The Heist
Daniel Silva
Gabriel Allon, master art restorer and assassin, returns in a spellbinding new thriller from No.1 bestselling author Daniel Silva. For all fans of Robert Ludlum.
Gabriel Allon art restorer and legendary spy is in Venice when he receives an urgent call from the Italian police. The art dealer Justin Isherwood has stumbled upon a chilling murder scene, and is being held as a suspect.
The dead man is a fallen spy with a secret a trafficker in stolen artwork, sold to a mysterious collector. To save his friend, Gabriel must track down the world’s most iconic missing painting: Caravaggio’s Nativity with St. Francis and St. Lawrence.
Gabriel’s mission takes him on exhilarating hunt from Marseilles and Corsica, to Paris and Geneva, and, finally, to a private bank in Austria, where a dangerous man stands guard over the ill-gotten wealth of one of the world’s most brutal dictators…
The Heist
Daniel Silva
Copyright (#u7d0e8eb7-9bbe-56a1-a425-bf1463536686)
Harper
An imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers
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London SE1 9GF
www.harpercollins.co.uk (http://www.harpercollins.co.uk)
First published in Great Britain by HarperCollinsPublishers 2014
Copyright © Daniel Silva 2014
Cover design layout © HarperCollinsPublishers 2014
Cover photographs © Nik Keevil/Arcangel Images (man); Lorenzo Montezemolo/Getty Images (Venice scene); Joe Beynon/Plain Picture (staircase); Shutterstock.com (http://www.shutterstock.com) (sky)
Daniel Silva asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work
Designed by Leah Carlson-Stanisic
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
This is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins.
Ebook Edition © JULY 2014 ISBN: 9780007552276
Version: 2015-01-07
Dedication (#u7d0e8eb7-9bbe-56a1-a425-bf1463536686)
As always, for my wife, Jamie, and
my children, Nicholas and Lily
Most stolen art is gone forever … The lone bit of good news is that the better the painting, the better the odds it will someday be found.
— EDWARD DOLNICK, THE RESCUE ARTIST
He that diggeth a pit shall fall into it; and who so breaketh a hedge, a serpent shall bite him.
— ECCLESIASTES 10:8
Contents
Cover (#ub6b7986a-3c47-5c81-b273-9561e45a126c)
Title Page (#u9c00d703-08b5-528f-a62c-ad6267547563)
Copyright
Dedication
Epigraph (#u17f72fb7-5c5e-50ae-8e62-f971a940bfad)
Preface
Part One: Chiaroscuro
Chapter 1: St. James’s, London
Chapter 2: Venice
Chapter 3: Venice
Chapter 4: Venice
Chapter 5: Venice
Chapter 6: Lake Como, Italy
Chapter 7: Lake Como, Italy
Chapter 8: Stockwell, London
Chapter 9: Stockwell, London
Chapter 10: Rue De Miromesnil, Paris
Chapter 11: Jardin Des Tuileries, Paris
Chapter 12: Montmartre, Paris
Part Two: Sunflowers
Chapter 13: San Remo, Italy
Chapter 14: Corsica
Chapter 15: Corsica
Chapter 16: Corsica
Chapter 17: Rue De Miromesnil, Paris
Chapter 18: Hyde Park, London
Chapter 19: Amsterdam
Chapter 20: Geneva
Chapter 21: Rue De Miromesnil, Paris
Chapter 22: ÎLe Saint-Louis, Paris
Chapter 23: Boulevard Saint-Germain, Paris
Chapter 24: Chelles, France
Chapter 25: Geneva
Part Three: The Open Window
Chapter 26: King Saul Boulevard, Tel Aviv
Chapter 27: King Saul Boulevard, Tel Aviv
Chapter 28: Petah Tikva, Israel
Chapter 29: Jerusalem
Chapter 30: Narkiss Street, Jerusalem
Chapter 31: Jerusalem
Chapter 32: King Saul Boulevard, Tel Aviv
Chapter 33: Linz, Austria
Chapter 34: King Saul Boulevard, Tel Aviv
Chapter 35: Munich, Germany
Chapter 36: Linz, Austria
Chapter 37: The Attersee, Austria
Chapter 38: The Attersee, Austria
Chapter 39: The Attersee, Austria
Chapter 40: The Attersee, Austria
Chapter 41: The Attersee, Austria
Part Four: The Score
Chapter 42: London
Chapter 43: Chelsea, London
Chapter 44: London—Linz, Austria
Chapter 45: Linz, Austria
Chapter 46: Heathrow Airport, London
Chapter 47: Linz, Austria
Chapter 48: King Saul Boulevard, Tel Aviv
Chapter 49: The Attersee, Austria
Chapter 50: The Attersee, Austria
Chapter 51: The Attersee—Geneva
Chapter 52: Hotel Métropole, Geneva
Chapter 53: Geneva
Chapter 54: Tel Aviv—Haute-Savoie, France
Chapter 55: Haute-Savoie, France
Chapter 56: Annecy, France
Chapter 57: Annecy, France
Part Five: One Last Window
Chapter 58: Venice
Chapter 59: Venice
Chapter 60: Venice
Chapter 61: Lake Como, Italy
Chapter 62: Brienno, Italy
Author’s Note
Acknowledgments
About the Author
Also Written by Daniel Silva
About the Publisher
PREFACE (#u7d0e8eb7-9bbe-56a1-a425-bf1463536686)
ON OCTOBER 18, 1969, CARAVAGGIO’S Nativity with St. Francis and St. Lawrence vanished from the Oratorio di San Lorenzo in Palermo, Sicily. The Nativity, as it is commonly known, is one of Caravaggio’s last great masterworks, painted in 1609 while he was a fugitive from justice, wanted by papal authorities in Rome for killing a man during a swordfight. For more than four decades, the altarpiece has been the most sought-after stolen painting in the world, and yet its exact whereabouts, even its fate, have remained a mystery. Until now …
PART ONE (#u7d0e8eb7-9bbe-56a1-a425-bf1463536686)
1 (#u7d0e8eb7-9bbe-56a1-a425-bf1463536686)
ST. JAMES’S, LONDON (#u7d0e8eb7-9bbe-56a1-a425-bf1463536686)
IT BEGAN WITH AN ACCIDENT, but then matters involving Julian Isherwood invariably did. In fact, his reputation for folly and misadventure was so indisputably established that London’s art world, had it known of the affair, which it did not, would have expected nothing less. Isherwood, declared one wit from the Old Masters department at Sotheby’s, was the patron saint of lost causes, a high-wire artist with a penchant for carefully planned schemes that ended in ruins, oftentimes through no fault of his own. Consequently, he was both admired and pitied, a rare trait for a man of his position. Julian Isherwood made life a bit less tedious. And for that, London’s smart set adored him.
His gallery stood at the far corner of the cobbled quadrangle known as Mason’s Yard, occupying three floors of a sagging Victorian warehouse once owned by Fortnum & Mason. On one side were the London offices of a minor Greek shipping company; on the other was a pub that catered to pretty office girls who rode motor scooters. Many years earlier, before the successive waves of Arab and Russian money had swamped London’s real estate market, the gallery had been located in stylish New Bond Street, or New Bondstrasse, as it was known in the trade. Then came the likes of Hermès, Burberry, Chanel, and Cartier, leaving Isherwood and others like him—independent dealers specializing in museum-quality Old Master paintings—no choice but to seek sanctuary in St. James’s.
It was not the first time Isherwood had been forced into exile. Born in Paris on the eve of World War II, the only child of the renowned art dealer Samuel Isakowitz, he had been carried over the Pyrenees after the German invasion and smuggled into Britain. His Parisian childhood and Jewish lineage were just two pieces of his tangled past that Isherwood kept secret from the rest of London’s notoriously backbiting art world. As far as anyone knew, he was English to the core—English as high tea and bad teeth, as he was fond of saying. He was the incomparable Julian Isherwood, Julie to his friends, Juicy Julian to his partners in the occasional crime of drink, and His Holiness to the art historians and curators who routinely made use of his infallible eye. He was loyal as the day was long, trusting to a fault, impeccably mannered, and had no real enemies, a singular achievement given that he had spent two lifetimes navigating the treacherous waters of the art world. Mainly, Isherwood was decent—decency being in short supply these days, in London or anywhere else.
Isherwood Fine Arts was a vertical affair: bulging storage rooms on the ground floor, business offices on the second, and a formal exhibition room on the third. The exhibition room, considered by many to be the most glorious in all of London, was an exact replica of Paul Rosenberg’s famous gallery in Paris, where Isherwood had spent many happy hours as a child, oftentimes in the company of Picasso himself. The business office was a Dickensian warren piled high with yellowed catalogues and monographs. To reach it, visitors had to pass through a pair of secure glass doorways, the first off Mason’s Yard, the second at the top of a narrow flight of stairs covered in stained brown carpeting. There they would encounter Maggie, a sleepy-eyed blonde who couldn’t tell a Titian from toilet paper. Isherwood had once made a complete ass of himself trying to seduce her and, having no other recourse, hired her to be his receptionist instead. Presently, she was buffing her nails while the telephone on her desk bleated unanswered.
“Mind getting that, Mags?” Isherwood inquired benevolently.
“Why?” she asked without a trace of irony in her voice.
“Might be important.”
She rolled her eyes before resentfully lifting the receiver to her ear and purring, “Isherwood Fine Arts.” A few seconds later, she rang off without another word and resumed work on her nails.
“Well?” asked Isherwood.
“No one on the line.”
“Be a love, petal, and check the caller ID.”
“He’ll call back.”
Isherwood, frowning, resumed his silent appraisal of the painting propped upon the baize-covered easel in the center of the room—a depiction of Christ appearing before Mary Magdalene, probably by a follower of Francesco Albani, which Isherwood had recently plucked for a pittance from a manor house in Berkshire. The painting, like Isherwood himself, was badly in need of restoration. He had reached the age that estate planners refer to as “the autumn of his years.” It was not a golden autumn, he thought gloomily. It was late autumn, with the wind knife-edged and Christmas lights burning along Oxford Street. Still, with his handmade Savile Row suit and plentiful gray locks, he cut an elegant if precarious figure, a look he described as dignified depravity. At this stage of his life, he could strive for nothing more.
“I thought some dreadful Russian was dropping by at four to look at a painting,” said Isherwood suddenly, his gaze still roaming the worn canvas.
“The dreadful Russian canceled.”
“When?”
“This morning.”
“Why?”
“Didn’t say.”
“Why didn’t you tell me?”
“Did.”
“Nonsense.”
“You must have forgotten, Julian. Been happening a lot lately.”
Isherwood fixed Maggie with a withering stare, all the while wondering how he could have been attracted to so repulsive a creature. Then, having no other appointments on his calendar, and positively nothing better to do, he crawled into his overcoat and hiked over to Green’s Restaurant and Oyster Bar, thus setting in motion the chain of events that would lead him into yet another calamity not of his own making. The time was twenty minutes past four. It was a bit too early for the usual crowd, and the bar was empty except for Simon Mendenhall, Christie’s permanently suntanned chief auctioneer. Mendenhall had once played an unwitting role in a joint Israeli-American intelligence operation to penetrate a jihadist terror network that was bombing the daylights out of Western Europe. Isherwood knew this because he had played a minor role in the operation himself. Isherwood was not a spy. He was a helper of spies, one spy in particular.
“Julie!” Mendenhall called out. Then, in the bedroom voice he reserved for reluctant bidders, he added, “You look positively marvelous. Lost weight? Been to a pricey spa? A new girl? What’s your secret?”
“Sancerre,” replied Isherwood before settling in at his usual table next to the window overlooking Duke Street. And there he ordered a bottle of the stuff, brutally cold, for a glass wouldn’t do. Mendenhall soon departed with his usual flourish, and Isherwood was alone with his thoughts and his drink, a dangerous combination for a man of advancing years with a career in full retreat.
But eventually the door swung open, and the wet darkening street yielded a pair of curators from the National Gallery. Someone important from the Tate came next, followed by a delegation from Bonhams led by Jeremy Crabbe, the tweedy director of the auction house’s Old Master paintings department. Hard on their heels was Roddy Hutchinson, widely regarded as the most unscrupulous dealer in all of London. His arrival was a bad omen, for everywhere Roddy went, tubby Oliver Dimbleby was sure to follow. As expected, he came waddling into the bar a few minutes later with all the discretion of a train whistle at midnight. Isherwood seized his mobile phone and feigned an urgent conversation, but Oliver was having none of it. He made a straight line toward the table—like a hound bearing down on a fox, Isherwood would recall later—and settled his ample backside into the empty chair. “Domaine Daniel Chotard,” he said approvingly, lifting the bottle of wine from the ice bucket. “Don’t mind if I do.”
He wore a blue power suit that fit his portly frame like a sausage casing and large gold cuff links the size of shillings. His cheeks were rounded and pink; his pale blue eyes shone with a brightness that suggested he slept well at night. Oliver Dimbleby was a sinner of the highest order, but his conscience bothered him not.
“Don’t take this the wrong way, Julie,” he said as he poured himself a generous measure of Isherwood’s wine, “but you look like a pile of dirty laundry.”
“That’s not what Simon Mendenhall said.”
“Simon earns his living by talking people out of their money. I, however, am a source of unvarnished truth, even when it hurts.” Dimbleby settled his gaze on Isherwood with a look of genuine concern.
“Oh, don’t look at me like that, Oliver.”
“Like what?”
“Like you’re trying to think of something kind to say before the doctor pulls the plug.”
“Have you had a peek in the mirror lately?”
“I try to avoid mirrors these days.”
“I can see why.” Dimbleby added another half inch of the wine to his glass.
“Is there anything else I can get for you, Oliver? Some caviar?”
“Don’t I always reciprocate?”
“No, Oliver, you don’t. In fact, if I were keeping track, which I am not, you would be several thousand pounds in arrears.”
Dimbleby ignored the remark. “What is it, Julian? What’s troubling you this time?”
“At the moment, Oliver, it’s you.”
“It’s that girl, isn’t it, Julie? That’s what’s got you down. What was her name again?”
“Cassandra,” Isherwood answered to the window.
“Broke your heart, did she?”
“They always do.”
Dimbleby smiled. “Your capacity for love astounds me. What I wouldn’t give to fall in love just once.”
“You’re the biggest womanizer I know, Oliver.”
“Being a womanizer has precious little to do with being in love. I love women, all women. And therein lies the problem.”
Isherwood stared into the street. It was starting to rain again, just in time for the evening rush.
“Sold any paintings lately?” asked Dimbleby.
“Several, actually.”
“None that I’ve heard about.”
“That’s because the sales were private.”
“Bollocks,” replied Oliver with a snort. “You haven’t sold anything in months. But that hasn’t stopped you from acquiring new stock, has it? How many paintings have you got stashed away in that storeroom of yours? Enough to fill a museum, with a few thousand paintings to spare. And they’re all burned to a crisp, deader than the proverbial doornail.”
Isherwood made no response other than to rub at his lower back. It had replaced a barking cough as his most persistent physical ailment. He supposed it was an improvement. A sore back didn’t disturb the neighbors.
“My offer still stands,” Dimbleby was saying.
“What offer is that?”
“Come on, Julie. Don’t make me say it aloud.”
Isherwood swiveled his head a few degrees and stared directly into Dimbleby’s fleshy, childlike face. “You’re not talking about buying my gallery again, are you?”
“I’m prepared to be more than generous. I’ll give you a fair price for the small portion of your collection that’s sellable and use the rest to heat the building.”
“That’s very charitable of you,” Isherwood responded sardonically, “but I have other plans for the gallery.”
“Realistic?”
Isherwood was silent.
“Very well,” said Dimbleby. “If you won’t allow me to take possession of that flaming wreck you refer to as a gallery, at least let me do something else to help lift you out of your current Blue Period.”
“I don’t want one of your girls, Oliver.”
“I’m not talking about a girl. I’m talking about a nice trip to help take your mind off your troubles.”
“Where?”
“Lake Como. All expenses paid. First-class airfare. Two nights in a luxury suite at the Villa d’Este.”
“And what do I have to do in return?”
“A small favor.”
“How small?”
Dimbleby helped himself to another glass of the wine and told Isherwood the rest of it.
