The English Assassin

  “I need a boat.”

  “That will be no problem. When would you like it?”

  “Right away.”

  The jeweler stroked the side of his cheek. “There’s a young man I know. His name is Angelo. He owns a water taxi. Very careful, very dependable.”

  “He’s not the kind to ask uncomfortable questions?”

  “Not at all. He’s performed jobs like this before.”

  “Can you reach him on short notice?”

  “I think so, yes. What sort of arrangement do you require?”

  “I’d like him to be waiting on the Rio di San Polo, near the Museo Goldoni.”

  “I see. That should not be a problem, though therewill be an extra charge for night service. It’s customary in Venice. One moment, please. Let me see if I can reach him.”

  Rossetti found the man’s name in his telephone book and dialed his number. After a brief conversation, the deal was done. Angelo would be at the Museo Goldoni in fifteen minutes and he would wait there.

  “Perhaps it would be easier if you paid me,” Rossetti said. “I’ll look after the boy’s interests.”

  Once again the transaction was carried out in dollars after Rossetti worked out the sum on his pad of scratch paper. The Englishman saw himself out and walked to a restaurant on the Calle della Verona, where he dined simply on vegetable soup and fettuccine with cream and mushrooms. It was not the happy din of the little restaurant that filled his ears during the meal, but the memory of the conversation he had heard on the tape he had taken from Emil Jacobi—the conversation between the Swiss professor and Gabriel Allon about the sins of a man named Augustus Rolfe. The father of the woman he had been hired to kill.

  A few moments later, when ordering his espresso, he asked the waiter for a piece of paper. He wrote a few words on it, then slipped it into his pocket. After supper he walked to the Grand Canal and boarded atraghetto that would take him to the San Rocco.

  THEexplosion of lightning shattered the studied calm of the lobby of the Luna Hotel Baglioni. The lights dimmed, braced themselves, then flickered back to life. Signore Brunetti, the head concierge, clasped his hands and murmured a prayer of thanks.

  Gabriel led Anna across the lobby to the dock. Jonathan walked a step ahead of them. Deborah was a step behind, the Guarneri in one hand, the Stradivarius in the other. Signore Brunetti lifted his hand in farewell and wished her the very best of luck. The rest of the staff broke into circumspect applause. Anna smiled and pulled her hood over her head.

  Three water taxis waited at the dock, engines idling, dark varnished prows shimmering in the rain and lights. Jonathan went first, followed by Gabriel. Looking to his right, he saw Moshe and Yitzhak standing atop the footbridge at the entrance of the Grand Canal. Moshe was looking in the other direction, eyes fastened on the crowd at the San Marcovaporetto stop.

  Gabriel turned and motioned for Anna to step outside. He handed her off to the driver of the second water taxi, then followed her into the cabin. Jonathan and Deborah climbed aboard the first taxi. Moshe and Yitzhak stayed on the bridge until the taxis passed beneath it. Then they descended the steps and boarded the final boat.

  Gabriel glanced at his watch: seven-thirty.

  THEGrand Canal curves lazily through the heart of Venice, like a child’s reversedS , in the bed of an ancient river. On Gabriel’s instruction, the taxis kept to the center, following its long, gentle sweep around the edge of San Marco.

  Gabriel stayed inside the cabin with Anna, the curtains drawn, the lights doused. In the first taxi, Jonathan stood at the prow next to the driver, eyes on the move. In the third, Yitzhak and Moshe did the same thing. All three were thoroughly soaked ten minutes later when the taxis turned into the Rio della Frescada.

  This was the portion of the journey that worried Gabriel the most. The narrow canal would force the taxis to slow dramatically, and there were four bridges between the Grand Canal and the San Rocco. It was the perfect spot for an assassination.

  Gabriel pulled out his telephone and dialed Jonathan. Anna squeezed his hand.

  ZACCARIACordoni was pacing the ground-floor hall of the Scuola Grande di San Rocco, dressed in a black suit and his trademark maroon silk scarf, an unlit cigarette between his fingers. Fiona Richardson, Anna’s manager, was at his side.

