Chapter 34
St. James’s, London
GABRIEL’S ACCOMPLICE WAS NOT YET aware of his plans—hardly surprising, since he was none other than Julian Isherwood, owner and sole proprietor of Isherwood Fine Arts, 7–8 Mason’s Yard. Among the many hundreds of paintings controlled by Isherwood’s gallery was Madonna and Child with Mary Magdalene, formerly attributed to the Venetian master Palma Vecchio, now tentatively attributed to none other than the great and mighty Titian himself. For the moment, however, the painting remained locked away in Isherwood’s underground storage room, its image hidden by a protective layer of tissue paper. Isherwood had come to loathe the painting almost as much as the man who had defaced it. Indeed, in Isherwood’s troubled mind, the glorious swath of canvas had come to symbolize all that was wrong with his life.
As far as Isherwood was concerned, it had been an autumn to forget. He had sold just one picture—a minor Italian devotional piece to a minor collector from Houston—and had acquired nothing more than a chronic barking cough that could empty a room quicker than a bomb threat. Word on the street was that he was in the throes of yet another late-life crisis, his seventh or eighth, depending on whether one counted the prolonged Blue Period he endured after being dumped by the girl who worked the coffee machine at the Costa in Piccadilly. Jeremy Crabbe, the tweedy director of the Old Master department at Bonhams, thought a surprise party might lift Isherwood’s sagging spirits, an idea that Oliver Dimbleby, Isherwood’s tubby nemesis from Bury Street, dismissed as the dumbest he’d heard all year. “Given Julie’s precarious health at the moment,” said Oliver, “a surprise party might kill him.” He suggested fixing Isherwood up with a talented tart instead, but then that was Oliver’s solution to every problem, personal or professional.
On the afternoon of Gabriel’s return to London, Isherwood closed his gallery early and, having nothing better to do, headed over to Duke Street through a pelting rain to have a drink at Green’s. Aided by Roddy Hutchinson, universally regarded as the most unscrupulous dealer in all of St. James’s, Isherwood quickly consumed a bottle of white Burgundy, followed by a dose of brandy for his health. Shortly after six, he teetered into the street again to find a taxi, but when one finally approached, he was overcome by a retching coughing fit that left him incapable of lifting his arm. “Bloody hell!” snapped Isherwood as the car swept past, soaking his trousers. “Bloody, bloody, bloody hell!”
His outburst brought on another round of staccato barking. When finally it subsided, he noticed a figure leaning against the brickwork of the passageway leading to Mason’s Yard. He wore a Barbour raincoat and a flat cap pulled low over his brow. The right foot was crossed over the left, and the eyes were sweeping back and forth along the street. He gazed at Isherwood for a moment with a mixture of bemusement and pity. Then, without word or sound, he turned and started across the cobbles of the old yard. Against all better judgment, Isherwood followed after him, hacking his lungs out like a consumption patient on the way to the sanatorium.
“Let me see if I understand this correctly,” said Isherwood. “First you cover my Titian in rabbit-skin glue and tissue paper. Then you deposit it in my storage room and disappear to parts unknown. Now you reappear unannounced, looking, as usual, like something the cat dragged in, and tell me that you need the aforementioned Titian for one of your little extracurricular projects. Have I left anything out?”
“In order for this scheme to work, Julian, I’ll need you to deceive the art world and to conduct yourself in a way that some of your colleagues might consider unethical.”
“Just another day at the office, petal,” said Isherwood with a shrug. “But what’s in it for moi?”
“If it works, there will be no more attacks like the one in Covent Garden.”
“Until the next jihadi loon comes along. Then we’ll be back at square one again, won’t we? Heaven knows I’m no expert, but it seems to me the terrorism game is a bit like the art trade. It has its peaks and valleys, its good seasons and bad, but it never goes away.”
In the upper exhibition room of Isherwood’s gallery, the overhead lamps glowed with the softness of votive candles. Rain pattered on the skylight and dripped from the hem of Isherwood’s sodden overcoat, which he had yet to remove. Isherwood frowned at the puddle on his parquet floor and then looked at the wounded painting propped upon the baize-covered pedestal.
