by Daniel Silva
“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.”
4
ZURICH
SOMETIME 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?”
“Go ask them.”
“I don’t want them. I want you.”
“Why me?”
“Because you have gifts. You have languages. You have a clear head. You don’t drink, and you don’t smoke hash. You’re not a crazy who’s going to go off half-cocked.”
And because you have the emotional coldness of a killer, Shamron thought, although he didn’t say these words to Gabriel then. Instead, he told him a story, the story of a young intelligence officer who had been chosen for a special mission because he had a gift, an unusually powerful grip for so small a man. The story of a night in a Buenos Aires suburb, when this young intelligence officer had seen a man waiting at a bus stop. Waiting like an ordinary
man, Gabriel. An ordinary, pathetic little man. And how this young intelligence officer had leapt from a car and grabbed the man by the throat and how he had sat on him as the car drove away and how he had smelled the stink of fear on his breath. The same stink the Jews had emitted as this pathetic little man sent them off to the gas chambers. And the story worked, as Shamron had known it would. Because Gabriel was the only son of two Auschwitz survivors, and their scars were his.
He was suddenly very tired. Imagine, all those years, all those killings, and now he was behind bars for the first time, for a murder he did not commit. Thou shalt not get caught! Shamron’s Eleventh Commandment. Thou shalt do anything to avoid being arrested. Thou shalt shed the blood of innocents if necessary. No, thought Gabriel. Thou shalt not shed innocent blood.
He squeezed his eyes shut and tried to sleep but it was no good: Peterson’s incessant light. The lights were surely burning on King Saul Boulevard too. And a call would go out. Don’t wake him, thought Gabriel, because I don’t ever want to see his lying face again. Let him sleep. Let the old man sleep.
IT was a few minutes after 8 A.M. when Peterson entered Gabriel’s cell. Gabriel knew this not because Peterson bothered to tell him but because he managed a glance at the face of Peterson’s big diver’s watch as Peterson tipped coffee into his mouth.
“I’ve spoken to your chief.”
He paused to see if his words provoked any response, but Gabriel remained silent. His position was that he was an art restorer, nothing more, and that Herr Peterson was suffering from a case of temporary insanity.
“He did me the professional courtesy of not trying to lie his way out of this situation. I appreciate the way he handled things. But it seems Bern has no appetite to pursue this matter further.”
“Which matter is that?”
“The matter of your involvement in the murder of Ali Hamidi,” Peterson said coldly. Gabriel had the impression he was struggling to control violent thoughts. “Since prosecuting you for your role in the Rolfe affair would inevitably reveal your sordid past, we have no choice but to drop charges against you in that matter as well.”
Peterson clearly disagreed with the decision of his masters in Bern.
“Your government has assured us that you are no longer a member of any branch of Israeli intelligence and that you did not come to Zurich in any official capacity. My government has chosen to accept these assurances at face value. It has no stomach for allowing Switzerland to become a stage for the Israelis and the Palestinians to relive the horrors of the past.”
“When do I get to leave?”
“A representative of your government will collect you.”
“I’d like to change my clothes. May I have my suitcase?”
“No.”
Peterson stood up, straightened his tie, and smoothed his hair. Gabriel thought it was an oddly intimate thing for one man to do in front of another. Then he walked to the door, knocked once, and waited for the guard to unlock it.
“I don’t like murderers, Mr. Allon. Especially when they kill for a government. One of the conditions of your release is that you never set foot in Switzerland again. If you come back here, I’ll see to it that you never leave.”
The door opened. Peterson started to leave, then turned and faced Gabriel.
“It’s a shame about what happened to your wife and son in Vienna. It must be very hard living with a memory like that. I suppose sometimes you wish it had been you in the car instead of them. Good day, Mr. Allon.”
IT was late afternoon by the time Peterson finally saw fit to release him. Sergeant-Major Baer escorted Gabriel from his holding cell, performing this task silently, as though Gabriel was bound for the gallows instead of freedom. Baer surrendered Gabriel’s suitcase, his restoration supplies, and a thick honey-colored envelope containing his personal effects. Gabriel spent a long moment taking careful inventory of his things. Baer looked at his watch as if pressing matters were tugging at him. The clothing in Gabriel’s suitcase had been dumped, searched, and stuffed haphazardly back into place. Someone had spilled a flask of arcosolve in his case. Baer tilted his head—Sorry, dear man, but these things happen when one bumps up against police officers.
Outside, in the misty courtyard, stood a black Mercedes sedan surrounded by a half-dozen uniformed officers. In the windows of the surrounding buildings stood policemen and secretaries come to see the Israeli assassin led away. As Gabriel approached the car, the rear door opened and a cloud of cigarette smoke billowed forth. A glimpse into the shadowed backseat established the source.
