The English Girl: A Novel Page 20

  Gradually, the square began to fill with townspeople. Teenage boys sat astride their mopeds outside the ice cream parlor; a group of men started up a hard-fought game of boules in the center of the dusty esplanade. Shortly after six, about twenty people, old women mainly, came filing down the steps of the church. Among them was the signadora. Her gaze settled briefly on Gabriel, the unbeliever; then she disappeared through the doorway of her crooked little house. Soon after, two women came calling on her—an old widow dressed head to toe in black and a distraught-looking girl in her mid-twenties who, doubtless, was suffering the ill effects of the occhju.

  A half hour later the two women reappeared, along with a boy, about ten years old, with long curly hair. The women made for the ice cream parlor, but the boy, after pausing a moment to watch the game of boules, came over to the café where Gabriel was sitting. In his hand was a slip of paper, pale blue and folded in quarters. He placed it on the table before Gabriel and then scurried off as though he feared he might catch something. Gabriel unfolded the slip of paper and in the fading light read the single line that had been written there:

  I must see you at once.

  Gabriel inserted the note into his coat pocket and sat there for several minutes debating what to do. Then he left a few coins on the table and headed across the square.

  When he knocked on her door, a reedy voice invited him to enter. She was seated sleepily in a faded wing chair, her head lolling to one side, as though she were still suffering from the exertion of absorbing the evil that infected her previous visitors. Despite Gabriel’s protests, she insisted on rising to greet him. This time there was no hostility in her expression, only concern. She touched Gabriel’s cheek without speaking and stared directly into his eyes.

  “Your eyes are so very green. You have your mother’s eyes, yes?”

  “Yes,” said Gabriel.

  “She suffered during the war, did she not?”

  “Did Keller tell you that?”

  “I’ve never spoken to Christopher about your mother.”

  “Yes,” said Gabriel after a moment, “terrible things happened to my mother during the war.”

  “In Poland?”

  “Yes, in Poland.”

  The signadora took one of Gabriel’s hands in hers. “You’re warm to the touch. Do you have fever?”

  “No,” said Gabriel.

  She closed her eyes. “Your mother was a painter like you?”

  “Yes.”

  “She was in the camps? The one that was named for the trees?”

  “Yes, that’s the one.”

  “I see a road, snow, a long line of women in gray clothing, a man with a gun.”

  Gabriel withdrew his hand quickly. The old woman’s eyes opened with a start.

  “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to upset you.”

  “Why did you want to see me?”

  “I know why you came back here.”

  “And?”

  “I want to help you.”

  “Why?”

  “Because it is important that nothing happens to you in the days to come. The old man needs you. So does your wife.”

  “I’m not married,” Gabriel lied.

  “Her name is Clara, is it not?”

  “No,” said Gabriel, smiling. “Her name is Chiara.”

  “She is an Italian?”

  “Yes.”

  “Then I will keep you in my prayers.” She nodded toward her table where a plate of water and a vessel of olive oil stood next to a pair of burning candles. “Won’t you sit down?”

  “I’d rather not.”

  “You still don’t believe?”

  “I believe,” he said.

  “Then why won’t you sit? Surely you’re not afraid. Your mother named you Gabriel for a reason. You have the strength of God.”

  Gabriel felt as though a stone had been laid over his heart. He wanted to leave at once but curiosity made him stay. After helping the old woman into her chair, he sat opposite her and dipped his finger into the oil. Upon striking the surface of the water, the three drops shattered into a thousand before disappearing. The old woman nodded gravely, as if the test had confirmed her darkest fears. Then, for the second time, she took Gabriel’s hand in hers.

  “You’re burning,” she said. “Are you sure you’re not unwell?”

  “I was in the sun.”

  “At Christopher’s house,” she said knowingly. “You drank his wine. You have his gun on your hip.”

  “Go on.”

  “You’re looking for a man, the man who killed the English girl.”

  “Do you know who he is?”

  “No,” she said. “But I know where he is. He’s hiding in the east, in the city of heretics. You must never set foot there. If you do,” she said firmly, “you will die.”

