by Daniel Silva
“They were gone.”
“That’s not possible.”
“Someone must have gotten to them first.”
“Did you find anything else?”
I found a photograph of your father with Adolf Hitler and Heinrich Himmler, admiring the view from the Berghof at Berchtesgaden.
“No,” Gabriel said. “I didn’t find anything else.”
“Are you sure about that? You didn’t use the opportunity to rifle through any of my father’s personal papers?”
Gabriel ignored her. “Did your father smoke?”
“Why does that matter now?”
“Just answer the question, please. Did your father smoke?”
“Yes, my father smoked!”
“What kind of cigarettes?”
“Benson and Hedges.”
“Did he ever smoke Silk Cuts?”
“He was very set in his ways.”
“What about someone else in the household?”
“Not that I know of. Why do you ask?”
“Because someone was smoking Silk Cuts in your father’s study recently.”
They came to the lake. Anna pulled to the side of the street. “Where are we going?”
“You’re going back to Portugal.”
“No, I’m not. We do this together, or not at all.” She dropped the Audi into gear. “Where are we going?”
26
LYONS
SOME MEN MIGHT be squeamish about installing a voice-activated taping system in their home. Professor Emil Jacobi was not one of them. His life was his work, and he had little time for anything else; certainly nothing that might cause him any embarrassment if it was captured on audiotape.
He received a steady stream of visitors to his flat on the rue Lanterne: people with unpleasant memories of the past; stories they had heard about the war. Just last week, an old woman had told him about a train that had stopped outside her village in 1944. She and a group of friends were playing in the meadow next to the tracks when they heard moans and scratches coming from the cargo cars. When they moved closer, they saw that there were people on the train: miserable, wretched people, begging for food and water. The old woman realized now that the people were Jews—and that her country had allowed the Nazis to use its railways to ship human cargo to the death camps in the East.
If Jacobi had tried to document her story by taking handwritten notes, he would have failed to capture it all. If he had placed a tape recorder in front of her, she might have become self-conscious. It had been Jacobi’s experience that most elderly were nervous around tape recorders and video cameras. And so they had sat in the cluttered comfort of his flat like old friends, and the old woman had told her story without the distraction of a notebook or a visible tape recorder. Jacobi’s secret system had caught every word of it.
The professor was listening to a tape now. As usual, the volume was set quite loud. He found it helped to focus his concentration by blocking out the noise from the street and the students who lived in the next flat. The voice emanating from his machine was not that of the old woman. It was the voice of a man: the man who had come the previous day. Gabriel Allon. An amazing story, this tale of Augustus Rolfe and his missing collection of paintings. Jacobi had promised the Israeli he would tell no one about their discussion, but when the story broke, as Jacobi knew it eventually would, he would be perfectly positioned to write about it. It would be yet another black eye for Jacobi’s mortal enemies, the financial oligarchy of Zurich. His popularity in his native country would sink to new depths. This pleased him. Flushing sewers was dirty work.
Emil Jacobi was engrossed in the story now, as he had been the first time he had heard it; so engrossed that he failed to notice the figure who had slipped into his flat—until it was too late. Jacobi opened his mouth to call out for help, but the man smothered his cry with an iron grip. The professor spotted the glint of a knife blade arcing toward him, then felt a searing pain across the base of his throat. The last thing he saw was his killer, picking up the tape player and slipping it into his pocket as he walked out.
27
VIENNA
ON THE WESTERN FRINGES of Vienna, Gabriel had to grip the wheel tightly to keep his hands from shaking. He had not been back to the city since the night of the bombing—since the night of fire and blood and a thousand lies. He heard a siren and was uncertain whether it was real or just memory until the blue lights of an ambulance flashed in his mirror. He pulled to the side of the road, his heart hammering against his ribs. He remembered riding with Leah in an ambulance and praying that she would be released from the pain of her burns, no matter what the price. He remembered sitting over the shattered body of his son while, in the next room, the chief of the Austrian security service screamed at Ari Shamron for turning central Vienna into a war zone.