He stopped in his tracks, a move that seemed to take Baer completely by surprise. Then, reluctantly, he started walking again and climbed into the backseat. Baer closed the door, and the car immediately pulled away, the tires slipping over the wet cobblestones. Shamron didn’t look at him. Shamron was gazing out the window, his eyes on the next battlefield, his thoughts on the next campaign.
5
ZURICH
TO GET TO Kloten Airport it was necessary to make the ascent up the Zürichberg one more time. As they breasted the summit, the graceful villas receded and they entered a river flatland scarred by ugly modular strip malls. They moved slowly along a clogged two-lane commuter road as the afternoon sun tried to fight its way out of the clouds. A car was following them. The man on the passenger side could have been Peterson.
Ari Shamron had come to Zurich in an official capacity, but in dress and manner he had assumed the identity of Herr Heller, the cover he used for his frequent European travels. Herr Rudolf Heller of Heller Enterprises, Ltd., an international venture capital firm with offices in London, Paris, Berlin, Bern, and Nassau. His multitude of critics might have said that Heller Enterprises specialized in murder and mayhem, blackmail and betrayal. Heller Enterprises was an Old Economy firm, the critics said. What King Saul Boulevard needed to shake off its long winter of despair was a New Economy chief for the New Economy world. But Herr Heller clung to the keys of the executive suite with one of his patented vise grips, and few in Israel, prime ministers included, could muster the courage to wrest them away from him.
To his brotherhood of devoted acolytes, Shamron was a legend. Once Gabriel had been among them. But Shamron was also a liar, an unrepentant, unreconstructed liar. He lied as a matter of course, lied because he knew no other way, and he had lied to Gabriel time and time again. For a time their relationship had been like that of a father and a son. But the father became like a man who gambles or drinks or sleeps with many women and is forced to lie to his children, and now Gabriel hated him the way only a son can hate his father.
“What are you doing here? Why didn’t you just send someone from Bern station to pick me up?”
“Because you’re too important to entrust to someone from the station.” Shamron lit another one of his vile Turkish cigarettes and violently snapped the lighter closed. “Besides, Herr Peterson and his friends from the Foreign Ministry made my appearance here a condition of your release. The Swiss love to yell at me when one of our agents gets in trouble. I’m not sure why. I suppose it reinforces their superiority complex—makes them feel better for their past sins.”
“Who’s Peterson?”
“Gerhardt Peterson works for the Division of Analysis and Protection.”
“What the hell is that?”
“The new name for Switzerland’s internal security service. It has responsibility for national security matters, counterintelligence, and investigating Swiss citizens suspected of treason. Peterson is the number-two man in the division. He oversees all operations.”
“How did you convince him to let me go?”
“I played the subservient Jew. I gave them the usual promises that we would not operate on Swiss soil without first consulting Herr Peterson and his superiors in the Swiss security service. I also told them about a certain Swiss arms-maker who’s flogging bomb triggers to terrorists on the open market. I suggested that they see to the situation themselves before someone takes matt
ers into their own hands.”
“You always have an ace in the hole.”
“It’s been my experience that one can never be too prepared.”
“I thought your term was over.”
“It was supposed to end six months ago, but the prime minister asked me to stay on. Given the current situation in the territories, we both agreed that now was not the time for a change of leadership at King Saul Boulevard.”
Shamron had probably engineered the uprising himself, thought Gabriel. What better way to make himself indispensable? No, that was beyond even Shamron.
“My offer still stands.”
“Which offer is that?”
“Deputy director for operations.”
“No, thank you.”
Shamron shrugged. “Tell me what happened. I want to hear it all, from beginning to end.”
Gabriel so mistrusted Shamron that he considered giving him an abridged account of the affair, based on the theory that the less Shamron knew about anything, the better. But at least it would give them something new to talk about instead of refighting old wars, so Gabriel told him everything, starting with his arrival on the overnight train from Paris and ending with his arrest and interrogation. Shamron looked out the window as Gabriel spoke, turning over his lighter in his fingers: clockwise, counterclockwise, clockwise, counterclockwise…
“Did you see the body?”
“Very professional, one shot through the eye. He was probably dead before he hit the ground. A coup de grâce wasn’t necessary.”
“Did the police ever hit you?”
“No.”
Shamron seemed disappointed by this.
Gabriel said, “Peterson told me the case was dropped because of pressure from Bern.”
“Perhaps, but there was no way Peterson was ever going to hang the Ali Hamidi job on you. Prosecuting anyone on a twenty-five-year-old murder is hard enough. Prosecuting a professional—” He shrugged his shoulders, as if to say such things are just not done. “The Hamidi job was a work of art. No witnesses, no evidence.”