The English Assassin (23 page)

At the moment, however, he was balanced precariously atop a library ladder, flipping through the contents of a bulging file and muttering to himself. The light from the windows cast a greenish glow over him, and it was then Gabriel realized that the glass was bulletproof. Lavon looked up suddenly, tipping his head downward in order to see over the pair of smudged half-moon reading glasses perched at the end of his nose. Cigarette ash dropped into the file. He seemed not to notice, because he closed the file and slipped it back into its slot on the shelf and smiled.

“Gabriel Allon! Shamron’s avenging angel. My God, what are you doing here?”

He climbed down the ladder like a man with old pains. As always, he seemed to be wearing all his clothing at once: a blue button-down shirt, a beige rollneck sweater, a cardigan, a floppy herringbone jacket that seemed a size too large. He had shaved carelessly, and wore socks but no shoes.

He held Gabriel’s hands and kissed his cheek.
How long had it been? Twenty-five years,
thought Gabriel. In the lexicon of the Wrath of God operation, Lavon had been an
ayin,
a tracker. An archaeologist by training, he had stalked members of Black September, learned
their habits, and devised ways of killing them. He had been a brilliant watcher, a chameleon who could blend into any surroundings. The operation took a terrible physical and psychological toll on all of them, but Gabriel remembered that Lavon had suffered the most. Working alone in the field, exposed to his enemies for long periods of time, he had developed a chronic stomach disorder that stripped thirty pounds from his lean frame. When it was over, Lavon took an assistant professorship at Hebrew University and spent his weekends on digs in the West Bank. Soon he heard other voices. Like Gabriel, he was a child of Holocaust survivors. Searching for ancient relics seemed trivial when there was so much still to be unearthed about the immediate past. He settled in Vienna and put his formidable talents to work in another way: tracking down Nazis and their looted treasure.

“So, what brings you to Vienna? Business? Pleasure?”

“Augustus Rolfe.”

“Rolfe? The banker?” Lavon lowered his head and glared at Gabriel over his glasses. “Gabriel, you weren’t the one who—” He made a gun of his right hand.

Gabriel unzipped his jacket, removed the envelope he had taken from Rolfe’s desk, and handed it to Lavon. Carefully he pried open the flap, as if he were handling a fragment of ancient ceramic, and removed the contents. He glanced at the first photograph, then the second, his face revealing nothing. Then he looked up at Gabriel and smiled.

“Well, well, Herr Rolfe takes a lovely photograph. Where did you get these, Gabriel?”

“From the old man’s desk in Zurich.”

He held up the sheaf of documents. “And these?”

“Same place.”

Lavon looked at the photographs again. “Fantastic.”

“What do they mean?”

“I need to pull a few files. I’ll have the girls get you some coffee and something to eat. We’re going to be a while.”

T
HEY
sat across from each other at a rectangular conference table, a stack of files between them. Gabriel wondered about the people who had come before him: old men convinced the man in the flat next door was one of their tormentors at Buchenwald; children trying to pry open a numbered account in Switzerland where their father had hidden his life savings before being shipped east into the archipelago of death. Lavon picked up one of the photographs—Rolfe seated in a restaurant next to the man with dueling scars on his cheeks—and held it up for Gabriel to see.

“Do you recognize this man?”

“No.”

“His name is Walter Schellenberg, Brigadeführer SS.” Lavon took the top file from the stack and spread it on the table before him. “Walter Schellenberg was the head of Department Four of the Reich Security Main Office. Department Four handled foreign intelligence, which effectively made Schellenberg the international spymaster of the Nazi Party. He was involved in some of the most dramatic intelligence episodes of the war: the Venlo Incident, the attempt to kidnap the Duke of Windsor, and the Cicero operation. At Nuremberg he was convicted of being a member of the SS, but he received a light sentence of just six years in prison.”

“Six years? Why?”

“Because during the last months of the war he
arranged for the release of a few Jews from the death camps.”

