The doorway was concrete and steel, like the entrance to a secret military bunker. Gabriel wondered how many were scattered around Gessler’s estate, and what other wonders could be discovered by someone with access to them. He pushed those thoughts from his mind for now and concentrated on orienting himself. He was not fifty yards from the pool house, on the back side, a few yards from the trees.
… make your way down the slope of the mountain…
He walked across the open ground, through knee-deep snow, and entered the trees. Somewhere a dog began to bark. The hounds of Gessler. He wondered how long it would be before another guard came to the cell and discovered the body. And how long Peterson could keep up the ruse that he’d been assaulted by a man who’d been beaten half to death.
It was dark in the trees, and as he groped his way forward, he thought of the night he’d crept through Rolfe’s villa in Zurich and discovered the photographs hidden in the false desk drawer.
Herr Hitler, I’d like you to meet Herr Rolfe. Herr Rolfe has agreed to do a few favors for us. Herr Rolfe is a collector, like you, mein Führer.
There was one advantage to the cold: after a few moments he could no longer feel his face. Here the snow was a few inches less deep, but each step was a new adventure: an outcropping of rock; a fallen tree limb; a hole left by some burrowing animal. Four times he lost his balance and fell, and each time it was harder to get up than the last. But he did get up, and he kept walking, down the fall line of the slope, down to the spot where Oded and Eli waited.
Gabriel came upon a small clearing where a guard stood watch. The guard was twenty yards away, his back slightly turned, so that Gabriel saw him in semi-profile. He didn’t trust himself to make the shot from that distance-not with his concussions and his swollen eyes and frozen hands-so he kept moving forward, hoping the dark would conceal his ragged appearance just long enough.
He managed a few steps before one of his footfalls snapped a tree limb. The guard pivoted and looked at Gabriel, uncertain what to do next. Gabriel kept moving forward, calmly and steadily, as though he were the next shift coming on duty. When he was three feet away he pulled the Beretta from his pocket and pointed it at the guard’s chest. The round exited the man’s back in a cloud of blood and tissue and polyester gossamer.
The gunshot echoed up the mountainside. Immediately a dog began to bark; then another; then a third. Lights came on up at the villa. Beyond the clearing was a narrow track, just wide enough for a small vehicle. Gabriel tried to run but could not. His muscles had neither the strength nor the coordination required to run down the slope of a snow-covered mountain. So he walked and barely managed that.
Ahead of him he sensed that the contour of the land was beginning to flatten out, as if Gessler’s mountain was meeting the valley floor. And then he saw the lights of the Volkswagen and two figures-mere shadows, Lavon and Oded, stomping their feet against the cold.
Keep moving! Walk!
From behind, he heard a dog bark, followed by the voice of a man. “Halt, you! Halt before I shoot!”
Judging from the volume, they were very close; thirty yards, no more. He looked down the mountain. Oded and Lavon had heard it too, because they were now scrambling up the road to meet him.
Gabriel kept walking.
“Halt, I say! Halt now, or I’ll shoot!”
He heard a rumble and turned around in time to see the Alsatian, released from the restraint of its lead, charging toward him like an avalanche. Behind the dog was the guard, a submachine gun in his hands.
Gabriel hesitated a fraction of a second. Who first? Dog or man? Man had a gun, dog had jaws that could break his back. As the dog leapt through the air toward him, he raised the Beretta one-handed and fired past the beast toward his master. The shot struck him in the center of his chest and he collapsed onto the track.
Then the dog drove his head into Gabriel’s chest and knocked him to the ground. As he hit the frozen track, his right hand slammed to the ground and the Beretta fell from his grasp.
The dog went immediately for Gabriel’s throat. He raised his left arm over his face, and it took that instead. Gabriel screamed as the teeth tore through the protective layer of the jacket and imbedded themselves in the flesh of his forearm. The dog was snarling, thrashing his giant head about, trying to move his arm away so it could be rewarded with the soft flesh of his throat. Frantically, he beat the snowy ground with his right hand, searching for the lost Beretta.
The dog bit down harder, breaking bone.
Gabriel screamed in agony. The pain was more intense than anything Gessler’s thugs had inflicted on him. One last time he swept the ground with his hand. This time he found the grip of the Beretta.
With a vicious twist of its massive neck, the dog forced Gabriel’s arm to the side and lunged for his throat. Gabriel pressed the barrel of the gun against the dog’s ribs and fired three shots into its heart.
Gabriel pushed the dog away and got to his feet. There were shouts coming from the direction of the villa, and Gessler’s dogs were baying. He started walking. The left sleeve of his jacket was in tatters and blood was streaming over his hand. After a moment he saw Eli Lavon running up the track to him, and he collapsed in his arms.
“Keep walking, Gabriel. Can you walk?”
“I can walk.”
“Oded, get ahold of him. My God, what have they done to you, Gabriel? What have they done?”
“I can walk, Eli. Let me walk.”
Part Four THREE MONTHS LATER
48
THE COTTAGE STOOD above a narrow tidal creek, low and stout and solid as a ship, with a fine double door and white shuttered windows. Gabriel returned on a Monday. The painting, a fourteenth-century Netherlandish altarpiece, care of Isherwood Fine Arts, St. James’s, London, came on the Wednesday. It was entombed in a shipping crate of reinforced pine and borne up the narrow staircase to Gabriel’s studio by a pair of thick boys who smelled of their lunchtime beer. Gabriel chased away the smell by opening a window and a flask of pungent arcosolve.
He took his time uncrating the painting. Because of its age and fragile state, it had been shipped in not one crate but two-an inner crate that secured the painting structurally and an outer crate that cradled it in a stable environment. Finally, he removed the cushion of foam padding and the shroud of protective silicone paper and placed the piece on his easel.
It was the centerpiece of a triptych, approximately three feet in height and two feet in width, oil on three adjoining oak panels with vertical grain-almost certainly Baltic oak, the preferred wood of the Flemish masters. He made diagnostic notes on a small pad: severe convex warp, separation of the second and third panels, extensive losses and scarring.
And if it had been his body on the easel instead of the altarpiece? Fractured jaw, cracked right cheekbone, fractured left eye socket, chipped vertebrae, broken left radius caused by severe dog bite requiring prophylactic treatment of rabies shots. A hundred sutures to repair more than twenty cuts and severe lacerations of the face, residual swelling and disfigurement.
He wished he could do for his face what he was about to do for the painting. The doctors who had treated him in Tel Aviv had said only time could restore his natural appearance. Three months had passed, and he still could barely summon the courage to look at his face in the mirror. Besides, he knew that time was not the most loyal friend of a fifty-year-old face.