Gabriel Allon 01 - The Kill Artist

by Daniel Silva

  The train pulled into Waterloo. Gabriel strode across the platform, sliced his way through the crowded arrivals hall. He had left his car in an underground car park. He dropped his keys, engaged in his ritualistic inspection, then climbed inside and drove to Surrey.

  There was no sign at the gate. Gabriel had always wanted a place with no sign. Beyond the wall was a well-tended lawn with evenly spaced trees. At the end of a meandering drive stood a rambling redbrick Victorian mansion. He lowered the car window and pressed the button of the intercom. The lens of a security camera stared down at him like a gargoyle. Gabriel instinctively turned his face away from the camera and pretended to fish something from the glove compartment.

  “May I help you?” Female voice, Middle European accent.

  “I’m here to see Miss Martinson. Dr. Avery is expecting me.”

  He raised the window, waited for the automatic security gate to roll aside; then he entered the grounds and headed slowly up the drive. Late afternoon, cold and gray, light wind chasing through the trees. As he drew closer to the house, he began to see a few of the patients. A woman sitting on a bench, dressed in her Sunday best, staring blankly into space. A man in an oilskin and Wellington boots strolling on the arm of a towering Jamaican orderly.

  Avery was waiting in the entrance hall. He wore expensive corduroy trousers, the color of rust and neatly pressed, and a gray cashmere pullover sweater that looked more suited to the golf links than a psychiatric hospital. He shook Gabriel’s hand with a cold formality, as though Gabriel were the representative of an occupying power, then led him down a long carpeted hallway.

  “She’s been speaking quite a bit more this month,” Avery said. “We’ve actually had a meaningful conversation on a couple of occasions.”

  Gabriel managed a tense smile. In all these years she had never spoken to him. “And her physical health?” he asked.

  “No change, really. She’s as fit as can be expected.”

  Avery used a magnetic card to pass through a secure door. On the other side was another hall, terra-cotta tiling instead of carpet. Avery discussed her medication as they walked. He had increased the dosage of one drug, reduced another, taken her off a third altogether. There was a new drug, an experimental, that was showing some promising results in patients suffering from a similar combination of acute post-traumatic stress syndrome and psychotic depression.

  “If you think it will help.”

  “We’ll never know unless we try.”

  Clinical psychiatry, Gabriel thought, was rather like intelligence work.

  The terra-cotta hall ended in a small room. It was filled with gardening tools—pruning shears, hand shovels, trowels—and bags of flower seed and fertilizer. At the other end of the cutting room was a pair of double doors with circular portholes.

  “She’s in her usual place. She’s expecting you. Please don’t keep her long. I should think a half hour would be appropriate. I’ll come for you when it’s time.”

  A solarium, oppressively hot and moist. Leah in the corner, seated in a straight-backed garden chair of wrought iron, young potted roses at her feet. She wore white. The white rollneck sweater Gabriel had given her for her last birthday. The white trousers he had bought for her during a summer holiday in Crete. Gabriel tried to remember the year but couldn’t. There seemed to be only Leah before Vienna and Leah after Vienna. She sat with a schoolgirl’s primness, looking away across the expanse of the lawn. Her hair had been cut institutionally short. Her feet were bare.

  She turned her head as Gabriel stepped forward. For the first time he could see the swath of scarring on the right side of her face. As always it made him feel violently cold. Then he saw her hands, or what was left of her hands. The hard white scar tissue reminded him of the exposed canvas of a damaged painting. He wished he could simply mix a bit of pigment on his palette and put her back to normal.

  He kissed her forehead, smelled her hair for the familiar traces of lavender and lemon, but instead there was only the oppressive moisture of the solarium and the stench of plants in an enclosed space. Avery had left a second chair, which Gabriel pulled a few inches closer. Leah flinched as the wrought-iron legs scraped over the floor. He murmured an apology and sat down. Leah looked away.