It seemed Oliver Dimbleby had recently made the acquaintance of an expatriate Englishman who collected ravenously but without the aid of a trained art adviser to guide him. Furthermore, it seemed the Englishman’s finances were not what they once were, thus requiring the rapid sale of a portion of his holdings. Dimbleby had agreed to have a quiet look at the collection, but now that the trip was upon him, he couldn’t face the prospect of getting on yet another airplane. Or so he claimed. Isherwood suspected Dimbleby’s true motives for backing out of the trip resided elsewhere, for Oliver Dimbleby was ulterior motives made flesh.
Nevertheless, there was something about the idea of an unexpected journey that appealed to Isherwood, and against all better judgment he accepted the offer on the spot. That evening he packed lightly, and at nine the next morning was settling into his first-class seat on British Airways Flight 576, with nonstop service to Milan’s Malpensa Airport. He drank only a single glass of wine during the flight—for the sake of his heart, he told himself—and at half past twelve, as he was climbing into a rented Mercedes, he was fully in command of his faculties. He made the drive northward to Lake Como without the aid of a map or navigation device. A highly regarded art historian who specialized in the painters of Venice, Isherwood had made countless journeys to Italy to prowl its churches and museums. Even so, he always leapt at the chance to return, especially when someone else was footing the bill. Julian Isherwood was French by birth and English by upbringing, but within his sunken chest beat the romantic, undisciplined heart of an Italian.
The expatriate Englishman of shrinking resources was expecting Isherwood at two. He lived grandly, according to Dimbleby’s hastily drafted e-mail, on the southwestern prong of the lake, near the town of Laglio. Isherwood arrived a few minutes early and found the imposing gate open to receive him. Beyond the gate stretched a newly paved drive, which bore him gracefully to a gravel forecourt. He parked next to the villa’s private quay and made his way past molded statuary to the front door. The bell, when pressed, went unanswered. Isherwood checked his watch and then rang the bell a second time. The result was the same.
At which point Isherwood would have been wise to climb into his rented car and leave Como as quickly as possible. Instead, he tried the latch and, regrettably, found it was unlocked. He opened the door a few inches, called a greeting into the darkened interior, and then stepped uncertainly into the grand entrance hall. Instantly, he saw the lake of blood on the marble floor, and the two bare feet suspended in space, and the swollen blue-black face staring down from above. Isherwood felt his knees buckle and saw the floor rising to receive him. He knelt there for a moment until the wave of nausea had passed. Then he rose unsteadily to his feet and, with his hand over his mouth, stumbled out of the villa toward his car. And though he did not realize it at the time, he was cursing tubby Oliver Dimbleby’s name every step of the way.
2 (#ulink_e0919903-04c8-59c5-a728-e0fec2064a57)
VENICE (#ulink_e0919903-04c8-59c5-a728-e0fec2064a57)
EARLY THE FOLLOWING MORNING, VENICE lost yet another skirmish in its ancient war with the sea. The floodwaters carried marine creatures of every sort into the lobby of the Hotel Cipriani and inundated Harry’s Bar. Danish tourists went for a morning swim in the Piazza San Marco; tables and chairs from Caffè Florian bobbed against the steps of the basilica like debris from a sunken luxury liner. For once, the pigeons were nowhere to be found. Most wisely fled the submerged city in search of dry land.
There were portions of Venice, however, where the acquaalta was more a nuisance than a calamity. In fact, the restorer managed to find an archipelago of reasonably dry land stretching from the door of his apartment in the sestiere of Cannaregio to Dorsoduro, at the southern end of the city. The restorer was not a Venetian by birth, but he knew its alleyways and squares better than most of the natives. He had studied his craft in Venice, loved and grieved in Venice, and once, when he was known by a name not his own, he had been chased from Venice by his enemies. Now, after a long absence, he had returned to his beloved city of water and paintings, the only city where he had ever experienced anything like contentment. Not peace, though; for the restorer, peace was only the period between the last war and the next. It was fleeting, a falsehood. Poets and widows dreamed of it, but men such as the restorer never allowed themselves to be seduced by the notion that peace might actually be possible.
He paused at a kiosk to see whether he was being followed and then continued on in the same direction. He was below average in height—five foot eight perhaps, but no more—and had the spare physique of a cyclist. The face was long and narrow at the chin, with wide cheekbones and a slender nose that looked as though it had been carved from wood. The eyes that peered from beneath the brim of his flat cap were unnaturally green; the hair at his temples was the color of ash. He wore an oilskin coat and Wellington boots but carried no umbrella against the steady rain. Out of habit, he never burdened himself in public with any object that might impede the swift movement of his hands.
He crossed into Dorsoduro, the highest point of the city, and made his way to the Church of San Sebastiano. The front entrance was tightly sealed, and there was an official-looking notice explaining that the building would be closed to the public until the following autumn. The restorer approached a smaller doorway on the right side of the church and opened it with a heavy skeleton key. A breath of cool air from the interior caressed his cheek. Candle smoke, incense, ancient mildew: something about the smell reminded the restorer of death. He locked the door behind him, sidestepped a font filled with holy water, and headed inside.
The nave was in darkness and empty of pews. The restorer trod silently over the smooth timeworn stones and slipped through the open gate of the altar rail. The ornate Eucharistic table had been removed for cleaning; in its place rose thirty feet of aluminum scaffolding. The restorer scaled it with the agility of a house cat and slipped through a tarpaulin shroud onto his work platform. His supplies were precisely as he had left them the previous evening: flasks of chemicals, a wad of cotton wool, a bundle of wooden dowels, a magnifying visor, two powerful halogen lamps, a paint-smudged portable stereo. The altarpiece—Virgin and Child in Glory with Saints by Paolo Veronese—was as he had left it, too. It was just one of several remarkable paintings Veronese had produced for the church between 1556 and 1565. His tomb, with his glowering marble bust, was on the left side of the presbytery. At moments like these, when the church was empty and dark, the restorer could almost feel Veronese’s ghost watching him as he worked.
The restorer switched on the lamps and stood motionless for a long moment before the altarpiece. At the apex were Mary and the Christ Child, seated upon clouds of glory and surrounded by musician angels. Beneath them, gazing upward in rapture, was a group of saints, including the patron saint of the church, Sebastian, whom Veronese depicted in martyrdom. For the past three weeks, the restorer had been painstakingly removing the cracked and yellowed varnish with a carefully calibrated mixture of acetone, methyl proxitol, and mineral spirits. Removing varnish from a Baroque painting, he liked to explain, was not like stripping a piece of furniture; it was more akin to scrubbing the deck of an aircraft carrier with a toothbrush. He first had to fashion a swab with cotton wool and a wooden dowel. After moistening the swab with solvent, he would apply it to the surface of the canvas and twirl, gently, so as not to cause any additional flaking of the paint. Each swab could clean about a square inch of the painting before it became too soiled to use. At night, when he was not dreaming of blood and fire, he was removing yellowed varnish from a canvas the size of the Piazza San Marco.
Another week, he thought, and then he would be ready to move on to the second phase of the restoration, retouching those portions of the canvas where Veronese’s original paint had flaked away. The figures of Mary and the Christ Child were largely free of damage, but the restorer had uncovered extensive losses along the top and bottom portion of the canvas. If everything went according to plan, he would finish the restoration as his wife was entering the final weeks of her pregnancy. If everything went according to plan, he thought again.
He inserted a CD of La Bohème into the stereo, and a moment later the sanctuary was filled with the opening notes of “Non sono in vena.” As Rodolfo and Mimi were falling in love in a tiny garret studio in Paris, the restorer stood alone before the Veronese, meticulously removing the surface grime and yellowed varnish. He worked steadily and with an easy rhythm—dip, twirl, discard … dip, twirl, discard—until the platform was littered with acrid balls of soiled cotton wool. Veronese had perfected formulae for paints that did not fade with age; and as the restorer removed each tiny patch of tobacco-brown varnish, the colors beneath glowed intensely. It was almost as if the master had applied the paint to the canvas only yesterday instead of four and a half centuries ago.
The restorer had the church to himself for another two hours. Then, at ten o’clock, he heard the clatter of boots across the stone floor of the nave. The boots belonged to Adrianna Zinetti, cleaner of altars, seducer of men. After that it was Lorenzo Vasari, a gifted restorer of frescoes who had almost single-handedly brought Leonardo’s Last Supper back from the dead. Then came the conspiratorial shuffle of Antonio Politi, who, much to his annoyance, had been assigned the ceiling panels instead of the main altarpiece. As a result, he spent his days sprawled on his back like a modern-day Michelangelo, glaring resentfully at the restorer’s shrouded platform high above the chancel.
It was not the first time the restorer and the other members of the team had worked together. Several years earlier, they had carried out major restorations of the Church of San Giovanni Crisostomo in Cannaregio and, before that, at the Church of San Zaccaria in Castello. At the time, they had known the restorer as the brilliant but intensely private Mario Delvecchio. Later, they would learn, along with the rest of the world, that he was a legendary Israeli intelligence officer and assassin named Gabriel Allon. Adrianna Zinetti and Lorenzo Vasari had found it in their hearts to forgive Gabriel’s deception, but not Antonio Politi. In his youth, he had once accused Mario Delvecchio of being a terrorist, and he regarded Gabriel Allon as a terrorist, too. Secretly, he suspected it was because of Gabriel that he spent his days in the upper reaches of the nave, supine and contorted, isolated from human contact, with solvent and paint dripping onto his face. The panels depicted the story of Queen Esther. Surely, Politi told anyone who would listen, it was no coincidence.
In truth, Gabriel had had nothing to do with the decision; it had been made by Francesco Tiepolo, owner of the most prominent restoration firm in the Veneto and director of the San Sebastiano project. A bearlike figure with a tangled gray-and-black beard, Tiepolo was a man of enormous appetites and passions, capable of great anger and even greater love. As he strode up the center of the nave, he was dressed, as usual, in a flowing tunic-like shirt with a silk scarf knotted around his neck. The clothing made it seem as though he were overseeing the construction of the church rather than its renovation.
Tiepolo paused briefly to cast an admiring glance at Adrianna Zinetti, with whom he had once had an affair that was among the worst-kept secrets in Venice. Then he scaled Gabriel’s scaffolding and barged through the gap in the tarpaulin shroud. The wooden platform seemed to bow under the strain of his enormous weight.
“Careful, Francesco,” said Gabriel, frowning. “The floor of the altar is made of marble, and it’s a long way down.”
“What are you saying?”
“I’m saying that it might be wise for you to lose a few kilos. You’re starting to develop your own gravitational pull.”
“What good would it do to lose weight? I could shed twenty kilos, and I’d still be fat.” The Italian took a step forward and examined the altarpiece over Gabriel’s shoulder. “Very good,” he said with mock admiration. “If you continue at this pace, you’ll be finished in time for the first birthday of your children.”
“I can do it quickly,” replied Gabriel, “or I can do it right.”
“They’re not mutually exclusive, you know. Here in Italy, our restorers work quickly. But not you,” Tiepolo added. “Even when you were pretending to be one of us, you were always very slow.”
Gabriel fashioned a fresh swab, moistened it with solvent, and twirled it over Sebastian’s arrow-pierced torso. Tiepolo watched intently for a moment; then he fashioned a swab of his own and worked it against the saint’s shoulder. The yellowed varnish dissolved instantly, exposing Veronese’s pristine paint.
“Your solvent mixture is perfect,” said Tiepolo.
“It always is,” replied Gabriel.
“What’s the solution?”
“It’s a secret.”
“Must everything be a secret with you?”
When Gabriel made no reply, Tiepolo glanced down at the flasks of chemicals.
“How much methyl proxitol did you use?”
“Exactly the right amount.”
Tiepolo scowled. “Didn’t I arrange work for you when your wife decided she wanted to spend her pregnancy in Venice?”
“You did, Francesco.”
“And do I not pay you far more than I pay the others,” he whispered, “despite the fact that you’re always running out on me every time your masters require your services?”
“You’ve always been very generous.”
“Then why won’t you tell me the formula for your solvent?”
“Because Veronese had his secret formula, and I have mine.”
Tiepolo gave a dismissive wave of his enormous hand. Then he discarded his soiled swab and fashioned a new one.
“I got a call from the Rome bureau chief of the New York Times last night,” he said, his tone offhand. “She’s interested in doing a piece on the restoration for the Sunday arts section. She wants to come up here on Friday and have a look around.”
“If you don’t mind, Francesco, I think I’ll take Friday off.”
“I thought you’d say that.” Tiepolo gave Gabriel a sidelong glance. “Not even tempted?”
“To what?”
“To show the world the real Gabriel Allon. The Gabriel Allon who cares for the works of the great masters. The Gabriel Allon who can paint like an angel.”
“I only talk to journalists as a last resort. And I would never dream of talking to one about myself.”
“You’ve lived an interesting life.”
“That’s putting it mildly.”
“Perhaps it’s time for you to come out from behind the shroud.”
“And then what?”
“You can spend the rest of your days here in Venice with us. You always were a Venetian at heart, Gabriel.”
“It’s tempting.”
“But?”
With his expression, Gabriel made it clear he wished to discuss the matter no further. Then, turning to the canvas, he asked, “Have you received any other phone calls I should know about?”
“Just one,” answered Tiepolo. “General Ferrari of the Carabinieri is coming into town later this morning. He’d like a word with you in private.”
Gabriel turned sharply and looked at Tiepolo. “About what?”
“He didn’t say. The general is far better at asking questions than answering them.” Tiepolo scrutinized Gabriel for a moment. “I never knew that you and the general were friends.”
“We’re not.”
“How do you know him?”
“He once asked me for a favor, and I had no choice but to agree.”
Tiepolo made a show of thought. “It must have been that business at the Vatican a couple of years ago, that girl who fell from the dome of the Basilica. As I recall, you were restoring their Caravaggio at the time it happened.”
“Was I?”
“That was the rumor.”
“You shouldn’t listen to rumors, Francesco. They’re almost always wrong.”
“Unless they involve you,” Tiepolo responded with a smile.
Gabriel allowed the remark to echo unanswered into the heights of the chancel. Then he resumed his work. A moment earlier, he had been using his right hand. Now he was using his left, with equal dexterity.
“You’re like Titian,” Tiepolo said, watching him. “You are a sun amidst small stars.”
“If you don’t leave me in peace, the sun is never going to finish this painting.”
Tiepolo didn’t move. “Are you sure you’re not him?” he asked after a moment.
“Who?”
“Mario Delvecchio.”
“Mario is dead, Francesco. Mario never was.”
3 (#ulink_a1fca49e-daaa-51e0-bac3-4ffd21a076d8)
VENICE (#ulink_a1fca49e-daaa-51e0-bac3-4ffd21a076d8)
THE REGIONAL HEADQUARTERS OF THE Carabinieri, Italy’s national military police force, was located in the sestiere of Castello, not far from the Campo San Zaccaria. General Cesare Ferrari emerged from the building promptly at one. He had forsaken his blue uniform with its many medals and insignia and was wearing a business suit instead. One hand clutched a stainless steel attaché case; the other, the one missing two fingers, was thrust into the pocket of a well-cut overcoat. He removed the hand long enough to offer it to Gabriel. His smile was brief and formal. As usual, it had no influence upon his prosthetic right eye. Even Gabriel found its lifeless, unyielding gaze difficult to bear. It was like being studied by the all-seeing eye of an unforgiving God.
“You’re looking well,” said General Ferrari. “Being back in Venice obviously agrees with you.”
“How did you know I was here?”
The general’s second smile lasted scarcely longer than his first. “There isn’t much that happens in Italy that I don’t know about, especially when it concerns you.”
“How did you know?” Gabriel asked again.
“When you requested permission from our intelligence services to return to Venice, they forwarded that information to all relevant ministries and divisions of law enforcement. One of those places was the palazzo.”
The palazzo to which the general was referring overlooked the Piazza di Sant’Ignazio in the ancient center of Rome. It housed the Division for the Defense of Cultural Patrimony, which was better known as the Art Squad. General Ferrari was its chief. And he was right about one thing, thought Gabriel. There wasn’t much that happened in Italy the general didn’t know about.
The son of schoolteachers from the impoverished Campania region, Ferrari had long been regarded as one of Italy’s most competent and accomplished law enforcement officials. During the 1970s, a time of terrorist bombings in Italy, he helped to neutralize the Communist Red Brigades. Then, during the Mafia wars of the 1980s, he served as a commander in the Camorra-infested Naples division. The assignment was so dangerous that Ferrari’s wife and three daughters were forced to live under twenty-four-hour guard. Ferrari himself was the target of numerous assassination attempts, including the letter-bomb attack that claimed his eye and two fingers.
