Prince of Fire (12 page)

The apartment he entered seemed more suited to a member of the Aixois aristocracy than an archaeologist and part-time professor. Originally it had been two apartments, but Martineau, after the untimely accidental death of his widower neighbor, had won the right to combine them into a single flat. The living room was large and dramatic, with a high ceiling and large windows overlooking the street. The furnishings were Provençal in style, though less rustic than the pieces at his villa in Lacoste. On one wall was a landscape by Cézanne; on another a pair of sketches by Degas. A pair of remarkably intact Roman pillars flanked the entrance to a large study, which contained
several hundred archaeological monographs and a remarkable collection of original field notes and manuscripts from some of the greatest minds in the history of the discipline. Martineau’s home was his sanctuary. He never invited colleagues here, only women—and lately only Yvette.

He showered quickly and changed into clean clothing. Two minutes later he was behind the wheel of the Mercedes once more, speeding along the cours Mirabeau. He did not drive toward the university. Instead, he made his way across the city and turned onto the A51 Autoroute toward Marseilles. He had lied to Yvette. It was not the first time.

M
OST
A
IXOIS TENDED
to turn up their nose at Marseilles. Paul Martineau had always been seduced by it. The port city the Greeks had called Massalia was now the second largest in France, and it remained the point of entry for the majority of immigrants to the country, most of whom now came from Algeria, Morocco, and Tunisia. Divided roughly in half by the thunderous boulevard de la Canebière, it had two distinct faces. South of the boulevard, on the edge of the old port, lay a pleasant French city with broad pedestrian walks, exclusive shopping streets, and esplanades dotted with outdoor cafés. But to the north were the districts known as Le Panier and the Quartier Belsunce. Here it was possible to walk the pavements and hear only Arabic. Foreigners and native Frenchmen, easy prey for street criminals, rarely strayed into the Arab neighborhoods after dark.

Paul Martineau had no such misgivings about his security. He left his Mercedes on the boulevard d’Anthènes, near the base of the steps that led to the St-Charles train station, and set out
down the hill toward rue de la Canebière. Before reaching the thoroughfare he turned right, into a narrow street called the rue des Convalescents. Barely wide enough to accommodate a car, it sloped downward toward the port, into the heart of the Quartier Belsunce.

It was dark in the street, and Martineau, at his back, felt the first gusts of a mistral. The night air smelled of charcoal smoke and turmeric and faintly of honey. A pair of old men, seated on spindly chairs outside the doorway of a tenement house, shared a hubble-bubble water pipe and studied Martineau indifferently as he trod past. A moment later a soccer ball, deflated and nearly the color of the pavement, bounded toward him out of the darkness. Martineau put a foot on it and sent it adroitly back in the direction from which it came. It was scooped up by a sandaled boy, who, upon seeing the tall stranger in Western clothes, turned and vanished into the mouth of an alleyway. Martineau had a vision of himself, thirty years earlier.
Charcoal smoke, turmeric, honey . . .
For an instant he felt as though he was walking the streets of south Beirut.

He came to the intersection of two streets. On one corner was a
shwarma
stand, on another a tiny café that promised Cuisine Tunisienne. A trio of teenage boys eyed Martineau provocatively from the doorway of the café. In French he wished them good evening, then lowered his gaze and turned to the right.

The street was narrower than the rue des Convalescents, and most of the pavement was consumed by market stalls filled with cheap carpets and aluminum pots. At the other end was an Arab coffeehouse. Martineau went inside. At the back of the coffeehouse, near the toilet, was a narrow flight of unlit stairs. Martineau climbed slowly upward through the gloom. At the top was a door. As Martineau approached, it swung open suddenly.
A man, clean-shaven and dressed in a galabia gown, stepped onto the landing.

“Maa-salaamah,”
he said. Peace be upon you.

“As-salaam alaykum,”
replied Martineau, as he slipped past the man and entered the apartment.

