Daniel Silva - Prince of fire

“Of course I did.”

“It didn’t occur to you to come see me first?”

“She’s in a hospital. She doesn’t know where she is. She’s confused. She’s scared.”

“I suppose Leah and I have a lot in common after all.”

“Let’s not do this, Chiara.”

“Do what?”

He headed down the hallway to their bedroom. It too had been redecorated. On Gabriel’s nightstand were the papers that, when signed, would dissolve his marriage to Leah. Chiara had left a pen beside them. He glanced up and saw her standing in the doorway. She was staring at him, searching his eyes for evidence of his emotions-like a detective, he thought, observing a person of interest at the scene of the crime.

“What happened to your face?”

Gabriel told her about the beating he’d been given.

“Did it hurt?” She didn’t seem terribly concerned.

“Only a little.” He sat on the edge of the bed and pulled off his shoes. “How much did you know?”

“Shamron told me right away that the hit had gone wrong. He kept me updated throughout the day. The moment I heard you were safe was the happiest moment of my life.”

Gabriel took note of the fact that Chiara had not mentioned Leah.

“How is she?”

“Leah?”

Chiara closed her eyes and nodded. Gabriel quoted the prognosis of Dr. Bar-Zvi: Leah had come through it remarkably well. He removed his shirt. Chiara covered her mouth. His bruises, after three days at sea, had turned deep purple and black.

“It looks worse than it really is,” he said.

“Have you seen a doctor?”

“Not yet.”

“Take off your clothes. I’ll run a hot bath for you. A good soak will do you good.”

She left the room. A few seconds later he heard water splashing against enamel. He undressed and went into the bathroom. Chiara examined his bruises again, then she ran her hand through his hair and looked at the roots.

“It’s long enough to cut now. I don’t want to make love to a gray-haired man tonight.”

“So cut it.”

He sat on the edge of the bath. As always Chiara sang to herself while she cut his hair, one of those silly Italian pop songs she loved so much. Gabriel, his head bowed, watched as the last silvered remnants of Herr Klemp fluttered to the floor. He thought of Cairo, and how he had been deceived, and the anger welled within him once more. Chiara switched off the shears.

“There, you look like yourself again. Black hair, gray at the temples. What was it Shamron used to say about your temples?”

“He called them smudges of ash,” Gabriel said. Smudges of ash on the prince of fire.

Chiara tested the temperature of the bath. Gabriel unwrapped the towel from his waist and slid into the water. It was too hot-Chiara always made it too hot-but after a few moments the pain began to retreat from his body. She sat with him for a time. She talked about the apartment and an evening she had spent with Gilah Shamron-anything but France. After a while she went into the bedroom and undressed. She sang softly to herself. Chiara always sang when she removed her clothing.

Her kisses, usually so tender, pained his lips. She made love to him feverishly, as though trying to draw Leah’s venom from his bloodstream, and her fingertips left new bruises on his shoulders. “I thought you were dead,” she said. “I thought I’d never see you again.”

“I was dead,” Gabriel said. “I was dead for a very long time.”

The walls of their bedroom in Venice had been hung with paintings. Chiara, in Gabriel’s absence, had hung them here. Some of the works had been painted by Gabriel’s grandfather, the noted German expressionist Viktor Frankel. His work had been declared “degenerate” by the Nazis in 1936. Impoverished, stripped of his ability to paint or even teach, he had been deported to Auschwitz in 1942 and gassed on arrival along with his wife. Gabriel’s mother, Irene, had been deported with them, but Mengele had assigned her to a work detail, and she’d managed to survive the women’s camp at Birkenau until it was evacuated in the face of the Russian advance. Some of her work hung here in Gabriel’s private gallery. Tormented by what she had seen in Birkenau, her paintings burned with an intensity unmatched by even her famous father. In Israel she had used the name Allon, which means oak tree in Hebrew, but she’d always signed her canvases Frankel to honor her father. Only now could Gabriel see the paintings for themselves instead of the broken woman who had produced them.

There was one work that bore no signature, a portrait of a young man, in the style of Egon Schiele. The artist was Leah, and the subject was Gabriel himself. It had been painted shortly after he returned to Israel with the blood of six Palestinian terrorists on his hands, and it was the only time he ever agreed to sit for her. He had never liked the painting, because it showed him as Leah saw him-a haunted young man, aged prematurely by the shadow of death. Chiara believed the painting to be a self-portrait.

She switched on the bedroom light and looked at the papers on the bedside table. Her examination was demonstrative in nature; she knew that Gabriel had not signed them.

“I’ll sign them in the morning,” he said.

She offered him the pen. “Sign them now.”

Gabriel switched off the light. “Actually, there’s something else I want to do now.”

Chiara took him into her body and wept silently through the act.

“You’re never going to sign them, are you?”

Gabriel tried to silence her with a kiss.

“You’re lying to me,” she said. “You’re using your body as a weapon of deception.”

His days quickly acquired shape. in the morning he would wake early and sit in Chiara’s newly decorated kitchen with coffee and the newspapers. The stories about the Khaled affair depressed him. Ha’aretz christened the affair “Bunglegate,” and the Office lost its battle to keep Gabriel’s name out of print. In Paris the French press besieged the government and the Israeli ambassador for an explanation of the mysterious photographs that had appeared in Le Monde. The French foreign minister, a blow-dried former poet, threw gasoline on the fire by expressing his belief that “there may indeed have been an Israeli hand in the Holocaust of the Gare de Lyon.” The next day, Gabriel read with a heavy heart that a Kosher pizzeria on the rue des Rosiers had been vandalized. Then a gang of French boys attacked a young girl as she walked home from school and carved a swastika into her cheek. Chiara usually awakened an hour after Gabriel. She read of the events in France with more alarm than sadness. Once a day she phoned her mother in Venice to make certain her family was safe.

At eight Gabriel would leave Jerusalem and make the drive down the Bab al-Wad to King Saul Boulevard. The proceedings were held in the top-floor conference room so Lev would not have far to walk when he wished to pop in and observe them. Gabriel, of course, was the star witness. His conduct, from the moment he’d returned to Office discipline until his escape from the Gare de Lyon was reviewed in excruciating detail. Despite Shamron’s dire predictions, there was to be no bloodletting. The results of such investigations were usually preordained, and Gabriel could see from the outset that he was not going to be made the scapegoat. This was a collective mistake, the committee members seemed to be saying by the tone of their questions, a forgivable sin committed by an intelligence apparatus desperate to avoid another catastrophic loss of life. Still, at times the questions became pointed. Did Gabriel have no suspicions about the motivations of Mahmoud Arwish? Or the loyalty of David Quinnell? Would things not have gone differently if he’d listened to his teammates in Marseilles and turned back instead of going with the girl? At least then Khaled’s plan to destroy the credibility of the Office would not have succeeded. “You’re right,” Gabriel said, “and my wife would be dead, along with many more innocent people.”