years earlier, there had been a major cleaning and restoration project at St. Stephen's Cathedral in Vienna. An Italian called Mario was part of that team.
'Our Mario?' Adriana wondered over a glass of ripasso.
'Of course it was our Mario. Same snobbery. Same snail's pace.'
According to Antonio's source, the restorer in question had vanished without a trace one night--the same night a car bomb exploded in the old Jewish quarter.
'And what do you make of this, Antonio?' Again, it was Adriana, peering at him through the ruby ripasso. Antonio paused for dramatic effect, spearing a piece of grilled polenta and holding it aloft like a scepter. 'Isn't it obvious? Clearly, the man is a terrorist. I'd say he's Brigate Rossa.'
'Or maybe he's Osama bin Laden himself!'
Team Zaccaria erupted into such laughter that they were nearly asked to leave the restaurant. The theories of Antonio Politi were never again given any credence, although he never lost faith in them himself. Secretly, he hoped the quiet restorer behind the shroud would repeat his performance of Vienna and vanish without a trace. Then Antonio would step in and finish the Bellini, and his reputation would be made.
The restorer worked well that morning, and the time slipped rapidly away. Glancing at his wristwatch, he was surprised to see that it was already eleven-thirty. He sat down on the edge of the platform, poured more coffee, and looked up at the altarpiece. Painted by Bellini at the height of his powers, it was widely regarded by historians as the first great altarpiece of the sixteenth century. The restorer never tired of looking at it. He marveled at Bellini's skillful use of light and space, the powerful pulling effect that drew his eye inward and upward, the sculptural nobility of the Madonna and child and the saints surrounding them. It was a painting of utter silence. Even after a long, tedious morning of work, the painting blanketed him with a sense of peace.
He pulled aside the shroud. The sun was out, the nave was filled with light streaming through the stained- glass windows. As he finished the last of his coffee, his attention was drawn by a movement at the entrance of the church. It was a boy, about ten years old, with long curly hair. His shoes were soaked from the water in the square. The restorer watched him intently. Even after ten years, he could not look at a young boy without thinking of his son.
The boy went first to Antonio, who waved him on without looking up from his work. Next he made his way up the long center aisle to the high altar, where he received a more friendly reception from Adriana. She smiled at him, touched the side of his face, then pointed in the direction of the restorer's scaffold. The child stopped at the foot of the platform and wordlessly passed the restorer a slip of paper. He unfolded it and found a few words, scrawled
like the last plea of a desperate lover. The note was unsigned, but the hand was as plain as the brushstrokes of Bellini.
Ghetto Nuovo. Six o'clock..
The restorer crushed the paper and slipped it into his pocket. When he looked down again the child was gone.
AT FIVE-THIRTY, Francesco Tiepolo entered the church and lumbered slowly across the nave. With his tangled beard, flowing white shirt, and silk scarf knotted at his throat, the immense Italian looked as though he had just stepped from a Renaissance workshop. It was a look he carefully cultivated.
'All right, everyone,' he sang, his voice echoing among the apses and the columns. 'That's all for today. Pack up your things. Doors close in five minutes.' He seized the restorer's work platform in his bear-like paw and shook it once violently, rattling his lights and brushes. 'You too, Mario. Give your lady a kiss goodnight. She'll be all right without you for a few hours. She's managed for five hundred years.'
The restorer methodically wiped off his brushes and palette and packed his pigments and solvents into a rectangular case of varnished wood. Then he switched off the lamp and hopped down from the scaffolding. As always, he left the church without saying a word to the others.
With his case beneath his arm, he struck out across the Campo San Zaccaria. He had a smooth gait that seemed to propel him effortlessly across the square, though his unimpressive height and lean physique made him easy to miss. The black hair was cropped short and shot with gray. The angular face, with its deeply cleft chin and
full lips, gave the impression of having been carved from wood. The most lasting impression of the face was the eyes, which were almond-shaped and a shocking shade of emerald green. Despite the demanding nature of his work--and the fact that he had recently celebrated his fifty-first birthday--his vision remained perfect.
