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“What do you want me to do?”
“Marry me, Gabriel. Stay in Venice and restore paintings. Tell Shamron to leave you alone. You have scars all over your body. Haven’t you given enough to your country?”
He closed his eyes. Before him opened a gallery door. Reluctantly he passed through to the other side and found himself on a street in the old Jewish quarter of Vie
He waited for the images of fire and blood to dissolve into blackness; then he told Chiara what she wanted to hear. When he returned from Vie
Chiara’s face darkened. “I wish there were some other way.”
“I have to tell her the truth,” Gabriel said. “She deserves nothing less.”
“Will she understand?”
Gabriel shrugged his shoulders. Leah’s affliction was psychotic depression. Her doctors believed the night of the bombing played without break in her memory like a loop of videotape. It left no room for impressions or sound from the real world. Gabriel often wondered what Leah saw of him on that night. Did she see him walking away toward the spire of the cathedral, or could she feel him pulling her blackened body from the fire? He was certain of only one thing. Leah would not speak to him. She had not spoken a single word to him in thirteen years.
“It’s for me,” he said. “I have to say the words. I have to tell her the truth about you. I have nothing to be ashamed of, and I’m certainly not ashamed of you.”
Chiara lowered the duvet and kissed him feverishly. Gabriel could feel tension in her body and taste arousal on her breath. Afterward he lay beside her, stroking her hair. He could not sleep, not the night before a journey back to Vie
4 VIENNA
PASSPORT, PLEASE.”
Gabriel slid it across the countertop, the emblem facing down. The officer glanced wearily at the scuffed cover and thumbed the folio pages until he located the visa. He added another stamp-with more violence than was necessary, Gabriel thought-and handed it over without a word. Gabriel dropped the passport into his coat pocket and set out across the gleaming arrivals hall, towing a rolling suitcase behind him.
Outside, he took his place in line at the taxi stand. It was bitterly cold, and there was snow in the wind. Snatches of Vie
He moved to the front of the queue. A white Mercedes slid forward to collect him. Gabriel memorized the registration number before sliding into the back seat. He placed the bag on the seat and gave the driver an address several streets away from the hotel where he’d booked a room.
The taxi hurtled along the motorway, through an ugly industrial zone of factories, power plants, and gasworks. Before long, Gabriel spotted the floodlit spire of St. Stephen’s Cathedral, looming over the I
They came to the Ringstrasse, the broad boulevard encircling the city center. The handsome face of Peter Metzler, the candidate for chancellor from the far-right Austrian National Party, gri
Gabriel left the taxi near the state opera house and walked a short distance to a narrow street called the Weihburggasse. It appeared no one was following him, though from experience he knew expert watchers were almost impossible to detect. He entered a small hotel. The concierge, upon seeing his Israeli passport, adopted a posture of bereavement and murmured a few sympathetic words about “the terrible bombing in the Jewish Quarter.” Gabriel, playing the role of Gideon Argov, spent a few minutes chatting with the concierge in German before climbing the stairs to his room on the second floor. It had wood floors the color of honey and French doors overlooking a darkened interior courtyard. Gabriel drew the curtains and left the bag on the bed in plain sight. Before leaving, he placed a telltale in the doorjamb that would signal whether the room had been entered in his absence.
He returned to the lobby. The concierge smiled as if they had not seen each other in five years instead of five minutes. Outside it had begun to snow. He walked the darkened streets of the I
He had no need to consult the brightly lit maps of the Vie
A hospital had occupied this plot of ground in west Vie