Portrait of a Spy. Daniel Silva
Читать онлайн книгу.
to the CCTV camera in the yard, they were admitted into the premises at 11:40 London time, though Maggie, Isherwood’s latest mediocre secretary, would erroneously record the time in her logbook as 11:45.
Purveyors of museum-quality Italian and Dutch Old Master paintings since 1968, the gallery had once occupied a lofty perch on tony New Bond Street in Mayfair. Driven into St. Jamesian exile by the likes of Hermès, Burberry, and Cartier, it had taken refuge in three floors of a sagging warehouse once owned by Fortnum & Mason. Among the incestuous, backbiting villagers of St. James’s, the gallery had always been regarded as rather good theater—comedy and tragedy, stunning highs and seemingly bottomless lows, and always a whiff of conspiracy lying just beneath the surface. This was, in large measure, a consequence of the owner’s personality. Julian Isherwood was cursed with a near fatal flaw for an art dealer—he liked to possess art more than he liked to sell it. As a result, he was burdened with a large inventory of what is affectionately known in the trade as dead stock—paintings for which no buyer would ever pay a fair price. It was rumored that Isherwood’s personal holdings rivaled those of the British royal family. Even Gabriel, who had restored paintings for the gallery for more than thirty years, had only the vaguest idea of Isherwood’s true holdings.
They found him in his office—a tall, slightly precarious figure tilted against the front of a desk piled with old catalogs and monographs. He wore a gray chalk-stripe suit and a lavender necktie that had been given to him the previous evening by his latest love interest. As usual, he appeared slightly hungover, a look he cultivated. His eyes were fixed mournfully on the television.
“I take it you’ve heard the news?”
Gabriel nodded slowly. He and Chiara had heard the first bulletins on the radio as they were passing through the western suburbs of London. The images playing out on the screen were remarkably similar to the ones that had formed in Gabriel’s own mind—the dead covered in plastic sheeting, the bloodied survivors, the onlookers with their palms pressed to their faces in horror. It never changed. He supposed it never would.
“I had lunch at Fouquet’s last week with a client,” Isherwood said, running a hand through his longish gray locks. “We parted company on the very spot where that maniac detonated his bomb. What if the client had scheduled the lunch for today? I might have been—”
Isherwood stopped himself. It was a typical reaction after an attack, thought Gabriel. The living always sought to find some connection, however tenuous, to the dead.
“The bomber in Copenhagen killed children,” Isherwood said. “Will you please explain to me what cause is served by the murder of innocent children?”
“Fear,” said Gabriel. “They want us to be afraid.”
“When is this going to end?” Isherwood asked, shaking his head in disgust. “When in God’s name is this madness going to end?”
“You should know better than to ask a question like that, Julian.” Gabriel lowered his voice and added, “After all, you’ve had a ringside seat at this war for a very long time.”
Isherwood gave a melancholy smile. His backbone-of-England surname and English scale concealed the fact that he was not, at least technically, English at all. British by nationality and passport, yes, but German by birth, French by upbringing, and Jewish by religion. Only a handful of trusted friends knew that Isherwood had staggered into London as a child refugee in 1942 after being carried across the snowbound Pyrenees by a pair of Basque shepherds. Or that his father, the renowned Paris art dealer Samuel Isakowitz, had been murdered at the Sobibor death camp along with Isherwood’s mother. Though Isherwood had carefully guarded the secrets of his past, the story of his dramatic escape from Nazi-occupied Europe had reached the ears of Israel’s secret intelligence service. And in the mid-1970s, during a wave of Palestinian terrorist attacks against Israeli targets in Europe, he was recruited as a sayan, a volunteer helper. Isherwood had but one assignment—to assist in building and maintaining the operational cover of an art restorer and assassin named Gabriel Allon.
“Just keep one thing in mind,” Isherwood said. “You work for me now, not them. This isn’t your problem, petal. Not anymore.” He aimed his remote at the television and the mayhem in Paris and Copenhagen vanished, at least for the moment. “Let’s have a look at something beautiful, shall we?”
The limited space of the gallery had compelled Isherwood to arrange his empire vertically—storerooms on the ground floor, business offices on the second, and on the third, a glorious formal exhibition room modeled on Paul Rosenberg’s famous gallery in Paris, where young Julian had spent many happy hours as a child. As they entered the room, midday sun was slanting through the overhead skylight, illuminating a large oil painting propped on a baize-covered pedestal. It was a depiction of the Madonna and Child with Mary Magdalene, set against an evening backdrop, quite obviously of the Venetian School. Chiara removed her car-length leather coat and sat on the museum-style ottoman at the center of the room. Gabriel stood directly before the canvas, one hand resting on his narrow chin, his head tilted to one side.
“Where did you find it?”
“In a great limestone pile along the Norfolk coast.”
“Does the pile have an owner?”
“Insists on anonymity. Suffice it to say he descends from a family of title, his property holdings are enormous, and his cash reserves are dwindling at an alarming rate.”
“So he asked you to take a few paintings off his hands to keep him afloat for another year.”
“At the rate he goes through money, I’d give him two months at the outside.”
“How much did you pay for it?”
“Twenty thousand.”
“How charitable of you, Julian.” Gabriel glanced at Isherwood and added, “I assume you covered your tracks by taking a few other pictures as well.”
“Six worthless pieces of crap,” Isherwood confessed. “But if my hunch about this one is correct, they were well worth the investment.”
“Provenance?” asked Gabriel.
“It was purchased in the Veneto by one of the owner’s ancestors while he was doing his Grand Tour in the early nineteenth century. It’s been in the family ever since.”
“Current attribution?”
“Workshop of Palma Vecchio.”
“Really?” asked Gabriel skeptically. “According to whom?”
“The Italian art expert who brokered the sale.”
“Was he blind?”
“Only in one eye.”
Gabriel smiled. Many of the Italians who had advised British nobility during their travels were charlatans who did a brisk trade in worthless copies falsely attributed to the masters of Florence and Venice. Occasionally, they erred in the opposite direction. Isherwood suspected that the painting on the pedestal fell into the second category. So, too, did Gabriel. He dragged the tip of his forefinger over the face of the Magdalene, dislodging a century’s worth of surface grime.
“Where was it hung? In a coal mine?”
He picked at the heavily discolored varnish. In all likelihood, it was composed of a mastic or dammar resin that had been dissolved with turpentine. Removing it would be a painstaking process involving the use of a carefully calibrated mixture of acetone, methyl proxitol, and mineral spirits. Gabriel could only imagine the horrors that awaited him once the old varnish had been stripped away: archipelagos of pentimento, a desert of surface cracks and creases, wholesale paint losses concealed by previous restorations. And then there was the condition of the canvas, which was sagging dramatically with age. The remedy was a relining, a perilous procedure involving the application of heat, moisture, and pressure. Any restorer who had ever performed a relining had the scars to prove it. Gabriel had once destroyed a large portion of a painting by Domenico Zampieri by using an iron with a faulty temperature gauge. The fully restored painting,