable. I’ll bring you the contents of the account in a few moments.”

When Becker returned, he was carrying a metal safe-deposit box. “According to the covenant on the account, anyone who presents the proper account number and password is permitted access to the deposit boxes,” Becker said as he slid the box onto the tabletop. “I possess all the keys.”

“I understand,” said Anna.

Becker whistled tunelessly as he removed a heavy ring of keys from his pocket and selected the appropriate one. When he found it, he held it aloft to check the engraving, then inserted it into the lock and lifted the lid. Instantly, the air smelled of decaying paper.

Becker stepped back to a respectful distance. “There is a second safe-deposit box. I’m afraid it’s rather large. Do you wish to see that one as well?”

Gabriel and Anna looked at each other across the table and at the same time said: “Yes.”

GABRIEL waited for Becker to leave the room before lifting the lid. There were sixteen in all, neatly rolled, shrouded in protective coverings: Monet, Picasso, Degas, van Gogh, Manet, Toulouse-Lautrec, Renoir, Bonnard, Cézanne, a stunning nude in repose by Vuillard. Even Gabriel, a man used to working with priceless art, was overwhelmed by the sheer volume of it. How many people had searched for these very pieces? How many years? How many tears had been shed over their loss? And here they were, locked in a safe-deposit box, in a vault beneath the Bahnhofstrasse. How fitting. How perfectly logical.

Anna resumed her search of the smaller box. She lifted the lid and began removing the contents. First came the cash-Swiss francs, French francs, dollars, pounds, marks-which she handled with the ease of someone used to money. Next came an accordion file folder filled with documents, and finally a stack of letters, bound by a pale-blue elastic band.

She loosened the band, laid it on the table, and began flipping through the stack of envelopes with her long, agile fingers. Forefinger, middle finger, forefinger, middle finger, pause… Forefinger, middle finger, forefinger, middle finger, pause… She pulled one envelope from the stack, turned it over in her hand, tested the flap to make certain it was still sealed, then held it up for Gabriel to see.

“You might be interested in this.”

“What is it?”

“I don’t know,” she said. “But it’s addressed to you.”

IT was the personal stationery of a man from another time: pale gray in color, A4 in size, AUGUSTUS ROLFE centered at the top, no other superfluous information such as a fax number or an e-mail address. Only a date: one day before Gabriel arrived in Zurich. The note was rendered in English, handwritten by a man no longer capable of producing legible handwriting. The result was that it might have been written in almost any language using any alphabet. With Anna looking over his shoulder, Gabriel managed to decipher the text.

Dear Gabriel,

I hope you do not find it presumptuous that I have chosen to address you by your real name, but I have known your true identity for some time and have been an admirer of your work, both as an art restorer and as a guardian of your people. When one is a Swiss banker, one hears things.

If you are reading this note, it certainly means that I am dead. It also means that you have probably uncovered a great deal of information about my life-information that I had hoped to convey to you personally. I will attempt to do that now, posthumously.

As you know by now, you were not brought to my villa in Zurich to clean my Raphael. I made contact with your service for one reason: I wanted you to take possession of my second collection-the secret collection in the underground chamber of my villa which, I trust, you are aware of-and return the works to their rightful owners. If the rightful owners could not be located, it was my wish that the paintings be hung in museums in Israel. I turned to your service because I preferred that the matter be handled quietly, so as not to bring additional shame on my family or my country.

The paintings were acquired with a veneer of legality but quite unjustly. When I “purchased” them, I was aware that they had been confiscated from the collections of Jewish dealers and collectors in France. Gazing upon them has given me untold hours of pleasure over the years, but like a man who lies with a woman not his own, I have been left with the ache of guilt. It was my wish to return those paintings before my death-to atone for my misdeeds in this life before moving on to the next. Ironically, I found inspiration in the foundation of your religion. On Yom Kippur, it is not enough for one to feel sorry for the foul deeds one has done. To achieve forgiveness, one must go to the injured parties and make amends. I found particular relevance in Isaiah. A sinner asks God: “Why, when we fasted, did You not see? When we starved our bodies, did You pay no heed?” And God replies: “Because on your fast day you see to your business and oppress all your laborers! Because you fast in strife and contention, and you strike with a wicked fist!”

