The English Assassin (19 page)

The following morning, before leaving his flat for the office, Gerhardt Peterson made a telephone call from the privacy of his study. It lasted no more than two minutes. The fate of Emil Jacobi, the guilty conscience of Switzerland, had been sealed by a financial transaction, the transfer of two hundred thousand dollars into a numbered account in Geneva controlled by Anton Orsati. Gerhardt Peterson found that very fitting indeed.

COSTA DE PRATA, PORTUGAL

W
HEN GABRIEL ARRIVED
at Anna Rolfe’s villa the following morning, he was pleased to see it being guarded by at least four men: one at the gate, a second at the base of the vineyards, a third on the tree line, and a fourth perched on the hilltop. Shamron had sent Rami, his taciturn personal bodyguard, to supervise the detail. He greeted Gabriel in the drive. When Gabriel asked how Anna was dealing with the team, Rami rolled his eyes—
You’ll see soon enough.

He entered the villa and followed the sound of Anna’s violin up the staircase. Then he knocked on the door of her practice room and entered without waiting for permission. She spun round and berated him for interrupting her, then screamed at him for turning her home into an armed camp. As her tirade intensified, Gabriel looked down and fingered his bandages. A trickle of fresh blood had seeped through. Anna
noticed this too. Immediately she fell silent and gently led him to her bedroom to change his dressings. He couldn’t help but look at her while she attended to him. The skin at the base of her neck was damp; the violin strings had left tiny valleys in the fingertips of her left hand. She was more beautiful then he remembered.

“Nice job,” he said, inspecting her work.

“I know something about bandaging hands, Mr. Allon. You have some things to tell me about my father, yes?”

“More questions than answers at this point. And please call me Gabriel.”

She smiled. “I have an idea,
Gabriel.
”

I
N
a nylon rucksack, Anna packed a picnic lunch of bread and cheese and cold chicken. Last she added a chilled bottle of wine, which she wrapped in a woolen blanket before placing it in the bag. Rami gave Gabriel a Beretta and a pair of boyish-looking bodyguards. On the shaded footpaths of the pine grove, with Rami’s chaperons in close attendance, Gabriel told Anna about Paris. He did not tell her about his conversations with Julian Isherwood and Emil Jacobi. That could wait.

The trees broke and the ruins appeared, perched on the face of a steep hillside. A wild goat hopped onto a granite boulder, bleated at them, then melted into the gorse. Gabriel shouldered the rucksack and followed Anna up the path.

He watched the muscles of her legs flexing with each stride, and thought of Leah. A hike on an autumn day like this, twenty-five years earlier—only then the hillside had been in the Golan and the ruins
were Crusader. Leah had painted; Gabriel had just returned from Europe, and his desire to create had been chased away by the ghosts of the men he had killed. He had left Leah at her easel and climbed to the top of the hill. Above him had stood the military fortifications along the Syrian border; below stretched the Upper Galilee and the rolling hills of southern Lebanon. Lost in thought, he had not heard Leah’s approach. “They’re still going to come, Gabriel. You can sit there for the rest of your life looking at them, but they’re still going to come.” And without looking at her Gabriel had said: “If I used to live there, in the Upper Galilee, and now I lived up there, in a camp in Lebanon, I’d come too.”

The snap of Anna unfurling the picnic blanket shattered Gabriel’s memory. She spread the blanket over a patch of sunlit grass, as Leah had done that day, while Gabriel ritually uncorked the wine. Rami’s watchers took up their positions: one atop the ruins, one on the footpath below. As Anna pulled meat from the bones of the chicken, Gabriel showed her the photo of the man who had left the attaché-bomb at the gallery.

“Ever seen him before?”

She shook her head.

Gabriel put away the photo. “I need to know more about your father.”

“Like what?”

“Anything that can help me find out who killed him and took his collection.”

“My father was a Swiss banker, Gabriel. I know him as a man, but I know next to nothing about his work.”

“So tell me about him.”

“Where shall I start?”

“How about his age. You’re thirty-eight?”

“Thirty-
seven.
”

“Your father was eighty-nine. That’s a rather large age difference.”

“That’s easy to explain. He was married to someone before my mother. She died of tuberculosis during the war. He and my mother met ten years later. She was quite a gifted pianist. She could have played professionally, but my father wouldn’t hear of it. Musicians were one step above exhibitionists, in his opinion. Sometimes I wonder what brought them together in the first place.”

“Were there children from the first marriage?”

Anna shook her head.

“And your mother’s suicide?”

“I was the one who found her body.” She hesitated for a moment, then said: “One never forgets something like that. Afterward, my father told us she’d had a history of depression. I loved my mother dearly, Gabriel. We were extremely close. My mother did not suffer from depression. She wasn’t taking any medication, she wasn’t under the care of a psychiatrist. She was moody, she was temperamental, but she was not the kind of woman who commits suicide for no reason. Something or someone
made
her take her own life. Only my father knew what it was, and he kept it secret from us.”

“Did she leave a suicide note?”

“According to the inquest, there was no note. But I saw my father take something from her body that looked very much like a note. He never showed it to me, and apparently he never showed it to the police either.”

“And the death of your brother?”

“It happened a year later. My father wanted him to
go to work in the bank and carry on the family tradition, but Max wanted to race bicycles. And that’s exactly what he did—quite well, in fact. He was one of the best riders in Switzerland and a top European professional. He was killed in an accident during the Tour of Switzerland. My father was devastated, but at the same time, I think he felt a certain vindication. It was as if Max had been punished for daring to contradict his wishes.”

“And you?”

