The English Assassin   ::   Silva Daniel

Downstairs, Rossetti and the Englishman walked out together, Rossetti locking the door behind them. A torrent of rain greeted them, great curtains of water that pounded the little alley and ran toward the storm drains like a swollen mountain stream. The Italian had pulled on a pair of knee-length rubber boots; the Englishman was reduced to hopping and skipping through the puddles in his suede loafers. This amused the Venetian jeweler.

“Your first time in Venice?”

“Yes, I’m afraid so.”

“It’s been like this every day for a week, and still the tourists come. We need them-God knows, I’d have no business without them-but sometimes even I tire of their presence.”

At a vaporetto stop, they shook hands.

“I have to say that I find this a most distasteful business, but I suppose you must do what you are paid to do. A violinist”-he raised his hands in a thoroughly Italian gesture-“A violinist can be replaced. But the Tintorettos… the Tintorettos are irreplaceable. Please, I will never forgive myself if I played any role in their destruction.”

“I assure you, Signore Rossetti, that I will make every effort to avoid damaging them.”

The Italian smiled. “I trust that you will. Besides, can you imagine the curse that would befall a man who put a bullet hole through the Savior or the Virgin?”

The little jeweler made the sign of the cross, then turned and melted into the alley.



37

VENICE



GABRIEL’S TEAM gathered that afternoon in the sitting room of Anna Rolfe’s hotel suite. They had come to Venice by different routes, with the passports of different countries and with different cover stories. In keeping with Office doctrine, they all posed as couples. The operation had been conceived and set into motion so hastily that it had never been given a proper code name. Anna’s hotel room was called the Giorgione Suite, and from that moment on Gabriel’s Venetian field unit took the name as their own.

There were Shimon and Ilana. Playing the parts of French newlyweds, they had driven to Venice from the Cote d’Azur. They were dark-eyed and olive-skinned, equal in height and nearly equal in physical beauty. They had trained together at the Academy, and their relationship was strained when Ilana bested Shimon on the shooting range and broke his collarbone during a session on the foam-rubber mats in the gymnasium.

There were Yitzhak and Moshe.