My greed during the war was as boundless as my guilt is now. There are sixteen paintings in this bank. They represent the rest of my secret collection. Please do not leave without them. There are people in Switzerland who want the past to remain exactly where it is-entombed in the bank vaults of the Bahnhofstrasse-and they will stop at nothing to achieve that end. They think of themselves as patriots, as guardians of the Swiss ideal of neutrality and fierce independence. They are intensely hostile to outsiders, especially those that they regard as a threat to their survival. Once, I considered these men my friends-another of my many mistakes. Unfortunately, they became aware of my plans to relinquish the collection. They sent a man from the security services to frighten me. It is because of his visit that I am writing this letter. It is because of his masters that I am now dead. One final thing. If you are in contact with my daughter, Anna, please take care that no harm comes to her. She has suffered enough because of my folly.

Sincerely,

Augustus Rolfe

THE little banker was waiting outside in the anteroom. Gabriel signaled him through the glass door, and he entered the viewing room. “May I help you?”

“When was the last time this account was accessed?”

“I’m sorry, sir, but that information is privileged.”

Anna said, “We need to remove a few items. Would you happen to have a bag of any kind?”

“Regrettably, we do not. We’re a bank, not a department store.”

“May we have the box?”

“I’m afraid there will be a fee.”

“That’s fine.”

“A rather substantial fee.”

Anna pointed to the stack of cash on the tabletop.

“Do you have a currency preference?”

30

IN A BAKERY five miles north of Zurich, Gabriel made a telephone call and bought a Dinkelbrot. When he returned to the car, he found Anna reading the letter her father had written the night before his murder. Her hands were shaking. Gabriel started the engine and pulled back onto the motorway. Anna folded the letter, slipped it back into the envelope, then placed the envelope in the safe-deposit box. The box containing the paintings lay on the backseat. Gabriel switched on the wipers. Anna leaned her head against the window and watched the water streaking across the glass.

“Who did you call?”

“We’re going to need some help getting out of the country.”

“Why? Who’s going to stop us?”

“The same people who killed your father. And Müller. And Emil Jacobi.”

“How will they find us?”

“You entered the country on your own passport last night. Then you rented this car in your own name. It’s a small town. We should act on the assumption that they know we’re in the country and that someone saw us on the Bahnhofstrasse, despite your new appearance.”

“Who’s they, Gabriel?”

He thought of Rolfe’s letter. There are people in Switzerland who want the past to remain exactly where it is-entombed in the bank vaults of the Bahnhofstrasse-and they will stop at nothing to achieve that end.

What the hell was he trying to say? People in Switzerland… Rolfe knew exactly who they were, but even in death, the secretive old Swiss banker couldn’t reveal too much. Still, the clues and the circumstantial evidence were there. Through the use of conjecture and educated guesses, Gabriel might be able to fill in the pieces the old man had left out.

Instinctively, he approached the problem as though it were a painting in need of restoration-a painting that, unfortunately, had suffered significant losses over the centuries. He thought of a Tintoretto he had once restored, a version of The Baptism of Christ that the Venetian master had painted for a private chapel. It was Gabriel’s first job after the bombing in Vienna, and he had deliberately sought out something difficult in which to lose himself. The Tintoretto was just that. Vast portions of the original painting had been lost over the centuries. Indeed, there were more blank spots on the canvas than those covered with pigment. Gabriel effectively had to repaint the entire work, incorporating the small patches of the original. Perhaps he could do the same with this case: repaint the entire story around the few patches of fact that were known to him.

Perhaps it went something like this…

Augustus Rolfe, a prominent Zurich banker, decides to give up his collection of Impressionist paintings, a collection he knows contains works confiscated from Jews in France. In keeping with his character, Rolfe wishes to conduct this transaction quietly, so he contacts Israeli intelligence and asks for a representative to be sent to Zurich. Shamron suggests Gabriel meet with Rolfe at his villa, using the restoration of the Raphael as cover for the visit.