“How did he manage that?”

“He sold them.”

“So why was the spymaster of the Nazi Party having dinner with Augustus Rolfe?”

“Intelligence services the world over have one thing in common: They all run on money. Even Shamron couldn’t survive without money. But when Shamron needs money, he just lays a hand on the shoulder of a rich friend and tells him the story of how he captured Eichmann. Schellenberg had a special problem. His money was no good anywhere outside Germany. He needed a banker in a neutral country who could provide him with hard currency and then transfer that money through a dummy company or some other front to his agents. Schellenberg needed a man like Augustus Rolfe.”

Lavon picked up the documents Gabriel had taken from Rolfe’s desk. “Take this transaction. Fifteen hundred pounds sterling, wired from the accounts of Pillar Enterprises Limited to the account of a Mr. Ivan Edberg, Enskilde Bank, Stockholm, the twenty-third of October, 1943.”

Gabriel inspected the document, then slid it back across the table.

“Sweden was neutral, of course, and a hotbed of wartime intelligence,” Lavon said. “Schellenberg surely had an agent there, if not an entire network. I suspect Mr. Edberg was one of those agents. Perhaps the leader and paymaster of the network.”

Lavon slipped the transfer order back into the pile and removed another. He peered down at it through his reading glasses, squinting from the smoke of the cigarette between his lips.

“Another transfer order: one thousand pounds sterling from the account of Pillar Enterprises Limited to a Mr. Jose Suarez, care of the Bank of Lisbon.” Lavon lowered the paper and looked up at Gabriel. “Portugal, like Sweden, was neutral, and Lisbon was an amusement park for spies. Schellenberg operated there himself during the Duke of Windsor affair.”

“So Rolfe was Schellenberg’s secret banker. But how does that explain the photograph of Rolfe at Berchtesgaden with Himmler and Hitler?”

Lavon prepared his next cup of coffee with the reverence of a true Viennese: a precise measure of heavy cream, just enough sugar to remove the bitter edge. Gabriel thought of Lavon in a safe flat in Paris, living on mineral water and weak tea because his ravaged stomach would tolerate nothing else.

“Everything changed inside Germany after Stalingrad. Even the true believers knew it was over. The Russians were coming from the east, the invasion from the west was inevitable. Anyone who’d accumulated wealth as a result of the war wanted desperately to hang onto that wealth. And where do you think they turned?”

“The bankers of Switzerland.”

“And Augustus Rolfe would have been in a unique position to capitalize on the changing tide of the war. Based on these documents, it appears as though he was an important agent of Walter Schellenberg. I suspect the Nazi bigwigs would have held Herr Rolfe in very high esteem.”

“Someone who could be trusted to look after their money?”

“Their money. Their stolen treasures. All of it.”

“What about the list of names and the account numbers?”

“I think it’s safe to assume that those are German clients. I’ll run them through our database and see if they correspond with known members of the SS and the Nazi Party, but I suspect they’re pseudonyms.”

“Would there be any other record of the accounts in the bank’s files?”

Lavon shook his head. “Typically, the real identities of holders of numbered accounts are known by only the top officers of a bank. The more notorious the customer, the fewer people who know the name attached to the account number. If these accounts belonged to Nazis, I doubt whether anyone knew about them but Rolfe.”

“If he kept the list after all these years, does it mean the accounts still exist?”

“I suppose it’s possible. It depends a great deal on who owned them. If the holder was able to get out of Germany at the end of the war, then I would doubt the account is still active. But if the holder was arrested by the Allies—”

“—then it’s possible his money and valuables are still in the vault of the Rolfe bank.”

“Possible, but unlikely.”

Lavon gathered up the documents and photographs and slipped them back into the envelope. Then he looked up at Gabriel and said, “I’ve answered all your questions. Now, it’s time for you to answer some of mine.”

“What do you want to know?”

“Just one thing, actually,” Lavon said, holding the envelope aloft. “I’d like to know what the hell are you doing with the secret files of Augustus Rolfe.”

