full lips, gave the impression of having been carved from wood. The most lasting impression of the face was the eyes, which were almond-shaped and a shocking shade of emerald green. Despite the demanding nature of his work--and the fact that he had recently celebrated his fifty-first birthday--his vision remained perfect.
Passing through an archway, he came to the Riva della Schiavoni, the broad quay overlooking the Canale di San Marco. In spite of the chill March weather, there were many tourists about. The restorer could make out a half-dozen different languages, most of which he could speak. A phrase of Hebrew reached his ears. It diminished quickly, like music on the wind, but left the restorer with an unyielding ache to hear the sound of his real name.
A No. 82 vaporetto was waiting at the stop. He boarded and found a place along the railing from which he could see the face of every passenger getting on and off. He dug the note from his pocket and read it one last time. Then he dropped it over the side of the boat and watched it drift away on the silken waters of the lagoon.
IN THE fifteenth century, a swampy parcel of land in the sestieri of Cannaregio was set aside for the construction of a new brass foundry, known in the Venetian dialect as ageto. The foundry was never built, and a century later, when the rulers of Venice were looking for a suitable spot to confine the city's swelling population of unwanted Jews, the remote parcel known as Ghetto Nuovo was deemed the ideal place. The campo was large and had no parish church. The surrounding canals formed a natural moat, which cut off the island from the neighboring communities, and the single
bridge could be guarded by Christian watchmen. In 1516, the Christians of Ghetto Nuovo were evicted and the Jews of Venice were forced to take their place. They could leave the ghetto only after sunrise, when the bell tolled in the campanile, and only if they wore a yellow tunic and hat. At nightfall they were required to return to the island, and the gates were chained. Only Jewish doctors could leave the ghetto at night. At its height, the population of the ghetto was more than five thousand. Now, it was home to only twenty Jews.
The restorer crossed a metal footbridge. A ring of apartment buildings, unusually tall for Venice, loomed before him. He entered a sottoportego and followed it beneath the apartment houses, emerging a moment later into a square, the Campo di Ghetto Nuovo. A kosher restaurant, a Jewish bakery, a bookstore, a museum. There were two old synagogues as well, virtually invisible except to a trained eye. Only the five windows on the second story of each--the symbol for the five books of the Pentateuch--gave away their locations.
A half-dozen boys were playing football between the long shadows and the puddles. A ball bounced toward the restorer. He gave it a deft kick with the instep of his right foot and sent it expertly back toward the game. One of the boys took it squarely in the chest. It was the one who had come to San Zaccaria that morning.
The child nodded in the direction of the pozzo, the wellhead in the center of the square. The restorer turned and saw a familiar figure leaning there, smoking a cigarette. Gray cashmere overcoat, gray scarf wound tightly around his neck, a bullet-shaped head. The skin of his face was deeply tanned and full of cracks and fissures, like desert rock scored by a million years of sun and wind. The spectacles were small and round and inadvertently fashionable. The expression was one of perpetual impatience.
As the restorer approached, the old man lifted his head, and his lips curled into something between a smile and a grimace. He seized the restorer by the arm and inflicted a bone-crushing handshake. Then, tenderly, he kissed his cheek.
"You're here because of Benjamin, aren't you?" The old man closed his crumpled eyelids and nodded. Then he hooked two stubby fingers inside the restorer's elbow and said, "Walk with me." For an instant the restorer resisted the pull, but there was no escaping it. There had been a death in the family, and Ari Shamron was never one for sitting shivah.
IT HAD BEEN a year since Gabriel had seen him last. Shamron had grown visibly older since that day. As they set off round the campo in the gathering darkness, Gabriel had to resist the urge to take him by the arm. His cheeks had hollowed, and the steel-blue eyes--eyes that had once struck fear into his enemies and his allies alike--were clouded and wet. When he raised his Turkish cigarette to his lips, his right hand trembled.
Those hands had made Shamron a legend. Shortly after he joined the Office in the 1950s, Shamron's superiors noticed that he possessed an unusually strong grip for a man with such an ordinary physique. He was trained in the art of street snatches and silent killing and sent into the field. He preferred the garrote and used it with deadly efficiency from the cobbled streets of Europe to the filthy alleyways of Cairo and Damascus. He killed Arab spies and generals. He killed the Nazi scientists who were helping Nasser build rockets. And on a warm night in April 1960, in a town north of Buenos Aires, Ari Shamron leapt from the back of a car and
seized Adolf Eichmann by the throat as he was waiting for a bus to take him home.
Gabriel was the only person who knew one other salient fact about that night in Argentina: Adolf Eichmann had nearly escaped because Shamron had tripped over a loose shoelace. That same edge-of-disaster quality would mark his many stopovers in the executive suite at King Saul Boulevard. Prime ministers never knew quite what to expect when Shamron appeared outside their door--word of another shocking success or a secret confession of another humiliating failure. His willingness to take risks was both a potent operational strength and a crippling political weakness. Gabriel had lost count of how many times the old man had been cast into exile, then recalled to colors with great fanfare.
Shamron's hold on the executive suite had finally been broken, though his exile would never be permanent. He retained the dubious title of special administrative advisor, which gave him just enough entree to make a general nuisance of himself, and from his fortresslike villa overlooking the Sea of Galilee he still exercised considerable clandestine power. Spies and generals regularly went there to kiss his ring, and no major decision regarding the security of the state could be taken without first running it past the old man.
His health was a carefully guarded secret. Gabriel had heard rumors about prostate cancer, a mild heart attack, recurring problems with his kidneys. It was clear the old man didn't have long to live. Shamron did not fear death--only that in his absence would spring complacency. And now, as they ambled slowly around the old ghetto, death walked beside them. Benjamin's death. And Shamron's. The nearness of death had made Shamron restless. He seemed like a man anxious to settle accounts. An old warrior, desperate for one last fight.
"DID YOU GO to the funeral?"
Shamron shook his head. "Benjamin feared his academic achievements would be tainted if it ever became known he'd worked for us. My presence at the burial would only have raised uncomfortable questions, in Israel and abroad, so I stayed away. I have to admit I wasn't anxious to attend. It's difficult to bury a child."
"Was anyone there? He had no other family in Israel."
"I'm told there were some old friends from the overt world and a few members of the faculty from Hebrew."
"Who sent you here?"
"What does it matter?"
"It matters to me. Who sent you?"
"I'm like a parolee," Shamron said wearily. "I cannot move or act without the approval of the supreme tribunal."
"And who sits on this tribunal?"
"Lev, for one. Of course, if it were up to Lev, I'd be locked in a room with an iron cot and bread and water. But fortunately for me, the other person on the tribunal is the prime minister."