The English Assassin

time, walks away. Then the car explodes. He turns and begins to run. In his dream it takes several minutes for him to reach the car, even though it is only a few yards away. He finds his son, torn to pieces by the bomb. In the front seat is a woman, blackened by fire. Now, instead of Leah, the woman is Anna Rolfe.

Finally he forced the dream to end. He awoke in damp sheets, looked at his wristwatch. He had slept twelve hours.

He showered and dressed. Outside it was midmorning, puffy white clouds scudding across an azure sky, wind prowling the Corso d’Italia. Overnight it had stormed, and the gusts were making tiny whitecaps in large puddles on the pavement. He walked to the Via Veneto, bought the papers, and read them over breakfast in a cafe.

After an hour he left the cafe, walked to a telephone booth, and dialed a number from memory. Click… hum… click… Finally a voice, slightly distant, a bit of an echo. “Yes?”

Gabriel identified himself as Stevens, one of his old work names, and said he wished to have lunch with Mr. Baker at Il Drappo. A pause, another click, more humming, something that sounded like shattering china. Then the voice returned.

“Mr. Baker says lunch at Il Drappo is suitable.”

After that the line went dead.

FOR two days Gabriel waited. He rose early each morning and jogged the quiet footpaths of the Villa Borghese. Then he would walk to the Via Veneto for coffee at a counter tended by a pretty girl with auburn hair. On the second day, he noticed a priest in a black cassock whose face looked familiar to him. Gabriel searched his memory for the face but could not find it. When he asked the girl for his check, her telephone number was written on the back of it. He smiled apologetically and dropped it on the bar when he left. The priest stayed in the cafe.

That afternoon, Gabriel spent a long time checking his tail. He wandered through churches, studying frescoes and altarpieces until his neck ached. He could almost feel the presence of Umberto Conti at his side. Conti, like Ari Shamron, believed Gabriel was a man of special gifts, and he doted on Gabriel, just as Shamron had done. Sometimes he would come to Gabriel’s sagging pensione and drag him into the Venetian night to look at art. He spoke of paintings the way some men speak of women. Look at the light, Gabriel. Look at the technique, the hands, my God, the hands.

Gabriel’s neighbor in Venice had been a Palestinian called Saeb, a skinny intellectual who wrote violent poetry and incendiary tracts comparing the Israelis to the Nazis. He reminded Gabriel too much of a man named Wadal Adel Zwaiter, the Black September chief in Italy, whom Gabriel had assassinated in the stairwell of an apartment building in Rome ’s Piazza Annabaliano.

“I was part of a special unit, Miss Rolfe.”

“What kind of special unit?”

“A counterterrorism unit that tracked down people who committed acts of violence against Israel.”

“Palestinians?”

“For the most part, yes.”

“And what did you do to these terrorists when you found them?”

Silence…

“Tell me, Mr. Allon. What did you do when you found them?”

Late at night, Saeb would come to Gabriel’s room like Zwaiter’s ghost, always with a bottle of cheap red wine and French cigarettes, and he would sit cross-legged on the floor and lecture Gabriel on the injustices heaped upon the Palestinian people. The Jews! The West! The corrupt Arab regimes! All of them have Palestinian blood on their hands! Gabriel would nod and help himself to Saeb’s wine and another of his cigarettes. Occasionally he would contribute his own condemnation of Israel. The State could not last, Gabriel had said in one of his more memorable speeches. Eventually, it would collapse, like capitalism, beneath the weight of its inherent contradictions. Saeb was so moved he included a variation of the line in his next article.

During Gabriel’s apprenticeship Shamron had permitted Leah to visit him once each month. They would make love frantically, and afterward she would lie next to him on the single bed and beg him to come home to Tel Aviv. She posed as a German sociology student from Hamburg named Eva. When Saeb came to the room with his wine and cigarettes, she spoke in glowing terms of the Baader-Meinhof Gang and the PLO. Saeb declared her an enchantress. “Someday, you must come to Palestine and see the land,” he said. Yes, Leah had agreed. Someday.

GABRIEL ate each night in a small trattoria near his hotel. On the second night the owner treated him as though he was a regular who had been coming once a week for twenty years. Placed him at a special table near the kitchen and plied him with antipasti until Gabriel begged for mercy. Then pasta, then fish, then an assortment of dolci. Over coffee he handed Gabriel a note.

“Who left this?” said Gabriel.

He lifted his hands in a Roman gesture of befuddlement. “A man.”

Gabriel looked at the note: plain paper, anonymous script, no signature.

Church of Santa Maria della Pace. One hour.

THE night had turned colder, a gusty wind moving in the trees of the Villa Borghese. Gabriel walked for a time-along the Corso d’Italia, down the Via Veneto-then stopped a taxi and took it to the edge of the Centro Storico.

For twenty minutes he wandered through the narrow streets and quiet squares until confident he was not being followed. Then he walked to the Piazza Navona. The square was crowded in spite of the chill, cafes filled, street artists hawking cheap paintings.

Gabriel slowly circled the piazza, now pausing to gaze at an ornate fountain, now stopping to drop a few coins into the basket of a blind man strumming a guitar with just four strings. Someone was following him; he could feel it.

He started toward the church, then doubled back suddenly. His pursuer was now standing among a small group of people listening to the guitarist. Gabriel walked over and stood next to him.

“You’re clean,” the man said. “Go inside.”

THE church was empty, the smell of burning wax and incense heavy on the air. Gabriel moved forward through the nave and stood before the altar. Behind him the door opened and the sounds of the busy square filled the church. He turned to look, but it was only an old woman come to pray.

A moment later the doors opened again. A man this time, leather jacket, quick dark eyes-Rami, the old man’s personal bodyguard. He knelt in a pew and made the sign of the cross.

Gabriel suppressed a smile as he turned and gazed upon the altar. Again the doors opened, again the clamor of the piazza intruded upon the silence, but this time Gabriel didn’t bother to turn, because immediately he recognized the distinctive cadence of Ari Shamron’s walk.

A moment later Shamron was at his side, looking up at the altarpiece. “What is this, Gabriel?” he asked impatiently. Shamron had no capacity to appreciate art. He found beauty only in a