“Do you know how much that thing is worth?”
“In a fair auction, ten million in the shade. But in the auction I have in mind . . .”
“Naughty boy,” said Isherwood. “Naughty, naughty boy.”
“Have you mentioned it to anyone, Julian?”
“The painting?” Isherwood shook his head. “Not a peep.”
“You’re sure about that? No moment of indiscretion at the bar at Green’s? No pillow talk with that preposterously young woman from the Tate?”
“Her name’s Penelope,” Isherwood said.
“Does she know about the picture, Julian?”
“ ’Course not. That’s not the way it works when one has a coup, petal. One doesn’t brag about such things. One keeps it very quiet until the moment is just right. Then one announces it to the world with all the usual fanfare. One also expects to be compensated for one’s cleverness. But under your scenario, I’ll be expected to actually take a loss—for the good of God’s children, of course.”
“Your loss will be temporary.”
“How temporary?”
“The CIA is handling all operational expenses.”
“That’s not a line one hears every day in an art gallery.”
“One way or another, Julian, you’ll be compensated.”
“Of course I will,” Isherwood said with mock confidence. “This reminds me of the time my Penelope told me her husband wouldn’t be home for another hour. I’m rather too old to be leaping over garden walls.”
“Still seeing her?”
“Penelope? Left me,” Isherwood said, shaking his head. “They all leave me eventually. But not you, petal. And not this damn cough. I’m starting to think of it as an old friend.”
“Have you seen a doctor?”
“Couldn’t get an appointment. The National Health Service is so bad these days, I’m thinking about becoming a Christian Scientist.”
“I thought you were a hypochondriac.”
“Orthodox, actually.” Isherwood picked at the tissue paper in the upper-right portion of the canvas.
“Every flake of paint you dislodge I have to put back.”
“Sorry,” said Isherwood, slipping his hand into his coat pocket. “There’s precedent for it, you know. A couple of years ago, Christie’s sold a painting attributed to the School of Titian for the paltry sum of eight thousand quid. But the painting wasn’t a School of Titian. It was a Titian Titian. As you might imagine, the owners weren’t terribly pleased. They accused Christie’s of malpractice. The lawyers got involved. There were ugly stories in the press. Bad feelings all round.”
“Perhaps we should give Christie’s a chance to redeem itself.”
“They might actually like that. There’s just one problem.”
“Just one?”
“We’ve already missed the big Old Master sales.”
“That’s true,” Gabriel acknowledged, “but you’re forgetting about the special Venetian School auction planned for the first week of February. A newly discovered Titian might be just the thing to gin up a bit of extra excitement.”
“Naughty boy. Naughty, naughty boy.”
“Guilty as charged.”
“Considering my past connection to certain unsavory elements of this operation, it might be wise to put some distance between the gallery and the final sale. That means we’ll need to enlist the services of another dealer. Given the circumstances, he’ll have to be greedy, sneaky, cunning, and a first-class shit.”
“I know what you’re thinking,” said Gabriel, “but are you sure he can handle it?”
“H
e’s perfect,” Isherwood said. “All you need now is a Titian that actually looks like one.”
“I think I can manage that.”
“Where do you intend to work?”
Gabriel looked around the room and said, “This will do quite nicely.”
“Is there anything else you require?”
Gabriel handed him a list. Isherwood slipped on his reading glasses and frowned. “One bolt of Italian linen, one professional-grade iron, one pair of magnifying visors, one liter of acetone, one liter of methyl proxitol, one liter of mineral spirits, one dozen Winsor & Newton Series 7 brushes, one pair of standing halogen work lamps, one copy of La Bohème by Giacomo Puccini . . .” He glared at Gabriel over his glasses. “Do you know how much this is going to cost me?”
But Gabriel seemed not to hear. He was standing before the canvas, one hand resting against his chin, his head tilted meditatively to one side.
