The Kill Artist Read online

  Shamron fell silent as the girl with the bracelets came to their table and added hot water to their teapot.

  When she was gone he asked, “Do you have a girl?” He knew no boundaries when it came to asking personal questions. No corner of a man’s life, friend or enemy, was off limits.

  Gabriel shook his head and busied himself with the tea—milk on the bottom, tea on top, English style. Shamron dumped three packets of sugar into his cup, stirred violently, and pressed on with his inquiries. “No little loves? No loose women that you lure onto your boat for a pleasure cruise?”

  “No women on the boat. Just Peel.”

  “Ah, yes, Peel. Your watcher.”

  “My watcher.”

  “May I ask why not?”

  “No, you may not.”

  Shamron frowned. He was accustomed to unimpeded access into Gabriel’s personal life.

  “What about this girl?” Shamron cocked his head in the direction of the waitress. “She can’t take her eyes off of you. She doesn’t interest you in any way?”

  “She’s a child,” said Gabriel.

  “You’re a child.”

  “I’m closing in on fifty now.”

  “You look forty.”

  “That’s because I don’t work for you anymore.”

  Shamron dabbed omelet from his lips. “Maybe you won’t take another woman because you’re afraid Tariq will try to kill her too.”

  Gabriel looked up as if he had heard a gunshot.

  “Maybe if you help me take down Tariq, you can forgive yourself for what happened in Vienna. I know you blame yourself, Gabriel. If it wasn’t for Tunis, Leah and Dani would never have been in Vienna.”

  “Shut up—”

  “Maybe if you help me take down Tariq, you can finally let go of Leah and get on with your life.”

  Gabriel stood up, tossed a crumpled ten-pound note onto the table, and went out. Shamron smiled apologetically at the girl and followed softly after him.

  * * *

  At the base of the cliff, on the little gray-sand beach at Polpeor Cove, stood the ruins of a lifeguard station slip. A bright wet moon shone through the broken clouds, and the sea held the reflection of light. Gabriel thrust his hands into the pockets of his jacket, thinking of Vienna. The afternoon before the bombing. The last time he had made love to Leah. The last time he had made love to anyone… Leah had insisted on keeping the blinds of their bedroom window open, even though it overlooked the courtyard of the apartment house and Gabriel was convinced the neighbors were watching them. Leah hoped they were. She found perverse justice in the idea of Jews—even secret Jews living as an Italian art restorer and his Swiss girlfriend—seeking pleasure in a city where they had suffered so much persecution. Gabriel remembered the damp heat of Leah’s body, the taste of salt on her skin. Afterward they had slept. When he awakened he found her sitting on the edge of the bed, watching him. “I want this to be your last job. I can’t take this anymore. I want you to leave the Office and do something normal. We can stay in Europe and you can work only as a restorer. Promise me, Gabriel.”

  Shamron joined him on the beach.

  Gabriel looked up. “Why did you go back to the Office? Why couldn’t you stay in Tiberias and live life? Why did you go running back when they called?”

  “Too much unfinished business. I’ve never known anyone who left the secret world with all his affairs in order. We all leave behind bits of loose thread. Old operations, old enemies. They pull at you, like memories of old lovers. I also couldn’t bear to watch the Alsatian and Lev destroying my service any longer.”

  “Why did you keep Lev?”

  “Because I was forced to keep Lev. Lev made it clear to the prime minister that he would not go quietly if I tried to push him out. The last thing the prime minister wanted was a paralyzed Operations division. He got weak knees and made Lev untouchable.”

  “He’s a snake.”

  “The prime minister?”

  “Lev.”

  “A venomous snake, however, who needs to be handled carefully. When the Alsatian resigned, Lev believed he was next in the line of succession. Lev is no longer a young man. He can feel the keys to the throne room slipping through his fingers. If I come and go quickly, Lev may still get his chance. If I serve out my full term, if I linger and take a long time to die, then perhaps the prime minister will choose a younger prince as my successor. Needless to say, I do not count Lev as one of my supporters at King Saul Boulevard.”

  “He never liked me.”

