Gabriel Allon 01 - The Kill Artist

by Daniel Silva

  “There’s only one problem,” Shamron said.

  The prime minister glanced at the ceiling impatiently. He was fond of saying, “Bring me solutions, not problems.” Shamron had an innate distrust of men who lived by catchy maxims.

  “Benjamin Stone.”

  “What now?”

  “His business is in terrible shape. He’s robbing Peter to pay Paul, and Peter’s friends are getting upset about it.”

  “Will it affect us?”

  “If he goes under quietly, we’ll just miss his money. But if he goes under in a messy way, he could make things uncomfortable for us. I’m afraid he knows too much.”

  “Benjamin Stone never does anything quietly.”

  “Point taken.”

  “What about those lovely home movies you made of him last year at the King David?”

  “It seemed like a good idea at the time, but Stone has developed a rather high threshold for public embarrassment. I’m not sure he’s going to be terribly upset if the world sees him utilizing the services of an Israeli prostitute.”

  “The politicians outside my door are my problem,” the prime minister said. “But I’m afraid that Benjamin Stone is yours. Deal with him as you see fit.”

  PART TWO

  ASSESSMENT

  11

  Before the war Maurice Halévy was one of the most prominent lawyers in Marseilles. He and his wife, Rachel, had lived in a stately old house on the rue Sylvabelle in the Beaux Quartiers, where most of the city’s successful assimilated Jews had settled. They were proud to be French; they considered themselves French first and Jews second. Indeed, Maurice Halévy was so assimilated that he rarely bothered to go to synagogue. But when the Germans invaded, the Halévys’ idyllic life in Marseilles came to an abrupt end. In October 1940 the collaborationist Vichy government handed down the statut des Juifs, the anti-Jewish edicts that reduced Jews to second-class citizens in Vichy France. Maurice Halévy was stripped of the right to practice law. He was required to register with the police, and later he and his wife were forced to wear the Star of David on their clothing.

  The situation worsened in 1942, when the German army moved into Vichy France after the Allied invasion of North Africa. French Resistance forces carried out a series of deadly attacks on German forces. The German security police, with the help of Vichy French authorities, responded with brutal reprisal killings. Maurice Halévy could ignore the threat no longer. Rachel had become pregnant. The thought of trying to care for a newborn in the chaos of Marseilles was too much to bear. He decided to leave the city for the countryside. He used his dwindling savings to rent a cottage in the hills outside Aix-en-Provence. In January, Rachel gave birth to a son, Isaac.

  A week later the Germans and French police began rounding up the Jews. It took them a month to find Maurice and Rachel Halévy. A pair of German SS officers appeared at the cottage on a February evening, accompanied by a local gendarme. They gave the Halévys twenty minutes to pack a bag weighing no more than sixty pounds. While the Germans and the gendarme waited in the dining room, the woman from the next cottage appeared at the door.

  “My name is Anne-Marie Delacroix,” she said. “The Halévys were looking after my son while I went to the market.”

  The gendarme studied his papers. According to the documents, only two Jews lived in the cottage. He called for the Halévys and said, “This woman says the boy belongs to her. Is this the truth?”

  “Of course it is,” Maurice Halévy said, squeezing Rachel’s arm before she could utter a sound. “We were just watching the boy for the afternoon.” The gendarme looked at Maurice Halévy incredulously, then consulted the registration documents a second time. “Take the child and leave,” he snapped to the woman. “I have a good mind to take you into custody myself for entrusting a French child to the care of these dirty Jews.”

  Two months later Maurice and Rachel Halévy were murdered at Sobibor.

  After the liberation, Anne-Marie Delacroix took Isaac to a synagogue in Marseilles and told the rabbi what had happened that night in Aix-en-Provence. The rabbi offered her the choice of placing the child for adoption by a Jewish family or raising him herself. She took the boy back to Aix and raised him as a Jew alongside her own Catholic children. In 1965 Isaac Halévy married a girl from Nîmes named Deborah and settled in Marseilles in his father’s old house on the rue Sylvabelle. Three years later they had their first and only child: a girl they named Sarah.

