The English Girl: A Novel Page 6

  “I’m glad we didn’t kill you,” Orsati said, raising his wineglass a fraction of an inch.

  “I can assure you, Don Orsati, the feeling is mutual.”

  “More sausage?”

  “Please.”

  Orsati carved off two more thick slabs and deposited them on Gabriel’s plate. Then he slipped on a pair of half-moon reading glasses and examined the photograph of the man from Les Palmiers. “He looks different in this picture,” he said after a moment, “but it’s definitely him.”

  “What’s different?”

  “The way he’s wearing his hair. When he came to see me, it was oiled and combed close to the scalp. It was subtle,” Orsati added, “but very effective.”

  “Did he have a name?”

  “He called himself Paul.”

  “Last name?”

  “For all I know, that was his last name.”

  “What language did our friend Paul speak?”

  “French.”

  “Local?”

  “No, he had an accent.”

  “What kind?”

  “I couldn’t place it,” the don said, furrowing his heavy brow. “It was as if he learned his French from a tape recorder. It was perfect. But at the same time it wasn’t quite right.”

  “I assume he didn’t find your name in the telephone book.”

  “No, Allon, he had a reference.”

  “What sort of reference?”

  “A name.”

  “Someone who hired you in the past.”

  “That’s the usual kind.”

  “What kind of job was it?”

  “The kind where two men enter a room and only one man comes out. And don’t bother asking me the name of the reference,” Orsati added quickly. “We’re talking about my business.”

  With a slight inclination of his head, Gabriel indicated he had no desire to pursue the matter further, at least for the moment. Then he asked the don why the man had come to see him.

  “Advice,” answered Orsati.

  “About what?”

  “He told me he had some product to move. He said he needed someone with a fast boat. Someone who knew the local waters and could move at night. Someone who knew how to keep his mouth shut.”

  “Product?”

  “This might surprise you, but he didn’t go into specifics.”

  “You assumed he was a smuggler,” said Gabriel, more a statement of fact than a question.

  “Corsica is a major transit point for heroin moving from the Middle East into Europe. For the record,” the don added quickly, “the Orsatis do not deal in narcotics, though, on occasion, we have been known to eliminate prominent members of the trade.”

  “For a fee, of course.”

  “The bigger the player, the bigger the fee.”

  “Were you able to accommodate him?”

  “Of course,” the don said. Then, lowering his voice, he added, “Sometimes we have to move things at night ourselves, Allon.”

  “Things like dead bodies?”

  The don shrugged. “They are an unfortunate byproduct of our business,” he said philosophically. “Usually, we try to leave them where they fall. But sometimes the clients pay a bit extra to make them disappear forever. Our preferred method is to put them into concrete coffins and send them to the bottom of the sea. Only God knows how many are down there.”

  “How much did Paul pay?”

  “A hundred thousand.”

  “What was the split?”

  “Half for me, half for the man with the boat.”

  “Only half?”

  “He’s lucky I gave him that much.”

  “And when you heard the English girl had gone missing?”

  “Obviously, I was suspicious. And when I saw Paul’s picture in the newspapers . . .” The don’s voice trailed off. “Let’s just say I wasn’t pleased. The last thing I need is trouble. It’s bad for business.”

  “You draw the line at kidnapping young women?”

  “I suspect you do, too.”

  Gabriel said nothing.

  “I meant no offense,” the don said genuinely.

  “None taken, Don Orsati.”

  The don loaded his plate with roasted peppers and eggplant and doused them in Orsati olive oil. Gabriel drank some of the wine, paid a compliment to the don, and then asked for the name of the man with the fast boat who knew the local waters. He did so as if it were the furthest thing from his thoughts.

  “We’re getting into sensitive territory,” replied Orsati. “I do business with these people all the time. If they ever find out I betrayed them to someone like you, things would get messy, Allon.”

  “I can assure you, Don Orsati, they will never know how I obtained the information.”

