The English Assassin (Gabriel Allon 02) Page 9

  “Thank you,” he said, taking the old woman’s hand. She held it for a moment, then drew away, as if he had fever. The Englishman asked: “What’s wrong?”

  “Are you going to remain in the valley for a time, or are you going away again?”

  “I’m afraid I have to go away.”

  “In the service of Don Orsati?”

  The Englishman nodded. He kept no secrets from the oldsignadora.

  “Do you have your charm?”

  He opened his shirt. A piece of coral, shaped like a hand, hung by a leather cord from his neck. She took it in her fingers and stroked it, as if to ascertain whether it still contained the mystical power to ward off theocchju. She seemed satisfied but still concerned.

  The Englishman asked, “Do you see something?”

  “I see a man.”

  “What’s this man like?”

  “He’s like you, only a heretic. You should avoid him. You will do as I have instructed?”

  “I always do.”

  The Englishman kissed her hand, then slipped a roll of francs into her palm.

  “It’s too much,” she said.

  “You always say that.”

  “That’s because you always give me too much.”

  Part Two

  13

  ROME

  AN HOUR AFTER DAWNthey crossed the Italian border. It had been a long time since Gabriel had been so glad to leave a place. He drove toward Milan while Anna slept. She was troubled by nightmares, tossing her head, waging private battles. When the dream finally released her, she woke and stared wide-eyed at Gabriel, as if startled by his presence. She closed her eyes and soon the struggle began again.

  In a roadside café they ate silently, like famished lovers: omelets and bread, bowls of milky coffee. During the last miles before Milan, they talked through the plans one last time. Anna would fly to Lisbon; Gabriel would keep the Mercedes and drive on to Rome. At the airport, he pulled to the curb on the departure level and slid the car into park. “Before we continue, there’s one thing I have to know,” he said.

  “You want to know why I didn’t tell the Zurich police about the missing paintings.”

  “That’s right.”

  “The answer is quite simple: I don’t trust them. It’s why I returned your phone call and why I showed you the missing collection in the first place.” She took his hand. “I don’t trust the Swiss police, Mr. Allon, and neither should you. Does that answer your question?”

  “For now.”

  She climbed out and disappeared into the terminal. Her scent lingered in the car for the remainder of the morning, like the simple question which ran ceaselessly round his head. Why would a band of professional art thieves go to the trouble of stealing Rolfe’s private collection but leave a Raphael hanging on the parlor wall?

  ROMEsmelled of autumn: bitter coffee, garlic frying in olive oil, woodsmoke and dead leaves. Gabriel checked into a small hotel on the Corso d’Italia, opposite the Villa Borghese. His room overlooked a tiny courtyard with a still fountain and parasols bound for winter. He climbed into bed and immediately was asleep.

  It had been a long time since he had dreamed of Vienna, but something he had seen in Zurich had set his subconscious aflame, and he dreamed of it again now. The dream began as it always did, with Gabriel buckling his son into the backseat of the car, unaware he is strapping him to a bomb planted by a Palestinian who has sworn to destroy him. He kisses his wife, says good night to her for the last time, walks away. Then the car explodes. He turns and begins to run. In his dream it takes several minutes for him to reach the car, even though it is only a few yards away. He finds his son, torn to pieces by the bomb. In the front seat is a woman, blackened by fire. Now, instead of Leah, the woman is Anna Rolfe.

  Finally he forced the dream to end. He awoke in damp sheets, looked at his wristwatch. He had slept twelve hours.

  He showered and dressed. Outside it was midmorning, puffy white clouds scudding across an azure sky, wind prowling the Corso d’Italia. Overnight it had stormed, and the gusts were making tiny whitecaps in large puddles on the pavement. He walked to the Via Veneto, bought the papers, and read them over breakfast in a café.

  After an hour he left the café, walked to a telephone booth, and dialed a number from memory.Click . . . hum . . . click . . . Finally a voice, slightly distant, a bit of an echo. “Yes?”

  Gabriel identified himself as Stevens, one of his old work names, and said he wished to have lunch with Mr. Baker at Il Drappo. A pause, another click, more humming, something that sounded like shattering china. Then the voice returned.