  “Where is she?” Cordoni asked.

  “She’s on her way.”

  “You’re sure?”

  “She called me before she left the hotel.”

  “She’s not going to back out, is she, Fiona?”

  “She’s coming.”

  “Because if she backs out on me, I’ll see to it that she never performs in Italy again.”

  “She’ll be here, Zaccaria.”

  Just then Anna entered the room, surrounded by Gabriel’s team.

  “Anna! Darling!” breathed Cordoni. “You look absolutely delicious this evening. Is there anything else we can do for you to make tonight a smashing success?”

  “I’d like to see the upper hall before the audience arrives.”

  Cordoni held out his hand gallantly.

  “Right this way.”

  ANNAhad performed at the San Rocco twice before, but in keeping with her pre-performance ritual she slowly toured the venue to make certain everything was to her liking—the placement of the stage and the piano, the arrangement of the seats, the lighting. Gabriel did the same, but for a very different reason.

  When the inspection was complete, Cordoni led her through a doorway behind the stage into a large gallery with dark wood floors and tapestries on the walls. Adjacent to that room was a small parlor that would serve as Anna’s dressing room. A security man from thescuola stood guard at the door. He wore a burgundy-colored blazer.

  “I’ve printed two programs for this evening’s performance,” Cordoni said carefully. “One with ‘The Devil’s Trill’ and one without it. The doors will be opening in five minutes.”

  Anna looked at Gabriel, then at Fiona Richardson. “I’m not sure an evening in Venice would be complete without Tartini. Hand out the program with ‘The Devil’s Trill.’ ”

  “You’re sure, Anna?” asked Fiona.

  “Positive.”

  “As you wish,” said Zaccaria Cordoni.

  WHENCordoni and Fiona Richardson were gone, Anna removed her coat and opened the case containing the Guarneri. When Gabriel sat down, Anna looked at him, hands on her hips.

  “What do you think you’re doing?”

  “I’m going to stay here with you.”

  “No, you’re not. I need to be alone before a performance. I can’t have you here distracting me.”

  “I’m afraid you’re going to have to make an exception tonight.”

  “Tell me something, Gabriel. If you were restoring one of those Tintorettos out there, would you like me standing over your shoulder watching?”

  “I see your point.”

  “Good—now get out of here.”

  ANNAhad been given a gift: the ability to block out all distraction; the strength to create an impenetrable bubble of silence around herself, to enclose herself in a cocoon. She had discovered this gift the morning of her mother’s suicide. A simple scale—G Minor played over two octaves, the ascent, the descent—was enough to send her through a mystical porthole to another time and place. Unfortunately, her ability to create this perfectly ordered place of silence did not extend beyond the violin, and God knows almost everything else in her life had been chaos.

  She had known musicians who had come to loathe their instruments. Anna had never done that. Her violin was the anchor which prevented her from drifting into the rocks—a lifeline which pulled her to safety each time she was in danger of drowning. When she was holding her violin, only good things happened. It was when she let go that things spun out of control.

  It did not come automatically, this mystical bubble. It had to be summoned. She hung her coat over the back of a baroque chair and crushed out her cigarette. She removed her wristwatch an
d dropped it into her handbag. She had no need for time now—she would create her own moment in time, a moment that would exist only once and would never be duplicated.

  She had decided to use the Guarneri tonight. It seemed only fitting, since the instrument had probably been assembled two hundred years earlier in a workshop not far from where she was sitting now. She opened the case and ran her forefinger down the length of the instrument: the head, the fingerboard, the bridge, the body. She was a lady, this Guarneri of Anna’s. Dignified and graceful, no flaws or failings, no scars.

  She removed the violin from its case and placed it against her neck, so that the button pressed against the familiar spot a few inches above the base of her shoulder. Her dress was strapless; she didn’t like anything between her body and her instrument. At first the violin felt cool against her skin, but soon the heat of her body suffused its wood. She placed the bow on the G string and pulled. The violin responded with a thick, resonant tone. Her tone. Anna Rolfe’s tone. The door to her mystical place was now open.

