“Nationality?”
“Sometimes Venezuelan, sometimes Ecuadorian.” Lavon smiled. “Are you beginning to see a pattern?”
“But he never tries to pass himself off as Portuguese?”
“He doesn’t have the language for it. Even his Spanish is on the rough side. Apparently, he has quite an accent.”
Someone at the bar must have said something funny, because a sonic boom of laughter reverberated off the checkered tile floor and died out high in the ceiling, where the chandeliers emitted a gauzy golden glow. Gabriel looked past Lavon’s shoulder and imagined that Quinn was sitting at the next table. But it wasn’t Quinn; it was Christopher Keller. He was holding a cup of coffee in his right hand. The right hand meant they were clean, the left meant trouble. Gabriel looked at Lavon again and asked about the location of Quinn’s apartment. Lavon inclined his head in the direction of the Bairro Alto.
“What’s the building like?”
Lavon made a gesture with his hand to indicate it fell somewhere between acceptable and condemnable.
“Concierge?”
“In the Bairro Alto?”
“What floor?”
“Second.”
“Can we get inside?”
“I’m surprised you’d even ask. The question is,” Lavon continued, “do we want to get inside?”
“Do we?”
Lavon shook his head. “When one is fortunate enough to find the pied-à-terre of a man like Eamon Quinn, one doesn’t risk throwing it away by rushing through the front door. One acquires a fixed observation post and waits patiently for the target to appear.”
“Unless there are other factors to consider.”
“Such as?”
“The possibility another bomb might explode.”
“Or that one’s wife is about to give birth to twins.”
Gabriel frowned but said nothing.
“In case you’re wondering,” said Lavon, “she’s doing well.”
“Is she angry?”
“She’s seven and a half months pregnant, and her husband is sitting in a café in Lisbon. How do you think she feels?”
“How’s her security?”
“Narkiss Street is quite possibly the safest street in all Jerusalem. Uzi keeps a security team outside the door all hours.” Lavon hesitated, then added, “But all the bodyguards in the world are no substitute for a husband.”
Gabriel made no reply.
“May I make a suggestion?”
“If you must.”
“Go back to Jerusalem for a few days. Your friend and I can keep watch on the apartment. If Quinn shows up, you’ll be the first to know.”
“If I go to Jerusalem,” replied Gabriel, “I’ll never want to leave.”
“Which is why I suggested it.” Lavon cleared his throat gently. It was a warning of an impending intimacy. “Your wife would like you to know that in one month’s time, perhaps less, you will be a father again. She’d like you to be present for the occasion. Otherwise, your life won’t be worth living.”
“Did she say anything else?”
“She might have mentioned something about Eamon Quinn.”
“What was that?”
“Apparently, Uzi’s briefed her on the operation. Your wife doesn’t take kindly to men who blow up innocent women and children. She’d like you to find Quinn before you come home. And then,” Lavon added, “she’d like you to kill him.”
Gabriel glanced at Keller and said, “That won’t be necessary.”
“Yes,” said Lavon. “Lucky you.”
Gabriel smiled and drank some of his coffee. Lavon reached into his coat pocket and withdrew a silver thumb drive. He placed it on the table and pushed it toward Gabriel.
“As requested, the complete Office file on Tariq al-Hourani, born in Palestine during the great Arab catastrophe, shot to death in the stairwell of a Manhattan apartment building shortly before the Twin Towers came tumbling down.” Lavon paused, then added, “I believe you were there at the time. Somehow, I wasn’t invited.”
Gabriel stared at the thumb drive in silence. There were portions of the file he would not force himself to read again—for it was Tariq al-Hourani who, on a snowy January night in 1991, had planted a bomb beneath Gabriel’s car in Vienna. The explosion had killed Gabriel’s son Dani and maimed Leah, his first wife. She lived now in a psychiatric hospital atop Mount Herzl, trapped in a prison of memory and a body destroyed by fire. During a recent visit, Gabriel had told her he would soon be a father again.