  “Mr. Baker says lunch at Il Drappo is suitable.”

  After that the line went dead.

  FORtwo days Gabriel waited. He rose early each morning and jogged the quiet footpaths of the Villa Borghese. Then he would walk to the Via Veneto for coffee at a counter tended by a pretty girl with auburn hair. On the second day, he noticed a priest in a black cassock whose face looked familiar to him. Gabriel searched his memory for the face but could not find it. When he asked the girl for his check, her telephone number was written on the back of it. He smiled apologetically and dropped it on the bar when he left. The priest stayed in the café.

  That afternoon, Gabriel spent a long time checking his tail. He wandered through churches, studying frescoes and altarpieces until his neck ached. He could almost feel the presence of Umberto Conti at his side. Conti, like Ari Shamron, believed Gabriel was a man of special gifts, and he doted on Gabriel, just as Shamron had done. Sometimes he would come to Gabriel’s saggingpensione and drag him into the Venetian night to look at art. He spoke of paintings the way some men speak of women.Look at the light, Gabriel. Look at the technique, the hands, my God, the hands.

  Gabriel’s neighbor in Venice had been a Palestinian called Saeb, a skinny intellectual who wrote violent poetry and incendiary tracts comparing the Israelis to the Nazis. He reminded Gabriel too much of a man named Wadal Adel Zwaiter, the Black September chief in Italy, whom Gabriel had assassinated in the stairwell of an apartment building in Rome’s Piazza Annabaliano.

  “I was part of a special unit, Miss Rolfe.”

  “What kind of special unit?”

  “A counterterrorism unit that tracked down people who committed acts of violence against Israel.”

  “Palestinians?”

  “For the most part, yes.”

  “And what did you do to these terrorists when you found them?”

  Silence . . .

  “Tell me, Mr. Allon. What did you do when you found them?”

  Late at night, Saeb would come to Gabriel’s room like Zwaiter’s ghost, always with a bottle of cheap red wine and French cigarettes, and he would sit cross-legged on the floor and lecture Gabriel on the injustices heaped upon the Palestinian people.The Jews! The West! The corrupt Arab regimes! All of them have Palestinian blood on their hands! Gabriel would nod and help himself to Saeb’s wine and another of his cigarettes. Occasionally he would contribute his own condemnation of Israel. The State could not last, Gabriel had said in one of his more memorable speeches. Eventually, it would collapse, like capitalism, beneath the weight of its inherent contradictions. Saeb was so moved he included a variation of the line in his next article.

  During Gabriel’s apprenticeship Shamron had permitted Leah to visit him once each month. They would make love frantically, and afterward she would lie next to him on the single bed and beg him to come home to Tel Aviv. She posed as a German sociology student from Hamburg named Eva. When Saeb came to the room with his wine and cigarettes, she spoke in glowing terms of the Baader-Meinhof Gang and the PLO. Saeb declared her an enchantress. “Someday, you must come to Palestine and see the land,” he said.Yes, Leah had agreed.Someday.

  GABRIELate each night in a small trattoria near his hotel. On the second night the owner treated him as though he was a regular who had been coming once a week for twenty years. Placed him at a special table near the kitchen and plied him wit
hantipasti until Gabriel begged for mercy. Then pasta, then fish, then an assortment ofdolci. Over coffee he handed Gabriel a note.

  “Who left this?” said Gabriel.

  He lifted his hands in a Roman gesture of befuddlement. “A man.”

  Gabriel looked at the note: plain paper, anonymous script, no signature.

  Church of Santa Maria della Pace. One hour.

  THEnight had turned colder, a gusty wind moving in the trees of the Villa Borghese. Gabriel walked for a time—along the Corso d’Italia, down the Via Veneto—then stopped a taxi and took it to the edge of the Centro Storico.

  For twenty minutes he wandered through the narrow streets and quiet squares until confident he was not being followed. Then he walked to the Piazza Navona. The square was crowded in spite of the chill, cafés filled, street artists hawking cheap paintings.