  It was always like this. It wasn’t Leah sitting next to him, only a monument to Leah. A gravestone. He used to try to talk to her, but now he was content to just sit in her presence. He followed her gaze across the misty landscape and wondered what she was looking at. There were days, according to Avery, when she just sat and relived it over and over again in excruciatingly vivid detail, unable, or unwilling, to make it stop. Gabriel couldn’t imagine her suffering. He had been permitted to carry on with some semblance of his life, but Leah had been stripped of everything—her child, her body, her sanity. Everything but her memory. Gabriel feared that her grip on life, however tenuous, was somehow linked to his continued fidelity. If he allowed himself to fall in love with someone else, Leah would die.

  After forty-five minutes he stood and pulled on his jacket; then he crouched at her feet with his hands resting on her knees. She looked over his head for a few seconds before lowering her eyes and meeting his gaze. “I have to go,” he said. Leah made no movement.

  He was about to stand when suddenly she reached out and touched the side of his face. Gabriel tried not to recoil at the sensation of the scar tissue sliding along the skin at the corner of his eye. She smiled sadly and lowered her hand. She placed it in her lap, covered it with the other, resumed the frozen pose Gabriel had found her in.

  He stood and walked away. Avery was waiting for him outside. He walked Gabriel to his car. Gabriel sat behind the wheel for a long time before starting the engine, thinking about her hand on his face. So unlike Leah, touching him like that. What did she see there? The strain of the operation? Or the shadow of Jacqueline Delacroix?

  28

  LISBON

  Tariq appeared in the doorway of the fado house. Once again he was dressed like a dockworker. Ghostly pale, hand trembling as he lit his cigarette. He crossed the room and sat down next to Kemel. “What brings you back to Lisbon?”

  “It turns out we have a rather serious bottleneck in our Iberian distribution chain. I may be forced to spend a great deal of time in Lisbon over the next few days.”

  “That’s all?”

  “And this.” Kemel laid a large color photograph on the table. “Meet Dominique Bonard.”

  Tariq picked up the photograph, studied it carefully. “Come with me,” he said calmly. “I want to show you something that I think you’ll find interesting.”

  Tariq’s flat was high in the Alfama. Two rooms, sagging wooden floors, a tiny veranda overlooking a quiet courtyard. He fixed tea Arab style, strong and sweet, and they sat near the open door of the veranda, rain smacking on the stones of the courtyard.

  Tariq said, “Do you remember how we found Allon in Vienna?”

  “It was a long time ago. You’ll have to refresh my memory.”

  “My brother was in bed when he was killed. He had a girl with him—a German student, a radical. She wrote a letter to my parents a few weeks after Mahmoud was killed and told them how it happened. She said she would never forget the face of the assassin as long as she lived. My father took the letter to the PLO security officer in the camp. The security officer turned it over to PLO intelligence.”

  “This all sounds vaguely familiar,” Kemel said.

  “After Abu Jihad was murdered in Tunis, PLO security conducted an investigation. They worked from a simple premise. The killer seemed to know the villa well, inside and out. Therefore he must have spent time around the villa conducting surveillance and planning the attack.”

  “A brilliant piece of detective work,” Kemel said sarcastically. “If PLO security had been doing their job right to begin with, Abu Jihad would still be alive.”

  Tariq went into the bedroom, returned a moment later holding a large manila envelope. “They began reviewin
g all the videotape from the surveillance cameras and found several shots of a small, dark-haired man.” Tariq opened the envelope and handed Kemel several grainy prints. “Over the years PLO intelligence had kept track of the German girl. They showed her these photographs. She said it was the same man who had killed Mahmoud. No doubt about it. So we started looking for him.”

  “And you found him in Vienna?”

  “That’s right.”

  Kemel held out the photographs to Tariq. “What does this have to do with Dominique Bonard?”

  “It goes back to the investigation of the Tunis affair. PLO security wanted to find out where the assassin had stayed in Tunis while he was planning the attack. They knew from past experience that Israeli agents tend to pose as Europeans during jobs like this. They assumed that a man posing as a European had probably stayed in a hotel. They started calling on their spies and informants. They showed the photographs of the assassin to a concierge at one of the beachfront hotels. The concierge said the man had stayed in the hotel with his French girlfriend. PLO security went back to the tapes and began looking for a girl. They found one and showed her to the concierge.”