“I would have thought,” said Lavon quietly, “that you knew his file by heart.”
“I do,” said Gabriel. “But I’d like to refresh my memory about one particular part of his career.”
“What’s that?”
“The time he spent in Libya.”
“You have a hunch?”
“Maybe.”
“Is there anything else you want to tell me?”
“I’m glad you’re here, Eli.”
Lavon stirred his coffee slowly. “That makes one of us.”
They emerged from Brasileira’s famous green door into a tiled square where Fernando Pessoa sat bronzed for all eternity, his punishment for being Portugal’s most famous poet and man of letters. A cold wind from the Tagus swirled in an amphitheater of graceful yellow buildings; a tram clattered past in the Largo Chiado. Gabriel imagined Quinn sitting in a seat in the window, Quinn of the surgically altered face and merciless heart, Quinn the prostitute of death. Lavon was heading up the slope of the hill, slowly, in the manner of a flâneur. Gabriel fell in beside him and together they wound their way through a labyrinth of darkened streets. Lavon never paused to take his bearings or consult a map. He was speaking in German about a discovery he’d made recently on a dig beneath the Old City of Jerusalem. When he wasn’t working for the Office, he served as an adjunct professor of biblical archaeology at Hebrew University. Indeed, owing to a monumental find he had made beneath the Temple Mount, Eli Lavon was regarded as Israel’s answer to Indiana Jones.
He stopped suddenly and asked, “Recognize it?”
“Recognize what?”
“This spot.” Greeted by silence, Lavon turned. “How about now?”
Gabriel turned, too. There were no lights burning anywhere in the street. The darkness had rendered the buildings shapeless, without character or detail.
“This is where they were standing.” Lavon walked a few paces up the cobbled street. “And the person who snapped the photograph was standing here.”
“I wonder who it was.”
“It could have been someone who passed in the street.”
“Quinn doesn’t strike me as the sort who would let a complete stranger take a photo of him.”
Lavon set off again without another word and climbed higher into the district. He made several more turns, left and right, until Gabriel had lost all sense of direction. His only point of orientation was the Tagus, which appeared sporadically through gaps in the buildings, its surface shining like the scales of a fish. Finally, Lavon slowed to a stop and nodded once toward the entrance of an apartment house. It was slightly taller than most buildings in the Bairro Alto, four floors instead of three, and defaced at street level by graffiti. A shutter on the second floor hung aslant on one hinge; a flowering vine dripped from the rusted balcony. Gabriel walked over to the doorway and inspected the intercom. The nameplate for 2B was empty. He placed his thumb atop the button and the buzzer sounded clearly, as if through an open window or walls of paper. Then he placed his hand lightly upon the latch.
“Do you know how long it would take me to open this?”
“About fifteen seconds,” answered Lavon. “But good things come to those who wait.”
Gabriel peered down the slope of the street. On the corner was a matchbox of a restaurant where Keller was indifferently studying the menu at a streetside table. Directly opposite the building was a pair of stubby sugar-cube dwellings, and a few paces farther along was another four-le
vel apartment house with a facade the color of a canary. Taped to its entrance, curled like a cold cut left too long in the sun, was a flier explaining in Portuguese and English that an apartment in the building was available to let.
Gabriel tore away the flier and slipped it into his pocket. Then, with Lavon at his side, he walked past Keller without a word or glance and headed down the hill toward the river. In the morning, while taking coffee at Café Brasileira, he rang the number printed on the flier. And by midday, after paying six months’ rent and a security deposit in advance, the apartment was his.
24
BAIRRO ALTO, LISBON
GABRIEL MOVED INTO THE APARTMENT at dusk with the air of a man whose wife could no longer tolerate his company. He had no possessions other than a well-traveled overnight bag, and wore no expression other than a scowl that said he would prefer to be left to his own devices. Eli Lavon arrived an hour later bearing two bags of groceries—the makings, or so it seemed, of a meal of consolation. Keller came last. He stole into the building with the silence of a night thief and settled in front of a window as though he were digging into a hide in the Bandit Country of South Armagh. And thus commenced the long watch.
