by Daniel Silva
The restorer’s gait was smooth and seemingly without effort. The slight outward bend to his legs suggested speed and surefootedness. The face was long and narrow at the chin, with a slender nose that looked as if it had been carved from wood. The cheekbones were wide, and there was a hint of the Russian steppes in the restless green eyes. The black hair was cropped short and shot with gray at the temples. It was a face of many possible national origins, and the restorer possessed the linguistic gifts to put it to good use. In Venice, he was known as Mario Delvecchio. It was not his real name.
The altarpiece was concealed behind a tarpaulin-draped scaffold. The restorer took hold of the aluminum tubing and climbed silently upward. His work platform was as he had left it the previous afternoon: his brushes and his palette, his pigments and his medium. He switched on a bank of fluorescent lamps. The painting, the last of Giovanni Bellini’s great altarpieces, glowed under the intense lighting. At the left side of the image stood Saint Christopher, the Christ Child straddling his shoulders. Opposite stood Saint Louis of Toulouse, a crosier in hand, a bishop’s miter atop his head, his shoulders draped in a cape of red and gold brocade. Above it all, on a second parallel plane, Saint Jerome sat before an open Book of Psalms, framed by a vibrant blue sky streaked with gray-brown clouds. Each saint was separated from the other, alone before God, the isolation so complete it was almost painful to observe. It was an astonishing piece of work for a man in his eighties.
The restorer stood motionless before the towering panel, like a fourth figure rendered by Bellini’s skilled hand, and allowed his mind to float away into the landscape. After a moment he poured a puddle of Mowolith 20 medium onto his palette, added pigment, then thinned the mixture with Arcosolve until the consistency and intensity felt right.
He looked up again at the painting. The warmth and richness of the colors had led the art historian Raimond Van Marle to conclude the hand of Titian was clearly in evidence. The restorer believed Van Marle, with all due respect, was sadly mistaken. He had retouched works by both artists and knew their brushwork like the sun lines around his own eyes. The altarpiece in the Church of San Giovanni Crisostomo was Bellini’s and Bellini’s alone. Besides, at the time of its production, Titian was desperately attempting to replace Bellini as Venice’s most important painter. The restorer sincerely doubted Giovanni would have invited the young headstrong Titian to assist in so important a commission. Van Marle, had he done his homework, would have saved himself the embarrassment of so ludicrous an opinion.
The restorer slipped on a pair of Binomags and focused on the rose-colored tunic of Saint Christopher. The painting had suffered from decades of neglect, wild temperature swings, and the continuous onslaught of incense and candle smoke. Christopher’s garments had lost much of their original luster and were scarred by the islands of pentimenti that had pushed their way to the surface. The restorer had been granted authority to carry out an aggressive repair. His mission was to restore the painting to its original glory. His challenge was to do so without making it look as though it had been churned out by a counterfeiter. In short, he wished to come and go leaving no trace of his presence, to make it appear as if the retouching had been performed by Bellini himself.
For two hours, the restorer worked alone, the silence broken only by the shuffle of feet outside in the street and the rattle of rising aluminum storefronts. The interruptions began at ten o’clock with the arrival of the renowned Venetian altar cleaner, Adrianna Zinetti. She poked her head around the restorer’s shroud and wished him a pleasant morning. Annoyed, he raised his magnifying visor and peered down over the edge of his platform. Adrianna had positioned herself in such a way that it was impossible to avoid gazing down the front of her blouse at her extraordinary breasts. The restorer nodded solemnly, then watched her slither up her scaffolding with feline assurance. Adrianna knew he was living with another woman, a Jewess from the old ghetto, yet she still flirted with him at every opportunity, as if one more suggestive glance, or one more “accidental” touch, would be the one to topple his defenses. Still, he envied the simplicity with which she viewed the world. Adrianna loved art and Venetian food and being adored by men. Little else mattered to her.
A young restorer called Antonio Politi came next, wearing sunglasses and looking hung over, a rock star arriving for yet another interview he wished to cancel. Antonio did not bother to wish the restorer good morning. Their dislike was mutual. For the Crisostomo project, Antonio had been assigned Sebastiano del Piombo’s main altarpiece. The restorer believed the boy was not ready for the piece, and each evening, before leaving the church, he secretly scaled Antonio’s platform to inspect his work.
