And they don’t look that wet to me.” He looked up at Gabriel and smiled briefly. “But then, I’ve heard it said that people who panic easily often have sensitive feet.”
IT was three hours before Baer entered the room again. For the first time he was not alone. It was obvious to Gabriel that the new man represented higher authority. It was also obvious that he was not an ordinary detective from the Zurich murder squad. Gabriel could see it in the small ways that Baer deferred to him physically, the way his heels clicked together when, like a headwaiter, he seated the new man at the interrogation table and moved unobtrusively into the background.
The man called himself Peterson. He provided no first name and no professional information. He wore an immaculately pressed suit of charcoal gray and a banker’s tie. His hair was nearly white and neatly trimmed. His hands, folded on the table in front of him, were the hands of a pianist. On his left wrist was a thick silver watch, Swiss-made of course, with a dark blue face, an instrument that could withstand the pressure of great depths. He studied Gabriel for a moment with slow, humorless eyes. He had the natural arrogance of a man who knows secrets and keeps files.
“The security codes.” Like Baer, he spoke to Gabriel in English, though almost without a trace of an accent. “Where did you write them down?”
“I didn’t write them down. As I told Sergeant-Major Baer-”
“I know what you told Sergeant-Major Baer.” His eyes suddenly came to life. “I’m asking you for myself. Where did you write them down?”
“I received the codes over the telephone from Mr. Isherwood in London, and I used them to open the security gate and the front door of the villa.”
“You committed the numbers to memory?”
“Yes.”
“Give them to me now.”
Gabriel recited the numbers calmly. Peterson looked at Baer, who nodded once.
“You have a very good memory, Signore Delvecchio.”
He had switched from English to German. Gabriel stared back at him blankly, as if he did not understand. The interrogator resumed in English.
“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 Zurichberg, you speak German quite well.”
“Speaking a few words of German and actually
“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?”
“
“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
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
