The Heist (44 page)

“What are you hearing?”

“That he gave it to someone for safekeeping.”

“Someone at the dirty end of the business?”

“It’s hard to say. But as you might expect,” the general added quickly, “other people are now looking for it. Which means it’s imperative we find it before they do.”

Gabriel was silent.

“Not even tempted, Allon?”

“My involvement in this affair is now officially over.”

“It sounds as though you actually mean it this time.”

“I do.”

The family of four quietly departed, leaving the
campo
deserted. The heavy silence seemed to disturb the general. He looked at the lights burning in the windows of the Casa Israelitica di Riposo and shook his head slowly.

“I don’t understand why you choose to live in a ghetto,” he said.

“It’s a nice neighborhood,” replied Gabriel. “The nicest in Venice, if you ask me.”

F
OR THE NEXT SEVERAL DAYS
, Gabriel rarely strayed far from Chiara’s side. He made her breakfast each morning. He spent afternoons with her at the office of the Jewish community. He sat at the kitchen counter in the evening and watched over her as she cooked. At first, she was charmed by the attention, but gradually the sheer weight of his ceaseless affections began to grate upon her. It was, she would say later, a little too much of a good thing. She briefly considered asking Francesco Tiepolo for a painting to restore—something small and not too damaged—but decided that they should take a trip instead. Nothing too extravagant, she said, and nowhere that would require air travel. Two days, three at the most. Gabriel had an idea. That evening, he rang Christoph Bittel and requested permission to enter Switzerland; and Bittel, who knew well the reason why his newfound friend and accomplice wanted to return to the Confederation, readily agreed.

“It might be better if I meet you,” he said.

“I was hoping you’d say that.”

“Do you know the area?”

“Not at all,” said Gabriel, lying.

“There’s a hotel just outside of town called the Alpenblick. I’ll be waiting for you there.”

And so it was that, early the following morning, Gabriel and Chiara left their beloved city of water and paintings and set out for the landlocked little country of wealth and secrets that had played such a prominent role in their lives. It was midmorning when they crossed the border at Lugano and started northward into the Alps. Snow flurries blew through the high passes, but by the time they reached the shores of the Interlaken the sun was shining brightly from a cloudless sky. Gabriel refilled his tank with gas and then set out up the valley to Grindelwald. The Alpenblick Hotel was a rustic building standing alone at the edge of town. Gabriel left the car in the hotel’s small parking lot and, with Chiara at his side, climbed the stairs to the terrace. Bittel was drinking coffee and gazing upward at the looming peaks of the Monch and the Eiger. Rising, he shook Gabriel’s hand. Then he looked at Chiara and smiled.

“You surely have a very beautiful name, but I won’t make the mistake of asking it.” He glanced at Gabriel and said, “You never told me you were about to be a father again, Allon.”

“Actually,” said Gabriel, “she’s just my food taster.”

“I’m sorry to hear that.”

Bittel sat down and waved away an approaching waiter. Then he pointed across a green meadow, toward the base of the mountains.

“The chalet is right over there,” he said to Gabriel. “It’s a nice place, good views, very clean and comfortable.”

“You have a future as an estate agent, Bittel.”

“I like protecting my country better.”

“I assume you have a static watch post somewhere?”

“We’re renting the chalet next door,” said Bittel. “We keep two officers here full-time, and others cycle in and out as needed. She never goes anywhere without an escort.”

“Any suspicious visitors?”

“Of the Syrian variety?”

Gabriel nodded.

“You get all kinds here in Grindelwald,” Bittel responded, “so it’s a little hard to tell. But so far, no one’s gone anywhere near her.”

“How’s her mood?”

“She seems lonely,” said Bittel seriously. “The guards spend as much time with her as possible, but . . .”

“But what, Bittel?”

The Swiss policeman smiled sadly. “I could be wrong,” he said, “but I think she could use a friend.”

Gabriel rose to his feet. “I can’t thank you enough for agreeing to take her, Bittel.”

“It was the least we could do to repay you for cleaning up the mess at the Geneva Freeport. But you should have requested our permission before running that operation at the Hotel Métropole.”

“Would you have given it?”

“Of course not,” replied Bittel. “Which means you’d still have eight billion dollars in Syrian money in your bank account.”

