The English Assassin (2 page)

He was up now. Afloat. Flush with funds. A million pounds, to be precise, tucked nicely into his account at Barclays Bank, thanks to a Venetian painter named Francesco Vecellio and the morose-looking art restorer now making his way across the wet bricks of Mason’s Yard.

Isherwood pulled on a macintosh. His English scale and devoutly English wardrobe concealed the fact that he was not—at least not technically speaking—English at all. English by nationality and passport, yes, but German by birth, French by upbringing, and Jewish by religion. Few people knew that his last name was merely a phonetic perversion of its original. Fewer still knew that he’d done favors over the years for a certain bullet-headed gentleman from a certain clandestine agency based in Tel Aviv. Rudolf Heller was the name the gentleman used when calling on Isherwood at the
gallery. It was a borrowed name, borrowed like the gentleman’s blue suit and gentleman’s manners. His real name was Ari Shamron.

“One makes choices in life, doesn’t one?”
Shamron had said at the time of Isherwood’s recruitment.
“One doesn’t betray one’s adopted country, one’s college, or one’s regiment, but one looks out for one’s flesh and blood, one’s tribe, lest another Austrian madman, or the Butcher of Baghdad, try to turn us all into soap again, eh, Julian?”

“Hear, hear, Herr Heller.”

“We won’t pay you a pound. Your name will never appear in our files. You’ll do favors for me from time to time. Very specific favors for a very special agent.”

“Super. Marvelous. Where do I sign up? What sort of favors? Nothing shady, I take it?”

“Say I need to send him to Prague. Or Oslo. Or Berlin, God forbid. I’d like you to find legitimate work for him there. A restoration. An authentication. A consultation. Something appropriate for the amount of time he’ll be staying.”

“Not a problem, Herr Heller. By the way, does this agent of yours have a name?”

The agent had many names, thought Isherwood now, watching the man make his way across the quadrangle. His real name was Gabriel Allon, and the nature of his secret work for Shamron was betrayed by subtle things he did now. The way he glanced over his shoulder as he slipped through the passageway from Duke Street. The way that, in spite of a steady rain, he made not one but two complete circuits of the old yard before approaching the gallery’s secure door and ringing Isherwood’s bell.
Poor Gabriel. One of the three or four best in the world at what he does, but he can’t walk a straight line.
And why not? After what happened to his wife and child in Vienna . . . no man would be the same after that.

He was unexpectedly average in height, and his smooth gait seemed to propel him effortlessly across Duke Street to Green’s Restaurant, where Isherwood had booked a table for lunch. As they sat down, Gabriel’s eyes flickered about the room like searchlights. They were almond-shaped, unnaturally green, and very quick. The cheekbones were broad and square, the lips dark, and the sharp-edged nose looked as though it had been carved from wood. It was a timeless face, thought Isherwood. It could be a face on the cover of a glossy men’s fashion magazine or a face from a dour Rembrandt portrait. It was also a face of many possible origins. It had been a superb professional asset.

Isherwood ordered stuffed sole and Sancerre, Gabriel black tea and a bowl of consommé. He reminded Isherwood of an Orthodox hermit who subsisted on rancid feta and concrete flatbread, only Gabriel lived in a pleasant cottage on a remote tidal creek in Cornwall instead of a monastery. Isherwood had never seen him eat a rich meal, had never seen him smile or admire an attractive pair of hips. He never lusted after material objects. He had only two toys, an old MG motorcar and a wooden ketch, both of which he had restored himself. He listened to his opera on a dreadful little portable CD player stained with paint and varnish. He spent money only on his supplies. He had more high-tech toys in his little Cornish studio than there were in the conservation department of the Tate.

How little Gabriel had changed in the twenty-five years since they had first met. A few more wrinkles around those watchful eyes, a few more pounds on his spare frame. He’d been little more than a boy that day,
quiet as a church mouse. Even then, his hair was streaked with gray, the stain of a boy who’d done a man’s job. “Julian Isherwood, meet Gabriel,” Shamron had said. “Gabriel is a man of enormous talent, I assure you.”

