The English Assassin (3 page)

Mounted next to the gate on a stone wall was a telephone. Gabriel picked up the receiver, heard ringing at the other end of the line, waited. Nothing. He replaced the receiver, picked it up again. Still no answer.

He pulled out the lawyer’s fax that Julian
Isherwood had given him in London.
You are to arrive at precisely 9
A.M.
Ring the bell and you’ll be escorted inside.
Gabriel looked at his watch. Three minutes after nine.

As he slipped the papers back into his pocket it began to rain. He looked around: no cafés where he might sit in comfort, no parks or squares where he might find some shelter from the weather. Just a desert of inherited residential wealth. If he stood on the pavement too long, he’d probably be arrested for loitering.

He pulled out his mobile phone and dialed Isherwood’s number. He was probably still on his way to the gallery. As Gabriel waited for the connection to go through, he had a mental image of Isherwood, hunched over the wheel of his shining new Jaguar motorcar, crawling along Piccadilly as if he were piloting an oil tanker through treacherous waters.

“Sorry, but I’m afraid there’s been a change in plan. The fellow who was supposed to meet you was apparently called out of town suddenly. An emergency of some sort. He was vague about it. You know how the Swiss can be, petal.”

“What am I supposed to do?”

“He sent me the security codes for the gate and the front door. You’re to let yourself in. There’s supposed to be a note for you on the table in the entrance hall explaining where you can find the painting and your accommodations.”

“Rather unorthodox, don’t you think?”

“Consider yourself fortunate. It sounds as if you’re going to have the run of the place for a few days, and you won’t have anyone watching over your shoulder while you work.”

“I suppose you’re right.”

“Let me give you the security codes. Do you have paper and pen by any chance? They’re rather long.”

“Just tell me the numbers, Julian. It’s pouring rain, and I’m getting soaked out here.”

“Ah, yes. You and your little parlor tricks. I used to have a girl at the gallery who could do the same thing.”

Isherwood rattled off two series of numbers, each eight digits in length, and severed the connection. Gabriel lifted the receiver of the security phone and punched in the numbers. A buzzer sounded; he turned the latch and stepped through the gate. At the front entrance of the house he repeated the routine, and a moment later he was standing in the darkened front hall, groping for a light switch.

The envelope lay in a large glass bowl on a carved antique table at the foot of the staircase. It was addressed to Signore Delvecchio, Gabriel’s work name. He picked up the envelope and sliced it open with his forefinger. Plain dove-gray paper, heavy bond, no letterhead. Precise careful handwriting, unsigned. He lifted it to his nose. No scent.

Gabriel began to read. The painting hung in the drawing room, a Raphael,
Portrait of a Young Man.
A reservation had been made for him at the Dolder Grand Hotel, about a mile away on the other side of the Zürichberg. There was food in the refrigerator. The owner would return to Zurich the following day. He would appreciate it greatly if Signore Delvecchio could begin work without delay.

Gabriel slipped the note into his pocket. So, a Raphael. It would be his second. Five years ago he had restored a small devotional piece, a Madonna and Child, based on the renowned composition of
Leonardo. Gabriel could feel a tingling sensation spreading over the tips of his fingers. It was a marvelous opportunity. He was glad he had taken the job, regardless of the unorthodox arrangements.

He stepped through a passageway into a large room. It was dark, no lights burning, the heavy curtains tightly drawn. Despite the gloom he had the sensation of Middle European aristocratic clutter.

He took a few steps forward. Beneath his feet the carpet was damp. The air tasted of salt and rust. It was an odor Gabriel had smelled before. He reached down, touched his fingers to the carpet, and brought them to his face.

He was standing in blood.

T
HE
Oriental carpet was faded and very old, and so was the dead man sprawled in the center of it. He lay facedown, and in death he was reaching forward with his right hand. He wore a double-vented blue blazer, shiny with wear in the back, and gray flannel trousers. His shoes were brown suede. One shoe, the right, had a thickened heel and sole. The trousers had ridden up along his lower leg. The skin was shockingly white, like exposed bone. The socks were mismatched.