J
ERUSALEM IS QUITE LITERALLY A CITY ON A HILL
. It stands high atop the Judean Mountains and is reached from the Coastal Plain by a staircase-like road that climbs through the twisting mountain gorge known as the Sha’ar Ha’Gai. Gabriel, like most Israelis, still referred to it by its Arab name, the Bab al-Wad. He lowered the window of his Office Skoda and rested his arm in the opening. The evening air, cool and soft and scented with cypress and pine, tugged at his shirtsleeve. He passed the rusted carcass of an armored personnel carrier, a memorial relic of the fighting in 1948, and thought of Sheikh Asad and his campaign to sever the lifeline to Jerusalem.

He switched on the radio, hoping to find a bit of music to take his mind off the case, but instead heard a bulletin that a
suicide bomber had just struck a bus in the affluent Jerusalem neighborhood of Rehavia. He listened to the updates for a time; then, when the somber music began, he switched off the radio. Somber music meant fatalities. The more music, the higher the number of dead.

Highway One changed suddenly from a four-lane motorway into a broad urban boulevard, the famed Jaffa Road that ran from the northwest corner of Jerusalem to the walls of the Old City. Gabriel followed the road to the left, then down a long, gentle sweep, past the chaotic New Central Bus Station. In spite of the bombing, commuters streamed across the road toward the entrance. Most had no choice but to board their bus and hope that tonight the roulette ball didn’t land on their number.

He passed the entrance of the sprawling Makhane Yehuda Market. An Ethiopian girl in police uniform stood watch at a metal barricade, checking the bag of each person who entered. When Gabriel stopped for a traffic light, clusters of black-coated Haredi men drifted between the cars like swirling leaves.

A series of turns brought him to Narkiss Street. There were no parking spaces to be had, so he left the car around the corner and walked slowly back to his apartment beneath the protective awning of the eucalyptus trees. He had a bittersweet memory of Venice, of gliding home upon the silken waters of a canal and tying his boat to the dock at the back of his house.

The Jerusalem limestone apartment block was set back a few meters from the street and reached by a cement walkway through a tangled little garden. The foyer was lit by a greenish light and smelled heavily of new oil-based paint. He didn’t bother checking the mailbox—no one knew he lived there, and the utility bills went directly to an ersatz property management company run by Housekeeping.

The block contained no elevator. Gabriel climbed the cement stairs wearily to the fourth floor and opened the door. The flat was large by Israeli standards—two bedrooms, a galley kitchen, a small study off the combination living room and dining room—but a far cry from the
piano nobile
of Gabriel’s canal house in Venice. Housekeeping had offered to sell it to him. The value of Jerusalem apartments seemed to sink with each suicide bombing, and at the moment it could be had for a good price. Chiara had decided not to wait for a deed to make it her own. With little else to do, she spent much of her time shopping and was steadily turning the functional but cheerless place into something like a home. A new rug had appeared since Gabriel had been home; so had a circular brass coffee table with a lacquered wood pedestal. He hoped she’d bought it somewhere reputable and not from one of those hucksters who sold Holy Land air in a bottle.

He called Chiara’s name but received only silence in reply. He wandered down the hall to their bedroom. It had been furnished for operatives rather than lovers. Gabriel had pushed the twin beds together, but invariably he would awaken in the middle of the night to find himself falling into the crevasse, clinging to the edge of the precipice. At the foot of the bed rested a small cardboard box. Chiara had packed away most of their things; this was all that remained. He supposed the psychologist at King Saul Boulevard would have read deep analytical insight into his failure to unpack the box. The truth was far more prosaic—he’d been too busy at work. Still, it was depressing to think that his entire life could fit into this box, just as it is hard to fathom a small metallic urn can contain the ashes of a human being. Most of the things weren’t even his. They’d belonged to
Mario Delvecchio, a role he had played for some time to moderate acclaim.

He sat down and with his thumbnail sliced open the packing tape. He was relieved to find a small wooden case, the traveling restoration kit containing pigments and brushes that Umberto Conti had given him as a gift at the end of his apprenticeship. The rest was mainly rubbish, things with which he should have parted long ago: old check stubs, notes on restorations, a harsh review he’d received in an Italian art magazine for his work on Tintoretto’s
Christ on the Sea of Galilee.
He wondered why he’d bothered to read it, let alone keep it.

