by Daniel Silva
He got down on one knee, slipped the tools into the lock, and went to work, flashlight between his teeth. A moment later, under Gabriel’s diligent assault, the old lock gave up the fight. He got to his feet, stepped inside, and closed the door behind him.
The room smelled of woodsmoke and dog and faintly of tobacco. He lifted the flashlight and played it about the interior. Its tiny pool of light meant that he experienced the room a few square feet at a time. A sitting area furnished with eighteenth-century armchairs. A Flemish Renaissance oak writing table. Bookshelves stretching from a burnished wood floor to a molded ceiling.
Augustus Rolfe’s desk.
Strange, but it didn’t seem like the desk of a powerful man. There was an air of donnish clutter: a stack of files, a faded leather blotter, a teacup filled with paper clips, a pile of antique books. Gabriel lifted the first cover with his index finger and was greeted by the scent of ancient paper and dust. He turned the light toward the first page. Goethe.
As he closed the volume, the light fell upon a large ashtray of cut glass. A dozen cigarette butts lay haphazardly, like spent cartridges, in a bed of ash. He examined the butts more carefully. Two different brands. Most were Benson & Hedges, but three were Silk Cuts. The old man probably had smoked the Benson & Hedges, but who had smoked the Silk Cuts? Anna? No, Anna always smoked Gitanes.
He turned his attention back to the provenance. Anna had said Rolfe kept them in the bottom right-hand desk drawer in a file labeled PERSONAL CORRESPONDENCE. The drawer, like the entrance to Rolfe’s study, was locked. This time he had a key. He pulled it open and began leafing through the personal papers of Augustus Rolfe.
He came across a file labeled MAXIMILIAN. He took it between his thumb and forefinger, then hesitated. Did he have any right? It felt too much like voyeurism. Like peering through a lighted window during an evening walk through a city and seeing a couple quarreling. Or an old man sitting alone in front of a television. But what might the file reveal? What sort of things had this man saved about his son? What might Gabriel learn from it about this man Augustus Rolfe?
He pulled out the file, laid it across the open drawer, lifted the cover. Photographs, magazine clippings from the sporting pages of European newspapers, tributes from teammates, a long piece from the Zurich newspaper on the cycling accident in the Alps—“He was a good man, and I was proud to call him my son,” Augustus Rolfe, a prominent Zurich banker, said in a statement issued by his lawyer. “I will miss him more than any words could ever express.” Crisply folded, meticulously dated and labeled. Augustus Rolfe may have disagreed with his son’s chosen profession, Gabriel concluded, but he was a proud father.
Gabriel closed the file, slipped it back in its proper place, and resumed the search for PERSONAL CORRESPONDENCE. Another file caught his eye: ANNA. Again he hesitated, then drew out the file. Inside were childhood photographs of Anna playing the violin, invitations to recitals and concerts, newspaper clippings, reviews of her performances and recordings. He looked more carefully at the photographs. There were definitely two Annas—before the suicide of her mother, and after. The difference in her appearance was striking.
Gabriel closed the file and slipped it back into the drawer. Time to get back to the business at hand. He flipped through the files until he came to the one marked PERSONAL CORRESPONDENCE. He removed it, placed it on Rolfe’s desk, and lifted the cover. Letters, some handwritten, some typed on professional stationery. German, French, Italian, English—the linguistic patchwork quilt that is Switzerland. Gabriel leafed through them quickly until he came to the end of the stack. Then he went back to the beginning and repeated the process more slowly. The result was the same.
The provenance were gone.
AS Gabriel played his flashlight beam about the study, he thought of a training drill he had undergone at the Academy. An instructor had led him into a room decorated like a hotel suite, handed him a document, and given him a minute to find five suitable hiding places. Had he been given the test in Rolfe’s study instead of an ersatz hotel room, he could have come up with a hundred places to hide a document. A false floorboard, a large book, beneath a carpet or floorboard, inside a piece of furniture, locked away in a concealed wall safe. And that was only in the study. There were thousands of places in the rambling villa for Rolfe to conceal a sheaf of documents. This was a man who had built an underground bunker for his secret art collection. If Rolfe wanted to hide something, the odds of Gabriel finding it were slim.