  “That’s because he was envious of you. Envious of your professional accomplishments. Envious of your talent. Envious of the fact you earned three times as much in your cover job as Lev earned on his Office salary. My God, he was even envious of Leah. You’re everything Lev wanted to see in himself, and he hated you for it.”

  “He wanted to be part of the Black September team.”

  “Lev is brilliant, but he was never field material. Lev is a headquarters man.”

  “Does he know you’re here?”

  “He knows nothing,” Shamron said coldly. “And if you decide to come back, he’ll know nothing about that either. I’ll handle you personally, just like the old days.”

  “Killing Tariq isn’t going to bring back Dani. Or Leah. Haven’t you learned anything? While we were busy killing the members of Black September, we didn’t notice that the Egyptians and the Syrians were preparing to drive us into the sea. And they nearly succeeded. We killed thirteen members of Black September, and it didn’t bring back one of the boys they slaughtered in Munich.”

  “Yes, but it felt good.”

  Gabriel closed his eyes: an apartment block in Rome’s Piazza Annabaliano, a darkened stairwell, a painfully thin Palestinian translator named Wadal Abdel Zwaiter. Black September’s chief of operations in Italy. He remembered the sound of a neighbor practicing piano—a rather tedious piece he didn’t recognize—and the sickening thud of the bullets tearing through tissue and cracking bone. One of Gabriel’s shots missed Zwaiter’s body and shattered a bottle of fig wine that he had purchased moments earlier. For some reason Gabriel always thought of the wine, dark, purple and brown, flowing over the stone floor, mingling with the blood of the dying man.

  He opened his eyes, and Rome was gone. “It feels good for a while,” he said. “But then you start to think you’re as bad as the people you’re killing.”

  “War always takes a toll on the soldiers.”

  “When you look into a man’s eyes while pouring lead into his body, it feels more like murder than war.”

  “It’s not murder, Gabriel. It was never murder.”

  “What makes you think I can find Tariq?”

  “Because I’ve found someone who works for him. Someone I believe will lead us to Tariq.”

  “Where is he?”

  “Here in England.”

  “Where?”

  “London, which presents me with a problem. Under our agreements with British intelligence, we’re obligated to inform them when we are operating on their soil. I would prefer not to live up to that agreement, because the British will inform their friends at Langley, and Langley will pressure us to knock it off for the sake of the peace process.”

  “You do have a problem.”

  “Which is why I need you. I need someone who can run an operation in England without arousing suspicion among the natives. Someone who can run a simple surveillance operation without fucking it up.”

  “I watch him, and he leads me to Tariq?”

  “Sounds simple, doesn’t it?”

  “It’s never that simple, Ari. Especially when you’re involved.”

  Gabriel slipped into the cottage and tossed his jacket onto the cot in the sitting room. Immediately he felt the Vecellio pulling at him. It was always this way. He never left the house without first spending one more moment before his work, never returned home without going directly to his studio to gaze at the painting. It was the first thing he saw each afternoon when
he awoke, the last thing he saw each morning before he went to sleep. It was something like obsession, but Gabriel believed only an obsessive could be a good restorer. Or a good assassin, for that matter.

  He climbed the stairs to his studio, switched on the fluorescent lamp, gazed at the painting. God, how long had he been at it already? Six months? Seven? Vecellio had probably completed the altarpiece in a matter of weeks. It would take Gabriel ten times that long to repair it.

  He thought of everything he had done so far. Two weeks studying Vecellio himself. Life, influences, techniques. A month analyzing The Adoration of the Shepherd with several pieces of high-tech equipment: the Wild microscope to view the surface, X-ray photography to peer below the surface, ultraviolet light to expose previous retouching. After the assessment, four months removing the dirty, yellowed varnish. It was not like stripping a coffee table; it was tedious, time-consuming work. Gabriel first had to create the perfect solvent, one that would dissolve the varnish but leave the paint intact. He would dip a homemade cotton swab into the solvent and then twirl it over the surface of the painting until it became soiled with dirty varnish. Then make another swab and start all over again. Dip… twirl… discard. Dip… twirl… discard. Like swabbing the deck of a battleship with a toothbrush. On a good day he could remove a few square inches of dirty varnish.