Enormous talent, indeed, but there had been gaps in the young man’s provenance—like the missing three years between his graduation from the prestigious Betsal’el School of Art in Jerusalem and his apprenticeship in Venice with the master restorer Umberto Conti. “Gabriel spent time traveling in Europe,” Shamron had said curtly. That was the last time the subject of Gabriel’s European adventures was ever raised. Julian Isherwood didn’t talk about what had happened to his father, and Gabriel didn’t talk about the things he had done for Ari Shamron, alias Rudolf Heller, from approximately 1972 to 1975. Secretly, Isherwood referred to them as the Lost Years.

Isherwood reached into the breast pocket of his jacket and withdrew a check. “Your share from the sale of the Vecellio. One hundred thousand pounds.”

Gabriel scooped up the check and pocketed it with a smooth movement of his hand. He had magician’s hands and a magician’s sense of misdirection. The check was there, the check was gone.

“How much was your share?”

“I’ll tell you, but you must first promise me that you won’t divulge the figure to any of these vultures,” Isherwood said, sweeping his hand across the dining room of Green’s.

Gabriel said nothing, which Isherwood interpreted as a blood oath of everlasting silence.

“One million.”

“Dollars?”

“Pounds, petal. Pounds.”

“Who bought it?”

“A very nice gallery in the American Midwest. Tastefully displayed, I assure you. Can you imagine? I picked it up for sixteen thousand from a dusty sale room in Hull on the hunch—the wild bloody hunch—that it was the missing altarpiece from the church of San Salvatore in Venice. And I was right! A coup like this comes along once in a career, twice if you’re lucky. Cheers.”

They toasted each other, stemmed wineglass to bone-china teacup. Just then a tubby man with a pink shirt and pink cheeks to match presented himself breathlessly at their table.

“Julie!” he sang.

“Hullo, Oliver.”

“Word on Duke Street is you picked up a cool million for your Vecellio.”

“Where the bloody hell did you hear that?”

“There are no secrets down here, love. Just tell me if it’s the truth or a dirty, seditious lie.” He turned to Gabriel, as if noticing him for the first time, and thrust out a fleshy paw with a gold-embossed business card wedged between the thick fingers. “Oliver Dimbleby. Dimbleby Fine Arts.”

Gabriel took the card silently.

“Why don’t you join us for a drink, Oliver?” said Isherwood.

Beneath the table Gabriel put his foot on Isherwood’s toe and pressed hard.

“Can’t now, love. That leggy creature in the booth over there has promised to whisper filth into my ear if I buy her another glass of champagne.”

“Thank God!” blurted Isherwood through clenched teeth.

Oliver Dimbleby waddled off. Gabriel released the pressure on Isherwood’s foot.

“So much for your secrets.”

“Vultures,” Isherwood repeated. “I’m up now, but the moment I stumble they’ll be hovering again, waiting for me to die so they can pick over the bones.”

“Maybe this time you should watch your money a little more carefully.”

“I’m afraid I’m a hopeless case. In fact—”

“Oh, God.”

“—I’m traveling to Amsterdam to have a look at a painting next week. It’s the centerpiece of a triptych, classified as artist unknown, but I have another one of my hunches. I think it may have come from the workshop of Rogier van der Weyden. In fact, I may be willing to bet a great deal of money on it.”

“Van der Weydens are notoriously difficult to authenticate. There are only a handful of works firmly attributed to him, and he never signed or dated any of them.”

“If it came from his workshop, his fingerprints will be on it. And if there’s anyone who can find them, it’s you.”

“I’ll be happy to take a look at it for you.”

“Are you working on anything now?”

“I just finished a Modigliani.”

“I have a job for you.”

“What kind of job?”

“I received a call from a lawyer a few days ago. Said his client has a painting that requires cleaning. Said his client wanted
you
to handle the job and would pay handsomely.”

