Daniel Silva - The English Assassin

That afternoon, Gabriel spent a long time checking his tail. He wandered through churches, studying frescoes and altarpieces until his neck ached. He could almost feel the presence of Umberto Conti at his side. Conti, like Ari Shamron, believed Gabriel was a man of special gifts, and he doted on Gabriel, just as Shamron had done. Sometimes he would come to Gabriel’s sagging pensione and drag him into the Venetian night to look at art. He spoke of paintings the way some men speak of women. Look at the light, Gabriel. Look at the technique, the hands, my God, the hands.

Gabriel’s neighbor in Venice had been a Palestinian called Saeb, a skinny intellectual who wrote violent poetry and incendiary tracts comparing the Israelis to the Nazis. He reminded Gabriel too much of a man named Wadal Adel Zwaiter, the Black September chief in Italy, whom Gabriel had assassinated in the stairwell of an apartment building in Rome ’s Piazza Annabaliano.

“I was part of a special unit, Miss Rolfe.”

“What kind of special unit?”

“A counterterrorism unit that tracked down people who committed acts of violence against Israel.”

“Palestinians?”

“For the most part, yes.”

“And what did you do to these terrorists when you found them?”

Silence…

“Tell me, Mr. Allon. What did you do when you found them?”

Late at night, Saeb would come to Gabriel’s room like Zwaiter’s ghost, always with a bottle of cheap red wine and French cigarettes, and he would sit cross-legged on the floor and lecture Gabriel on the injustices heaped upon the Palestinian people. The Jews! The West! The corrupt Arab regimes! All of them have Palestinian blood on their hands! Gabriel would nod and help himself to Saeb’s wine and another of his cigarettes. Occasionally he would contribute his own condemnation of Israel. The State could not last, Gabriel had said in one of his more memorable speeches. Eventually, it would collapse, like capitalism, beneath the weight of its inherent contradictions. Saeb was so moved he included a variation of the line in his next article.

During Gabriel’s apprenticeship Shamron had permitted Leah to visit him once each month. They would make love frantically, and afterward she would lie next to him on the single bed and beg him to come home to Tel Aviv. She posed as a German sociology student from Hamburg named Eva. When Saeb came to the room with his wine and cigarettes, she spoke in glowing terms of the Baader-Meinhof Gang and the PLO. Saeb declared her an enchantress. “Someday, you must come to Palestine and see the land,” he said. Yes, Leah had agreed. Someday.

GABRIEL ate each night in a small trattoria near his hotel. On the second night the owner treated him as though he was a regular who had been coming once a week for twenty years. Placed him at a special table near the kitchen and plied him with antipasti until Gabriel begged for mercy. Then pasta, then fish, then an assortment of dolci. Over coffee he handed Gabriel a note.

“Who left this?” said Gabriel.

He lifted his hands in a Roman gesture of befuddlement. “A man.”

Gabriel looked at the note: plain paper, anonymous script, no signature.

Church of Santa Maria della Pace. One hour.

THE night had turned colder, a gusty wind moving in the trees of the Villa Borghese. Gabriel walked for a time-along the Corso d’Italia, down the Via Veneto-then stopped a taxi and took it to the edge of the Centro Storico.

For twenty minutes he wandered through the narrow streets and quiet squares until confident he was not being followed. Then he walked to the Piazza Navona. The square was crowded in spite of the chill, cafés filled, street artists hawking cheap paintings.

Gabriel slowly circled the piazza, now pausing to gaze at an ornate fountain, now stopping to drop a few coins into the basket of a blind man strumming a guitar with just four strings. Someone was following him; he could feel it.

He started toward the church, then doubled back suddenly. His pursuer was now standing among a small group of people listening to the guitarist. Gabriel walked over and stood next to him.

“You’re clean,” the man said. “Go inside.”

THE church was empty, the smell of burning wax and incense heavy on the air. Gabriel moved forward through the nave and stood before the altar. Behind him the door opened and the sounds of the busy square filled the church. He turned to look, but it was only an old woman come to pray.

A moment later the doors opened again. A man this time, leather jacket, quick dark eyes-Rami, the old man’s personal bodyguard. He knelt in a pew and made the sign of the cross.

Gabriel suppressed a smile as he turned and gazed upon the altar. Again the doors opened, again the clamor of the piazza intruded upon the silence, but this time Gabriel didn’t bother to turn, because immediately he recognized the distinctive cadence of Ari Shamron’s walk.

A moment later Shamron was at his side, looking up at the altarpiece. “What is this, Gabriel?” he asked impatiently. Shamron had no capacity to appreciate art. He found beauty only in a perfectly conceived operation or the destruction of an enemy.

“These frescoes were painted, coincidentally, by Raphael. He rarely worked in fresco, only for popes and their close associates. A well-connected banker named Agostino Chigi owned this chapel, and when Raphael presented Chigi his bill for the frescoes, he was so outraged that he went to Michelangelo for a second opinion.”

“What was Michelangelo’s reaction?”

“He told Chigi he would have asked for more.”

“I’m sure I would have sided with the banker. Let’s take a walk. Catholic churches make me nervous.” He managed a terse smile. “A remnant of my Polish childhood.”

THEYwalked along the edge of the piazza, and the vigilant Rami shadowed them like Shamron’s guilty conscience, hands in his pockets, eyes on the move. Shamron listened silently while Gabriel told him about the missing collection.

“Did she tell the police?”

“No.”

“Why not?”

Gabriel told him what Anna had said when he asked her the same question.

“Why would the old man keep the paintings secret?”

“It’s not unprecedented. Perhaps the nature of the collection didn’t allow him to show it in public.”

“Are you suggesting he was an art thief?”

“No, not an art thief, but sometimes things are a little more complicated than that. It’s possible Rolfe’s collection didn’t have the most pristine provenance. We are talking about Switzerland , after all.”

“Meaning?”

“The bank vaults and cellars of Switzerland are filled with history’s booty, including art. It’s possible those paintings didn’t even belong to Rolfe. We can assume one thing: Whoever took them did it for a specific reason. They left behind a Raphael worth several million dollars.”

“Can they be recovered?”

“I suppose it’s possible. It depends on whether they’ve been sold yet.”

“Can works like those be sold quickly on the black market?”

“Not without raising quite a racket. But then again, it might have been a commissioned theft.”

“Meaning?”

“Someone paid someone else to pull off the job.”

“Was the murder of Rolfe included in the fee?”

“Good question.”

Shamron seemed suddenly tired. He sat on the edge of a fountain. “I don’t travel as well as I used to,” he said. “Tell me about Anna Rolfe.”

“If we had a choice, we’d never be involved with her. She’s unpredictable, volatile, and she smokes more than you do. But she plays the violin like no one else I’ve ever heard.”