The English Assassin

thousands of sayanim around the globe—bankers who could provide Office field agents with money, hotel clerks who could give them lodging, doctors who could quietly treat them if they were wounded or ill. In the case of Henri, he dispensed with the usual paperwork and issued the Renault to Gabriel in such a way that it could never be traced.
    Shortly after his arrival in Paris, Gabriel reluctantly had made contact with the head of the local station, a man called Uzi Navot. Navot had strawberry-blond hair and the lumpy physique of a wrestler. He was one of Shamron’s devoted acolytes and was jealous of the old man’s affections toward Gabriel. As a result he hated Gabriel, in the way a second son hates an elder brother, and he had buried a knife in Gabriel’s back at every opportunity. Their meeting, on a bench next to the fountain in the Tuileries Gardens, had the cold formality of two opposing generals negotiating a cease-fire. Navot made it clear that he believed the Paris station could handle a simple surveillance job without the help of the great Gabriel Allon. He also wasn’t pleased that Shamron had kept him in the dark about why a Paris art dealer should warrant Office surveillance. Gabriel had remained stoically calm in the face of Navot’s quiet tirade, tossing bits of baguette to the pigeons and nodding sympathetically from time to time. When Navot stormed off across a gravel footpath twenty minutes later, Gabriel had arranged for everything he needed: watchers, radios with secure frequencies, cars, bugging equipment, a .22-caliber Beretta pistol.
     
    FORtwo days they watched him. It was not particularly difficult work; Müller, if he was a criminal, did not behave much like one. He arrived at the gallery each morning at nine forty-five, and by ten he was ready to receive customers. At one-thirty he would close the gallery and walk to the same restaurant on the rue de Rivoli, pausing once along the way to purchase newspapers from the same kiosk.
    On the first day, a blunt-headed watcher called Oded followed him. On the second it was a reedy boy called Mordecai, who huddled outside at a freezing table on the sidewalk. After lunch he followed Müller back to the gallery, then came upstairs to Gabriel’s hotel room for a debriefing.
    “Tell me something, Mordecai,” Gabriel said. “What did he have for lunch today?”
    The watcher pulled his thin face into a disapproving frown. “Shellfish. An enormous platter. It was a massacre.”
    “And what did you eat, Mordecai?”

    “Eggs and pommes frites. ”
    “How were they?”
    “Not bad.”
    In the evenings, another predictable routine. Müller would remain at the gallery until six-thirty. Before leaving, he would place a dark-green plastic rubbish bag at the curbside for the overnight pickup, then would walk through the crowds along the Champs-Élysées to Fouquet’s. On the first night it was Oded who collected the garbage and brought it to Gabriel’s room and Mordecai who followed the art dealer to Fouquet’s. On the second night, the two watchers reversed roles. As Müller sipped champagne with the film and literary crowd at Fouquet’s, Gabriel performed the unenviable task of sifting through the rubbish. It was as ordinary as Müller’s daily routine: discarded facsimiles in a half-dozen languages, unimportant mail, cigarette butts, soiled napkins, and coffee grounds.
    After Fouquet’s, Müller would stroll through the quiet side streets of the eighth arrondissement, have a light supper in a bistro, then head up to his apartment. After two nights of the same thing, Oded grew rebellious. “Maybe he’s just a Swiss art dealer who doesn’t deal much art. Perhaps you’re wasting your time— and ours.”
    But Gabriel was not deterred by the protestations of Oded and the rest of his small team. Shortly after midnight, he watched from the window of his room at the Hôtel Laurens as an unmarked van pulled to the curb outside the gallery. The next sequence unfolded with the fluidity of a choreographed dance. Two men emerged from the van. Twenty seconds later they had broken into the gallery and disarmed the alarm system. The work inside took less than a minute. Then the two men slipped out of the gallery and climbed back into the van. The headlights flashed twice and the van drove off.
    Gabriel turned away from the window, picked up the telephone, and dialed the number for the gallery. After five rings, an answering machine picked up.