The posting to the Art Squad was supposed to be a reward for a long and distinguished career. It was assumed Ferrari would merely follow in the footsteps of his lackluster predecessor, that he would shuffle papers, take long Roman lunches, and, occasionally, find one or two of the museum’s worth of paintings that were stolen in Italy each year. Instead, he immediately set about modernizing a once-effective unit that had been allowed to atrophy with age and neglect. Within days of his arrival, he fired half the staff and quickly replenished the ranks with aggressive young officers who actually knew something about art. He gave them a simple mandate. He wasn’t much interested in the street-level hoods who dabbled in art theft; he wanted the big fish, the bosses who brought the stolen goods to market. It didn’t take long for Ferrari’s new approach to pay dividends. More than a dozen important thieves were now behind bars, and statistics for art theft, while still astonishingly high, were beginning to show improvement.
“So what brings you to Venice?” Gabriel asked as he led the general between the temporary ponds in the Campo San Zaccaria.
“I had business in the north—Lake Como, to be specific.”
“Something got stolen?”
“No,” replied the general. “Someone got murdered.”
“Since when are dead bodies the business of the Art Squad?”
“When the decedent has a connection to the art world.”
Gabriel stopped walking and turned to face the general. “You still haven’t answered my question,” he said. “Why are you in Venice?”
“I’m here because of you, of course.”
“What does a dead body in Como have to do with me?”
“The person who found it.”
The general was smiling again, but the prosthetic eye was staring blankly into the middle distance. It was the eye of a man who knew everything, thought Gabriel. A man who was not about to take no for an answer.
They entered the church through the main doorway off the campo and made their way to Bellini’s famed San Zaccaria altarpiece. A tour group stood before it while a guide lectured sonorously on the subject of the painting’s most recent restoration, unaware that the man who had performed it was among his audience. Even General Ferrari seemed to find it amusing, though after a moment his monocular gaze began to wander. The Bellini was San Zaccaria’s most important piece, but the church contained several other notable paintings as well, including works by Tintoretto, Palma the Elder, and Van Dyke. It was just one example of why the Carabinieri maintained a dedicated unit of art detectives. Italy had been blessed with two things in abundance: art and professional criminals. Much of the art, like the art in the church, was poorly protected. And many of the criminals were bent on stealing every last bit of it.
On the opposite side of the nave was a small chapel that contained the crypt of its patron and a canvas by a minor Venetian painter that no one had bothered to clean in more than a century. General Ferrari lowered himself onto one of the pews, opened his metal attaché case, and removed a file folder. Then, from the folder, he drew a single eight-by-ten photograph, which he handed to Gabriel. It showed a man of late middle age hanging by his wrists from a chandelier. The cause of death was not clear from the image, though it was obvious the man had been tortured savagely. The face was a bloody, swollen mess, and several swaths of skin and flesh had been carved away from the torso.
“Who was he?” asked Gabriel.
“His name was James Bradshaw, better known as Jack. He was a British subject, but he spent most of his time in Como, along with several thousand of his countrymen.” The general paused thoughtfully. “The British don’t seem to like living in their own country much these days, do they?”
“No, they don’t.”
“Why is that?”
“You’d have to ask them.” Gabriel looked down at the photograph and winced. “Was he married?”
“No.”
“Divorced?”
“No.”
“Significant other?”
“Apparently not.”
Gabriel returned the photograph to the general and asked what Jack Bradshaw had done for a living.
“He described himself as a consultant.”
“What sort?”
“He worked in the Middle East for several years as a diplomat. Then he retired early and went into business for himself. Apparently, he dispensed advice to British firms wishing to do business in the Arab world. He must have been quite good at his job,” the general added, “because his villa was among the most expensive on that part of the lake. It also contained a rather impressive collection of Italian art and antiquities.”
“Which explains the Art Squad’s interest in his death.”
“Partly,” said the general. “After all, having a nice collection is no crime.”
“Unless the collection is acquired in a way that skirts Italian law.”
“You’re always one step ahead of everyone else, aren’t you, Allon?” The general looked up at the darkened painting hanging on the wall of the chapel. “Why wasn’t this cleaned in the last restoration?”
“There wasn’t enough money.”
“The varnish is almost entirely opaque.” The general paused, then added, “Just like Jack Bradshaw.”
“May he rest in peace.”
“That’s not likely, not after a death like that.” Ferrari looked at Gabriel and asked, “Have you ever had occasion to contemplate your own demise?”
“Unfortunately, I’ve had several. But if you don’t mind, I’d rather talk about the collecting habits of Jack Bradshaw.”
“The late Mr. Bradshaw had a reputation for acquiring paintings that were not actually for sale.”
“Stolen paintings?”
“Those are your words, my friend. Not mine.”
“You were watching him?”
“Let us say that the Art Squad monitored his activities to the best of our ability.”
“How?”
“The usual ways,” answered the general evasively.
“I assume your men are doing a complete and thorough inventory of his collection.”
“As we speak.”
“And?”
“Thus far they’ve found nothing from our database of missing or stolen works.”
“Then I suppose you’ll have to take back all the nasty things you said about Jack Bradshaw.”
“Just because there’s no evidence doesn’t mean it isn’t so.”
“Spoken like a true Italian policeman.”
It was clear from General Ferrari’s expression that he interpreted Gabriel’s remark as a compliment. Then, after a moment, he said, “One heard other things about the late Jack Bradshaw.”
“What sort of things?”
“That he wasn’t just a private collector, that he was involved in the illegal export of paintings and other works of art from Italian soil.” The general lowered his voice and added, “Which explains why your friend Julian Isherwood is in a great deal of trouble.”
“Julian Isherwood doesn’t trade in smuggled art.”
The general didn’t bother to respond. In his eyes, all art dealers were guilty of something.
“Where is he?” asked Gabriel.
“In my custody.”
“Has he been charged with anything?”
“Not yet.”
“Under Italian law, you can’t hold him for more than forty-eight hours without bringing him before a judge.”
“He was found standing over a dead body. I’ll think of something.”
“You know Julian had nothing to do with Bradshaw’s murder.”
“Don’t worry,” the general replied, “I have no plans to recommend charges at this time. But if it were to become public that your friend was meeting with a known smuggler, his career would be over. You see, Allon, in the art world, perception is reality.”
“What do I have to do to keep Julian’s name out of the papers?”
The general didn’t respond immediately; he was scrutinizing the photograph of Jack Bradshaw’s body.
“Why do you suppose they tortured him before killing him?” he asked at last.
“Maybe he owed them money.”
“Maybe,” agreed the general. “Or maybe he had something the killers wanted, something more valuable.”
“You were about to tell me what I have to do to save my friend.”
“Find out who killed Jack Bradshaw. And find out what they were looking for.”
“And if I refuse?”
“The London art world will be abuzz with nasty rumors.”
“You’re a cheap blackmailer, General Ferrari.”
“Blackmail is an ugly word.”
“Yes,” said Gabriel. “But in the art world, perception is reality.”
4 (#ulink_6a43bcac-6f2e-57a1-b726-6efb84c30205)
VENICE (#ulink_6a43bcac-6f2e-57a1-b726-6efb84c30205)
GABRIEL KNEW A GOOD RESTAURANT not far from the church, in a quiet corner of Castello where tourists rarely ventured. General Ferrari ordered lavishly; Gabriel moved food around his plate and sipped at a glass of mineral water with lemon.
“You’re not hungry?” inquired the general.
“I was hoping to spend a few more hours with my Veronese this afternoon.”
“Then you should eat something. You need your strength.”
“It doesn’t work that way.”
“You don’t eat when you’re restoring?”
“Coffee and a bit of bread.”
“What kind of diet is that?”
“The kind that allows me to concentrate.”
“No wonder you’re so thin.”
General Ferrari went to the antipasti trolley and filled his plate a second time. There was no one else in the restaurant, no one but the owner and his daughter, a pretty dark-haired girl of twelve or thirteen. The child bore an uncanny resemblance to the daughter of Abu Jihad, the second-in-command of the PLO whom Gabriel, on a warm spring evening in 1988, had assassinated at his villa in Tunis. The killing had been carried out in Abu Jihad’s second-floor study, where he had been watching videos of the Palestinian intifada. The girl had seen everything: two immobilizing shots to the chest, two fatal shots to the head, all set to the music of Arab rebellion. Gabriel could no longer recall the death mask of Abu Jihad, but the young girl’s portrait, serene but seething with rage, hung prominently in the exhibition rooms of his memory. As the general retook his seat, Gabriel concealed her face beneath a layer of obliterating paint. Then he leaned forward across the table and asked, “Why me?”
“Why not you?”
“Shall I start with the obvious reasons?”
“If it makes you feel better.”
“I’m not an Italian policeman. In fact, I’m quite the other thing.”
“You have a long history here in Italy.”
“Not all of it pleasant.”
“True,” agreed the general. “But along the way, you’ve made important contacts. You have friends in high places like the Vatican. And, perhaps more importantly, you have friends in low places, too. You know the country from end to end, you speak our language like a native, and you’re married to an Italian. You’re practically one of us.”
“My wife isn’t Italian anymore.”
“What language do you speak at home?”
“Italian,” admitted Gabriel.
“Even when you’re in Israel?”
Gabriel nodded.
“I rest my case.” The general lapsed into a thoughtful silence. “This might surprise you,” he said finally, “but when a painting goes missing, or someone gets hurt, I usually have a pretty good idea who’s behind it. We have more than a hundred informants on our payroll, and we’ve tapped more phones and e-mail accounts than the NSA. When something happens in the criminal end of the art world, there’s always chatter. As you say in the counterterrorism business, nodes light up.”
“And now?”
“The silence is deafening.”
“What do you think it means?”
“It means that, in all likelihood, the men who killed Jack Bradshaw were not from Italy.”
“Any guess as to where they’re from?”
“No,” the general said, shaking his head slowly, “but the level of violence concerns me. I’ve seen a lot of dead bodies during my career, but this one was different. The things they did to Jack Bradshaw were …” His voice trailed off, then he said, “Medieval.”
“And now you want me to get mixed up with them.”
“You strike me as a man who knows how to take care of himself.”
Gabriel ignored the remark. “My wife is pregnant. I can’t possibly leave her alone.”
“We’ll keep a close eye on her.” The general lowered his voice and added, “We already are.”
“It’s good to know the Italian government is spying on us.”
“You didn’t really expect otherwise, did you?”
“Of course not.”
“I didn’t think so. Besides, Allon, it’s for your own good. You have a lot of enemies.”
“And now you want me to make another one.”
The general laid down his fork and peered contemplatively out the window in the manner of Bellini’s Doge Leonardo Loredan. “It’s rather ironic,” he said after a moment.
“What’s that?”
“That a man such as yourself would choose to live in a ghetto.”
“I don’t actually live in the ghetto.”
“Close enough,” said the general.
“It’s a nice neighborhood—the nicest in Venice, if you ask me.”
“It’s filled with ghosts.”
Gabriel glanced at the young girl. “I don’t believe in ghosts.”
The general dabbed his napkin skeptically at the corner of his mouth.
“How would it work?” asked Gabriel.
“Consider yourself one of my informants.”
“Meaning?”
“Go forth into the nether regions of the art world and find out who killed Jack Bradshaw. I’ll take care of the rest.”
“And if I come up empty?”
“I’m confident you won’t.”
“That sounds like a threat.”
“Does it?”
The general said nothing more. Gabriel exhaled heavily.
“I’m going to need a few things.”
“Such as?”
“The usual,” replied Gabriel. “Phone records, credit cards, e-mails, Internet browsing histories, and a copy of his computer hard drive.”
The general nodded toward his attaché case. “It’s all there,” he said, “along with every nasty rumor we’ve ever heard about him.”
“I’ll also need to have a look around his villa and his collection.”
“I’ll give you a copy of the inventory when it’s complete.”
“I don’t want an inventory. I want to see the paintings.”
“Done,” said the general. “Anything else?”
“I suppose someone should tell Francesco Tiepolo that I’m going to be leaving Venice for a few days.”
“And your wife, too.”
“Yes,” said Gabriel distantly.
“Perhaps we should share the labor. I’ll tell Francesco, you tell your wife.”
“Any chance we can do it the other way around?”
“I’m afraid not.” The general raised his right hand, the one with the two missing fingers. “I’ve suffered enough already.”
Which left only Julian Isherwood. As it turned out, he was being held at the Carabinieri’s regional headquarters, in a windowless chamber that was not quite a holding cell but not a waiting room, either. The handover took place on the Ponte della Paglia, within sight of the Bridge of Sighs. The general did not seem at all displeased to be rid of his prisoner. He remained on the bridge, with his ruined hand tucked into his coat pocket and his prosthetic eye watching unblinkingly, as Gabriel and Isherwood made their way along the Molo San Marco to Harry’s Bar. Isherwood drank two Bellinis very fast while Gabriel quietly saw to his travel arrangements. There was a British Airways flight leaving Venice at six that evening, arriving at Heathrow a few minutes after seven. “Thus leaving me plenty of time,” said Isherwood darkly, “to murder Oliver Dimbleby and still be in bed for the News at Ten.”
“As your informal representative in this matter,” said Gabriel, “I would advise against that.”
“You think I should wait until morning before killing Oliver?”
Gabriel smiled in spite of himself. “The general has generously agreed to keep your name out of this,” he said. “If I were you, I wouldn’t say anything in London about your brief brush with Italian law enforcement.”
“It wasn’t brief enough,” said Isherwood. “I’m not like you, petal. I’m not used to spending nights in jail. And I’m certainly not used to stumbling upon dead bodies. My God, but you should have seen him. He was positively filleted.”
“All the more reason you shouldn’t say anything when you get home,” Gabriel said. “The last thing you want is for Jack Bradshaw’s killers to read your name in the papers.”
Isherwood chewed his lip and nodded slowly in agreement. “The general seemed to think Bradshaw was trafficking in stolen paintings,” he said after a moment. “He also seemed to think I was in business with him. He gave me quite a going-over.”
“Were you, Julian?”
“In business with Jack Bradshaw?”
Gabriel nodded.
“I won’t dignify that with a response.”
“I had to ask.”
“I’ve done many naughty things during my career, usually at your behest. But I have never, and I mean never, sold a painting that I knew was stolen.”
“What about a smuggled painting?”
“Define smuggled,” said Isherwood with an impish smile.
“What about Oliver?”
“Are you asking whether Oliver Dimbleby is flogging stolen paintings?”
“I suppose I am.”
Isherwood had to think it over for a moment before answering. “There’s not much I would put past Oliver Dimbleby,” he said finally. “But no, I don’t believe he’s dealing in stolen pictures. It was all a case of bad luck and timing.”
Isherwood signaled the waiter and ordered another Bellini. He was finally beginning to relax. “I have to admit,” he said, “that you were the absolute last person in the world I expected to see today.”
“The feeling is mutual, Julian.”
“I take it you and the general are acquainted.”
“We’ve exchanged business cards.”
“He’s one of the most disagreeable creatures I’ve ever met.”
“He’s not so bad once you get to know him.”
“How much does he know about our relationship?”
“He knows we’re friends and that I’ve cleaned a number of pictures for you. And if I had to guess,” Gabriel added, “he probably knows about your links to King Saul Boulevard.”
King Saul Boulevard was the address of Israel’s foreign intelligence service. It had a long and deliberately misleading name that had very little to do with the true nature of its work. Those who worked there referred to it as the Office and nothing else. So did Julian Isherwood. He was not directly employed by the Office; he was a member of the sayanim, a global network of volunteer helpers. They were the bankers who supplied Office agents with cash in emergencies; the doctors who treated them in secret when they were wounded; the hoteliers who gave them rooms under false names, and the rental car agents who supplied them with untraceable vehicles. Isherwood had been recruited in the mid-1970s, during a wave of Palestinian terrorist attacks against Israeli targets in Europe. He’d had but one assignment—to assist in building and maintaining the operational cover of a young art restorer and assassin named Gabriel Allon.
“I suppose my release didn’t come free of charge,” Isherwood said.
“No,” replied Gabriel. “In fact, it was rather pricey.”
“How pricey?”
Gabriel told him.
