Portrait of a Spy Read Free Page B

at the Sobibor death camp along with Isherwood’s mother. Though Isherwood had carefully guarded the secrets of his past, the story of his dramatic escape from Nazi-occupied Europe had reached the ears of Israel’s secret intelligence service. And in the mid-1970s, during a wave of Palestinian terrorist attacks against Israeli targets in Europe, he was recruited as a sayan , a volunteer helper. Isherwood had but one assignment—to assist in building and maintaining the operational cover of an art restorer and assassin named Gabriel Allon.
    “Just keep one thing in mind,” Isherwood said. “You work for me now, not them. This isn’t your problem, petal. Not anymore.” He aimed his remote at the television and the mayhem in Paris and Copenhagen vanished, at least for the moment. “Let’s have a look at something beautiful, shall we?”
    The limited space of the gallery had compelled Isherwood to arrange his empire vertically—storerooms on the ground floor, business offices on the second, and on the third, a glorious formal exhibition room modeled on Paul Rosenberg’s famous gallery in Paris, where young Julian had spent many happy hours as a child. As they entered the room, midday sun was slanting through the overhead skylight, illuminating a large oil painting propped on a baize-covered pedestal. It was a depiction of the Madonna and Child with Mary Magdalene, set against an evening backdrop, quite obviously of the Venetian School. Chiara removed her car-length leather coat and sat on the museum-style ottoman at the center of the room. Gabriel stood directly before the canvas, one hand resting on his narrow chin, his head tilted to one side.
    “Where did you find it?”
    “In a great limestone pile along the Norfolk coast.”
    “Does the pile have an owner?”
    “Insists on anonymity. Suffice it to say he descends from a family of title, his property holdings are enormous, and his cash reserves are dwindling at an alarming rate.”
    “So he asked you to take a few paintings off his hands to keep him afloat for another year.”
    “At the rate he goes through money, I’d give him two months at the outside.”
    “How much did you pay for it?”
    “Twenty thousand.”
    “How charitable of you, Julian.” Gabriel glanced at Isherwood and added, “I assume you covered your tracks by taking a few other pictures as well.”
    “Six worthless pieces of crap,” Isherwood confessed. “But if my hunch about this one is correct, they were well worth the investment.”
    “Provenance?” asked Gabriel.
    “It was purchased in the Veneto by one of the owner’s ancestors while he was doing his Grand Tour in the early nineteenth century. It’s been in the family ever since.”
    “Current attribution?”
    “Workshop of Palma Vecchio.”
    “Really?” asked Gabriel skeptically. “According to whom?”
    “The Italian art expert who brokered the sale.”
    “Was he blind?”
    “Only in one eye.”
    Gabriel smiled. Many of the Italians who had advised British nobility during their travels were charlatans who did a brisk trade in worthless copies falsely attributed to the masters of Florence and Venice. Occasionally, they erred in the opposite direction. Isherwood suspected that the painting on the pedestal fell into the second category. So, too, did Gabriel. He dragged the tip of his forefinger over the face of the Magdalene, dislodging a century’s worth of surface grime.
    “Where was it hung? In a coal mine?”
    He picked at the heavily discolored varnish. In all likelihood, it was composed of a mastic or dammar resin that had been dissolved with turpentine. Removing it would be a painstaking process involving the use of a carefully calibrated mixture of acetone, methyl proxitol, and mineral spirits. Gabriel could only imagine the horrors that awaited him once the old varnish had been stripped away: archipelagos of pentimento , a desert of surface cracks and creases, wholesale paint losses concealed by previous