Prince of fire ga-5 Page 4

  The church was in the final stages of restoration. The pews had been removed from the Greek Cross nave and pushed temporarily against the eastern wall. The cleaning of Sebastiano del Piombo’s main altarpiece was complete. Unlit, it was barely visible in the late-afternoon shadow. The Bellini hung in the Chapel of Saint Jerome, on the right side of the church. It should have been concealed behind a tarpaulin-draped scaffold, but the scaffolding had been moved aside and the painting was ablaze with harsh fluorescent lights. Chiara turned to watch Gabriel’s approach. Shamron’s hooded gaze remained fixed on the painting.

  “You know something, Gabriel, even I have to admit it’s beautiful.”

  The old man’s tone was grudging. Shamron, an Israeli primitive, had no use for art or entertainment of any kind. He saw beauty only in a perfectly conceived operation or the destruction of an enemy. But Gabriel took note of something else-the fact that Shamron had just spoken to him in Hebrew and committed the unpardonable sin of uttering his real name in an insecure location.

  “Beautiful,” he repeated, then he turned to Gabriel and smiled sadly. “It’s a pity you’ll never be able to finish it.”

  4

  VENICE

  Shamron eased his body wearily onto a church pew and, with a liver-spotted hand, motioned for Gabriel to adjust the angle of the fluorescent lights. From a metal briefcase he removed a manila envelope and from the envelope three photographs. He placed the first wordlessly into Gabriel’s outstretched hand. Gabriel looked down and saw himself walking in the Campo di Ghetto Nuovo with Chiara at his side. He examined the image calmly, as if it was a painting in need of restoration, and tried to determine when it had been taken. Their clothing, the sharp contrast of the afternoon light, and the dead leaves on the paving stones of the square suggested late autumn. Shamron held up a second photo-Gabriel and Chiara again, this time in a restaurant not far from their house in Cannaregio. The third photograph, Gabriel leaving the Church of San Giovanni Crisostomo, turned his spinal cord to ice. How many times? he wondered. How many times had an assassin been waiting in the campo when he left work for the night?

  “It couldn’t last forever,” Shamron said. “Eventually they were going to find you here. You’ve made too many enemies over the years. We both have.”

  Gabriel handed the photographs back to Shamron. Chiara sat down next to him. In this setting, in this light, she reminded Gabriel of Raphael’s Alba Madonna. Her hair, dark and curly and shimmering with highlights of chestnut and auburn, was clasped at the nape of her neck and spilled riotously about her shoulders. Her skin was olive and luminous. Her eyes, deep brown with flecks of gold, shone in the lamplight. They tended to change color with her mood. Gabriel, in Chiara’s dark gaze, could see there was more bad news to come.

  Shamron reached into the briefcase a second time. “This is a dossier, summarizing your career, uncomfortably accurate, I’m afraid.” He paused. “Seeing one’s entire life reduced to a succession of deaths can be difficult. Are you sure you want to read it?”

  Gabriel held out his hand. Shamron had not bothered to have the dossier translated from Arabic into Hebrew. The Jezreel Valley contained many Arab towns and villages. Gabriel’s Arabic, while not fluent, was good enough to read a recitation of his own professional exploits.

  Shamron was right-somehow his enemies had managed to assemble a tellingly complete account of his career. The dossier referred to Gabriel by his real name. The date of his recruitment was correct, as was the reason, though it credited him with killing eight members of Black September when in truth he had killed only six. Several pages were devoted to Gabriel’s assassination of Khalil el-Wazir, the PLO’s second-in-command, better known by his nom de guerre Abu Jihad. Gabriel had killed him inside his seaside villa in Tunis in 1988. The description of the operation had been provided by Abu Jihad’s wife, Umm Jihad, who had been present that night. The entry for Vienna was terse and noteworthy for its one glaring factual error: Wife and son killed by car bomb, Vienna, January 1991. Reprisal ordered by Abu Amar. Abu Amar was none other than Yasir Arafat. Gabriel had always suspected Arafat’s personal involvement. Until now he had never seen evidence confirming it.

  He held up the pages of the dossier. “Where did you get this?”