“So much for your sabbatical in Venice,” said Isherwood. “It seems I’ve ruined everything.”
“It’s the least I can do for you, Julian. I owe you a great deal.”
Isherwood smiled wistfully. “How long has it been?” he asked.
“A hundred years.”
“And now you’re going to be a father again, twice over. I never thought I’d live to see the day.”
“Neither did I.”
Isherwood looked at Gabriel. “You don’t sound thrilled about the prospect of having children.”
“Don’t be ridiculous.”
“But?”
“I’m old, Julian.” Gabriel paused, then added, “Perhaps too old to be starting another family.”
“Life dealt you a lousy hand, my boy. You’re entitled to a bit of happiness in your dotage. I must admit I envy you. You’re married to a beautiful young woman who’s going to bear you two beautiful children. I wish I were in your shoes.”
“Be careful what you wish for.”
Isherwood drank slowly of his Bellini but said nothing.
“It’s not too late, you know.”
“To have children?” he asked incredulously.
“To find someone to spend the rest of your life with.”
“I’m afraid I’m past my expiration date,” Isherwood answered. “At this point, I’m married to my gallery.”
“Sell the gallery,” said Gabriel. “Retire to a villa in the south of France.”
“I’d go mad in a week.”
They left the bar and walked a few paces to the Grand Canal. A sleek wooden water taxi gleamed at the edge of the crowded dock. Isherwood seemed reluctant to board it.
“If I were you,” said Gabriel, “I’d get out of town before the general changes his mind.”
“Sound advice,” replied Isherwood. “May I give you some?”
Gabriel was silent.
“Tell the general to find someone else.”
“I’m afraid it’s too late for that.”
“Then watch your step out there. And don’t go playing the hero again. You have a lot to live for.”
“You’re going to miss your plane, Julian.”
Isherwood teetered aboard the water taxi. As it eased away from the dock, he turned to Gabriel and shouted, “What do I say to Oliver?”
“You’ll think of something.”
“Yes,” said Isherwood. “I always do.”
Then he ducked into the cabin and was gone.
5 (#ulink_dbe8a6fc-024e-56ce-bf48-e39da740f526)
VENICE (#ulink_dbe8a6fc-024e-56ce-bf48-e39da740f526)
GABRIEL WORKED ON THE VERONESE until the windows of the nave darkened with dusk. Then he rang Francesco Tiepolo on his telefonino and broke the news that he had to run a very private errand for General Cesare Ferrari of the Carabinieri. He didn’t go into any of the details.
“How long will you be gone?” asked Tiepolo.
“A day or two,” replied Gabriel. “Maybe a month.”
“What shall I say to the others?”
“Tell them I died. It will lift Antonio’s spirits.”
Gabriel straightened his work platform with more care than usual and went into the cold evening. He followed his usual route northward, across San Polo and Cannaregio, until he came to an iron bridge, the only iron bridge 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. Now the bridge was empty except for a single gull that glared at Gabriel malevolently as he trod slowly past.
He entered a darkened sottoportego. At the end of the passageway a broad square opened before him, the Campo di Ghetto Nuovo, the heart of the ancient ghetto of Venice. He crossed the square and stopped at the door of Number 2899. A small brass plaque read COMUNITÀ EBRAICA DI VENEZIA: JEWISH COMMUNITY OF VENICE. He pressed the bell, then, instinctively, turned his face away from the security camera.
“Can I help you?” a familiar female voice asked in Italian.
“It’s me.”
“Who’s me?”
“Open the door, Chiara.”
A buzzer howled, a deadbolt snapped open. Gabriel entered a cramped passage and followed it to another door, which unlocked automatically as he approached. It gave onto a small office, where Chiara sat primly behind an orderly desk. She wore a sweater of winter white, fawn-colored leggings, and a pair of leather boots. Her riotous auburn hair fell across her shoulders and upon a silk scarf that Gabriel had purchased on the island of Corsica. He resisted the impulse to kiss her wide mouth. He didn’t think it proper to express physical affection toward the receptionist of the chief rabbi of Venice, even if the receptionist also happened to be the rabbi’s devoted daughter.
Chiara was about to address him but was interrupted by the ringing of the telephone. Gabriel sat on the edge of her desk and listened as she dispensed with a small crisis afflicting a shrinking community of believers. She looked astonishingly like the beautiful young woman he had first encountered, ten years earlier, when he had come calling on Rabbi Jacob Zolli for information on the fate of Italy’s Jews during the Second World War. Gabriel had not known then that Chiara was an agent of Israeli intelligence, or that she had been assigned by King Saul Boulevard to watch over him during the restoration of the San Zaccaria altarpiece. She revealed herself to him a short time later in Rome, after an incident involving gunplay and the Italian police. Trapped alone with Chiara in a safe flat, Gabriel had wanted desperately to touch her. He had waited until the case was resolved and they had returned to Venice. There, in a canal house in Cannaregio, they made love for the first time, in a bed prepared with fresh linen. It was like making love to a figure painted by the hand of Veronese.
On the day of their first meeting, Chiara had offered him coffee. She no longer drank coffee, only water and fruit juice, which she sipped constantly from a plastic bottle. It was the only outward sign that, after a long struggle with infertility, she was finally pregnant with twins. She had vowed not to resist the inevitable weight gain with dieting or exercise, which she regarded as yet another obsession inflicted upon the world by the Americans. Chiara was a Venetian at heart, and Venetians did not flail on cardio contraptions or lift heavy objects to build their muscles. They ate and drank well, they made love, and when they required a bit of exercise, they strolled the sands of the Lido or walked down to the Zattere for a gelato.
She hung up the telephone and settled her playful gaze upon him. Her eyes were the color of caramel and flecked with gold, a combination that Gabriel had never been able to render accurately on canvas. At the moment, they were very bright. She was happy, he thought, happier than he had ever seen her before. Suddenly, he didn’t have the heart to tell her that General Ferrari had appeared like the flood to spoil everything.
“How are you feeling?” he asked.
She rolled her eyes and sipped from her plastic water bottle.
“Did I say something wrong?”
“You don’t have to ask me how I’m feeling all the time.”
“I want you to know that I’m concerned about you.”
“I know you’re concerned, darling. But I’m not terminally ill. I’m just pregnant.”
“What should I ask you?”
“You should ask me what I want for dinner.”
“I’m famished,” he said.
“I’m always famished.”
“Should we go out?”
“Actually, I feel like cooking.”
“Are you up to it?”
“Gabriel!”
She began to needlessly straighten the papers on her desk. It wasn’t a good sign. Chiara always straightened things when she was annoyed.
“How was your work?” she asked.
“It was a thrill a minute.”
“Don’t tell me you’re bored with the Veronese.”
“Removing dirty varnish isn’t the most rewarding part of a restoration.”
“No surprises?”
“With the painting?”
“In general,” she answered.
It was a peculiar question. “Adrianna Zinetti came to work dressed as Groucho Marx,” Gabriel replied, “but otherwise it was a normal day at the Church of San Sebastiano.”
Chiara frowned at him. Then she opened a drawer with the toe of her boot and absently inserted a few papers into a manila folder. Gabriel wouldn’t have been surprised if the papers bore no relation to the others already in the file.
“Is there something bothering you?” he asked.
“You’re not going to ask me how I’m feeling again, are you?”
“I wouldn’t dream of it.”
She closed the drawer with more force than necessary. “I stopped by the church at lunchtime to surprise you,” she said after a moment, “but you weren’t there. Francesco said you had a visitor. He claimed not to know who it was.”
“And you knew Francesco was lying, of course.”
“It didn’t take a trained intelligence officer to see that.”
“Go on,” said Gabriel.
“I called the Operations Desk to see whether anyone from King Saul Boulevard was in town, but the Operations Desk told me that no one was looking for you.”
“For a change.”
“Who came to see you today, Gabriel?”
“This is beginning to sound like an interrogation.”
“Who was it?” she asked again.
Gabriel held up his right hand and then lowered two of the fingers.
“General Ferrari?”
Gabriel nodded. Chiara stared at her desk as if searching for something out of place.
“How are you feeling?” asked Gabriel quietly.
“I’m fine,” she replied without looking up. “But if you ask me that question one more time …”
It was true that Gabriel and Chiara did not actually live in the ancient ghetto of Venice. Their rented apartment was on the second floor of a faded old palazzo, in a quiet quarter of Cannaregio where Jews never had been forbidden to enter. On one side was a quiet square; on the other was a canal where King Saul Boulevard kept a small, fast boat, lest Gabriel had need to flee Venice for the second time in his storied career. Tel Aviv had good reason to be mindful of his security; after many years of resistance, he had agreed to become the next chief of the Office. A year remained until his term was to begin. After that, his every waking moment would be devoted to protecting the State of Israel from those who wished to destroy it. There would be no more restorations or extended stays in Venice with his beautiful young wife—at least, not without an army of bodyguards watching over them.
The apartment had been fitted with a sophisticated security system, which chirped benignly when Gabriel pushed open the door. Entering, he removed the cork from a bottle of Bardolino and sat at the kitchen counter, listening to the news on the BBC, while Chiara prepared a platter of bruschetta. A UN panel had predicted an apocalyptic warming of the global climate, a car bomb had killed forty in a Shiite neighborhood of Baghdad, and the Syrian president, the butcher of Damascus, had once again used chemical weapons against his own people. Chiara frowned and switched off the radio. Then she looked longingly at the open bottle of wine. Gabriel was sorry for her. Chiara had always loved to drink Bardolino in the springtime.
“It won’t harm them if you take just a sip,” he said.
“My mother never touched wine when she was pregnant with me.”
“And look how you turned out.”
“Perfect in every way.”
She smiled and then placed the bruschetta in front of Gabriel. He selected two slices—one with chopped olives, the other with white beans and rosemary—and poured some of the Bardolino. Chiara peeled the skin from an onion and with a few quick thrusts of her knife turned it into a pile of perfect white cubes.
“You’d better be careful,” said Gabriel, watching her, “or you’ll end up looking like the general.”
“Don’t give me any ideas.”
“What was I supposed to say to him, Chiara?”
“You might have told him the truth.”
“Which version of the truth?”
“You have one year until you take your oath, darling. After that, you’ll be at the prime minister’s beck and call, and the security of the state will be your responsibility. Your life will be one long meeting interspersed with the occasional crisis.”
“Which is why I turned down the job several times before finally accepting it.”
“But now it’s yours. And this is your last chance to take some well-deserved time off before we go back to Israel.”
“I tried to explain that to the general without going into all the sordid details. That’s when he threatened to leave Julian rotting in an Italian jail cell.”
“He had nothing on Julian. He was bluffing.”
“He might have been,” Gabriel conceded. “But what if some enterprising British reporter decided to do a little digging into Julian’s background? And what if the same enterprising reporter somehow discovered he was an asset of the Office? I would have never forgiven myself if I’d allowed him to be dragged through the mud. He’s always been there when I needed him.”
“Do you remember the time you asked him to take care of that Russian defector’s cat?”
“How could I forget? I never knew Julian was allergic to cats. He had a rash for a month.”
Chiara smiled. She placed the onion in a heavy skillet with olive oil and butter, quickly chopped a carrot, and added it, too.
“What are you making?”
“It’s a local meat dish called calandraca.”
“Where did you learn to make it?”
Chiara glanced at the ceiling, as if to say such knowledge was to be found in the air and the water of Italy. It wasn’t far from the truth.
“What can I do to help?” asked Gabriel.
“You can stop hovering over me.”
Gabriel carried the platter of bruschetta and the wine into the small sitting room. Before lowering himself onto the couch, he removed the gun from the small of his back and placed it carefully on the coffee table, atop a pile of bright magazines having to do with pregnancy and childbirth. The gun was a Beretta 9mm, and its walnut grip was stained with paint: a dab of Titian, a bit of Bellini, a drop of Raphael and Tintoretto. Soon he would no longer carry a weapon; others would carry weapons on his behalf. He wondered how it was going to feel to walk through the world unarmed. It would be akin, he thought, to leaving home without first putting on a pair of trousers. Some men wore neckties when they went to the office. Gabriel Allon carried a gun.
“I still don’t understand why the general needs you to find out who killed Jack Bradshaw,” Chiara called from the kitchen.
“He seems to think they were looking for something,” replied Gabriel, leafing through the pages of one of the magazines. “He’d like me to find it before they do.”
“Looking for what?”
“He didn’t go into specifics, but I suspect he knows more than he’s saying.”
“He usually does.”
Chiara placed cubes of lightly floured veal in the pan, and soon the apartment was filled with the savor of the browning meat. Next she added a few ounces of tomato sauce, white wine, and herbs that she measured out in the palm of her hand. Gabriel watched the running lights of a boat moving slowly over the black waters of the canal. Then, cautiously, he told Chiara he planned to leave for Lake Como first thing in the morning.
“When will you be back?” she asked.
“That depends.”
“On what?”
“On what I find inside Jack Bradshaw’s villa.”
Chiara was chopping potatoes on a wooden cutting board. As a result, her declaration that she intended to accompany Gabriel was scarcely audible over the clatter of the knife. Gabriel turned from the window and fixed her with a reproachful stare.
“What’s wrong?” she asked after a moment.
“You’re not going anywhere,” he replied evenly.
“It’s Lake Como. What could possibly happen?”
“Shall I give you a few examples?”
Chiara was silent. Gabriel turned to watch the boat moving up the canal again, but in his thoughts were images of a long and turbulent career. It was a career, oddly enough, that had played itself out in some of Europe’s most glamorous settings. He had killed in Cannes and Saint-Tropez and fought for his life on the streets of Rome and in the mountains of Switzerland. And once, many years earlier, he had lost a wife and son to a car bomb on a quaint street in the elegant First District of Vienna. No, he thought now, Chiara would not be coming with him to Lake Como. He would leave her here in Venice, in the care of her family and under the protection of the Italian police. And God help the general if he allowed anything to happen to her.
She was singing softly to herself, one of those silly Italian pop songs she so adored. She added the chopped potatoes to the pot, lowered the heat, and then joined Gabriel in the sitting room. General Ferrari’s file on Jack Bradshaw lay on the coffee table, next to the Beretta pistol. She reached for it, but Gabriel stopped her; he didn’t want her to see the mess that Jack Bradshaw’s killers had made of his body. She placed her head against his shoulder. Her hair smelled of vanilla.
“How long before the calandraca is ready?” asked Gabriel.
“An hour or so.”
“I can’t wait that long.”
“Have another bruschetta.”
He did. So did Chiara. Then she lifted the glass of Bardolino to her nose but did not drink from it.
“It won’t hurt them if you take only a small sip.”
She returned the wineglass to the table and placed her hand over her womb. Gabriel placed his own hand next to hers, and for an instant he thought he could detect the hummingbird flutter of two fetal heartbeats. They’re mine, he thought, holding them tightly. And God help the man who ever tries to harm them.
6 (#ulink_6780786c-24bc-5652-bd86-06c8521d6ccd)
LAKE COMO, ITALY (#ulink_6780786c-24bc-5652-bd86-06c8521d6ccd)
NEXT MORNING, RESIDENTS OF THE United Kingdom awoke to the news that one of their countrymen, the expatriate businessman James “Jack” Bradshaw, had been found brutally murdered at his villa overlooking Lake Como. The Italian authorities offered up robbery as a possible motive, despite the fact that they had no evidence that anything at all had been stolen. General Ferrari’s name did not appear in the coverage; nor was there any mention that Julian Isherwood, the noted London art dealer, had discovered the body. All of the newspapers struggled to find anyone who had a kind word to say about Bradshaw. The Times managed to dredge up an old colleague from the Foreign Office who described him as “a fine officer,” but otherwise it seemed Bradshaw’s life was deserving of no eulogy. The photograph that popped up on the BBC looked at least twenty years old. It showed a man who did not like to have his picture taken.
There was another crucial fact missing from the coverage of Jack Bradshaw’s murder: Gabriel Allon, the legendary but wayward son of Israeli intelligence, had been quietly retained by the Art Squad to look into it. His investigation commenced at half past seven when he inserted a high-capacity flash drive into his notebook computer. Given to him by General Ferrari, the drive contained the contents of Jack Bradshaw’s personal computer. Most of the documents dealt with his business, the Meridian Global Consulting Group—a curious name, thought Gabriel, for Meridian appeared to have no other employees. The drive contained more than twenty thousand documents. In addition, there were several thousand telephone numbers and e-mail addresses that had to be checked out and cross-referenced. It was far too much material for Gabriel to review alone. He needed an assistant, a skilled researcher who knew something about criminal matters and, preferably, about Italian art.
