“That’s funny, but I don’t remember mentioning my travel plans to the Operations Desk.”
“They watch your credit cards, darling—you know that. They had a team from London Station waiting at Heathrow. They saw you leave with Nigel Whitcombe. And then they saw you entering Downing Street through the back door.”
“I was slightly disappointed we didn’t go through the front, but under the circumstances it was probably for the best.”
“What happened in France?”
“Things didn’t go according to plan.”
“So what now?”
“Britain’s prime minister is about to make someone a very rich man.”
“How rich?”
“Ten million euros rich.”
“So crime pays after all.”
“It usually does. That’s why there are so many criminals.”
Chiara withdrew from Gabriel and removed her coat. She was wearing a tight black sweater with a roll neck. She had arranged her hair to fit inside the helmet. Now, with her eyes fixed warily on Gabriel, she removed several clasps and pins, and it fell about her square shoulders in an auburn-and-chestnut cloud.
“So that’s it?” she asked. “We can go home now?”
“Not exactly.”
“What does that mean?”
“It means someone has to deliver the ransom money.” He paused, then added, “And then someone has to bring her out.”
Chiara narrowed her eyes. They seemed to have darkened in color, never a good sign.
“I’m sure the prime minister can find someone other than you,” she said.
“I’m sure he can, too,” said Gabriel, “but I’m afraid he doesn’t have much of a choice in the matter.”
“Why is that?”
“Because the kidnappers made one final demand tonight.”
“You?”
Gabriel nodded. “No Gabriel, no girl.”
Despite the lateness of the hour, Chiara wanted to cook. Gabriel sat at the tiny kitchen table, a glass of wine at his elbow, and recounted the journey he had taken after leaving her in Jerusalem. In any other marriage, the wife surely would have responded with incredulity and astonishment to such a story, but Chiara seemed preoccupied by the preparation of her vegetables and herbs. Only once did she look up from her work—when Gabriel told her about the empty holding cell in the house in the Lubéron, and the woman who had died in his arms. When he finished, she filled the center of her palm with salt, discarded a small portion into the sink, and poured the rest into a pot of boiling water.
“And after all that,” she said, “you decided to take a midnight stroll to South Kensington.”
“I considered doing a very foolish thing.”
“More foolish than agreeing to deliver ten million euros in ransom to the kidnappers of the British prime minister’s mistress?”
Gabriel said nothing.
“Who lives at Fifty-Nine Victoria Road?”
“Dr. and Mrs. Robert Keller.”
Chiara was about to ask Gabriel why he had gone to see them, but then she understood.
“What on earth would you have told them?”
“That’s the problem, isn’t it?”
Chiara placed several mushrooms in the center of the cutting board and began slicing them precisely. “It’s probably better they think he’s dead,” she said reflectively.
“And if it was your son? Wouldn’t you want to know the truth?”
“If you’re asking whether I would want to know that my son killed people for a living, the answer is no.”
A silence fell between them.
“I’m sorry,” Chiara said after a moment. “I didn’t mean that to sound the way it did.”
“I know.”
Chiara placed the mushrooms in a sauté pan and seasoned them with salt and pepper. “Did she ever know?”
“My mother?”
Chiara nodded.
“No,” said Gabriel. “She never knew.”
“But she must have suspected something,” Chiara said. “You were gone for three years.”
“She knew I was involved in secret work and that it had something to do with Munich. But I never told her that I was the one who did the actual killing.”
“She must have been curious.”
“She wasn’t.”
“Why not?”
“Munich was a trauma for the entire country,” Gabriel responded, “but it was especially hard on people like my mother—German Jews who had survived the camps. She could barely look at the newspapers or watch the funerals on television. She locked herself in her studio and painted.”
“And when you came home after Wrath of God?”
“She could see the death in my eyes.” He paused, then added, “She knew what it looked like.”
“But you never talked about it?”
“Never,” said Gabriel, shaking his head slowly. “She never told me what happened to her during the Holocaust, and I never told her what I had done while I was in Europe for three years.”
“Do you think she would have approved?”
“It didn’t matter to me what she thought.”