The Messenger

for, but how did you find out about my van Gogh?”
    Gabriel was silent for a moment, then he answered her truthfully. The mention of Isherwood’s visit to this very apartment more than thirty years earlier caused her lips to curl into a vague smile of remembrance.
    “I think I remember him,” she said. “A tall man, quite handsome, full of charm and grace but at the same time somehow vulnerable.” She paused, then added, “Like you.”
    “Charm and grace are words that are not often applied to me.”
    “And vulnerability?” She gave him another slight smile. It served to soften the serious edges of her face. “All of us are vulnerable to some degree, are we not? Even someone like you? The terrorists found where you were vulnerable, and they exploited that. That’s what they do best. They exploit our decency. Our respect for life. They go after the things we hold dear.”
    Navot was right, Gabriel thought. She was a gift from the intelligence gods. He placed his glass on the coffee table. Hannah’s eyes followed his every movement.
    “What happened to this man Samuel Isakowitz?” she asked. “Did he make it out?”
    Gabriel shook his head. “He and his wife were captured in Bordeaux when the Germans moved south.”
    “Where did they send them?”
    “Sobibor.”
    She knew what that meant. Gabriel needn’t say anything more.
    “And your grandfather?” he said.
    She peered into her Sancerre for a moment before answering. “Jeudi Noir,” she said. “Do you know this term?”
    Gabriel nodded solemnly. Jeudi Noir. Black Thursday.
    “On the morning of July 16, 1942, four thousand French police officers descended on the Marais and other Jewish districts in Paris with orders to seize twenty-seven thousand Jewish immigrants from Germany, Austria, Poland, the Soviet Union, and Czechoslovakia. My father and grandparents were on the list. You see, my grandparents were originally from the Lublin district of Poland. The two policemen who knocked on the door of this very apartment took pity on my father and told him to run. A Catholic family who lived a floor below took him in, and he stayed there until liberation. My grandparents weren’t so lucky. They were sent to the detention camp at Drancy. Five days after that, a sealed railcar to Auschwitz. Of course, that was the end for them.”
    “And the van Gogh?”
    “There wasn’t any time to make arrangements for it, and there was no one in Paris that my grandfather felt he could trust. It was war, you know. People were betraying each other for stockings and cigarettes. When he heard the roundups were coming, he removed the painting from the stretcher and hid it beneath a floorboard in the library. After the war it took my father years to get the apartment back. A French family had moved in after my grandparents were arrested, and they were reluctant to give up a nice apartment on the rue Pavée. Who could blame them?”
    “What year did your father regain possession of the apartment?”
    “It was 1952.”
    “Ten years,” Gabriel said. “And the van Gogh was still there?”
    “Just as my grandfather had left it, hidden under the floorboards of the library.”
    “Amazing.”
    “Yes,” she said. “The painting has remained in the Weinberg family for more than a century, through war and Holocaust. And now you’re asking me to give it up.”
    “Not give it up,” said Gabriel.
    “Then what?”
    “I just need to—” He paused, searching for the appropriate word. “I need to rent it.”
    “Rent it? For how long?”
    “I can’t say. Perhaps a month. Perhaps six months. Maybe a year or longer.”
    “For what purpose?”
    Gabriel was not ready to answer her. He picked up the cork and used his thumbnail to scratch away a torn edge.
    “Do you know how much that painting is worth?” she asked. “If you’re asking me to give it up, even for a brief period, I believe I’m entitled to know the reason why.”
    “You are,” Gabriel said, “but you should also know that if I tell you the truth, your life will never be the same.”
    She poured more wine for herself and held the glass for a moment against her body without drinking from it. “Two years ago, there was a particularly vicious attack here in the Marais. A young Orthodox boy was set upon by a gang of North Africans as he was walking home from school. They set his hair on fire and carved a swastika into his forehead. He still bears the scar. We organized a demonstration to bring