The English Assassin (5 page)

The detective seemed unmoved by Gabriel’s argument. He sipped his coffee. “Tell me what happened after you entered the villa.”

Gabriel recounted the chain of events in a dull monotone: the dark entrance hall, groping for the light switch, the unsigned letter in the bowl on the table, the strange odor in the air as he entered the drawing room, the discovery of the body.

“Did you see the painting?”

“Yes.”

“Before you saw the body or after?”

“After.”

“And how long did you look at it?”

“I don’t know. A minute or so.”

“You’ve just discovered a dead body, but you stop to look at a painting.” The detective didn’t seem to know what to make of this piece of information. “Tell me about this painter”—he looked down at his notes—“Raphael. I’m afraid I know little of art.”

Gabriel could tell he was lying but decided to play along. For the next fifteen minutes, he delivered a detailed lecture on the life and work of Raphael: his training and his influences, the innovations of his technique, the lasting relevance of his major works. By the time he had finished, the policeman was staring into the remains of his coffee, a beaten man.

“Would you like me to go on?”

“No, thank you. That was very helpful. If you did not kill Augustus Rolfe, why did you leave the villa without telephoning the police? Why did you try to flee Zurich?”

“I knew the circumstances would appear suspicious, so I panicked.”

The detective looked him over skeptically, as if he did not quite believe Mario Delvecchio was a man given to panic. “How did you get from the Zürichberg to the Hauptbahnhof?”

“I took the tram.”

Baer made a careful inspection of Gabriel’s seized possessions. “I don’t see a tram ticket among your things. Surely you purchased a ticket before you boarded the streetcar?”

Gabriel shook his head: guilty as charged. Baer’s eyebrows shot up. The notion that Gabriel had boarded a tram ticketless seemed more horrifying to him than the possibility that he had shot an old man in the head.

“That’s a very serious offense, Signore Delvecchio! I’m afraid you’re going to be fined fifty francs!”

“I’m deeply sorry.”

“Have you been to Zurich before?”

“No, never.”

“Then how did you know which tram would take you to the Hauptbahnhof?”

“It was a lucky guess, I suppose. It was heading in the right direction, so I got on.”

“Tell me one more thing, Signore Delvecchio. Did you make any purchases while you were in Zurich?”

“Purchases?”

“Did you buy anything? Did you do any shopping?”

“I bought a pair of shoes.”

“Why?”

“Because while I was waiting to get into the villa, my shoes became soaked in the rain.”

“You were panicked. You were afraid to go to the police, desperate to get out of Zurich, but you took time to get new shoes because your feet were wet?”

“Yes.”

He leaned back in his chair and knocked on the door. It opened, and an arm appeared, holding an evidence bag containing Gabriel’s shoes.

“We found these in a toilet at the Hauptbanhof, buried in a rubbish bin. I suspect they’re yours. I also suspect that they will match the set of bloody footprints we found in the entrance hall and the walkway of the villa.”

“I’ve already told you I was there. The footprints, if they do match those shoes, prove nothing.”

“Rather nice shoes to simply toss away in the toilet of a rail station. And they don’t look that wet to me.” He looked up at Gabriel and smiled briefly. “But then, I’ve heard it said that people who panic easily often have sensitive feet.”

I
T
was three hours before Baer entered the room again. For the first time he was not alone. It was obvious to Gabriel that the new man represented higher authority. It was also obvious that he was not an ordinary detective from the Zurich murder squad. Gabriel could see it in the small ways that Baer deferred to him physically, the way his heels clicked together when, like a headwaiter, he seated the new man at the interrogation table and moved unobtrusively into the background.

The man called himself Peterson. He provided no first name and no professional information. He wore an immaculately pressed suit of charcoal gray and a banker’s tie. His hair was nearly white and neatly trimmed. His hands, folded on the table in front of him, were the hands of a pianist. On his left wrist was a thick silver watch, Swiss-made of course, with a dark blue face, an instrument that could withstand the pressure of great depths. He studied Gabriel for a moment with slow, humorless eyes. He had the natural arrogance of a man who knows secrets and keeps files.

“The security codes.” Like Baer, he spoke to Gabriel in English, though almost without a trace of an accent. “Where did you write them down?”

“I didn’t write them down. As I told Sergeant-Major Baer—”

“I know what you told Sergeant-Major Baer.” His eyes suddenly came to life. “I’m asking you for myself. Where did you write them down?”

“I received the codes over the telephone from Mr. Isherwood in London, and I used them to open the security gate and the front door of the villa.”

“You committed the numbers to memory?”

“Yes.”

“Give them to me now.”

Gabriel recited the numbers calmly. Peterson looked at Baer, who nodded once.

“You have a very good memory, Signore Delvecchio.”

He had switched from English to German. Gabriel stared back at him blankly, as if he did not understand. The interrogator resumed in English.

“You don’t speak German, Signore Delvecchio?”

“No.”

“According to the taxi driver, the one who took you from the Bahnhofstrasse to the villa on the Zürichberg, you speak German quite well.”

“Speaking a few words of German and actually
speaking
German are two very different things.”

“The driver told us that you gave him the address in rapid and confident German with the pronounced accent of a Berliner. Tell me something, Signore Delvecchio. How is it that you speak German with the accent of a Berliner?”

“I told you—I don’t speak German. I speak a few words of German. I spent a few weeks in Berlin restoring a painting. I suppose I acquired the accent while I was there.”

“How long ago was that?”

“About four years ago?”

“
About
four years?”

“Yes.”

“Which painting?”

