The English Assassin

“What are you doing?”

“I always hum when I’m scared.”

“I’m not going to let anything happen to you.”

“You promise?”

“I promise,” he said. “So what were you humming?”

“ ‘The Swan’ from The Carnival of Animals by Camille Saint-Saëns.”

“Will you play it for me sometime?”

“No,” she said.

“Why not?”

“Because I never play for my friends.”

TEN minutes later: the border. The truck joined a queue of vehicles waiting to make the crossing into Germany. It crept forward a few inches at a time: accelerate, brake, accelerate,brake. Their heads rolled back and forth like a pair of children’s toys. Each touch of the brake produced a deafening screech of protest; each press of the throttle another blast of poisonous diesel fumes. A

ON the other side of the border another car was waiting, a dark-blue Ford Fiesta with Munich registration. Ari Shamron’s truck driver dropped them and continued on his synthetic journey to nowhere. Gabriel loaded the safe-deposit boxes into the trunk and started driving-the E41 to Stuttgart, the E52 to Karlsruhe, the E35 to Frankfurt. Once during the night he stopped to telephone Tel Aviv on an emergency line, and he spoke briefly with Shamron.

At 2A.M. they arrived in the Dutch market town of Delft, a few miles inland from the coast. Gabriel could drive no farther. His eyes burned, his ears were ringing with exhaustion. In eight hours, a ferry would leave from Hoek van Holland for the English port of Harwich, and Gabriel and A

He found one, on the Vondelstraat, within sight of the spire of the Nieuwe Kerk. A

He placed the boxes in the closet; then he pulled off his shoes and stretched out on the bed. A

A few minutes later A

“Are you awake?”

“No.”

“Aren’t you going to sleep on the floor, the way you did in Vie

“I can’t move.”

She lifted the blanket and crawled into bed next to him.

Gabriel said, “How did you know the password was ‘adagio’?”

“Albinoni’s “Adagio” was one of the first pieces I learned to play. For some reason, it remained my father’s favorite.” Her lighter flared in the darkness. “My father wanted forgiveness for his sins. He wanted absolution. He was willing to turn to you for that but not to me. Why didn’t my father ask me for forgiveness?”

“He probably didn’t think you’d give it to him.”

“It sounds as though you speak from experience. Has your wife ever forgiven you?”

“No, I don’t think she has.”

“And what about you? Have you ever forgiven yourself?”

“I wouldn’t call it forgiveness.”

“What would you call it?”

“Accommodation. I’ve reached accommodation with myself.”

“My father died without absolution. He probably deserved that. But I want to finish what he set out to do. I want to get those paintings back and send them to Israel.”

“So do I.”

“How?”

“Go to sleep, A

Which she did. Gabriel lay awake, waiting for the dawn, listening to the gulls on the canal and the steady rhythm of A

Part Three

32

ON THE EVE of the Second World War, General Henri Guisan, the commander in chief of Switzerland ’s armed forces, a

Indeed, it was on Gerhardt Peterson’s mind the following afternoon as he skirted Lucerne and the Alps loomed before him, shrouded in cloud. Peterson could feel his heart beat faster as he pressed the accelerator and his big Mercedes roared up the first mountain pass. Peterson came from I

But his sudden trip into the Alps that afternoon had nothing to do with pleasure. It had been precipitated by two pieces of bad news. The first was the discovery of an abandoned Audi A8 on a road near the town of Bargen, a few miles from the German border. A check of the registration revealed that the car had been rented the previous evening in Zurich by A

It began to snow, big downy flakes that turned the afternoon to white. Peterson switched on his amber fog lamps and kept his foot down. One hour later, he was rolling through the town of Stans. By the time he reached the gates of the Gessler estate, three inches of new snow covered the ground.

As he slipped the car into park, a pair of Gessler’s security men appeared, dressed in dark-blue ski jackets and woolen caps. A moment later, the formalities of identification and scrutiny behind him, Peterson was rolling up the drive toward Gessler’s chateau. There, another man waited, tossing bits of raw meat to a ravenous Alsatian bitch.

ON the shores of Lake Lucerne, not far from Otto Gessler’s mountain home, is the legendary birthplace of the Swiss Confederation. In 1291, the leaders of the three so-called Forest Cantons-Uri, Schwyz, and Unterwalden-are said to have gathered in the Rütli Meadow and formed a defensive alliance against anyone who “may plot evil against their persons or goods.” The event is sacred to the Swiss. A mural of the Rütli Meadow adorns the wall of the Swiss National Council chamber, and each August the meeting on the meadow is remembered with a national day of celebration.