The English Assassin

neighborhood, hoping to find you before you tried to go in. I missed you, of course. Then I heard the alarms going off.”
    “Did you tell anyone you were coming?”
    “No.”
    “Are you sure?”
    “Of course I’m sure. Why?”
    “Because it explains a lot of things. It means that the villa is under constant watch. It means that they know we came back here. It means they followed me to Rome. They’ve been following me ever since.”
    “What happened inside my father’s house?”
     
    WHENGabriel had finished, Anna said: “Did you get the provenance at least?”
    “They were gone.”
    “That’s not possible.”
    “Someone must have gotten to them first.”
    “Did you find anything else?”
    I found a photograph of your father with Adolf Hitler and Heinrich Himmler, admiring the view from the Berghof at Berchtesgaden.
    “No,” Gabriel said. “I didn’t find anything else.”

    “Are you sure about that? You didn’t use the opportunity to rifle through any of my father’s personal papers?”
    Gabriel ignored her. “Did your father smoke?”
    “Why does that matter now?”
    “Just answer the question, please. Did your father smoke?”
    “Yes, my father smoked!”
    “What kind of cigarettes?”
    “Benson and Hedges.”
    “Did he ever smoke Silk Cuts?”
    “He was very set in his ways.”
    “What about someone else in the household?”
    “Not that I know of. Why do you ask?”
    “Because someone was smoking Silk Cuts in your father’s study recently.”
    They came to the lake. Anna pulled to the side of the street. “Where are we going?”
    “ You’re going back to Portugal.”
    “No, I’m not. We do this together, or not at all.” She dropped the Audi into gear. “Where are we going?”

26
    LYONS
     
    S OME MEN MIGHTbe squeamish about installing a voice-activated taping system in their home. Professor Emil Jacobi was not one of them. His life was his work, and he had little time for anything else; certainly nothing that might cause him any embarrassment if it was captured on audiotape.
    He received a steady stream of visitors to his flat on the rue Lanterne: people with unpleasant memories of the past; stories they had heard about the war. Just last week, an old woman had told him about a train that had stopped outside her village in 1944. She and a group of friends were playing in the meadow next to the tracks when they heard moans and scratches coming from the cargo cars. When they moved closer, they saw that there were people on the train: miserable, wretched people, begging for food and water. The old woman realized now that the people were Jews—and that her country had allowed the Nazis to use its railways to ship human cargo to the death camps in the East.
    If Jacobi had tried to document her story by taking handwritten notes, he would have failed to capture it all. If he had placed a tape recorder in front of her, she might have become self-conscious. It had been Jacobi’s experience that most elderly were nervous around tape recorders and video cameras. And so they had sat in the cluttered comfort of his flat like old friends, and the old woman had told her story without the distraction of a notebook or a visible tape recorder. Jacobi’s secret system had caught every word of it.
    The professor was listening to a tape now. As usual, the volume was set quite loud. He found it helped to focus his concentration by blocking out the noise from the street and the students who lived in the next flat. The voice emanating from his machine was not that of the old woman. It was the voice of a man: the man who had come the previous day. Gabriel Allon. An amazing story, this tale of Augustus Rolfe and his missing collection of paintings. Jacobi had promised the Israeli he would tell no one about their discussion, but when the story broke, as Jacobi knew it eventually would, he would be perfectly positioned to write about it. It would be yet another black eye for Jacobi’s mortal enemies, the financial oligarchy of Zurich. His popularity in his native country would sink to new depths. This pleased him. Flushing sewers was dirty work.
    Emil Jacobi was engrossed in the story now, as he had been the first time he had heard it; so engrossed that he failed to notice the figure who had slipped into his flat—until it was too late. Jacobi opened his mouth to call out for help, but the man smothered his cry with an iron grip. The professor spotted the glint of a knife blade arcing toward