The English Assassin

the Guarneri. When Gabriel sat down, Anna looked at him, hands on her hips.
    “What do you think you’re doing?”
    “I’m going to stay here with you.”
    “No, you’re not. I need to be alone before a performance. I can’t have you here distracting me.”
    “I’m afraid you’re going to have to make an exception tonight.”
    “Tell me something, Gabriel. If you were restoring one of those Tintorettos out there, would you like me standing over your shoulder watching?”
    “I see your point.”
    “Good—now get out of here.”
     
    ANNAhad been given a gift: the ability to block out all distraction; the strength to create an impenetrable bubble of silence around herself, to enclose herself in a cocoon. She had discovered this gift the morning of her mother’s suicide. A simple scale—G Minor played over two octaves, the ascent, the descent—was enough to send her through a mystical porthole to another time and place. Unfortunately, her ability to create this perfectly ordered place of silence did not extend beyond the violin, and God knows almost everything else in her life had been chaos.
    She had known musicians who had come to loathe their instruments. Anna had never done that. Her violin was the anchor which prevented her from drifting into the rocks—a lifeline which pulled her to safety each time she was in danger of drowning. When she was holding her violin, only good things happened. It was when she let go that things spun out of control.
    It did not come automatically, this mystical bubble. It had to be summoned. She hung her coat over the back of a baroque chair and crushed out her cigarette. She removed her wristwatch and dropped it into her handbag. She had no need for time now—she would create her own moment in time, a moment that would exist only once and would never be duplicated.
    She had decided to use the Guarneri tonight. It seemed only fitting, since the instrument had probably been assembled two hundred years earlier in a workshop not far from where she was sitting now. She opened the case and ran her forefinger down the length of the instrument: the head, the fingerboard, the bridge, the body. She was a lady, this Guarneri of Anna’s. Dignified and graceful, no flaws or failings, no scars.
    She removed the violin from its case and placed it against her neck, so that the button pressed against the familiar spot a few inches above the base of her shoulder. Her dress was strapless; she didn’t like anything between her body and her instrument. At first the violin felt cool against her skin, but soon the heat of her body suffused its wood. She placed the bow on the G string and pulled. The violin responded with a thick, resonant tone. Her tone. Anna Rolfe’s tone. The door to her mystical place was now open.
    She permitted herself to look once at her hand. The scars were so ugly. She wished there was something she could do to hide them. Then she pushed the thought from her mind. Her hand did not play the violin; it was her head that played. Her fingers would obey her brain.
    She switched off the lights and closed her eyes, then laid the bow across the strings and pulled slowly, coaxing sound from the violin. She executed no scales, performed no exercises, played no portion of the compositions she would perform that evening. There was nothing she could do now to prepare further. The pieces were so imbedded in her cells that she would play them not from memory but from instinct. Now she simply drew sound from the violin and allowed the sound to flow through her body. It’s just you and me, fiddle, she thought. Just you and me.
    She could hear the murmur of a conversation beyond her closed door. She threw a switch in her mind, and it was gone. Through the walls seeped the low din of the upper hall beginning to fill with members of the audience. She threw the switch, and it too was gone.
    It’s just you and me, fiddle. Just you and me. . . .
    She thought of the man in Gabriel’s photographs, the assassin known as the Englishman. It had been a long time since she had been able to put her trust in a man. She supposed her father’s betrayal—the lies he had told her about the reasons for her mother’s suicide—had spoiled her for all men. But tonight she would place her life in the hands of Gabriel Allon. Her father had set in motion a plan to try to atone for terrible sins he had committed. He was murdered before he was able to finish what he started. Gabriel would have to