“I’m sorry?”

“The painting you restored in Berlin. Who was the artist? What was it called?”

“I’m afraid that’s confidential.”

“Nothing is confidential at this point, Signore Delvecchio. I’d like the name of the painting and the name of the owner.”

“It was a Caravaggio in private hands. I’m sorry, but I cannot divulge the name of the owner.”

Peterson held out his hand toward Baer without looking at him. Baer reached into his file folder and handed him a single sheet of paper. He reviewed it sadly, as if the patient did not have long to live.

“We ran your name through our computer database to see if there happened to be any outstanding arrest warrants for you in Switzerland. I’m pleased to announce there was nothing—not even a traffic citation. We asked our friends across the border in Italy to do the same thing. Once again, there was nothing recorded against you. But our Italian friends told us something more interesting. It seems that a Mario Delvecchio, born 23 September 1951, died in Turin twenty-three years ago of lymphatic cancer.” He looked up from the paper and fixed his gaze on Gabriel. “What do you think are the odds of two men having precisely the same name and the same date of birth?”

“How should I know?”

“I think they’re very long indeed. I think there is only one Mario Delvecchio, and you stole his identity in order to obtain an Italian passport. I don’t believe
your name is Mario Delvecchio. In fact, I’m quite certain it isn’t. I believe your name is Gabriel Allon, and that you work for the Israeli secret service.”

Peterson smiled for the first time, not a pleasant smile, more like a tear in a scrap of paper.

“Twenty-five years ago, you murdered a Palestinian playwright living in Zurich named Ali Abdel Hamidi. You slipped out of the country an hour after the killing and were probably back home in your bed in Tel Aviv before midnight. This time, I’m afraid you’re not going anywhere.”

ZURICH

S
OMETIME AFTER MIDNIGHT
Gabriel was moved from the interrogation room to a holding cell in an adjacent wing of the building. It was small and institutional gray, with a bare mattress mounted on a steel frame and a rust-stained toilet that never stopped running. Overhead, a single lightbulb buzzed behind a mesh cage. His untouched dinner—a fatty pork sausage, some wilted greens, and a pile of greasy potatoes—sat on the ground next to the door like room service waiting to be collected. Gabriel supposed the pork sausage had been Peterson’s idea of a joke.

He tried to picture the events he knew were taking place outside these walls. Peterson had contacted his superior, his superior had contacted the Foreign Ministry. By now word had probably reached Tel Aviv. The prime minister would be livid. He had enough problems: the West Bank in flames, the peace process in tatters, his brittle coalition crumbling. The last thing he
needed was a
kidon,
even a former
kidon,
behind bars in Switzerland—yet another Office scandal waiting to explode across the front pages of the world’s newspapers.

And so the lights were certainly burning with urgency tonight in the anonymous office block on Tel Aviv’s King Saul Boulevard. And Shamron? Had the call gone out to his lakeside fortress in Tiberias? Was he in or out these days? It was always hard to tell with Shamron. He’d been dug out of his precarious retirement three or four times, called back to deal with this crisis or that, tapped to serve on some dubious advisory panel or to sit in wizened judgment on a supposedly independent fact-finding committee. Not long ago he’d been appointed interim chief of the service, the position he’d held the first time he was sent into the Judean wilderness of retirement. Gabriel wondered whether that term had ended. With Shamron the word
interim
could mean a hundred days or a hundred years. He was Polish by birth but had a Bedouin’s elastic sense of time. Gabriel was Shamron’s
kidon.
Shamron would handle it, retired or not.

The old man . . .
He’d always been “the old man,” even during his brief fling with middle age.
Where’s the old man? Anyone seen the old man? Run for the hills! The old man is coming this way!
Now he
was
an old man, but in Gabriel’s mind’s eye he always appeared as the menacing little figure who’d come to see him one afternoon in September 1972 between classes at Betsal’el. An iron bar of a man. You could almost hear him clanking as he walked. He had known everything about Gabriel. That he had been raised on an agricultural kibbutz in the Jezreel Valley and that he had a passionate hatred of farming. That he was something
of a lone wolf, even though he was already married at the time to a fellow art student named Leah Savir. That his mother had found the strength to survive Auschwitz but was no match for the cancer that ravaged her body; that his father had survived Auschwitz too but was no match for the Egyptian artillery shell that blew him to bits in the Sinai. Shamron knew from Gabriel’s military service that he was nearly as good with a gun as he was with a paintbrush.

“You watch the news?”

“I paint.”

“You know about Munich? You know what happened to our boys there?”

“Yeah, I heard.”

“You’re not upset by it?”

“Of course, but I’m not more upset because they’re athletes or because it’s the Olympics.”

“You can still be angry.”

“At who?”

“At the Palestinians. At the Black September terrorists who walk around with the blood of your people on their hands.”

“I never get angry.”

And though Gabriel did not realize it at the time, those words had sealed Shamron’s commitment to him, and the seduction was begun.

“You speak languages, yes?”

“A few.”

“A few?”

“My parents didn’t like Hebrew, so they spoke the languages from Europe.”

“Which ones?”

“You know already. You know all about me. Don’t play games with me.”

And so Shamron decided to play his pickup line. Golda had ordered Shamron to “send forth the boys” to take down the Black September bastards who had carried out this bloodbath. The operation was to be called Wrath of God. It was not about justice, Shamron had said. It was about taking an eye for an eye. It was about revenge, pure and simple.

“Sorry, not interested.”

“Not interested? Do you know how many boys in this country would give anything to be part of this team?”