  “Same girl?”

  “Same girl.”

  Then Tariq reached into the envelope and removed one more surveillance photograph: this one of a beautiful dark-haired girl. He handed it to Kemel, who compared it with the photograph of the woman in London.

  “I could be mistaken,” Tariq said. “But it looks to me like Yusef’s new girlfriend has worked with Gabriel Allon before.”

  They reviewed the plan one last time as they walked through the twisting alleys of the Alfama.

  “The prime minister and Arafat leave for the United States in five days,” Kemel said. “They’re going to Washington first for a meeting at the White House, then it’s off to New York for the signing ceremony at the United Nations. Everything is in place in New York.”

  “Now I just need a traveling companion,” Tariq said. “I think I’d like a beautiful French woman—the type of woman who would look good on the arm of a successful entrepreneur.”

  “I think I know where I can find a woman like that.”

  “Imagine, killing the peace process and Gabriel Allon in one final moment of glory. We’re going to shake the world, Kemel. And then I’m going to leave it.”

  “Are you sure you want to go through with this?”

  “You’re not concerned about my safety at this point?”

  “Of course I am.”

  “Why? You know what’s happening to me.”

  “Actually, I try not to think about it.”

  At the bottom of the hill they came to a taxi stand. Tariq kissed Kemel’s cheeks, then gripped his shoulders. “No tears, my brother. I’ve been fighting for a long time. I’m tired. It’s best this way.”

  Kemel released his grip and opened the door to the waiting taxi.

  Tariq said, “He should have killed the girl.”

  Kemel turned around. “What?”

  “Allon should have killed the German girl who was with my brother. It would all have ended there.”

  “I suppose you’re right.”

  “It was a stupid mistake,” Tariq said. “I wouldn’t have made a mistake like that.”

  Then he turned and walked slowly up the hill into the Alfama.

  29

  ST. JAMES’S, LONDON

  When the security buzzer sounded, Jacqueline turned and peered into the monitor: a bicycle courier. She looked at her watch: six-fifteen. She pressed the buzzer to let him in, then walked from her desk into the hallway to sign for the package. A large manila envelope. She went back to her office, sat down at the desk, sliced open the envelope with the tip of her forefinger. Inside was a single piece of executive-sized letter paper, light gray in color, folded crisply in half. The letterhead bore the name Randolph Stewart, private art dealer. She read the handwritten note: Just back from Paris. . . . Very good trip. . . . No problems with the acquisition. . . . Continue with sale as planned. She placed the letter in Isherwood’s shredder and watched it turn to paper linguine.

  She stood up, pulled on her coat, then walked into Isherwood’s office. He was hunched over a ledger book, chewing on the end of a pencil. He looked up as she entered the room and gave her a weak smile. “Leaving so soon, my love?”

  “I’m afraid I must.”

  “I shall count the hours until I see you again.”

  “And I shall do the same.”

  As she walked out she realized that she would miss Isherwood when it was all over. He was a decent man. She wondered how he had become entangled with the likes of Ari Shamron and Gabriel. She hurried across Mason’s Yard through windblown rain, then walked up Duke Street toward Piccadilly, thinking about the letter. It depressed her. She could picture the rest of the evening. She would meet Yusef at his flat. They would go to dinner, then return to his flat and make love. Then two hours of Middle East history. The injustices heaped upon the defenseless Palestinians. The crimes of the Jews. The inequity of the two-state solution on the negotiating table. It was getting harder and harder for her to pretend that she was enjoying herself.

  Gabriel had promised her a short assignment: seduce him, get into his flat, get his keys and his telephone, and get out again. She had not signed up for a long-term romance. She found the idea of sleeping with Yusef again repulsive. But there was something else. She had agreed to come to London because she thought working with Gabriel would rekindle their romance. If anything it had driven them farther apart. She rarely saw him—he communicated through letters—and the few times they had been together he had been cold and distant. She had been a fool to think things could ever be the way they had been in Tunis.

