Gabriel Allon 01 - The Kill Artist Page 7

  Shamron rubbed the spot on the bridge of his nose where his elegant tortoiseshell glasses were pinching him. He had aged; Gabriel could see it at the edges of his eyes when he removed the little spectacles. Even the great Shamron was not immune to the ravages of time.

  “You know what happened in Amman?” Shamron asked.

  “I read about it in the newspapers. I also know what happened in Switzerland.”

  “Ah, Switzerland,” Shamron said mildly, as if Switzerland were an unfortunate romance he would rather forget. “A simple operation, right? Bug the flat of a high-level Islamic extremist. Nothing to it. In the old days we could do something like this with our eyes closed. Place the device and get out before anyone realizes we’ve been there. But these idiots forget that the Swiss are the most vigilant people on earth. One old lady makes a telephone call, and the entire team is in the hands of the Swiss police.”

  “How unfortunate.”

  “And I’m on the next plane to Zürich begging our Swiss brethren not to make it public.”

  “I would have enjoyed watching that.”

  Shamron emitted a few grunts of laughter. Gabriel realized that in an odd way he had missed the old man. How long had it been since they had seen each other? Eight years? No, nearly nine. Shamron had come to Vienna after the bombing to help clean up the mess and make certain the real reason for Gabriel’s presence in the city remained secret. Gabriel saw Shamron once more after that: when he returned to Tel Aviv to tell him he wanted out.

  “I’m not sure where it went wrong,” Shamron said. “Everyone thinks now that peace is at hand there are no more threats to our survival. They don’t understand that peace will only make the fanatics more desperate. They don’t understand that we will need to spy on our new Arab friends just as hard as when they were openly committed to our destruction.”

  “A spy’s work is never done.”

  “But these days all the smart boys do their compulsory service in the IDF and then run like hell. They want to make money and talk on their cell phones from the cafés of Ben Yehuda Street. We used to get only the best. Like you, Gabriel. Now we get the ones who are too stupid or lazy to make it in the real world.”

  “Change your recruiting tactics.”

  “I have, but I need someone now. Someone who can run an operation in Europe without permission from the host government and without it ending up on the front page of The Sunday Times. I need you, Gabriel. I need a prince. I need you to do for the Office what you are doing to that Vecellio. Our service has been damaged. I need you to help me restore it.”

  “Five hundred years of dirt and neglect I can fix. Ten years of institutional incompetence is another matter entirely. Find someone else to find your terrorists and fix your Office. I’m already under contract.”

  Shamron removed his glasses, breathed on the lenses, polished them with his scarf. “It was Tariq, by the way,” he said, inspecting the glasses in the weak dashboard light. “Did I mention that, Gabriel? It was Tariq who killed the ambassador and his wife in Paris. It was Tariq who made the Seine run red with the blood of my people. Tariq—your old friend.”

  Gabriel slammed on the brakes, and Shamron’s spectacles careened against the windshield.

  Gabriel drove through Lizard Town, then raced across a stark plain of windblown grass down to the sea. He pulled into a car park near the lighthouse and killed the engine. The car shuddered in the wind. He led Shamron along a darkened footpath down to the cliffs. The crashing of the waves filled the air. A seabird screamed at them. When the foghorn in the lighthouse groaned, Shamron spun around and braced himself as if he were preparing for a silent kill.

  Lights burned in the little café on the edge of the cliffs. The staff was trying to close up, but Gabriel charmed them out of a couple of omelets and a pot of tea. Shamron, acting the role of Herr Heller, used a damp paper napkin to dab the dust of the footpath from his costly suede loafers. The girl who served them wore so many earrings and bracelets she sounded like a wind chime when she moved. There was something of Leah in her—Gabriel could see it; Shamron could see it too.

  “Why do you think it was Tariq?”

  “Did you hear about the girl? The American girl? The one he used for cover and then murdered in cold blood? Tariq always liked women. Too bad they all ended up the same way.”

  “That’s all you have? A dead American girl?”

  Shamron told him about the videotape, about the waiter who made a mysterious telephone call a minute before the ambassador and his wife stepped into the car. “His name is Mohammed Azziz. He told the catering company he was an Algerian. He’s not a waiter, and he’s not Algerian. He’s been a member of Tariq’s organization for ten years. He’s played a supporting role in several of Tariq’s operations.”

  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 an
d 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 Shepherds 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 brush strokes. 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 i
t 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.