  PARIS

  Michel Duval was the hottest fashion photographer in Paris. The designers and the magazine editors adored him because his pictures radiated an eye-grabbing aura of dangerous sexuality. Jacqueline Delacroix thought he was a pig. She knew he achieved his unique look by abusing his models. She wasn’t looking forward to working with him.

  She stepped out of a taxi and entered the apartment building on the rue St-Jacques where Michel kept his studio. Upstairs a small crowd was waiting: makeup artist, hairdresser, stylist, a representative from Givenchy. Michel stood atop a ladder, adjusting lights: good-looking, shoulder-length blond hair, feline features. He wore black leather trousers, low-slung around narrow hips, and a loose pullover. He winked at Jacqueline as she came in. She smiled and said, “Nice to see you, Michel.”

  “We’ll have a good shoot today, yes? I can feel it.”

  “I hope so.”

  She entered a changing room, undressed, and studied her appearance in the mirror with professional dispassion. Physically she was a stunning woman: tall, graceful arms and legs, elegant waist, pale olive skin. Her breasts were aesthetically perfect: firm, rounded, neither too small nor abnormally large. The photographers had always loved her breasts. Most models detested lingerie work, but it never bothered Jacqueline. She’d always had more offers for work than she could fit into her schedule.

  Her gaze moved from her body to her face. She had curly raven hair that fell about her shoulders, dark eyes, a long, slender nose. Her cheekbones were wide and even, her jawline angular, her lips full. She was proud of the fact that her face had never been altered by a surgeon’s scalpel. She leaned forward, probed at the skin around her eyes. She didn’t like what she saw. It wasn’t a line, really—something more subtle and insidious. The intangible sign of aging. She no longer had the eyes of a child. She had the eyes of a thirty-three-year-old woman.

  You’re still beautiful, but face facts, Jacqueline. You’re getting old.

  She pulled on a white robe, went into the next room, and sat down. The makeup artist began applying a base to her cheek. Jacqueline watched in the mirror as her face was slowly transformed into that of someone she didn’t quite recognize. She wondered what her grandfather would think if he could see this.

  He’d probably be ashamed. . . .

  When the makeup artist and hairstylist finished, Jacqueline looked at herself in the mirror. Had it not been for the courage of those three remarkable people—her grandparents and Anne-Marie Delacroix—she would not be here today.

  And look at what you’ve become—an exquisite clothes hanger.

  She stood up, walked back to the changing room. The dress, a black strapless evening gown, waited for her. She removed her robe, stepped into the gown, and pulled it up over her bare breasts. Then she glanced at herself in the mirror. Devastating.

  A knock at the door. “Michel is ready for you, Miss Delacroix.”

  “Tell Michel I’ll be out in a moment.”

  Miss Delacroix . . .

  Even after all these years she was still not used to it: Jacqueline Delacroix. Her agent, Marcel Lambert, was the one who had changed her name—“Sarah Halévy sounds too . . . well . . . you know what I mean, mon chou. Don’t make me say it out loud. So vulgar, but such is the way of the world.” Sometimes the sound of her French name made her skin crawl. When she learned what had happened to her grandparents in the war, she had burned with hatred and suspicion of all French people. Whenever she saw an old man, she would wonder what he had done during the war. Had he bee
n a guard at Gurs or Les Milles or one of the other detention camps? Had he been a gendarme who helped the Germans round up her family? Had he been a bureaucrat who stamped and processed the paperwork of death? Or had he simply stood by in silence and done nothing? Secretly it gave her intense delight that she was deceiving the fashion world. Imagine their reaction if they found out the lanky, raven-haired beauty from Marseilles was in fact a Provençal Jew whose grandparents had been gassed at Sobibor. In a way being a model, the very image of French beauty, was her revenge.

  She took one last look at herself, lowering her chin toward her chest, parting her lips slightly, bringing fire to her coal black eyes.

  Now she was ready.

