The English Assassin

then he remembered.
    “Nice job,” he said, inspecting her work.
    “I know something about bandaging hands, Mr. Allon. You have some things to tell me about my father, yes?”
    “More questions than answers at this point. And please call me Gabriel.”
    She smiled. “I have an idea, Gabriel. ”
     
    INa nylon rucksack, Anna packed a picnic lunch of bread and cheese and cold chicken. Last she added a chilled bottle of wine, which she wrapped in a woolen blanket before placing it in the bag. Rami gave Gabriel a Beretta and a pair of boyish-looking bodyguards. On the shaded footpaths of the pine grove, with Rami’s chaperons in close attendance, Gabriel told Anna about Paris. He did not tell her about his conversations with Julian Isherwood and Emil Jacobi. That could wait.
    The trees broke and the ruins appeared, perched on the face of a steep hillside. A wild goat hopped onto a granite boulder, bleated at them, then melted into the gorse. Gabriel shouldered the rucksack and followed Anna up the path.
    He watched the muscles of her legs flexing with each stride, and thought of Leah. A hike on an autumn day like this, twenty-five years earlier—only then the hillside had been in the Golan and the ruins were Crusader. Leah had painted; Gabriel had just returned from Europe, and his desire to create had been chased away by the ghosts of the men he had killed. He had left Leah at her easel and climbed to the top of the hill. Above him had stood the military fortifications along the Syrian border; below stretched the Upper Galilee and the rolling hills of southern Lebanon. Lost in thought, he had not heard Leah’s approach. “They’re still going to come, Gabriel. You can sit there for the rest of your life looking at them, but they’re still going to come.” And without looking at her Gabriel had said: “If I used to live there, in the Upper Galilee, and now I lived up there, in a camp in Lebanon, I’d come too.”
    The snap of Anna unfurling the picnic blanket shattered Gabriel’s memory. She spread the blanket over a patch of sunlit grass, as Leah had done that day, while Gabriel ritually uncorked the wine. Rami’s watchers took up their positions: one atop the ruins, one on the footpath below. As Anna pulled meat from the bones of the chicken, Gabriel showed her the photo of the man who had left the attaché-bomb at the gallery.
    “Ever seen him before?”
    She shook her head.
    Gabriel put away the photo. “I need to know more about your father.”
    “Like what?”
    “Anything that can help me find out who killed him and took his collection.”
    “My father was a Swiss banker, Gabriel. I know him as a man, but I know next to nothing about his work.”
    “So tell me about him.”
    “Where shall I start?”
    “How about his age. You’re thirty-eight?”

    “Thirty- seven. ”
    “Your father was eighty-nine. That’s a rather large age difference.”
    “That’s easy to explain. He was married to someone before my mother. She died of tuberculosis during the war. He and my mother met ten years later. She was quite a gifted pianist. She could have played professionally, but my father wouldn’t hear of it. Musicians were one step above exhibitionists, in his opinion. Sometimes I wonder what brought them together in the first place.”
    “Were there children from the first marriage?”
    Anna shook her head.
    “And your mother’s suicide?”
    “I was the one who found her body.” She hesitated for a moment, then said: “One never forgets something like that. Afterward, my father told us she’d had a history of depression. I loved my mother dearly, Gabriel. We were extremely close. My mother did not suffer from depression. She wasn’t taking any medication, she wasn’t under the care of a psychiatrist. She was moody, she was temperamental, but she was not the kind of woman who commits suicide for no reason. Something or someone made her take her own life. Only my father knew what it was, and he kept it secret from us.”
    “Did she leave a suicide note?”
    “According to the inquest, there was no note. But I saw my father take something from her body that looked very much like a note. He never showed it to me, and apparently he never showed it to the police either.”
    “And the death of your brother?”
    “It happened a year later. My father wanted him to go to work in the bank and carry on the family tradition, but Max wanted to race bicycles. And that’s exactly what he did—quite