A Death in Vienna

Leonardo, the water was nearing his boot tops. He turned into an alley, quiet except for the sloshing of the waters, and followed it to a temporary wooden footbridge spanning the Rio di Ghetto Nuovo. A ring of unlit apartment houses loomed before him, notable because they were taller than any others in Venice. He waded through a swamped passageway and emerged into a large square. A pair of bearded yeshiva students crossed his path, tiptoeing across the flooded square toward the synagogue, the fringes of theirtallit katan dangling against their trouser legs. He turned to his left and walked to the doorway at No. 2899. A small brass plaque read COMUNITÀEBRÀICA DIVENEZIA: JEWISHCOMMUNITY OFVENICE. He pressed the bell and was greeted by an old woman’s voice over the intercom.
    “It’s Mario.”
    “She’s not here.”
    “Where is she?”
    “Helping out at the bookstore. One of the girls was sick.”
    He entered a glass doorway a few paces away and lowered his hood. To his left was the entrance of the ghetto’s modest museum; to the right an inviting little bookstore, warm and brightly lit. A girl with short blond hair was perched on a stool behind the counter, hurriedly cashing out the register before the setting of the sun made it impossible for her to handle money. Her name was Valentina. She smiled at Gabriel and pointed the tip of her pencil toward the large floor-to-ceiling window overlooking the canal. A woman was on her hands and knees, soaking up water that had seeped through the allegedly watertight seals around the glass. She was strikingly beautiful.
    “I told them those seals would never hold,” Gabriel said. “It was a waste of money.”
    Chiara looked up sharply. Her hair was dark and curly and shimmering with highlights of auburn and chestnut. Barely constrained by a clasp at the nape of her neck, it spilled riotously about her shoulders. Her eyes were caramel and flecked with gold. They tended to change color with her mood.
    “Don’t just stand there like an idiot. Get down here and help me.”
    “Surely you don’t expect a man of my talent—”
    The soaking white towel, thrown with surprising force and accuracy, struck him in the center of the chest. Gabriel wrung it out into a bucket and knelt next to her. “There’s been a bombing in Vienna,” Chiara whispered, her lips pressed to Gabriel’s neck. “He’s here. He wants to see you.”
    THE FLOODWATERS LAPPEDagainst the street entrance of the canal house. When Gabriel opened the door, water rippled across the marble hall. He surveyed the damage, then wearily followed Chiara up the stairs. The living room was in heavy shadow. An old man stood in the rain-spattered window overlooking the canal, as motionless as a figure in the Bellini. He wore a dark business suit and silver necktie. His bald head was shaped like a bullet; his face, deeply tanned and full of cracks and fissures, seemed to be fashioned of desert rock. Gabriel went to his side. The old man did not acknowledge him. Instead, he contemplated the rising waters of the canal, his face set in a fatalistic frown, as though he were witnessing the onset of the Great Flood come to destroy the wickedness of man. Gabriel knew that Ari Shamron was about to inform him of death. Death had joined them in the beginning, and death remained the foundation of their bond.
    3
    VENICE
    IN THE CORRIDORSand conference rooms of the Israeli intelligence services, Ari Shamron was a legend. Indeed, he was the service made flesh. He had penetrated the courts of kings, stolen the secrets of tyrants, and killed the enemies of Israel, sometimes with his bare hands. His crowning achievement had come on a rainy night in May 1960, in a squalid suburb north of Buenos Aires, when he leapt from the back of a car and seized Adolf Eichmann.
    In September 1972, Prime Minister Golda Meir had ordered him to hunt down and assassinate the Palestinian terrorists who had kidnapped and murdered eleven Israelis at the Munich Olympic Games. Gabriel, then a promising student at the Bezalel Academy of Art in Jerusalem, reluctantly joined Shamron’s venture, fittingly code-named Wrath of God. In the Hebrew-based lexicon of the operation, Gabriel was anAleph. Armed only with a .22-caliber Beretta, he had quietly killed six men.
    Shamron’s career had not been an unbroken ascent to greater glory. There had been deep valleys along the way and mistaken journeys into operational wasteland. He developed a reputation as a