Gabriel believed the craft of restoration was a bit like making love. It was best done slowly and with painstaking attention to detail, with occasional breaks for rest and refreshment. But in a pinch, if the craftsman and his subject matter were adequately acquainted, a restoration could be done at extraordinary speed, with more or less the same result.
Of the subsequent ten days Gabriel would later be able to recall very little, for they were a near-sleepless blur of linen, solvent, medium, and pigment, set to the music of Puccini and lit by the harsh white glare of his halogen work lamps. His initial fears about the condition of the canvas thankfully proved overblown. Indeed, once he had completed the relining and removed the yellowed varnish, he found Titian’s original work to be largely intact except for a chain of bare spots across the body of the Virgin and four lines of abrasion where the canvas had sloughed against the old stretcher. Having restored several Titians in the past, he was able to repair the painting almost as swiftly as the master himself had been able to paint it. His palette was Titian’s palette, as were his brushstrokes. Only the conditions of his studio were different. Titian had no doubt worked with a team of gifted apprentices and journeymen while Gabriel had no assistant other than Julian Isherwood, which meant he had no help at all.
He wore no wristwatch so that he would have only the vaguest idea of time, and when he slept, which was seldom, he did so on a camp bed in the corner of the room, beneath a luminous landscape by Claude. He drank coffee by the bucket from Costa and subsisted largely on butter cookies and tea biscuits that Isherwood smuggled into the gallery from Fortnum & Mason. Having no time to waste on shaving, he allowed his beard to grow. Much to his dismay it came in even grayer than the last time. Isherwood said the beard made it look as though Titian himself were standing before the canvas. Given Gabriel’s uncanny skill with a brush, it wasn’t far from the truth.
On his final evening in London, Gabriel stopped at Thames House, the riverfront headquarters of MI5, where, as promised, he informed Graham Seymour that the operation had in fact washed ashore in the British Isles. Seymour’s mood was foul and his thoughts clearly elsewhere. The son of the future king had decided to marry in late spring, and it was up to Seymour and his colleagues at the Metropolitan Police Service to see that nothing spoiled the occasion. Listening to Seymour bemoan his plight, Gabriel couldn’t help but think of the words Sarah had spoken in the garden of the café in Georgetown. London is low-hanging fruit. London can be attacked at will.
As if to illustrate the point, Gabriel emerged from Thames House to find the Jubilee Line of the Underground had been shut down at the height of the evening rush due to a suspicious package. He headed back to Mason’s Yard on foot and, with Isherwood peering over his shoulder, applied a coat of varnish to the newly restored Titian. The next morning, he instructed Nadia to deposit two hundred million dollars with TransArabian Bank. Then he climbed into a taxi and headed for Heathrow Airport.
Chapter 35
Zurich
FEW COUNTRIES HAD PLAYED A more prominent role in the life and career of Gabriel Allon than the Swiss Confederation. He spoke three of its four languages fluently and knew its mountains and valleys like the clefts and curves of his wife’s body. He had killed in Switzerland, kidnapped in Switzerland, and exposed some of its most repulsive secrets. One year earlier, in a café at the base of the glacier at Les Diablerets, he had taken a solemn vow never to set foot in the country again. It was funny how things never seemed to go according to plan.
Behind the wheel of a rented Audi, he glided past the dour banks and storefronts of the Bahnhofstrasse, then turned onto the busy road running along the western shore of Lake Zurich. The safe house was located two miles south of the city center. It was a modern structure, with far too many windows for Gabriel’s comfort, and a small T-shaped dock that had been sugared by a recent snow. Entering, he heard a female voice singing softly in Italian. He smiled. Chiara always sang to herself when she was alone.
He left his bag in the foyer and followed the sound into the living room, which had been converted into a makeshift field command post. Chiara was staring at a computer screen while at the same time peeling the skin from an orange. Her lips, when kissed by Gabriel, were very warm, as though she were suffering from a fever. He kissed them for a long time.
