“First name?” asked Gabriel.

“Sometimes José. Other times he’s Jorge.”

“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-level 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.