He pulled back into the traffic. The discipline of driving helped to settle his turbulent emotions. Five minutes later, in the Stephansdom Quarter, he stopped outside a souvenir shop. Anna opened her eyes.
“Where are you going?”
“Wait here.”
He went inside, and returned to the car two minutes later with a plastic shopping bag. He handed it to Anna. She removed both items: a pair of large sunglasses and a baseball hat with VIENNA! stenciled across the crown.
“What am I supposed to do with these?”
“Do you remember what happened at the airport in Lisbon the night you showed me your father’s missing collection?”
“It’s been a long night, Gabriel. Refresh my memory.”
“A woman stopped you and asked for your autograph.”
“It happens all the time.”
“My point exactly. Put them on.”
She placed the sunglasses over her eyes and tucked her hair beneath the hat. She examined her own appearance in the vanity mirror for a moment, then turned to look at him.
“How do I look?”
“Like a famous person trying to hide behind a pair of large sunglasses and a stupid hat,” he said wearily. “But it will have to do for now.”
He drove to a hotel on the Weihburggasse called the Kaiserin Elisabeth and checked in under the name of Schmidt. They were given a room with floors the color of honey. Anna fell onto the bed, still wearing the hat and glasses.
Gabriel went into the bathroom and looked at his face for a long time in the mirror. He lifted his right hand to his nose, smelled gunpowder and fire, and saw the faces of the two men he had killed at the Rolfe villa in Zurich. He ran warm water into the basin, washed his hands and his neck. Suddenly the bathroom was filled with ghosts—pallid, lifeless men with bullet holes in their faces and their chests. He looked down and found that the basin was filled with their blood. He wiped his hands on a towel, but it was no good—the blood still was there. Then the room began to spin, and he fell to his knees over the toilet.
WHEN he returned to the bedroom, Anna’s eyes were closed. “Are you all right?” she murmured.
“I’m going out. Don’t go anywhere. Don’t open the door for anyone but me.”
“You won’t be long, will you?”
“Not too long.”
“I’ll wait up for you,” she said, drifting closer toward sleep.
“Whatever you say.”
And then she was asleep. Gabriel covered her with a blanket and went out.
DOWNSTAIRS in the lobby, Gabriel told the officious Viennese desk clerk that Frau Schmidt was not to be disturbed. The clerk nodded briskly, as if to give the impression that he would lay down his life to prevent anyone from interrupting Frau Schmidt’s rest. Gabriel pushed a few schilling across the counter and went out.
He walked in the Stephansplatz, checking his tail for surveillance, storing faces in his memory. Then he entered the cathedral and drifted through the tourists across the nave until he came to a side altar. He looked up at the altarpiece, a depiction of the martyrdom of Saint Stephen. Gabriel had completed a restoration of the painting the night Leah’s car was b
ombed. His work had held up well. Only when he cocked his head to create the effect of raked lighting could he tell the difference between his inpainting and the original.
He turned and scanned the faces of the people standing behind him. He recognized none of them. But something else struck him. Each one of them was transfixed by the beauty of the altarpiece. At least something good had come of his time in Vienna. He took one last look at the painting, then left the cathedral and headed for the Jewish Quarter.
ADOLF Hitler’s barbarous dream of ridding Vienna of its Jews had largely succeeded. Before the war some two hundred thousand had lived here, many of them in the warren of streets around the Judenplatz. Now there were but a few thousand left, mainly newer arrivals from the East, and the old Jewish Quarter had been transformed into a strip of boutiques, restaurants, and nightclubs. Among Viennese it was known as the Bermuda Triangle.
Gabriel walked past the shuttered bars along the Sterngasse, then turned into a winding walkway that ended in a staircase of stone. At the top of the stairs was a heavy studded door. Next to the door was a small brass plaque: WARTIME CLAIMS AND INQUIRIES—APPOINTMENTS ONLY. He pressed the bell.