  “Milan,” Shamron said. He then told Gabriel about the raid on the pensione and the computer disk found in one of the suspects’ bags. “When the Italians couldn’t break the security code, they turned to us. I suppose we should consider ourselves fortunate. If they’d been able to get inside that disk they would have been able to solve a thirty-year-old Roman murder in a matter of minutes.”

  Contained in the dossier was the fact that he had killed a Black September operative named Wadal Abdel Zwaiter in a Rome apartment house in 1972. It was that killing, Gabriel’s first, which had caused his temples to gray virtually overnight. He handed the dossier back to Shamron.

  “What do we know about the men who were hiding in that pensione?”

  “Based on fingerprints discovered on the material and in the room, along with the photos in the false passports, we’ve managed to identify one of them. His name is Daoud Hadawi, a Palestinian, born in the Jenin refugee camp. He was a ringleader during the first intifada and was in and out of prison. At seventeen he joined Fatah, and when Arafat came to Gaza after Oslo, Hadawi went to work for Al-Amn Al-Ra’isah, the Presidential Security Service. You may know that organization by its previous name, the name it used before Oslo: Force 17, Arafat’s praetorian guard. Arafat’s favorite killers.”

  “What else do we know about Hadawi?”

  Shamron reached into his coat pocket for his cigarettes. Gabriel stopped him and explained that the smoke was harmful to the paintings. Shamron sighed and carried on with his briefing.

  “We were convinced he was involved in terror operations during the second intifada. We placed him on a list of wanted suspects, but the Palestinian Authority refused to hand him over. We assumed he was hiding inside the Mukata with Arafat and the rest of the senior men.” The Mukata was the name of Arafat’s walled, militarized compound in Ramallah. “But when we smashed into the Mukata during Operation Defense Shield, Hadawi was not among the men we found hiding there.”

  “Where was he?”

  “Shabak and Aman assumed he’d fled to Jordan or Lebanon. They turned the case file over to the Office. Unfortunately, locating Hadawi was not high on Lev’s list of priorities. It turned out to be a very costly mistake.”

  “Is Hadawi still a member of Force 17?”

  “Unclear.”

  “Does he still have links to Arafat?”

  “We simply don’t know yet.”

  “Does Shabak think Hadawi was capable of pulling off something like this?”

  “Not really. He was considered a foot soldier, not a mastermind. Rome was planned and executed by a class act. Someone very smart. Someone capable of pulling off a shocking act of terrorism on the world stage. Someone with experience in this sort of thing.”

  “Like who?”

  “That’s what we want you to find out.”

  “Me?”

  “We want you to find the animals who carried out this massacre, and we want you to put them down. It will be just like seventy-two, except this time you’ll be the one in command instead of me.”

  Gabriel shook his head slowly. “I’m not an investigator. I was the executioner. Besides, this isn’t my war any longer. It’s Shabak’s war. It’s the Sayaret’s war.”

  “They’ve come back to Europe,” Shamron said. “Europe is Office turf. This is your war.”

  “Why don’t you lead the team?”

  “I’m a mere adviser with no operational authority.” Shamron’s tone was heavy with irony. He enjoyed playing the role of the downtrodden civil servant who’d been put out to pasture before his time, even if the reality was far different. “Besides, Lev wouldn’t hear of it.”

  “And he would let me lead the team?”

  “He doesn’t have a choi
ce. The prime minister has already spoken on the matter. Of course I was whispering in his ear at the time.” Shamron paused. “Lev did make one demand, however, and I’m afraid I was in no position to challenge it.”

  “What’s that?”

  “He insists that you come back on the payroll and return to full-time duty.”

  Gabriel had left the Office after the bombing in Vienna. His missions in the intervening years had been essentially freelance affairs orchestrated by Shamron. “He wants me under Office discipline so he can keep me under his control,” Gabriel said.

  “His motives are rather transparent. For a man of the secret world, Lev does a terrible job covering his own tracks. But don’t take it personally. It’s me who Lev despises. You, I’m afraid, are guilty by association.”

  A sudden clamor rose from the street, children running and shouting. Shamron remained silent until the noise dissipated. When he spoke again, his voice took on a new tone of gravity.

  “That disk contains more than just your dossier,” he said. “We also found surveillance photographs and detailed security analyses of several potential future targets in Europe.”

  “What sorts of targets?”