“Me?” asked Chiara incredulously.
“Do you have a better idea?”
“Are you sure you want me to answer that?”
Gabriel made no reply. He could see there was something about the idea that appealed to Chiara. She was a natural solver of puzzles and problems.
“It would be easier if I could run the phone numbers and e-mail addresses through the computers of King Saul Boulevard,” she said after a moment of thought.
“Obviously,” replied Gabriel. “But the last thing I intend to do is tell the Office that I’m investigating a case for the Italians.”
“They’ll find out eventually. They always do.”
Gabriel copied Bradshaw’s files onto the hard drive of the notebook computer and kept the flash drive for himself. Then he packed a small overnight bag with two changes of clothing and two sets of identity while Chiara showered and dressed for work. He walked her to the ghetto and on the doorstep of the community center placed his hand on her abdomen one last time. Leaving, he couldn’t help but notice the young, good-looking Italian man drinking coffee at the kosher café. He rang General Ferrari at the palazzo in Rome. The general confirmed that the young Italian was an officer of the Carabinieri who specialized in personal protection.
“Couldn’t you have found someone to watch my wife who didn’t look like a film star?”
“Don’t tell me the great Gabriel Allon is jealous.”
“Just make sure nothing happens to her. Do you hear me?”
“I only have one eye,” replied the general, “but I still have both my ears, and they function quite well.”
Like many Venetians, temporary or otherwise, Gabriel kept a car, a Volkswagen sedan, in a garage near the Piazzale Roma. He headed across the causeway to the mainland and then made his way to the autostrada. When the traffic thinned, he pressed his foot to the floor and watched the needle of the speedometer creep toward one hundred. For weeks he had strolled and floated through life at a crawl. Now, the rumble of an internal combustion engine was suddenly a guilty pleasure. He pushed the car to the limit and saw the flatlands of the Veneto sweep past his window in a satisfying green-and-tan blur.
He sped westward, past Padua, Verona, and Bergamo, and arrived at the outskirts of Milan thirty minutes earlier than he had anticipated. From there, he headed north to Como; then he followed the winding shore of the lake until he arrived at the gate of Jack Bradshaw’s villa. Through its bars he could see an unmarked Carabinieri car parked in the forecourt. He rang the general in Rome, told him where he was, and then quickly severed the connection. Thirty seconds later, the gate swung open.
Gabriel slipped the car into gear and eased slowly down the steep drive, toward the home of a man whose life had been summarized in a single hollow line. A fine officer … He was certain of only one thing, that Jack Bradshaw, retired diplomat, consultant to firms doing business in the Middle East, collector of Italian art, had been a liar by trade. He knew this because he was a liar as well. Therefore, as he stepped from his car, he felt a certain kinship with the man whose life he was about to ransack. He came not as an enemy but as a friend, the perfect implement for an unpleasant job. In death there are no secrets, he thought, crossing the forecourt. And if there was a secret hidden in the beautiful villa by the lake, he was going to find it.
A Carabinieri officer in plain clothes waited in the entrance. He introduced himself as Lucca—no last name or rank, just Lucca—and offered Gabriel nothing but a pair of rubber gloves and plastic shoe covers. Gabriel was more than happy to put them on. The last thing he needed at this stage of his life was to leave his DNA at yet another Italian crime scene.
“You have one hour,” the Carabinieri man said. “And I’ll be coming with you.”
“I’ll take as long as I need,” replied Gabriel. “And you’re staying right here.”
When the officer offered no response, Gabriel pulled on the gloves and shoe covers and entered the villa. The first thing he noticed was the blood. It was hard not to; the entire stone floor of the entrance foyer was black with it. He wondered why the murder had occurred here rather than in a more secluded section of the house. It was possible Bradshaw had confronted his killers after they broke into the residence, but there was no evidence of forcible entry on the door or at the gate. The more logical explanation was that Bradshaw had admitted his assailants. He had known them, thought Gabriel. And, foolishly, he had trusted them enough to let them into his home.
From the entrance hall, Gabriel moved into the great room. It was elegantly furnished in silk-covered couches and chairs, and adorned with expensive tables, lamps, and trinkets of every kind. One wall was given over entirely to large windows that overlooked the lake; the others were hung with Italian Old Master paintings. Most were minor devotional pieces or portraits churned out by journeymen or followers of well-known painters from Venice and Florence. One, however, was a Roman architectural capriccio that clearly was the work of Giovanni Paolo Panini. Gabriel licked his gloved fingertip and dragged it across the surface. The Panini, like the other paintings displayed in the room, was sorely in need of a good cleaning.
Gabriel wiped the surface grime onto the leg of his jeans and walked over to an antique writing desk. On it were two silver-framed photographs of Jack Bradshaw in happier times. In the first he was posed before the Great Pyramid of Giza, a boyish forelock falling across a face that was full of hope and promise. In the second the backdrop was the ancient city of Petra in Jordan. It had been snapped, Gabriel supposed, when Bradshaw was serving at the British embassy in Amman. He looked older, harder, perhaps wiser. The Middle East was like that. It turned hope to despair, idealists into Machiavellians.
Gabriel opened the drawer of the writing table, found nothing of interest, then scrolled through the directory of missed calls on the telephone. One number, 6215845, appeared seven times—five times before Bradshaw’s death, and twice after. Gabriel lifted the receiver, pressed the autodial, and a few seconds later heard the distant tone of a telephone. After several rings came a series of clicks and rattles indicating that the person at the other end of the line had picked up the call and quickly hung up. Gabriel dialed the number again with the same result. But when he tried the number a third time, a male voice came on the line and in Italian said, “This is Father Marco. How can I help you?”
Gabriel gently replaced the receiver without speaking. Next to the phone was a message pad. He tore away the top page, jotted the phone number on the adjoining page, and slipped both into his coat pocket. Then he headed upstairs.
Paintings lined the wide central corridor and covered the walls of two otherwise empty bedrooms. Bradshaw had used a third bedroom for storage. Several dozen paintings, some in frames, some on their stretchers, leaned against the walls like folding chairs after a catered affair. Most of the paintings were Italian in origin, but there were several works by German, Flemish, and Dutch artists as well. One, a genre painting of Dutch washerwomen working in a courtyard, probably by an imitator of Willem Kalf, appeared as though it had recently been restored. Gabriel wondered why Bradshaw had decided to have the painting cleaned while others in his collection, some more valuable, languished beneath coats of yellowed varnish—and why, having done so, he had left it leaning against a wall in a storage room.
On the opposite side of the center hall were Bradshaw’s bedroom and office. Gabriel quickly searched them with the thoroughness of a man who knew how to hide things. In the bedroom, concealed beneath a Gatsbyesque pile of colorful shirts, he found a wrinkled manila envelope stuffed with several thousand euros that had somehow escaped the attention of General Ferrari’s men. In the office, he found file folders swollen with business papers, along with an impressive collection of monographs and catalogues. He also discovered documentation suggesting that Meridian Global Consulting had rented a vault in the Geneva Freeport. He wondered whether the documents had escaped the attention of the general’s men, too.
Gabriel slipped the Freeport documentation into his coat pocket and crossed the hallway to the room Bradshaw had used for storage. The three Dutch washerwomen were still toiling away in their cobblestone courtyard, oblivious to his presence. He crouched before the canvas and examined the brushwork carefully. It was quite obviously the work of an imitator, for it lacked any trace of confidence or spontaneity. Indeed, in Gabriel’s learned opinion, it had a paint-by-numbers quality to it, as if the artist had been staring at the original while he worked. Perhaps he had been.
Gabriel headed downstairs and, under the watchful gaze of the Carabinieri man, retrieved a handheld ultraviolet lamp from his overnight bag. When trained on an Old Master canvas in a darkened room, the lamp would reveal the extent of the last restoration by making the retouching appear as black blotches. Typically, a Dutch Old Master painting from that period had suffered minor to moderate losses, which meant the retouching—or inpainting, as it was known in the trade—would appear as speckles of black.
Gabriel returned to the room on the second floor of the villa, closed the door, and drew the blinds tightly. Then he switched on the ultraviolet lamp and pointed it toward the painting. The three Dutch washerwomen were no longer visible. The entire canvas was black as pitch.
7 (#ulink_8c7b1f3e-9544-58e3-98f3-4a5c46f1ee10)
LAKE COMO, ITALY (#ulink_8c7b1f3e-9544-58e3-98f3-4a5c46f1ee10)
AT A CHEMICAL SUPPLY COMPANY in an industrial quarter of Como, Gabriel purchased acetone, alcohol, distilled water, goggles, a glass beaker, and a protective mask. Next he stopped at an arts-and-crafts shop in the center of town where he picked up wooden dowels and a packet of cotton wool. Returning to the villa by the lake, he found the Carabinieri man waiting in the entrance with fresh gloves and shoe covers. This time, the Italian didn’t make any noises about a one-hour limit. He could see Gabriel was going to be a while.
“You’re not going to contaminate anything, are you?”
“Only my lungs,” replied Gabriel.
Upstairs he removed the canvas from its frame, propped it on an armless chair, and illuminated its surface with as much light as he could find. Then he mixed equal amounts of acetone, alcohol, and distilled water in the beaker and fashioned a swab using a dowel and cotton wool. Working quickly, he removed the fresh varnish and inpainting from a small rectangle—about two inches by one inch—at the bottom left corner of the canvas. Restorers referred to the technique as “opening a window.” Usually, it was done to test the strength and effectiveness of a solvent solution. In this case, however, Gabriel was opening a window in order to strip away the surface layers of the painting to see what lay beneath. What he discovered were the lush folds of a crimson garment. Clearly, there was an intact painting beneath the three Dutch washerwomen working in a courtyard—a painting that, in Gabriel’s opinion, had been produced by a true Old Master of considerable talent.
He quickly opened three more windows, one at the bottom right of the canvas and two more across the top. At the bottom right, he found additional fabric, darker and less distinct; but at the top right, the canvas was nearly black. At the top left, he found a tawny-colored Roman arch that looked as though it was part of an architectural background. The four open windows gave him a rough sense of how the figures were arrayed upon the canvas. More important, they told him that, in all likelihood, the painting was the work of an Italian rather than an artist from the Dutch or Flemish schools.
Gabriel opened a fifth window a few inches below the Roman arch and discovered a balding male pate. Expanding it, he found the bridge of a nose and an eye that was staring directly toward the viewer. Next he opened a window a few inches to the right and found the pale, luminous forehead of a young female. He expanded that window, too, and found a pair of downward-cast eyes. A long nose emerged next, followed by a pair of small red lips and a delicate chin. Then, after another minute of work, Gabriel saw the outstretched hand of a child. A man, a woman, a child … Gabriel studied the hand of the child—specifically, the way the thumb and forefinger were touching the chin of the woman. The pose was familiar to him. So was the brushwork.
He crossed the hall to Jack Bradshaw’s office, switched on the computer, and went to the Web site of the Art Loss Register, the world’s largest private database of stolen, missing, and looted artwork. After a few keystrokes, a photograph of a painting appeared on the screen—the same painting that was now propped on a chair in the room across the hall. Beneath the photo was a brief description:
The Holy Family, oil on canvas, Parmigianino (1503–1540), stolen from a restoration lab at the historic Santo Spirito Hospital in Rome, July 31, 2004.
The Art Squad had been searching for the missing painting for more than a decade. And now Gabriel had found it, in the villa of a dead Englishman, hidden beneath a copy of a Dutch painting by Willem Kalf. He started to dial General Ferrari’s number but stopped. Where there was one, he thought, there would surely be others. He rose from the dead man’s desk and started looking.
Gabriel discovered two additional paintings in the storeroom that, when subjected to ultraviolet light, were totally black. One was a Dutch School coastal scene reminiscent of the work of Simon de Vlieger; the other was a vase of flowers that appeared to be a copy of a painting by the Viennese artist Johann Baptist Drechsler. Gabriel began opening windows.
Dip, twirl, discard …
A swollen tree against a cloud-streaked sky, the folds of a skirt spread across a meadow, the naked flank of a corpulent woman …
Dip, twirl, discard …
A patch of blue-green background, a floral blouse, a wide, sleepy eye above a rose-colored cheek …
Gabriel recognized both paintings. He sat down at the computer and returned to the Web site of the Art Loss Register. After a few keystrokes, a photograph of a painting appeared on the screen:
Young Women in the Country, oil on canvas, Pierre-Auguste Renoir (1841–1919), 16.4 x 20 inches, missing since March 13, 1981, from the Musée de Bagnols-sur-Cèze, Gard, France. Estimated current value: unknown.
More keystrokes, another painting, another story of loss:
Portrait of a Woman, oil on canvas, Gustav Klimt (1862–1918), 32.6 x 21.6 inches, missing since February 18, 1997, from the Galleria Ricci Oddi, Piacenza, Italy. Estimated current value: $4 million.
Gabriel placed the Renoir and the Klimt next to the Parmigianino, snapped a photograph with his mobile phone, and quickly forwarded it to the palazzo. General Ferrari rang him back thirty seconds later. Help was on the way.
Gabriel carried the three paintings downstairs and propped them on one of the couches in the great room. Parmigianino, Renoir, Klimt … Three missing paintings by three prominent artists, all concealed beneath copies of lesser works. Even so, the copies had been of extremely high quality. They were the work of a master forger, thought Gabriel. Perhaps even a restorer. But why go to the trouble of commissioning a copy in order to conceal a stolen work? Clearly, Jack Bradshaw was connected to a sophisticated network that dealt in stolen and smuggled art. Where there were three, thought Gabriel, looking at the paintings, there would be more. Many more.
He picked up one of the photographs of a youthful Jack Bradshaw. His curriculum vitae read like something from a lost age. Educated at Eton and Oxford, fluent in Arabic and Persian, he had been sent into the world to do the bidding of a once-mighty empire that had fallen into terminal decline. Perhaps he had been an ordinary diplomat, an issuer of visas, a stamper of passports, a writer of thoughtful cables that no one bothered to read. Or perhaps he had been something else entirely. Gabriel knew a man in London who could put flesh on the bones of Jack Bradshaw’s dubiously thin résumé. The truth would not come without a price. In the espionage business, truth rarely did.
Gabriel set aside the photograph and used his mobile phone to book a seat on the morning flight to Heathrow. Then he picked up the slip of paper on which he’d written the number from the dialing directory of Bradshaw’s phone.
6215845 …
This is Father Marco. How can I help you?
He dialed the number again now, but this time it rang unanswered. Then, reluctantly, he forwarded it securely to the Operations Desk at King Saul Boulevard and asked for a routine check. Ten minutes later came the reply: 6215845 was an unpublished number located in the rectory of the Church of San Giovanni Evangelista in Brienno, which was located a few kilometers up the lakeshore.
Gabriel picked up the slip of paper that had been at the top of Jack Bradshaw’s telephone message pad on the night of his murder. Tilting it toward the lamp, he studied the indentations that had been left by Bradshaw’s fountain pen. Then he removed a pencil from the top drawer of the desk and rubbed the tip gently across the surface until a pattern of lines emerged. Most of it was an impenetrable mess: the numeral 4, the numeral 8, the letters C and V and O. At the bottom of the page, however, a single word was clearly visible.
Samir …
8 (#ulink_712e2883-fee3-5943-9406-d09ebab30b86)
STOCKWELL, LONDON (#ulink_712e2883-fee3-5943-9406-d09ebab30b86)
THE ROAD WAS CALLED PARADISE, but it was a paradise lost: tattered blocks of redbrick council flats, a patch of trampled grass, a childless playground where a merry-go-round rotated slowly in the wind. Gabriel lingered there only long enough to make sure he was not being followed. He pulled his coat collar around his ears and shivered. Spring had not yet arrived in London.
Beyond the playground a dirty passageway led to Clapham Road. Gabriel turned to the left and walked through the glare of the oncoming traffic to the Stockwell Tube station. Another turn brought him to a quiet street with a terrace of sooty postwar houses. Number 8 had a crooked black fence of wrought iron and a tiny cement garden with no decoration other than a royal blue recycling bin. Gabriel lifted the lid, saw the bin was empty, and climbed the three steps to the front door. A sign stated that solicitations of any kind were unwelcome. Ignoring it, he placed his thumb atop the bell push—two short bursts, a longer third, just as he had been told. “Mr. Baker,” said the man who appeared in the doorway. “So good of you to come. I’m Davies. I’m here to look after you.”