Gabriel squatted on his haunches with the casualness of someone who was at ease around the dead. The corpse had been a tiny man—five feet in height, no more. He lay in profile, the left side of the face exposed. Through the blood, Gabriel could see a square jaw and a delicate cheekbone. The hair was thick and snowy white. It appeared that the man had been shot once, through the left eye, and that the slug had exited the back of the skull. Judging from the size of the exit wound, the weapon was a rather large-caliber
handgun. Gabriel looked up and saw that the slug had shattered the mirror above the large fireplace. He suspected the old man had been dead a few hours.

He supposed he should telephone the police, but then he imagined the situation from their point of view. A foreigner in an expensive home, a corpse shot through the eye. At the very least, he would be detained for questioning. Gabriel couldn’t allow that to happen.

He rose and turned his gaze from the dead man to the Raphael. A striking image: a beautiful young man in semi-profile, sensuously lit. Gabriel guessed it had been painted while Raphael was living and working in Florence, probably between 1504 and 1508. Too bad about the old man. It would have been a pleasure to restore such a painting.

He walked back to the entrance hall, stopped and looked down. He had tracked blood across the marble floor. There was nothing to be done about it. In circumstances like these he had been trained to leave quickly without worrying about making a bit of a mess or noise.

He collected his cases, opened the door, and stepped outside. It was raining harder now, and by the time he reached the gate at the end of the flagstone walk he was no longer leaving bloody footprints.

He walked quickly until he came to a thoroughfare: the Krähbühlstrasse. The Number 6 tram slithered down the slope of the hill. He raced it to the next stop, walking quickly but not running, and hopped on without a ticket.

The streetcar jerked forward. Gabriel sat down and looked to his right. Scrawled on the carriage wall, in black indelible marker, was a swastika superimposed
over a Star of David. Beneath it were two words:

JUDEN SCHEISS.

T
HE
tram took him directly to Hauptbahnhof. Inside the terminal, in an underground shopping arcade, he purchased an exorbitantly priced pair of Bally leather boots. Upstairs in the main hall he checked the departure board. A train was leaving for Munich in fifteen minutes. From Munich he could make an evening flight back to London, where he would go directly to Isherwood’s house in South Kensington and strangle him.

He purchased a first-class ticket and walked to the toilet. In a stall he changed from his loafers into the new boots. On the way out he dropped the loafers into a rubbish bin and covered them with paper towels.

By the time he reached the platform, the train was boarding. He stepped onto the second carriage and picked his way along the corridor until he came to his compartment. It was empty. A moment later, as the train eased forward, Gabriel closed his eyes, but all he could see was the dead man lying at the foot of the Raphael, and the two words scrawled on a streetcar:

JUDEN SCHEISS.

The train slowed to a stop. They were still on the platform. Outside, in the corridor, Gabriel heard footfalls. Then the door to his compartment flew back as though blown open by a bomb, and two police officers burst inside.

S
IX HUNDRED MILES
to the west, in the Basque town of Vitoria, an Englishman sat amid the cool shadows of the Plaza de España, sipping coffee at a café beneath the graceful arcade. Though he was unaware of the events taking place in Zurich, they would soon alter the course of his well-ordered life. For now, his attention was focused on the bank entrance across the square.

He ordered another
café con leche
and lit a cigarette. He wore a brimmed hat and sunglasses. His hair had the healthy silver sheen of a man gone prematurely gray. His sandstone-colored poplin suit matched the prevailing architecture of Vitoria, allowing him to blend, chameleonlike, into his surroundings. He appeared to be entranced by that morning’s editions of
El País
and
El Mundo.
He was not.

