The Messenger Read online

  “Don’t be ridiculous. You’re the most qualified man for the job. You’ll be my boss, Uzi.”

  “Your boss? Please. No one is your boss, Gabriel. Only the old man.” Navot’s expression turned suddenly grave. “How is he? I hear it’s not good.”

  “He’s going to be fine,” Gabriel assured him.

  They lapsed into silence as the waiter came to the table and cleared away the dishes. When he was gone again, Gabriel gave the file folder to Navot, who slipped it back into his briefcase.

  “So how are you going to play it with Hannah Weinberg?”

  “I’m going to ask her to give up a painting that’s worth eighty million dollars. I have to tell her the truth—or at least some version of the truth. And then we’ll have to deal with the security consequences.”

  “What about the approach? Are you going to dance for a while or go straight in for the kill?”

  “I don’t dance, Uzi. I’ve never had time for dancing.”

  “At least you won’t have any trouble convincing her who you are. Thanks to the French security service, everyone in Paris knows your name and your face. When do you want to start?”

  “Tonight.”

  “You’re in luck then.”

  Navot looked toward the window. Gabriel followed his gaze and saw a woman with dark hair walking down the rue des Rosiers beneath the shelter of an umbrella. He stood without a word and headed toward the door. “Don’t worry, Gabriel,” Navot muttered to himself. “I’ll take care of the check.”

  AT THE END of the street she turned left and disappeared. Gabriel paused on the corner and watched black-coated Orthodox men filing into a large synagogue for evening prayers. Then he looked down the rue Pavée and saw the silhouette of Hannah Weinberg receding gently into the shadows. She stopped at the doorway of an apartment building and reached into her handbag for the key. Gabriel set out down the pavement and stopped a few feet from her, as her hand was outstretched toward the lock.

  “Mademoiselle Weinberg?”

  She turned and regarded him calmly in the darkness. Her eyes radiated a calm and sophisticated intelligence. If she was startled by his approach, she gave no sign of it.

  “You are Hannah Weinberg, are you not?”

  “What can I do for you, Monsieur?”

  “I need your help,” Gabriel said. “I was wondering whether we might have a word in private.”

  “Are we acquainted, Monsieur?”

  “No,” said Gabriel.

  “Then how can I possibly help you?”

  “It would be better if we discussed this in private, Mademoiselle.”

  “I don’t make a habit of going to private places with strange men, Monsieur. Now if you’ll excuse me.”

  She turned away and raised the key toward the lock again.

  “It’s about your painting, Mademoiselle Weinberg. I need to talk to you about your van Gogh.”

  She froze and looked at him again. Her gaze was still placid.

  “I’m sorry to disappoint you, Monsieur, but I don’t have a van Gogh. If you’d like to see some paintings by Vincent, I suggest you visit the Musée d’Orsay.”

  She looked away again.

  “Marguerite Gachet at Her Dressing Table,” said Gabriel calmly. “It was purchased by your grandfather from Theo van Gogh’s widow, Johanna, and given to your grandmother as a birthday present. Your grandmother bore a vague resemblance to Mademoiselle Gachet. When you were a child, the painting hung in your bedroom. Shall I go on?”

  Her composure disappeared. Her voice, when she spoke again after a moment of stunned silence, was unexpectedly vehement. “How do you know about the painting?”

  “I’m not at liberty to say.”

  “Of course not.” She said this as an insult. “My father always warned me that one day a greedy French art dealer would try to get the painting away from me. It is not for sale, and if it ever turns up missing, I’ll make certain to give the police your description.”

  “I’m not an art dealer—and I’m not French.”

  “Then who are you?” she asked. “And what do you want with my painting?”

  15.

  The Marais, Paris

  THE COURTYARD WAS EMPTY and dark, lit only by the lights burning in the windows of the apartments above. They crossed it in silence and entered the foyer, where an old-fashioned cage lift stood ready to receive them. She mounted a flight of wide stairs instead and led him up to the fourth floor. On the landing were two stately mahogany doors. The door on the right was absent a nameplate. She opened it and led him inside. Gabriel took note of the fact that she punched the code into the keypad before switching on the lights. Hannah Weinberg, he decided, was good at keeping secrets.