  “Embassies, consulates, El Al offices, major synagogues, Jewish community centers, schools.” Shamron’s final word echoed in the apses of the church for a moment before dying away. “They’re going to hit us again, Gabriel. You can help us stop them. You know them as well as anyone at King Saul Boulevard.” He turned his gaze toward the altarpiece. “You know them like the brushstrokes of that Bellini.”

  Shamron looked at Gabriel. “Your days in Venice are over. There’s a plane waiting on the other side of the lagoon. You’re getting on it, whether you like it or not. What you do after that is your business. You can sit around a safe flat, pondering the state of your life, or you can help us find these murderers before they strike again.”

  Gabriel could muster no challenge. Shamron was right: he had no choice but to leave. Still, there was something in the self-satisfied tone of Shamron’s voice that Gabriel found irritating. Shamron had been pleading with him for years to forsake Europe and return to Israel, preferably to assume control of the Office, or at least Operations. Gabriel couldn’t help but feel Shamron, in his Machiavellian way, was deriving a certain satisfaction from the situation.

  He stood and walked to the altarpiece. Attempting to hurriedly finish it was out of the question. The figure of Saint Christopher, with the Christ Child straddling his shoulders, still required substantial inpainting. Then the entire piece required a new coat of varnish. Four weeks minimum, probably more like six. He supposed Tiepolo would have to give it to someone else to finish, a thought that made Gabriel’s stomach churn with acid. But there was something else: Israel wasn’t exactly flooded with Italian Old Master paintings. Chances were he would never again touch a Bellini.

  “My work is here,” Gabriel said, though his voice was heavy with resignation.

  “No, your work was here. You’re coming home”-Shamron hesitated-“to King Saul Boulevard. To Eretz Yisrael.”

  “Leah, too,” Gabriel said. “It’s going to take some time to make the arrangements. Until then, I want a man at the hospital. I don’t care if the dossier says she’s dead.”

  “I’ve already dispatched a Security agent from London station.”

  Gabriel looked at Chiara.

  “She’s coming, too,” Shamron said, reading his thoughts. “We’ll leave a team from Security in Venice as long as necessary to look after her family and the community.”

  “I have to tell Tiepolo that I’m leaving.”

  “The fewer people who know, the better.”

  “I don’t care,” said Gabriel. “I owe it to him.”

  “Do what you need to do. Just do it quickly.”

  “What about the house? There are things-”

  “Extraction will see to your things. By the time they finish, there’ll be no trace of you here.” Shamron, in spite of Gabriel’s admonition against smoking, lit a cigarette. He held the match aloft for a moment, then ceremoniously blew it out. “It will be as though you never existed.”

  Shamron granted him one hour. Gabriel, with Chiara’s Beretta in his pocket, slipped from the back door of the church and made his way to Castello. He had lived there during his apprenticeship and knew the tangled streets of the sestiere well. He walked in a section where tourists never went and many of the houses were uninhabited. His route, deliberately circuitous, took him through several underground sottoportegi, where it was impossible for a pursuer to hide. Once he purposely led himself into an enclosed corte, from which there was only one way to enter and leave. After twenty minutes, he was certain no one was following him.

  Francesco Tiepolo kept his office in San Marco, on the Viale 22 Marzo. Gabriel found him seated behind the large oaken table he used as his desk, his large body folded over a stack of paperwork. Were it not for the notebook computer and electric light, he might have been a figure in a Renaissance painting. He looked up at Gabriel and smiled through his tangled black beard. On the streets of Venice, tourists often mistook him for Luciano Pavarotti. Lately he’d taken to posing for photographs and singing a few lines of “Non ti scordar di me” very badly.

  He had been a great restorer once; now he was a businessman. Indeed, Tiepolo’s was the most successful restoration firm in the entire Veneto. He spent most of his day preparing bids for various projects or locked in political battles with the Venetian officials charged with the care of the city’s artistic and architectural treasures. Once a day he popped into the Church of San Crisostomo to prod his gifted chief restorer, the recalcitrant and reclusive Mario Delvecchio, into working faster. Tiepolo was the only person in the art world other than Julian Isherwood who knew the truth about the talented Signore Delvecchio.

