The Rembrandt Affair

an otherwise undamaged canvas. Pull on the right one, Gabriel promised, and Saint Martin’s world would fall to pieces.

43
    KING SAUL BOULEVARD, TEL AVIV
    T hey divided his life in half, which Martin, had he known of their efforts, would surely have found appropriate. Dina, Rimona, Mordecai, and Chiara were given responsibility for his highly guarded personal life and his philanthropic work while the rest of the team took on the Herculean task of deconstructing his far-flung financial empire. Their goal was to find evidence that Saint Martin knew his astonishing wealth had been built upon a great crime. Eli Lavon, a battle-scarred veteran of many such investigations, privately despaired of their chances for success. The case against Landesmann, while compelling to a layman, was based largely on the fading memories of a few participants. Without original documentation from Bank Landesmann or an admission of guilt from Saint Martin himself, any allegations of wrongdoing might ultimately be impossible to prove. But as Gabriel reminded Lavon time and time again, he was not necessarily looking for legal proof, only a hammer that he might use to beat down the doors of Saint Martin’s citadel.
    Gabriel’s first priority, however, was to break open the doors of Uzi Navot’s executive suite. Within hours of the team’s formation, Navot had issued a collegial directive to all department heads instructing them to cooperate fully with its work. But the written directive was soon followed by a verbal one that had the effect of sending all requests for intelligence or resources to Navot’s sparkling desk, where invariably they languished before receiving his necessary signature. Navot’s personal demeanor only reinforced the notion of indifference. Those who witnessed his encounters with Gabriel described them as tense and abbreviated. And during his daily planning meetings, Navot referred to the investigation of Martin Landesmann only as “Gabriel’s project.” He even refused to assign the venture a proper code name. The message, while carefully encrypted, was clear to all those who heard it. The Landesmann case was a tin can Navot intended to kick down the road. As for Gabriel, yes, he was a legend, but he was yesterday’s man. And anyone foolish enough to hitch his wagon to him would at some point feel Uzi’s wrath.
    But as the work of the team quietly progressed, the siege slowly lifted. Gabriel’s requests began clearing Navot’s desk in a more timely fashion, and the two men were soon conferring in person on a regular basis. They were even spotted together in the executive dining room sharing a dietetic lunch of steamed chicken and wilted greens. Those fortunate few who were able to gain admittance to Gabriel’s subterranean realm described the mood as one of palpable excitement. Those who labored there under Gabriel’s unrelenting pressure might have described the atmosphere in another manner, but, as always, they kept their own counsel. Gabriel made few demands of his team other than loyalty and hard work, and they rewarded him with absolute discretion. They regarded themselves as a family—a boisterous, quarrelsome, and sometimes dysfunctional family—and outsiders were never privy to family secrets.
    The true nature of their project was known only to Navot and a handful of his most senior aides, though even a glance inside the team’s cramped lair would have left very little to the imagination. Stretching the entire length of one wall was a complex diagram of Saint Martin’s global business empire. At the top were the companies directly owned or controlled by Global Vision Investments of Geneva. Below that was a directory of firms owned by known subsidiaries of GVI, and farther down lay a substrata of enterprises held by corporate shells and offshore fronts.
    The diagram proved Alfonso Ramirez’s contention that, for all Saint Martin’s corporate piety, he was remorseless in pursuit of profit. There was a textile mill in Thailand that had been cited repeatedly for using slave labor, a chemical complex in Vietnam that had destroyed a nearby river, and a cargo vessel recycling center in Bangladesh that was regarded as one of the most fouled parcels of land on the planet. GVI also controlled a Brazilian agribusiness that was destroying several hundred acres of the Amazon rain forest on a daily basis, an African mining company that was turning a corner of Chad into a dust bowl, and a Korean