Gabriel Allon: Prince of Fire, the Messenger, the Secret Servant Page 35

  Gabriel nodded.

  “Use your power wisely. Even though you will find yourself in a position to punish your enemies, use your power to pursue peace at every turn. Seek justice rather than vengeance.”

  Gabriel was tempted to remind the Pope that he was only a secret servant of the State, that decisions of war and peace were in the hands of men far more powerful than he. Instead he assured the Pope that he would take his advice to heart.

  “Will you search for the men who attacked the Vatican?”

  “It’s not our fight—not yet, at least.”

  “Something tells me it will be soon.”

  The Pope was watching the traffic below him with a childlike fascination.

  “It was my idea to put the dove of peace on the shroud covering the façade of the Basilica. I’m sure you find the sentiment hopelessly naïve. You probably consider me naïve as well.”

  “I wouldn’t want to live in this world without men such as you, Holiness.”

  Gabriel made no attempt to hide the next glance at his watch.

  “Your plane awaits you?” the Pope asked.

  “Yes, Holiness.”

  “Come,” he said. “I’ll see you out.”

  Gabriel started toward the steps, but the Pope remained at the parapet. “Francesco Tiepolo called me this morning from Venice. He sends his regards.” He turned and looked at Gabriel. “So does Chiara.”

  Gabriel was silent.

  “She says she wants to see you before you go home to Israel. She was wondering whether you might stop in Venice on your way out of the country.” The Pope took Gabriel by the elbow and, smiling, led him down the steps. “I realize I have very little experience when it comes to matters of the heart, but will you allow an old man to give you one more piece of advice?”

  8.

  Venice

  IT WAS A SMALL terra-cotta church, built for a poor parish in the sestiere of Cannaregio. The plot of land had been too cramped for a proper church square, and so the main entrance opened directly onto the busy Salizzada San Giovanni Crisostomo. Gabriel had once carried a key to the church in his pocket. Now he entered like an ordinary tourist and paused for a moment in the vestibule, waiting for his eyes to adjust to the dim light while a breath of cool air, scented with candle wax and incense, brushed against his cheek. He thought of the last time he had set foot in the church. It was the night Shamron had come to Venice to tell Gabriel that he had been discovered by his enemies and that it was time for him to come home again. There’ll be no trace of you here, Shamron had said. It will be as though you never existed.

  He crossed the intimate nave to the Chapel of St. Jerome on the right side of the church. The altarpiece was concealed by heavy shadow. Gabriel dropped a coin into the light meter, and the lamps flickered into life, illuminating the last great work by Giovanni Bellini. He stood for a moment, right hand pressed to his chin, head tilted slightly to one side, examining the painting in raked lighting. Francesco Tiepolo had done a fine job finishing it for him. Indeed it was nearly impossible for Gabriel to tell where his inpainting left off and Tiepolo’s began. Hardly surprising, he thought. They had both served their apprenticeships with the master Venetian restorer Umberto Conti.

  The meter ran out, and the lights switched off automatically, plunging the painting into darkness again. Gabriel went back into the street and made his way westward across Cannaregio until he came to an iron bridge, the only one in all of Venice. In the Middle Ages there had been a gate in the center of the bridge, and at night a Christian watchman had stood guard so that those imprisoned on the other side could not escape. He crossed the bridge and entered a darkened sottoportego. At the end of the passageway, a broad square opened before him, the Campo del Ghetto Nuovo, center of the ancient ghetto of Venice. More than five thousand Jews had once lived in the ghetto. Now it was home to only twenty of the city’s four hundred Jews, and most of those were elderly who resided in the Casa di Riposo Israelitica.

  He crossed the campo and stopped at Number 2899. A small brass plaque read COMUNITÀ EBRAICA DI VENEZIA—Jewish Community of Venice. He pressed the bell and quickly turned his back to the security camera over the doorway. After a long silence a woman’s voice, familiar to him, crackled over the intercom. “Turn around,” she said. “Let me have a look at your face.”