The thought of leaving Zurich empty-handed after so difficult and treacherous a journey was galling to Gabriel. There were two possible explanations for the missing documents. Number one: They had been removed, by Rolfe or someone like Werner Müller. Number two: Rolfe had somehow misplaced them. Surely it was possible. He was an old man. Old men make mistakes. Memories fade. File labels become harder to read.
Gabriel decided to search the desk thoroughly.
There were four file drawers, two on each side, and Gabriel started with the top left. He fell into a monotonous routine: remove a single file, carefully inspect the contents, replace it, move on to the next.
It took Gabriel thirty minutes to search all four drawers.
Nothing.
He pulled open the center drawer: pens, pencils, bits of scrap paper, a bottle of glue, a staple remover. A miniature tape recorder. Gabriel picked it up and inspected it with his flashlight. There was no tape inside. He searched the drawer carefully. A tape recorder, no tapes. Odd.
He closed the drawer, sat down in Rolfe’s chair, and stared at the desk. The center drawer…something wasn’t right. He pulled it open, looked inside, closed it again. Open, close. Open, close….
THE drawer itself was about four inches deep, but the storage space was shallower. Two inches, Gabriel calculated, perhaps even less. He tried to pull the drawer completely out of the desk, but a catch prevented it from coming out. He pulled harder. Same result.
He looked at his watch. He had been in the villa forty-five minutes, probably longer than was wise. Now, he had two choices: Walk away, or trust his instincts.
He stood up, grasped the drawer with both hands, and pulled as hard as he could. The catch gave way and the drawer tumbled onto the floor, spilling the contents.
Gabriel lifted the now-empty drawer and turned it over in his hands. Solid, well-crafted, abnormally heavy. He looked carefully at the base. It was quite thick—an inch perhaps.
Walk away, or trust your instincts?
There was no neat way to go about it, not if he was going to get his answer quickly. He leaned the drawer against the side of the desk and adjusted the angle. Then he raised his foot and slammed it down. Once, twice, a third time, until the wood began to splinter.
THE base of the drawer was constructed of not one piece of wood but two, identical in dimension, one laid atop the other. Between them was a large, rectangular envelope, yellow with age, the flap secured with a bit of frayed twine. The provenance? Seemed like an awfully elaborate scheme to conceal provenance. Gabriel separated the shattered bits of wood and held the envelope in his hand. A tremor shook his fingers as he unwound the twine and pried open the flap.
He removed the contents, a sheaf of ancient flimsies, and laid them on the desk. He sorted through them carefully, as though he feared they might crumble at his touch. Kronin…pesetas…escudos…pounds. The documents were copies of currency transactions and bank transfers carried out during the war. He looked at the dates. The first of the transactions, a transfer of several thousand Swiss francs to the Union Bank of Stockholm, had occurred in February 1942. The last, a transfer of funds to the Bank of Lisbon, had taken place in June 1944.
He set aside the flimsies. The next item was a single sheet of plain white paper with no letterhead. On the left side of the page was a list of names, all German. On the right side was a corresponding list of twelve-digit numbers. Gabriel read a few lines:
He gathered up the flimsies and lifted the flap of the envelope. He was a
bout to slip the papers inside when he felt something caught in the bottom corner. He reached inside and drew the objects out.
A pair of photographs.
He looked at the first one: Augustus Rolfe, young, handsome, rich, sitting in a restaurant. Judging from the state of the table, a good deal of wine had been consumed. Seated next to him was a fleshy, decadent-looking man in civilian dress with dueling scars on his cheeks. Gabriel did not recognize him.
He turned his attention to the second photograph. The setting was a terrace in an Alpine home—Rolfe, standing at the balustrade, admiring the magnificent view, accompanied by two men in uniform. Gabriel recognized them both.
