The Fallen Angel

making a ransom payment. The French police knocked on a few doors and questioned a few of the usual suspects, but after a week they decided they had more important things to do than chase down a swath of canvas and a very old lump of clay. Besides, they had dealt with this band of thieves before. These men were pros, not adventurers, and when they stole something, it never reappeared.
    The theft sent the usual tremors of apprehension through the art galleries of Paris, but in Maurice Durand’s world it was but a pebble cast upon an otherwise tranquil surface. They overheard him discussing the case with his favorite waitress at the brasserie, but otherwise his life moved at the same monotonous rhythm. He opened his shop at ten. He lunched at one. And at five o’clock sharp, he treated himself to the pleasures of Madame Brossard and then drank his red wine for the sake of his guiltless little heart.
    Finally, a week after the theft, he rang Gabriel on a prearranged number to say the items he had requested—an early twentieth-century Swiss pocket barometer and a brass-and-wood telescope by Merz of Munich—had arrived safely. At Gabriel’s request, Durand delivered the items that evening to the flat overlooking the Pont Marie and departed as quickly as he could. The painting, a landscape of Cézanne’s beloved Mont Saint-Victoire, had been expertly removed from its stretcher and placed in a cardboard tube. The hydria was packed into a nylon Adidas sports bag. Eli Lavon removed it and placed it carefully on the kitchen table. Then he sat there for several minutes with Gabriel at his side, staring at the image of the Greek maidens attending to the nude athletes.
    “Someone has to do it,” Lavon said finally, “but it’s not going to be me.”
    “I’m a restorer,” said Gabriel. “I couldn’t possibly.”
    “And I’m an archaeologist,” Lavon replied defensively. “Besides, I’ve never been one for the rough stuff.”
    “I’ve never assassinated a vase.”
    “Don’t worry,” Lavon said. “Unlike your previous work, it will only be temporary.”
    Gabriel exhaled heavily, returned the hydria to the Adidas sports bag, and gently pushed it over the edge of the table. The sound it made on impact was like the shattering of bone. Lavon slowly opened the zipper and peered mournfully inside.
    “Murderer,” he whispered softly.
    “Someone had to do it.”
     
     
    The Cézanne, however, received no such maltreatment. Indeed, during the final hours of the team’s stay in Paris, Gabriel ministered tenderly to its wounds as though it were a patient in intensive care. His goal was to stabilize the image so that the painting could one day be returned to its owner in the same condition in which it had been found. No ordinary art thief would ever have taken such a step, but Gabriel’s commitment to operational verisimilitude went only so far. He was a restorer first and foremost, and caring for the Cézanne helped to relieve his guilt over breaking the vase.
    He briefly considered returning the canvas to a stretcher, but ruled out such a procedure on the grounds it would make the painting too difficult to move securely. Instead, he adhered a protective layer of tissue paper to the surface using a rabbit-skin glue that he concocted in the kitchen of the Bois de Boulogne safe flat. Next morning, when the glue had dried, he returned the canvas carefully to its cardboard tube and ferried it to the Israeli Embassy at 3 rue Rabelais. The Office station chief was understandably apprehensive about accepting stolen property, but he relented after receiving a phone call from Uzi Navot. Gabriel tucked the painting into a moisture-free corner of the station’s vault and set the thermostat to a comfortable sixty-eight degrees. Then he headed to the Gare de Lyon and boarded the midday train for Zurich.
    He passed the four-hour journey plotting the next phase of the operation, and by six that evening, he was guiding a rented Audi sedan down the graceful sweep of Zurich’s Bahnhofstrasse. Seated next to him, the Adidas sports bag between his feet, was Eli Lavon. “Switzerland,” he said, staring glumly out his window. “Why does it always have to be Switzerland?”

23
     
    ST. MORITZ, SWITZERLAND
     
    B Y THEN IT WAS M ARCH , which meant that St. Moritz, the quaint former spa town in the Upper Engadine valley, was once more in the grip of madness. On the Via Serlas, perhaps the world’s costliest shopping street, faded