  HE WAITED WHERE she had told him to wait, on a wooden bench in a sunlit corner of the campo, near a memorial for the Venetian Jews who were rounded up in December 1943 and sent to their deaths at Auschwitz. Ten minutes elapsed, then ten minutes more. When finally she emerged from the office she took her time crossing the square, then stopped several feet away from him, as though she were afraid to come any closer. Gabriel, still seated, pushed his sunglasses onto his forehead and regarded her in the dazzling autumn light. She wore faded blue jeans, snug around her long thighs and flared at the bottom, and a pair of high-heeled suede boots. Her white blouse was tailored in such a way that it left no doubt about the generous figure beneath it. Her riotous auburn hair was held back by a chocolate-colored satin ribbon, and a silk scarf was wound round her neck. Her olive skin was very dark. Gabriel suspected she’d been to the sun recently. Her eyes, wide and Oriental in shape, were the color of caramel and flecked with gold. They tended to change color with her mood. The last time Gabriel had seen Chiara’s eyes they were nearly black with anger and streaked with mascara. She folded her arms defensively beneath her breasts and asked what he was doing in Venice.

  “Hello, Chiara. Don’t you look lovely.”

  The breeze took her hair and blew a few strands across her face. She brushed it away with her left hand. It was absent the diamond engagement ring Gabriel had given her. There were other rings on her fingers now and a new gold watch on her wrist. Gabriel wondered if they were gifts from someone else.

  “I haven’t heard from you since I left Jerusalem,” Chiara said in the deliberately even tone she used whenever she was trying to keep her emotions in check. “It’s been months. Now you show up here without warning and expect me to greet you with my arms open and a smile on my face?”

  “Without warning? I came here because you asked me to come.”

  “Me? What on earth are you talking about?”

  Gabriel searched her eyes. He could tell she was not dissembling. “Forgive me,” he said. “It seems I was brought here under false pretenses.”

  She toyed with the ends of her scarf, clearly enjoying his discomfort. “Brought here by whom?”

  Donati and Tiepolo, reckoned Gabriel. Maybe even His Holiness himself. He stood abruptly. “It doesn’t matter,” he said. “I’m sorry, Chiara. It was nice to see you again.”

  He turned and started to walk away, but she seized his arm.

  “Wait,” she said. “Stay for a moment.”

  “Are you going to be civil?”

  “Civility is for divorced couples with children.”

  Gabriel sat down again, but Chiara remained standing. A man in dark glasses and a tan blazer emerged from the sottoportego. He looked admiringly at Chiara, then crossed the campo and disappeared over the bridge that led to the pair of old Sephardic synagogues at the southern end of the ghetto. Chiara watched the man go, then tilted her head and scrutinized Gabriel’s appearance.

  “Has anyone ever told you that you bear more than a passing resemblance to the man who saved the Pope?”

  “He’s an Italian,” Gabriel said. “Didn’t you read about him in the newspapers?”

  She ignored him. “When I saw the footage on television, I thought I was hallucinating. I knew it was you. That night, after things calmed down, I checked in with Rome. Shimon told me you’d been at the Vatican.”

  A sudden movement in the campo caused her to turn her head. She watched as a man with a salt-and-pepper beard and a fedora hurried toward the entrance of the community center. It was her father, the chief rabbi of Venice. She raised the toe of her right boot and balanced her weight on the heel. Gabriel knew the gesture well. It me
ant something provocative was coming.

  “Why are you here, Gabriel Allon?”

  “I was told you wanted to see me.”

  “And so you came? Just like that?”

  “Just like that.”

  The corners of her lips started to curl into a smile.

  “What’s so funny?” he asked.

  “Poor Gabriel. You’re still in love with me, aren’t you?”

  “I always was.”

  “Just not enough to marry me?”

  “Can we do this in private?”

  “Not for a while. I need to keep an eye on the office. My other job,” she said in a tone of mock conspiracy.

  “Please give Rabbi Zolli my regards.”

  “I’m not sure that’s such a good idea. Rabbi Zolli is still furious with you.”

