Black September who had plotted the attack. A brash operations officer named Ari Shamron was placed in charge of the mission, and one of the boys he came for was a promising young student at Jerusalem's Betsal'el School of Art named Gabriel Allon.
Somehow, Shamron had come across the file from Gabriel's unhappy compulsory service in the army. The child of Auschwitz survivors, Gabriel was found arrogant and selfish by his superiors; prone to periods of melancholia, but also highly intelligent and capable of taking independent action without waiting for guidance from commanding officers. He was also multilingual, an attribute that had little value in a frontline infantry unit but was much sought after by Ari Shamron. His war would not be fought in the Golan or the Sinai. It would be a secret war waged in the shadows of Europe. Gabriel had tried to resist him. Shamron left him no choice.
'Once again, Jews are dying on German soil with their hands tied behind their backs,' Shamron had said. 'Your parents survived, but how many didn't? Their brothers and sisters? Their aunts and uncles?
tGrandparents? They're all gone, aren't they? Are you really going to sit here in Tel Aviv with your brushes and your paints and do nothing? You have gifts. Let me borrow them for a few months. Then you can do whatever you want with your life.'
The mission was code-named Operation Wrath of God. In the lexicon of the unit, Gabriel was an aleph, an assassin. The agents who tracked Black Septembrists and learned their habits were code-named ayin. A qoph was a communications officer. Benjamin Stern had been a heth, a logistician. His job was to procure transport and lodging in ways that could never be traced to the Office. Sometimes he doubled as a getaway driver. Indeed, Benjamin had been behind the wheel of the green Fiat that carried Gabriel away from the Piazza Annibaliano the night he assassinated Black September's chief in Italy. On the way to the airport, Gabriel had forced Benjamin to pull to the side of the road so he could be sick. Even now, he could hear Benjamin shouting at him to get back into the car.
'Give me a minute.'
'You'll miss your flight.'
'I said give me a minute!'
'What's wrong with you? That bastard deserved to die!'
'You didn't see his face, Beni. You didn't see his fucking face.'
Over the next eighteen months, Shamron's team assassinated a dozen members of Black September. Gabriel personally killed six men. When it was over, Benjamin resumed his academic career. Gabriel tried to go back to Betsal'el and do the same, but his ability to paint had been chased away by the ghosts of the men he had killed, so he left Leah behind in Israel and moved to Venice to study restoration with Umberto Conti. In restoration, he found healing, who knew nothing of Gabriel's past, seemed to understand
this. Late at night he would come to Gabriel's room in a sagging pensione and drag him into the streets of Venice to look at art. One evening, standing before the great Titian altarpiece in the Frari church, he seized Gabriel by the arm.
'A man who is pleased with himself can be an adequate restorer but not a great restorer. Only a man with a damaged canvas of his own can truly be a great restorer. It is a meditation for you. A ritual. One day you will be a great restorer. You will be better than I am. I'm sure of it.'
And though Conti did not know it, those were the same words Shamron had said to Gabriel the night before he sent him to Rome to kill his first Palestinian.
Gabriel Was standing outside the Gastatte Atzinger at six-thirty sharp. The first thing he saw of Professor Helmut Berger was the headlamp on his bicycle floating above the Amalienstrasse. Then his form appeared, legs pumping rhythmically, his thinning gray hair floating above his large ears like wings. A brown leather satchel hung across his back.
The endearing quality of the professor's arrival evaporated in short order. Like many German intellectuals, Helmut Berger had the put-upon air of a man who had spent the day grappling with beings of inferior intelligence. He claimed to have time only for a small glass of beer, but he invited Gabriel to select something from the menu. Gabriel ordered only mineral water, which the German seemed to find deeply scandalous.
'I'm very sorry about your brother. Excuse me, your half-brother. He was a valuable member of the faculty. His death was a shock to us all.' He spoke these lines without genuine emotion, as though
they had been written for him by a graduate student. 'How can I help you, Herr Landau?'
'Is it true that Benjamin was on a sabbatical at the time of his murder?'
'Yes, that's correct. He was working on another book.'
'Do you know the subject of that book?'
'Actually, I don't.'
'Really?' Gabriel was genuinely surprised. 'Is it typical for someone to leave your department to work on a book without telling you the subject matter?'
'No, but Benjamin was very secretive about this project from the very beginning.'
Gabriel decided he could not press the issue. 'Did you know anything about the kind of threats Benjamin received?'
'There were so many, it was hard to keep them straight. Benjamin's theories about a collective German wartime guilt made him, shall we say, highly unpopular in many quarters.'
'It sounds to me as though you didn't share Benjamin's views.'
The professor shrugged. 'A few years ago, I wrote a book on the role of the German Catholic Church during the war. Benjamin disagreed with my conclusions and said so in a very public manner. It was not a pleasant time for either of us.'
The professor looked at his watch. 'I'm afraid I have another engagement. Is there anything else I can tell you? Perhaps something more relevant to your inquiries?'
'Last month, Benjamin made a trip to Italy. Do you happen to know why he went there? Was it connected to the book in any way?'
'I have no idea. You see, Doctor Stern didn't make a habit of giving me advance warning about his travel plans.' The professor finished the last of his beer and stood up. Class dismissed. 'Again, my condolences, Herr Landau. I wish you luck in your inquiries.' hike hell you do, thought Gabriel, as he watched Professor Berger walk outside and pedal away.
ON THE WAY back to his hotel, Gabriel entered a large student bookstore on the southern edge of the university district. He gazed at the store directory for a moment, then climbed the stairs to the travel section, where he searched a display bin filled with maps until he came across one for northern Italy.
He spread it over a nearby table, then reached into his pocket and removed the postcard. The hotel where Benjamin had stayed was in a town called Brenzone. Judging from the photograph, the town was set on the shoreline of one of Italy's northern lakes. He started in the west and worked his way slowly eastward, reading the names of the towns and villages surrounding each of the great northern lakes--first Maggiore, then Como, then Iseo, and finally Garda. Brenzone. There it was, on the eastern shore of the Lago di Garda, about halfway between the bulge at the southern end and the daggerlike northern tip.
Gabriel refolded the map and carried it downstairs to the cash register. A moment later, he stepped back through the revolving doors into the street, the map and postcard resting in his jacket pocket. Instinctively, his eyes flickered over the pavement, the parked cars, the windows of the surrounding buildings.
He turned left and started back to his hotel, wondering why Detective Axel Weiss had been sitting in the cafe across the street the entire time Gabriel was in the bookstore--and why he was now following him across the center of Munich.
Gabriel was confident he could easily evade or expose the German detective, but now was not the time to betray the fact that he was a trained professional. As far as Axel Weiss knew, Gabriel was Ehud Landau, brother of slain historian Benjamin Stern, and nothing else--which made the fact that he was following him all the more curious.
He entered a hotel on the Maximilianstrasse. He made a brief call on a public telephone in the lobby, then went back outside and kept walking. The policeman was still there, fifty meters back, on the opposite side of the street.
Gabriel walked directly to his hotel. He collected his key from the clerk at the front counter and rode the lift up to his room. He packed his clothing into a garment bag of black leather, then unlocked the room safe and removed the file he had been given by the Israeli consulate, along with the envelope containing Benjamin's
