The English Assassin

finish it for him. And Anna would help him the only way she knew how—by playing her violin. Beautifully.
    The bubble began to close around her, to enfold her. There was no assassin, no photograph of her father with Adolf Hitler, no Gabriel Allon. Just her and the violin.
    There was a faint tapping at the door. Instantly, Anna’s bow stopped.
    “Five minutes, Miss Rolfe.”
    “Thank you.”

    The bow slid along the string once more. The sound flowed through her body. The violin turned to fire against her skin. The bubble closed around her. She was lost. Soon the door was open and she was floating toward the upper hall. As she entered the room she assumed there was applause—she knew this only from experience, not from any information she was receiving from her senses. She could not see the audience, nor could she hear it.
    She dipped her head and waited an instant before lifting the violin above her shoulder and pressing it to her neck. Then she laid the bow on the strings, hesitated, and began to play.
     
    GABRIELestablished his watch post beneath Tintoretto’s Temptation of Christ. Slowly, his eyes swept the room. Person by person, face by face, he searched the chamber for the man in the photograph. If the assassin was there, Gabriel did not see him.
    He checked the disposition of his team. Yitzhak stood directly across the hall from Gabriel. A few feet away, at the top of the staircase, stood Moshe. Shimon and Ilana roamed the back of the hall, and a few feet to Gabriel’s right was Jonathan, arms folded, chin on his chest, his dark gaze up.
    For a moment he allowed himself to look at Anna. She performed “The Devil’s Trill” unaccompanied, as Tartini had intended. The first movement was spellbinding—the floating and distant snatches of simple melody, the hints of Baroque ornamentation; the repeated intrusion of the unsettling double-stop of E-flat and G. The Devil’s chord.
    Anna played with her eyes closed, her body swaying slightly, as if she were physically drawing sound from her instrument. She was no more than ten feet away from him, but for now Gabriel knew she was lost to him. She belonged to the music now, and whatever bond that had existed between them was broken.
    He watched her now as an admirer—and vaguely, he thought, as a restorer. He had helped her to discover the truth about her father and to come to terms with her family’s past. The damage was still there, he thought, but it was concealed, invisible to the naked eye, like in a perfect restoration.
    She executed the treacherous chromatic descent at the end of the first movement. Pausing for a moment, she began the second movement. Mischievous and faster-paced, it was full of demanding string crossings that required her hand to move repeatedly from the first position to the fifth and from the E string to the G. Eighteen minutes later, when the third movement dissolved into a final arpeggiated G-minor chord, the audience exploded into applause.
    Anna lowered the violin and drew several deep breaths. Only then did she open her eyes. She acknowledged the applause with a slight bow. If she ever looked at Gabriel, he did not know it, because by then he had turned his back to her and was scanning the room, looking for a man with a gun.

39
    VENICE
     
    A STEADY RAINwas falling on the Campo San Rocco. The miserable weather did nothing to dampen the spirits of the large crowd that lingered there after the recital, hoping for one last glimpse of Anna Rolfe. The atmosphere was electrically charged. After performing “The Devil’s Trill,” Anna had been joined onstage by her longtime accompanist, Nadine Rosenberg, for Brahms’s Sonata No. 1 for Violin and Piano in D Minor and Pablo Sarasate’s Zigeunerweisen. The evening’s final piece, Paganini’s demonic solo Caprice No. 24, had brought the audience to its feet.
    Anna Rolfe was unaware of the crowd outside. At that moment she was standing in the gallery behind the stage with Zaccaria Cordoni and Fiona Richardson. Fiona was conducting an animated conversation in German on her mobile telephone. Anna was smoking a much-deserved Gitane, trying to come down off the high of the performance. She was still holding the violin. The old Guarneri had been good to her tonight. She wanted it near her a little longer.
    Gabriel was standing a few feet away, watching her carefully. Anna caught his eye briefly and smiled. She mouthed the words thank you and discreetly blew him a kiss. Fiona ended