The English Assassin (12 page)

“So what happened on the night of the murder?”

“The system failed inexplicably.”

“How convenient.”

She sat down in front of a computer terminal. “There’s a separate system for the room downstairs. It’s activated when the outer door opens. The time of
entry is automatically logged, and inside the room two digital cameras begin recording still images every three seconds.”

She typed in a few characters on the keyboard, moved the mouse, clicked. “This is when we entered the room, twelve forty-nine a.m., and here we are inside.”

Gabriel leaned over her shoulder and peered into the computer monitor. A grainy color image of their visit appeared on the screen and then dissolved, only to be replaced by another. Anna worked the mouse again. A directory appeared.

“This is the master list of visits to that room for the past three months. As you can see, my father spent a great deal of time with the collection. He came down at least once a day, sometimes twice.” She touched the screen with her forefinger. “Here’s his last visit, shortly after midnight, the morning he was murdered. The security system shows no other entries after that.”

“Did the police give you an estimate of when they thought he was killed?”

“They said around three
A
.
M
.”

“So it stands to reason that the same people who killed your father also took the paintings and that it probably happened around three o’clock in the morning, six hours before I arrived at the villa.”

“Yes, that’s right.”

Gabriel pointed to the last entry on the screen. “Let me see that one.”

A
MOMENT
later, the images flickered onto the monitor. The camera angles did not reveal all the paintings, but Gabriel could see enough to realize that it was a remarkable collection. Manet, Bonnard,
Toulouse-Lautrec, Cézanne, Pissarro, Degas, a nude by Renoir, a canal landscape by van Gogh, two street scenes by Monet, a large portrait of a woman painted by Picasso during his blue period. And seated in the center of the room, in a straight-backed wing chair, was an old man, gazing at his collection one last time before his death.

ZURICH

F
OUR HOURS LATER
, Gerhardt Peterson was sitting alone in his office, a grotto of pale Scandinavian wood overlooking the grimy inner courtyard of blackened brick. His computer screen was blank, his morning correspondence unopened, his morning coffee untouched, his outer door uncustomarily locked. A cigarette slowly turned to dust in his ashtray. Peterson did not notice. His gaze was downward, toward the three photographs that lay side by side on his leather blotter. Allon and Anna Rolfe, leaving the villa. Allon and Anna Rolfe, getting into a Mercedes sedan. Allon and Anna Rolfe, driving away. Finally he stirred, as if awakened from an unpleasant daydream, and fed the photographs into his shredder, one by one, watching with particular satisfaction as they turned to confetti. Then he picked up the telephone, dialed a number from memory, and waited for an answer. Twenty minutes later, his appointments for the rest of the day canceled, he climbed into his Mercedes sedan and raced down the shore of the Zürichsee toward Herr Gessler’s mountain chalet.

CORSICA

T
HE OLD
signadora
lived in a crooked house in the village, not far from the church. She greeted the Englishman as always, with a worried smile and a hand on his cheek. She wore a heavy black dress with an embroidered neck. Her skin was the color of flour, her white hair was pulled back and held in place by metal pins. Funny how the marks of ethnicity and national origin are diminished by time, thought the Englishman. If it wasn’t for her Corsican language and mystical Catholic ways she might have been his old Auntie Beatrice from Ipswich. “The evil has returned, my son,” she whispered, stroking his cheek. “I can see it in your eyes. Sit down. Let me help you.”

The old woman lit a candle as the Englishman sat down at the small, wooden table. In front of him she placed a china plate filled with water and a small bowl of oil. “Three drops,” she said. “Then we will see if my fears are correct.”

The Englishman dipped his forefinger in the oil; then he held it over the plate and allowed three drops to fall onto the water. By the laws of physics the oil should have gathered into a single globule, but instead it shattered into a thousand droplets, and soon there was no trace of it. The old woman sighed heavily and made the sign of the cross. There it was, undeniable proof that the
occhju,
the Evil Eye, had invaded the Englishman’s soul.

She took hold of the Englishman’s hand and prayed. After a moment she began to cry, a sign the
occhju
had passed from his body into hers. Then she closed her eyes and appeared to be sleeping. She opened her eyes a moment later and instructed him to repeat the trial of the oil and the water. This time, the oil coalesced into a single drop. The evil had been exorcised.

“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 old
signadora.

“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 the
occhju.
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.”

ROME

A
N HOUR AFTER DAWN
they 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?

R
OME
smelled 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.

F
OR
two 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 sagging
pensione
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.