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

  “I still don’t like it.”

  “Don’t worry,” Shamron said. “Soon you’ll be the one deciding how we use her.”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “The prime minister would like a word with you. He has a job he’d like you to take.”

  “Javelin-catcher?”

  Shamron threw back his head and laughed, then suffered a long, spasmodic fit of coughing.

  “Actually, he wants you to be the next director of Operations.”

  “Me? By the time Lev’s committee of inquiry has finished with me, I’ll be lucky to get a job as a security guard at a café in Ben-Yehuda Street.”

  “You’ll come out of it just fine. Now is not the time for public self-flagellation. Leave that for the Americans. If we have to tell a few half-truths, if we must lie to a country like France that is not interested in our survival, then so be it.”

  “By way of deception, thou shalt do war,” Gabriel said, reciting the motto of the Office. Shamron nodded once and said, “Amen.”

  “Even if I come out of it in one piece, Lev won’t allow me to have Operations.”

  “He won’t have a say in the matter. Lev’s term is ending, and he has few friends in King Saul Boulevard or Kaplan Street. He won’t be invited to stay for a second dance.”

  “So who’s going to be the next chief?”

  “The prime minister and I have a short list of names. None of them are Office. Whoever we select, he’ll need an experienced man running Operations.”

  “I knew it was leading to this,” Gabriel said. “I knew it the moment I saw you in Venice.”

  “I admit my motives are selfish. My term is coming to an end, too. If the prime minister goes, so do I. And this time there won’t be a return from exile. I need you, Gabriel. I need you to keep watch over my creation.”

  “The Office?”

  Shamron shook his head, then lifted his hand toward the land.

  “I know you’ll do it,” Shamron said. “You have no choice. Your mother named you Gabriel for a reason. Michael is the highest, but you, Gabriel, you are the mightiest. You’re the one who defends Israel against its accusers. You’re the angel of judgment—the prince of fire.”

  Gabriel, silent, looked out at the lake. “There’s something I need to take care of first.”

  “Eli will find him, especially with the clues you’ve given him. That was a brilliant piece of detective work on your part. But then you always did have that kind of mind.”

  “It was Fellah,” Gabriel said. “She doomed him by telling me her story.”

  “But that’s the Palestinian way. They’re trapped in their narrative of loss and exile. There’s no escaping it.” Shamron leaned forward, resting his elbows on his knees. “Are you really sure you want the job of turning Khaled into a martyr? There are other boys who can do it for you.”

  “I know,” he said, “but I need to do it.”

  Shamron sighed heavily. “If you must, but it’s going to be a private affair this time. No teams, no surveillance, nothing Khaled can manipulate to his advantage. Just you and him.”

  “As it should be.”

  A silence fell between them. They watched the running lights of a fishing boat steaming slowly toward Tiberias.

  “There’s something I need to ask you,” Gabriel said.

  “You want to talk to me about Tochnit Dalet,” Shamron said. “About Beit Sayeed and Sumayriyya.”

  “How did you know?”

  “You’ve been wandering in the wilderness of Palestinian pain for a long time now. It’s only natural.”

  He asked Shamron the same question he’d put to Eli Lavon a week earlier at Megiddo. Did we drive them out?

  “Of course we did,” Shamron said, then hastily he added: “In a few places, under specific circumstances. And if you ask me, we should have driven more out. That was where we went wrong.”

  “You can’t be serious, Ari.”

  “Let me explain,” he said. “History dealt us a losing hand. In 1947, the United Nations decided to give us a scrap of land to found our new state. Remember, four-fifths of Mandatory Palestine had already been cut away to create the state of Transjordan. Eighty percent! Of the final twenty percent, the United Nations gave us half—ten percent of Mandatory Palestine, the Coastal Plain and the Negev. And still the Arabs said no. Imagine if they’d said yes. Imagine if they’d said yes in 1937, when the Peel Commission recommended partition. How many millions might we have saved? Your grandparents would still be alive. My parents and my sisters might still be alive. But what did the Arabs do? They said no, and they aligned themselves with Hitler and cheered our extermination.”

