Gabriel Allon: Prince of Fire, the Messenger, the Secret Servant Read online

  “It’s all very speculative,” Shamron said, “and therefore more damaging as a result. The suggestion is that you were somehow involved in the plot to bomb the train station.”

  “And what might my motivation be?”

  “To discredit the Palestinians, of course. Khaled carried off quite a coup. He managed to bomb the Gare de Lyon and blame us for the deed.”

  Gabriel read the first few paragraphs of the story. “He obviously has friends in high places—Egyptian and French intelligence to name two. The Mukhabarat was watching me from the moment I set foot in Cairo. They photographed me in the nightclub, and after the bombing they sent that photograph to the French DST. Khaled orchestrated the whole thing.”

  “Unfortunately, there’s more to the story. David Quinnell was found murdered in his Cairo apartment yesterday morning. It’s safe to assume we’re going to be blamed for that, too.”

  Gabriel handed the newspaper back to Shamron, who returned it to his briefcase. “The fallout has already begun. The foreign minister was supposed to visit Paris next week, but the invitation has been rescinded. There’s talk of a temporary break in relations and diplomatic expulsions. We’re going to have to come clean to avoid a major rupture in our relations with France and the rest of the European Community. I suppose that eventually we’ll be able to repair the damage, but only to a degree. After all, a majority of French still believe we were the ones who flew those planes into the World Trade Center. How will we ever convince them we had nothing to do with the Gare de Lyon bombing?”

  “But you warned them before the bombing took place.”

  “True, but the conspiratorialists will view that only as further evidence of our guilt. How did we know the bomb would explode at seven o’clock unless we were involved in the plot? We’ll have to open our books at some point, and that includes you.”

  “Me?”

  “The French would like to talk to you.”

  “Tell them I’ll be at the Palais de Justice on Monday morning. Ask them to hold a room for me at the Crillon. I never have any luck getting a good room at the Crillon.”

  Shamron laughed. “I’ll keep you away from the French, but Lev is another story.”

  “Death by committee?”

  Shamron nodded. “The inquiry will begin tomorrow. You’re the first witness. You should expect your testimony to take several days and that it will be extremely unpleasant.”

  “I have better things to do besides sitting before Lev’s committee.”

  “Such as?”

  “Finding Khaled.”

  “And how do you intend to do that?”

  Gabriel told Shamron about the girl from Sumayriyya. “Who else knows about this?”

  “Only Dina.”

  “Pursue it quietly,” Shamron said, “and for God’s sake, don’t leave a trail.”

  “Arafat had a hand in this. He fed us Mahmoud Arwish and then killed him to cover his tracks. And now he’ll reap the public relations rewards of our alleged involvement in the Gare de Lyon plot.”

  “He already is,” Shamron said. “The world’s media are lining up outside the Mukata waiting for their turn to interview him. We’re in no position to lay a finger on him.”

  “So we do nothing and hold our breath every April eighteenth while we wait for the next embassy or synagogue to explode?” Gabriel shook his head. “No, Ari, I’m going to find him.”

  “Try not to think of any of that now.” Shamron gave him a paternal pat on the shoulder. “Get some rest. Go see Leah. Then spend some time with Chiara.”

  “Yes,” Gabriel said, “an evening with no complications would do me good.”

  32

  JERUSALEM

  Shamron took Gabriel to Mount Herzl. It was beginning to get dark as he headed up the tree-lined walkway to the hospital’s entrance. Leah’s new doctor awaited him in the lobby. Rotund and bespectacled, he had the long beard of a rabbi and an unfailingly pleasant demeanor. He introduced himself as Mordecai Bar-Zvi, then took Gabriel by the arm and led him along a corridor of cool Jerusalem limestone. By gesture and intonation, he made it clear to Gabriel that he knew much about the patient’s rather unorthodox case history.

  “I must say, it appears she came through it remarkably well.”

  “Is she talking?”

  “A little.”

  “Does she know where she is?”