  She closed her eyes, and after a moment began to weep softly, a sign that the evil had flowed from Gabriel’s body into hers. Then, with a nod, she instructed Gabriel to repeat the test of the oil and the water. This time the oil coalesced into a single drop. The old woman smiled in a way that Gabriel had never seen before.

  “What do you see?” asked Gabriel.

  “Are you sure you want to know?”

  “Yes, of course.”

  “I see a child,” she replied without hesitation.

  “Whose child?”

  She patted Gabriel’s hand. “Go back to the villa,” she said. “Your friend Christopher has returned to Corsica.”

  When Gabriel arrived at the villa, he found Keller standing before the open refrigerator. He wore a dark gray suit, wrinkled from travel, and a white dress shirt open at the neck. He withdrew the half-drunk bottle of Sancerre, gave it a demonstrative shake, and then dumped several inches of the wine into a glass.

  “Rough day at the office, honey?” asked Gabriel.

  “Brutal.” He held up the bottle. “You?”

  “I’ve had quite enough.”

  “I can see that.”

  “How was your trip?”

  “The travel was hell,” said Keller, “but everything else went smoothly.”

  “Who was he?”

  Keller drank some of his wine without answering and asked Gabriel where he had been. When Gabriel told him that he had been to see the signadora, Keller smiled.

  “We’ll make a Corsican of you yet.”

  “It wasn’t my idea,” explained Gabriel.

  “What did she want to tell you?”

  “It was nothing,” said Gabriel. “Just the usual hocus-pocus about the wind in the willows.”

  “Then why are you so pale?”

  Gabriel made no response other than to place Keller’s gun carefully on the countertop.

  “From what I hear,” Keller said, “you’re going to need that.”

  “What do you hear?”

  “I hear you’re going on a hunting trip.”

  “Are you willing to help me?”

  “Frankly,” said Keller, raising his wineglass to the light, “I expected you a long time ago.”

  “I had a painting to finish.”

  “By whom?”

  “Bassano.”

  “Studio of Bassano or Bassano Bassano?”

  “A little of both.”

  “Nice,” said Keller.

  “How quickly can you be ready to move?”

  “I have to check my calendar, but I suspect I’ll be ready to go first thing in the morning. But you should know,” he added, “that Marseilles is crawling with flics at the moment. And half of them are looking for us.”

  “Which is why we’re not going anywhere near Marseilles, at least for now.”

  “So where are we going?”

  Gabriel smiled. “We’re going home.”

  32

  CORSICA–LONDON

  They had dinner in the village, then Gabriel settled into a guest suite on the lower level of the villa. The walls were white, the bedding was white, the armchair and ottoman were covered in sailcloth. The room’s
lack of color disturbed his sleep. That night, when he ran to Madeline in his dreams, he ran across an endless field of snow. And when she scratched at the back of her hand, the blood that flowed from the wound was the color of heavy cream.

  In the morning they caught the first flight to Paris and then flew on to Heathrow. Keller cleared customs on a French passport, which Gabriel, who was waiting for him in the arrivals hall, thought was a most ignoble way for an Englishman to return to the land of his birth. They made their way outside and waited twenty minutes for a taxi. It crawled into central London through heavy traffic and rain.

  “Now you know why I don’t live here any longer,” Keller said quietly in French as he stared out his rain-spattered window at the gray London suburbs.

  “The moisture will do wonders for your skin,” Gabriel replied in the same language. “You look like a piece of leather.”

  The taxi delivered them to Marble Arch. Gabriel and Keller walked a short distance along Bayswater Road, to the apartment house overlooking Hyde Park. The flat was precisely as he had left it the morning he had driven to France with the ransom money; in fact, Chiara’s breakfast dishes were still in the sink. Gabriel dropped his bag in the main bedroom and took a gun from the floor safe. When he emerged, he found Keller standing in the window of the sitting room.

  “Can you manage for a few hours on your own?” Gabriel asked.

  “I’ll be fine.”