Francesco Tiepolo, the chief of the San Giovanni Crisostomo project, was the last to arrive, a shambling, bearded figure, dressed in a flowing white shirt and silk scarf round his thick neck. On the streets of Venice, tourists mistook him for Luciano Pavarotti. Venetians rarely made such a mistake, for Francesco Tiepolo ran the most successful restoration company in the entire Veneto region. Among the Venetian art set, he was an institution.
“Buongiorno,” Tiepolo sang, his cavernous voice echoing high in the central dome. He seized the restorer’s platform with his large hand and gave it one violent shake. The restorer peered over the side like a gargoyle.
“You almost ruined an entire morning’s work, Francesco.”
“That’s why we use isolating varnish.” Tiepolo held up a white paper sack. “Cornetto?”
“Come on up.”
Tiepolo put a foot on the first rung of the scaffolding and pulled himself up. The restorer could hear the aluminum tubing straining under Tiepolo’s enormous weight. Tiepolo opened the sack, handed the restorer an almond cornetto, and took one for himself. Half of it disappeared in one bite. The restorer sat on the edge of the platform with his feet dangling over the side. Tiepolo stood before the altarpiece and examined his work.
“If I didn’t know better, I would have thought old Giovanni slipped in here last night and did the inpainting himself.”
“That’s the idea, Francesco.”
“Yes, but few people have the gifts to actually pull it off.” The rest of the cornetto disappeared into his mouth. He brushed powdered sugar from his beard. “When will it be finished?”
“Three months, maybe four.”
“From my vantage point, three months would be better than four. But heaven forbid I should rush the great Mario Del vecchio. Any travel plans?”
The restorer glared at Tiepolo over the cornetto and slowly shook his head. A year earlier, he had been forced to confess his true name and occupation to Tiepolo. The Italian had preserved that trust by never revealing the information to another soul, though from time to time, when they were alone, he still asked the restorer to speak a few words of Hebrew, just to remind himself that the legendary Mario Delvecchio truly was an Israeli from the Valley of Jezreel named Gabriel Allon.
A sudden downpour hammered on the roof of the church. From atop the platform, high in the apse of the chapel, it sounded like a drum roll. Tiepolo raised his hands toward the heavens in supplication.
“Another storm. God help us. They say the acqua alta could reach five feet. I still haven’t dried out from the last one. I love this place, but even I don’t know how much longer I can take it.”
It had been a particularly difficult season for high water. Venice had flooded more than fifty times, and three months of winter still remained. Gabriel’s house had been inundated so many times that he’d moved everything off the ground floor and was installing a waterproof barrier around his doors and windows.
“You’ll die in Venice, just like Bellini,” Gabriel said. “And I’ll bury you beneath a cypress tree on San Michele, in an enormous crypt befitting a man of your achievements.”
Tiepolo seemed pleased with this image, even though he knew that, like most modern Venetians, he would have to suffer the indignity of a mainland burial.
“And what about you, Mario? Where
will you die?”
“With a bit of luck, it will be at the time and place of my own choosing. That’s about the best a man like me can hope for.”
“Just do me one favor.”
“What’s that?”
Tiepolo gazed at the scarred painting. “Finish the altarpiece before you die. You owe it to Giovanni.”
THE FLOOD SIRENS atop the Basilica San Marco cried out a few minutes after four o’clock. Gabriel hurriedly cleaned his brushes and his palette, but by the time he’d descended his scaffolding and crossed the nave to the front portal, the street was already running with several inches of floodwater.
He went back inside. Like most Venetians, he owned several pairs of rubber Wellington boots, which he stored at strategic points in his life, ready to be deployed at a moment’s notice. The pair he kept in the church were his first. They’d been lent to him by Umberto Conti, the master Venetian restorer with whom Gabriel had served his apprenticeship. Gabriel had tried countless times to return them, but Umberto would never take them back. Keep them, Mario, along with the skills I’ve given you. They will serve you well, I promise.