  “Sometimes. I can say one thing for certain: she’s very anxious to see you.” The doctor looked at Gabriel over the top of his smudged eyeglasses. “You seem surprised.”

  “She went thirteen years without speaking to me.”

  The doctor shrugged. “I doubt that will ever happen again.”

  They came to a door. The doctor knocked once and led Gabriel inside. Leah was seated in an armchair in the window. She turned as Gabriel entered the room and smiled briefly. He kissed her cheek, then sat on the edge of the bed. She regarded him silently for a moment, then turned and looked out the window again. It was as if he were no longer there.

  The doctor excused himself and closed the door as he left. Gabriel sat there with her, content to say nothing at all as the pine trees outside receded gently into the gathering darkness. He stayed for an hour, until a nurse entered the room and suggested it was time for Leah to get some sleep. When Gabriel stood, Leah’s head swiveled round.

  “Where are you going?”

  “They say you need to rest.”

  “That’s all I ever do.”

  Gabriel kissed her lips.

  “One last—” She stopped herself. “You’ll come see me again tomorrow?”

  “And the next day.”

  She turned away and looked out the window.

  There were no taxis to be had on Mount Herzl, so he boarded a bus crowded with evening commuters. The seats were all taken; he stood in the open space at the center and felt forty pairs of eyes boring into him. On the Jaffa Road he stepped off and waited in a shelter for an eastbound bus. Then he thought better of it—he had survived one ride; a second seemed an invitation to disaster—so he set off on foot through a swirling night wind. He paused for a moment at the entrance of the Makhane Yehuda Market, then headed for Narkiss Street. Chiara must have heard his footfalls on the stairwell, because she was waiting for him on the landing outside their apartment. Her beauty, after the scars of Leah, seemed even more shocking. Gabriel, when he bent to kiss her, was offered only a cheek. Her newly washed hair smelled of vanilla.

  She turned and went inside. Gabriel followed her, then stopped suddenly. The apartment had been completely redecorated: new furniture, new carpets and fixtures, a fresh coat of paint. The table had been laid and candles lit. Their diminished length suggested they’d been burning for some time. Chiara, as she passed by the table, snuffed them out.

  “It’s beautiful,” Gabriel said.

  “I worked hard to finish it before you arrived. I wanted it to feel like a proper home. Where have you been?” She tried, with little success, to ask the question without a confrontational tone.

  “You can’t be serious, Chiara.”

  “Your helicopter landed three hours ago. And I know you didn’t go to King Saul Boulevard, because Lev’s office called here looking for you.” She paused. “You went to see her, didn’t you? You went to see Leah.”

  “Of course I did.”

  “It didn’t occur to you to come see me first?”

  “She’s in a hospital. She doesn’t know where she is. She’s confused. She’s scared.”

  “I suppose Leah and I have a lot in common after all.”

  “Let’s not do this, Chiara.”

  “Do what?”

  He headed down the hallway to their bedroom. It too had been redecorated. On Gabriel’s nightstand were the papers that, when signed, would dissolve his marriage to Leah. Chiara had left a pen beside them. He glanced up and saw her standing in the doorway. She was staring at him, searching his eyes for evidence of his emotions—like a detective, he thought, observing a
person of interest at the scene of the crime.

  “What happened to your face?”

  Gabriel told her about the beating he’d been given.

  “Did it hurt?” She didn’t seem terribly concerned.

  “Only a little.” He sat on the edge of the bed and pulled off his shoes. “How much did you know?”

  “Shamron told me right away that the hit had gone wrong. He kept me updated throughout the day. The moment I heard you were safe was the happiest moment of my life.”

  Gabriel took note of the fact that Chiara had not mentioned Leah.

  “How is she?”

  “Leah?”

  Chiara closed her eyes and nodded. Gabriel quoted the prognosis of Dr. Bar-Zvi: Leah had come through it remarkably well. He removed his shirt. Chiara covered her mouth. His bruises, after three days at sea, had turned deep purple and black.

  “It looks worse than it really is,” he said.