“I was alone with him. The two people I loved most in the world were gone, and I was trapped with a man I loathed. I threw myself more deeply into violin. The arrangement seemed to suit both of us. As long as I was playing music, my father didn’t have to pay any attention to me. He was free to do what he loved most.”

“Which was?”

“Making money, of course. He thought his wealth absolved him of his sins. He was such a fool. From the beginning of my career, people thought I played with such fire. They didn’t realize that fire was fueled by hatred and pain.”

Gabriel broached the next subject cautiously. “What do you know about your father’s activities during the war?”

“
Activities
? That’s an interesting word. What are you trying to imply by that?”

“I meant nothing by it. I just need to know whether there was something in your father’s past that might have led to his murder.”

“My father was a banker in Switzerland during the Second World War.” Her voice had turned suddenly cold. “That doesn’t automatically make him a monster.
But to be perfectly honest, I know virtually nothing about my father’s
activities
during the war. It was not something he ever discussed with us.”

Gabriel thought of information Emil Jacobi had given him in Lyons: Rolfe’s frequent trips to Nazi Germany; the rumors of Rolfe’s connection to important members of the Nazi hierarchy. Had Rolfe really managed to keep all these things secret from his daughter? Gabriel decided to push it a little further—gently.

“But you have your suspicions, don’t you, Anna? You’d have never taken me to Zurich if you didn’t have suspicions about your father’s past.”

“I only know one thing, Gabriel: My mother dug her own grave, climbed inside, and shot herself. It was a hateful, vengeful thing to do. And she did it for a reason.”

“Was he dying?”

The bluntness of this final question seemed to take her by surprise, for she looked up suddenly, as though prodded by a sharp object. “My father?”

Gabriel nodded.

“As a matter of fact, Gabriel, yes, my father was dying.”

W
HEN
the food was gone, Gabriel poured out the last of the wine and asked her about the provenance.

“They’re locked in the desk of my father’s study.”

“I was afraid you were going to say that.”

“Why do you want to see them?”

“I want to look at the chain of possession for each work. The provenance might tell us something about who took them and why your father was killed.”

“Or it might tell you nothing at all. And remember one thing: My father purchased all those paintings
legally. They belonged to him, no matter what quirk you might find in the provenance.”

“I’d still like to see them.”

“I’ll show you where they are.”

“No, you’ll
tell
me where they are, and I’ll get them and bring them back here. You can’t come to Zurich now.”

“Why not?”

“Because it’s not safe. Which leads me to my next topic.”

“What’s that?”

“Your recital in Venice.”

“I’m not canceling it.”

“It’s not safe for you to perform in public now.”

“I don’t have a choice. If I don’t keep this engagement, my career is over.”

“The people who killed your father have made it abundantly clear that they’ll do anything to prevent us from finding their identity. That would include killing you too.”

“Then you’ll just have to make certain they don’t succeed, but I’m going to perform next week, and there’s nothing you can do to stop me.”

C
OLUMNS
of gunmetal cloud had appeared over the sea and started their advance inland. A chill wind rose and moaned in the ruins. Anna shivered in the abrupt cold and folded her arms beneath her breasts, her eyes on the approaching weather. Gabriel packed up the remains of their lunch, and in the gathering darkness they ambled down the hill, shadowed by the two silent watchers. When they reached the footpaths of the pine grove it began to rain heavily. “Too late,” Anna shouted above the pounding. “We’re caught.”
She took him by the arm and led him to the shelter of a towering pine. “We need to keep your bandages dry,” she said, a note of concern creeping into her voice. She dug a wrinkled nylon anorak from the pocket of the rucksack and held it over their heads, and there they huddled for the next twenty minutes like a pair of refugees, Rami’s watchers standing silently on either side of them like andirons. While they waited for the weather to break, Anna told Gabriel the security codes for the villa and the location of the provenance in her father’s files. When finally the rain moved off, Anna bound Gabriel’s hands in the anorak, and they proceeded carefully down the wet track to the villa. At the front gate, Gabriel relinquished her into the custody of Rami and climbed into his car. As he drove away, he took one last look over his shoulder and saw Anna Rolfe chasing Rami across the drive, shouting, “Bang, bang, Rami! You’re dead!”

LISBON

M
OTZKIN LIKED IT
in Lisbon. He’d done the glamour postings. He’d done London. He’d done Paris and Brussels. He’d spent a nail-biting year in Cairo posing as a journalist from a newspaper in Ottawa. It was quiet in Lisbon these days, and that was fine with Motzkin. The odd surveillance job, a bit of liaison work. Just enough to keep him from going stir crazy. He had time for his books and his stamps and for long siestas with his girl in the Alfama.

He had just returned from her flat when the telephone on his desk rattled softly. Motzkin lifted the receiver and brought it cautiously to his ear. This was the time Ari Shamron usually chose to poke his head out of his foxhole and make life miserable for his
katsas.
But thankfully it wasn’t Shamron—just the guard down in the lobby. It seemed there was a visitor, a man who knew Motzkin’s name.

Motzkin rang off and punched up the lobby
surveillance camera on his computer monitor. The station regularly fielded walk-ins of all shapes and sizes. Usually a quick once-over could determine whether the person should be seen or frog-marched to the gate.

As the image appeared on his screen, Motzkin murmured: “I’ll be damned.” Imagine, the living legend, walking into the embassy, looking like something the proverbial cat dragged in. Last Motzkin had heard, he was holed up in some English cottage with his paintings and his demons. “I’ll be damned,” he repeated as he clambered down the stairs. “Is it really you?”