One was Heinrich Himmler. The other was Adolf Hitler.
GABRIEL slipped the photographs and the documents back into the envelope. It was legal-sized, too large to fit into a pocket, so he shoved it down the front of his trousers and secured it by zipping his leather jacket. He looked at the desk. Nothing to be done about the drawer; it was broken to bits. He pushed the fragments under the seating compartment with his foot and concealed them with Rolfe’s chair. The Beretta was lying on Rolfe’s leather blotter. He dropped it into his pocket and turned to leave.
He navigated by the beam of the weak penlight. Once again, he had the sensation of experiencing the room a fragment at a time, this time in reverse order. With each movement of the light, a new piece of information: the oak writing table, the eighteenth-century armchairs, a leather ottoman…
A man standing in the doorway, with a gun pointed at Gabriel’s heart.
25
ZURICH
GABRIEL TOSSED the flashlight across the room, drew his Beretta, and dropped to the floor. The man in the doorway fired. The gun was silenced, but the muzzle flash was visible in the darkness. The shot ripped through the air over Gabriel’s head and shattered the window behind Rolfe’s desk. Before the man could shoot again, Gabriel rose onto one knee and fired in the direction of the muzzle flash. The shots struck their target—Gabriel knew this because he could hear the rounds tearing through tissue and shattering bone. He got to his feet and ran forward, firing as he went, the way he had been trained at the Academy. The way he had done it so many times before. When he was standing over the man, he reached down, placed the barrel into his ear, and fired one last time.
The body convulsed, then went still.
Gabriel knelt and searched the dead man’s pockets: no billfold, no keys, no money. A Glock nine-millimeter lay on the floor a few feet from the body. Gabriel slipped it into his pocket and went into the corridor.
Next to the center stairwell was an alcove with a set of tall windows overlooking the street. Gabriel looked down and saw two men pounding up the front steps. He ran across the corridor to the windows overlooking the rear garden. Outside was another man, gun drawn, feet apart, talking on a handheld radio.
As Gabriel descended the curving staircase, he ejected the spent cartridge from his Beretta and inserted the backup. He retraced the route Anna had taken the night she showed him the secret vault: through the great dining room, through the kitchen, down the back staircase, through the wine cellar, into the cutting room.
He came to a doorway with a window of paned glass that led into the garden. Gabriel pushed open the door a few inches and peered out. The man with the radio and the gun was prowling the snowy terrace. The other team had entered the house—Gabriel could hear the trample of feet on the first floor above him.
He stepped outside and trotted across the garden directly toward the man with the gun. In rapid German, he said: “You there! Did you see which way that jackass went?” The man looked at him in utter confusion. Gabriel kept moving forward. “What’s wrong with you, man? Are you deaf? Answer me!”
When the man lifted his radio to his mouth, Gabriel’s arm swung up, and he started firing. Five shots, the last into his chest from three feet away.
Gabriel looked up toward the house. He could see flashlight beams playing over the drawn curtains. Then the curtains parted and a face appeared. A shout. Hammering on glass.
Gabriel turned and sprinted across the garden until he came to a wall—seven feet in height, he guessed, with a row of wrought-iron spikes across the top. Glancing over his shoulder, he spotted the two men from the house. One was kneeling over the dead man, the other scanning the garden by the beam of a powerful flashlight.
Gabriel jumped up and grabbed hold of the metal spikes at the top of the wall. The beam of light fell on him, and someone shouted in German. He pulled himself up, flailing his feet against the wall. A shot struck the stucco, then another. Gabriel could feel sutures tearing in his hands.
He threw his leg over the top and tried to drop onto the other side, but his coat had become tangled on a spike, and he dangled there helplessly, his head exposed, blinded by the flashlight. He twisted his body violently until the spike released him, and he fell into the opposing garden.
The envelope slipped through his coat and dropped into the snow. Gabriel scooped it up, shoved it back into his trousers, and started running.
