The English Assassin

Rolfe, aren’t you?”
    She nodded.
    “We’re friends of Gabriel’s.”
     
    INMarseille, the Englishman left his car near the Abbaye St-Victor and walked through the darkened streets to the ferry terminal. As the vessel slipped over the calm waters of the harbor, he went downstairs to his private cabin. He lay on the narrow bed, listening to the news on Marseille radio. The bombing of the Müller Gallery in Paris was the lead item. Pascal Debré’s bomb had caused innocent casualties, a fact which made him feel a good deal more like a terrorist than a professional. Tomorrow he would go see the old signadora, and she would chase away the occhju with her rituals and prayers and absolve him of his sins, the way she always did.
    He switched off the radio. In spite of his fatigue, he wanted a woman. It was always that way after the completion of an assignment. He closed his eyes and Elizabeth appeared in his thoughts—Elizabeth Conlin, the pretty Catholic girl from the Ballymurphy housing estates, West Belfast, Northern Ireland. She’d had the instincts of a good professional. When it was safe for them to meet, she would hang a violet scarf in her bedroom window, and the Englishman would crawl through the window and into her bed. They would make love with excruciating slowness, so as not to wake the other members of her family. The Englishman would cover her mouth with the palm of his hand to smother her cries. Once she bit down on the flesh of his thumb and drew blood. It stained the sheets of her bed. Afterward, he would lie next to her in the dark and let her tell him again how she wanted to get away from Belfast—away from the bombs and the British soldiers, the IRA gunmen and the Protestant paramilitaries. And when she thought he was sleeping, she would whisper a rosary, her penance for succumbing to the temptations of the Englishman’s body. The Englishman never allowed himself to fall asleep in Elizabeth Conlin’s bed.
    One night when he crawled through her window, Elizabeth Conlin had been replaced by her father and two IRA enforcers. Somehow they knew the truth about the Englishman. He was driven to a remote farmhouse for what promised to be a lengthy and painful interrogation, followed by his own execution. Unlike most who had found themselves in a similar situation, the Englishman managed to leave the farmhouse alive. Four IRA men did not.
    Within hours the Englishman was safely out of the province. Elizabeth Conlin did not fare so well. Her body was found the following morning in the Belfast city cemetery, her head shaved, her throat slashed, the punishment for sleeping with a British agent.
    The Englishman had never been able to trust a woman since. Anton Orsati understood this. Once a week he brought a girl up to the Englishman’s villa—not a Corsican girl, only French girls, specially flown in for the task of servicing the Englishman’s particular needs. And he would wait with the old paesanu down the valley road until the Englishman had finished. The Englishman found the act of making love to Orsati’s girls as cold and clinical as an assassination, but he endured it because he could not trust himself to choose a lover and was not yet prepared to live like a monastic hermit.
    The assignment in Paris intruded on his thoughts. There was something that had been bothering him—the man who entered the gallery just before the bomb had exploded. The Englishman was the product of an elite unit and capable of spotting the influence in others: the light-footed gait; the subtle combination of absolute confidence and eternal vigilance. The man had been a soldier once—or perhaps something more complicated.
    But there was something else. The Englishman had the nagging sensation he had seen the man somewhere before. And so he lay there for the next several hours, sorting through the countless faces stored in his memory, looking for him.

19
    LONDON
     
    T HE BOMBINGof the Müller Gallery had done more than create a security problem for Gabriel in Paris. It had eliminated his only obvious lead in the case. Now he had to start over from the beginning, which is why, late the following morning, he was drifting across Mason’s Yard toward Julian Isherwood’s gallery through a gentle rain.
    On the brick wall next to the door was a panel, and on the panel were two buttons and two corresponding names: LOCUSTRAVELand ISHER OOFINEAR S. Gabriel pressed the second and waited. When the buzzer sounded, he pushed