“I’m Chiara Allon,” she murmured, stroking the bristly gray hair on his cheeks. “And who might you be?”
“I’m not sure any longer.”
“They say aging can cause memory problems,” she said, still kissing him. “You should try fish oil. I hear it helps.”
“I’d rather have a bite of that orange instead.”
“I’m sure you would. It’s been a long time.”
“A very long time.”
She broke the fruit into segments and placed one in Gabriel’s mouth.
“Where’s the rest of the team?” he asked.
“They’re watching an employee of TransArabian Bank who also happens to have ties to the global jihadist movement.”
“So you’re all alone?”
“Not anymore.”
Gabriel loosened the buttons of Chiara’s blouse. Her nipples firmed instantly to his touch. She gave him another piece of the fruit.
“Maybe we shouldn’t do this in front of a computer,” she said. “You never know who might be watching.”
“How much time do we have?”
“As much as you need.”
She took his hand and led him upstairs. “Slowly,” she said, as he lowered her onto the bed. “Slowly.”
The room was in semidarkness by the time Gabriel fell away exhausted from Chiara’s body. They lay for a long time together in silence, close but not quite touching. From outside came the distant rumble of a passing boat, followed a moment later by the lapping of wavelets against the dock. Chiara rolled onto one elbow and traced her finger along the ridgeline of Gabriel’s nose.
“How long are you planning to keep it?”
“Since I require it to breathe, I intend to keep it for as long as possible.”
“I was talking about your beard, darling.”
“I hate it, but something tells me I might need it before this operation is through.”
“Maybe you should keep it after the operation, too. I think it makes you look . . .” Her voice trailed off.
“Don’t say it, Chiara.”
“I was going to say distinguished.”
“That’s like calling a woman elegant.”
“What’s wrong with that?”
“You’ll understand when people start saying you look elegant.”
“It won’t be so bad.”
“It will never happen, Chiara. You’re beautiful and you’ll always be beautiful. And if I keep this beard after the operation, people will start to mistake you for my daughter.”
“Now you’re being unreasonable.”
“It is biologically possible.”
“What is?”
“For you to be my daughter.”
“I’ve never actually thought about it that way.”
r /> “Don’t,” he said.
She laughed quietly and then said nothing more.
“What are you thinking about now?” Gabriel asked.
“What might have happened if you hadn’t noticed that boy with the bomb under his jacket walking along Wellington Street. We would have been sitting down to lunch when the bomb exploded. It would have been a tragedy, of course, but our lives would have gone on as normal, just like everyone else’s.”
“Maybe this is normal for us, Chiara.”
“Normal couples don’t make love in safe houses.”
“Actually, I’ve always enjoyed making love to you in safe houses.”
“I fell in love with you in a safe house.”
“Which one?”
“Rome,” she said. “That little flat off the Via Veneto where I took you after the Polizia di Stato tried to kill you in that dreadful pensione near the train station.”
“The Abruzzi,” Gabriel said heavily. “What a pit.”
“But the safe flat was lovely.”
“You barely knew me.”
“I knew you very well, actually.”
“You made me fettuccini with mushrooms.”
“I only make my fettuccini with mushrooms for people I love.”
“Make me some now.”
“You have some work to do first.”
Chiara flipped a switch on the wall above the bed. A tiny halogen reading lamp burned laserlike into Gabriel’s eye.
“Must you?” he asked, squinting.
“Sit up.”
She took a file folder from the bedside table and handed it to him. Gabriel lifted the cover and for the first time saw the face of Samir Abbas. It was angular, bespectacled, and lightly bearded, with thoughtful brown eyes and a deeply receded hairline. At the time the photo was snapped, he had been walking along a street in a residential section of Zurich. He was wearing a gray suit, the uniform of a Swiss banker, and a silver necktie. His briefcase looked expensive, as did his shoes. His overcoat was unbuttoned and his hands were gloveless. He was talking on a mobile phone. Judging by the shape of his mouth, it appeared to Gabriel he was speaking German.