The English Assassin (16 page)

Navot had brought a doctor, one of Ari Shamron’s
sayanim
. He was sitting in the front passenger seat. He made an operating table of the center armrest, spreading a sterile cloth over it and switching on the dome light. The doctor cut away the dressing and examined the wound. He pulled his lips into a mild frown—
Not so bad. You bring me here for this?
“Something for the pain?” he asked, but Gabriel shook his head. Another frown, another tip of the head—
As you wish.

The doctor flushed the wound with an antiseptic solution and went to work. Gabriel, the restorer, watched him intently.
Insert, pull, tug, snip.
Navot lit a cigarette and pretended to look out the window. When the doctor had finished the suturing, he dressed the wound carefully and nodded that he was done. Gabriel laid his right hand upon the sterile towel. As the doctor cut away the dirty dressing, he emitted a very French sigh of disapproval, as if Gabriel had ordered the wrong wine for fish with saffron butter sauce. “This one will take a few minutes, yes?” Navot waved his hand impatiently.

The doctor didn’t care for Navot’s attitude, and he took his time about it. This time he didn’t bother to ask Gabriel whether he wanted anything for the pain. He simply prepared a syringe and injected an anesthetic into Gabriel’s hand. He worked slowly and steadily for almost a half-hour. Then he looked up. “I did the best I could, under the circumstances.” A hostile glance toward Navot—
I do this for free, boy. Shamron is going to hear about this.
“You need proper surgery on that wound. The muscles, the tendons—” A pause, a shake of the head. “Not good. You’re likely to experience some stiffness, and your range of motion will never be quite the same.”

“Leave us,” Navot said. “Go to the other car and wait there.” Navot dismissed the driver too. When they were alone, he looked at Gabriel. “What the hell happened?”

“How many dead?” Gabriel asked, ignoring Navot’s question.

“Three, so far. Four more in bad shape.”

“Have you heard from the rest of the team?”

“They’ve left Paris. Shamron is bringing everyone home. This could get ugly.”

“The car?”

“We’ve got a man watching it. So far, the police haven’t made a move on it.”

“Eventually, they will.”

“What are they going to find when they do?”

Gabriel told him. Navot closed his eyes and swayed a bit, as though he had just been told of a death. “What about Müller’s apartment?”

“There’s a glass on his telephone.”

“Shit.”

“Any chance of getting inside and cleaning things up?”

Navot shook his head. “The police are already there. If they find your car and establish that Müller was under surveillance of some sort they’ll tear apart his flat. It won’t take them long to find the bug.”

“Any friends on the force that might be able to help us?”

“Not for something like this.”

“That bug is like a calling card.”

“I know, Gabriel, but I wasn’t the one who put it there.”

Gabriel fished the roll of film from his pocket and handed it to Navot. “I got a picture of the man who left the bomb at the gallery. Get it to King Saul Boulevard tonight. Tell the troglodytes in Research to run it through the database. Maybe they can put a name to his face.”

The film disappeared into Navot’s big paw.

“Contact Shamron and tell him to get a security detail up to Anna Rolfe’s villa right away.” Gabriel opened the car door and put his foot on the ground. “Which car is mine?”

“Shamron wants you to come home.”

“I can’t find the man who planted that bomb if I’m sitting in Tel Aviv.”

“You won’t be able to find him if you’re sitting in a French jail cell, either.”

“Which car is mine, Uzi?”

“All right! Take this one. But you’re on your own.”

“Someday, I’ll try to repay the favor.”

“Have a good time, Gabriel. I’ll stay here and clean up your fucking mess.”

“Just get the film to Tel Aviv. Good dog.”

O
N
the Costa de Prata, Anna Rolfe lowered her violin and switched off the metronome. Her practice room was in shadow, the breeze from the open window cool and moist with the Atlantic. A professional-quality microphone hung over her stool from a chrome-colored stand. It was connected to a German-made tape deck. Today she had recorded much of her practice session. She played back the tape while she packed the Guarneri into its case and straightened her sheet music.

As always, she found it uncomfortable to listen to herself play, but she did it now for a very specific reason. She wanted to know
exactly
how she sounded; which passages of the piece were acceptable and which needed additional attention. She liked much of what she heard but picked out three or four sections in the second and third movements where the effects of her long layoff were apparent to her highly critical ear. Tonight, in her second practice session, she would focus exclusively on those passages. For now, she needed to clear her mind.

She went to her bedroom, removed a pale yellow sweater from her dresser drawer, and wrapped it
around her shoulders. Then she went downstairs. A moment later, she slipped through the gate of her villa and set out along the winding track down toward the village. At the halfway point, she spotted a tiny Fiat station wagon coming up the track through the trees. Inside were four men. They were not Portuguese. Anna stepped to the side to allow the car to pass, but it stopped instead, and the man seated in the front passenger seat got out.

“Miss Rolfe?”

“Who wants to know?”

“You are Miss
Anna
Rolfe, aren’t you?”

She nodded.

“We’re friends of Gabriel’s.”

I
N
Marseille, the Englishman left his car near the Abbaye St-Victor and walked through the darkened streets to the ferry terminal. As the vessel slipped over the calm waters of the harbor, he went downstairs to his private cabin. He lay on the narrow bed, listening to the news on Marseille radio. The bombing of the Müller Gallery in Paris was the lead item. Pascal Debré’s bomb had caused innocent casualties, a fact which made him feel a good deal more like a terrorist than a professional. Tomorrow he would go see the old
signadora,
and she would chase away the
occhju
with her rituals and prayers and absolve him of his sins, the way she always did.

