He slept poorly that night and woke at four. He tried to fall asleep again, but it was no use, so he slipped out of bed and headed downstairs. He had always worked well in the early morning, and, despite his weakened eye, that morning was no exception. He applied the first layers of base paint, and by midday two small children were clearly visible on the canvas.
He took a break for lunch, then spent a second session before the canvas that lasted until dinner. He painted from memory, without even a photograph for reference, and with a swiftness and confidence he would not have thought possible a week earlier. Sometimes, when the house was quiet, he could almost feel her at his shoulder, whispering instructions into his ear. Watch your brushwork on the hands, she reminded him. Not too impasto on the hands. And sometimes, when his vision began to blur, he would see Elena chained to a chair in her husband’s warehouse of death, a gun pressed to the side of her head. You’d better pull the trigger, Arkady, because Ivan is never getting those children.
Chiara and the household staff knew better than to watch him while he worked, but Shamron and Gilah were unaware of his rules and were therefore never far from his back. Gilah’s visits were brief in duration, but Shamron, with nothing else to occupy his time, became a permanent fixture in Gabriel’s studio. He had always been mystified by Gabriel’s ability to paint-to Shamron, it was but a parlor trick or an illusion of some sort-and he was content now to sit silently at Gabriel’s side as he worked, even if it meant forgoing his cigarettes.
“I should have left you at Bezalel in ’seventy-two,” he said late one night. “I should have found someone else to execute those Black September murderers. You would have been one of the greatest artists of your generation, instead of-”
“Instead of what?”
“Instead of an eccentric old restorer with melancholia and mood swings who lives in a villa in the middle of Umbria surrounded by pigs and crucifixes.”
“I’m happy, Ari. I have Chiara.”
“Keep her close, Gabriel. Remember, Ivan likes to break pretty things.”
Gabriel laid down his brush, then stepped back and examined the painting for a long time, hand pressed to his chin, head tilted to one side. Chiara, who was watching from the top of the stairs, said, “Is it finished, Signore Vianelli?”
Gabriel was silent for a moment. “Yes,” he said finally. “I think it is finished.”
“What are you going to do about the signature?” Shamron asked.
“I’m not sure.”
“May I give you a small piece of artistic advice?”
“If you must.”
“Sign it with the name your mother gave you.”
He dipped the brush in black paint and signed the name Gabriel Allon in the bottom left corner.
“Do you think she’ll like it?”
“I’m sure she will. Is it finished now?”
“Not quite,” Gabriel said. “I have to bake it for thirty minutes.”
"I should have left you at Bezalel,” Shamron said. “You could have been great. ”
AUTHOR’S NOTE
Moscow Rules is a work of fiction. The names, characters, places, and incidents portrayed in this novel are the product of the author’s imagination or have been used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
Two Children on a Beach by Mary Cassatt does not exist and therefore could not have been forged. If it did, it would bear a striking resemblance to a picture called Children Playing on the Beach, which hangs in the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C. Visitors to the French ski resort of Courchevel will search in vain for the Hôtel Grand, for it, too, is an invention. Riviera Flight Services is fictitious, and I have tinkered with airline schedules to make them fit my story. The Novodevichy Cemetery is faithfully rendered, as is the House on the Embankment, though it is a slightly less sinister place now than I have made it out to be. The FSB is in fact the internal security service of the Russian Federation, and its multitude of sins have been widely reported. Deepest apologies to the director of the Impressionist and Modern Art department at Christie’s auction house in London. I am quite certain he is nothing like Alistair Leach. To the best of my knowledge, there is no CIA safe house on N Street in Georgetown.
Moskovsky Gazeta does not exist, though, sadly, the threat to Russian journalists is all too real. According to the Committee to Protect Journalists, forty-seven reporters, editors, cameramen, and photographers have been killed in Russia since 1992, making it the third-deadliest country in the world in which to practice the craft of journalism, after Iraq and Algeria. Fourteen of those deaths occurred during the rule of Russian president Vladimir Putin, who undertook a systematic crack-down on press freedom and political dissent after coming to power in 1999. Virtually all the murders were contract killings, and few have been solved or prosecuted.
The most famous Russian reporter murdered during the rule of Vladimir Putin was Anna Politkovskaya, who was gunned down in the elevator of her Moscow apartment house in October 2006. A vocal critic of the regime, Politkovskaya was about to publish a searing exposé detailing allegations of torture and kidnapping by the Russian military and security forces in Chechnya. Putin dismissed Anna Politkovskaya as a person of “marginal significance” and did not bother to attend her funeral. No one connected to the Kremlin did.
Six months after Politkovskaya’s murder, Ivan Safronov, a highly respected military affairs writer for the Kommersant newspaper, was found dead in the courtyard of his Moscow apartment building. Russian police claimed he committed suicide by jumping from a fifth-floor window, even though he resided on the third floor. While conducting research in Moscow, I learned Safronov had telephoned his wife on the way home to say he was stopping to buy some oranges, hardly the act of a suicidal man. The oranges were later found scattered in the stairwell between the fourth and fifth floors, along with Safronov’s cap. According to witnesses, Safronov was alive for several minutes after the fall and even attempted to stand. He would not survive the uncaring ineptitude of Moscow ’s ambulance service, which took thirty minutes to dispatch help. The “attendants” assumed Safronov had fallen from an open window in a drunken stupor. An autopsy found no trace of alcohol or drugs in his system.
If the brutal death of Ivan Safronov was an act of murder rather than suicide, then why was he killed and by whom? Like Anna Politkovskaya,Ivan Safronov had apparently uncovered information that Vladimir Putin’s Kremlin did not want the rest of the world to know: specifically, that Russia intended to sell advanced fighter jets and missiles to its two pariah allies in the Middle East, Iran and Syria. In order to provide the Kremlin with plausible deniability it played any part in the sale, the deal was reportedly set to be conducted through an arms dealer in Belarus. Safronov is said to have confirmed details of the sale during a trip to the Middle East in the days before his death.
The promiscuity of Russian arms sales in the Middle East has been well documented. So, too, have the activities of “private” Russian arms traffickers. One such man is Viktor Bout. Often referred to as “the merchant of death” and the world’s most notorious gunrunner, Bout is alleged to have sold weapons to a diverse set of clients that include the likes of Hezbollah, the Taliban, and even elements of al-Qaeda. In 2006, the U.S. Treasury Department seized some of Bout’s aircraft and froze his assets. In March 2008, as I was finishing this manuscript, he was arrested in a luxury Bangkok hotel in an American-led sting operation. He is accused of offering to sell millions of dollars’ worth of weaponry to the FARC rebels of Colombia, including advanced shoulder-launch antiaircraft missiles. At the time of this writing, he sits in a Thai jail cell, awaiting legal proceedings and possible extradition to the United States to face charges.