On the pale yellow stonework a graffiti artist had scrawled a warning:
TOURISTS BEWARE! YOU ARE NOT IN
SPAIN ANY LONGER! THIS IS BASQUE COUNTRY!
The Englishman did not feel any sense of unease. If for some reason he was targeted by the separatists, he was quite certain he would be able to look after himself.

His gaze settled on the door of the bank. In a few minutes, a teller called Felipe Navarra would be leaving for his midday break. His colleagues believed he went home for lunch and siesta with his wife. His wife believed he was meeting secretly with his Basque political associates. In reality, Felipe Navarra would be heading to an apartment house in the old town, just off the Plaza de la Virgen Blanca, where he would spend the afternoon with his mistress, a beautiful black-haired girl called Amaia. The Englishman knew this because he had been watching Navarra for nearly a week.

At one-fifteen Navarra emerged from the bank and headed toward the old town. The Englishman left a handful of pesetas on the table, enough to cover his tab along with a generous tip for the waiter, and trailed softly after him. Entering a crowded market street, he kept to a safe distance. There was no need to get too close. He knew where his quarry was going.

Felipe Navarra was no ordinary bank teller. He was an active service agent of the Euzkadi Ta Askatasuna (Basque Fatherland and Liberty) better known as ETA. In the lexicon of ETA, Navarra was a sleeping commando. He lived a normal life with a normal job and received his orders from an anonymous commander. A year ago he had been directed to assassinate a young officer of the Guardia Civil. Unfortunately for Navarra, the officer’s father was a successful winemaker, a man with plenty of money to finance an extensive search for his son’s killer. Some of that money
now resided in the Englishman’s numbered Swiss bank account.

Among the terror experts of Europe, ETA had a reputation for training and operational discipline that rivaled that of the Irish Republican Army, a group with which the Englishman had dealt in the past. But based on the Englishman’s observations thus far, Felipe Navarra seemed a rather free-spirited agent. He walked directly toward the girl’s flat, taking no security precautions or countersurveillance measures. It was a miracle he’d managed to kill the Guardia Civil officer and escape. The Englishman thought he was probably doing ETA a favor by eliminating such an incompetent agent.

Navarra entered an apartment building. The Englishman walked across the street to a bakery, where he consumed two sugared pastries and drank another
café con leche.
He didn’t like to work on an empty stomach. He looked at his watch. Navarra had been inside for twenty minutes, plenty of time for the preliminaries of a sexual liaison.

Crossing the quiet street, he had an amusing thought. If he telephoned Navarra’s wife, a redhead with a fiery Basque temper, she would probably do the job for him. But, strictly speaking, that would be a breach of contract. Besides, he wanted to do it himself. The Englishman was happy in his work.

He entered the cool, dark foyer. Directly in front of him was the entrance to a shaded courtyard. To his right was a row of post boxes. He mounted the stairs quickly to the door of the girl’s flat on the fourth floor.

A television was playing, a senseless game show on Antena 3. It helped to cover the minimal sound the Englishman made while picking the lock. He entered the
flat, closed the door, and locked it again. Then he padded into the bedroom.

Navarra was seated at the end of the bed. The woman was kneeling on the floor, her head moving rhythmically between his legs. Navarra’s fingers were entwined in her hair, and his eyes were closed, so he was unaware of the new presence in the room. The Englishman wondered why they were making love to a game show.
To each his own,
he thought.

The Englishman crossed the room quickly in three powerful strides, his footfalls covered by the sound of the television. A knife slipped from a sheath on his right forearm and fell into his palm. It was the weapon of a soldier, a heavy serrated blade, with a thick leather-bound grip. He held it the way he had been trained at the headquarters of his old regiment on a windswept moorland in the Midlands of England.

The natural inclination when stabbing a man is to do it from behind, so that the killer and victim are never face-to-face, but the Englishman had been trained to kill with a knife from the front. In this case it meant the element of surprise was lost, but the Englishman was a creature of habit and believed in doing things by the book.