  Orsati appeared unconvinced. “Why is this girl so important that the great Gabriel Allon is looking for her?”

  “Let’s just say she has powerful friends.”

  “Friends?” Orsati shook his head skeptically. “If you’re involved, there’s more to it than that.”

  “You are very wise, Don Orsati.”

  “The macchia has no eyes,” the don said cryptically.

  “I need his name,” Gabriel said quietly. “He’ll never know where I got it.”

  Orsati picked up his glass of the bloodred wine and lifted it to the sun. “If I were you,” he said after a moment, “I’d talk to a man named Marcel Lacroix. He might know something about where the girl went after she left Corsica.”

  “Where can I find him?”

  “Marseilles,” replied Orsati. “He keeps his boat in the Old Port.”

  “Which side?”

  “The south, opposite the art gallery.”

  “What’s the boat called?”

  “Moondance.”

  “Nice,” said Gabriel.

  “I can assure you there’s nothing nice about Marcel Lacroix or the men he works for. You need to watch your step in Marseilles.”

  “This might come as a surprise to you, Don Orsati, but I’ve done this a time or two before.”

  “That’s true. But you should have been dead a long time ago.” Orsati handed Gabriel the talisman. “Put it around your neck. It wards off more than just the evil eye.”

  “Actually,” replied Gabriel, “I was wondering whether you had something a bit more powerful.”

  “Like what?”

  “A gun.”

  The don smiled. “I have something better than a gun.”

  Gabriel followed the road until it turned to dirt, and then he followed it a little farther. The old goat was waiting exactly where Don Orsati had said it would be, just before the sharp left-hand turn, in the shade of three ancient olive trees. As Gabriel approached, it rose from its resting place and stood in the center of the narrow track, its chin raised defiantly, as if daring Gabriel to attempt to pass. It had the markings of a palomino and a red beard. Like Gabriel, it was scarred from old battles.

  He inched the car forward, hoping the goat would surrender its position without a fight, but the beast stood its ground. Gabriel looked at the gun Don Orsati had given to him. A Beretta 9mm, it was lying on the front passenger seat, fully loaded. One shot between the goat’s battered horns was all it would take to end the standoff, but it was not possible; the goat, like the three ancient olive trees, belonged to Don Casabianca. And if Gabriel so much as touched one hair on its wretched head, there would be a feud, and blood would be spilled.

  Gabriel tapped the car horn twice, but the goat did not budge. Then, sighing heavily, he climbed out and attempted to reason with the beast—first in French, then Italian, and then, exasperated, in Hebrew. The goat responded by lowering its head and aiming it like a battering ram toward Gabriel’s midsection. But Gabriel, who believed the best defense was a good offense, charged first, flailing his arms and shouting like a madman. Surprised, the goat gave ground instantly and vanished through a gap in the macchia.

  Gabriel quickly started back toward the open car door but st
opped when he heard a sound, like the cackling of a mockingbird, in the distance. Turning, he looked up toward the ocher-colored villa anchored to the side of the next hill. Standing on the terrace was a blond-haired man dressed entirely in white. And though Gabriel could not be certain, it appeared the man was laughing uncontrollably.

  9

  CORSICA

  The man awaiting Gabriel in the villa was not a Corsican—at least he had not been born one. His real name was Christopher Keller, and he had been raised in a solidly upper-middle-class home in the posh London district of Kensington. On Corsica, however, only Don Orsati and a handful of his men were aware of these facts. To the rest of the island, Keller was known simply as the Englishman.

  The story of Christopher Keller’s journey from Kensington to the island of Corsica was one of the more intriguing Gabriel had ever heard, which was saying something in itself. The only son of two Harley Street physicians, Keller had made it clear at an early age that he had no intention of following in his parents’ footsteps. Obsessed with history, especially military history, he wanted to become a soldier. His parents forbade him to enter the military, and for a time he acceded to their wishes. He enrolled at Cambridge and began reading history and Oriental languages. He was a brilliant student, but in his second year he grew restless and one night vanished without a trace. A few days later he surfaced at his father’s Kensington home, hair cut to the scalp, dressed in an olive-drab uniform. He had enlisted in the British army.