Eight-point-two, thought Gabriel as he headed toward his car. But who was counting?

Gabriel left Chiara and Bittel behind at the hotel and drove into the meadow alone. The house was at the end of a lane, a small, tidy structure of dark timber with a steeply pitched roof and flowerpots lining the balcony. Jihan Nawaz appeared there as Gabriel eased into the grassy drive and switched off the engine. She was wearing blue jeans and a thick woolen sweater. Her hair was longer and lighter; a plastic surgeon had altered the shape of her nose, her cheekbones, and her chin. She was not quite pretty, but she was no longer ordinary looking, either. A moment later, when she came spilling out of the front door, she brought with her the faint scent of roses. She flung her arms around his neck, embraced him tightly, and kissed him on each cheek.

“Am I allowed to call you by your real name?” she whispered in his ear.

“No,” he replied. “Not here.”

“How long can you stay?”

“As long as you like.”

“Come,” she said, taking him by the hand. “I’ve made us something to eat.”

The interior of the chalet was warm and comfortable, but it contained not a trace of evidence the person who lived there had a family or a past of any kind. Gabriel felt a stab of regret. He should have left her alone. Waleed al-Siddiqi would still be managing the money of the worst man in the world, and Jihan would be living quietly in Linz. And yet she had known the name of al-Siddiqi’s special client, he thought. And she had stayed at the bank for a reason.

“I’ve seen that look on your face before,” she said, watching him intently. “It was in Annecy, as I was coming out of the back of the car. I saw you sitting in the café on the other side of the square. You looked . . .” She left the thought unfinished.

“How?” he asked.

“Guilty,” she said without an instant of hesitation.

“I was guilty.”

“Why?”

“I never should have let you walk into that hotel.”

“My hand healed nicely,” she said, holding it up as though to prove the point. “And my bruises have healed, too. Besides, it was nothing compared to what most Syrians have suffered since the war began. I’m only sorry I couldn’t do more.”

“Your war is over, Jihan.”

“You were the one who urged me to join the Syrian rebellion.”

“And our rebellion failed.”

“You paid too much to get me back.”

“I wasn’t in the mood for a prolonged negotiation,” said Gabriel. “It was a take-away offer.”

“I only wish I could have seen Mr. al-Siddiqi’s face when he found out you’d taken the money.”

“I must admit I enjoyed his suffering a little too much,” said Gabriel, “but yours was the only face I wanted to see at that moment.”

With that, she turned and led him into the garden. A small table had been laid with coffee and Swiss chocolates. Jihan sat facing her chalet; Gabriel, the towering gray massif. When they were settled, he asked her about her stay in Israel.

“I spent the first two weeks locked away in an apartment in Tel Aviv,” she said. “It was dreadful.”

“We do our utmost to make visitors feel welcome.”

Jihan smiled. “Ingrid came to see me a few times,” she said, “but not you. They refused to tell me where you were.”

“I’m afraid I had other business to attend to.”

“Another operation?”

“In a manner of speaking.”

She filled their cups with coffee. “Eventually,” she resumed, “they allowed Ingrid and me to take a trip together. We stayed in a hotel on the Golan Heights. At night, we could hear the shelling and the air-strikes on the other side of the border. All I could think about is how many people were being killed each time the sky filled with light.”

To that, Gabriel offered no reply.

“I read in the newspapers this morning that the Americans are reconsidering military strikes against the regime.”

“I read the same thing.”

“Do you think he’ll do it this time?”

“Attack the regime?”

She nodded her head. Gabriel didn’t have the heart to tell her the truth, so he told her one last falsehood instead.

“Yes,” he said. “I think they will.”

“And will the regime fall if the Americans attack it?”

“It might.”

“If it did,” she said after a moment, “I would go back to Syria and help rebuild the country.”

“This is your home now.”

“No,” she said. “This is the place where I hide from butchers. But Hama will always be my home.”

A sudden gust of wind blew a lock of her newly lightened hair across her face. She brushed it away and looked across the meadow, toward the massif. Its base was in deep shadow, but the snow-capped peaks were rose-tinted with the setting sun.