  It was a large apartment, with a formal entrance hall and a library adjoining the sitting room. Antique furniture covered in faded brocade stood sedately about, thick velvet curtains hung in the windows, and an ormolu clock set to the wrong time ticked quietly on the mantel. Gabriel’s professional eye went immediately to the six decent oil paintings that hung on the walls. The effect of the decor was to create the impression of a bygone era. Indeed Gabriel would scarcely have been surprised to see Paul Gachet reading the evening newspapers by gaslight.

  Hannah Weinberg removed her coat, then disappeared into the kitchen. Gabriel used the opportunity to look inside the library. Leather-bound legal volumes lined formal wooden bookcases with glass doors. There were more paintings here—prosaic landscapes, a man on horseback, the obligatory sea battle—but nothing that suggested the owner might also be in possession of a lost van Gogh.

  He returned to the sitting room as Hannah Weinberg emerged from the kitchen with a bottle of Sancerre and two glasses. She handed him the bottle and a corkscrew and watched his hands carefully as he removed the cork. She was not as attractive as she had appeared in Uzi Navot’s photograph. Perhaps it had been a trick of the nickeled Parisian light, or perhaps almost any woman looked attractive descending a flight of steps in Montmartre. Her pleated wool skirt and heavy sweater concealed what Gabriel suspected was a somewhat chunky figure. Her eyebrows were very wide and lent a profound seriousness to her face. Seated as she was now, surrounded by the dated furnishings of the room, she looked much older than her forty-four years.

  “I’m surprised to see you in Paris, Monsieur Allon. The last time I read your name in the newspaper you were still wanted for questioning by the French police.”

  “I’m afraid that’s still the case.”

  “But you still came—just to see me? It must be very important.”

  “It is, Mademoiselle Weinberg.”

  Gabriel filled two glasses with wine, handed one to her, and raised his own in a silent toast. She did the same, then lifted the glass to her lips.

  “Are you aware of what happened here in the Marais after the bombing?” She answered her own question. “Things were very tense. Rumors were flying that it had been carried out by Israel. Everyone believed it was true, and unfortunately the French government was very slow to do anything about the situation, even after they knew it was all a lie. Our children were beaten in the streets. Rocks were thrown through the windows of our homes and shops. Terrible things were spray-painted on the walls of the Marais and other Jewish neighborhoods. We suffered because of what happened inside that train station.” She gave him a scrutinizing look, as though trying to determine whether he was really the man she had seen in the newspapers and on television. “But you suffered, too, didn’t you? Is it true your wife was involved in it?”

  The directness of her question surprised Gabriel. His first instinct was to lie, to conceal, to guide the conversation back onto ground of his choosing. But this was a recruitment—and a perfect recruitment, Shamron always said, is at its heart a perfect seduction. And when one was seducing, Gabriel reminded himself, one had to reveal something of oneself.

  “They lured me to Gare de Lyon by kidnapping my wife,” he said. “Their intention was to kill us both, but they also
wanted to discredit Israel and make things unbearable for the Jews of France.”

  “They succeeded…for a little while, at least. Don’t misunderstand me, Monsieur Allon, things are still bad for us here. Just not as bad as they were during those days after the bombing.” She drank some more of the wine, then crossed her legs and smoothed the pleats of her skirt. “This might sound like a silly question, considering who you work for, but how did you find out about my van Gogh?”

  Gabriel was silent for a moment, then he answered her truthfully. The mention of Isherwood’s visit to this very apartment more than thirty years earlier caused her lips to curl into a vague smile of remembrance.

  “I think I remember him,” she said. “A tall man, quite handsome, full of charm and grace but at the same time somehow vulnerable.” She paused, then added, “Like you.”

