Gabriel walked past the shuttered bars along the Sterngasse, then turned into a winding walkway that ended in a staircase of stone. At the top of the stairs was a heavy studded door. Next to the door was a small brass plaque: WARTIME CLAIMS AND INQUIRIES -APPOINTMENTS ONLY. He pressed the bell.
“May I help you?”
“I’d like to see Mr. Lavon, please.”
“Do you have an appointment?”
“No.”
“Mr. Lavon doesn’t accept unscheduled visitors.”
“I’m afraid it’s an emergency.”
“May I have your name, please?”
“Tell him it’s Gabriel Allon. He’ll remember me.”
THE room into which Gabriel was shown was classic Viennese in its proportions and furnishings: a high ceiling, a polished wood floor catching the light streaming through the tall windows, bookshelves sagging beneath the weight of countless volumes and files. Lavon seemed lost in it. But then, disappearing into the background was Lavon’s special gift.
At the moment, however, he was balanced precariously atop a library ladder, flipping through the contents of a bulging file and muttering to himself. The light from the windows cast a greenish glow over him, and it was then Gabriel realized that the glass was bulletproof. Lavon looked up suddenly, tipping his head downward in order to see over the pair of smudged half-moon reading glasses perched at the end of his nose. Cigarette ash dropped into the file. He seemed not to notice, because he closed the file and slipped it back into its slot on the shelf and smiled.
“Gabriel Allon! Shamron’s avenging angel. My God, what are you doing here?”
He climbed down the ladder like a man with old pains. As always, he seemed to be wearing all his clothing at once: a blue button-down shirt, a beige rollneck sweater, a cardigan, a floppy herringbone jacket that seemed a size too large. He had shaved carelessly, and wore socks but no shoes.
He held Gabriel’s hands and kissed his cheek. How long had it been? Twenty-five years, thought Gabriel. In the lexicon of the Wrath of God operation, Lavon had been anayin, a tracker. An archaeologist by training, he had stalked members of Black September, learned their habits, and devised ways of killing them. He had been a brilliant watcher, a chameleon who could blend into any surroundings. The operation took a terrible physical and psychological toll on all of them, but Gabriel remembered that Lavon had suffered the most. Working alone in the field, exposed to his enemies for long periods of time, he had developed a chronic stomach disorder that stripped thirty pounds from his lean frame. When it was over, Lavon took an assistant professorship at Hebrew University and spent his weekends on digs in the West Bank. Soon he heard other voices. Like Gabriel, he was a child of Holocaust survivors. Searching for ancient relics seemed trivial when there was so much still to be unearthed about the immediate past. He settled in Vienna and put his formidable talents to work in another way: tracking down Nazis and their looted treasure.
“So, what brings you to Vienna? Business? Pleasure?”
“Augustus Rolfe.”
“Rolfe? The banker?” Lavon lowered his head and glared at Gabriel over his glasses. “Gabriel, you weren’t the one who-” He made a gun of his right hand.
Gabriel unzipped his jacket, removed the envelope he had taken from Rolfe’s desk, and handed it to Lavon. Carefully he pried open the flap, as if he were handling a fragment of ancient ceramic, and removed the contents. He glanced at the first photograph, then the second, his face revealing nothing. Then he looked up at Gabriel and smiled.
“Well, well, Herr Rolfe takes a lovely photograph. Where did you get these, Gabriel?”
“From the old man’s desk in Zurich.”
He held up the sheaf of documents. “And these?”
“Same place.”
Lavon looked at the photographs again. “Fantastic.”
“What do they mean?”
“I need to pull a few files. I’ll have the girls get you some coffee and something to eat. We’re going to be a while.”
THEY sat across from each other at a rectangular conference table, a stack of files between them. Gabriel wondered about the people who had come before him: old men convinced the man in the flat next door was one of their tormentors at Buchenwald; children trying to pry open a numbered account in Switzerland where their father had hidden his life savings before being shipped east into the archipelago of death. Lavon picked up one of the photographs-Rolfe seated in a restaurant next to the man with dueling scars on his cheeks-and held it up for Gabriel to see.
“Do you recognize this man?”
“No.”
“His name is Walter Schellenberg, Brigadeführer SS.” Lavon took the top file from the stack and spread it on the table before him. “Walter Schellenberg was the head of Department Four of the Reich Security Main Office. Department Four handled foreign intelligence, which effectively made Schellenberg the international spymaster of the Nazi Party. He was involved in some of the most dramatic intelligence episodes of the war: the Venlo Incident, the attempt to kidnap the Duke of Windsor, and the Cicero operation. At Nuremberg he was convicted of being a member of the SS, but he received a light sentence of just six years in prison.”
“Six years? Why?”
“Because during the last months of the war he arranged for the release of a few Jews from the death camps.”
“How did he manage that?”
“He sold them.”
“So why was the spymaster of the Nazi Party having dinner with Augustus Rolfe?”
“Intelligence services the world over have one thing in common: They all run on money. Even Shamron couldn’t survive without money. But when Shamron needs money, he just lays a hand on the shoulder of a rich friend and tells him the story of how he captured Eichmann. Schellenberg had a special problem. His money was no good anywhere outside Germany. He needed a banker in a neutral country who could provide him with hard currency and then transfer that money through a dummy company or some other front to his agents. Schellenberg needed a man like Augustus Rolfe.”
Lavon picked up the documents Gabriel had taken from Rolfe’s desk. “Take this transaction. Fifteen hundred pounds sterling, wired from the accounts of Pillar Enterprises Limited to the account of a Mr. Ivan Edberg, Enskilde Bank, Stockholm, the twenty-third of October, 1943.”
Gabriel inspected the document, then slid it back across the table.
“ Sweden was neutral, of course, and a hotbed of wartime intelligence,” Lavon said. “Schellenberg surely had an agent there, if not an entire network. I suspect Mr. Edberg was one of those agents. Perhaps the leader and paymaster of the network.”
Lavon slipped the transfer order back into the pile and removed another. He peered down at it through his reading glasses, squinting from the smoke of the cigarette between his lips.
“Another transfer order: one thousand pounds sterling from the account of Pillar Enterprises Limited to a Mr. Jose Suarez, care of the Bank of Lisbon.” Lavon lowered the paper and looked up at Gabriel. “ Portugal, like Sweden, was neutral, and Lisbon was an amusement park for spies. Schellenberg operated there himself during the Duke of Windsor affair.”
“So Rolfe was Schellenberg’s secret banker. But how does that explain the photograph of Rolfe at Berchtesgaden with Himmler and Hitler?”
Lavon prepared his next cup of coffee with the reverence of a true Viennese: a precise measure of heavy cream, just enough sugar to remove the bitter edge. Gabriel thought of Lavon in a safe flat in Paris, living on mineral water and weak tea because his ravaged stomach would tolerate nothing else.
“Everything changed inside Germany after Stalingrad. Even the true believers knew it was over. The Russians were coming from the east, the invasion from the west was inevitable. Anyone who’d accumulated wealth as a result of the war wanted desperately to hang onto that wealth. And where do you think they turned?”