  She permitted herself to look once at her hand. The scars were so ugly. She wished there was something she could do to hide them. Then she pushed the thought from her mind. Her hand did not play the violin; it was her head that played. Her fingers would obey her brain.

  She switched off the lights and closed her eyes, then laid the bow across the strings and pulled slowly, coaxing sound from the violin. She executed no scales, performed no exercises, played no portion of the compositions she would perform that evening. There was nothing she could do now to prepare further. The pieces were so imbedded in her cells that she would play them not from memory but frominstinct. Now she simply drew sound from the violin and allowed the sound to flow through her body.It’s just you and me, fiddle, she thought.Just you and me.

  She could hear the murmur of a conversation beyond her closed door. She threw a switch in her mind, and it was gone. Through the walls seeped the low din of the upper hall beginning to fill with members of the audience. She threw the switch, and it too was gone.

  It’s just you and me, fiddle. Just you and me. . . .

  She thought of the man in Gabriel’s photographs, the assassin known as the Englishman. It had been a long time since she had been able to put her trust in a man. She supposed her father’s betrayal—the lies he had told her about the reasons for her mother’s suicide—had spoiled her for all men. But tonight she would place her life in the hands of Gabriel Allon. Her father had set in motion a plan to try to atone for terrible sins he had committed. He was murdered before he was able to finish what he started. Gabriel would have to finish it for him. And Anna would help him the only way she knew how—by playing her violin. Beautifully.

  The bubble began to close around her, to enfold her. There was no assassin, no photograph of her father with Adolf Hitler, no Gabriel Allon. Just her and the violin.

  There was a faint tapping at the door. Instantly, Anna’s bow stopped.

  “Five minutes, Miss Rolfe.”

  “Thank you.”

  The bow slid along the string once more. The sound flowed through her body. The violin turned to fire against her skin. The bubble closed around her. She was lost. Soon the door was open and she was floating toward the upper hall. As she entered the room she assumed there was applause—she knew this only from experience, not from any information she was receiving from her senses. She could not see the audience, nor could she hear it.

  She dipped her head and waited an instant before lifting the violin above her shoulder and pressing it to her neck. Then she laid the bow on the strings, hesitated, and began to play.

  GABRIELestablished his watch post beneath Tintoretto’sTemptation of Christ. Slowly, his eyes swept the room. Person by person, face by face, he searched the chamber for the man in the photograph. If the assassin was there, Gabriel did not see him.

  He checked the disposition of his team. Yitzhak stood directly across the hall from Gabriel. A few feet away, at the top of the staircase, stood Moshe. Shimon and Ilana roamed the back of the hall, and a few feet to Gabriel’s right was Jonathan, arms folded, chin on his chest, his dark gaze up.

  For a moment he allowed himself to look at Anna. She performed “The Devil’s Trill” unaccompanied, as Tartini had intended. The first movement was spellbinding—the floating and distant snatches of simple melody, the hints of Baroque ornamentation; the repeated intrusion of the unsettling double-stop of E-flat and G. The Devil’s chord.

  Anna played with her eyes closed, her body swaying slightly, as if she were physically drawing sound from her instrument. She was no more than ten feet away from him, but for now Gabriel knew she was lost to him. She belonged to the music now, and whatever bond that had existed between them was broken.

  He watched her now as an admirer—and vaguely, he thought, as a restorer. He had helped her to discover the truth about her father and to come to terms with her family’s past. The damage was still there, he thought, but it was concealed, invisible to the naked eye, like in a perfect restoration.

  She executed the treacherous chromatic descent at the end of the first movement. Pausing for a moment, she began the second movement. Mischievous and faster-paced, it was full of demanding string crossings that required her hand to move repeatedly from the first position to the fifth and from the E string to the G. Eighteen minutes later, when the third movement dissolved into a final arpeggiated G-minor chord, the audience exploded into applause.