At the bottom of the box he found a manila envelope no bigger than a checkbook. He loosened the flap and turned the envelope over. Out fell a pair of eyeglasses. They had belonged to Benjamin Stern, a former Office agent who’d been murdered. Gabriel could still make out Benjamin’s oily fingerprints on the dirty lenses.

He started to place the glasses back into the envelope but noticed something lodged at the bottom. He turned it over and tapped on the base. An object fell to the floor, a strand of leather on which hung a piece of red coral shaped like a hand. Just then he heard Chiara’s footfalls on the landing. He scooped up the talisman and slipped it into his pocket.

By the time he arrived in the front room, she’d managed to get the door open and was in the process of carrying several bags of groceries over the threshold. She looked up at Gabriel and smiled, as though surprised to find him there. Her dark hair was braided into a heavy plait, and the early spring Mediterranean sun had left a trace of color across her cheeks. She looked to Gabriel like a native-born Sabra. Only when she spoke
Hebrew with her outrageous Italian accent did she betray her country of origin. Gabriel no longer spoke to her in Italian. Italian was the language of Mario, and Mario was dead. Only in bed did they speak to each other in Italian, and that was a concession to Chiara, who believed Hebrew was not a proper language for lovers.

Gabriel closed the door and helped carry the plastic bags of groceries into the kitchen. They were mismatched, some white, some blue, a pinkish bag bearing the name of a well-known kosher butcher. He knew Chiara once again had ignored his admonition to stay out of the Makhane Yehuda Market.

“Everything is better there, especially the produce,” she said defensively, reading the look of disapproval on his face. “Besides, I like the atmosphere. It’s so intense.”

“Yes,” Gabriel agreed. “You should see it when a bomb goes off.”

“Are you saying that the great Gabriel Allon is afraid of suicide bombers?”

“Yes, I am. You can’t stop living, but there are sensible things you can do. How did you get home?”

Chiara looked at him sheepishly.

“Damn it, Chiara!”

“I couldn’t find a cab.”

“Do you know a bus was just bombed in Rehavia?”

“Of course. We heard the explosion inside Makhane Yehuda. That’s why I decided to take the bus home. I figured the odds were in my favor.”

Such macabre calculations, Gabriel knew, were a daily facet of modern Israeli life.

“From now on, take bus number eleven.”

“Which one is that?”

He pointed two fingers toward the floor and moved them in a walking motion.

“Is that an example of your fatalistic Israeli sense of humor?”

“You have to have a sense of humor in this country. It’s the only way to keep from going crazy.”

“I liked you better when you were an Italian.” She pushed him gently from the kitchen. “Go take a shower. We’re having guests for dinner.”

A
RI
S
HAMRON HAD ALIENATED
all those who loved him most. He had wagered, foolishly as it turned out, that his lifelong commitment to the defense of his country granted him immunity when it came to his children and his friends. His son, Yonatan, was a tank commander in the Israel Defense Forces and seemed gripped by an almost suicidal need to die in battle. His daughter had moved to New Zealand and was living on a chicken farm with a gentile. She avoided his calls and refused his repeated demands to return to the land of her birth.

Only Gilah, his long-suffering wife, had remained faithfully at his side. She was as calm as Shamron was temperamental and blessed with a myopic ability to see only the good in him. She was the only person who ever dared to scold him, though to spare him needless embarrassment she usually did so in Polish—as she did when Shamron tried to light a cigarette at the dinner table after finishing his plate of roasted chicken and rice pilaf. She knew only the vaguest details of her husband’s work and suspected his hands were unclean. Shamron had spared her the worst, for he feared that Gilah, if she knew too much, would
abandon him the way his children had. She viewed Gabriel as a restraining influence and treated him kindly. She also sensed that Gabriel loved Shamron in the turbulent way in which a son loves a father, and she loved him in return. She did not know that Gabriel had killed men on orders from her husband. She believed he was a clerk of some sort who had spent a great deal of time in Europe and knew much about art.