  Now he had begun the final phase of the job: retouching those portions of the altarpiece damaged or destroyed over the centuries. It was mind-bending, meticulous work, requiring him to spend several hours each night with his face pressed against the painting, magnifying glasses over his eyes. His goal was to make the retouching invisible to the naked eye. The brush strokes, colors, and texture all had to match the original. If the surrounding paint was cracked, Gabriel painted false cracks into his retouching. If the artist had created a unique shade of lapis lazuli blue, Gabriel might spend several hours mixing pigment on his palette trying to duplicate it. His mission was to come and go without being seen. To leave the painting as he had found it, but restored to its original glory, cleansed of impurity.

  He needed sleep, but he needed time with the Vecellio more. Shamron had wakened his emotions, sharpened his senses. He knew it would be good for his work. He switched on the stereo, waited for the music to begin, then slipped his Binomags on his head and picked up his palette as the first notes of La Bohème washed over him. He placed a small amount of Mowolith 20 on the palette, added a bit of dry pigment, thinned down the mixture with arcosolve until the consistency felt right. A portion of the Virgin’s cheek had flaked away. Gabriel had been struggling to repair the damage for more than a week. He touched his brush to the paint, lowered the magnifying visor on the Binomags, and gently tapped the tip of the brush against the surface of the painting, carefully imitating Vecellio’s brushstrokes. Soon he was completely lost in the work and the Puccini.

  After two hours Gabriel had retouched an area about half the size of the button on his shirt. He lifted the visor on the Binomags and rubbed his eyes. He prepared more paint on his palette and started in again.

  After another hour Shamron intruded on his thoughts.

  It was Tariq who killed the ambassador and his wife in Paris.

  If it wasn’t for the old man, Gabriel would never have become an art restorer. Shamron had wanted an airtight cover, something that would allow Gabriel to live and travel legitimately in Europe. Gabriel had been a gifted painter—he had studied art at a prestigious institute in Tel Aviv and had spent a year studying in Paris—so Shamron sent him to Venice to study restoration. When he had finished his apprenticeship, Shamron had recruited Julian Isherwood to find him work. If Shamron needed to send Gabriel to Geneva, Isherwood used his connections to find Gabriel a painting to restore. Most of the work was for private collections, but sometimes he did work for small museums and for other dealers. Gabriel was so talented he quickly became one of the most sought-after art restorers in the world.

  At 2:00 A.M. the Virgin’s face blurred before Gabriel’s eyes. His neck felt as though it were on fire. He pushed back the visor, scraped the paint from his palette, put away his things. Then he went downstairs and fell into his bed, still clothed, and tried to sleep. It was no good. Shamron was back in his head.

  It was Tariq who made the Seine run red with the blood of my people.

  Gabriel opened his eyes. Slowly, bit by bit, layer by layer, it all came back, as though it were depicted in some obscene fresco painted on the ceiling of his cottage: the day Shamron recruited him, his training at the Academy, the Black September operation, Tunis, Vienna… He could almost hear the crazy Hebrew-based lexicon of the place: kidon, katsa, sayan, bodel, bat leveyha.

  We all leave behind bits of loose thread. Old operations, old enemies. They pull at you, like memories of old lovers.

  Damn you, Shamron, thought Gabriel. Find someone else.

  At dawn he swung his feet to the floor, climbed out of bed, and stood in front of the window. The sky was low and dark and filled with swirling rain. Beyond the quay, in the choppy water off the stern of the ketch, a flotilla of seagulls quarreled noisily. Gabriel went into the kitchen and fixed coffee.

  Shamron had left behind a file: ordinary manila folder, no label, a Rorschach-test coffee stain on the back cover next to a cometlike smear of cigarette ash. Gabriel opened it slowly, as if he feared it might explode, and gently lifted it to his nose—the file room at Research, yes, that was it. Attached to the inside of the front cover was a list of every officer who had ever checked out the file. They were all Office pseudonyms and meant nothing to him—except for the last name: Rom, the internal code name for the chief of the service. He turned the first page and looked at the name of the subject, then flipped through a series of grainy surveillance photographs.