  “Have you seen a doctor?”

  “Not yet.”

  “Take off your clothes. I’ll run a hot bath for you. A good soak will do you good.”

  She left the room. A few seconds later he heard water splashing against enamel. He undressed and went into the bathroom. Chiara examined his bruises again; then she ran her hand through his hair and looked at the roots.

  “It’s long enough to cut now. I don’t want to make love to a gray-haired man tonight.”

  “So cut it.”

  He sat on the edge of the bath. As always Chiara sang to herself while she cut his hair, one of those silly Italian pop songs she loved so much. Gabriel, his head bowed, watched as the last silvered remnants of Herr Klemp fluttered to the floor. He thought of Cairo, and how he had been deceived, and the anger welled within him once more. Chiara switched off the shears.

  “There, you look like yourself again. Black hair, gray at the temples. What was it Shamron used to say about your temples?”

  “He called them smudges of ash,” Gabriel said. Smudges of ash on the prince of fire.

  Chiara tested the temperature of the bath. Gabriel unwrapped the towel from his waist and slid into the water. It was too hot—Chiara always made it too hot—but after a few moments the pain began to retreat from his body. She sat with him for a time. She talked about the apartment and an evening she had spent with Gilah Shamron—anything but France. After a while she went into the bedroom and undressed. She sang softly to herself. Chiara always sang when she removed her clothing.

  Her kisses, usually so tender, pained his lips. She made love to him feverishly, as though trying to draw Leah’s venom from his bloodstream, and her fingertips left new bruises on his shoulders. “I thought you were dead,” she said. “I thought I’d never see you again.”

  “I was dead,” Gabriel said. “I was dead for a very long time.”

  The walls of their bedroom in Venice had been hung with paintings. Chiara, in Gabriel’s absence, had hung them here. Some of the works had been painted by Gabriel’s grandfather, the noted German expressionist Viktor Frankel. His work had been declared “degenerate” by the Nazis in 1936. Impoverished, stripped of his ability to paint or even teach, he had been deported to Auschwitz in 1942 and gassed on arrival along with his wife. Gabriel’s mother, Irene, had been deported with them, but Mengele had assigned her to a work detail, and she’d managed to survive the women’s camp at Birkenau until it was evacuated in the face of the Russian advance. Some of her work hung here in Gabriel’s private gallery. Tormented by what she had seen in Birkenau, her paintings burned with an intensity unmatched by even her famous father. In Israel she had used the name Allon, which means oak tree in Hebrew, but she’d always signed her canvases Frankel to honor her father. Only now could Gabriel see the paintings for themselves instead of the broken woman who had produced them.

  There was one work that bore no signature, a portrait of a young man, in the style of Egon Schiele. The artist was Leah, and the subject was Gabriel himself. It had been painted shortly after he returned to Israel with the blood of six Palestinian terrorists on his hands, and it was the only time he ever agreed to sit for her. He had never liked the painting, because it showed him as Leah saw him—a haunted young man, aged prematurely by the shadow of death. Chiara believed the painting to be a self-portrait.

  She switched on the bedroom light and looked at the papers on the bedside table. Her examination was demonstrative in nature; she knew that Gabriel had not signed them.

  “I’ll sign them in the morning,” he said.

  She offered him the pen. “Sign them now.”

  Gabriel switched off the light. “Actually, there’s something else I want to do now.”

  Chiara took him into her body and wept silently through the act.

  “You’re never going to sign them, are you?”

  Gabriel tried to silence her with a kiss.

  “You’re lying to me,” she said. “You’re using your body as a weapon of deception.”