  They worked for thirty minutes without stopping. Jacqueline adopted several poses. She sprawled across a simple wooden chair. She sat on the floor, leaning back on her hands, with her head tilted upward and her eyes closed. She stood with her hands on her hips and her eyes boring through the lens of Michel’s camera. Michel seemed to like what he was seeing. They were in sync. Every few minutes he would pause for a few seconds to change his film, then quickly resume shooting. Jacqueline had been in the business long enough to know when a shoot was working.

  So she was surprised when he suddenly stepped from behind the camera and ran a hand through his hair. He was frowning. “Clear the studio, please. I need some privacy.”

  Jacqueline thought: Oh, Christ. Here we go.

  Michel said, “What the hell’s wrong with you?”

  “Nothing’s wrong with me!”

  “Nothing? You’re flat, Jacqueline. The pictures are flat. I might as well be taking pictures of a mannequin wearing the dress. I can’t afford to give Givenchy a set of flat prints. And from what I hear on the street, you can’t afford it either.”

  “What’s that supposed to mean?”

  “It means you’re getting old, darling. It means that no one’s quite sure whether you have what it takes anymore.”

  “Just get back behind the camera, and I’ll show you I have what it takes.”

  “I’ve seen enough. It’s just not there today.”

  “Bullshit!”

  “You want me to get you a drink? Maybe a glass of wine will help loosen you up.”

  “I don’t need a drink.”

  “How about some coke?”

  “You know I don’t do that anymore.”

  “Well, I do.”

  “Some things never change.”

  Michel produced a small bag of cocaine from his shirt pocket. Jacqueline sat down in the prop chair while he prepared two lines on a glass-topped table. He snorted one, then offered her the rolled-up hundred-franc note. “Feel like being a bad girl today?”

  “All yours, Michel. Not interested.”

  He leaned over and snorted the second line. Then he wiped the glass with his finger and spread the residue over his gums. “If you’re not going to have a drink or do a line, maybe we need to think of some other way to light a fire in you.”

  “Like what?” she said, but she knew what Michel had on his mind.

  He stood behind her, placed his hands lightly on her bare shoulders. “Maybe you need to be thinking about getting fucked.” His hands moved from her shoulders, and he stroked the skin just above her breasts. “Maybe we can do something to make the idea a little more realistic in your imagination.”

  He pressed his pelvis against her back, so that she could feel his erection beneath his leather trousers.

  She drew away.

  “I’m just trying to help, Jacqueline. I want to make sure these pictures come out well. I don’t want to see your career crash and burn. My motives are purely selfless.”

  “I never knew you were such a philanthropist, Michel.”

  He laughed. “Come with me. I want to show you something.” He took her by the hand and pulled her off the set. They walked down a hallway and entered a room furnished with nothing but a large bed. Michel pulled off his shirt and began unbuttoning his trousers.

  Jacqueline said, “What do you think you’re doing?”

  “You want good pictures, I want good pictures. Let’s get in the right frame of mind. Take off the dress so it doesn’t get ruined.”

  “Go fuck yourself, Michel. I’m leaving.”

  “Come on, Jacqueline. Stop fooling around and get into bed.”

  “No!”

  “What’s the big deal? You slept with Robert Leboucher, so he would give you that swimwear shoot in Mustique.”

  “How did you know that?”

  “Because he told me.”

  “You’re a bastard, and so is he! I’m not some seventeen-year-old who’s going to spread her legs for you because she wants good pictures from the great Michel Duval.”

  “If you walk out of here, your career is over.”

  “I don’t give a shit.”

  He pointed at his erection. “What am I supposed to do about this?”

  Marcel Lambert lived a short distance away, on the rue de Tournon, in the Luxembourg Quarter. Jacqueline needed time to herself, so she walked, taking her time in the narrow side streets of the Latin Quarter. Darkness falling, lights coming on in the bistros and the cafés, the smell of cigarettes and frying garlic on the chill air.

  She crossed into the Luxembourg Quarter. How quickly it had come to this, she thought—Michel Duval, trying to threaten her into a quickie between takes. A few years ago he wouldn’t have considered it. But not now. Now she was vulnerable, and Marcel had decided to test her.

