The English Assassin (22 page)

“You can slow down now.”

She eased off the gas.

“Where did you learn to handle a car like that?”

“I was a Zurich girl with a lot of money. When I wasn’t practicing the violin, I was tearing around the Zürichsee in one of my father’s cars. I’d wrecked three by the time I was twenty-one.”

“Congratulations.”

“Bitterness doesn’t suit you, Gabriel. My cigarettes are in the console. Do me a favor and light one.”

Gabriel opened the console and took out the pack of Gitanes. He lit it with the dashboard lighter. The smoke caught at the back of his throat and he nearly choked.

Anna laughed at him. “Imagine, an Israeli who doesn’t smoke.”

“What the hell are you doing here?”

“That’s all you have to say? If I hadn’t shown up, you’d have been arrested.”

“No, if you hadn’t shown up, I’d be dead. But I still want to know what the hell you’re doing here. Did Rami give you permission to leave the villa?”

“I suspect that by now he’s probably discovered that I’m not there.”

“How did you get away?”

“I went upstairs to my studio to practice. I rolled a tape on a particularly long piece. I suppose you can guess the rest.”

“How did you get off the grounds?”

“Carlos told Rami that he was going into the village to do some marketing. I was in the back beneath a blanket.”

“It’s safe to assume several dozen members of my service are now engaged in a frantic and pointless search for you. That was a very stupid thing to do. How did you get to Zurich?”

“I flew here, of course.”

“Directly from Lisbon?”

“Yes.”

“How long have you been here?”

“About two hours.”

“Did you go inside your father’s house?”

She shook her head. “When I arrived I saw two men waiting outside in a parked car. At first I thought they might be private security. Then I realized something was wrong.”

“What did you do?”

“I didn’t feel safe waiting in the car, so I drove around the neighborhood, hoping to find you before you tried to go in. I missed you, of course. Then I heard the alarms going off.”

“Did you tell anyone you were coming?”

“No.”

“Are you sure?”

“Of course I’m sure. Why?”

“Because it explains a lot of things. It means that the villa is under constant watch. It means that they know we came back here. It means they followed me to Rome. They’ve been following me ever since.”

“What happened inside my father’s house?”

W
HEN
Gabriel had finished, Anna said: “Did you get the provenance at least?”

“They were gone.”

“That’s not possible.”

“Someone must have gotten to them first.”

“Did you find anything else?”

I found a photograph of your father with Adolf Hitler and Heinrich Himmler, admiring the view from the Berghof at Berchtesgaden.

“No,” Gabriel said. “I didn’t find anything else.”

“Are you sure about that? You didn’t use the opportunity to rifle through any of my father’s personal papers?”

Gabriel ignored her. “Did your father smoke?”

“Why does that matter now?”

“Just answer the question, please. Did your father smoke?”

“Yes, my father smoked!”

“What kind of cigarettes?”

“Benson and Hedges.”

“Did he ever smoke Silk Cuts?”

“He was very set in his ways.”

“What about someone else in the household?”

“Not that I know of. Why do you ask?”

“Because someone was smoking Silk Cuts in your father’s study recently.”

They came to the lake. Anna pulled to the side of the street. “Where are we going?”

“
You’re
going back to Portugal.”

“No, I’m not. We do this together, or not at all.” She dropped the Audi into gear. “Where are we going?”

LYONS

S
OME MEN MIGHT
be squeamish about installing a voice-activated taping system in their home. Professor Emil Jacobi was not one of them. His life was his work, and he had little time for anything else; certainly nothing that might cause him any embarrassment if it was captured on audiotape.

He received a steady stream of visitors to his flat on the rue Lanterne: people with unpleasant memories of the past; stories they had heard about the war. Just last week, an old woman had told him about a train that had stopped outside her village in 1944. She and a group of friends were playing in the meadow next to the tracks when they heard moans and scratches coming from the cargo cars. When they moved closer, they saw that there were people on the train: miserable, wretched people, begging for food and water. The old woman realized now that the people were Jews—and that her country had allowed the Nazis to use its
railways to ship human cargo to the death camps in the East.

If Jacobi had tried to document her story by taking handwritten notes, he would have failed to capture it all. If he had placed a tape recorder in front of her, she might have become self-conscious. It had been Jacobi’s experience that most elderly were nervous around tape recorders and video cameras. And so they had sat in the cluttered comfort of his flat like old friends, and the old woman had told her story without the distraction of a notebook or a visible tape recorder. Jacobi’s secret system had caught every word of it.

The professor was listening to a tape now. As usual, the volume was set quite loud. He found it helped to focus his concentration by blocking out the noise from the street and the students who lived in the next flat. The voice emanating from his machine was not that of the old woman. It was the voice of a man: the man who had come the previous day. Gabriel Allon. An amazing story, this tale of Augustus Rolfe and his missing collection of paintings. Jacobi had promised the Israeli he would tell no one about their discussion, but when the story broke, as Jacobi knew it eventually would, he would be perfectly positioned to write about it. It would be yet another black eye for Jacobi’s mortal enemies, the financial oligarchy of Zurich. His popularity in his native country would sink to new depths. This pleased him. Flushing sewers was dirty work.

