A Death in Vienna

The outer door would not open until the inner door had been closed for ten seconds. Lavon put his face to the bulletproof glass and peered out.
    On the opposite side of the street, concealed in the shadows at the entrance of a narrow alleyway, stood a heavy-shouldered figure with a fedora hat and mackintosh raincoat. Eli Lavon could not walk the streets of Vienna, or any other city for that matter, without ritualistically checking his tail and recording faces that appeared too many times in too many disparate situations. It was a professional affliction. Even from a distance, and even in the poor light, he knew that he had seen the figure across the street several times during the last few days.
    He sorted through his memory, almost as a librarian would sort through a card index, until he found references to previous sightings.Yes, here it is. The Judenplatz, two days ago. It was you who was following me after I had coffee with that reporter from the States. He returned to the index and found a second reference. The window of a bar along the Sterngasse. Same man, without the fedora hat, gazing casually over his pilsner as Lavon hurried through a biblical deluge after a perfectly wretched day at the office. The third reference took him a bit longer to locate, but he found it nonetheless. The Number Two streetcar, evening rush. Lavon is pinned against the doors by a florid-faced Viennese who smells of bratwurst and apricot schnapps. Fedora has somehow managed to find a seat and is calmly cleaning his nails with his ticket stub. He is a man who enjoys cleaning things, Lavon had thought at the time. Perhaps he cleans things for a living.
    Lavon turned round and pressed the intercom. No response.Come on, girls. He pressed it again, then looked over his shoulder. The man in the fedora and mackintosh coat was gone.
    A voice came over the speaker.Reveka.
    “Did you lose the list already, Eli?”
    Lavon pressed his thumb against the button.
    “Get out!Now! ”
    A few seconds later, Lavon could hear the trample of footfalls in the corridor. The girls appeared before him, separated by a wall of glass. Reveka coolly punched in the code. Sarah stood by silently, her eyes locked on Lavon’s, her hand on the glass.
    He never remembered hearing the explosion. Reveka and Sarah were engulfed in a ball of fire, then were swept away by the blast wave. The door blew outward. Lavon was lifted like a child’s toy, arms spread wide, back arched like a gymnast. His flight was dreamlike. He felt himself turning over and over again. He had no memory of impact. He knew only that he was lying on his back in snow, in a hailstorm of broken glass. “My girls,” he whispered as he slid slowly into blackness. “My beautiful girls.”
    2
    VENICE
    IT WAS Asmall terra-cotta church, built for a poor parish in thesestière of Cannaregio. The restorer paused at the side portal beneath a beautifully proportioned lunette and fished a set of keys from the pocket of his oilskin coat. He unlocked the studded oaken door and slipped inside. A breath of cold air, heavy with damp and old candle wax, caressed his cheek. He stood motionless in the half-light for a moment, then headed across the intimate Greek Cross nave, toward the small Chapel of Saint Jerome on the right side of the church. The restorer’s gait was smooth and seemingly without effort. The slight outward bend to his legs suggested speed and sure-footedness. The face was long and narrow at the chin, with a slender nose that looked as if it had been carved from wood. The cheekbones were wide, and there was a hint of the Russian steppes in the restless green eyes. The black hair was cropped short and shot with gray at the temples. It was a face of many possible national origins, and the restorer possessed the linguistic gifts to put it to good use. In Venice, he was known as Mario Delvecchio. It was not his real name.
    The altarpiece was concealed behind a tarpaulin-draped scaffold. The restorer took hold of the aluminum tubing and climbed silently upward. His work platform was as he had left it the previous afternoon: his brushes and his palette, his pigments and his medium. He switched on a bank of fluorescent lamps. The painting, the last of Giovanni Bellini’s great altarpieces, glowed under the intense lighting. At the left side of the image stood Saint Christopher, the Christ Child straddling his shoulders. Opposite stood Saint Louis of Toulouse, a crosier in hand, a bishop’s miter