Moscow Rules

“Don’t even think about it. Not for at least three days.”

The doctor put his light and suture cutters back in his bag and pulled the zipper closed. Gabriel thanked him for coming all the way from Tel Aviv for a five-minute job. “Just don’t tell anyone you were here,” he added. “If you do, that angry-looking little man over there will kill you with his bare hands.”

The doctor looked at Shamron, who had managed to watch the entire proceeding without offering a single piece of advice.

“Is it true what they say about him? Was he really the one who kidnapped Eichmann?”

Gabriel nodded.

“Is it all right if I shake his hand? I want to touch the hands that grabbed hold of that monster.”

'It’s fine,” said Gabriel. “But be careful. He bites.”

He didn’t want to wear the patch, but even he had to admit he looked better with it on than off. The tissue around the eye was still distorted with swelling and the new scar was raw and hideous. “You’ll look like yourself eventually,” Chiara assured him. “But it’s going to take a while. You older men don’t heal as fast.”

The doctor’s optimism about the pace of his recovery turned out to be accurate. By the next morning, Gabriel’s vision had improved dramatically, and by the morning after it seemed almost normal. He felt ready to begin work on Elena’s request but confined his efforts to only one small task: the fabrication of a stretcher, 38 ? inches by 29 ? inches. When the stretcher was finished, he pulled a linen canvas over it and covered the canvas with a layer of ground. Then he placed the canvas on his easel and waited for it to dry.

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 Hotel 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 expose 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