  Sometimes she was sorry she ever got into this business. She had planned to be a ballet dancer—had studied at the most prestigious academy in Marseilles—but at sixteen she was spotted by a talent scout from a Paris modeling agency, who gave her name to Marcel Lambert. Marcel scheduled a test shoot, let her move into his flat, taught her how to move and act like a model instead of a ballerina. The photographs from the test shoot were stunning. She had dominated the camera, radiated a playful sexuality. Marcel quietly put the pictures into circulation around Paris: no name, nothing about the girl, just the pictures and his card. The reaction was instantaneous. His telephone didn’t stop ringing for a week. Photographers were clamoring to work with her. Designers wanted to sign her up for their fall shows. Word of the photographs leaked from Paris to Milan and from Milan to New York. The entire fashion world wanted to know the name of this mysterious raven-haired French beauty.

  Jacqueline Delacroix.

  How different things were now. The quality work had started to slow down when she turned twenty-six, but now that she was thirty-three the good jobs had dried up. She still got some runway work in Paris and Milan in the fall, but only with lower-level designers. She still landed the occasional lingerie ad—“There’s nothing wrong with your tits, darling,” Marcel liked to say—but he had been forced to hire her out for different types of shoots. She had just finished a shoot for a German brewery in which she posed as the attractive wife of a successful middle-aged man.

  Marcel had warned it would happen this way. He had told her to save her money, to prepare herself for a life after modeling. Jacqueline had never bothered—she’d assumed the money would pour in forever. Sometimes she tried to remember where all of it had gone. The clothes. The crash pads in Paris and New York. The extravagant vacations with the other girls in the Caribbean or the South Pacific. The ton of cocaine she had sucked up her nose before getting straight.

  Michel Duval had been right about one thing: she had slept with a man to get a job, an editor from French Vogue named Robert Leboucher. It was a high-profile job that she needed desperately—a swimsuit and summer-wear shoot in Mustique. It could change everything for her—give her enough money to get back on stable ground financially, show everyone in the industry that she still had what it took for the hot jobs. At least for one more year, two at the most. Then what?

  She walked into Marcel’s building, entered the lift, rode up to his flat. When she knocked on the door, it flew back. Marcel stood there, wide-e
yed, mouth open. “Jacqueline, my pet! Please tell me it’s not true. Tell me you didn’t kick Michel Duval in the balls! Tell me he made up the entire thing!”

  “Actually, Marcel, I kicked him in the cock.”

  He threw back his head and laughed loudly. “I’m certain you’re the first woman who’s ever done that. Serves the bastard right. He almost ruined Claudette. You remember what he did to her? Poor little thing. So beautiful, so much talent.”

  He pulled his lips downward, emitted a Gallic snort of disapproval, took her by the hand, and pulled her inside. A moment later they were drinking wine on the couch in his sitting room, the hum of evening traffic drifting through the open windows. Marcel lit her cigarette and deftly waved out the match. He wore tight-fitting faded blue jeans, black loafers, and a gray turtleneck sweater. His thinning gray hair was cropped very short. He’d had another face-lift recently; his blue eyes seemed unnaturally large and bulging, as if he were constantly surprised. She thought about those days so long ago, when Marcel had brought her to this flat and prepared her for her life ahead. She’d always felt safe in this place.

  “So what kind of stunt did Michel pull now?”

  Jacqueline described the shoot, holding nothing back. There were few secrets between them. When she finished Marcel said, “You probably shouldn’t have kicked him. He’s threatening to sue.”

  “Let him try. Every girl he’s coerced into having sex will testify at his trial. It’ll destroy him.”

  “Robert Leboucher called me a few minutes before you arrived. He’s trying to back out of Mustique. He says he can’t work with a woman who kicks photographers.”

  “Word travels fast in this business.”

  “It always has. I think I can talk some sense into Robert.” Marcel hesitated, then added, “That is, if you want me to.”

  “Of course I want you to.”