  33

  JERUSALEM

  His days quickly acquired shape. In the mornings he would wake early and sit in Chiara’s newly decorated kitchen with coffee and the newspapers. The stories about the Khaled affair depressed him. Ha’aretz christened the affair “Bunglegate,” and the Office lost its battle to keep Gabriel’s name out of print. In Paris the French press besieged the government and the Israeli ambassador for an explanation of the mysterious photographs that had appeared in Le Monde. The French foreign minister, a blow-dried former poet, threw gasoline on the fire by expressing his belief that “there may indeed have been an Israeli hand in the Holocaust of the Gare de Lyon.” The next day, Gabriel read with a heavy heart that a Kosher pizzeria on the rue des Rosiers had been vandalized. Then a gang of French boys attacked a young girl as she walked home from school and carved a swastika into her cheek. Chiara usually awakened an hour after Gabriel. She read of the events in France with more alarm than sadness. Once a day she phoned her mother in Venice to make certain her family was safe.

  At eight Gabriel would leave Jerusalem and make the drive down the Bab al-Wad to King Saul Boulevard. The proceedings were held in the top-floor conference room so Lev would not have far to walk when he wished to pop in and observe them. Gabriel, of course, was the star witness. His conduct, from the moment he’d returned to Office discipline until his escape from the Gare de Lyon was reviewed in excruciating detail. Despite Shamron’s dire predictions, there was to be no bloodletting. The results of such investigations were usually preordained, and Gabriel could see from the outset that he was not going to be made the scapegoat. This was a collective mistake, the committee members seemed to be saying by the tone of their questions, a forgivable sin committed by an intelligence apparatus desperate to avoid another catastrophic loss of life. Still, at times the questions became pointed. Did Gabriel have no suspicions about the motivations of Mahmoud Arwish? Or the loyalty of David Quinnell? Would things not have gone differently if he’d listened to his teammates in Marseilles and turned back instead of going with the girl? At least then Khaled’s plan to destroy the credibility of the Office would not have succeeded. “You’re right,” Gabriel said, “and my wife would be dead, along with many more innocent people.”

  One by one, the others were brought before the committee as well, first Yossi and Rimona, then Yaakov and lastly Dina, whose discoveries had fueled the investigation into Khaled in the first place. It pained Gabriel to see them in the dock. His career was over, but for the others the Khaled affair, as it had become known, would leave a black mark on their records that would never be expunged.

  In the late afternoon, when the committee had adjourned, he would drive to Mount Herzl to spend time with Leah. Sometimes they would sit in her room; and sometimes, if there was still light, he would place her in a wheelchair and push her slowly round the grounds. She never failed to acknowledge his presence and usually managed to speak a few words to him. Her hallucinatory journeys to Vienna became less apparent, though he was never certain precisely what
she was thinking.

  “Where is Dani buried?” she asked once, as they sat beneath the canopy of a pine tree.

  “The Mount of Olives.”

  “Will you take me there sometime?”

  “If your doctor says it’s all right.”

  Once, Chiara accompanied him to the hospital. As they entered, she sat down in the lobby and told Gabriel to take his time.

  “Would you like to meet her?” Chiara had never seen Leah.

  “No,” she said, “I think it’s better if I wait here. Not for my sake, for hers.”

  “She won’t know.”

  “She’ll know, Gabriel. A woman always knows when a man’s in love with someone else.”

  They never quarreled about Leah again. Their battle, from that point onward, was a black operation, a covert affair waged by long silences and remarks edged with double meaning. Chiara never entered their bed without first checking to see whether the papers had been signed. Her lovemaking was as confrontational as her silences. My body is intact, she seemed to be saying to him. I’m real. Leah is only a memory.

  The apartment grew claustrophobic, so they took to eating out. Some evenings they walked over to Ben-Yehuda Street—or to Mona, a trendy restaurant that was actually located in the cellar of the old campus of the Bezalel Academy of Art. One evening they drove down Highway One to Abu Ghosh, one of the only Arab villages along the road to survive the expulsions of Plan Dalet. They ate hummus and grilled lamb in an outdoor restaurant in the village square, and for a few moments it was possible to imagine how different things might have been had Khaled’s grandfather not turned the road into a killing zone. Chiara marked the occasion by buying Gabriel an expensive bracelet from a village silversmith. The next evening, on King George Street, she bought him a silver watch to match. Keepsakes, she called them. Tokens by which to remember me.