The Kill Artist

and began to shake.
    The fight next door had gone quiet. Gabriel wanted to think about something besides Tunis, so he imagined sailing his ketch down the Helford Passage to the sea. Then he thought of the Vecellio, stripped of dirty varnish, the damage of the centuries laid bare. He thought of Peel, and for the first time that day he thought of Dani. He remembered pulling what remained of his body from the flaming wreckage of the car in Vienna, checking to see if somehow he had survived, thanking God that he had died quickly and not lingered with one arm and one leg and half a face.
    He stood up and paced the room, trying to make the image go away, and for some reason found himself thinking of Peel's mother. Several times during his stay in Port Navas he'd found himself fantasizing about her. It began the same way each time. He would bump into her in the village, and she would volunteer that Derek was out for a long walk on the Lizard trying to repair the second act. "He'll be gone for hours," she would say. "Would you like to come over for tea?" He would say yes, but instead of serving tea she would take him upstairs to Derek's bed and allow him to pour nine years of self-imposed abstinence into her supple body. Afterward she would lie with her head on his stomach, damp hair spread across his chest. "You're not really an art restorer, are you?" she would say in his fantasy. And Gabriel would tell her the truth. "I kill people for the government of Israel. I killed Abu Jihad in front of his wife and children. I killed three people in thirteen seconds that night. The prime minister gave me a medal for it. I used to have a wife and a son, but a terrorist put a bomb under their car because I had an affair with my bat leveyha in Tunis." And Peel's mother would run screaming from the cottage, body wrapped in a white bedsheet, the bedsheet stained with the blood of Leah.
    He returned to his chair and waited for Yusef. The face of Peel's mother had been replaced by the face of Vecellio's Virgin Mary. To help fill the empty hours, Gabriel dipped an imaginary brush into imaginary pigment and tenderly healed her wounded cheek.
    Yusef came home at 3:00 A.M. A girl was with him, the girl who had given him her telephone number that afternoon at the restaurant. Gabriel watched them disappear through the front entrance. Upstairs in the flat the lights flared briefly before Yusef made his nightly appearance in the window. Gabriel bid him good night as he disappeared behind the curtain. Then he fell onto the couch and closed his eyes. Today he had watched. Tomorrow he would begin to listen.
    THIRTEEN
    Amsterdam
    Three hours later a slender young woman named Inge van der Hoff stepped out of a bar in the red-light district and walked quickly along a narrow alley. Black leather skirt, black leggings, black leather jacket, boots clattering over the bricks of the alley. The streets of the Old Side were still dark, a light mist falling. She lifted her face skyward. The mist tasted of salt, smelled of the North Sea. She passed two men, a drunk and a hash dealer, lowered her head, kept moving. Her boss didn't like her walking home in the morning, but after a long night of serving drinks and fending off the advances of drunken customers, it always felt good to be alone for a few minutes.
    Suddenly she felt very tired. She needed to crash. She thought: What I really need is a fix. I hope Leila scored tonight.
    Leila… She loved the sound of her name. Loved everything about her. They had met two weeks earlier at the bar. Leila had come for three consecutive nights, each time alone. She would stay for an hour, have a shot of jenever, a Grolsch, a few hits of hash, listen to the music. Each time Inge went to her table she could feel the girl's eyes on her. Inge had to admit that she liked it. She was a stunningly attractive woman, with lustrous black hair and wide brown eyes. Finally, on the third night, Inge introduced herself and they began to talk. Leila said that her father was a businessman and that she had lived all over the world. She said she was taking a year off from her studies in Paris, just traveling and living life. She said Amsterdam enchanted her. The picturesque canals. The gabled houses, the museums, and the parks. She wanted to stay for a few months, get to know the place.
    "Where are you staying?" Inge had asked.
    "In a youth hostel in south Amsterdam. It's horrible. Where do you live?"
    "A houseboat on the Amstel."
    "A