The English Assassin (31 page)

There was Deborah from the Ottawa station. Gabriel had worked with her on the Tariq operation and was so impressed with her performance that he had insisted she be a part of the Venice team. Shamron had balked at first, but when Gabriel refused to back down, he put her on the next plane from Ottawa and concocted a compelling lie for her section chief.

Seated next to her on the sofa, his leg hanging suggestively over the armrest, was Jonathan. Taciturn and bored, he had the air of a man kept waiting in a doctor’s office for a routine physical he did not need. He was a younger version of Gabriel—Gabriel before Vienna perhaps. “He takes his killing seriously,” Shamron had said. “But he’s no gunslinger. He has a conscience, like you. When it’s over, and everyone’s safe, he’ll find a nice quiet toilet where he can throw up his guts.” Gabriel found this element of Jonathan’s character reassuring, as Shamron knew he would.

The session lasted one hour and fifteen minutes, though why Gabriel made a note of this fact he did not know. He had chosen to conduct that day’s run in Castello, the
sestiere
which lay just to the east of the Basilica San Marco and the Doge’s Palace. He had lived in Castello when he was serving his apprenticeship and knew the tangled streets well. Using a hotel pencil as a pointer, he plotted his route and choreographed the movements of the team.

To cover the sound of his instructions, he played a recording of German dances by Mozart. This seemed
to darken Jonathan’s mood. Jonathan reviled all things German. Indeed, the only people he hated more than the Germans were the Swiss. During the war, his grandfather had tried to preserve his money and heirlooms by entrusting them to a Swiss banker. Fifty years later, Jonathan had tried to gain access to the account but was told by an officious clerk that the bank first required proof that Jonathan’s grandfather was indeed dead. Jonathan explained that his grandfather had been murdered at Treblinka—with gas manufactured by a Swiss chemical company, he had been tempted to say—and that the Nazis, while sticklers for paperwork, had not been thoughtful enough to provide a death certificate. Sorry, the clerk had said. No death certificate, no money.

When Gabriel finished his instructions, he opened a large stainless-steel suitcase and gave a secure cell phone and a nine-millimeter Beretta to each member of the team. When the guns were out of sight again, he walked upstairs, collected Anna from the bedroom, and brought her down to meet Team Giorgione for the first time. Shimon and Ilana stood and applauded quietly. Slipping into character, Yitzhak and Moshe commented on the cut of her fashionable leather boots. Deborah eyed her jealously. Only Jonathan seemed to have no interest in her, but Jonathan was to be forgiven, for by then he had eyes only for the assassin known as the Englishman.

T
EN
minutes later, Gabriel and Anna were walking along the Calle dell’Ascencione. The other members of the team had gone before them and taken up their positions—Jonathan to the San Marco
vaporetto
stop, Shimon and Ilana to look at shoes in the shop windows of
the Calle Frezzeria, Yitzhak and Moshe to a table at Caffé Quadri in the Piazza San Marco. Deborah, the baby of the group, was given the unenviable assignment of feeding cracked corn to the pigeons in the shadow of the campanile tower. With admirable forbearance, she allowed the beasts to climb onto her shoulders and roost in her hair. She even found a handsome
carabiniere
to take her photograph with the disposable camera she’d purchased from a kiosk in the center of the square.

As Gabriel and Anna entered the piazza, a thin rain was falling, like mist from a room vaporizer. The forecast called for more heavy weather in the next two days, and there were fears of a severe
acqua alta.
Work crews were erecting a network of elevated duckboards, so that the tourist trade could continue when the lagoon tide turned San Marco into a shallow lake.

Anna wore a car-length quilted jacket, chunky enough to conceal the Kevlar vest beneath. Her hood was up, and she wore sunglasses in spite of the sunless afternoon sky. Gabriel was vaguely aware of Jonathan at his heels, a tourist guidebook open in his palms, his eyes flickering about the square. He glanced to his left and saw Shimon and Ilana strolling beneath the arcade. Hundreds of café tables receded into the distance like the ranks of an army on parade. The basilica floated before them, the great domes etched against the leaden sky.

