The Kill Artist (14 page)

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Authors: Daniel Silva

Tags: #Mystery, #Thriller, #Suspense, #Adventure, #Politics

BOOK: The Kill Artist

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“He works for me,” Isherwood said, as if he were confessing some misdeed. “I own the painting he’s restoring.”

“The Rembrandt or the Vecellio?”

Isherwood smiled and said, “The Vecellio, my dear fellow.”

“It’s beautiful.”

“Indeed, it is.”

They stood side by side for a moment, oblivious of the rain. Isherwood saw something of himself in Gabriel’s miniature sentinel. Another Gabriel refugee, another piece of wreckage adrift in Gabriel’s wake. Another damaged soul in need of restoration by Gabriel’s skilled hands.

“Who took him?” Isherwood finally asked.

“The bald man who walked like a soldier. Do you know him?”

“Unfortunately, I do.” Isherwood smiled at Peel. “Are you hungry?”

Peel nodded.

“Is there someplace in the village to get some tea and sweets?”

“And a pastie,” Peel said. “Do you like sausage pasties?”

“Can’t say I’ve ever tried one, but there’s no time like the present. Should you ask your parents for permission first?”

Peel shook his head. “He’s not my dad, and my mum won’t care.”

Ari Shamron arrived at Lod Airport in Tel Aviv late the following evening. Rami was waiting at the gate. He shepherded Shamron through the arrivals area into a secure room reserved for Office personnel and special guests. Shamron stripped off his European business suit and pulled on his khakis and bomber jacket.

“The prime minister wants to see you tonight, boss.”

Shamron thought:
So much for keeping his nose out of the operation.

They rode into the hills toward Jerusalem. Shamron passed the time by leafing through a stack of paperwork that had piled up in his brief absence.

As usual there was a crisis in the prime minister’s diverse coalition. To reach his office Shamron first had to negotiate a smoky corridor filled with feuding politicians.

The prime minister listened raptly as Shamron brought him up-to-date. He was by nature a schemer. He had begun his career in the cutthroat atmosphere of academia, then moved to the hornets’ nest at the Foreign Ministry. By the time he entered the political arena, he was well versed in the black arts of bureaucratic treachery. His meteoric rise through the party ranks was attributed to his powerful intellect and his willingness to resort to subterfuge, misdirection, and outright blackmail to get what he wanted. In Shamron he saw a kindred spirit—a man who would stop at nothing if he believed his cause was right.

“There’s only one problem,” Shamron said.

The prime minister glanced at the ceiling impatiently. He was fond of saying, “Bring me solutions, not problems.” Shamron had an innate distrust of men who lived by catchy maxims.

“Benjamin Stone.”

“What now?”

“His business is in terrible shape. He’s robbing Peter to pay Paul, and Peter’s friends are getting upset about it.”

“Will it affect us?”

“If he goes under quietly, we’ll just miss his money. But if he goes under in a messy way, he could make things uncomfortable for us. I’m afraid he knows too much.”

“Benjamin Stone never does anything quietly.”

“Point taken.”

“What about those lovely home movies you made of him last year at the King David?”

“It seemed like a good idea at the time, but Stone has developed a rather high threshold for public embarrassment. I’m not sure he’s going to be terribly upset if the world sees him utilizing the services of an Israeli prostitute.”

“The politicians outside my door are my problem,” the prime minister said. “But I’m afraid that Benjamin Stone is yours. Deal with him as you see fit.”

PART TWO

ASSESSMENT

Before the war Maurice Halévy was one of the most prominent lawyers in Marseilles. He and his wife, Rachel, had lived in a stately old house on the rue Sylvabelle in the Beaux Quartiers, where most of the city’s successful assimilated Jews had settled. They were proud to be French; they considered themselves French first and Jews second. Indeed, Maurice Halévy was so assimilated that he rarely bothered to go to synagogue. But when the Germans invaded, the Halévys’ idyllic life in Marseilles came to an abrupt end. In October 1940 the collaborationist Vichy government handed down the
statut des Juifs,
the anti-Jewish edicts that reduced Jews to second-class citizens in Vichy France. Maurice Halévy was stripped of the right to practice law. He was required to register with the police, and later he and his wife were forced to wear the Star of David on their clothing.

The situation worsened in 1942, when the German army moved into Vichy France after the Allied invasion of North Africa. French Resistance forces carried out a series of deadly attacks on German forces. The German security police, with the help of Vichy French authorities, responded with brutal reprisal killings. Maurice Halévy could ignore the threat no longer. Rachel had become pregnant. The thought of trying to care for a newborn in the chaos of Marseilles was too much to bear. He decided to leave the city for the countryside. He used his dwindling savings to rent a cottage in the hills outside Aix-en-Provence. In January, Rachel gave birth to a son, Isaac.

A week later the Germans and French police began rounding up the Jews. It took them a month to find Maurice and Rachel Halévy. A pair of German SS officers appeared at the cottage on a February evening, accompanied by a local gendarme. They gave the Halévys twenty minutes to pack a bag weighing no more than sixty pounds. While the Germans and the gendarme waited in the dining room, the woman from the next cottage appeared at the door.

“My name is Anne-Marie Delacroix,” she said. “The Halévys were looking after my son while I went to the market.”

The gendarme studied his papers. According to the documents, only two Jews lived in the cottage. He called for the Halévys and said, “This woman says the boy belongs to her. Is this the truth?”

“Of course it is,” Maurice Halévy said, squeezing Rachel’s arm before she could utter a sound. “We were just watching the boy for the afternoon.” The gendarme looked at Maurice Halévy incredulously, then consulted the registration documents a second time. “Take the child and leave,” he snapped to the woman. “I have a good mind to take you into custody myself for entrusting a French child to the care of these dirty Jews.”