L
AVON
liked nothing better than a good story. It had always been that way. During the Black September
operation, he and Gabriel had shared a kinship of the sleepless: Lavon because of his stomach, Gabriel because of his conscience. Gabriel thought of him now, an emaciated figure sitting cross-legged on the floor, asking Gabriel what it felt like to kill. And Gabriel had told him—because he had needed to tell someone. “There is no God,” Lavon had said. “There is only Shamron. Shamron decides who shall live and who shall die. And he sends boys like you to wreak his terrible vengeance.”

Now, as then, Lavon did not look at Gabriel as he told his story. He stared down at his hands and turned over his cigarette lighter between his nimble little fingers until Gabriel had finished.

“Do you have a list of the paintings that were taken from the secret vault?”

“I do, but I’m not sure how accurate it is.”

“There’s a man in New York. He’s dedicated his life to the subject of Nazi art-looting. He knows the contents of every stolen collection, every transaction, every piece that’s been recovered, every piece that’s still missing. If anyone knows anything about the collecting habits of Augustus Rolfe, it’s him.”

“Quietly, Eli. Very quietly.”

“My dear Gabriel, I know of no other way.”

They pulled on their coats, and Lavon walked him across the Judenplatz.

“Does the daughter know any of this?”

“Not yet.”

“I don’t envy you. I’ll call you when I hear something from my friend in New York. In the meantime, go to your hotel and get some rest. You don’t look well.”

“I can’t remember the last time I slept.”

Lavon shook his head and laid his small hand on Gabriel’s shoulder. “You’ve killed again, Gabriel. I can see it in your face. It’s the stain of death. Go to your room and wash your face.”

“You be a good boy and watch your back.”

“I used to watch yours.”

“You were the best.”

“I’ll let you in on a little secret, Gabriel. I still am.”

And with that Lavon turned and vanished into the crowd on the Judenplatz.

G
ABRIEL
walked to the little trattoria where he had eaten his last meal with his Leah and Dani. For the first time in ten years, he stood on the spot where the car had exploded. He looked up and saw the spire of Saint Stephen’s, floating above the rooftops. A wind rose suddenly; Gabriel turned up the collar of his coat. What had he expected? Grief? Rage? Hatred? Much to his surprise, he felt nothing much at all. He turned and walked back to the hotel in the rain.

A
COPY
of
Die Presse
had been slipped under the door and lay on the floor in the alcove. Gabriel scooped it up and entered the bedroom. Anna was still asleep. At some point, she had removed her clothing, and in the dim light he could see the luminous skin of her shoulder glowing against the bedding. Gabriel dropped the newspaper on the bed next to her.

Exhaustion pounced on him. He needed to sleep.
But where?
On the bed? Next to Anna? Next to the daughter of Augustus Rolfe? How much did she know? What secrets did her father keep from her? What secrets had she kept from Gabriel?

He thought of the words Julian Isherwood had said
to him in London: “Assume at all times that she knows more about her father and his collection than she’s telling you. Daughters tend to be very protective of their fathers, even when they think their fathers are complete bastards.” No, he thought—he would not be sleeping next to Anna Rolfe. In the closet he found an extra blanket and a spare pillow, and he made a crude bed for himself on the floor. It was like lying on a slab of cold marble. He reached up and blindly patted the duvet, searching for the newspaper. Quietly, so as not to wake her, he opened it. On the front page was a story about the murder in Lyons of the Swiss writer Emil Jacobi.

VIENNA

I
T WAS DUSK
when Eli Lavon telephoned Gabriel’s hotel room. Anna stirred, then drifted back into an uneasy sleep. During the afternoon, she had kicked away her blankets, and her body lay exposed to the cold air seeping through the half-open window. Gabriel covered her and went downstairs. Lavon was sitting in the parlor, drinking coffee. He poured some for Gabriel and handed him the cup.