  “Does that justify expelling them?”

  “No, and that’s not the reason why we did it. They were expelled as a consequence of war, a war they initiated. The land the UN gave us contained five hundred thousand Jews and four hundred thousand Arabs. Those Arabs were a hostile force, committed to our destruction. We knew that the minute we declared our independence we were going to be the target of a pan-Arab military invasion. We had to prepare the battlefield. We couldn’t fight two wars at the same time. We couldn’t fight the Egyptians and the Jordanians with one hand while battling the Arabs of Beit Sayeed and Sumayriyya with the other. They had to go.”

  Shamron could see that Gabriel remained unconvinced.

  “Tell me something, Gabriel. Do you think that if the Arabs had won the war that there would be any Jewish refugees? Look at what happened in Hebron. They brought the Jews to the center of town and cut them down. They attacked a convoy of doctors and nurses heading up Mount Scopus and butchered them all. To make certain no one survived, they doused the vehicles with gasoline and set them alight. This was the nature of our enemy. Their goal was to kill us all, so we would never come back. And that remains their goal today. They want to kill us all.”

  Gabriel recited to Shamron the words Fellah had spoken to him on the road to Paris. My Holocaust is as real as yours, and yet you deny my suffering and exonerate yourself of guilt. You claim my wounds are self-inflicted.

  “They are self-inflicted,” Shamron said.

  “But was there a blanket strategy of expulsion? Did you engage in ethnic cleansing as a matter of policy?

  “No,” Shamron said, “and the proof is all around us.

  You had dinner the other night in Abu Ghosh. If there was a blanket policy of expulsion, why is Abu Ghosh still there? In the Western Galilee, why is Sumayriyya gone but al-Makr still there? Because the residents of Abu Ghosh and al-Makr didn’t try to butcher us. But maybe that was our mistake. Maybe we should have expelled them all instead of trying to retain an Arab minority in our midst.”

  “Then there would have been more refugees.”

  “True, but if they had no hope of ever returning, perhaps they might have integrated themselves into Jordan and Lebanon, instead of allowing themselves to be used as a propaganda tool to demonize and delegitimize us. Why is Fellah al-Tamari’s father still in Ein al-Hilweh after all these years? Why didn’t any of his brother Arab states—nations with whom he shares a common language, culture, and religion—why didn’t any of them take him in? Because they want to use him as a tool to question my right to exist. I’m here. I live. I breathe. I exist. I don’t need anyone’s permission to exist. I don’t need anyone’s approval. And I certainly have nowhere else to go.” He looked at Gabriel. “I just need you to watch over it for me. My eyes aren’t what they used to be.”

  The lights of the fishing boat disappeared into the port of Tiberias. Shamron seemed suddenly weary. “There will never be peace in this place, but then there never was. Ever since we stumbled into this land from Egypt and Mesopotamia, we’ve been fighting. Canaanites, Assyrians, Philistines, Romans, Amalekites. We deluded ourselves into believing our enemies had given up their dream of destroying us. We have prayed for impossible things. Peace without justice, forgiveness without restitution.” He looked provocatively at Gabriel. “Love witho
ut sacrifice.”

  Gabriel stood and prepared to take his leave.

  “What shall I tell the prime minister?”

  “Tell him I have to think about it.”

  “Operations is only a way station, Gabriel. One day you’ll be the chief. The Memuneh.”

  “You’re the Memuneh, Ari. And you always will be.”

  Shamron gave a satisfied laugh. “What shall I tell him, Gabriel?”

  “Tell him I have nowhere else to go, either.”

  The telephone call from Julian Isherwood provided Gabriel with the excuse he’d been looking for to remove the last traces of Chiara from the flat. He contacted a charity for Russian immigrants and said he wished to make a donation. The following morning, two skinny boys from Moscow came and removed all the furniture from the living room: the couches and chairs, the end tables and lamps, the dining room table, even the decorative brass pots and ceramic dishes that Chiara had selected and placed with such care. The bedroom he left untouched, except for the sheets and the duvet, which still bore the vanilla scent of Chiara’s hair.