“May I help you?”
“I’d like to see Mr. Lavon, please.”
“Do you have an appointment?”
“No.”
“Mr. Lavon doesn’t accept unscheduled visitors.”
“I’m afraid it’s an emergency.”
“May I have your name, please?”
“Tell him it’s Gabriel Allon. He’ll remember me.”
THE room into which Gabriel was shown was classic Viennese in its proportions and furnishings: a high ceiling, a polished wood floor catching the light streaming through the tall windows, bookshelves sagging beneath the weight of countless volumes and files. Lavon seemed lost in it. But then, disappearing into the background was Lavon’s special gift.
At the moment, however, he was balanced precariously atop a library ladder, flipping through the contents of a bulging file and muttering to himself. The light from the windows cast a greenish glow over him, and it was then Gabriel realized that the glass was bulletproof. Lavon looked up suddenly, tipping his head downward in order to see over the pair of smudged half-moon reading glasses perched at the end of his nose. Cigarette ash dropped into the file. He seemed not to notice, because he closed the file and slipped it back into its slot on the shelf and smiled.
“Gabriel Allon! Shamron’s avenging angel. My God, what are you doing here?”
He climbed down the ladder like a man with old pains. As always, he seemed to be wearing all his clothing at once: a blue button-down shirt, a beige rollneck sweater, a cardigan, a floppy herringbone jacket that seemed a size too large. He had shaved carelessly, and wore socks but no shoes.
He held Gabriel’s hands and kissed his cheek. How long had it been? Twenty-five years, thought Gabriel. In the lexicon of the Wrath of God operation, Lavon had been an ayin, a tracker. An archaeologist by training, he had stalked members of Black September, learned their habits, and devised ways of killing them. He had been a brilliant watcher, a chameleon who could blend into any surroundings. The operation took a terrible physical and psychological toll on all of them, but Gabriel remembered that Lavon had suffered the most. Working alone in the field, exposed to his enemies for long periods of time, he had developed a chronic stomach disorder that stripped thirty pounds from his lean frame. When it was over, Lavon took an assistant professorship at Hebrew University and spent his weekends on digs in the West Bank. Soon he heard other voices. Like Gabriel, he was a child of Holocaust survivors. Searching for ancient relics seemed trivial when there was so much still to be unearthed about the immediate past. He settled in Vienna and put his formidable talents to work in another way: tracking down Nazis and their looted treasure.
“So, what brings you to Vienna? Business? Pleasure?”
“Augustus Rolfe.”
“Rolfe? The banker?” Lavon lowered his head and glared at Gabriel over his glasses. “Gabriel, you weren’t the one who—” He made a gun of his right hand.
Gabriel unzipped his jacket, removed the envelope he had taken from Rolfe’s desk, and handed it to Lavon. Carefully he pried open the flap, as if he were handling a fragment of ancient ceramic, and removed the contents. He glanced at the first photograph, then the second, his face revealing nothing. Then he looked up at Gabriel and smiled.
“Well, well, Herr Rolfe takes a lovely photograph. Where did you get these, Gabriel?”
“From the old man’s desk in Zurich.”
He held up the sheaf of documents. “And these?”
“Same place.”
Lavon looked at the photographs again. “Fantastic.”
“What do they mean?”
“I need to pull a few files. I’ll have the girls get you some coffee and something to eat. We’re going to be a while.”
THEY sat across from each other at a rectangular conference table, a stack of files between them. Gabriel wondered about the people who had come before him: old men convinced the man in the flat next door was one of their tormentors at Buchenwald; children trying to pry open a numbered account in Switzerland where their father had hidden his life savings before being shipped east into the archipelago of death. Lavon picked up one of the photographs—Rolfe seated in a restaurant next to the man with dueling scars on his cheeks—and held it up for Gabriel to see.
“Do you recognize this man?”
“No.”