Passing through an archway, he came to the Riva della Schiavoni, the broad quay overlooking the Canale di San Marco. In spite of the chill March weather, there were many tourists about. The restorer could make out a half-dozen different languages, most of which he could speak. A phrase of Hebrew reached his ears. It diminished quickly, like music on the wind, but left the restorer with an unyielding ache to hear the sound of his real name.
A No. 82 vaporetto was waiting at the stop. He boarded and found a place along the railing from which he could see the face of every passenger getting on and off. He dug the note from his pocket and read it one last time. Then he dropped it over the side of the boat and watched it drift away on the silken waters of the lagoon.
IN THE fifteenth century, a swampy parcel of land in the sestieri of Cannaregio was set aside for the construction of a new brass foundry, known in the Venetian dialect as ageto. The foundry was never built, and a century later, when the rulers of Venice were looking for a suitable spot to confine the city's swelling population of unwanted Jews, the remote parcel known as Ghetto Nuovo was deemed the ideal place. The campo was large and had no parish church. The surrounding canals formed a natural moat, which cut off the island from the neighboring communities, and the single
bridge could be guarded by Christian watchmen. In 1516, the Christians of Ghetto Nuovo were evicted and the Jews of Venice were forced to take their place. They could leave the ghetto only after sunrise, when the bell tolled in the campanile, and only if they wore a yellow tunic and hat. At nightfall they were required to return to the island, and the gates were chained. Only Jewish doctors could leave the ghetto at night. At its height, the population of the ghetto was more than five thousand. Now, it was home to only twenty Jews.
The restorer crossed a metal footbridge. A ring of apartment buildings, unusually tall for Venice, loomed before him. He entered a sottoportego and followed it beneath the apartment houses, emerging a moment later into a square, the Campo di Ghetto Nuovo. A kosher restaurant, a Jewish bakery, a bookstore, a museum. There were two old synagogues as well, virtually invisible except to a trained eye. Only the five windows on the second story of each--the symbol for the five books of the Pentateuch--gave away their locations.
A half-dozen boys were playing football between the long shadows and the puddles. A ball bounced toward the restorer. He gave it a deft kick with the instep of his right foot and sent it expertly back toward the game. One of the boys took it squarely in the chest. It was the one who had come to San Zaccaria that morning.
The child nodded in the direction of the pozzo, the wellhead in the center of the square. The restorer turned and saw a familiar figure leaning there, smoking a cigarette. Gray cashmere overcoat, gray scarf wound tightly around his neck, a bullet-shaped head. The skin of his face was deeply tanned and full of cracks and fissures, like desert rock scored by a million years of sun and wind. The spectacles were small and round and inadvertently fashionable. The expression was one of perpetual impatience.
As the restorer approached, the old man lifted his head, and his lips curled into something between a smile and a grimace. He seized the restorer by the arm and inflicted a bone-crushing handshake. Then, tenderly, he kissed his cheek.
'You're here because of Benjamin, aren't you?' The old man closed his crumpled eyelids and nodded. Then he hooked two stubby fingers inside the restorer's elbow and said, 'Walk with me.' For an instant the restorer resisted the pull, but there was no escaping it. There had been a death in the family, and Ari Shamron was never one for sitting shivah.
IT HAD BEEN a year since Gabriel had seen him last. Shamron had grown visibly older since that day. As they set off round the campo in the gathering darkness, Gabriel had to resist the urge to take him by the arm. His cheeks had hollowed, and the steel-blue eyes--eyes that had once struck fear into his enemies and his allies alike--were clouded and wet. When he raised his Turkish cigarette to his lips, his right hand trembled.
Those hands had made Shamron a legend. Shortly after he joined the Office in the 1950s, Shamron's superiors noticed that he possessed an unusually strong grip for a man with such an ordinary physique. He was trained in the art of street snatches and silent killing and sent into the field. He preferred the garrote and used it