He switched off the radio. In spite of his fatigue, he wanted a woman. It was always that way after the completion of an assignment. He closed his eyes and Elizabeth appeared in his thoughts—Elizabeth Conlin, the pretty Catholic girl from the Ballymurphy housing estates, West Belfast, Northern Ireland. She’d had the
instincts of a good professional. When it was safe for them to meet, she would hang a violet scarf in her bedroom window, and the Englishman would crawl through the window and into her bed. They would make love with excruciating slowness, so as not to wake the other members of her family. The Englishman would cover her mouth with the palm of his hand to smother her cries. Once she bit down on the flesh of his thumb and drew blood. It stained the sheets of her bed. Afterward, he would lie next to her in the dark and let her tell him again how she wanted to get away from Belfast—away from the bombs and the British soldiers, the IRA gunmen and the Protestant paramilitaries. And when she thought he was sleeping, she would whisper a rosary, her penance for succumbing to the temptations of the Englishman’s body. The Englishman never allowed himself to fall asleep in Elizabeth Conlin’s bed.

One night when he crawled through her window, Elizabeth Conlin had been replaced by her father and two IRA enforcers. Somehow they knew the truth about the Englishman. He was driven to a remote farmhouse for what promised to be a lengthy and painful interrogation, followed by his own execution. Unlike most who had found themselves in a similar situation, the Englishman managed to leave the farmhouse alive. Four IRA men did not.

Within hours the Englishman was safely out of the province. Elizabeth Conlin did not fare so well. Her body was found the following morning in the Belfast city cemetery, her head shaved, her throat slashed, the punishment for sleeping with a British agent.

The Englishman had never been able to trust a woman since. Anton Orsati understood this. Once a week he brought a girl up to the Englishman’s villa—
not a Corsican girl, only French girls, specially flown in for the task of servicing the Englishman’s particular needs. And he would wait with the old
paesanu
down the valley road until the Englishman had finished. The Englishman found the act of making love to Orsati’s girls as cold and clinical as an assassination, but he endured it because he could not trust himself to choose a lover and was not yet prepared to live like a monastic hermit.

The assignment in Paris intruded on his thoughts. There was something that had been bothering him—the man who entered the gallery just before the bomb had exploded. The Englishman was the product of an elite unit and capable of spotting the influence in others: the light-footed gait; the subtle combination of absolute confidence and eternal vigilance. The man had been a soldier once—or perhaps something more complicated.

But there was something else. The Englishman had the nagging sensation he had seen the man somewhere before. And so he lay there for the next several hours, sorting through the countless faces stored in his memory, looking for him.

LONDON

T
HE BOMBING
of the Müller Gallery had done more than create a security problem for Gabriel in Paris. It had eliminated his only obvious lead in the case. Now he had to start over from the beginning, which is why, late the following morning, he was drifting across Mason’s Yard toward Julian Isherwood’s gallery through a gentle rain.

On the brick wall next to the door was a panel, and on the panel were two buttons and two corresponding names: L
OCUS
T
RAVEL
and I
SHER OO
F
INE
A
R S
. Gabriel pressed the second and waited. When the buzzer sounded, he pushed open the door and mounted the stairs: same threadbare brown carpet, same Rorschachesque stain on the third step where a hung-over Isherwood had spilled coffee the morning after Oliver Dimbleby’s drunken birthday bash at the Mirabelle. At the top landing were two doors, one leading to the gallery, the other to a small travel
agency where a plain woman sat behind a headmasterly desk, surrounded by posters promising boundless excitement in exotic locales. She glanced up at Gabriel, smiled sadly, and returned to her needlepoint.

Though Julian Isherwood clung unwisely to the paintings in his inventory, he did not do the same with the girls who answered his telephones and kept his appalling files. He hired and drove them away with seasonal regularity. So Gabriel was surprised to see Irina, a black-haired leopard of a girl whom Isherwood had taken on six months ago, still at her post behind the desk in the anteroom.

The door separating the anteroom and Isherwood’s office stood slightly ajar. Isherwood was with a client. Gabriel could see a painting propped on the black, felt-covered viewing pedestal. Italian Old Master by the look of it; no one Gabriel recognized. Isherwood paced the carpet slowly behind it, hand on his chin, eyes on the floor, like a barrister awaiting an answer from a hostile witness.

“He’d like you to wait upstairs in the exhibition room,” the girl purred. “I assume you know the way.”

Gabriel entered the tiny lift and rode it upward. The exposition room was a place of shadows, quiet except for the rain pattering on the skylight. Large Old Masters canvases hung on each of the walls: a Venus by Luini, a nativity by del Vaga, a baptism of Christ by Bordone, a luminous landscape by Claude. Gabriel left the lights off and sank heavily onto the velvet-covered divan. He loved this room. It had always been a sanctuary; an island of peace. He had once made love to his wife in this room. Years later, he had plotted the death of the man who had taken her away from him.

The door of the lift opened and Isherwood entered.

“My God, Gabriel, but you look like complete hell.”

“Is that supposed to be a compliment?”

“What the hell’s going on? Why aren’t you in Zurich?”

“The owner of the painting you sent me to clean was a man named Augustus Rolfe. Ever heard of him?”

“Oh, good Lord—the one who was murdered last week?”

Gabriel closed his eyes and nodded. “I found his body.”

Isherwood noticed the bandages. “What happened to your hands?”

“You heard about the explosion at the gallery in Paris yesterday?”

“Of course—this place is buzzing about it. Surely you weren’t involved in that?”

“No, I just happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time. I’ll tell you everything, Julian, but first I need your help.”

“What sort of help?” Isherwood asked cautiously.

“Nothing like the old days. I just need you to explain why an aging Swiss banker might have kept a very impressive collection of French Impressionist and Modern paintings hidden from the world in an underground vault.”