Anna threaded her arm through Gabriel’s. It was a wholly spontaneous gesture, neither too intimate nor too detached. They might have been friends or professional colleagues; they might have just completed the act of love. No one would have been able to tell how she felt by the way she touched him. Only Gabriel could, and that was only because he could feel a slight
tremor in her body and the powerful fingers of her left hand digging into the tendons of his arm.

They took a table at Caffé Florian beneath the shelter of the arcade. A quartet played Vivaldi rather poorly, which drove Anna to distraction. Shimon and Ilana had walked the length of the square and were pretending to gaze upon the lions in the Piazzetta dei Leoncini. Yitzhak and Moshe remained at their table on the opposite side of the piazza, while Deborah continued to be mauled by the pigeons. Jonathan sat down a few feet from Gabriel.

Anna ordered the coffees. Gabriel pulled out his telephone and checked in with each component of his team, beginning with Yitzhak and ending with a distraught Deborah. Then he pocketed the phone, caught Jonathan’s eye, and shook his head once.

They remained in place while Anna finished her coffee. Then Gabriel asked for the check, a signal to the rest of the team that the second act was about to begin. Jonathan did the same. Even though he was on Shamron’s expense account, his face revealed his disgust at the outrageous sum they were asking for a
cappuccino
and a bottle of mineral water.

Five minutes later, Team Giorgione was drifting in formation over the Ponte della Paglia into the
sestiere
of Castello—first Shimon and Ilana, then Yitzhak and Moshe, then Gabriel and Anna. Jonathan hovered a few feet from Gabriel’s back, though by now he had put away his tourist guide and had his fingers wrapped tightly around the butt of his Beretta.

A
ND
forty yards behind them all was the Englishman. Two questions played in his thoughts. Why was the girl who had been feeding the pigeons in San
Marco now walking five paces behind Gabriel Allon? And why was the man who had been seated near Allon at Caffé Florian walking five paces ahead of her?

The Englishman was well-versed in the art of countersurveillance. Anna Rolfe was under the protection of a skilled and professional service. But then that’s the way Allon would play it. The Englishman had studied at his feet; knew the way he thought. The Gabriel Allon that the Englishman met in Tel Aviv would never go out for a stroll without a purpose, and the purpose of this one was to expose the Englishman.

On the Riva degli Schiavoni, the Englishman bought a postcard from a tourist kiosk and watched Allon and Anna Rolfe disappear into the streets of Castello. Then he turned in the other direction and spent the next two hours walking slowly back to his hotel.

V
ENICE
is a city where the usual rules of street surveillance and countersurveillance do not apply. It is a virtuoso piece requiring a virtuoso’s sure hand. There are no motorcars, no buses or streetcars. There are few places to establish a worthwhile fixed post. There are streets that lead to nowhere—into a canal or an enclosed courtyard with no means of escape. It is a city where the man being pursued holds all the advantages.

They were very good, Team Giorgione. They had been trained by the surveillance artists of the Office, and they had honed their skills on the streets of Europe and the Middle East. They communicated silently, drifting in and out of Gabriel’s orbit, appearing and reappearing from different directions. Only Jonathan remained constantly in the same position, five paces from Gabriel’s back, like a satellite in stationary orbit.

They moved north through a series of church squares, until finally they settled in a small café on the edge of the broad Campo Santa Maria della Formosa. Gabriel and Anna took a table, while Jonathan remained standing at the bar with a group of men. Through the windows, Gabriel caught momentary glimpses of the team: Shimon and Ilana buying
gelato
from a vendor at the center of the square. Yitzhak and Moshe admiring the plain exterior of the church of the Santa Maria Formosa. And Deborah, in a flash of her old spirit, playing football with a group of Italian schoolboys.