A BURST of halogen lamplight turned the night electric white. Somewhere an alarm screamed. Gabriel ran along the side of the villa until he reached another wall, this one shielding the villa from the street. He scaled it quickly and dropped onto the other side.
He found himself in a narrow street. Lights were coming on in the neighboring villas—the Swiss and their legendary vigilance. As he ran down the street, Ari Shamron’s Eleventh Commandment played in his head: Thou shalt not get caught!
He came to Krähbühlstrasse, the wide boulevard where he had parked. He sprinted down the gentle curving slope of the street until he spotted his car. He skidded to a stop and came crashing to the pavement. Two men were peering into the interior with flashlights.
As he clambered to his feet, the men trained their flashlights on him. He turned in the opposite direction and headed back up the hill. Thou shalt do anything to avoid being arrested!
He drew the Glock he had taken from the man in the study and kept running. He was beginning to tire. The cold air was searing his lungs, and his mouth tasted of rust and blood. After a few steps, he saw headlights coming down the hill: a big Audi sedan, wheels spinning on the new snow.
He glanced over his shoulder down the hill. The two men were chasing him on foot. No side streets, no alleys—he was trapped. Thou shalt shed innocent blood if necessary!
The Audi was speeding directly toward him. He stopped running and leveled the Glock in his out-stretched hands. When the car fishtailed and slid to a halt a few feet away, he took aim at the silhouette behind the wheel. Before he could fire, the passenger door flew open.
“Get in, Gabriel!” Anna Rolfe shouted. “Hurry.”
SHE drove with the same intensity with which she played the violin—one hand on the steering wheel, the other gripping the stick shift. Down the Zürichberg, across Limmat, into the quiet streets of the city center. Gabriel took a long look over his shoulder.
“You can slow down now.”
She eased off the gas.
“Where did you learn to handle a car like that?”
“I was a Zurich girl with a lot of money. When I wasn’t practicing the violin, I was tearing around the Zürichsee in one of my father’s cars. I’d wrecked three by the time I was twenty-one.”
“Congratulations.”
“Bitterness doesn’t suit you, Gabriel. My cigarettes are in the console. Do me a favor and light one.”
Gabriel opened the console and took out the pack of Gitanes. He lit it with the dashboard lighter. The smoke caught at the back of his throat and he nearly choked.
Anna laughed at him. “Imagine, an Israeli who doesn’t smoke.”
“What the hell are you doing here?”
“That’s all you have to say? If I hadn’t shown up, you’d have been arrested.”
“No, if you hadn’t shown up, I’d be dead. But I still want to know what the hell you’re doing here. Did Rami give you perm
ission to leave the villa?”
“I suspect that by now he’s probably discovered that I’m not there.”
“How did you get away?”
“I went upstairs to my studio to practice. I rolled a tape on a particularly long piece. I suppose you can guess the rest.”
“How did you get off the grounds?”
“Carlos told Rami that he was going into the village to do some marketing. I was in the back beneath a blanket.”
“It’s safe to assume several dozen members of my service are now engaged in a frantic and pointless search for you. That was a very stupid thing to do. How did you get to Zurich?”
“I flew here, of course.”
“Directly from Lisbon?”
“Yes.”
“How long have you been here?”
“About two hours.”
“Did you go inside your father’s house?”
She shook her head. “When I arrived I saw two men waiting outside in a parked car. At first I thought they might be private security. Then I realized something was wrong.”
“What did you do?”
“I didn’t feel safe waiting in the car, so I drove around the neighborhood, hoping to find you before you tried to go in. I missed you, of course. Then I heard the alarms going off.”
“Did you tell anyone you were coming?”
“No.”
“Are you sure?”
“Of course I’m sure. Why?”
“Because it explains a lot of things. It means that the villa is under constant watch. It means that they know we came back here. It means they followed me to Rome. They’ve been following me ever since.”
“What happened inside my father’s house?”
WHEN Gabriel had finished, Anna said: “Did you get the provenance at least?”