“I love my mountain,” she said suddenly. “It makes me feel safe. It makes me feel as though nothing can happen to me.”

“Are you happy here?”

“I have a new name, a new face, a new country. It is my fourth. That is what it means to be a Syrian.”

“And a Jew,” said Gabriel.

“But the Jews have a home now.” She raised her hand toward the meadow. “And I have this.”

“Can you be happy here?”

“Yes,” she answered after a long moment. “I think I can. But I did enjoy the time we spent together on the Attersee, especially the boat rides.”

“So did I.”

She smiled, then asked, “And what about you? Are you happy?”

“I wish they hadn’t hurt you.”

“But we beat them, didn’t we? At least for a little while.”

“Yes, Jihan, we beat them.”

The last light leaked from the mountain peaks, and evening fell like a curtain upon the valley.

“There’s one thing you never told me.”

“What’s that?”

“How did you find me?”

“You wouldn’t believe me.”

“Is it a good story?”

“Yes,” he said. “I think it is.”

“How does it end?”

He kissed her cheek and left her alone with her past.

G
ABRIEL AND
C
HIARA SPENT
the next two nights at a small resort on the shores of the Interlaken and then departed Switzerland by the same route they had entered it. In the mountain passes, Gabriel received a secure text message from King Saul Boulevard instructing him to turn on the radio; and as they crossed the Italian border at Lugano, he learned that Kemel al-Farouk, deputy minister of foreign affairs, former officer of the Mukhabarat, friend and trusted adviser of the Syrian president, had been killed in a mysterious explosion in Damascus. It had been Uzi Navot’s operation, but in many respects it was the first killing of the Allon era. Somehow, he suspected it wouldn’t be the last.

It was raining by the time they reached Como. Gabriel should have taken the autostrada down to Milan, but instead he followed the winding road above the lake until he arrived once more at the leaden gate of Jack Bradshaw’s villa. The gate was tightly closed; next to it was a sign stating the property was for sale. Gabriel sat there for a moment, hands atop the steering wheel, debating what to do. Then he rang General Ferrari in Rome, asked for the security code, and punched it into the keypad. A few seconds later, the gate swung open. Gabriel slipped the car into gear and headed down the drive.

The door was locked, too. Gabriel quickly unbuttoned it with a thin metal tool he carried habitually in his wallet and led Chiara into the entrance hall. A heavy smell of disuse hung on the air, but the blood had been scrubbed from the marble floor. Chiara tried the light switch; the chandelier from which Jack Bradshaw had been hung burst into life. Gabriel closed the door and headed toward the great room.

The walls had been stripped of artwork and freshly painted; some of the furniture had been removed to create the illusion of greater space. But not Bradshaw’s pretty antique writing desk. It stood in the same place where it had been before, though the two photographs of Bradshaw before the fall had been removed. His multiline telephone remained, covered in a fine layer of dust. Gabriel lifted the receiver to his ear. There was no dial tone. He returned it to its cradle and looked at Chiara.

“Why are we here?” she asked.

“Because
it
was here.”

“Maybe,” she said.

“Maybe,” he conceded.

In the days after Gabriel’s initial discovery, General Ferrari’s Art Squad had torn Jack Bradshaw’s villa to pieces looking for additional stolen paintings. It was unlikely a canvas measuring seven feet by eight feet had somehow escaped their notice. Even so, Gabriel wanted to have one final look for himself, if only to put his mind at ease. He had spent the last several months of his life in pursuit of the world’s most famous lost masterpiece. And thus far all he had to show for it was a few stolen paintings and a dead Syrian thug.

And so, as the daylight faded that autumn afternoon, he searched the home of a man he had never met, with his pregnant wife at his side—room by room, closet by closet, cupboard by cupboard, drawer by drawer, crawl spaces, air ducts, the attic, the cellar. He searched the walls for newly spread plaster. He searched the floorboards for clean nail heads. He searched the gardens for freshly turned earth. Until finally, fatigued, frustrated, and smudged with dirt, he found himself standing again at Bradshaw’s writing desk. He lifted the telephone to his ear, but not surprisingly there was still no dial tone. Then he drew his BlackBerry from his coat pocket and dialed a number from memory. A few seconds later, a male voice answered in Italian.