“His name is Walter Schellenberg, Brigadeführer SS.” Lavon took the top file from the stack and spread it on the table before him. “Walter Schellenberg was the head of Department Four of the Reich Security Main Office. Department Four handled foreign intelligence, which effectively made Schellenberg the international spymaster of the Nazi Party. He was involved in some of the most dramatic intelligence episodes of the war: the Venlo Incident, the attempt to kidnap the Duke of Windsor, and the Cicero operation. At Nuremberg he was convicted of being a member of the SS, but he received a light sentence of just six years in prison.”
“Six years? Why?”
“Because during the last months of the war he arranged for the release of a few Jews from the death camps.”
“How did he manage that?”
“He sold them.”
“So why was the spymaster of the Nazi Party having dinner with Augustus Rolfe?”
“Intelligence services the world over have one thing in common: They all run on money. Even Shamron couldn’t survive without money. But when Shamron needs money, he just lays a hand on the shoulder of a rich friend and tells him the story of how he captured Eichmann. Schellenberg had a special problem. His money was no good anywhere outside Germany. He needed a banker in a neutral country who could provide him with hard currency and then transfer that money through a dummy company or some other front to his agents. Schellenberg needed a man like Augustus Rolfe.”
Lavon picked up the documents Gabriel had taken from Rolfe’s desk. “Take this transaction. Fifteen hundred pounds sterling, wired from the accounts of Pillar Enterprises Limited to the account of a Mr. Ivan Edberg, Enskilde Bank, Stockholm, the twenty-third of October, 1943.”
Gabriel inspected the document, then slid it back across the table.
“Sweden was neutral, of course, and a hotbed of wartime intelligence,” Lavon said. “Schellenberg surely had an agent there, if not an entire network. I suspect Mr. Edberg was one of those agents. Perhaps the leader and paymaster of the network.”
Lavon slipped the transfer order back into the pile and removed another. He peered down at it through his reading glasses, squinting from the smoke of the cigarette between his lips.
“Another transfer order: one thousand pounds sterling from the account of Pillar Enterprises Limited to a Mr. Jose Suarez, care of the Bank of Lisbon.” Lavon lowered the paper and looked up at Gabriel. “Portugal, like Sweden, was neutral, and Lisbon was an amusement park for spies. Schellenberg operated
there himself during the Duke of Windsor affair.”
“So Rolfe was Schellenberg’s secret banker. But how does that explain the photograph of Rolfe at Berchtesgaden with Himmler and Hitler?”
Lavon prepared his next cup of coffee with the reverence of a true Viennese: a precise measure of heavy cream, just enough sugar to remove the bitter edge. Gabriel thought of Lavon in a safe flat in Paris, living on mineral water and weak tea because his ravaged stomach would tolerate nothing else.
“Everything changed inside Germany after Stalingrad. Even the true believers knew it was over. The Russians were coming from the east, the invasion from the west was inevitable. Anyone who’d accumulated wealth as a result of the war wanted desperately to hang onto that wealth. And where do you think they turned?”
“The bankers of Switzerland.”
“And Augustus Rolfe would have been in a unique position to capitalize on the changing tide of the war. Based on these documents, it appears as though he was an important agent of Walter Schellenberg. I suspect the Nazi bigwigs would have held Herr Rolfe in very high esteem.”
“Someone who could be trusted to look after their money?”
“Their money. Their stolen treasures. All of it.”
“What about the list of names and the account numbers?”
“I think it’s safe to assume that those are German clients. I’ll run them through our database and see if they correspond with known members of the SS and the Nazi Party, but I suspect they’re pseudonyms.”
“Would there be any other record of the accounts in the bank’s files?”
Lavon shook his head. “Typically, the real identities of holders of numbered accounts are known by only the top officers of a bank. The more notorious the customer, the fewer people who know the name attached to the account number. If these accounts belonged to Nazis, I doubt whether anyone knew about them but Rolfe.”
“If he kept the list after all these years, does it mean the accounts still exist?”