Two months later Maurice and Rachel Halévy were murdered at Sobibor.

After the liberation, Anne-Marie Delacroix took Isaac to a synagogue in Marseilles and told the rabbi what had happened that night in Aix-en-Provence. The rabbi offered her the choice of placing the child for adoption by a Jewish family or raising him herself. She took the boy back to Aix and raised him as a Jew alongside her own Catholic children. In 1965 Isaac Halévy married a girl from Nîmes named Deborah and settled in Marseilles in his father’s old house on the rue Sylvabelle. Three years later they had their first and only child: a girl they named Sarah.

PARIS

Michel Duval was the hottest fashion photographer in Paris. The designers and the magazine editors adored him because his pictures radiated an eye-grabbing aura of dangerous sexuality. Jacqueline Delacroix thought he was a pig. She knew he achieved his unique look by abusing his models. She wasn’t looking forward to working with him.

She stepped out of a taxi and entered the apartment building on the rue St-Jacques where Michel kept his studio. Upstairs a small crowd was waiting: makeup artist, hairdresser, stylist, a representative from Givenchy. Michel stood atop a ladder, adjusting lights: good-looking, shoulder-length blond hair, feline features. He wore black leather trousers, low-slung around narrow hips, and a loose pullover. He winked at Jacqueline as she came in. She smiled and said, “Nice to see you, Michel.”

“We’ll have a good shoot today, yes? I can feel it.”

“I hope so.”

She entered a changing room, undressed, and studied her appearance in the mirror with professional dispassion. Physically she was a stunning woman: tall, graceful arms and legs, elegant waist, pale olive skin. Her breasts were aesthetically perfect: firm, rounded, neither too small nor abnormally large. The photographers had always loved her breasts. Most models detested lingerie work, but it never bothered Jacqueline. She’d always had more offers for work than she could fit into her schedule.

Her gaze moved from her body to her face. She had curly raven hair that fell about her shoulders, dark eyes, a long, slender nose. Her cheekbones were wide and even, her jawline angular, her lips full. She was proud of the fact that her face had never been altered by a surgeon’s scalpel. She leaned forward, probed at the skin around her eyes. She didn’t like what she saw. It wasn’t a line, really—something more subtle and insidious. The intangible sign of aging. She no longer had the eyes of a child. She had the eyes of a thirty-three-year-old woman.

You’re still beautiful, but face facts, Jacqueline. You’re getting old.

She pulled on a white robe, went into the next room, and sat down. The makeup artist began applying a base to her cheek. Jacqueline watched in the mirror as her face was slowly transformed into that of someone she didn’t quite recognize. She wondered what her grandfather would think if he could see this.

He’d probably be ashamed. . . .

When the makeup artist and hairstylist finished, Jacqueline looked at herself in the mirror. Had it not been for the courage of those three remarkable people—her grandparents and Anne-Marie Delacroix—she would not be here today.

And look at what you’ve become—an exquisite clothes hanger.

She stood up, walked back to the changing room. The dress, a black strapless evening gown, waited for her. She removed her robe, stepped into the gown, and pulled it up over her bare breasts. Then she glanced at herself in the mirror. Devastating.

A knock at the door. “Michel is ready for you, Miss Delacroix.”

“Tell Michel I’ll be out in a moment.”

Miss Delacroix . . .

Even after all these years she was still not used to it: Jacqueline Delacroix. Her agent, Marcel Lambert, was the one who had changed her name—
“Sarah Halévy sounds too . . . well . . . you know what I mean,
mon chou.
Don’t make me say it out loud. So vulgar, but such is the way of the world.”
Sometimes the sound of her French name made her skin crawl. When she learned what had happened to her grandparents in the war, she had burned with hatred and suspicion of all French people. Whenever she saw an old man, she would wonder what he had done during the war. Had he been a guard at Gurs or Les Milles or one of the other detention camps? Had he been a gendarme who helped the Germans round up her family? Had he been a bureaucrat who stamped and processed the paperwork of death? Or had he simply stood by in silence and done nothing? Secretly it gave her intense delight that she was deceiving the fashion world. Imagine their reaction if they found out the lanky, raven-haired beauty from Marseilles was in fact a Provençal Jew whose grandparents had been gassed at Sobibor. In a way being a model, the very image of French beauty, was her revenge.

She took one last look at herself, lowering her chin toward her chest, parting her lips slightly, bringing fire to her coal black eyes.

Now she was ready.

They worked for thirty minutes without stopping. Jacqueline adopted several poses. She sprawled across a simple wooden chair. She sat on the floor, leaning back on her hands, with her head tilted upward and her eyes closed. She stood with her hands on her hips and her eyes boring through the lens of Michel’s camera. Michel seemed to like what he was seeing. They were in sync. Every few minutes he would pause for a few seconds to change his film, then quickly resume shooting. Jacqueline had been in the business long enough to know when a shoot was working.

So she was surprised when he suddenly stepped from behind the camera and ran a hand through his hair. He was frowning. “Clear the studio, please. I need some privacy.”

Jacqueline thought:
Oh, Christ. Here we go.

Michel said, “What the hell’s wrong with you?”

“Nothing’s wrong with me!”

“Nothing? You’re flat, Jacqueline. The pictures are flat. I might as well be taking pictures of a mannequin wearing the dress. I can’t afford to give Givenchy a set of flat prints. And from what I hear on the street, you can’t afford it either.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

“It means you’re getting old, darling. It means that no one’s quite sure whether you have what it takes anymore.”

“Just get back behind the camera, and I’ll show you I have what it takes.”

“I’ve seen enough. It’s just not there today.”

“Bullshit!”

“You want me to get you a drink? Maybe a glass of wine will help loosen you up.”