He pulled on Umberto’s faded old boots and cloaked himself in a green waterproof poncho. A moment later he was wading through the shin-deep waters of the Salizzada San Giovanni Crisostomo like an olive-drab ghost. In the Strada Nova, the wooden gangplanks known as passerelle had yet to be laid down by the city’s sanitation workers—a bad sign, Gabriel knew, for it meant the flooding was forecast to be so severe the passerelle would float away.
By the time he reached the Rio Terrà San Leonardo, the water was nearing his boot tops. He turned into an alley, quiet except for the sloshing of the waters, and followed it to a temporary wooden footbridge spanning the Rio di Ghetto Nuovo. A ring of unlit apartment houses loomed before him, notable because they were taller than any others in Venice. He waded through a swamped passageway and emerged into a large square. A pair of bearded yeshiva students crossed his path, tiptoeing across the flooded square toward the synagogue, the fringes of their tallit katan dangling against their trouser legs. He turned to his left and walked to the doorway at No. 2899. A small brass plaque read COMUNITÀ EBRÀICA DI VENEZIA: JEWISH COMMUNITY OF VENICE. He pressed the bell and was greeted by an old woman’s voice over the intercom.
“It’s Mario.”
“She’s not here.”
“Where is she?”
“Helping out at the bookstore. One of the girls was sick.”
He entered a glass doorway a few paces away and lowered his hood. To his left was the entrance of the ghetto’s modest museum; to the right an inviting little bookstore, warm and brightly lit. A girl with short blond hair was perched on a stool behind the counter, hurriedly cashing out the register before the setting of the sun made it impossible for her to handle money. Her name was Valentina. She smiled at Gabriel and pointed the tip of her pencil toward the large floor-to-ceiling window overlooking the canal. A woman was on her hands and knees, soaking up water that had seeped through the allegedly watertight seals around the glass. She was strikingly beautiful.
“I told them those seals would never hold,” Gabriel said. “It was a waste of money.”
Chiara looked up sharply. Her hair was dark and curly and shimmering with highlights of auburn and chestnut. Barely constrained by a clasp at the nape of her neck, it spilled riotously about her shoulders. Her eyes were caramel and flecked with gold. They tended to change color with her mood.
“Don’t just stand there like an idiot. Get down here and help me.”
“Surely you don’t expect a man of my talent—”
The soaking white towel, thrown with surprising force and accuracy, struck him in the center of the chest. Gabriel wrung it out into a bucket and knelt next to her. “There’s been a bombing in Vienna,” Chiara whispered, her lips pressed to Gabriel’s neck. “He’s here. He wants to see you.”
THE FLOODWATERS LAPPED against the street entrance of the canal house. When Gabriel opened the door, water rippled across the marble hall. He surveyed the damage, then wearily followed Chiara up the stairs. The living room was in heavy shadow. An old man stood in the rain-spattered window overlooking the canal, as motionless as a figure in the Bellini. He wore a dark business suit and silver necktie. His bald head was shaped like a bullet; his face, deeply tanned and full of cracks and fissures, seemed to be fashioned of desert rock. Gabriel went to his side. The old man did not acknowledge him. Instead, he contemplated the rising waters of the canal, his face set in a fatalistic frown, as though he were witnessing the onset of the Great Flood come to destroy the wickedness of man. Gabriel knew that Ari Shamron was about to inform him of death. Death had joined them in the beginning, and death remained the foundation of their bond.
3
VENICE
IN THE CORRIDORS and conference rooms of the Israeli intelligence services, Ari Shamron was a legend. Indeed, he was the service made flesh. He had penetrated the courts of kings, stolen the secrets of tyrants, and killed the enemies of Israel, sometimes with his bare hands. His crowning achievement had come on a rainy night in May 1960, in a squalid suburb north of Buenos Aires, when he leapt from the back of a car and seized Adolf Eichmann.