Unfortunately, they became aware of my plans to relinquish the collection…

Somewhere along the line, Rolfe makes a mistake, and his plan to hand over the paintings to Israel is discovered by someone who wishes to stand in his way.

They think of themselves as patriots, as guardians of the Swiss ideal of neutrality and fierce independence. They are intensely hostile to outsiders, especially those that they regard as threats to their survival…

Who would feel threatened by the prospect of a Swiss banker handing over an ill-gotten collection of paintings to Israel? Other Swiss bankers with similar collections? Gabriel tried to look at it from their perspective-the perspective of those “guardians of the Swiss ideal of neutrality and fierce independence.” What would have happened if it became public knowledge that Augustus Rolfe possessed so many paintings thought to have been lost forever? The outcry would have been deafening. The world’s Jewish organizations would have descended on the Bahnhofstrasse, demanding that the bank vaults be opened. Nothing short of a nationwide systematic search would have been acceptable. If you were one of these so-called guardians of the Swiss ideal, it might have been easier to kill a man and steal his collection than face uncomfortable new questions about the past.

They sent a man from the security services to frighten me…

Gabriel thought of the Silk Cut cigarettes he had found in the ashtray on the desk in Rolfe’s study.

… a man from the security services…

Gerhardt Peterson.

They meet in the quiet of Rolfe’s Zurich study and discuss the situation like reasonable Swiss gentlemen, Rolfe smoking his Benson amp; Hedges, Peterson his Silk Cuts. “Why hand over the paintings now, Herr Rolfe? So many years have gone by. There’s nothing that can be done now to change the past.” But Rolfe doesn’t budge, so Peterson arranges with Werner Müller to steal the paintings.

Rolfe knows that Gabriel is coming the next day, but he’s concerned enough to write a letter and leave it in his secret account. He tries to throw off a false trail. Using a telephone he knows is tapped, he makes an appointment to be in Geneva the next morning. Then he makes arrangements for Gabriel to let himself into the villa and he waits.

But at 3A.M., the security system at the villa suddenly goes down. Peterson’s team enters the house. Rolfe is killed, the paintings are taken. Six hours later, Gabriel arrives at the villa and discovers Rolfe’s body. During the interrogation, Peterson realizes how the old man planned to surrender his collection. He also realizes that Rolfe’s plan had progressed further than he ever imagined. He releases Gabriel, warns him never to set foot on Swiss soil again, and puts him under surveillance. Perhaps he places Anna under surveillance too. When Gabriel begins his investigation, Peterson knows it. He launches a cleanup operation. Werner Müller is killed in Paris and his gallery destroyed. Gabriel is seen meeting with Emil Jacobi in Lyons, and three days later Jacobi is murdered.

Anna tore the end off the loaf of Dinkelbrot. “Who’s ‘they’?” she repeated.

Gabriel wondered how long he had been silent, how many miles he had driven.

“I’m not sure,” he said. “But perhaps it went something like this.”

“DOyou really think it’s possible, Gabriel?”

“Actually, it’s the onlylogical explanation.”

“My God, I think I’m going to be sick. I want to get out of this country.”

“So do I.”

“So if your theory is correct, there’s still one more question to be answered.”

“What’s that?”

“Where are the paintings now?”

“The same place they’ve always been.”

“Where, Gabriel?”

“Here in Switzerland.”

31

THREE MILES from the German border, at the end of a narrow valley dotted with logging villages, stands drab little Bargen, famous in Switzerland if for no other reason than that it is the northernmost town in the country. Just off the motorway is a gas station and a market with a gravel parking lot. Gabriel shut down the car engine, and there they waited in the steel afternoon light.

“How long before they get here?”

“I don’t know.”

“I have to pee.”

“You have to hold it.”

“I always wondered how I would react in a situation like this, and now I have my answer. Faced with danger, a life-and-death situation, I’m overcome by an uncontrollable need to urinate.”

“You have incredible powers of concentration. Use them.”

“Is that what you would do?”

“I never urinate.”

She swatted his arm, gently, so as not to hurt his damaged hand.