  After completing his basic training, Keller joined an infantry unit, but his intellect, physical prowess, and lone-wolf attitude quickly captured the attention of the elite Special Air Service. Within days of his arrival at the Regiment’s headquarters at Hereford, it became clear Keller had found his true calling. His scores in the “killing house,” an infamous facility where recruits practice close-quarters combat and hostage rescue, were the highest ever recorded, while the instructors in the unarmed combat course wrote that they had never seen a man who possessed such an instinctual knack for the taking of human life. His training culminated with a forty-mile march across the windswept moorland known as the Brecon Beacons, an endurance test that had left men dead. Laden with a fifty-five-pound rucksack and a ten-pound assault rifle, Keller broke the course record by thirty minutes, a mark that stands to this day.

  Initially, he was assigned to a Sabre squadron specializing in mobile desert warfare, but his career soon took another turn when a man from military intelligence came calling. The man was looking for a unique brand of soldier capable of performing close observation and other special tasks in Northern Ireland. He said he was impressed by Keller’s linguistic skills and his ability to improvise and think on his feet. Was Keller interested? That same night Keller packed his kit and moved from Hereford to a secret base in the Scottish Highlands.

  During his training, Keller displayed yet another remarkable gift. For years the British security and intelligence forces had struggled with the myriad of accents in Northern Ireland. In Ulster the opposing communities could identify each other by the sound of a voice, and the way a man uttered a few simple phrases could mean the difference between life and an appalling death. Keller developed the ability to mimic the intonations perfectly. He could even shift accents at a moment’s notice—a Catholic from Armagh one minute, a Protestant from Belfast’s Shankill Road the next, then a Catholic from the Ballymurphy housing estates. He operated in Belfast for more than a year, tracking known members of the IRA, picking up bits of useful gossip from the surrounding community. The nature of his work meant that he would sometimes go several weeks without contacting his control officers.

  His assignment in Northern Ireland came to an abrupt end late one night when he was kidnapped in West Belfast and driven to a remote farmhouse in County Armagh. There he was accused of being a British spy. Keller knew the situation was hopeless, so he decided to fight his way out. By the time he left the farmhouse, four hardened terrorists from the Provisional Irish Republican Army were dead. Two had been virtually cut to pieces.

  Keller returned to Hereford for what he thought would be a long rest and a stint as an instructor. But his stay ended in August 1990, when Saddam Hussein invaded Kuwait. Keller quickly rejoined his old Sabre unit and by January 1991 was in the western desert of Iraq, searching out the Scud missile launchers that were raining terror on Tel Aviv. On the night of January 28, Keller and his team located a launcher about one hundred miles northwest of Baghdad and radioed the coordinates to their commanders in Saudi Arabia. Ninety minutes later a formation of Coalition fighter-bombers streaked low over the desert. But in a disastrous case of friendly fire, the aircraft attacked the SAS squadron instead of the Scud site. British officials concluded the entire unit was lost, including Keller. His obituaries made no mention of his intelligence work in Northern Ireland, or of the four IRA fighters he had butchered in the farmhouse in County Armagh.

  What British military officials did not realize, however, was that Keller had survived the incident without a scratch. His first instinct was to radio his base and request an extraction. Instead, enraged by the incompetence of his superiors, he started walking. Concealed beneath the robe and headdress of a desert Arab, and highly trained in the art of clandestine movement, Keller made his way through the Coalition forces and slipped undetected into Syria. From there, he hiked westward across Turkey, Greece, and Italy until he finally washed ashore in Corsica, where he fell into the waiting arms of Don Orsati. The don gave Keller a villa and a woman to help heal his many wounds. Then, when Keller was rested, the don gave him work. With his northern European looks and SAS training, Keller was able to fulfill contracts that were far beyond the capabilities of Orsati’s Corsican-born taddunaghiu. One such contract had borne the names Anna Rolfe and Gabriel Allon. For reasons of conscience, Keller had been unable to carry it out, but professional pride had compelled him to leave behind the talisman—the talisman that Gabriel now held in the palm of his hand.