  Gabriel slowly circled the piazza, now pausing to gaze at an ornate fountain, now stopping to drop a few coins into the basket of a blind man strumming a guitar with just four strings. Someone was following him; he could feel it.

  He started toward the church, then doubled back suddenly. His pursuer was now standing among a small group of people listening to the guitarist. Gabriel walked over and stood next to him.

  “You’re clean,” the man said. “Go inside.”

  THEchurch was empty, the smell of burning wax and incense heavy on the air. Gabriel moved forward through the nave and stood before the altar. Behind him the door opened and the sounds of the busy square filled the church. He turned to look, but it was only an old woman come to pray.

  A moment later the doors opened again. A man this time, leather jacket, quick dark eyes—Rami, the old man’s personal bodyguard. He knelt in a pew and made the sign of the cross.

  Gabriel suppressed a smile as he turned and gazed upon the altar. Again the doors opened, again the clamor of the piazza intruded upon the silence, but this time Gabriel didn’t bother to turn, because immediately he recognized the distinctive cadence of Ari Shamron’s walk.

  A moment later Shamron was at his side, looking up at the altarpiece. “What is this, Gabriel?” he asked impatiently. Shamron had no capacity to appreciate art. He found beauty only in a perfectly conceived operation or the destruction of an enemy.

  “These frescoes were painted, coincidentally, by Raphael. He rarely worked in fresco, only for popes and their close associates. A well-connected banker named Agostino Chigi owned this chapel, and when Raphael presented Chigi his bill for the frescoes, he was so outraged that he went to Michelangelo for a second opinion.”

  “What was Michelangelo’s reaction?”

  “He told Chigi he would have asked for more.”

  “I’m sure I would have sided with the banker. Let’s take a walk. Catholic churches make me nervous.” He managed a terse smile. “A remnant of my Polish childhood.”

  THEYwalked along the edge of the piazza, and the vigilant Rami shadowed them like Shamron’s guilty conscience, hands in his pockets, eyes on the move. Shamron listened silently while Gabriel told him about the missing collection.

  “Did she tell the police?”

  “No.”

  “Why not?”

  Gabriel told him what Anna had said when he asked her the same question.

  “Why would the old man keep the paintings secret?”

  “It’s not unprecedented. Perhaps the nature of the collection didn’t allow him to show it in public.”

  “Are you suggesting he was an art thief?”

  “No, not an art thief, but sometimes things are a little more complicated than that. It’s possible Rolfe’s collection didn’t have the most pristine provenance. We are talking aboutSwitzerland, after all.”

  “Meaning?”

  “The bank vaults and cellars of Switzerland are filled with history’s booty, including art. It’s possible those paintings didn’t even belong to Rolfe. We can assume one thing: Whoever took them did it for a specific reason. They left behind a Raphael worth several million dollars.”

  “Can they be recovered?”

  “I suppose it’s possible. It depends on whether they’ve been sold yet.”

  “Can works like those be sold quickly on the black market?”

  “Not without raising quite a racket. But then again, it might have been a commissioned theft.”

  “Meaning?”

  “Someone paid someone else to pull off the job.”

  “Was the murder of Rolfe included in the fee?”

  “Good question.”

  Shamron seemed suddenly tired. He sat on the edge of a fountain. “I don’t travel as well as I used to,” he said. “Tell me about Anna Rolfe.”

  “If we had a choice, we’d never be involved with her. She’s unpredictable, volatile, and she smokes more than you do. But she plays the violin like no one else I’ve ever heard.”

  “You’re good with people like that. Restore her.” Shamron began to cough, a violent cough that shook his entire body. After a moment he said, “Does she have any idea why her father made contact with us?”

  “She says she doesn’t. They weren’t exactly close.”

  This seemed to cause Shamron a moment of physical pain. His own daughter had moved to New Zealand. He telephoned her once a month, but she never returned his calls. His greatest fear was that she would not come home for his funeral or saykaddish for him. He took a long time lighting his next cigarette. “Do you have anything to go on?”

  “One lead, yes.”

  “Worth pursuing?”

  “I think so.”

  “What do you need?”

  “The resources to mount a surveillance operation.”

  “Where?”

  “In Paris.”