“I heard you in the bathroom in Vienna. I heard you throwing up. You act as though nothing bothers you. But you’re human after all, Gabriel Allon.”

“Why don’t you smoke a cigarette? Maybe that will help you think of something else.”

“How did it feel to kill those men in my father’s house?”

Gabriel thought of Eli Lavon. “I didn’t have much time to consider the morality or the consequences of my actions. If I hadn’t killed them, they would have killed me.”

“I suppose it’s possible they were the ones who killed my father.”

“Yes, it’s possible.”

“Then I’m glad you killed them. Is that wrong for me to think that way?”

“No, it’s perfectly natural.”

She took his advice and lit a cigarette. “So now you know all the dirty secrets of my family. But today I realized that I really don’t know a thing about you.”

“You know more about me than most people do.”

“I know a little about what you do -but nothing about you. ”

“That’s as it should be.”

“Oh, come on, Gabriel. Are you really as cold and distant as you pretend to be?”

“I’ve been told I have a problem with preoccupation.”

“Ah! That’s a start. Tell me something else.”

“What do you want to know?”

“You wear a wedding ring. Are you married?”

“Yes.”

“Do you live in Israel?”

“I live in England.”

“Do you have children?”

“We had a son, but he was killed by a terrorist’s bomb.” He looked at her coldly. “Is there anything else you’d like to know about me, Anna?”

HE supposed he did owe her something, after everything she had surrendered about herself and her father. But there was something else. He suddenly found that he actuallywanted her to know. And so he told her about a night in Vienna, ten years earlier, when his enemy, a Palestinian terrorist named Tariq al-Hourani, planted a bomb beneath his car-a bomb that was meant to destroy his family because the Palestinian knew it would hurt Gabriel much more than killing him.

It had happened after dinner. Leah had been edgy throughout the meal, because the television above the bar was showing pictures of Scud missiles raining down on Tel Aviv. Leah was a good Israeli girl; she couldn’t stand the thought of eating pasta in a pleasant little Italian restaurant in Vienna while her mother was sitting in her flat in Tel Aviv with packing tape on the windows and a gas mask over her face.

After dinner they walked through drifting snow to Gabriel’s car. He strapped Dani into his safety seat, then kissed his wife and told her that he would be working late. It was a job for Shamron: an Iraqi intelligence officer who was plotting to kill Jews. This he didn’t tell Anna Rolfe.

When he turned and walked away, the car engine tried to turn over and hesitated, because the bomb Tariq had placed there was drawing its power from the battery. He turned and shouted for Leah to stop, but she must not have heard him, because she turned the key a second time.

Some primeval instinct to protect the young made him rush to Dani first, but he was already dead, his body blown to pieces. So he went to Leah and pulled her from the flaming wreckage. She would survive, though it might have been better had she not. Now she lived in a psychiatric hospital in the south of England, afflicted with a combination of post-traumatic stress syndrome and psychotic depression. She had never spoken to Gabriel since that night in Vienna.

This he didn’t tell Anna Rolfe.

“IT must have been difficult for you-being back in Vienna.”

“It was the first time.”

“Where did you meet her?”

“At school.”

“Was she an artist too?”

“She was much better than I am.”

“Was she beautiful?”

“She was very beautiful. Now she has scars.”

“We all have scars, Gabriel.”

“Not like Leah.”

“Why did the Palestinian plant the bomb beneath the car?”

“Because I killed his brother.”

Before she could ask another question, a Volvo truck pulled into the parking lot and flashed its lights. Gabriel started the car and followed it to the edge of a pine grove outside the town. The driver hopped down from the cab and quickly pulled open the rear door. Gabriel and Anna got out of their car, Anna holding the small safe-deposit box, Gabriel the one containing the paintings. He paused briefly to hurl the car keys deep into the trees.

The container of the truck was filled with office furniture: desks, chairs, bookshelves, file cabinets. The driver said, “Go to the front of the cabin, lie down on the floor, and cover yourself with those extra freight blankets.”

Gabriel went first, clambering over the furniture, the deposit box in his arms. Anna followed. At the front of the cabin, there was just enough room for them to sit with their knees beneath their chins. When Anna was in place, Gabriel covered them both with the blanket. The darkness was absolute.