Gabriel entered the house and waited for the door to close before turning to face the man who had admitted him. He had soft pale hair and the guiltless face of a country parson. His name was not Davies. It was Nigel Whitcombe.
“Why all the cloak-and-dagger stuff?” asked Gabriel. “I’m not defecting. I just need a word with the boss.”
“The Intelligence Service frowns on the use of real names in safe houses. Davies is my work name.”
“Catchy,” said Gabriel.
“I chose it myself. I was always fond of the Kinks.”
“Who’s Baker?”
“You’re Baker,” replied Whitcombe without a trace of irony in his voice.
Gabriel entered the small sitting room. It was furnished with all the charm of an airport departure lounge.
“You couldn’t find a safe house in Mayfair or Chelsea?”
“All the West End properties were taken. Besides, this one’s closer to Vauxhall Cross.”
Vauxhall Cross was the headquarters of Britain’s Secret Intelligence Service, also known as MI6. There was a time when the service operated from a dingy building in Broadway and its director-general was known only as “C.” Now the spies worked in one of London’s flashiest landmarks, and their boss’s name appeared regularly in the press. Gabriel liked the old ways better. In matters of intelligence, as in art, he was a traditionalist by nature.
“Does the Intelligence Service allow coffee in safe houses these days?” he asked.
“Not real coffee,” replied Whitcombe, smiling. “But there might be a jar of Nescafé in the pantry.”
Gabriel shrugged, as if to say one could certainly do worse than Nescafé, and followed Whitcombe into the galley kitchen. It looked as though it belonged to a man who was recently separated and hoping for a quick reconciliation. There was indeed a container of Nescafé, along with a tin of Twinings that looked as though it had been there when Edward Heath was prime minister. Whitcombe filled the electric kettle with water while Gabriel searched the cabinets for a mug. There were two, one with the logo of the London Olympic Games, the other with the face of the Queen. When Gabriel chose the mug with the Queen, Whitcombe smiled.
“I never realized you were an admirer of Her Majesty.”
“She has good taste in art.”
“She can afford to.”
Whitcombe offered this assessment not as a criticism but merely an observation of fact. He was like that: careful, shrewd, opaque as a concrete wall. He had started his career at MI5, where he had cut his operational teeth working with Gabriel against a Russian oligarch and arms dealer named Ivan Kharkov. Soon after, he became the primary aide-de-camp and runner of off-the-record errands for Graham Seymour, MI5’s deputy director-general. Seymour had recently been named the new chief of MI6, a move that surprised everyone in the intelligence trade except Gabriel. Whitcombe was now serving his master in the same capacity, which explained his presence in the Stockwell safe house. He spooned the Nescafé into the mug and watched the steam rising from the spout of the kettle.
“How’s life at Six?” asked Gabriel.
“When we first arrived, there was a great deal of suspicion among the troops. I suppose they had a right to be uneasy. After all, we were coming across the river from a rival service.”
“It’s not as if Graham was a total outsider. His father was an MI6 legend. He was practically raised within the service.”
“Which is one of the reasons any concerns were short-lived.” Whitcombe drew a mobile device from the breast pocket of his suit and peered at the screen. “He’s pulling up now. Can you manage the coffee on your own?”
“Pour in the water, then stir, right?”
Whitcombe departed. Gabriel prepared the coffee and went into the sitting room. Entering, he saw a tall figure clad in a perfectly fitted charcoal-gray suit and a striped blue necktie. His face was fine boned and even featured; his hair had a rich silvery cast that made him look like a male model one might see in ads for costly but needless trinkets. He was holding a mobile phone to his ear with his left hand. The right he stretched absently toward Gabriel. His handshake was firm, confident, and appropriate in duration. It was an unfair weapon to be deployed against inferior opponents. It said he had attended the better schools, belonged to the better clubs, and was good at gentlemanly games like tennis and golf, all of which happened to be true. Graham Seymour was a relic of Britain’s glorious past, a child of the administrative classes who had been bred, educated, and programmed to lead. A few months earlier, weary after years of trying to protect the British homeland from the forces of Islamic extremism, he had privately told Gabriel of his plans to leave the intelligence trade and retire to his villa in Portugal. Now, unexpectedly, he had been handed the keys to his father’s old service. Gabriel suddenly felt guilty about coming to London. He was about to hand Seymour his first potential crisis at MI6.
Seymour murmured a few words into the mobile phone, severed the connection, and handed it to Nigel Whitcombe. Then he turned toward Gabriel and regarded him curiously for a moment. “Given our long history together,” Seymour said finally, “I’m a bit reluctant to ask what brings you to town. But I suppose I have no choice.”
Gabriel responded by telling Seymour a small portion of the truth—that he had come to London because he was looking into the murder of an expatriate Englishman living in Italy.
“Does the expatriate Englishman have a name?” asked Seymour.
“James Bradshaw,” replied Gabriel. He paused, then added, “But his friends called him Jack.”
Seymour’s face remained a blank mask. “I think I read something about that in the papers,” he said. “He was former Foreign Office, wasn’t he? Did some consulting work in the Middle East. He was murdered at his villa in Como. Apparently, it was quite messy.”
“Quite,” agreed Gabriel.
“What does any of this have to do with me?”
“Jack Bradshaw wasn’t a diplomat, was he, Graham? He was MI6. He was a spy.”
Seymour managed to maintain his composure for a moment longer. Then he narrowed his eyes and asked, “What else have you got?”
“Three stolen paintings, a vault in the Geneva Freeport, and someone named Samir.”
“Is that all?” Seymour shook his head slowly and turned to Whitcombe. “Cancel my appointments for the remainder of the afternoon, Nigel. And find us something to drink. We’re going to be a while.”
9 (#ulink_4b056133-b768-546e-bba5-8b1e4e513941)
STOCKWELL, LONDON (#ulink_4b056133-b768-546e-bba5-8b1e4e513941)
WHITCOMBE WENT OUT TO FETCH the makings of a gin and tonic while Gabriel and Graham Seymour settled into the charmless little sitting room. Gabriel wondered what sort of intelligence debris had floated through this place before him. A KGB defector willing to sell his soul for thirty pieces of Western silver? An Iraqi nuclear scientist with a briefcase full of lies? A jihadist double agent claiming to know the time and place of the next al-Qaeda spectacular? He looked at the wall above the electric fire and saw two horsemen in red jackets leading their mounts across a green English meadow. Then he glanced out the window and saw a portly lawn cherub keeping a lonely vigil in the darkening garden. Graham Seymour seemed oblivious to his surroundings. He was contemplating his hands, as if trying to decide where to begin his account. He didn’t bother to delineate the ground rules, for no such disclaimer was necessary. Gabriel and Seymour were as close as two spies from opposing services could be, which meant they distrusted each other only a little.
“Do the Italians know you’re here?” asked Seymour at last.
Gabriel shook his head.
“What about the Office?”
“I didn’t tell them I was coming, but that doesn’t mean they aren’t watching my every move.”
“I appreciate your honesty.”
“I’m always honest with you, Graham.”
“At least when it suits your purposes.”
Gabriel didn’t bother to offer a retort. Instead, he listened intently while Seymour, in the beleaguered voice of a man who would rather be discussing other matters, recounted the brief life and career of James “Jack” Bradshaw. It was familiar territory for a man like Seymour, for he had lived a version of Bradshaw’s life himself. Both were products of moderately happy middle-class homes, both had been shipped off to costly but coldhearted public schools, and both had earned admission to elite universities, though Seymour had been at Cambridge while Bradshaw had landed at Oxford. There, while still an undergraduate, he came to the attention of a professor who was serving on the Faculty of Oriental Studies. The professor was actually a talent spotter for MI6. Graham Seymour knew him, too.
“The talent spotter was your father?” asked Gabriel.
Seymour nodded. “He was in the twilight of his career. He was too worn out to be of much use in the field, and he wanted nothing to do with a job at headquarters. So they packed him off to Oxford and told him to keep an eye out for potential recruits. One of the first students he noticed was Jack Bradshaw. It was hard not to notice Jack,” Seymour added quickly. “He was a meteor. But more important, he was seductive, naturally deceptive, and without scruples or morals.”
“In other words, he had all the makings of a perfect spy.”
“In the finest English tradition,” Seymour added with a wry smile.
And so it was, he continued, that Jack Bradshaw set out along the same path that so many others had taken before him—the path that led from the tranquil quads of Cambridge and Oxford to the cipher-protected doorway of the Secret Intelligence Service. It was 1985 when he arrived. The Cold War was nearing its end, and MI6 was still searching for a reason to justify its existence after being destroyed from within by Kim Philby and the other members of the Cambridge spy ring. Bradshaw spent two years in the MI6 training program and then headed off to Cairo to serve his apprenticeship. He became an expert in Islamic extremism and accurately predicted the rise of an international jihadist terror network led by veterans of the Afghan war. Next he went to Amman, where he established close ties with the chief of the GID, Jordan’s all-powerful intelligence and security service. Before long, Jack Bradshaw was regarded as MI6’s top field officer in the Middle East. He assumed he would be the next division chief, but the job went to a rival who promptly shipped Bradshaw to Beirut, one of the most dangerous and thankless posts in the region.
“And that,” said Seymour, “is when the trouble began.”
“What kind of trouble?”
“The usual kind,” replied Seymour. “He started drinking too much and working too little. He also developed a rather high opinion of himself. He came to believe he was the smartest man in any room he entered and that his superiors in London were utter incompetents. How else to explain that he had been passed over for promotion when he was clearly the most qualified candidate for the job? Then he met a woman named Nicole Devereaux, and the situation went from bad to worse.”
“Who was she?”
“A staff photographer for AFP, the French news service. She knew Beirut better than most of her competitors because she was married to a Lebanese businessman named Ali Rashid.”
“How did Bradshaw meet her?” asked Gabriel.
“A Friday-night mixer at the British embassy: hacks, diplomats, and spies swapping gossip and Beirut horror stories over warm beer and stale savories.”
“And they began an affair?”
“A quite torrid one, actually. By all accounts, Bradshaw was in love with her. Rumors started to swirl, of course, and before long they reached the ears of the KGB rezident at the Soviet embassy. He managed to snap a few photographs of Nicole in Bradshaw’s bedroom. And then he made his move.”
“A recruitment?”
“That’s one way of putting it,” said Seymour. “In reality, it was good old-fashioned blackmail.”
“The KGB’s specialty.”
“Yours, too.”
Gabriel ignored the remark and asked about the nature of the approach.
“The rezident gave Bradshaw a simple choice,” Seymour replied. “He could go to work as a paid agent of the KGB, or the Russians would quietly give the photos of Nicole Devereaux in flagrante delicto to her husband.”
“I take it Ali Rashid wouldn’t have reacted kindly to the news that his wife was having an affair with a British spy.”
“Rashid was a dangerous man.” Seymour paused, then added, “A connected man, too.”
“What kind of connections?”
“Syrian intelligence.”
“So Bradshaw was afraid Rashid would kill her?”
“With good reason. Needless to say, he agreed to cooperate.”
“What did he give them?”
“Names of MI6 personnel, current operations, insight into British policy in the region. In short, our entire playbook in the Middle East.”
“How did you find out about it?”
“We didn’t,” Seymour said. “The Americans discovered that Bradshaw had a bank account in Switzerland with half a million dollars in it. They revealed the information with great fanfare during a rather horrendous meeting at Langley.”
“Why wasn’t Bradshaw arrested?”
“You’re a man of the world,” Seymour said. “You tell me.”
“Because it would have led to a scandal that MI6 couldn’t afford at the time.”
Seymour touched his nose. “They even left the money in the Swiss bank account because they couldn’t figure out a way to seize it without raising a red flag. It was quite possibly the most lucrative golden parachute in the history of MI6.” Seymour shook his head slowly. “Not exactly our finest hour.”
“What happened to Bradshaw after he left MI6?”
“He hung around Beirut for a few months licking his wounds before returning to Europe and starting his own consulting firm. For the record,” Seymour added, “British intelligence never thought much of the Meridian Global Consulting Group.”
“Did you know Bradshaw was dealing in stolen art?”
“We suspected he was involved in business ventures that were not exactly legal, but for the most part we averted our eyes and hoped for the best.”
“And when you learned he’d been murdered in Italy?”
“We clung to the fiction he was a diplomat. The Foreign Office made it clear, however, that they would disown him at the first hint of trouble.” Seymour paused, then asked, “Have I left anything out?”
“What happened to Nicole Devereaux?”
“Apparently, someone told her husband about the affair. She disappeared one night after leaving the AFP bureau. They found her body a few days later out in the Bekaa Valley.”
“Did Rashid kill her himself?”
“No,” replied Seymour. “He had the Syrians do it for him. They had a little fun with her before hanging her from a lamppost and slitting her throat. It was all rather gruesome. But I suppose that was to be expected. After all,” he added gloomily, “they were Syrians.”
“I wonder if it was a coincidence,” said Gabriel.
“What’s that?”
“That someone killed Jack Bradshaw in the exact same way.”
Seymour made no response other than to ponder his wristwatch with the air of a man who was running late for an appointment he would rather not keep. “Helen is expecting me for dinner,” he said with a profound lack of enthusiasm. “I’m afraid she’s on an African kick at the moment. I’m not sure, but it’s possible I may have eaten goat last week.”
“You’re a lucky man, Graham.”
“Helen says the same thing. My doctor isn’t so sure.”
Seymour put down his drink and got to his feet. Gabriel remained motionless.
“I take it you have another question,” Seymour said.
“Two, actually.”
“I’m listening.”
“Is there any chance I can have a look at Bradshaw’s file?”
“Next question.”
“Who’s Samir?”
“Last name?”
“I’m working on that.”
Seymour lifted his gaze to the ceiling. “There’s a Samir who runs a little grocery around the corner from my flat. He’s a devout member of the Muslim Brotherhood who believes Britain should be governed by shari’a law.” He looked at Gabriel and smiled. “Otherwise, he’s a rather nice chap.”
The Israeli embassy was located on the other side of the Thames, in a quiet corner of Kensington just off the High Street. Gabriel slipped into the building through an unmarked door in the rear and made his way downstairs to the lead-lined suite of rooms reserved for the Office. The station chief was not present, only a young field hand called Noah who leapt to his feet when his future director came striding through the door unannounced. Gabriel entered the secure communications pod—in the lexicon of the Office it was referred to as the Holy of Holies—and sent a message to King Saul Boulevard requesting access to any files related to a Lebanese businessman named Ali Rashid. He didn’t bother to state the reason for his request. Impending rank had its privileges.
Twenty minutes elapsed before the file appeared over the secure link—long enough, Gabriel reckoned, for the current chief of the Office to approve its transmission. It was brief, about a thousand words in length, and composed in the terse style demanded of Office analysts. It stated that Ali Rashid was a known asset of Syrian intelligence, that he served as a paymaster for a large Syrian network in Lebanon, and that he died in a car bombing in the Lebanese capital in 2011, the authorship of which was unknown. At the bottom of the file was the six-digit numerical cipher of the originating officer. Gabriel recognized it; the analyst had once been the Office’s top expert on Syria and the Baath Party. These days she was noteworthy for another reason. She was the wife of the soon-to-be-former chief.
Like most Office outposts around the world, London Station contained a small bedroom for times of crisis. Gabriel knew the room well, for he had stayed in it many times. He stretched out on the uncomfortable single bed and tried to sleep, but it was no good; the case would not leave his thoughts. A promising British spy gone bad, a Syrian intelligence asset blown to bits by a car bomb, three stolen paintings covered by high-quality forgeries, a vault in the Geneva Freeport … The possibilities, thought Gabriel, were endless. It was no use trying to force the pieces now. He needed to open another window—a window onto the global trade in stolen paintings—and for that he needed the help of a master art thief.
