One searing afternoon in June, Gabriel had coffee with Dr. Bar-Zvi in the staff canteen.

“Will she ever be able to leave this place?”

“No.”

“What about for short periods?”

“I don’t see why not,” the doctor said. “In fact, I think it sounds like a rather good idea.”

She came with a nurse the first few times. Then, as she grew more comfortable being away from the hospital, Gabriel brought her home alone. She sat in a chair in his studio and watched him work for hours on end. Sometimes her presence brought him peace, sometimes unbearable pain. Always, he wished he could set her upon his easel and re-create the woman he had placed in a car that snowy night in Vienna.

“Do you have any of my paintings?”

He showed her the portrait in the bedroom. When she asked who the model had been, Gabriel said it was him.

“You look sad.”

“I was tired,” he said. “I’d been gone for three years.”

“Did I really paint this?”

“You were good,” he said. “You were better than me.”

One afternoon, while Gabriel was retouching a damaged portion of Daniel’s face, she asked him why she had come to Vienna.

“We’d grown apart because of my work. I thought my cover was secure enough to bring you and Dani along. It was a foolish mistake, and you were the one to pay for it.”

“There was another woman, wasn’t there? A French girl. Someone who worked for the Office.”

Gabriel nodded once and returned to work on the face of Daniel. Leah pressed him for more. “Who did it?” she asked. “Who put the bomb in my car?”

“It was Arafat. I was supposed to die with you and Dani, but the man who carried out the mission changed the plan.”

“Is he alive, this man?”

Gabriel shook his head.

“And Arafat?”

Leah’s grasp on the present situation was tenuous at best. Gabriel explained that Yasir Arafat, Israel’s mortal enemy, now lived a few miles away, in Ramallah.

“Arafat is here? How can that be?”

From the mouths of innocents, thought Gabriel. Just then he heard footfalls in the stairwell. Eli Lavon let himself into the flat without bothering to knock.

37 AIX-EN-PROVENCE: FIVE MONTHS LATER

37

AIX-EN-PROVENCE: FIVE MONTHS LATER

THE FIRST STIRRINGS OF A MISTRAL WERE PROWLING the ravines and gorges of the Bouches-du-Rhône. Paul Martineau, climbing out of his Mercedes sedan, buttoned his canvas field coat and turned the collar up round his ears. Another winter had come to Provence. A few more weeks, he thought, then he’d have to shut down the dig until spring.