The truck teetered onto the road, and for several minutes they sped along the motorway. Gabriel could feel the tire spray on the undercarriage. Anna began to hum softly.

“What are you doing?”

“I always hum when I’m scared.”

“I’m not going to let anything happen to you.”

“You promise?”

“I promise,” he said. “So what were you humming?”

“ ‘The Swan’ from The Carnival of Animals by Camille Saint-Saëns.”

“Will you play it for me sometime?”

“No,” she said.

“Why not?”

“Because I never play for my friends.”

TEN minutes later: the border. The truck joined a queue of vehicles waiting to make the crossing into Germany. It crept forward a few inches at a time: accelerate, brake, accelerate,brake. Their heads rolled back and forth like a pair of children’s toys. Each touch of the brake produced a deafening screech of protest; each press of the throttle another blast of poisonous diesel fumes. Anna leaned her cheek against his shoulder and whispered, “Now I thinkI’m going to be sick.” Gabriel squeezed her hand.

ON the other side of the border another car was waiting, a dark-blue Ford Fiesta with Munich registration. Ari Shamron’s truck driver dropped them and continued on his synthetic journey to nowhere. Gabriel loaded the safe-deposit boxes into the trunk and started driving-the E41 to Stuttgart, the E52 to Karlsruhe, the E35 to Frankfurt. Once during the night he stopped to telephone Tel Aviv on an emergency line, and he spoke briefly with Shamron.

At 2A.M. they arrived in the Dutch market town of Delft, a few miles inland from the coast. Gabriel could drive no farther. His eyes burned, his ears were ringing with exhaustion. In eight hours, a ferry would leave from Hoek van Holland for the English port of Harwich, and Gabriel and Anna would be on it, but for now he needed a bed and a few hours of rest, so they drove through the streets of the old town looking for a hotel.

He found one, on the Vondelstraat, within sight of the spire of the Nieuwe Kerk. Anna handled the formalities at the front desk while Gabriel waited in the tiny parlor with the two safe-deposit boxes. A moment later, they were escorted up a narrow staircase to an overheated room with a peaked ceiling and a gabled window, which Gabriel immediately opened.

He placed the boxes in the closet; then he pulled off his shoes and stretched out on the bed. Anna slipped into the bathroom, and a moment later Gabriel heard the comforting sound of water splashing against enamel. The cold night air blew through the open window. Scented with the North Sea, it caressed his face. He permitted himself to close his eyes.

A few minutes later Anna came out of the bathroom. A burst of light announced her arrival; then she reached out and threw the wall switch, and the room was in darkness again, except for the weak glow of streetlamps seeping through the window.

“Are you awake?”

“No.”

“Aren’t you going to sleep on the floor, the way you did in Vienna?”

“I can’t move.”

She lifted the blanket and crawled into bed next to him.

Gabriel said, “How did you know the password was ‘adagio’?”

“Albinoni’s “Adagio” was one of the first pieces I learned to play. For some reason, it remained my father’s favorite.” Her lighter flared in the darkness. “My father wanted forgiveness for his sins. He wanted absolution. He was willing to turn to you for that but not to me. Why didn’t my father ask me for forgiveness?”

“He probably didn’t think you’d give it to him.”

“It sounds as though you speak from experience. Has your wife ever forgiven you?”

“No, I don’t think she has.”

“And what about you? Have you ever forgiven yourself?”

“I wouldn’t call it forgiveness.”

“What would you call it?”

“Accommodation. I’ve reached accommodation with myself.”

“My father died without absolution. He probably deserved that. But I want to finish what he set out to do. I want to get those paintings back and send them to Israel.”

“So do I.”

“How?”

“Go to sleep, Anna.”

Which she did. Gabriel lay awake, waiting for the dawn, listening to the gulls on the canal and the steady rhythm of Anna’s breathing. No demons tonight, no nightmares-the guiltless sleep of a child. Gabriel did not join her. He wasn’t ready to sleep yet. When the paintings were locked away in Julian Isherwood’s vault-then he would sleep.