  She entered the Piccadilly Underground station and walked to the crowded platform. She thought of her villa; of cycling through the sun-drenched hillsides around Valbonne. For a moment she imagined Gabriel riding next to her, his legs pumping rhythmically. Then she felt silly for allowing herself to think about such things. When the train came, she squeezed her way into the packed carriage and clung to a metal handhold. As the car lurched forward, she decided this would be the last night. In the morning, she would tell Gabriel she wanted out.

  Gabriel paced the carpet of the listening post, casually dribbling a lime-green tennis ball in his stocking feet. It was shortly before midnight. Jacqueline and Yusef had just finished making love. He listened to their mutual declarations of physical pleasure. He listened to Yusef using the toilet. He listened to Jacqueline padding into the kitchen for something to drink. He heard her ask Yusef where he had hidden her cigarettes.

  Gabriel lay on the couch and tossed the ball toward the ceiling while he waited for Yusef to begin tonight’s seminar. He wondered what the topic would be. What was it last night?—the myth that only the Jews made the desert bloom. No, that was the night before. Last night had been the betrayal of the Palestinians by the rest of the Arab world. He switched off the lamp and continued tossing the ball and catching it in the dark to test his reflexes and sensory perception.

  A door opening, the snap of a light switch.

  Yusef said somberly: “We need to talk. I misled you about something. I need to tell you the truth now.”

  Gabriel snatched the tennis ball out of the darkness and held it very still in the palm of his hand. He thought of Leah, the night she used those same words before telling him that she had retaliated for his infidelity by taking lovers of her own.

  Jacqueline said lightheartedly, “Sounds awfully serious.”

  Gabriel sent the ball floating upward through the darkness with a subtle flick of his wrist.

  “It’s about the scar on my back.”

  Gabriel got to his feet and switched on the lamp. Then he checked his tape decks to make certain they were recording properly.

  Jacqueline said, “What about the scar on your back?”

  “How it got there.”

  Yusef sat down on the end of the bed. “I lied t
o you about how I got the scar. I need to tell you the truth now.”

  He took a deep breath, let the air out slowly, began speaking, slowly and softly.

  “Our family stayed in Shatila after the PLO was driven out of Lebanon. Maybe you remember that day, Dominique; the day Arafat and his guerrillas pulled out while the Israelis and the Americans waved good-bye to them from the waterfront. With the PLO gone we had no protection. Lebanon was in shambles. Christians, Sunnis, Shiites, the Druse—everyone was fighting everyone else, and the Palestinians were caught in the middle of it. We lived in fear that something terrible might happen. Do you remember now?”

  “I was young, but I think I remember.”

  “The situation was a powder keg. It would take just one spark to set off a holocaust. That spark turned out to be the assassination of Bashir Gemayel. He was the leader of Lebanon’s Maronite Christians and the president-elect of the country. He was killed in a car bomb explosion at the headquarters of the Christian Phalange party.

  “That night half of Beirut was screaming for vengeance, while the other half was cowering in fear. No one was sure who had planted the bomb. It could have been anyone, but the Phalangists were convinced the Palestinians were to blame. They loathed us. The Christians never wanted us in Lebanon, and now that the PLO was gone, they wanted to eliminate the Palestinian problem from Lebanon once and for all. Before his death Gemayel had said it very clearly: ‘There is one people too many: the Palestinian people.’

  “After the assassination the Israelis moved into West Beirut and took up positions overlooking Sabra and Shatila. They wanted to cleanse the camps of the remaining PLO fighters, and in order to prevent Israeli casualties they sent in the Phalange militiamen to do the job for them. Everyone knew what would happen once the militiamen were let loose on the camps. Gemayel was dead, and we were the ones who were going to pay the price. It would be a bloodbath, but the Israeli army let them in anyway.