  “Any plans?”

  “I think I’ll take a boat ride on the Serpentine and then pop over to Covent Garden for a bit of shopping.”

  “It might be better if you stayed here. You never know who you might bump into.”

  “I’m Regiment, luv.”

  Keller said nothing more; he didn’t need to. He was SAS, which meant that, if he wanted, he could walk through a room of close friends and no one would know his name.

  Gabriel headed down to the street and hailed a passing taxi. Twenty minutes later he was walking past the gated entrance of Downing Street, toward the Houses of Parliament. In his pocket was a single entry from his dossier, a lengthy article from London’s Daily Telegraph. The headline read MADELINE HART—THE UNANSWERED QUESTIONS.

  The article had been written by Samantha Cooke, the Telegraph’s chief Whitehall correspondent and one of Britain’s most highly regarded journalists. She had been covering Jonathan Lancaster from the time he was a lowly backbencher and had chronicled his rise in a biography called The Path to Power. Despite the book’s somewhat pretentious title, it had been well received, even by her competitors who were jealous of the advance paid by her London publisher. Samantha Cooke was the kind of reporter who knew much more than she could ever put into print, which is why Gabriel wanted to talk to her.

  He rang the Telegraph’s switchboard and asked to be connected to her extension. The operator put him through without delay, and after a few seconds Samantha Cooke picked up. Gabriel suspected she was on a mobile phone because he could hear footsteps and the echo of baritone voices in a high-ceilinged room—perhaps the lobby of Parliament, which was just across the street from the café where Gabriel was sitting. He said he needed a few minutes of her time. He promised he would make it well worth her while. He never mentioned a name.

  “Do you know how many calls I get like this every day?” she asked wearily.

  “I can assure you, Ms. Cooke, you’ve never received a call like this before.”

  There was silence on the line. Clearly, she was intrigued.

  “What’s this about?”

  “I’d rather not talk about it over the telephone.”

  “Oh, no, of course not.”

  “You’re obviously skeptical.”

  “Obviously.”

  “Does your phone have an Internet connection?”

  “Of course.”

  “A couple of years ago, a rather well-known Israeli intelligence officer was captured by Islamic terrorists and interrogated on camera. Their plan was to kill him, but it didn’t work out that way. The video of the interrogation is still floating around on the Internet. Watch it and then call me.”

  He gave her a number and rang off. Two minutes later she called him back.

  “I’d like to see you.”

  “Surely you can do better than that, Ms. Cooke.”

  “Please, Mr. Allon, would you consider granting me an audience?”

  “Only if you apologize for treating me so rudely a moment ago.”

  “I offer my most profound and humble apology, and I hope you will find some way in your heart to forgive me.”

  “You’re forgiven.”

  “Where are you?”

  “Café Nero on Bridge Street.”

  “Unfortunately, I know it well.”

  “How soon can you be here?”

  “Ten minutes.”

  “Don’t be late,” said Gabriel, and he severed the connection.

  As it turned out, she was late—six minutes late, which explained why she came whirling through the door in a rush, a phone to her ear, her umbrella flapping in the wind that blew in with her. Most of the patrons in the café were tourists, but three gray-suited junior MPs were sipping lattes in the back. Samantha Cooke stopped to have a word with them before making her way to Gabriel’s table. Her hair was ash blond and shoulder length. Her eyes were blue and probing. For several seconds they didn’t move from Gabriel’s face.

  “My God,” she said finally. “It really is you.”

  “What were you expecting?”

  “Horns, I suppose.”

  “At least you’re honest.”

  “It’s one of my worst faults.”

  “Any others?”

  “Curiosity,” she said.

  “Then you’ve come to the right place. Can I get you something to drink?”

  “Actually,” she said, looking around the room, “it might be better if we walked.”

  Gabriel rose and pulled on his coat.

  They headed toward the Tower Bridge and then made a quick left onto the Victoria Embankment. The afternoon traffic moved slowly along the road, but the crowds that usually surged along the river walk had been chased away by the rain. Gabriel glanced over his shoulder to make certain they hadn’t been followed from the café. Turning again, he noticed Samantha Cooke peering at him from beneath her umbrella as though he were on the endangered species list.