  She dug a key from her pocket and tossed it to him. He looked at it for a long moment. Even after months of separation it was difficult for Gabriel to imagine Chiara leading a life of her own.

  “In case you’re wondering, I live there alone. It’s more than you have a right to know, but it’s the truth. Make yourself comfortable. Get some rest. You look like hell.”

  “Full of compliments today, aren’t we?” He slipped the key into his pocket. “What’s the address?”

  “You know, for a spy, you’re a terrible liar.”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “You know my address, Gabriel. You got it from Operations, the same place you got my telephone number.”

  She leaned down and kissed his cheek. When her hair fell across his face, he closed his eyes and inhaled the scent of vanilla.

  HER BUILDING WAS on the other side of the Grand Canal in Santa Croce, in a small enclosed corte with but one passage in and out. Gabriel, as he slipped into her apartment, had the sensation of walking into his own past. The sitting room seemed posed for a magazine photo shoot. Even her old magazines and newspapers appeared to have been arranged by a fanatic in pursuit of visual perfection. He walked over to an end table and browsed the framed photographs: Chiara and her parents; Chiara and an older brother who lived in Padua; Chiara with a friend on the shore of the Sea of Galilee. It was during that trip, when she was just twenty-five, that she’d come to the attention of an Office talent scout. Six months later, after being vetted and trained, she was sent back to Europe as a bat leveyha, a female escort officer. There were no photographs of Chiara with Gabriel, for none existed.

  He went to the window and looked out. Thirty feet below, the oily green waters of the Rio del Megio flowed sluggishly by. A clothing line stretched to the building opposite. Shirts and trousers hung drunkenly in the sunlight, and at the other end of the line an old woman sat in an open window with her fleshy arm draped over the sill. She seemed surprised to see Gabriel. He held up the key and said he was Chiara’s friend from Milan.

  He lowered the blinds and went into the kitchen. In the sink was a half-drunk bowl of milky coffee and a crust of buttered toast. Chiara, fastidious in all other things, always left her breakfast dishes in the sink until the end of the day. Gabriel, in an act of domestic pettiness, left them where they stood and went into her bedroom.

  He tossed his bag onto the unmade bed and, resisting the temptation to search her closet and drawers, went into the bathroom and turned on the shower. He opened the medicine chest, looking for razors or cologne or any other evidence of a man. There were two things he’d never seen before: a bottle of sleeping tablets and a bottle of antidepressants. He returned them to the precise position in which he’d found them. Chiara, like Gabriel, had been trained to notice even the subtlest of changes.

  He stripped off his clothes and tossed them into the hallway, then spent a long time standing beneath the shower. When he was finished he wrapped a towel around his waist and padded into the bedroom. The duvet smelled of Chiara’s body. When he placed his head atop her pillow the bells of Santa Croce tolled midday. He closed his eyes and plunged into a dreamless sleep.

  HE WOKE IN late afternoon to the sound of a key being pushed into the lock, followed by the clatter of Chiara’s boot heels in the entrance hall. She didn’t bother calling out that she was home. She knew he came awake at the slightest sound or movement. When she entered the bedroom she was singing softly to herself, a silly Italian pop song she knew he loathed.

  She sat on the edge of the bed, close enough so that her hip pressed against his thigh. He opened his eyes and watched her remove her boots and wriggle out of her jeans. She pressed her palm against his chest. When he pulled the ribbon from her hair, auburn curls tumbled about her face and shoulders. She repeated the question she had posed to him in the ghetto: Why are you here, Gabriel Allon?

  “I was wondering whether we might try this again,” Gabriel said.

  “I don’t need to try it. I tried it once, and I liked it very much.”

  He unwound the silk scarf from her throat and slowly loosened the buttons of her blouse. Chiara leaned down and kissed his mouth. It was like being kissed by Raphael’s Alba Madonna.

  “If you hurt me again, I’ll hate you forever.”

  “I won’t hurt you.”

  “I never stopped dreaming of you.”

  “Good dreams?”

  “No,” she said. “I dreamt only of your death.”