  He read it once quickly, then poured himself more coffee and read it again more slowly. He had the strange sensation of walking through the rooms of his childhood—everything was familiar but slightly different, a bit smaller than he remembered, a bit shabbier perhaps. As always he was struck by the similarities between the craft of restoration and the craft of killing. The methodology was precisely the same: study the target, become like him, do the job, slip away without a trace. He might have been reading a scholarly piece on Francesco Vecellio instead of an Office case file on a terrorist named Yusef al-Tawfiki.

  Maybe if you help me take down Tariq, you can finally let go of Leah and get on with your life.

  When he had finished it a second time, he opened the cabinet below the sink and removed a stainless steel case. Inside was a gun: a Beretta .22-caliber semiautomatic, specially fitted with a competition-length barrel. The Office weapon of choice for assassinations—quiet, rapid, reliable. Gabriel pressed the release and thumbed the eight cartridges into the magazine. The rounds contained a light power loading, which made the Beretta fire extremely quietly. When Gabriel had killed the Black September operative in Rome, the neighbors mistook the lethal shots for firecrackers. He rammed the magazine into the grip and pulled the slide, chambering the first round. He had fine-tuned the spring in the blowback mechanism to compensate for the light power in the cartridges. He raised the weapon and peered through the sights. An image appeared before his eyes: pale olive skin, soft brown eyes, cropped black hair.

  It was Tariq who made the Seine run red with the blood of my people. Tariq—your old friend.

  Gabriel lowered the gun, closed the file, pressed the heels of his hands against his eyes. He had made himself a promise after the disaster in Vienna. He would leave the Office for good: no return engagements, no trips down memory lane, no contact with headquarters, period. He would restore his paintings and match wits with the sea and try to forget that Vienna ever happened. He had seen too many old-timers get pulled in whenever the Office had a lousy job and no one to do it—too many men who could never quite leave the secret world behind.

  But what if it were true? What if the boy could actually lead him to Tariq?

  Maybe if you help m
e take down Tariq, you can forgive yourself for what happened in Vienna.

  By instinct he drifted upstairs to his studio and stood before the Vecellio, inspecting that evening’s work. He approved. At least something good had come of Shamron’s visit. He felt a pang of regret. If he went to work for Shamron, he would have to leave the Vecellio behind. He would be a stranger to the painting when he got back. It would be like starting over. And the Rembrandt? The Rembrandt he would return to Christie’s, with his deepest professional apologies. But not the Vecellio. He had invested too much time—put too much of himself into it—to let anyone else touch it now. It was his painting. Julian would just have to wait.

  He slipped downstairs, extinguished the gas fire, packed away his Beretta, slipped Shamron’s file into a drawer. As he stepped outside, a gust of wet wind rocked him onto his heels. The air was oppressively cold, the rain on his face like pellets. He felt as though he were being pulled from a warm, safe place. The halyards snapped against the mast of his ketch. The gulls lifted from the surface of the river, screamed in unison, turned toward the sea, white wings beating against the gray of the clouds. Gabriel pulled his hood over his head and started walking.

  * * *

  Outside the village store was a public telephone. Gabriel dialed the number for the Savoy Hotel and asked to be connected to the room of Rudolf Heller. He always pictured Shamron in portrait over the telephone: the creviced face, the leather hands, the afflicted expression, a patch of bare canvas over the spot where his heart might be. When Shamron answered, the two men exchanged pleasantries in German for a moment, then switched to English. Gabriel always assumed telephone lines were monitored, so when he spoke to Shamron about the operation, he used a crude code. “A project like this will require a large amount of capital. I’ll need money for personnel, transportation, office space, apartment rentals, petty cash for unexpected expenses.”

  “I assure you, capital will not be a problem.”

  Gabriel raised the issue of Lev and how to keep the operation secret from him. “But if memory serves, the bank where you have obtained financing for such ventures in the past is now under the control of your competitors. If you approach the bank for financing now, you run the risk of alerting the competition to our intentions.”