  During the days that followed, Narkiss Street was visited by a succession of delivery trucks. The large white examination table arrived first, followed by the fluorescent and halogen lamps with adjustable stanchions. The venerable art supply shop of L. Cornelissen & Son, Great Russell Street, London, dispatched a shipment of brushes, pigment, medium, and varnish. A chemical firm in Leeds sent several cases of potentially dangerous solvents that aroused more than the passing interest of the Israeli postal authorities. From Germany came a costly microscope on a retractable arm; from a workshop in Venice two large oaken easels.

  Daniel in the Lions’ Den, oil on canvas, dubiously attributed to Erasmus Quellinus, arrived the following day. It took Gabriel the better part of the afternoon to disassemble the sophisticated shipping crate, and only with Shamron’s help was he able to maneuver the enormous canvas onto the twin easels. The image of Daniel surrounded by wild beasts intrigued Shamron, and he stayed late into the evening as Gabriel, armed with cotton swabs and a basin of distilled water and ammonia, began the tedious task of scrubbing more than a century’s worth of dirt and grime from the surface of the painting.

  To the degree possible he duplicated his work habits from Venice. He rose before it was light and resisted the impulse to switch on the radio, lest the daily toll of bloodshed and constant security alerts break the spell the painting had cast over him. He would remain in his studio all morning and usually worked a second shift late into the night. He spent as little time as possible at King Saul Boulevard; indeed he heard of Lev’s resignation on the car radio while driving from Narkiss Street to Mount Herzl to see Leah. During their visits together, her journeys to Vienna were shallower and shorter in duration. She asked him questions about their past.

  “Where did we meet, Gabriel?”

  “At Bezalel. You’re a painter, Leah.”

  “Where were we married?”

  “In Tiberias. On Shamron’s terrace overlooking the Sea of Galilee.”

  “And you’re a restorer now?”

  “I studied in Venice, with Umberto Conti. You used to visit me there every few months. You posed as a German girl from Bremen. Do you remember, Leah?”

  One searing afternoon in June, Gabriel had coffee with Dr. Bar-Zvi in the staff canteen.

  “Will she ever be able to leave this place?”

  “No.”

  “What about for short periods?”

  “I don’t see why not,” the doctor said. “In fact, I think it sounds like a rather good idea.”

  She came with a nurse the first few times. Then, as she grew more comfortable being away from the hospital, Gabriel brought her home alone. She sat in a chair in his studio and watched him work for hours on end. Sometimes her presence brought him peace, sometimes unbearable pain. Always, he wished he could set her upon his easel and re-create the woman he had placed in a car that snowy night in Vienna.

  “Do you have any of my paintings?”

  He showed her the portrait in the bedroom. When she asked who the model had been, Gabriel said it was him.

  “You look sad.”

  “I was tired,” he said. “I’d been gone for three years.”

  “Did I really paint this?”

  “You were good,” he said. “You were better than me.”

  One afternoon, while Gabriel was retouching a damaged portion of Daniel’s face, she asked him why she had come to Vienna.

  “We’d grown apart because of my work. I thought my cover was secure enough to bring you and Dani along. It was a foolish mistake, and you were the one to pay for it.”

  “There was another woman, wasn’t there? A French girl. Someone who worked for the Office.”

  Gabriel nodded once and returned to work on the face of Daniel. Leah pressed him for more. “Who did it?” she asked. “Who put the bomb in my car?”

  “It was Arafat. I was supposed to die with you and Dani, but the man who carried out the mission changed the plan.”

  “Is he alive, this man?”

  Gabriel shook his head.

  “And Arafat?”

  Leah’s grasp on the present situation was tenuous at best. Gabriel explained that Yasir Arafat, Israel’s mortal enemy, now lived a few miles away, in Ramallah.

  “Arafat is here? How can that be?”

  From the mouths of innocents, thought Gabriel. Just then he heard footfalls in the stairwell. Eli Lavon let himself into the flat without bothering to knock.

