The English Assassin (13 page)

G
ABRIEL
ate 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 with
antipasti
until Gabriel begged for mercy. Then pasta, then fish, then an assortment of
dolci.
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.

T
HE
night 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.”

T
HE
church 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.”

T
HEY
walked 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 about
Switzerland,
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 say
kaddish
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?”

ROME

T
HE MINIATURE
supercardioid 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 the
STOP
button, then
REWIND
, then
PLAY
.

“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.

PARIS

T
HE MÜLLER GALLERY
stood 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 crazy
Boche
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 a
sayan,
a volunteer helper. There were thousands of
sayanim
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.

F
OR
two days they watched him. It was not particularly difficult work; Müller, if he was a criminal, did not behave much like one. He arrived at the gallery each morning at nine forty-five, and by ten he was ready to receive customers. At one-thirty he would close the gallery and walk to the same restaurant on the rue de Rivoli, pausing once along the way to purchase newspapers from the same kiosk.

On the first day, a blunt-headed watcher called Oded followed him. On the second it was a reedy boy called Mordecai, who huddled outside at a freezing table on the sidewalk. After lunch he followed Müller back to the gallery, then came upstairs to Gabriel’s hotel room for a debriefing.

“Tell me something, Mordecai,” Gabriel said. “What did he have for lunch today?”

The watcher pulled his thin face into a disapproving frown. “Shellfish. An enormous platter. It was a massacre.”

“And what did you eat, Mordecai?”

“Eggs and
pommes frites.
”

“How were they?”

“Not bad.”

In the evenings, another predictable routine. Müller would remain at the gallery until six-thirty. Before leaving, he would place a dark-green plastic rubbish bag at the curbside for the overnight pickup, then would walk through the crowds along the Champs-Élysées to Fouquet’s. On the first night it was Oded who collected the garbage and brought it to Gabriel’s room and Mordecai who followed the art dealer to Fouquet’s. On the second night, the two watchers reversed roles. As Müller sipped champagne with the film and literary crowd at Fouquet’s, Gabriel performed the unenviable task of sifting through the rubbish. It was as ordinary as Müller’s daily routine: discarded facsimiles in a half-dozen languages, unimportant mail, cigarette butts, soiled napkins, and coffee grounds.

After Fouquet’s, Müller would stroll through the quiet side streets of the eighth arrondissement, have a light supper in a bistro, then head up to his apartment. After two nights of the same thing, Oded grew rebellious. “Maybe he’s just a Swiss art dealer who doesn’t deal much art. Perhaps you’re wasting your time—
and
ours.”