The Messenger

“Isherwood Fine Arts” suddenly took on new meaning among the denizens of Duke Street, and the gallery was hit by a rash of drop-bys and pop-ins. Even Jeremy Crabbe from Bonhams started dropping by unannounced just to have a glimpse at Isherwood’s collection.
    After shoring up the gallery Sarah began venturing out to meet her compatriots. She did formal meetings with the leading lights at the various London auction houses. She lunched expensively with the collectors and had quiet drinks in the late afternoon with their advisers, their consultants, and their assorted hangers-on. She popped into the galleries of Isherwood’s competitors and said hello. She stopped at the bar at Green’s once or twice and bought a round for the boys. Oliver Dimbleby finally screwed up the courage to invite her to lunch, but wisely she made it a coffee instead. Next afternoon they had a latte in a paper cup at an American chain on Piccadilly. Oliver fondled her hand and invited her to dinner. “I’m afraid I don’t do dinner,” she said. Why ever not? wondered Oliver as he waddled back to his gallery in King Street. Why ever not indeed?

    U ZI N AVOT had had his eye on it for some time. It was a perfect port in a storm, he’d always thought. The sort of place to stick in your back pocket for the inevitable rainy day. It was located just ten miles beyond the M25 ring road in Surrey—or, as he explained to Gabriel, an hour by Tube and car from Isherwood’s gallery in St. James’s. The house was a rambling Tudor pile with high gables and tiny leaded windows, reached by a long rutted beech drive and shielded by a forbidding brick-and-iron gate. There was a tumbledown barn and a pair of shattered greenhouses. There was a tangled garden for thinking deep thoughts, eight private acres for wrestling with one’s demons, and a stock pond that hadn’t been fished for fifteen years. The rental agent, when handing Navot the keys, had referred to it as Winslow Haven. To a field hand like Navot it was Nirvana.
    Dina, Rimona, and Yaakov worked in the dusty library; Lavon and Yossi set up shop in a rambling rumpus room hung with the heads of many dead animals. As for Gabriel, he made a shakedown studio for himself in a light-filled second-floor drawing room overlooking the garden. Because he could not show his face round the art world of London, he dispatched others to procure his supplies. Their missions were special operations unto themselves. Dina and Yossi made separate trips to L. Cornelissen & Sons in Russell Street, carefully dividing the order between them so that the girls who worked there would not realize they were filling the order of a professional restorer. Yaakov went to a lighting shop in Earl’s Court to purchase Gabriel’s halogen lamps and then to a master carpenter in Camden Town to collect a custom easel. Eli Lavon saw to the frame. A newly minted expert in all things al-Bakari, he took issue with Gabriel’s decision to go antique Italian. “Zizi’s taste is haute French,” he said. “The Italian will clash with Zizi’s sense of style.” But Gabriel always found that the more muscular carving of the Italian frames best suited Vincent’s impasto style, and so it was an Italian frame that Lavon ordered from the enchanted Bury Street premises of Arnold Wiggins & Sons.
    Sarah came to them early each evening, always by a different route, and always with Lavon handling the countersurveillance. She was a quick study and, as Gabriel had anticipated, was blessed with a flawless memory. Still, he was careful not to smother her beneath an avalanche of information. They started usually by seven, broke at nine for a family dinner in the formal dining room, then carried on until nearly midnight, when she was shuttled back to her apartment in Chelsea by Yossi, who was staying in a flat across the street.
    They spent a week on Zizi al-Bakari himself before branching off into his associates and the other members of his entourage and inner circle. Special attention was paid to Wazir bin Talal, the omnipresent chief of AAB security. Bin Talal was an intelligence service unto himself, with a staff of security agents inside AAB and a network of paid informants scattered around the world that fed him reports about potential threats to AAB properties or Zizi himself. “If Zizi likes the merchandise, it’s bin Talal who does the due diligence,” explained Lavon. “No one gets near the chief without first passing muster with