  Remarkably, the two men had met once before, many years earlier, when Keller and several other SAS officers had come to Israel for training in the techniques of counterterrorism. On the final day of their stay, Gabriel had reluctantly agreed to deliver a classified lecture on one of his most daring operations—the 1988 assassination of Abu Jihad, the PLO’s second-in-command, at his villa in Tunis. Keller had sat in the front row, hanging on Gabriel’s every word; and afterward, during a group photo session, he had positioned himself at Gabriel’s side. Gabriel had worn sunglasses and a hat to shield his identity, but Keller had stared directly into the camera. It was one of the last photographs ever taken of him.

  Now, as Gabriel alighted from his rented car, the man who had once spared his life was standing in the open doorway of his Corsican hideaway. He was taller than Gabriel by a chiseled head and much thicker through the chest and shoulders. Twenty years in the Corsican sun had done much to alter his appearance. His skin was now the color of saddle leather, and his cropped hair was bleached from the sea. Only his blue eyes seemed to have remained unchanged. They were the same eyes that had watched Gabriel so intently as he had recounted the death of Abu Jihad. And the same eyes that had once granted him mercy on a rainy night in Venice, in another lifetime.

  “I’d offer you lunch,” Keller said in his clipped English accent, “but I hear you’ve already dined at Chez Orsati.”

  When Keller extended his hand toward Gabriel, the muscles of his arm coiled and bunched beneath his white pullover. Gabriel hesitated for an instant before finally grasping it. Everything about Christopher Keller, from his hatchet-like hands to his powerful spring-loaded legs, seemed to have been expressly designed for the purpose of killing.

  “How much did the don tell you?” asked Gabriel.

  “Enough to know that you have no business approaching a man like Marcel Lacroix without backup.”

  “I take it you know him?”

  “He gave me a ride once.”

  “Before or after?”

>   “Both,” said Keller. “Lacroix did a stretch in the French army. He’s also spent time in some of the toughest prisons in the country.”

  “Am I supposed to be impressed?”

  “ ‘If you know your enemies and know yourself, you can win a hundred battles without a single loss.’ ”

  “Sun Tzu,” said Gabriel.

  “You cited that passage during your lecture in Tel Aviv.”

  “So you were listening after all.”

  Gabriel slipped past Keller and entered the large great room of the villa. The furnishings were rustic and, like Keller, covered in white fabric. Piles of books stood on every flat surface, and on the walls hung several quality paintings, including lesser works by Cézanne, Matisse, and Monet.

  “No security system?” asked Gabriel, looking around the room.

  “None needed.”

  Gabriel walked over to the Cézanne, a landscape painted in the hills near Aix-en-Provence, and ran his fingertip gently over the surface.

  “You’ve done very well for yourself, Keller.”

  “It pays the bills.”

  Gabriel said nothing.

  “You disapprove of the way I earn my living?”

  “You kill people for money.”

  “So do you.”

  “I kill for my country,” replied Gabriel. “And only as a last resort.”

  “Is that why you blew Ivan Kharkov’s brains all over that street in Saint-Tropez? For your country?”

  Gabriel turned from the Cézanne and stared directly into Keller’s eyes. Any other man would have wilted under the intensity of Gabriel’s gaze, but not Keller. His powerful arms were folded casually across his chest, and one corner of his mouth was lifted into a half smile.

  “Maybe this isn’t such a good idea after all,” said Gabriel.