And so he lay sleepless on the stiff little bed, wrestling with memories and with thoughts of his future, until six the following morning. After showering and changing his clothes, he left the embassy in darkness and rode the Underground to St. Pancras Station. A Eurostar was leaving for Paris at half past seven; he bought a stack of newspapers before boarding and finished reading them as the train eased to a stop at the Gare du Nord. Outside, a line of wet taxis waited under a sky the color of gunmetal. Gabriel slipped past them and spent an hour walking the busy streets around the station until he was certain he was not being followed. Then he set out for the Eighth Arrondissement and a street called the rue de Miromesnil.
10 (#ulink_d7f61fe6-0813-5bfd-88cf-d0ce18eeafcc)
RUE DE MIROMESNIL, PARIS (#ulink_d7f61fe6-0813-5bfd-88cf-d0ce18eeafcc)
IN THE INTELLIGENCE BUSINESS, as in life, it is sometimes necessary to deal with individuals whose hands are far from clean. The best way to catch a terrorist is to employ another terrorist as a source. The same was true, Gabriel reckoned, when one was trying to catch a thief. Which explained why, at 9:55, he was seated at a window table of a rather good brasserie on the rue de Miromesnil, a copy of Le Monde spread before him, a steaming café crème at his elbow. At 9:58 he spotted an overcoated, hatted figure walking briskly along the pavement from the direction of the Élysée Palace. The figure entered a small shop called Antiquités Scientifiques at the stroke of ten, switched on the lights, and changed the sign in the window from FERMÉ to OUVERT. Maurice Durand, thought Gabriel, smiling, was nothing if not reliable. He finished his coffee and crossed the empty street to the entrance of the shop. The intercom, when pressed, howled like an inconsolable child. Twenty seconds passed with no invitation to enter. Then the deadbolt snapped open with an inhospitable thud and Gabriel slipped inside.
The small showroom, like Durand himself, was a model of order and precision. Antique microscopes and barometers stood in neat rows along the shelves, their brass fittings shining like the buttons of a soldier’s dress tunic; cameras and telescopes peered blindly into the past. In the center of the room was a nineteenth-century Italian terrestrial floor globe, price available upon request. Durand’s tiny right hand rested atop Asia Minor. He wore a dark suit, a candy-wrapper gold necktie, and the most insincere smile Gabriel had ever seen. His bald pate shone in the overhead lighting. His small eyes stared straight ahead with the alertness of a terrier.
“How’s business?” asked Gabriel cordially.
Durand moved to the photographic devices and picked up an early-twentieth-century camera with a brass lens by Poulenc of Paris. “I’m shipping this to a collector in Australia,” he said. “Six hundred euros. Not as much as I would have hoped, but he drove a hard bargain.”
“Not that business, Maurice.”
Durand made no reply.
“That was a lovely piece of work you and your men pulled off in Munich last month,” Gabriel said. “An El Greco portrait disappears from the Alte Pinakothek, and no one’s seen or heard of it since. No ransom demands. No hints from the German police that they’re close to cracking the case. Nothing but silence and a blank spot on a museum wall where a masterpiece used to hang.”
“You don’t ask me about my business,” said Durand, “and I don’t ask you about yours. Those are the rules of our relationship.”
“Where’s the El Greco, Maurice?”
“It’s in Buenos Aires, in the hands of one of my best customers. He has a weakness,” Durand added, “an insatiable appetite that only I can satisfy.”
“What’s that?”
“He likes to own the unownable.” Durand returned the camera to the display shelf. “I assume this isn’t a social call.”
Gabriel shook his head.
“What do you want this time?”
“Information.”
“About what?”
“A dead Englishman named Jack Bradshaw.”
Durand’s face remained expressionless.
“I assume you knew him?” asked Gabriel.
“Only by reputation.”
“Any idea who cut him to pieces?”
“No,” said Durand, shaking his head slowly. “But I might be able to point you in the right direction.”
Gabriel walked over to the window and turned the sign from OUVERT to FERMÉ. Durand exhaled heavily and pulled on his overcoat.
They were as unlikely a pairing as one might have found in Paris that chill spring morning, the art thief and the intelligence operative, walking side by side through the streets of the Eighth Arrondissement. Maurice Durand, meticulous in all things, began with a brief primer on the trade in stolen art. Each year thousands of paintings and other objets d’art went missing from museums, galleries, public institutions, and private homes. Estimates of their value ranged as high as $6 billion, making art crime the fourth most lucrative illicit activity in the world, behind only drug trafficking, money laundering, and arms dealing. And Maurice Durand was responsible for much of it. Working with a stable of Marseilles-based professional thieves, he had carried off some of history’s greatest art heists. He no longer thought of himself as a mere art thief. He was a global businessman, a broker of sorts, who specialized in the quiet acquisition of paintings that were not actually for sale.
“In my humble opinion,” he continued without a trace of humility in his voice, “there are four distinct types of art thieves. The first is the thrill seeker, the art lover who steals to attain something he could never possibly afford. Stéphane Breitwieser comes to mind.” He cast a sidelong glance at Gabriel. “Know the name?”
“Breitwieser was the waiter who stole more than a billion dollars’ worth of art for his private collection.”
“Including Sybille of Cleves by Lucas Cranach the Elder. After he was arrested, his mother cut the paintings into small pieces and threw them out with her kitchen garbage.” The Frenchman shook his head reproachfully. “I am far from a perfect person, but I have never destroyed a painting.” He cast another glance at Gabriel. “Even when I should have.”
“And the second category?”
“The incompetent loser. He steals a painting, doesn’t know what to do with it, and panics. Sometimes he manages to collect a bit of ransom or reward money. Oftentimes he gets caught. Frankly,” Durand added, “I resent him. He gives people like me a bad name.”
“Professionals who carry out commissioned thefts?”
Durand nodded. They were walking along the avenue Matignon. They passed the Paris offices of Christie’s and then turned into the Champs-Élysées. The limbs of the chestnut trees lay bare against the gray sky.
“There are some in law enforcement who insist I don’t exist,” Durand resumed. “They think I’m a fantasy, that I’m wishful thinking. They don’t understand that there are extremely wealthy people in the world who lust after great works of art and don’t care whether they’re stolen or not. In fact, there are some people who want a masterpiece because it’s stolen.”
“What’s the fourth category?”
“Organized crime. They’re very good at stealing paintings but not so good at bringing them to market.” Durand paused, then added, “That’s where Jack Bradshaw entered the picture. He was a middleman between the thieves and the buyers—a high-end fence, if you will. And he was good at his job.”
“What sort of buyers?”
“Occasionally, he sold directly to collectors,” Durand replied. “But most of the time he funneled the stolen works into a network of dealers here in Europe.”
“Where?”
“Paris, Brussels, and Amsterdam are excellent dumping grounds for stolen art. But Switzerland’s property and privacy laws still make it a mecca for bringing hot property to market.”
They made their way across the Place de la Concorde and entered the Jardin des Tuileries. On their left was the Jeu de Paume, the small museum that the Nazis had used as a sorting facility when they were looting France of its art. Durand appeared to be making a conscious effort not to look at it.
“Your friend Jack Bradshaw was in a dangerous line of work,” he was saying. “He had to deal with the sort of people who are quick to resort to violence when they don’t get their way. The Serbian gangs are particularly active in Western Europe. The Russians, too. It’s possible Bradshaw was killed as a result of a deal gone bad. Or …” Durand’s voice trailed off.
“Or what?”
Durand hesitated before answering. “There were rumors,” he said finally. “Nothing concrete, mind you. Just informed speculation.”
“What sort of speculation?”
“That Bradshaw was involved in acquiring a large number of paintings on the black market for a single individual.”
“Do you know the individual’s name?”
“No.”
“Are you telling me the truth, Maurice?”
“This might surprise you,” Durand replied, “but when one is acquiring a collection of stolen paintings, one tends not to advertise what one is doing.”
“Go on.”
“There were rumors of another sort swirling around Bradshaw, rumors he was brokering a deal for a masterpiece.” Durand made an almost imperceptible check of his surroundings before continuing. It was a move, thought Gabriel, worthy of a professional spy. “A masterpiece that has been missing for several decades.”
“Do you know which painting it was?”
“Of course. And so do you.” Durand stopped walking and turned to face Gabriel. “It was a nativity painted by a Baroque artist at the end of his career. His name was Michelangelo Merisi, but most people know him by the name of his family’s village near Milan.”
Gabriel thought of the three letters he had found on Bradshaw’s message pad: C … V … O …
The letters weren’t random.
They were Caravaggio.
11 (#ulink_2826444a-400b-5dca-8120-cfa8490510dd)
JARDIN DES TUILERIES, PARIS (#ulink_2826444a-400b-5dca-8120-cfa8490510dd)
TWO CENTURIES AFTER HIS DEATH, he was all but forgotten. His paintings gathered dust in the storerooms of galleries and museums, many misattributed, their dramatically illuminated figures receding slowly into the emptiness of their distinctive black backgrounds. Finally, in 1951, the noted Italian art historian Roberto Longhi assembled his known works and displayed them for the world at the Palazzo Reale in Milan. Many of those who visited the remarkable exhibit had never heard the name Caravaggio.
The details of his early life are sketchy at best, faint lines of charcoal on an otherwise blank canvas. He was born on the twenty-ninth day of September in 1571, probably in Milan, where his father was a successful mason and architect. In the summer of 1576, plague returned to the city. By the time it finally abated, one-fifth of the Milan diocese had perished, including young Caravaggio’s father, grandfather, and uncle. In 1584, at the age of thirteen, he entered the workshop of Simone Peterzano, a dull but competent Mannerist who claimed to be a pupil of Titian. The contract, which survives, obligated Caravaggio to train “night and day” for a period of four years. It is not known whether he lived up to its terms, or even if he completed his apprenticeship. Clearly, Peterzano’s limp, lifeless work had little influence on him.
The exact circumstances surrounding Caravaggio’s departure from Milan are, like almost everything else about him, lost to time and shrouded in mystery. Records indicate his mother died in 1590 and that, from her modest estate, he claimed an inheritance equal to six hundred gold scudi. Within a year the money was gone. There is no suggestion, anywhere, that the volatile young man who had trained to be an artist ever placed a brush to canvas during his final years in Milan. It seems he was too busy with other pursuits. Giovanni Pietro Bellori, author of an early biography, suggests Caravaggio had to flee the city, perhaps after an incident involving a prostitute and a razor, perhaps after the murder of a friend. He traveled eastward to Venice, wrote Bellori, where he fell under the spell of Giorgione’s palette. Then, in the autumn of 1592, he set out for Rome.
Here Caravaggio’s life comes into sharper relief. He entered the city, like all migrants from the north, through the gates of the Porto del Popolo and made his way to the artists’ quarter, a warren of filthy streets around the Campo Marzio. According to the painter Baglione, he shared rooms with an artist from Sicily, though another early biographer, a physician who knew Caravaggio in Rome, records that he found lodgings in the home of a priest who forced him to do household chores and gave him only greens to eat. Caravaggio referred to the priest as Monsignor Insalata and left his home after a few months. He lived in as many as ten different places during his first years in Rome, including the workshop of Giuseppe Cesari, where he slept on a straw mattress. He walked the streets in tattered black stockings and a threadbare black cloak. His black hair was an unruly mess.
Cesari allowed Caravaggio to paint only flowers and fruit, the lowliest assignment for a workshop apprentice. Bored, convinced of his superior talent, he began to produce paintings of his own. Some he sold in the alleyways around the Piazza Navona. But one painting, a luminous image of a well-to-do Roman boy being cheated by a pair of cardsharps, he sold to a dealer whose shop was located across the street from the palazzo occupied by Cardinal Francesco del Monte. The transaction would dramatically alter the course of Caravaggio’s life, for the cardinal, a connoisseur and patron of the arts, admired the painting greatly and purchased it for a few scudi. Soon after, he acquired a second painting by Caravaggio depicting a smiling fortune-teller stealing a Roman boy’s ring as she reads his palm. At some point, the two men met, though at whose initiative remains unclear. The cardinal offered the young artist food, clothing, lodgings, and a studio in his palazzo. All he asked of Caravaggio was that he paint. Caravaggio, then twenty-four, accepted the cardinal’s proposal. It was one of the few wise decisions he ever made.
After settling in to his rooms at the palazzo, Caravaggio produced several works for the cardinal and his circle of wealthy friends, including The Lute Player, The Musicians, Bacchus, Martha and Mary Magdalene, and St. Francis of Assisi in Ecstasy. Then, in 1599, he was awarded his first public commission: two canvases depicting scenes from the life of Saint Matthew for the Contarelli Chapel in the Church of San Luigi dei Francesi. The paintings, while controversial, instantly established Caravaggio as the most sought-after artist in Rome. Other commissions soon followed, including The Crucifixion of St. Peter and The Conversion of St. Paul for the Cerasi Chapel of the Church of Santa Maria del Popolo, The Supper at Emmaus, John the Baptist, The Betrayal of Christ, Doubting Thomas, and The Sacrifice of Isaac. Not all his works met with approval upon delivery. Madonna and Child with St. Anne was removed from St. Peter’s Basilica because the church hierarchy apparently did not approve of Mary’s ample cleavage. Her bare-legged portrayal in Death of the Virgin was considered so offensive that the church for which it was commissioned, Santa Maria della Scala in Trastevere, refused to accept it. Rubens called it one of Caravaggio’s finest works and helped him to find a buyer.
Success as a painter did not bring calm to Caravaggio’s personal life—indeed, it remained as chaotic and violent as ever. He was arrested for carrying a sword without a license in the Campo Marzio. He smashed a plate of artichokes against a waiter’s face at the Osteria del Moro. He was jailed for throwing stones at the sbirri, the papal police, in the Via dei Greci. The stone-throwing incident occurred at half past nine on an October evening in 1604. By then, Caravaggio was living alone in a rented house with only Cecco, his apprentice and occasional model, for company. His physical appearance had deteriorated; he was once again the unkempt figure in tattered black clothing who used to sell his paintings on the street. Though he had many commissions, he worked fitfully. Somehow he managed to deliver a monumental altarpiece called The Deposition of Christ. It was widely regarded as his finest painting.
There were more brushes with the authorities—his name appears in the police records of Rome five times in 1605 alone—but none more serious than the incident that took place on May 28, 1606. It was a Sunday, and as usual Caravaggio went to the ball courts at the Via della Pallacorda for a game of tennis. There he encountered Ranuccio Tomassoni, a street fighter, a rival for the affections of a beautiful young courtesan who had posed for several of Caravaggio’s paintings. Words were exchanged, swords were drawn. The details of the mêlée are unclear, but it ended with Tomassoni lying on the ground with a deep wound to his upper thigh. He died a short time later, and by that evening Caravaggio was the target of a citywide manhunt. Wanted for murder, a crime with only one possible punishment, he fled into the Alban Hills. He would never see Rome again.
He made his way south to Naples, where his reputation as a great painter preceded him, the murder notwithstanding. He left behind The Seven Acts of Mercy before sailing to Malta. There he was admitted into the Knights of Malta, an expensive honor for which he paid in paintings, and for a brief time he lived as a nobleman. Then a fight with a fellow member of his order led to yet another spell in prison. He managed to escape and flee to Sicily where by all accounts he was a mad, deranged soul who slept with a dagger at his side. Even so, he managed to paint. In Syracuse he left The Burial of St. Lucy. In Messina he produced two monumental paintings: The Raising of Lazarus and the heartbreaking Adoration of the Shepherds. And for the Oratorio di San Lorenzo in Palermo he painted The Nativity with St. Francis and St. Lawrence. Three hundred and fifty-nine years later, on the night of October 18, 1969, two men entered the chapel through a window and cut the canvas from its frame. A copy of the painting hung behind General Cesare Ferrari’s desk at the palazzo in Rome. It was the Art Squad’s number-one target.
“I suspect the general already knows about the connection between the Caravaggio and Jack Bradshaw,” Maurice Durand said. “That would explain why he was so insistent you take the case.”
“You know the general well,” said Gabriel.
“Not really,” replied the Frenchman. “But I did meet him once.”
“Where?”
“Here in Paris, at a symposium on art crime. The general was on one of the panels.”
“And you?”
“I was in attendance.”
“In what capacity?”
“A dealer of valuable antiques, of course.” Durand smiled. “The general struck me as a serious fellow, very capable. It’s been a long time since I’ve stolen a painting in Italy.”
They were walking along the gravel footpath of the allée centrale. The leaden clouds had drained the gardens of color. It was Sisley rather than Monet.
“Is it possible?” asked Gabriel.
