The English Assassin

Provenance, after all, is everything.”

“And if I can get the provenance?”

“Then I’ll be able to tell you whether he was a legitimate collector or whether the old bastard was sitting atop a vault filled with looted art.”

GABRIEL had planned to leave him in Duke Street, but Isherwood took him by the elbow and pulled him through the passageway into Mason’s Yard. “Come with me. There’s one more thing I need to show you.”

As they entered the gallery, Irina recognized the telltale signs of a bottled lunch. She gave Isherwood a stack of telephone messages and went to work on a pot of coffee. Back in his office, Isherwood opened his private safe and withdrew two items, a sketch of a young boy and a photocopy of an old document several pages in length. He held up the sketch for Gabriel to see.

“Look familiar?”

“I can’t say it does.”

“The subject is me. The artist is Pablo Picasso. I carried it out of France with me.”

“And the document?”

“I carried that as well. My father gave it to me right before I set out with the Basques. It’s a detailed list of every painting in his private collection and professional inventory, written in his own hand. This is a copy, of course. The original’s in terrible shape now.”

He handed the list to Gabriel.

“I don’t know how far you plan to take this thing, but if you happen to come across any of these, you’ll let me know, won’t you, petal?”

Gabriel slipped the list into the breast pocket of his jacket.

“Where are you off to now?” Isherwood asked.

“I’m not sure.”

“There’s a man you should talk to in Lyons. He helped me with a few things when I was researching the book. If Augustus Rolfe has any dirt under his fingernails, this man will know about it.”

Isherwood flipped through the Rolodex and gave Gabriel the telephone numbers.

20

LONDON

AROUND THE CORNER from Isherwood Fine Arts, in Jermyn Street, a fair-haired man sat behind the wheel of a Rover sedan listening to the radio. For five days he had been watching the art dealer. He had followed him to his drunken lunches. Followed him home at night to his house in South Kensington. He’d even posed as a potential buyer in order to conceal a pair of tiny transmitters in the dealer’s office. The transmitter broadcast a weak analog signal over an ordinary FM wavelength. The man was using the radio in the Rover to monitor the output. Ten minutes later, when the conversation inside ended, he picked up his cellular phone and dialed a number in Zurich.

“Our friend is on his way to Lyons to see the professor.”

21

LYONS

PROFESSOR EMIL JACOBI was the self-appointed guilty conscience of Switzerland. He believed that in order to save his country he first had to tear it down, and he had devoted his life to unearthing and exposing the unsavory elements of Swiss history. His explosive book, The Myth, had ignited a firestorm by detailing the extensive economic and trade links between Nazi Germany and Switzerland throughout the Second World War. Jacobi outlined the process by which Swiss banks accepted looted gold-and gold ripped from the teeth of Jews on the way to the gas chambers-and converted it into the hard currency Hitler used to buy the raw materials needed to keep his war machine running. Professor Jacobi’s conclusion shocked the country and made him a national pariah: Switzerland and Nazi Germany were allies in everything but name, he wrote. Hitler could not have waged war without the help of Swiss bankers and arms- makers. If not for Switzerland, the Wehrmacht would have ground to a halt in the autumn of 1944. Millions of lives would have been spared but for the greed of Swiss bankers.

Soon after publication of The Myth, life for Professor Jacobi in Switzerland became increasingly uncomfortable. He received death threats, his telephones were tapped, and officers of the Swiss security service monitored his movements. Fearing for his safety, he resigned his professorship in Lausanne and accepted a position in the history department of the University of Lyons.

It took Gabriel the better part of the next day to track him down.

He left two messages on Jacobi’s answering machine at home and two more with his thoroughly unhelpful secretary at the university. At one-thirty in the afternoon, Jacobi called Gabriel on his cellular phone and agreed to a meeting. “Come by my flat at six this evening. We’ll talk then.” Then he rattled off the address and abruptly rang off. That left Gabriel several hours to kill. In a bookstore near the university he found a French-language copy of The Myth and spent the rest of the afternoon reading among the students in a cafe off the Place des Terreaux.

At six o’clock the professor was waiting in the foyer of his apartment building on the rue Lanterne. He wore a frayed tweed jacket, and his rimless spectacles were pushed up into a bird’s nest of unruly gray hair. There were clips on the legs of his trousers to keep the cuffs from becoming entangled in the chain of his bicycle. “Welcome to exile,” he said, leading Gabriel wearily up the staircase to his flat on the fourth floor. “We Swiss revere the right to free speech, but only if that speech refrains from criticism of Switzerland. I committed the mortal sin of a good Swiss, and so I find myself here, in the gilded cage of Lyons.”

On the landing outside his door, the professor spent a long moment digging in his saddlebag through loose papers and battered notebooks, searching for the keys to his flat. When finally he found them, they were admitted into a small, sparsely furnished apartment. Every flat surface was piled with books, documents, and newspapers. Gabriel smiled. He had come to the right place.

Jacobi closed the door and hung his saddlebag over the latch. “So you wish to discuss the murder of Augustus Rolfe? As it turns out, I’ve been following that case quite carefully.”

“I thought you might. I was wondering if we could compare notes.”

“Are you a historian as well, Mr. Allon?”

“Actually, I’m an art restorer, but in this matter I’m working for the government of Israel.”

“Well, this promises to be an interesting evening. Clear the things off that chair and sit down. I’ll see to the coffee.”

PROFESSOR Jacobi spent several minutes digging through his towering stacks of paper for the file on Augustus Rolfe. It was very slender.