  “You look much better than you did in that video,” she said after a moment.

  “It was all done with makeup.”

  She smiled in spite of herself. “Does it help?” she asked.

  “To make jokes after something like that?”

  She nodded.

  “Yes,” he said. “It helps.”

  “I met her once, you know.”

  “Who?”

  “Nadia al-Bakari. It was when she was a nobody, a Saudi party girl, the spoiled daughter of Abdul Aziz al-Bakari, financier of Islamic terror.” She looked at Gabriel’s face for a reaction and seemed disappointed when there was none. “Is it true that you were the one who killed him?”

  “Zizi al-Bakari was killed as the result of an operation initiated by the Americans and their allies in the global war on terror.”

  “But you were the one who actually pulled the trigger, weren’t you? You killed him in Cannes, in front of Nadia. And then you recruited Nadia to take down Rashid al-Husseini’s terror network. Brilliant,” she said. “Truly brilliant.”

  “If I was so brilliant, Nadia would still be alive.”

  “But her death changed the world. It helped to bring democracy to the Arab world.”

  “And look how well that worked out,” Gabriel said glumly.

  They passed beneath the Hungerford Bridge as a train rumbled into Charing Cross. The rain eased. Samantha Cooke lowered her umbrella, wound it tightly, and inserted it into her handbag.

  “I’m honored you came to me,” she said, “but the Middle East isn’t exactly my beat.”

  “This isn’t about the Middle East
. It’s about Jonathan Lancaster.”

  She looked up sharply. “Why is a famous Israeli intelligence operative coming to a London reporter for information about the British prime minister?”

  “It must be something important,” Gabriel said evasively. “Otherwise, the famous Israeli operative would never dare to do such a thing.”

  “No, he wouldn’t,” she agreed. “But surely the famous operative has a great deal of information about Lancaster at his fingertips. Why would he ask a reporter for help?”

  “Contrary to popular myth, we don’t compile personal dossiers on our friends.”

  “Bullshit.”

  Gabriel hesitated for a moment. “This is a strictly personal matter, Ms. Cooke. My service isn’t involved in any way.”

  “And if I agree to help you?”

  “Obviously, I would give you something in return.”

  “A story?”

  Gabriel nodded.

  “But you can’t tell me what it is,” she said.

  “Not yet.”

  “Whatever it is, it had better be something big.”

  “I’m Gabriel Allon. I only do big.”

  “Yes, you do.” She stopped walking and gazed at the London Eye turning slowly on the opposite bank of the river. “All right, Mr. Allon, we have a deal. Perhaps you should tell me what this is all about.”

  Gabriel withdrew the Telegraph article from his coat pocket and held it up for her to see. Samantha Cooke smiled.

  “Where would you like me to start?”

  Gabriel returned the article to his coat pocket. Then he asked her to start with Jeremy Fallon.

  33

  LONDON

  She was a good reporter, and like all good reporters she provided her audience with the necessary background to put her story into proper context. Gabriel, a former resident of the United Kingdom, knew much of it already. He knew, for example, that Jeremy Fallon had been educated at University College London and had worked as an advertising copywriter before joining the political unit at Party headquarters. What Fallon discovered was that there was an antiquated campaign organization dedicated to selling a product that no one, least of all the British voting public, wanted to buy. His first priority was to change the way the Party did its polling. Fallon didn’t care which party a particular voter supported; he wanted to know where the voter did his shopping, what programs the voter watched on television, and what hopes the voter had for his children. Most of all, Fallon wanted to know what the voter expected from his government. Quietly, working far from the public spotlight, Fallon set about retooling the Party’s core policies to meet the needs of a modern British electorate. Then he went in search of the perfect pitchman to take his new product to market. He found one in Jonathan Lancaster. With Fallon’s help, Lancaster successfully challenged for Party leader. Then, six months later, he was swept into Downing Street.