  37

  AIX-EN-PROVENCE: FIVE MONTHS LATER

  The first stirrings of a mistral were prowling the ravines and gorges of the Bouches-du-Rhône. Paul Martineau, climbing out of his Mercedes sedan, buttoned his canvas field coat and turned the collar up round his ears. Another winter had come to Provence. A few more weeks, he thought, then he’d have to shut down the dig until spring.

  He retrieved his canvas rucksack from the trunk, then set out along the edge of the ancient stone wall of the hill fort. A moment later, at the point where the wall ended, he paused. About fifty meters away, near the edge of the hilltop, a painter stood before a canvas. It was not unusual to see artists working atop the hill; Cézanne himself had adored the commanding view over the Chaine de l’Étoile. Still, Martineau reckoned it would be wise to have a closer look at the man before starting to work.

  He transferred his Makarov pistol from his rucksack to the pocket of his coat, then walked toward the painter. The man’s back was turned to Martineau. Judging from the attitude of his head he was gazing at the distant Mont Sainte-Victoire. This was confirmed for Martineau a few seconds later when he glimpsed the canvas for the first time. The work was very much in the style of Cézanne’s classic landscape. Actually, thought Martineau, it was an uncanny reproduction.

  The artist was so engrossed in his work he seemed not to hear Martineau’s approach. Only when Martineau was standing at his back did he cease painting and glance over his shoulder. He wore a heavy woolen sweater and a floppy wide-brimmed hat that moved with the wind. His gray beard was long and unkempt, his hands were smeared with paint. Judging from his expression he was a man who did not enjoy being interrupted while he was working. Martineau was sympathetic.

  “You’re obviously a devotee of Cézanne,” said Martineau.

  The painter nodded once, then resumed his work.

  “It’s quite good. Would you be willing to sell it to me?”

  “I’m afraid this one is spoken for, but I can do another if you like.”

  Martineau handed him his card. “You can reach me at my office at the university. We’ll discuss the price when I see the finished canvas.”

  The painter accepted the card and dropped it into a wooden case containing his paints and brushes. Martineau bid him a good morning, then set off across the site, until he arrived at the excavation trench where he’d been working the previous afternoon. He climbed down into the pit and removed the blue tarpaulin spread over the bott
om, exposing a stone-carved severed head in semi-profile. He opened his rucksack and removed a small hand trowel and a brush. Just as he was about to begin working, a shadow darkened the base of the pit. He rose onto his knees and looked up. He had expected to see Yvette or one of the other archaeologists working on the dig. Instead, he saw the hatted silhouette of the painter, lit from behind by the bright sun. Martineau lifted his hand to his brow and shielded his eyes.

  “Would you mind moving away from there? You’re blocking my light.”

  The painter silently held up the card Martineau had just given him. “I believe the name on this is incorrect.”

  “I beg your pardon.”

  “The name says Paul Martineau.”

  “Yes, that’s me.”

  “But it’s not your real name, is it?”

  Martineau felt a searing heat across the back of his neck. He looked carefully at the figure standing at the edge of the trench. Was it really him? Martineau couldn’t be sure, not with the heavy beard and floppy hat. Then he thought of the landscape. It was a perfect imitation of Cézanne in tone and texture. Of course it was him. Martineau inched his hand toward his pocket and made one more play for time.

  “Listen, my friend, my name is—”

  “Khaled al-Khalifa,” the painter said, finishing the sentence for him. His next words were spoken in Arabic. “Do you really want to die as a Frenchman? You’re Khaled, son of Sabri, grandson of Asad, the Lion of Beit Sayeed. Your father’s gun is in your coat pocket. Reach for it. Tell me your name.”

  Khaled seized the grip of the Makarov and was pulling it from his pocket when the first round tore into his chest. The second shot caused the gun to slip from his grasp. He toppled backward and struck his head against the rocklike base of the pit. As he slipped toward unconsciousness, he looked up and saw the Jew scooping a handful of earth from the mound at the edge of the trench. He tossed the soil onto Khaled’s face, then raised his gun for the final time. Khaled saw a flash of fire, then darkness. The trench began to spin, and he felt himself spiraling downward, into the past.