The English Assassin

open the door and mounted the stairs: same threadbare brown carpet, same Rorschachesque stain on the third step where a hung-over Isherwood had spilled coffee the morning after Oliver Dimbleby’s drunken birthday bash at the Mirabelle. At the top landing were two doors, one leading to the gallery, the other to a small travel agency where a plain woman sat behind a headmasterly desk, surrounded by posters promising boundless excitement in exotic locales. She glanced up at Gabriel, smiled sadly, and returned to her needlepoint.
    Though Julian Isherwood clung unwisely to the paintings in his inventory, he did not do the same with the girls who answered his telephones and kept his appalling files. He hired and drove them away with seasonal regularity. So Gabriel was surprised to see Irina, a black-haired leopard of a girl whom Isherwood had taken on six months ago, still at her post behind the desk in the anteroom.
    The door separating the anteroom and Isherwood’s office stood slightly ajar. Isherwood was with a client. Gabriel could see a painting propped on the black, felt-covered viewing pedestal. Italian Old Master by the look of it; no one Gabriel recognized. Isherwood paced the carpet slowly behind it, hand on his chin, eyes on the floor, like a barrister awaiting an answer from a hostile witness.
    “He’d like you to wait upstairs in the exhibition room,” the girl purred. “I assume you know the way.”
    Gabriel entered the tiny lift and rode it upward. The exposition room was a place of shadows, quiet except for the rain pattering on the skylight. Large Old Masters canvases hung on each of the walls: a Venus by Luini, a nativity by del Vaga, a baptism of Christ by Bordone, a luminous landscape by Claude. Gabriel left the lights off and sank heavily onto the velvet-covered divan. He loved this room. It had always been a sanctuary; an island of peace. He had once made love to his wife in this room. Years later, he had plotted the death of the man who had taken her away from him.

    The door of the lift opened and Isherwood entered.
    “My God, Gabriel, but you look like complete hell.”
    “Is that supposed to be a compliment?”
    “What the hell’s going on? Why aren’t you in Zurich?”
    “The owner of the painting you sent me to clean was a man named Augustus Rolfe. Ever heard of him?”
    “Oh, good Lord—the one who was murdered last week?”
    Gabriel closed his eyes and nodded. “I found his body.”
    Isherwood noticed the bandages. “What happened to your hands?”
    “You heard about the explosion at the gallery in Paris yesterday?”
    “Of course—this place is buzzing about it. Surely you weren’t involved in that?”
    “No, I just happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time. I’ll tell you everything, Julian, but first I need your help.”
    “What sort of help?” Isherwood asked cautiously.
    “Nothing like the old days. I just need you to explain why an aging Swiss banker might have kept a very impressive collection of French Impressionist and Modern paintings hidden from the world in an underground vault.”
    Isherwood pressed the button on the intercom. “Irina, would you be a love and bring a pot of coffee up to the exposition room? And some of those biscuits too. The ones with the nuts. And hold all my calls, please. There’s a good girl.”
     
    GABRIELknew the basics about the Nazi rape of Europe’s art treasures during the Second World War. Adolf Hitler had dreamed of building a massive Führermuseum in his hometown of Linz and filling it with the world’s finest collection of Old Masters and Northern European art. In 1938, he initiated a secret operation code-named Sonderauftrag Linz —Special Operation Linz—to acquire art for the Führermuseum by any means necessary. During the last months of peace, his agents secretly toured the museums, galleries, and private collections of Europe, selecting works for the future museum. When war broke out, Hitler’s art thieves followed hard on the heels of the Wehrmacht. Hundreds of thousands of paintings, sculptures and objets d’art quickly vanished, many of them Jewish-owned. Thousands of works, valued at roughly $30 billion, were still missing.
    Gabriel knew that Julian Isherwood could fill in the rest of the details for him. Isherwood was an above-average art dealer who’d had his fair share of triumphs, but when it came to the Nazi plunder of Europe he was something of an expert. He had written dozens of articles