  THE ONLY TRACE of Gabriel in the apartment was an old sketchpad. He turned to a fresh page and regarded Chiara with a professional dispassion. She was seated at the end of the couch, with her long legs folded beneath her and her body wrapped in a silk bedsheet. Her face was turned toward the window and lit by the setting sun. Gabriel was relieved to see the first lines around Chiara’s eyes. He always feared she was far too young for him and that one day, when he was old, she would leave him for another man. He tugged at the bedsheet, exposing her breast. She held his gaze for a moment, then closed her eyes.

  “You’re lucky I was here,” she said. “I might have been away on assignment.”

  She was a talker. Gabriel had learned long ago it was pointless to ask her to remain silent while posing for him.

  “You haven’t worked since that job in Switzerland.”

  “How do you know about that operation?”

  Gabriel gave her an inscrutable glance over the top of his sketchpad and reminded her not to move.

  “So much for the concept of need to know. It seems you can walk into Operations any time you feel like it and find out what I’m doing.” She started to turn her head, but Gabriel stilled her with a sharp tsk-tsk. “But I shouldn’t be surprised. Have they given you the directorate yet?”

  “Which directorate is that?” Gabriel said, being deliberately obtuse.

  “Special Operations.”

  Gabriel confessed that the post had been offered and accepted.

  “So you’re my boss now,” she pointed out. “I suppose we just violated about a half dozen different Office edicts about fraternization between senior officers and staff.”

  “At least,” said Gabriel. “But my promotion isn’t official yet.”

  “Oh, thank goodness. I wouldn’t want the great Gabriel to get into any sort of trouble because of his sex life. How much longer are we allowed to plunder each other’s bodies before we run into trouble with Personnel?”

  “As long as we like. We’ll just have to go on the record with them at some point.”

  “And what about God, Gabriel? Will you go on the record with God this time?” There was silence, except for the scratching of a charcoal pencil across paper. She changed the subject. “How much do you know about what I was doing in Switzerland?”

  “I know that you went to Zermatt to seduce a Swiss arms merchant who was about to make a deal with someone who didn’t have our best interests at heart. King Saul Boulevard wanted to know when the shipment was leaving and where it was bound.”

  After a long silence he asked her whether she had slept with the Swiss.

  “It wasn’t that kind of operation. I was working with another agent. I
just kept the arms dealer entertained in the bar while the other agent broke into his room and stole the contents of his computer. Besides, you know that a bat leveyha isn’t supposed to be used for sex. We hire professionals for that sort of thing.”

  “Not always.”

  “I could never use my body like that. I’m a religious girl.” She smiled at him mischievously. “We got it, by the way. The boat had a mysterious accident near the coast of Crete. The weapons are now on the bottom of the sea.”

  “I know,” Gabriel said. “Close your eyes again.”

  “Make me,” she said, then she smiled and did what he wanted. “Aren’t you going to ask me whether I was with anyone while we were apart?”

  “It’s none of my business.”

  “But you must be curious. I can only imagine what you did to my apartment when you walked through the door.”

  “If you’re suggesting I searched your things, I didn’t.”

  “Oh, please.”

  “Why can’t you sleep?”

  “Do you really want me to answer that?”

  He made no reply.

  “There was no one else, Gabriel, but then you knew that, didn’t you? How could there be?” She gave him a bittersweet smile. “They never tell you that when they ask you to join their exclusive club. They never tell you how the lies begin to add up, or that you’ll never truly be comfortable around people who aren’t members. Is that the only reason why you fell in love with me, Gabriel? Because I was Office?”

  “I liked your fettuccini and mushrooms. You make the best fettuccini and mushrooms in all of Venice.”

  “And what about you? Were you with any other women while I was gone?”

  “I spent all my time with a very large canvas.”

  “Oh, yes, I forgot about your affliction. You can’t make love to a woman unless she knows you’ve killed on behalf of your country. I’m sure you could have found someone suitable at King Saul Boulevard if you’d set your mind to it. Every woman in the Office lusts after you.”