Daniel Silva - Prince of fire

No, thought Gabriel. It wasn’t the Bellini. It was Rome.

The Stratford Clinic, one of the most prestigious and private psychiatric hospitals in Europe, was located an hour’s drive from the center of London on a rambling old Victorian estate in the hills of Surrey. The patient population included a distant member of the British royal family and the second cousin of the current prime minister, and so the staff were accustomed to unusual demands by visitors. Gabriel passed through the front security gate after identifying himself as “Mr. Browne.”

He parked his rented Opel in the visitors’ carpark in the forecourt of the old redbrick manor house. Leonard Avery, Leah’s physician, greeted him in the entrance hall, a windblown figure dressed in a Barbour coat and Wellington boots. “Once a week I lead a select group of patients on a nature walk in the surrounding countryside,” he said, explaining his appearance. “It’s extremely therapeutic.” He shook Gabriel’s hand without removing his glove and inquired about the drive from London as if he did not truly wish to know the answer. “She’s waiting for you in the solarium. She still likes the solarium the best.”

They set out down a corridor with a pale linoleum floor, Avery as though he were still pounding along a Surrey footpath. He was the only one at the hospital who knew the truth about the patient named Lee Martinson-or at least part of the truth. He knew that her true family name was Allon and that her terrible burns and near-catatonic state were not the result of a motor accident-the explanation that appeared in Leah’s hospital records-but of a car bombing in Vienna. He also knew that the bombing had claimed the life of her young son. He believed Gabriel was an Israeli diplomat and did not like him.

As they walked, he provided Gabriel with a terse update on Leah’s condition. There had been no change to speak of-Avery did not seem overly concerned by this. He was never one for false optimism and had always maintained low expectations about Leah’s prognosis. He had been proven correct. In the thirteen years since the bombing, she had never once uttered a word to Gabriel.

At the end of the corridor was a set of double doors, with round porthole-like windows clouded by moisture. Avery opened one and led Gabriel into the solarium. Gabriel, greeted by the oppressive humidity, immediately removed his coat. A gardener was watering the potted orange trees and chatting with a nurse, an attractive dark-haired woman whom Gabriel had never before seen.

“You can go now, Amira,” Dr. Avery said.

The nurse went out, followed by the gardener.

“Who’s that?” Gabriel asked.

“She’s a graduate of the King’s College school of nursing and a specialist in the care of the acutely mentally ill. Very accomplished at what she does. Your wife is quite fond of her.”

Avery gave Gabriel an avuncular pat on the shoulder, then saw himself out as well. Gabriel turned around. Leah was seated in a straight-backed wrought-iron chair, her eyes lifted toward the dripping windows of the solarium. She wore white trousers made from flimsy institutional cotton and a high-necked sweater that helped conceal her frail body. Her hands, scarred and twisted, held a sprig of blossom. Her hair, once long and black as a raven’s wing, was cropped short and nearly all gray. Gabriel leaned down and kissed her cheek. His lips fell upon cool, firm scar tissue. Leah seemed not to sense his touch.

He sat down and took hold of what remained of Leah’s left hand. He felt no life within. Her head swiveled slowly round until her eyes found his. He searched for some sign of recognition, but saw nothing. Her memory had been stolen. In Leah’s mind only the bombing remained. It played ceaselessly, like a loop of videotape. All else had been erased or pushed to some inaccessible corner of her brain. To Leah, Gabriel was no more important than the nurse who had brought her here or the gardener who cared for the plants. Leah had been punished for his sins. Leah was the price a decent man had paid for climbing into the sewer with murderers and terrorists. For Gabriel, a man blessed with the ability to heal beautiful things, Leah’s situation was doubly painful. He longed to strip away the scars and restore her glory. But Leah was beyond repair. Too little remained of the original.

He spoke to her. He reminded her that he was living in Venice these days, working for a firm that restored churches. He did not tell her that, occasionally, he still ran the odd errand for Ari Shamron, or that two months previously he had engineered the capture of an Austrian war criminal named Erich Radek and returned him to Israel to face justice. When finally he screwed up the nerve to tell her that he was in love with another woman and wished to dissolve their marriage so he could marry her, he could not go through with it. Talking to Leah was like talking to a gravestone. There seemed no point.

When a half hour had elapsed, he left Leah’s side and poked his head into the corridor. The nurse was waiting there, leaning against the wall with her arms folded across the front of her tunic.

“Are you finished?” she asked.

Gabriel nodded. The woman brushed past and went wordlessly inside.

It was late afternoon when the flight from Heathrow Airport touched down in Venice. Gabriel, riding into town in a water taxi, stood in the cockpit with the driver, his back to the cabin door, watching the channel markers of the lagoon rising out of the mist like columns of defeated soldiers returning home from the front. Soon the edges of Cannaregio appeared. Gabriel felt a fleeting sense of tranquillity. Venice, crumbling, sagging, sodden Venice, always had that effect on him. She’s an entire city in need of restoration, Umberto Conti had said to him. Use her. Heal Venice, and she’ll heal you.

The taxi dropped him at the Palazzo Lezze. Gabriel walked westward across Cannaregio along the banks of a broad canal called the Rio della Misericordia. He came to an iron bridge, the only one in all of Venice. In the Middle Ages there had been a gate in the center of the bridge, and at night a Christian watchman had stood guard so that those imprisoned on the other side could not escape. Gabriel crossed the bridge and entered an underground sottoportego. At the other end of the passageway a broad square opened before him: the Campo di Ghetto Nuovo, the center of the ancient ghetto of Venice. At its height it had been the cramped home to more than five thousand Jews. Now only twenty of the city’s four hundred Jews lived in the old ghetto, and most of those were elderly who resided in the Casa Israelitica di Riposo.

Gabriel made for the modern glass doorway at the opposite side of the square and went inside. To his right was the entrance to a small bookstore that specialized in books dealing with Jewish history and the Jews of Venice. It was warm and brightly lit, with floor-to-ceiling windows overlooking the canal that encircled the ghetto. Behind the counter, seated atop a wooden stool in a cone of halogen light, was a girl with short blond hair. She smiled at him as he entered and greeted him by his work name.

“She left about an hour ago.”

“Really? Where is she?”

The girl shrugged elaborately. “Didn’t say.”

Gabriel looked at his wristwatch. Four-fifteen. He decided to put in a few hours on the Bellini before dinner.

“If you see her, tell her I’m at the church.”

“No problem. Ciao, Mario.”

He walked to the Rialto Bridge. One street over from the canal he turned to the left and headed for a small terra-cotta church. He paused. Standing at the entrance of the church, in the shelter of the lunette, was a man Gabriel recognized, an Office security agent named Rami. His presence in Venice could mean but one thing. He caught Gabriel’s eye and glanced toward the doorway. Gabriel slipped past and went inside.