The apartment was furnished, but barely. The small gathering of mismatched chairs in the sitting room looked as if they had been acquired at a neighborhood flea market; the two bedrooms were like the cells of ascetic monks. The shortage of accommodations was of no consequence, for one man kept watch at the window always. Invariably, it was Keller. He had waited a long time for Quinn to rise from his cellar and wanted the honor of being the first to clap eyes upon the prize. Gabriel hung the composite sketch of Quinn on the wall like a family portrait, and Keller consulted it each time a man of appropriate age and height—mid-forties, perhaps five foot ten—passed in the narrow street. At sunrise on the third morning, he was convinced he saw Quinn approaching from the direction of the shuttered café. It was Quinn’s face, he told Lavon in an excited whisper. More important, he said, it was Quinn’s walk. But it wasn’t Quinn; it was a Portuguese man who, they discovered later, worked in a shop a few streets away. Lavon, a scholar of physical surveillance, explained that the mistake was one of the dangers of a long vigil. Sometimes the watcher sees what he wants to see. And sometimes the prize is standing right in front of him and the watcher is too blinded by fatigue or ambition to even realize it.
The landlord believed Gabriel to be the apartment’s sole occupant, so only Gabriel showed his face in public. He was a man with a damaged heart, a man with too much time on his hands. He wandered the hilly streets of the Bairro Alto, he rode trams seemingly without destination, he visited the Museu do Chiado, he took his afternoon coffee at Café Brasileira. And in a green park along the banks of the Tagus, he met an Office courier who gave him a case filled with the tools of a field outpost: a tripod-mounted camera with a night-vision telephoto lens, a parabolic microphone, secure radios, a concealable miniature transmitter, and a laptop computer with a secure satellite link to King Saul Boulevard. In addition, there was a note from the chief of Operations gently chiding Gabriel for acquiring a safe property on his own rather than through the auspices of Housekeeping. There was also a handwritten letter from Chiara. Gabriel read it twice before burning it in the bathroom sink. Afterward, his mood was as dark as the ashes he washed ritually down the drain.
“My offer still stands,” said Lavon.
“What’s that?”
“I’ll stay here with Keller. You go home to be with your wife.”
Gabriel’s answer was the same as before, and Lavon never raised the subject again—even late at night, when the tables of the corner restaurant had been packed away and rain baptized the silent street. They dimmed the lights of the apartment so their shadows would not be visible from without, and in the darkness the years faded from their faces. They might have been the same boys of twenty whom the Office had dispatched in the autumn of 1972 to hunt down the perpetrators of the Munich Olympics massacre. The operation had been code-named Wrath of God. In the Hebrew-based lexicon of the team, Lavon had been an ayin, a tracker. Gabriel was an aleph, an assassin. For three years they stalked their prey across Europe, killing in darkness and in broad daylight, living in fear that at any moment they might be arrested and charged as murderers. They had spent endless nights in shabby rooms watching doorways and men, secretly inhabiting the lives of others. Stress and visions of blood robbed them both of the ability to sleep. A transistor radio was their only link to the real world. It told them about wars won and lost, about an American president who resigned in disgrace, and sometimes, on warm summer nights, it played music for them—the same music that normal boys of twenty were listening to, boys who had not been sent forth by their country to serve as executioners, angels of vengeance for eleven murdered Jews.
Sleeplessness was soon epidemic in the little apartment in the Bairro Alto. They had planned to serve rotating two-hour shifts at the outpost by the window, but as the days wore on, and the mutual insomnia took hold, the three veteran operatives stood something like a joint permanent watch. All those who passed beneath their window were photographed, regardless of their age, gender, or national origin. Those who entered the target building received additional scrutiny, as did its residents. Gradually, their secrets came spilling into the observation post. Such was the nature of any long-term watch. More often than not, it was the venal sins of the innocent that were exposed.