  “Charm and grace are words that are not often applied to me.”

  “And vulnerability?” She gave him another slight smile. It served to soften the serious edges of her face. “All of us are vulnerable to some degree, are we not? Even someone like you? The terrorists found where you were vulnerable, and they exploited that. That’s what they do best. They exploit our decency. Our respect for life. They go after the things we hold dear.”

  Navot was right, Gabriel thought. She was a gift from the intelligence gods. He placed his glass on the coffee table. Hannah’s eyes followed his every movement.

  “What happened to this man Samuel Isakowitz?” she asked. “Did he make it out?”

  Gabriel shook his head. “He and his wife were captured in Bordeaux when the Germans moved south.”

  “Where did they send them?”

  “Sobibor.”

  She knew what that meant. Gabriel needn’t say anything more.

  “And your grandfather?” he said.

  She peered into her Sancerre for a moment before answering. “Jeudi Noir,” she said. “Do you know this term?”

  Gabriel nodded solemnly. Jeudi Noir. Black Thursday.

  “On the morning of July 16, 1942, four thousand French police officers descended on the Marais and other Jewish districts in Paris with orders to seize twenty-seven thousand Jewish immigrants from Germany, Austria, Poland, the Soviet Union, and Czechoslovakia. My father and grandparents were on the list. You see, my grandparents were originally from the Lublin district of Poland. The two policemen who knocked on the door of this very apartment took pity on my father and told him to run. A Catholic family who lived a floor below took him in, and he stayed there until liberation. My grandparents weren’t so lucky. They were sent to the detention camp at Drancy. Five days after that, a sealed railcar to Auschwitz. Of course, that was the end for them.”

  “And the van Gogh?”

  “There wasn’t any time to make arrangements for it, and there was no one in Paris that my grandfather felt he could trust. It was war, you know. People were betraying each other for stockings and cigarettes. When he heard the roundups were coming, he removed the painting from the stretcher and hid it beneath a floorboard in the library. After the war it took my father years to get the apartment back. A French family had moved in after my grandparents were arrested, and they were reluctant to give up a nice apartment on the rue Pavée. Who could blame them?”

  “What year did your father regain possession of the apartment?”

  “It was 1952.”

  “Ten years,” Gabriel said. “And the van Gogh was still there?”

  “Just as my grandfather had left it, hidden under the floorboards of the library.”

  “Amazing.”

  “Yes,” she said. “The painting has remained in the Weinberg family for more than a century, through war and Holocaust. And now you’re asking me to give it up.”

  “Not give it up,” said Gabriel.

  “Then what?”

  “I just need to—” He paused, searching for the appropriate word. “I need to rent it.”

  “Rent it? For how long?”

  “I can’t say. Perhaps a month. Perhaps six months. Maybe a year or longer.”

  “For what purpose?”

  Gabriel was not ready to answer her. He picked up the cork and used his thumbnail to scratch away a torn edge.

  “Do you know how much that painting is worth?” she asked. “If you’re asking me to give it up, even for a brief period, I believe I’m entitled to know the reason why.”

  “You are,” Gabriel said, “but you should also know that if I tell you the truth, your life will never be the same.”

  She poured more wine for herself and held the glass for a moment against her body without drinking from it. “Two years ago, there was a particularly vicious attack here in the Marais. A young Orthodox boy was set upon by a gang of North Africans as he was walking home from school. They set his hair on fire and carved a swastika into his forehead. He still bears the scar. We organized a demonstration to bring pressure on the French government to do something about the anti-Semitism. As we were marching in the place de la République, there was an anti-Israeli counter-demonstration. Do you know what they were shouting at us?”

  “Death to the Jews.”

  “And do you know what the French president said?”

  “There is no anti-Semitism in France.”

  “My life has never been the same since that day. Besides, as you might have surmised, I’m very good at keeping secrets. Tell me why you want my van Gogh, Monsieur Allon. Perhaps we can come to some accommodation.”