  “And the subject?”

  14

  ROME

  THE MINIATUREsupercardioid microphone held by the man dressed as a priest was no longer than an average fountain pen. Manufactured by an electronics firm in the Swiss industrial city of Zug, it allowed him to monitor the conversation conducted by the two men slowly circling the Piazza Navona. A second man sitting in the café on the opposite side of the square was armed with an identical piece of equipment. The man dressed as a priest was confident that between them they had recorded most of what was being said.

  His assumptions were confirmed twenty minutes later when, back in his hotel room, he synchronized the two tapes in an audio playback deck and slipped on a pair of headphones. After a few minutes, he reached out suddenly, pushed theSTOP button, thenREWIND , thenPLAY .

  “Where?”

  “In Paris.”

  “And the subject?”

  “An art dealer named Werner Müller.”

  STOP. REWIND. PLAY.

  “An art dealer named Werner Müller.”

  STOP.

  He dialed a number in Zurich and relayed the contents of the conversation to the man at the other end of the line. When he had finished, he treated himself to a cigarette and a split of champagne from the minibar, the reward for a job well done. In the bathroom, he burned the pages of his notebook in the sink and washed the ashes down the drain.

  15

  PARIS

  THE MÜLLER GALLERYstood at the bend of a small street between the rue Faubourg St. Honoré and the Avenue l’Opéra. On one side was a dealer of mobile telephones, on the other a boutique selling fine menswear that no man would wear. On the door was a sign, handwritten in neat blue script:BY APPOINTMENT ONLY . Behind the thick security glass of the window were two small decorative eighteenth-century works by minor French flower painters. Gabriel did not like the French flower painters. Three times he had agreed to restore a painting from the period. Each had been an exercise in exquisite tedium.

  For his observation post Gabriel chose the Hôtel Laurens, a small hotel fifty yards north of the gallery on the opposite side of the street. He checked in under the name of Heinrich Kiever and was given a small garret that smelled of spilt cognac and stale cigarette smoke. He told the front
-desk clerk that he was a German screenwriter. That he had come to Paris to rework a script for a film set in France during the war. That he would be working long hours in his room and wished not to be disturbed. He drank in the hotel bar and made boorish advances toward the waitress. He shouted at the chambermaids when they tried to clean his room. He screamed at the room service boys when they didn’t bring his coffee quickly enough. Soon, the entire staff and most of the guests at the Hôtel Laurens knew about the crazyBoche writer in the attic.

  On the way to Paris he had stopped at the airport in Nice, dropped off the rented Mercedes, and collected a Renault. The rental agent was a man called Henri, a Provençal Jew whose family had survived the French Holocaust. In the lexicon of the Office, Henri was asayan, a volunteer helper. There were thousands ofsayanim around the globe—bankers who could provide Office field agents with money, hotel clerks who could give them lodging, doctors who could quietly treat them if they were wounded or ill. In the case of Henri, he dispensed with the usual paperwork and issued the Renault to Gabriel in such a way that it could never be traced.

  Shortly after his arrival in Paris, Gabriel reluctantly had made contact with the head of the local station, a man called Uzi Navot. Navot had strawberry-blond hair and the lumpy physique of a wrestler. He was one of Shamron’s devoted acolytes and was jealous of the old man’s affections toward Gabriel. As a result he hated Gabriel, in the way a second son hates an elder brother, and he had buried a knife in Gabriel’s back at every opportunity. Their meeting, on a bench next to the fountain in the Tuileries Gardens, had the cold formality of two opposing generals negotiating a cease-fire. Navot made it clear that he believed the Paris station could handle a simple surveillance job without the help of the great Gabriel Allon. He also wasn’t pleased that Shamron had kept him in the dark about why a Paris art dealer should warrant Office surveillance. Gabriel had remained stoically calm in the face of Navot’s quiet tirade, tossing bits of baguette to the pigeons and nodding sympathetically from time to time. When Navot stormed off across a gravel footpath twenty minutes later, Gabriel had arranged for everything he needed: watchers, radios with secure frequencies, cars, bugging equipment, a .22-caliber Beretta pistol.