“You don’t speak German, Signore Delvecchio?”
“No.”
“According to the taxi driver, the one who took you from the Bahnhofstrasse to the villa on the Zürichberg, you speak German quite well.”
“Speaking a few words of German and actually speaking German are two very different things.”
“The driver told us that you gave him the address in rapid and confident German with the pronounced accent of a Berliner. Tell me something, Signore Delvecchio. How is it that you speak German with the accent of a Berliner?”
“I told you-I don’t speak German. I speak a few words of German. I spent a few weeks in Berlin restoring a painting. I suppose I acquired the accent while I was there.”
“How long ago was that?”
“About four years ago?”
“About four years?”
“Yes.”
“Which painting?”
“I’m sorry?”
“The painting you restored in Berlin. Who was the artist? What was it called?”
“I’m afraid that’s confidential.”
“Nothing is confidential at this point, Signore Delvecchio. I’d like the name of the painting and the name of the owner.”
“It was a Caravaggio in private hands. I’m sorry, but I cannot divulge the name of the owner.”
Peterson held out his hand toward Baer without looking at him. Baer reached into his file folder and handed him a single sheet of paper. He reviewed it sadly, as if the patient did not have long to live.
“We ran your name through our computer database to see if there happened to be any outstanding arrest warrants for you in Switzerland. I’m pleased to announce there was nothing-not even a traffic citation. We asked our friends across the border in Italy to do the same thing. Once again, there was nothing recorded against you. But our Italian friends told us something more interesting. It seems that a Mario Delvecchio, born 23 September 1951, died in Turin twenty-three years ago of lymphatic cancer.” He looked up from the paper and fixed his gaze on Gabriel. “What do you think are the odds of two men having precisely the same name and the same date of birth?”
“How should I know?”
“I think they’re very long indeed. I think there is only one Mario Delvecchio, and you stole his identity in order to obtain an Italian passport. I don’t believe your name is Mario Delvecchio. In fact, I’m quite certain it isn’t. I believe your name is Gabriel Allon, and that you work for the Israeli secret service.”
Peterson smiled for the first time, not a pleasant smile, more like a tear in a scrap of paper.
“Twenty-five years ago, you murdered a Palestinian playwright living in Zurich named Ali Abdel Hamidi. You slipped out of the country an hour after the killing and were probably back home in your bed in Tel Aviv before midnight. This time, I’m afraid you’re not going anywhere.”
4
SOMETIME AFTER MIDNIGHT Gabriel was moved from the interrogation room to a holding cell in an adjacent wing of the building. It was small and institutional gray, with a bare mattress mounted on a steel frame and a rust-stained toilet that never stopped running. Overhead, a single lightbulb buzzed behind a mesh cage. His untouched dinner-a fatty pork sausage, some wilted greens, and a pile of greasy potatoes-sat on the ground next to the door like room service waiting to be collected. Gabriel supposed the pork sausage had been Peterson’s idea of a joke.
He tried to picture the events he knew were taking place outside these walls. Peterson had contacted his superior, his superior had contacted the Foreign Ministry. By now word had probably reached Tel Aviv. The prime minister would be livid. He had enough problems: the West Bank in flames, the peace process in tatters, his brittle coalition crumbling. The last thing he needed was a kidon, even a former kidon, behind bars in Switzerland -yet another Office scandal waiting to explode across the front pages of the world’s newspapers.
And so the lights were certainly burning with urgency tonight in the anonymous office block on Tel Aviv’s King Saul Boulevard. And Shamron? Had the call gone out to his lakeside fortress in Tiberias? Was he in or out these days? It was always hard to tell with Shamron. He’d been dug out of his precarious retirement three or four times, called back to deal with this crisis or that, tapped to serve on some dubious advisory panel or to sit in wizened judgment on a supposedly independent fact-finding committee. Not long ago he’d been appointed interim chief of the service, the position he’d held the first time he was sent into the Judean wilderness of retirement. Gabriel wondered whether that term had ended. With Shamron the word interim could mean a hundred days or a hundred years. He was Polish by birth but had a Bedouin’s elastic sense of time. Gabriel was Shamron’s kidon. Shamron would handle it, retired or not.
The old man…He’d always been “the old man,” even during his brief fling with middle age. Where’s the old man? Anyone seen the old man? Run for the hills! The old man is coming this way! Now he was an old man, but in Gabriel’s mind’s eye he always appeared as the menacing little figure who’d come to see him one afternoon in September 1972 between classes at Betsal’el. An iron bar of a man. You could almost hear him clanking as he walked. He had known everything about Gabriel. That he had been raised on an agricultural kibbutz in the Jezreel Valley and that he had a passionate hatred of farming. That he was something of a lone wolf, even though he was already married at the time to a fellow art student named Leah Savir. That his mother had found the strength to survive Auschwitz but was no match for the cancer that ravaged her body; that his father had survived Auschwitz too but was no match for the Egyptian artillery shell that blew him to bits in the Sinai. Shamron knew from Gabriel’s military service that he was nearly as good with a gun as he was with a paintbrush.
“You watch the news?”
“I paint.”
“You know about Munich? You know what happened to our boys there?”
“Yeah, I heard.”
“You’re not upset by it?”
“Of course, but I’m not more upset because they’re athletes or because it’s the Olympics.”
“You can still be angry.”
“At who?”
“At the Palestinians. At the Black September terrorists who walk around with the blood of your people on their hands.”
“I never get angry.”
And though Gabriel did not realize it at the time, those words had sealed Shamron’s commitment to him, and the seduction was begun.
“You speak languages, yes?”
“A few.”
“A few?”
“My parents didn’t like Hebrew, so they spoke the languages from Europe.”
“Which ones?”
“You know already. You know all about me. Don’t play games with me.”
And so Shamron decided to play his pickup line. Golda had ordered Shamron to “send forth the boys” to take down the Black September bastards who had carried out this bloodbath. The operation was to be called Wrath of God. It was not about justice, Shamron had said. It was about taking an eye for an eye. It was about revenge, pure and simple.
“Sorry, not interested.”
“Not interested? Do you know how many boys in this country would give anything to be part of this team?”
“Go ask them.”
“I don’t want them. I want you.”
“Why me?”
“Because you have gifts. You have languages. You have a clear head. You don’t drink, and you don’t smoke hash. You’re not a crazy who’s going to go off half-cocked.”
And because you have the emotional coldness of a killer, Shamron thought, although he didn’t say these words to Gabriel then. Instead, he told him a story, the story of a young intelligence officer who had been chosen for a special mission because he had a gift, an unusually powerful grip for so small a man. The story of a night in a Buenos Aires suburb, when this young intelligence officer had seen a man waiting at a bus stop. Waiting like an ordinary man, Gabriel. An ordinary pathetic little man. And how this young intelligence officer had leapt from a car and grabbed the man by the throat and how he had sat on him as the car drove away and how he had smelled the stink of fear on his breath. The same stink the Jews had emitted as this pathetic little man sent them off to the gas chambers. And the story worked, as Shamron had known it would. Because Gabriel was the only son of two Auschwitz survivors, and their scars were his.