This time it was Jonathan who checked in with the team members by secure cell phone. When he was finished, he turned toward Gabriel and mouthed two words:
She’s clean.

L
ATE
that evening, when Team Giorgione had finished its debriefing and its members had decamped back to their hotel rooms, Gabriel lingered in the half-light of the sitting room, staring at the photographs of Christopher Keller. Upstairs, in the bedroom, Anna’s violin fell silent. Gabriel listened as she placed it back in its case and snapped the latches. A moment later, she descended the staircase. Gabriel gathered up the photographs and slipped them into a file folder. Anna sat down and lit a cigarette.

Gabriel said, “Are you going to try it?”

“ ‘The Devil’s Trill’?”

“Yes.”

“I haven’t decided yet.”

“What will you do if you think you can’t pull it off?”

“I’ll substitute a series of unaccompanied sonatas by Bach. They’re quite beautiful, but they’re not the ‘Trill.’
The critics will wonder why I chose not to play it. They’ll speculate that I returned too quickly. It will be great fun.”

“Whatever you decide to play, it’s going to be marvelous.”

Her gaze fell upon the manila folder on the coffee table.

“Why did you do that?”

“Do what?”

“Why did you hide the photographs of him when I came into the room? Why don’t you want me to see him?”

“You worry about ‘The Devil’s Trill,’ and I’ll worry about the man with the gun.”

“Tell me about him.”

“There are some things you don’t need to know.”

“He may very well try to kill me tomorrow night. I have a right to know something about him.”

Gabriel could not argue with this, and so he told her everything he knew.

“Is he really out there?”

“We have to assume he is.”

“Rather interesting, don’t you think?”

“What’s that?”

“He can change his voice and appearance at will and he vanished amid fire and blood in the desert of Iraq. He sounds like the Devil to me.”

“He is a devil.”

“So, I’ll play his sonata for him. Then you can send him back to Hell.”

VENICE

L
ATE THE FOLLOWING
afternoon, the Englishman drifted along Calle della Passion, the soaring Gothic campanile of the Frari church rising ahead of him. He sliced through a knot of tourists, adroitly shifting the position of his head to avoid their umbrellas, which bobbed like jellyfish adrift on the tide. In the square was a café. He ordered coffee and spread his guidebooks and maps over the little table. If anyone was watching, they would assume he was just another tourist, which was fine with the Englishman.

He had been working since early that morning. Shortly after breakfast, he had set out from his hotel in Santa Croce, maps and guidebooks in hand, and spent several hours wandering San Marco and San Polo, memorizing their streets and bridges and squares—the way he’d done before, in another lifetime, in West Belfast. He’d paid particular attention to the streets and canals around the Frari church and the Scuola
Grande di San Rocco—had played a game with himself, wandering in circles in San Polo until, quite intentionally, he would find himself lost. Then he would navigate his way back to the Frari church, testing himself on the street names as he went. Inside the
scuola,
he spent a few minutes in the ground-floor hall, pretending to gaze upon the massive Tintorettos, but in reality he was more interested in the relationship of the main entrance to the staircase. Then he went upstairs and stood in the upper hall, locating the approximate position on the floor where he expected to find himself seated during the recital. Rossetti had been right; even from the back of the room, it would be no problem for a professional to kill the violinist with the Tanfolglio.

He looked at his watch: a few minutes after five o’clock. The recital was scheduled to begin at eight-thirty. He had one final piece of business to conduct before then. He paid his check and walked through the gathering darkness toward the Grand Canal. Along the way he stopped in a men’s shop and purchased a new jacket, a quilted black nylon coat with a corduroy collar. The style was quite fashionable in Venice that season; he had seen dozens of coats just like it during the day.

He crossed the Grand Canal by
traghetto
and made his way to Signore Rossetti’s store in San Marco. The little jeweler was standing behind his counter, preparing to close up shop for the night. Once again the Englishman followed him up the groaning staircase to his office.