“What’s the client’s name?”

“Didn’t say.”

“What’s the painting?”

“Didn’t say.”

“So how is it supposed to work?”

“You go to the villa, you work on the painting. The owner pays for your hotel and expenses.”

“Where?”

“Zurich.”

Something flashed behind Gabriel’s green eyes, a vision, a memory. Isherwood frantically rifled through the file drawers of his own less reliable memory.
Have I ever sent him to Zurich for Herr Heller?

“Is Zurich a problem?”

“No, Zurich is fine. How much would I be paid?”

“Twice what I’ve just given you—if you start right away.”

“Give me the address.”

G
ABRIEL
did not have time to return to Cornwall to pick up his things, so after lunch he went shopping. In Oxford Street he purchased two changes of clothing and a small leather bag. Then he walked over to Great Russell Street and visited the venerable art supply store of L. Cornelissen & Son. A flaxen-haired angel called Penelope helped him assemble a traveling kit of pigments, brushes, and solvents. She knew him by his work name, and he flirted with her shamelessly in the faded accent of an Italian expatriate. She wrapped his things in brown paper and bound them with a string. He kissed her cheek. Her hair smelled of cocoa and incense.

Gabriel knew too much about terrorism and security to enjoy traveling by airplane, so he rode the Underground to Waterloo Station and caught a late-afternoon Eurostar to Paris. In the Gare de l’Est he boarded
a night train for Zurich, and by nine o’clock the next morning he was strolling down the gentle sweep of the Bahnhofstrasse.

How gracefully Zurich conceals her riches,
he thought. Much of the world’s gold and silver lay in the bank vaults beneath his feet, but there were no hideous office towers to mark the boundaries of the financial district and no monuments to moneymaking. Just understatement, discretion, and deception. A scorned woman who looks away to hide her shame. Switzerland.

He came upon the Paradeplatz. On one side of the square stood the headquarters of Credit Suisse, on the other the Union Bank of Switzerland. A burst of pigeons shattered the calm. He crossed the street.

Opposite the Savoy Hotel was a taxi stand. He climbed into a waiting car after first glancing at the registration number and committing it to memory. He gave the driver the address of the villa, doing his best to conceal the Berlin accent he had acquired from his mother.

Crossing the river, the driver switched on the radio. An announcer was reading the overnight news. Gabriel struggled to comprehend his
Züridütsch.
He tuned out the radio and focused on the task ahead. There were some in the art world who thought of restoration as tedious work, but Gabriel viewed each assignment as an adventure waiting to unfold; an opportunity to step through a looking glass into another time and place. A place where success or failure was determined by his own skills and nerve and nothing else.

He wondered what awaited him. The very fact that the owner had specifically requested him meant that the work was almost certainly an Old Master. He
could also assume that the painting was quite dirty and damaged. The owner wouldn’t have gone to the trouble and expense of bringing him to Zurich if it required only a fresh coat of varnish.

So how long would he be here? Six weeks? Six months? Difficult to say. No two restorations were the same; much would depend on the condition of the painting. Isherwood’s Vecellio had required a year to restore, though he had taken a brief sabbatical in the middle of the job, courtesy of Ari Shamron.

T
HE
Rosenbühlweg was a narrow street, just wide enough to accommodate two cars at once, and it rose sharply up the slope of the Zürichberg. The villas were old and big and huddled closely together. Stucco walls, tile roofs, small tangled gardens. All except the one where the taxi driver pulled to a stop.

It stood atop its own promontory and unlike its neighbors was set several meters back from the street. A high metal fence, like the bars of a jail cell, ran round the perimeter. At the level of the pavement there was a security gate, complete with a small surveillance camera. Beyond the gate rose a flight of stone steps. Then came the villa, a melancholy graystone structure with turrets and a towering front portico.

The taxi drove off. Below lay central Zurich and the lake. Cloud veiled the far shore. Gabriel remembered that it was possible to see the Alps on a clear day, but now they too were shrouded.