The apartment contained a television with a satellite dish that lost hold of its signal each time rain fell from the sky or a modest exhalation of wind blew through the street. It served as their link to a world that with each passing day seemed to be spinning further out of control. It was the world Gabriel would inherit the moment he swore his oath as the next chief of the Office. And it would be Keller’s world, too, should he choose it. Keller was Gabriel’s last restoration. His dirty varnish had been removed, his canvas had been relined and retouched. He was no longer the English assassin. Soon he would be the English spy.
Like all good watchers, Keller was blessed with a natural forbearance. But seven days into the vigil, his patience abandoned him. Lavon suggested a walk along the river or a drive up the coast, anything to break the monotony of the watch, but Keller refused to leave the apartment or surrender his post in the window. He photographed the faces that passed beneath his feet—the old acquaintances, the new arrivals, the passersby—and he waited for a man in his mid-forties, approximately five feet ten inches in height, to alight at the entrance of the apartment house on the opposite side of the thin street. To Lavon, it seemed as if Keller were keeping watch on Lower Market Street in Omagh, waiting for a red Vauxhall Cavalier riding low on its rear axle to pull to the curb, waiting for two men, Quinn and Walsh, to climb out. Walsh had been punished for his sins. Quinn would be next.
But when another day passed with no sign of him, Keller suggested they take the search elsewhere. South America, he said, was the logical place. They could slip into Caracas and start kicking down doors until they found Quinn’s. Gabriel appeared to give the idea serious consideration. In reality, he was watching the woman of perhaps thirty sitting alone at the restaurant at the end of the street. She had placed her handbag on the chair next to her. It was a large handbag, large enough to accommodate toiletries, even a change of clothing. The zipper was open, and the bag was turned in a way that made the contents easily accessible. A female Office field agent would have left her bag in the same place, thought Gabriel, especially if the bag contained a gun.
“Are you listening to me?” asked Keller.
“Hanging on every word,” lied Gabriel.
The last light of dusk was fading; the woman of perhaps thirty was still wearing sunglasses. Gabriel trained the telephoto lens upon her face, zoomed in, and stole her photograph. He examined it carefully in the viewfinder of the camera. It was a good face, he thought, a face worthy of painting. The cheekbones were wide, the chin was small and delicate, the skin was flawless an
d white. The sunglasses rendered her eyes invisible, but Gabriel would have guessed they were blue. Her hair was shoulder length and very black. He doubted the color was natural.
At the moment Gabriel had taken her photograph, the woman had been looking at the menu. Now she was gazing up the length of the street. It was not the preferred view. Most patrons of the restaurant faced the opposite direction, which had a better vista of the city. A waiter appeared. Too late, Gabriel seized the parabolic microphone and trained it on the table. He heard the waiter say “Thank you” in English, followed by a burst of dance music. It was the ringer of her mobile. She dismissed the call with the press of a button, returned the phone to the handbag, and withdrew a Lisbon guidebook. Gabriel again placed his eye to the viewfinder and zoomed in, not on the woman’s face but on the guidebook she held in her hand. It was Frommer’s, English-language. She lowered it after a few seconds and resumed her study of the street.
“What are you looking at?” asked Keller.
“I’m not sure.”
Keller moved closer to the window and followed Gabriel’s gaze. “Pretty,” he said.
“Maybe.”
“Newcomer or habitué?”
“Tourist, apparently.”
“Why would a pretty young tourist eat alone?”
“Good question.”
The waiter reappeared bearing a glass of white wine, which he placed on the table next to the Lisbon guidebook. He opened his order pad, but the woman said something that made him withdraw without writing anything down. He returned a moment later with a check. He placed it on the table and departed. No words were exchanged.
“What just happened?” asked Keller.
“It seems the pretty young tourist had a change of heart.”
“I wonder why.”
“Maybe it had something to do with the phone call she didn’t pick up.”
The woman’s hand was now delving into the open handbag. When it reappeared, it was holding a single banknote. She placed it atop the check, weighted it with the wineglass, and rose.