“That the Caravaggio is actually in play?”
Gabriel nodded. Durand appeared to give the question serious consideration before answering.
“I’ve heard all the stories,” he said at last. “That the collector who commissioned the theft refused to accept the painting because it was so badly damaged when it was cut from the frame. That the Mafia bosses of Sicily used to bring it out during meetings as a kind of trophy. That it was destroyed in a flood. That it was eaten by rats. But I’ve also heard rumors,” he added, “that it’s been in play before.”
“How much would it be worth on the black market?”
“The paintings Caravaggio produced while he was on the run lack the depth of his great Roman works. Even so,” Durand added, “a Caravaggio is still a Caravaggio.”
“How much, Maurice?”
“The rule of thumb is that a stolen painting retains ten percent of its value on the black market. If the Caravaggio were worth fifty million on the open market, it would fetch five million dirty.”
“There is no open market for a Caravaggio.”
“Which means it’s truly one of a kind. There are some men in the world who would pay almost anything for it.”
“Could you move it?”
“With a single phone call.”
They arrived at the boat pond where several miniature sailing vessels were careening about a tiny storm-tossed sea. Gabriel paused at the edge and explained how he had found three stolen paintings—a Parmigianino, a Renoir, and a Klimt—concealed beneath copies of lesser works at Jack Bradshaw’s villa on Lake Como. Durand, watching the boats, nodded thoughtfully.
“It sounds to me as though they were being readied for transport and sale.”
“Why paint over them?”
“So they could be sold as legitimate works.” Durand paused, then added, “Legitimate works of lesser value, of course.”
“And when the sales were complete?”
“A person like you would be hired to remove the concealing images and prepare the paintings for hanging.”
A pair of tourists, young girls, posed for a photograph on the opposite side of the boat pond. Gabriel took Durand by the elbow and led him toward the Louvre Pyramid. “The person who painted those fakes was good,” he said. “Good enough to fool someone like me at first glance.”
“There are many talented artists out there who are willing to sell their services to those of us who toil at the dirty end of the trade.” The Frenchman looked at Gabriel and asked, “Have you ever had occasion to forge a painting?”
“I might have forged a Cassatt once.”
“For a worthy cause, no doubt.”
They walked on, the gravel crunching beneath their feet.
“And what about you, Maurice? Have you ever required the services of a forger?”
“We are getting into sensitive territory,” Durand cautioned.
“We crossed that border a long time ago, you and I.”
They came to the Place du Carrousel, turned to the right, and made for the river.
“Whenever possible,” Durand said, “I prefer to create the illusion that a stolen painting hasn’t actually been stolen.”
“You leave behind a copy.”
“We call them replacement jobs.”
“How many are hanging in museums and homes across Europe?”
“I’d rather not say.”
“Go on, Maurice.”
“There’s one man who does all my work for me. He’s fast, reliable, and quite good.”
“Does the man have a name?”
Durand hesitated, then answered. The forger’s name was Yves Morel.
“Where did he train?”
“The École Nationale des Beaux-Arts in Lyon.”
“Very prestigious,” said Gabriel. “Why didn’t he become an artist?”
“He tried. It didn’t work out as planned.”
“So he took his revenge on the art world by becoming a forger?”
“Something like that.”
“How noble.”
“People in glass houses.”
“Is your relationship exclusive?”
“I wish it was, but I can’t give him enough work. On occasion he accepts commissions from other patrons. One of those patrons was a now-deceased fence named Jack Bradshaw.”
Gabriel stopped walking and turned to face Durand. “Which is why you know so much about Bradshaw’s operation,” he said. “You were sharing the services of the same forger.”
“It was all rather Caravaggesque,” replied Durand, nodding.
“Where did Morel do his work for Bradshaw?”
“In a room at the Geneva Freeport. Bradshaw had a rather unique art gallery there. Yves used to call it the gallery of the missing.”
“Where is he now?”
“Here in Paris.”
“Where, Maurice?”
Durand removed his hand from the pocket of his overcoat and indicated that the forger could be found somewhere near Sacré-Cœur. They entered the Métro, the art thief and the intelligence operative, and headed for Montmartre.
12 (#ulink_6b9c68f6-4dd1-528a-837b-f486d0ec1204)
MONTMARTRE, PARIS (#ulink_6b9c68f6-4dd1-528a-837b-f486d0ec1204)
YVES MOREL LIVED IN AN apartment building on the rue Ravignon. When Durand pressed the intercom button, there was no answer.
“He’s probably in the Place du Tertre.”
“Doing what?”
“Selling copies of famous Impressionist paintings to the tourists so the French tax authorities think he has a legitimate income.”
They walked to the square, a jumble of outdoor cafés and street artists near the basilica, but Morel wasn’t in his usual spot. Then they went to his favorite bar in the rue Norvins, but there was no sign of him there, either. A call to his mobile phone went unanswered.
“Merde,” said Durand softly, slipping the phone back into his coat pocket.
“What now?”
“I have a key to his apartment.”
“Why?”
“Occasionally, he leaves things in his studio for me to collect.”
“Sounds like a trusting soul.”
“Contrary to popular myth,” said Durand, “there is indeed honor among thieves.”
They walked back to the apartment house and rang the intercom a second time. When there was no response, Durand fished a ring of keys from his pocket and used one to unlock the door. He used the same key to unlock the door of Morel’s apartment. Darkness greeted them. Durand flipped a light switch on the wall, illuminating a large open room that doubled as a studio and living space. Gabriel walked over to an easel, on which was propped an unfinished copy of a landscape by Pierre Bonnard.
“Does he intend to sell this one to the tourists in the Place du Tertre?”
“That one’s for me.”
“What’s it for?”
“Use your imagination.”
Gabriel examined the painting more closely. “If I had to guess,” he said, “you intend to hang it in the Musée des Beaux-Arts in Nice.”
“You have a good eye.”
Gabriel turned away from the easel and walked over to the large rectangular worktable that stood in the center of the studio. Draped over it was a paint-spotted tarpaulin. Beneath it was an object approximately six feet in length and two feet across.
“Is Morel a sculptor?”
“No.”
“So what’s underneath the tarp?”
“I don’t know, but you’d better have a look.”
Gabriel lifted the edge of the tarpaulin and peered beneath it.
“Well?” asked Durand.
“I’m afraid you’re going to have to find someone else to finish the Bonnard, Maurice.”
“Let me see him.”
Gabriel drew back the top of the tarpaulin.
“Merde,” said Durand softly.
PART TWO (#ulink_57b63b72-dc36-565a-b70a-7f0768c4c1fd)
13 (#ulink_dfe44100-8efd-5bfd-88b0-4fb019aae92d)
SAN REMO, ITALY (#ulink_dfe44100-8efd-5bfd-88b0-4fb019aae92d)
GENERAL FERRARI WAITED NEAR THE walls of the old fortress in San Remo at half past two the following afternoon. He wore a business suit, a woolen overcoat, and dark glasses that shielded his all-seeing prosthetic eye from view. Gabriel, dressed in denim and leather, looked like the troubled younger sibling, the one who had made all the wrong choices in life and was once again in need of money. As they walked along the grimy waterfront, he briefed the general on his findings, though he was careful not to divulge his sources. The general didn’t seem surprised by anything he was hearing.
“You left out one thing,” he said.
“What’s that?”
“Jack Bradshaw wasn’t a diplomat. He was a spy.”
“How did you know?”
“Everyone in the trade knew about Bradshaw’s past. It was one of the reasons he was so good at his job. But don’t worry,” the general added. “I’m not going to make things difficult for you with your friends in London. All I want is my Caravaggio.”
They left the waterfront and headed up the slope of the hill toward the center of town. Gabriel wondered why anyone would want to holiday here. The city reminded him of a once-beautiful woman gathering herself to have her portrait painted.
“You misled me,” he said.
“Not at all,” replied the general.
“How would you describe it?”
“I withheld certain facts so as not to color your investigation.”
“Did you know the Caravaggio was in play when you asked me to look into Bradshaw’s death?”
“I’d heard rumors to that effect.”
“Had you also heard rumors about a collector on a shopping spree for stolen art?”
The general nodded.
“Who is it?”
“I haven’t a clue.”
“Are you telling me the truth this time?”
The general placed his good hand over his heart. “I do not know the identity of the person who’s been buying every piece of stolen art he can lay his hands on. Nor do I know who’s behind the murder of Jack Bradshaw.” He paused, then added, “Though I suspect they’re one and the same.”
“Why was Bradshaw killed?”
“I suppose he’d outlived his usefulness.”
“Because he’d delivered the Caravaggio?”
The general gave a noncommittal nod.
“So why was he tortured first?”
“Perhaps his killers wanted a name.”
“Yves Morel?”
“Bradshaw must have used Morel to knock the painting into shape so it could be sold.” He looked at Gabriel gravely and asked, “How did they kill him?”
“They broke his neck. It looked like a complete transection of the spinal cord.”
The general grimaced. “Silent and bloodless.”
“And very professional.”
“What did you do with the poor devil?”
“He’ll be taken care of,” said Gabriel quietly.
“By whom?”
“It’s better if you don’t know the details.”
The general shook his head slowly. He was now a party to a felony. It wasn’t the first time.
“Let us hope,” he said after a moment, “that the French police never discover that you were in Morel’s apartment. Given your track record, they might get the wrong impression.”
“Yes,” said Gabriel morosely. “Let us hope.”
They turned into the Via Roma. It reverberated with the buzz of a hundred motor scooters. Gabriel, when he spoke again, had to raise his voice to be heard.
“Who had it last?” he asked.
“The Caravaggio?”
Gabriel nodded.
“Even I’m not sure,” the general admitted. “Every time we arrest a mafioso, no matter how insignificant, he offers us information on the whereabouts of the Nativity in exchange for a reduced prison sentence. We call it the Caravaggio card. Needless to say, we’ve wasted countless man-hours chasing down false leads.”
“I thought you came close to finding it a couple of years ago.”
“So did I, but it slipped through my fingers. I was beginning to think that I would never get another opportunity to recover it.” He smiled in spite of himself. “And now this.”
“If the painting’s been sold, it’s probably no longer in Italy.”
“I concur. But in my experience,” the general added, “the best time to find a stolen painting is immediately after it’s changed hands. We have to move quickly, though. Otherwise, we might have to wait another forty-five years.”
“We?”
The general stopped walking but said nothing.
“My involvement in this affair,” said Gabriel over the drone of the traffic, “is now officially over.”
“You promised to find out who killed Jack Bradshaw in exchange for keeping your friend’s name out of the newspapers. The way I see it, you haven’t completed your commission.”
“I’ve given you an important lead, not to mention three stolen paintings.”
“But not the painting I want.” The general removed his sunglasses and fixed Gabriel with his monocular stare. “Your involvement in this case isn’t over, Allon. In fact, it’s just beginning.”
They walked to a small bar overlooking the marina. It was empty except for two young men who were grousing about the sad state of the economy. It was a common sight in Italy these days. There were no jobs, no prospects, no future—only the beautiful reminders of the past that the general and his team at the Art Squad were sworn to protect. He ordered a coffee and a sandwich and led Gabriel to a table outside in the cold sunlight.
“Frankly,” he said when they were alone again, “I don’t know how you can even think about walking away from the case now. It would be like leaving a painting unfinished.”
“My unfinished painting is in Venice,” replied Gabriel, “along with my pregnant wife.”
“Your Veronese is safe. And so is your wife.”
Gabriel looked at an overflowing rubbish bin at the edge of the marina and shook his head. The ancient Romans had invented central heating, but somewhere along the line their descendants had forgotten how to take out the trash.
“It could take months to find that painting,” he said.
“We don’t have months. I’d say we have a few weeks at most.”
“Then I suppose you and your men better get moving.”
The general shook his head slowly. “We’re good at tapping phones and making deals with mafioso scum. But we don’t do undercover operations well, especially outside Italy. I need someone to toss some bait into the waters of the stolen art market and to see if we can tempt Mr. Big into making another acquisition. He’s out there somewhere. You just have to find something to interest him.”
“One doesn’t find multimillion-dollar masterpieces. One steals them.”
“In spectacular fashion,” added the general. “Which means it shouldn’t be something from a home or a private gallery.”
“Do you realize what you’re saying?”
“Yes, I do.” The general gave a conspiratorial smile. “Most undercover operations involve sending a fake buyer into the field. But yours will be different. You’ll be posing as a thief with a hot piece of canvas to sell. The painting has to be real.”
“Why don’t you let me borrow something lovely from the Galleria Borghese?”
“The museum will never go for it. Besides,” the general added, “the painting can’t come from Italy. Otherwise, the person who has the Caravaggio might suspect my involvement.”
“You’ll never be able to prosecute anyone after something like this.”
“Prosecution is definitely second on my list of priorities. I want that Caravaggio back.”
The general lapsed into silence. Gabriel had to admit he was intrigued by the idea. “There’s no way I can front the operation,” he said after a moment. “My face is too well known.”
“Then I suppose you’ll have to find a good actor to play the role. And if I were you, I’d hire some muscle, too. The underworld can be a dangerous place.”
“You don’t say.”
The general made no reply.
“Muscle doesn’t come cheap,” Gabriel said. “And neither do competent thieves.”
“Can you borrow some from your service?”
“Muscle or thieves?”
“Both.”
“Not a chance.”
“How much money do you need?”
Gabriel made a show of thought. “Two million, bare minimum.”
“I might have a million in the coffee can under my desk.”
“I’ll take it.”
“Actually,” said the general, smiling, “the money’s in an attaché case in the trunk of my car. I also have a copy of the Caravaggio case file. It will give you something to read while you’re waiting for Mr. Big to put his oar into the water.”
“What if he doesn’t bite?”
“I suppose you’ll have to steal something else.” The general shrugged. “That’s the wonderful thing about stealing masterpieces. It’s really not all that difficult.”
The money, as promised, was in the trunk of the general’s official sedan—a million euros in very used bills, the source of which he refused to specify. Gabriel placed the attaché case on the passenger seat of his own car and drove away without another word. By the time he reached the fringes of San Remo, he had completed the first preparatory sketches of his operation to recover the lost Caravaggio. He had funding and access to the world’s most successful art thief. All he needed now was someone to take a stolen painting to market. An amateur wouldn’t do. He needed an experienced operative who had been trained in the black arts of deception. Someone who was comfortable in the presence of criminals. Someone who could take care of himself if things got rough. Gabriel knew of just such a man across the water, on the island of Corsica. He was a bit like Maurice Durand, an old adversary who was now an accomplice, but there the similarities ended.
14 (#ulink_9a4e03d0-8791-5aa4-84e2-802b1187b9fc)
CORSICA (#ulink_9a4e03d0-8791-5aa4-84e2-802b1187b9fc)
IT WAS APPROACHING MIDNIGHT WHEN the ferry drew into the port of Calvi, hardly the time to be making a social call in Corsica, so Gabriel checked into a hotel near the terminal and slept. In the morning he had breakfast at a small café along the waterfront; then he climbed into his car and set out along the rugged western coastline. For a time the rain persisted, but gradually the clouds thinned and the sea turned from granite to turquoise. Gabriel stopped in the town of Porto to purchase two bottles of chilled Corsican rosé and then headed inland along a narrow road lined with olive groves and stands of laricio pine. The air smelled of macchia—the dense undergrowth of rosemary, rockrose, and lavender that covered much of the island—and in the villages he saw many women cloaked in the black of widowhood, a sign they had lost male kin to the vendetta. Once the women might have pointed at him in the Corsican way in order to ward off the effects of the occhju, the evil eye, but now they avoided gazing at him for long. They knew he was a friend of Don Anton Orsati, and friends of the don could travel anywhere in Corsica without fear of reprisal.
For more than two centuries, the Orsati clan had been associated with two things on the island of Corsica: olive oil and death. The oil came from the groves that thrived on their large estates; the death came at the hands of their assassins. The Orsatis killed on behalf of those who could not kill for themselves: notables who were too squeamish to get their hands dirty; women who had no male kin to do the deed on their behalf. No one knew how many Corsicans had died at the hands of Orsati assassins, least of all the Orsatis themselves, but local lore placed the number in the thousands. It might have been significantly higher were it not for the clan’s rigorous vetting process. The Orsatis operated by a strict code. They refused to carry out a killing unless satisfied the party before them had indeed been wronged, and blood vengeance was required.
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