  Anna lowered the violin and drew several deep breaths. Only then did she open her eyes. She acknowledged the applause with a slight bow. If she ever looked at Gabriel, he did not know it, because by then he had turned his back to her and was scanning the room, looking for a man with a gun.

  39

  VENICE

  ASTEADY RAINwas falling on the Campo San Rocco. The miserable weather did nothing to dampen the spirits of the large crowd that lingered there after the recital, hoping for one last glimpse of Anna Rolfe. The atmosphere was electrically charged. After performing “The Devil’s Trill,” Anna had been joined onstage by her longtime accompanist, Nadine Rosenberg, for Brahms’sSonata No. 1 for Violin and Piano in D Minor and Pablo Sarasate’sZigeunerweisen. The evening’s final piece, Paganini’s demonic soloCaprice No. 24, had brought the audience to its feet.

  Anna Rolfe was unaware of the crowd outside. At that moment she was standing in the gallery behind the stage with Zaccaria Cordoni and Fiona Richardson. Fiona was conducting an animated conversation in German on her mobile telephone. Anna was smoking a much-deserved Gitane, trying to come down off the high of the performance. She was still holding the violin. The old Guarneri had been good to her tonight. She wanted it near her a little longer.

  Gabriel was standing a few feet away, watching her carefully. Anna caught his eye briefly and smiled. She mouthed the wordsthank you and discreetly blew him a kiss. Fiona ended her conversation and slipped the telephone into her pocketbook.

  “Word travels fast, my dear. You’re going to have a busy winter. Paris, Brussels, Stockholm, and Berlin. And that’s just the first week.”

  “I’m not sure I’m really ready to get back on the merry-go-round again, Fiona.”

  Zaccaria Cordoni laid a hand on her shoulder. “If I may be presumptuous, you are definitely ready. Your performance tonight was inspired. You played like a woman possessed.”

  “Maybe I am possessed,” she said mischievously.

  Fiona smiled and glanced toward Gabriel. “You want to tell us about your mysterious Frenchman—the handsome Monsieur Dumont?”

  “Actually, what I’d like to do is spend a few minutes alone.”

  She walked across the room and took Gabriel’s hand. Fiona and Cordoni watched them walk down the corridor to the dressing room. Fiona frowned.

  “Whoever Monsieur Dumont is, I hope he doesn’t break her heart like the others. She’s like fine crystal: beautiful but easily broken. And if that bastard breaks her, I’ll kill him.”

  ANNAclosed the
door of her dressing room and collapsed into Gabriel’s arms.

  “You were amazing tonight.”

  “I couldn’t have done it without you.”

  “I just watched over you to make sure nothing happened. You’re the one who made magic.”

  “I wish we could celebrate.”

  “You’re getting on a plane out of here. And I have a job to do.”

  “Was he here tonight?”

  “The assassin?”

  She nodded, her head pressed against his chest.

  “I don’t know, Anna.”

  She sat down, suddenly exhausted. On the coffee table in front of her was the case for the Guarneri. She undid the latches and lifted the lid. Inside was a single sheet of paper, folded in half, withAnna written on it.

  She looked up at Gabriel. “Did you leave this for me?”

  “Leave what?”

  “This note in my violin case. It wasn’t here when I left the room to go onstage.”

  She reached into the case and picked it up. When she did, an object slipped out. It was a narrow length of leather, and hanging from the end of it was a piece of red coral, shaped like a hand.

  GABRIELreached into the case and removed the pendant, his heart pounding against his ribs. “What does the note say?”

  “ ‘You need this more than I do. Tell Gabriel he owes me one. With compliments.’ ”

  Drawing his Beretta, he opened the door to the dressing room and looked out. Zaccaria Cordoni spotted him and hurried down the corridor to see what was the matter. Gabriel slipped the Beretta back into his pocket.

  “Where’s the man who was outside this door before the recital?”

  “What man?”

  “The security guard in the burgundy-colored jacket. Where is he now?”

  “I have no idea. Why?”

  “Because someone came into this room while Anna was onstage.”

  “Was any harm done?”

  “He left a note.” Gabriel held up the coral charm. “And this.”