The Messenger Read Free

flat had been turned into an artist’s studio. Not an artist, Shamron had to remind himself. Gabriel Allon was a restorer—one of the three or four most sought-after restorers in the world. He was standing now before an enormous canvas depicting a man surrounded by large predatory cats. Shamron settled himself quietly on a paint-smudged stool and watched him work for a few moments. He had always been mystified by Gabriel’s ability to imitate the brushstrokes of the Old Masters. To Shamron it was something of a parlor trick, just another of Gabriel’s gifts to be utilized, like his languages or his ability to get a Beretta off his hip and into firing position in the time it takes most men to clap their hands.
    “It certainly looks better than when it first arrived,” Shamron said, “but I still don’t know why anyone would want to hang it in his home.”
    “It won’t end up in a private home,” Gabriel said, his brush to the canvas. “This is a museum piece.”
    “Who painted it?” Shamron asked abruptly, as though inquiring about the perpetrator of a bombing.
    “Bohnams auction house in London thought it was Erasmus Quellinus,” Gabriel said. “Quellinus might have laid the foundations, but it’s clear to me that Rubens finished it for him.” He moved his hand over the large canvas. “His brushstrokes are everywhere.”
    “What difference does it make?”
    “About ten million pounds,” Gabriel said. “Julian is going to do very nicely with this one.”
    Julian Isherwood was a London art dealer and sometime secret servant of Israeli intelligence. The service had a long name that had very little to do with the true nature of its work. Men like Shamron and Gabriel referred to it as the Office and nothing more.
    “I hope Julian is giving you fair compensation.”
    “My restoration fee, plus a small commission on the sale.”
    “What’s the total?”
    Gabriel tapped his brush against his palette and resumed working.
    “We need to talk,” Shamron said.
    “So talk.”
    “I’m not going to talk to your back.” Gabriel turned and peered at Shamron once more through the lenses of his magnifying visor. “And I’m not going to talk to you while you’re wearing those things. You look like something from my nightmares.”
    Gabriel reluctantly set his palette on the worktable and removed his magnifying visor, revealing a pair of eyes that were a shocking shade of emerald green. He was below average in height and had the spare physique of a cyclist. His face was high at the forehead and narrow at the chin, and he had a long bony nose that looked as though it had been carved from wood. His hair was cropped short and shot with gray at the temples. It was because of Shamron that Gabriel was an art restorer and not one of the finest painters of his generation—and why his temples had turned gray virtually overnight when he was in his early twenties. Shamron had been the intelligence officer chosen by Golda Meir to hunt down and assassinate the perpetrators of the 1972 Munich Massacre, and a promising young art student named Gabriel Allon had been his primary gunman.
    He spent a few moments cleaning his palette and brushes, then went into the kitchen. Shamron sat down at the small table and waited for Gabriel to turn his back before hurriedly lighting one of his foul-smelling Turkish cigarettes. Gabriel, hearing the familiar click-click of Shamron’s old Zippo lighter, pointed toward the Rubens in exasperation, but Shamron made a dismissive gesture and defiantly raised the cigarette to his lips. A comfortable silence settled between them while Gabriel poured bottled water into the teakettle and spooned coffee into the French press. Shamron was content to listen to the wind moving in the eucalyptus trees outside in the garden. Devoutly secular, he marked the passage of time not by the Jewish festivals but by the rhythms of the land—the day the rains came, the day the wildflowers exploded in the Galilee, the