The English Assassin

without raising quite a racket. But then again, it might have been a commissioned theft.”
    “Meaning?”
    “Someone paid someone else to pull off the job.”
    “Was the murder of Rolfe included in the fee?”
    “Good question.”
    Shamron seemed suddenly tired. He sat on the edge of a fountain. “I don’t travel as well as I used to,” he said. “Tell me about Anna Rolfe.”
    “If we had a choice, we’d never be involved with her. She’s unpredictable, volatile, and she smokes more than you do. But she plays the violin like no one else I’ve ever heard.”
    “You’re good with people like that. Restore her.” Shamron began to cough, a violent cough that shook his entire body. After a moment he said, “Does she have any idea why her father made contact with us?”
    “She says she doesn’t. They weren’t exactly close.”
    This seemed to cause Shamron a moment of physical pain. His own daughter had moved to New Zealand. He telephoned her once a month, but she never returned his calls. His greatest fear was that she would not come home for his funeral or say kaddish for him. He took a long time lighting his next cigarette. “Do you have anything to go on?”
    “One lead, yes.”
    “Worth pursuing?”
    “I think so.”
    “What do you need?”
    “The resources to mount a surveillance operation.”
    “Where?”
    “In Paris.”
    “And the subject?”

14
    ROME
     
    T HE MINIATUREsupercardioid microphone held by the man dressed as a priest was no longer than an average fountain pen. Manufactured by an electronics firm in the Swiss industrial city of Zug, it allowed him to monitor the conversation conducted by the two men slowly circling the Piazza Navona. A second man sitting in the café on the opposite side of the square was armed with an identical piece of equipment. The man dressed as a priest was confident that between them they had recorded most of what was being said.
    His assumptions were confirmed twenty minutes later when, back in his hotel room, he synchronized the two tapes in an audio playback deck and slipped on a pair of headphones. After a few minutes, he reached out suddenly, pushed theSTOP button, thenREWIND , thenPLAY .
    “Where?”

    “In Paris.”
    “And the subject?”
    “An art dealer named Werner Müller.”
    STOP. REWIND. PLAY.
    “An art dealer named Werner Müller.”
    STOP.
    He dialed a number in Zurich and relayed the contents of the conversation to the man at the other end of the line. When he had finished, he treated himself to a cigarette and a split of champagne from the minibar, the reward for a job well done. In the bathroom, he burned the pages of his notebook in the sink and washed the ashes down the drain.

15
    PARIS
     
    T HE MÜLLER GALLERYstood at the bend of a small street between the rue Faubourg St. Honoré and the Avenue l’Opéra. On one side was a dealer of mobile telephones, on the other a boutique selling fine menswear that no man would wear. On the door was a sign, handwritten in neat blue script:BY APPOINTMENT ONLY . Behind the thick security glass of the window were two small decorative eighteenth-century works by minor French flower painters. Gabriel did not like the French flower painters. Three times he had agreed to restore a painting from the period. Each had been an exercise in exquisite tedium.
    For his observation post Gabriel chose the Hôtel Laurens, a small hotel fifty yards north of the gallery on the opposite side of the street. He checked in under the name of Heinrich Kiever and was given a small garret that smelled of spilt cognac and stale cigarette smoke. He told the front-desk clerk that he was a German screenwriter. That he had come to Paris to rework a script for a film set in France during the war. That he would be working long hours in his room and wished not to be disturbed. He drank in the hotel bar and made boorish advances toward the waitress. He shouted at the chambermaids when they tried to clean his room. He screamed at the room service boys when they didn’t bring his coffee quickly enough. Soon, the entire staff and most of the guests at the Hôtel Laurens knew about the crazy Boche writer in the attic.
    On the way to Paris he had stopped at the airport in Nice, dropped off the rented Mercedes, and collected a Renault. The rental agent was a man called Henri, a Provençal Jew whose family had survived the French Holocaust. In the lexicon of the Office, Henri was a sayan, a volunteer helper. There were