Emil Jacobi was engrossed in the story now, as he had been the first time he had heard it; so engrossed that he failed to notice the figure who had slipped into his flat—until it was too late. Jacobi opened his mouth to call out for help, but the man smothered his cry with
an iron grip. The professor spotted the glint of a knife blade arcing toward him, then felt a searing pain across the base of his throat. The last thing he saw was his killer, picking up the tape player and slipping it into his pocket as he walked out.

VIENNA

O
N THE WESTERN FRINGES
of Vienna, Gabriel had to grip the wheel tightly to keep his hands from shaking. He had not been back to the city since the night of the bombing—since the night of fire and blood and a thousand lies. He heard a siren and was uncertain whether it was real or just memory until the blue lights of an ambulance flashed in his mirror. He pulled to the side of the road, his heart hammering against his ribs. He remembered riding with Leah in an ambulance and praying that she would be released from the pain of her burns, no matter what the price. He remembered sitting over the shattered body of his son while, in the next room, the chief of the Austrian security service screamed at Ari Shamron for turning central Vienna into a war zone.

He pulled back into the traffic. The discipline of driving helped to settle his turbulent emotions. Five
minutes later, in the Stephansdom Quarter, he stopped outside a souvenir shop. Anna opened her eyes.

“Where are you going?”

“Wait here.”

He went inside, and returned to the car two minutes later with a plastic shopping bag. He handed it to Anna. She removed both items: a pair of large sunglasses and a baseball hat with
VIENNA!
stenciled across the crown.

“What am I supposed to do with these?”

“Do you remember what happened at the airport in Lisbon the night you showed me your father’s missing collection?”

“It’s been a long night, Gabriel. Refresh my memory.”

“A woman stopped you and asked for your autograph.”

“It happens all the time.”

“My point exactly. Put them on.”

She placed the sunglasses over her eyes and tucked her hair beneath the hat. She examined her own appearance in the vanity mirror for a moment, then turned to look at him.

“How do I look?”

“Like a famous person trying to hide behind a pair of large sunglasses and a stupid hat,” he said wearily. “But it will have to do for now.”

He drove to a hotel on the Weihburggasse called the Kaiserin Elisabeth and checked in under the name of Schmidt. They were given a room with floors the color of honey. Anna fell onto the bed, still wearing the hat and glasses.

Gabriel went into the bathroom and looked at his face for a long time in the mirror. He lifted his right
hand to his nose, smelled gunpowder and fire, and saw the faces of the two men he had killed at the Rolfe villa in Zurich. He ran warm water into the basin, washed his hands and his neck. Suddenly the bathroom was filled with ghosts—pallid, lifeless men with bullet holes in their faces and their chests. He looked down and found that the basin was filled with their blood. He wiped his hands on a towel, but it was no good—the blood still was there. Then the room began to spin, and he fell to his knees over the toilet.

W
HEN
he returned to the bedroom, Anna’s eyes were closed. “Are you all right?” she murmured.

“I’m going out. Don’t go anywhere. Don’t open the door for anyone but me.”

“You won’t be long, will you?”

“Not too long.”

“I’ll wait up for you,” she said, drifting closer toward sleep.

“Whatever you say.”

And then she was asleep. Gabriel covered her with a blanket and went out.

D
OWNSTAIRS
in the lobby, Gabriel told the officious Viennese desk clerk that Frau Schmidt was not to be disturbed. The clerk nodded briskly, as if to give the impression that he would lay down his life to prevent anyone from interrupting Frau Schmidt’s rest. Gabriel pushed a few schilling across the counter and went out.

He walked in the Stephansplatz, checking his tail for surveillance, storing faces in his memory. Then he entered the cathedral and drifted through the tourists across the nave until he came to a side altar. He looked up at the altarpiece, a depiction of the martyrdom of
Saint Stephen. Gabriel had completed a restoration of the painting the night Leah’s car was bombed. His work had held up well. Only when he cocked his head to create the effect of raked lighting could he tell the difference between his inpainting and the original.

He turned and scanned the faces of the people standing behind him. He recognized none of them. But something else struck him. Each one of them was transfixed by the beauty of the altarpiece. At least something good had come of his time in Vienna. He took one last look at the painting, then left the cathedral and headed for the Jewish Quarter.

A
DOLF
Hitler’s barbarous dream of ridding Vienna of its Jews had largely succeeded. Before the war some two hundred thousand had lived here, many of them in the warren of streets around the Judenplatz. Now there were but a few thousand left, mainly newer arrivals from the East, and the old Jewish Quarter had been transformed into a strip of boutiques, restaurants, and nightclubs. Among Viennese it was known as the Bermuda Triangle.

Gabriel walked past the shuttered bars along the Sterngasse, then turned into a winding walkway that ended in a staircase of stone. At the top of the stairs was a heavy studded door. Next to the door was a small brass plaque:
WARTIME CLAIMS AND INQUIRIES
—
APPOINTMENTS ONLY
. He pressed the bell.

“May I help you?”

“I’d like to see Mr. Lavon, please.”

“Do you have an appointment?”

“No.”

“Mr. Lavon doesn’t accept unscheduled visitors.”

“I’m afraid it’s an emergency.”

“May I have your name, please?”

“Tell him it’s Gabriel Allon. He’ll remember me.”

T
HE
room into which Gabriel was shown was classic Viennese in its proportions and furnishings: a high ceiling, a polished wood floor catching the light streaming through the tall windows, bookshelves sagging beneath the weight of countless volumes and files. Lavon seemed lost in it. But then, disappearing into the background was Lavon’s special gift.