HIS DAYS QUICKLY ACQUIRED SHAPE. IN THE MORNING he would wake early and sit in Chiara’s newly decorated kitchen with coffee and the newspapers. The stories about the Khaled affair depressed him. Ha’aretz christened the affair “Bunglegate,” and the Office lost its battle to keep Gabriel’s name out of print. In Paris the French press besieged the government and the Israeli ambassador for an explanation of the mysterious photographs that had appeared in Le Monde. The French foreign minister, a blow-dried former poet, threw gasoline on the fire by expressing his belief that “there may indeed have been an Israeli hand in the Holocaust of the Gare de Lyon.” The next day, Gabriel read with a heavy heart that a Kosher pizzeria on the rue des Rosiers had been vandalized. Then a gang of French boys attacked a young girl as she walked home from school and carved a swastika into her cheek. Chiara usually awakened an hour after Gabriel. She read of the events in France with more alarm than sadness. Once a day she phoned her mother in Venice to make certain her family was safe.

At eight Gabriel would leave Jerusalem and make the drive down the Bab al-Wad to King Saul Boulevard. The proceedings were held in the top-floor conference room so Lev would not have far to walk when he wished to pop in and observe them. Gabriel, of course, was the star witness. His conduct, from the moment he’d returned to Office discipline until his escape from the Gare de Lyon was reviewed in excruciating detail. Despite Shamron’s dire predictions, there was to be no bloodletting. The results of such investigations were usually preordained, and Gabriel could see from the outset that he was not going to be made the scapegoat. This was a collective mistake, the committee members seemed to be saying by the tone of their questions, a forgivable sin committed by an intelligence apparatus desperate to avoid another catastrophic loss of life. Still, at times the questions became pointed. Did Gabriel have no suspicions about the motivations of Mahmoud Arwish? Or the loyalty of David Quinnell? Would things not have gone differently if he’d listened to his teammates in Marseilles and turned back instead of going with the girl? At least then Khaled’s plan to destroy the credibility of the Office would not have succeeded. “You’re right,” Gabriel said, “and my wife would be dead, along with many more innocent people.”

One by one, the others were brought before the committee as well, first Yossi and Rimona, then Yaakov and lastly Dina, whose discoveries had fueled the investigation into Khaled in the first place. It pained Gabriel to see them in the dock. His career was over, but for the others the Khaled affair, as it had become known, would leave a black mark on their records that would never be expunged.