The Messenger

go after the things we hold dear.”

Navot was right, Gabriel thought. She was a gift from the intelligence gods. He placed his glass on the coffee table. Hannah’s eyes followed his every movement.

“What happened to this man Samuel Isakowitz?” she asked. “Did he make it out?”

Gabriel shook his head. “He and his wife were captured in Bordeaux when the Germans moved south.”

“Where did they send them?”

“Sobibor.”

She knew what that meant. Gabriel needn’t say anything more.

“And your grandfather?” he said.

She peered into her Sancerre for a moment before answering. “Jeudi Noir,” she said. “Do you know this term?”

Gabriel nodded solemnly. Jeudi Noir. Black Thursday.

“On the morning of July 16, 1942, four thousand French police officers descended on the Marais and other Jewish districts in Paris with orders to seize twenty-seven thousand Jewish immigrants from Germany, Austria, Poland, the Soviet Union, and Czechoslovakia. My father and grandparents were on the list. You see, my grandparents were originally from the Lublin district of Poland. The two policemen who knocked on the door of this very apartment took pity on my father and told him to run. A Catholic family who lived a floor below took him in, and he stayed there until liberation. My grandparents weren’t so lucky. They were sent to the detention camp at Drancy. Five days after that, a sealed railcar to Auschwitz. Of course, that was the end for them.”

“And the van Gogh?”

“There wasn’t any time to make arrangements for it, and there was no one in Paris that my grandfather felt he could trust. It was war, you know. People were betraying each other for stockings and cigarettes. When he heard the roundups were coming, he removed the painting from the stretcher and hid it beneath a floorboard in the library. After the war it took my father years to get the apartment back. A French family had moved in after my grandparents were arrested, and they were reluctant to give up a nice apartment on the rue Pavee. Who could blame them?”

“What year did your father regain possession of the apartment?”

“It was 1952.”

“Ten years,” Gabriel said. “And the van Gogh was still there?”

“Just as my grandfather had left it, hidden under the floorboards of the library.”

“Amazing.”

“Yes,” she said. “The painting has remained in the Weinberg family for more than a century, through war and Holocaust. And now you’re asking me to give it up.”

“Not give it up,” said Gabriel.

“Then what?”

“I just need to-” He paused, searching for the appropriate word. “I need to rent it.”

“Rent it? For how long?”

“I can’t say. Perhaps a month. Perhaps six months. Maybe a year or longer.”

“For what purpose?”

Gabriel was not ready to answer her. He picked up the cork and used his thumbnail to scratch away a torn edge.

“Do you know how much that painting is worth?” she asked. “If you’re asking me to give it up, even for a brief period, I believe I’m entitled to know the reason why.”

“You are,” Gabriel said, “but you should also know that if I tell you the truth, your life will never be the same.”

She poured more wine for herself and held the glass for a moment against her body without drinking from it. “Two years ago, there was a particularly vicious attack here in the Marais. A young Orthodox boy was set upon by a gang of North Africans as he was walking home from school. They set his hair on fire and carved a swastika into his forehead. He still bears the scar. We organized a demonstration to bring pressure on the French government to do something about the anti-Semitism. As we were marching in the place de la Republique, there was an anti- Israeli counter-demonstration. Do you know what they were shouting at us?”

“Death to the Jews.”

“And do you know what the French president said?”

“There is no anti-Semitism in France.”

“My life has never been the same since that day. Besides, as you might have surmised, I’m very good at keeping secrets. Tell me why you want my van Gogh, Monsieur Allon. Perhaps we can come to some accommodation.”

THE NEVIOT SURVEILLANCE van was parked at the edge of the Parc Royal. Uzi Navot rapped his knuckles twice on the one-way rear window and was immediately admitted. One neviot man was seated behind the wheel. The other was in the back, hunched over an electronic console with a pair of headphones over his ears.

“What’s going on?” Navot asked.

“Gabriel has her in his sights,” the neviot man said. “And now he’s going in for the kill.”

Navot slipped on a pair of headsets and listened while Gabriel told Hannah Weinberg how he was going to use her van Gogh to track down the most dangerous man in the world.

THE KEY WAS hidden in the top drawer of the writing desk in the library. She used it to unlock the door at the end of the unlit corridor. The room behind it was a child’s room. Hannah’s room, thought Gabriel, frozen in time. A four-poster bed with a lace canopy. Shelves stacked with stuffed animals and toys. A poster of an American heartthrob actor. And hanging above a French provincial dresser, shrouded in heavy shadow, a lost painting by Vincent van Gogh.

GABRIEL MOVED SLOWLY forward and stood motionless before it, right hand on his chin, head tilted slightly to one side. Then he reached out and gently fingered the lavish brushstrokes. They were Vincent’s-Gabriel was sure of it. Vincent on fire. Vincent in love. The restorer calmly assessed his target. The painting appeared as though it had never been cleaned. It was covered with a fine layer of surface grime, and there were three horizontal cracks-a result, Gabriel suspected, of having been rolled too tightly by Isaac Weinberg the night before Jeudi Noir.

“I suppose we should talk about the money,” Hannah said. “How much does Julian think it will fetch?”

“In the neighborhood of eighty million. I’ve agreed to let him keep a ten-percent commission as compensation for his role in the operation. The remainder of the money will be immediately transferred to you.”

“Seventy-two million dollars?”

“Give or take a few million, of course.”

“And when your operation is over?”

“I’m going to get the painting back.”

“How do you intend to do that?”

“Leave that to me, Mademoiselle Weinberg.”

“And when you return the painting to me, what happens to the seventy-two million? Give or take a few million, of course.”

“You may keep any interest accrued. In addition, I will pay you a rental fee. How does five million dollars sound?”

She smiled. “It sounds fine, but I have no intention of keeping the money for myself. I don’t want their money.”

“Then what do you intend to do with it?”

She told him.

“I like the sound of that,” he said. “Do we have a deal, Mademoiselle Weinberg?”