  THE NEVIOT SURVEILLANCE van was parked at the edge of the Parc Royal. Uzi Navot rapped his knuckles twice on the one-way rear window and was immediately admitted. One neviot man was seated behind the wheel. The other was in the back, hunched over an electronic console with a pair of headphones over his ears.

  “What’s going on?” Navot asked.

  “Gabriel has her in his sights,” the neviot man said. “And now he’s going in for the kill.”

  Navot slipped on a pair of headsets and listened while Gabriel told Hannah Weinberg how he was going to use her van Gogh to track down the most dangerous man in the world.

  THE KEY WAS hidden in the top drawer of the writing desk in the library. She used it to unlock the door at the end of the unlit corridor. The room behind it was a child’s room. Hannah’s room, thought Gabriel, frozen in time. A four-poster bed with a lace canopy. Shelves stacked with stuffed animals and toys. A poster of an American heartthrob actor. And hanging above a French provincial dresser, shrouded in heavy shadow, a lost painting by Vincent van Gogh.

  GABRIEL MOVED SLOWLY forward and stood motionless before it, right hand on his chin, head tilted slightly to one side. Then he reached out and gently fingered the lavish brushstrokes. They were Vincent’s—Gabriel was sure of it. Vincent on fire. Vincent in love. The restorer calmly assessed his target. The painting appeared as though it had never been cleaned. It was covered with a fine layer of surface grime, and there were three horizontal cracks—a result, Gabriel suspected, of having been rolled too tightly by Isaac Weinberg the night before Jeudi Noir.

  “I suppose we should talk about the money,” Hannah said. “How much does Julian think it will fetch?”

  “In the neighborhood of eighty million. I’ve agreed to let him keep a ten-percent commission as compensation for his role in the operation. The remainder of the money will be immediately transferred to you.”

  “Seventy-two million dollars?”

  “Give or take a few million, of course.”

  “And when your operation is over?”

  “I’m going to get the painting back.”

  “How do you intend to do that?”

  “Leave that to me, Mademoiselle Weinberg.”

  “And when you return the painting to me, what happens to the seventy-two million? Give or take a few million, of course.”

  “You may keep any interest accrued. In addition, I will pay you a rental fee. How does five million dollars sound?”

  She smiled. “It sounds fine, but I ha
ve no intention of keeping the money for myself. I don’t want their money.”

  “Then what do you intend to do with it?”

  She told him.

  “I like the sound of that,” he said. “Do we have a deal, Mademoiselle Weinberg?”

  “Yes,” she said. “I believe we have a deal.”

  AFTER LEAVING Hannah Weinberg’s apartment Gabriel went to an Office safe flat near the Bois de Boulogne. They watched her for three days. Gabriel saw her only in surveillance photographs and heard her voice only in the recordings. Each evening he scoured the tapes for signs of betrayal or indiscretion but found only fidelity. On the night before she was to surrender the painting, he heard her sobbing softly and realized she was saying good-bye to Marguerite.

  Navot brought the painting the next morning, wrapped in an old quilt he had taken from Hannah’s apartment. Gabriel considered sending it back to Tel Aviv by courier, but in the end decided to carry it out of France himself. He removed it from the frame, then pried the canvas off the stretcher. As he rolled it carefully he thought of Isaac Weinberg the night before Jeudi Noir. This time, instead of being hidden beneath a floorboard, it was tucked securely into the false lining of Gabriel’s suitcase. Navot drove him to the Gare du Nord.

  “An agent from London Station will be waiting for you at Waterloo,” Navot said. “He’ll run you out to Heathrow. El Al is expecting you. They’ll make sure you have no problems with your baggage.”

  “Thanks, Uzi. You won’t be making my travel arrangements much longer.”

  “I’m not so sure about that.”

  “Things didn’t go well with Amos?”

  “He’s hard to read.”

  “What did he say?”

  “He said he needs a few days to think it over.”

  “You didn’t expect him to offer it to you on the spot, did you?”