UZI NAVOT had had his eye on it for some time. It was a perfect port in a storm, he’d always thought. The sort of place to stick in your back pocket for the inevitable rainy day. It was located just ten miles beyond the M25 ring road in Surrey—or, as he explained to Gabriel, an hour by Tube and car from Isherwood’s gallery in St. James’s. The house was a rambling Tudor pile with high gables and tiny leaded windows, reached by a long rutted beech drive and shielded by a forbidding brick-and-iron gate. There was a tumbledown barn and a pair of shattered greenhouses. There was a tangled garden for thinking deep thoughts, eight private acres for wrestling with one’s demons, and a stock pond that hadn’t been fished for fifteen years. The rental agent, when handing Navot the keys, had referred to it as Winslow Haven. To a field hand like Navot it was Nirvana.

Dina, Rimona, and Yaakov worked in the dusty library; Lavon and Yossi set up shop in a rambling rumpus room hung with the heads of many dead animals. As for Gabriel, he made a shakedown studio for himself in a light-filled second-floor drawing room overlooking the garden. Because he could not show his face round the art world of London, he dispatched others to procure his supplies. Their missions were special operations unto themselves. Dina and Yossi made separate trips to L. Cornelissen & Sons in Russell Street, carefully dividing the order between them so that the girls who worked there would not realize they were filling the order of a professional restorer. Yaakov went to a lighting shop in Earl’s Court to purchase Gabriel’s halogen lamps and then to a master carpenter in Camden Town to collect a custom easel. Eli Lavon saw to the frame. A newly minted expert in all things al-Bakari, he took issue with Gabriel’s decision to go antique Italian. “Zizi’s taste is haute French,” he said. “The Italian will clash with Zizi’s sense of style.” But Gabriel always found that the more muscular carving of the Italian frames best suited Vincent’s impasto style, and so it was an Italian frame that Lavon ordered from the enchanted Bury Street premises of Arnold Wiggins & Sons.

Sarah came to them early each evening, always by a different route, and always with Lavon handling the countersurveillance. She was a quick study and, as Gabriel had anticipated, was blessed with a flawless memory. Still, he was careful not to smother her beneath an avalanche of information. They started usually by seven, broke at nine for a family dinner in the formal dining room, then carried on until nearly midnight, when she was shuttled back to her apartment in Chelsea by Yossi, who was staying in a flat across the street.