  Tiepolo suggested they walk around the corner for a glass of prosecco, then, confronted with Gabriel’s reluctance to leave the office, he fetched a bottle of ripasso from the next room instead. Gabriel scanned the framed photographs arrayed on the wall behind the Venetian’s desk. There was a new photograph of Tiepolo with his good friend, His Holiness Pope Paul VII. Pietro Lucchesi had been the Patriarch of Venice before reluctantly moving to the Vatican to become leader of the world’s one billion Roman Catholics. The photo showed Tiepolo and the pope seated in the dining room of Tiepolo’s gloriously restored palazzo overlooking the Grand Canal. What it didn’t show was that Gabriel, at that moment, had been seated to the pope’s left. Two years earlier, with a bit of help from Tiepolo, he had saved the pope’s life and destroyed a grave threat to his papacy. He hoped that Chiara and the team from Extraction had found the Hanuka card the Holy Father had sent him in December.

  Tiepolo poured out two glasses of the blood-red ripasso and slid one across the tabletop toward Gabriel. Half of his own wine disappeared in one swallow. Only in his work was Tiepolo meticulous. In all other things-food, drink, his many women-Francesco Tiepolo was prone to extravagance and excess. Gabriel leaned forward and quietly told Tiepolo the news-that his enemies had found him in Venice, that he had no choice but to leave the city immediately, before he could finish the Bellini. Tiepolo smiled sadly and closed his eyes.

  “Is there no other way?”

  Gabriel shook his head. “They know where I live. They know where I work.”

  “And Chiara?”

  Gabriel answered the question truthfully. Tiepolo, in Italian, was an uomo di fiducia, a man of trust.

  “I’m sorry about the Bellini,” Gabriel said. “I should have finished it months ago.” He would have, were it not for the Radek affair.

  “To hell with the Bellini! It’s you I care about.” Tiepolo stared into his wine. “I’m going to miss Mario Delvecchio, but I’m going to miss Gabriel Allon more.”

  Gabriel raised his glass in Tiepolo’s direction. “I know I’m not in any position to ask for a favor…” His voice trailed off.

  Tiepolo looked at the photograph of
the Holy Father and said, “You saved my friend’s life. What do you want?”

  “Finish the Bellini for me.”

  “Me?”

  “We shared the same teacher, Francesco. Umberto Conti taught you well.”

  “Yes, but do you know how long it’s been since I’ve put a brush to a painting?”

  “You’ll do just fine. Trust me.”

  “That’s quite a vote of confidence, coming from a man like Mario Delvecchio.”

  “Mario’s dead, Francesco. Mario never was.”

  Gabriel made his way back to Cannaregio through the gathering darkness. He took a short detour so he could walk, one final time, through the ancient ghetto. In the square, he watched proprietarily as a pair of boys, clad all in black with wispy untrimmed beards, hurried across the paving stones toward the yeshiva. He looked at his watch. An hour had elapsed since he’d left Shamron and Chiara in the church. He turned and started walking toward the house that would soon bear no trace of him, and the plane that would carry him home again. As he walked, two questions ran ceaselessly in his mind. Who had found him in Venice? And why was he being allowed to leave alive?

  5

  TEL AVIV: MARCH 10

  Gabriel arrived at King Saul Boulevard at eight o’clock the following morning. Two officers from Personnel were waiting for him. They wore matching cotton shirts and matching smiles-the tight, humorless smiles of men who are empowered to ask embarrassing questions. In the eyes of Personnel, Gabriel’s return to discipline was long overdue. He was like fine wine, to be savored slowly and with much commentary. He placed himself in their hands with the melancholy air of a fugitive surrendering after a long time on the run and followed them upstairs.

  There were declarations to sign, oaths to swear, and unapologetic questions about the state of his bank account. He was photographed and issued an identification badge, which was hung like an albatross around his neck. New fingerprints were taken because no one could seem to find the originals from 1972. He was examined by a medical doctor who, upon seeing the scars all over his body, seemed surprised to find a pulse in his wrist and blood pressure in his veins. He even endured a mind-numbing session with an Office psychologist, who jotted a few notes in Gabriel’s file and hurriedly fled the room. Motor Pool granted him temporary use of a Skoda sedan; Housekeeping assigned him a windowless cell in the basement and living accommodations until he could find a place of his own. Gabriel, who wished to maintain a buffer between himself and King Saul Boulevard, chose a disused safe flat on Narkiss Street in Jerusalem, not far from the old campus of the Bezalel Academy of Art.