In September 1972, Prime Minister Golda Meir had ordered him to hunt down and assassinate the Palestinian terrorists who had kidnapped and murdered eleven Israelis at the Munich Olympic Games. Gabriel, then a promising student at the Bezalel Academy of Art in Jerusalem, reluctantly joined Shamron’s venture, fittingly code-named Wrath of God. In the Hebrew-based lexicon of the operation, Gabriel was an Aleph. Armed only with a .22-caliber Beretta, he had quietly killed six men.
Shamron’s career had not been an unbroken ascent to greater glory. There had been deep valleys along the way and mistaken journeys into operational wasteland. He developed a reputation as a man who shot first and worried about the consequences later. His erratic temperament was one of his greatest assets. It struck fear into friends and enemies alike. For some politicians, Shamron’s volatility was too much to bear. Rabin often avoided his calls, fearing the news he might hear. Peres thought him a primitive and banished him into the Judean wilderness of retirement. Barak, when the Office was foundering, had rehabilitated Shamron and brought him back to right the ship.
Officially he was retired now, and his beloved Office was in the hands of a thoroughly modern and conniving technocrat called Lev. But among many quarters, Shamron would always be the Memuneh, the one in charge. The current prime minister was an old friend and fellow traveler. He’d given Shamron a vague title and just enough authority to make a general nuisance of himself. There were some at King Saul Boulevard who swore that Lev was secretly praying for Shamron’s rapid demise—and that Shamron, stubborn and steel-willed Shamron, was keeping himself alive merely to torment him.
Now, standing before the window, Shamron calmly told Gabriel what he knew about the events in Vienna. A bomb had exploded the previous evening inside Wartime Claims and Inquiries. Eli Lavon was in a deep coma in the intensive care ward of the Vienna General Hospital, the odds of survival one in two at best. His two research assistants, Reveka Gazit and Sarah Greenberg, had been killed in the blast. An offshoot of bin Laden’s al-Qaeda organization, a shadowy group called the Islamic Fighting Cells, had claimed responsibility. Shamron spoke to Gabriel in his murderously accented English. Hebrew was not permitted in the Venice canal house.
Chiara brought coffee and rugelach to the sitting room and settled herself between Gabriel and Shamron. Of the three, only Chiara was currently under Office discipline. Known as a bat leveyha, her work involved posing as the lover or spouse of a case officer in the field. Like all Office personnel, she was trained in the art of physical combat and in the use of weaponry. The fact that she had scored higher than the great Gabriel Allon on her final firing range exam was a source of some tension in their household. Her undercover assignments often required a certain intimacy with her partner, such as showing affection in res
taurants and nightclubs and sharing the same bed in hotel rooms or safe flats. Romantic relationships between case officers and escort agents were officially forbidden, but Gabriel knew that the close living quarters and natural stress of the field often drew them together. Indeed, he had once had an affair with his bat leveyha while in Tunis. She’d been a beautiful Marseilles Jew named Jacqueline Delacroix, and the affair had nearly destroyed his marriage. Gabriel, when Chiara was away, often pictured her in the bed of another man. Though not prone to jealousy, he secretly looked forward to the day King Saul Boulevard decided she was too overexposed for fieldwork.
“Who exactly are the Islamic Fighting Cells?” he asked.
Shamron made a face. “They’re small-time operators mainly, active in France and a couple of other European countries. They enjoy setting fire to synagogues, desecrating Jewish cemeteries, and beating up Jewish children on the streets of Paris.”
“Was there anything useful in the claim of responsibility?”
Shamron shook his head. “Just the usual drivel about the plight of the Palestinians and the destruction of the Zionist entity. It warns of continuous attacks against Jewish targets in Europe until Palestine is liberated.”
“Lavon’s office was a fortress. How did a group that usually uses Molotov cocktails and spray-paint cans manage to get a bomb inside Wartime Claims and Inquiries?”
Shamron accepted a cup from Chiara. “The Austrian Staatspolizei aren’t sure yet, but they believe it may have been concealed in a computer delivered to the office earlier that day.”
“Do we believe the Islamic Fighting Cells have the ability to conceal a bomb in a computer and smuggle it into a secure building in Vienna?”
Shamron stirred sugar violently into his coffee and slowly shook his head.