Portrait of a Spy Read Free Page A

Piccadilly. From there they proceeded on foot to Mason’s Yard, a tranquil quadrangle of paving stones and commerce in St. James’s, and presented themselves at the door of Isherwood Fine Arts. According to the CCTV camera in the yard, they were admitted into the premises at 11:40 London time, though Maggie, Isherwood’s latest mediocre secretary, would erroneously record the time in her logbook as 11:45.
    Purveyors of museum-quality Italian and Dutch Old Master paintings since 1968, the gallery had once occupied a lofty perch on tony New Bond Street in Mayfair. Driven into St. Jamesian exile by the likes of Hermès, Burberry, and Cartier, it had taken refuge in three floors of a sagging warehouse once owned by Fortnum & Mason. Among the incestuous, backbiting villagers of St. James’s, the gallery had always been regarded as rather good theater—comedy and tragedy, stunning highs and seemingly bottomless lows, and always a whiff of conspiracy lying just beneath the surface. This was, in large measure, a consequence of the owner’s personality. Julian Isherwood was cursed with a near fatal flaw for an art dealer—he liked to possess art more than he liked to sell it. As a result, he was burdened with a large inventory of what is affectionately known in the trade as dead stock—paintings for which no buyer would ever pay a fair price. It was rumored that Isherwood’s personal holdings rivaled those of the British royal family. Even Gabriel, who had restored paintings for the gallery for more than thirty years, had only the vaguest idea of Isherwood’s true holdings.
    They found him in his office—a tall, slightly precarious figure tilted against the front of a desk piled with old catalogs and monographs. He wore a gray chalk-stripe suit and a lavender necktie that had been given to him the previous evening by his latest love interest. As usual, he appeared slightly hungover, a look he cultivated. His eyes were fixed mournfully on the television.
    “I take it you’ve heard the news?”
    Gabriel nodded slowly. He and Chiara had heard the first bulletins on the radio as they were passing through the western suburbs of London. The images playing out on the screen were remarkably similar to the ones that had formed in Gabriel’s own mind—the dead covered in plastic sheeting, the bloodied survivors, the onlookers with their palms pressed to their faces in horror. It never changed. He supposed it never would.
    “I had lunch at Fouquet’s last week with a client,” Isherwood said, running a hand through his longish gray locks. “We parted company on the very spot where that maniac detonated his bomb. What if the client had scheduled the lunch for today? I might have been—”
    Isherwood stopped himself. It was a typical reaction after an attack, thought Gabriel. The living always sought to find some connection, however tenuous, to the dead.
    “The bomber in Copenhagen killed children,” Isherwood said. “Will you please explain to me what cause is served by the murder of innocent children?”
    “Fear,” said Gabriel. “They want us to be afraid.”
    “When is this going to end?” Isherwood asked, shaking his head in disgust. “When in God’s name is this madness going to end?”
    “You should know better than to ask a question like that, Julian.” Gabriel lowered his voice and added, “After all, you’ve had a ringside seat at this war for a very long time.”
    Isherwood gave a melancholy smile. His backbone-of-England surname and English scale concealed the fact that he was not, at least technically, English at all. British by nationality and passport, yes, but German by birth, French by upbringing, and Jewish by religion. Only a handful of trusted friends knew that Isherwood had staggered into London as a child refugee in 1942 after being carried across the snowbound Pyrenees by a pair of Basque shepherds. Or that his father, the renowned Paris art dealer Samuel Isakowitz, had been murdered at the