The English Assassin   ::   Silva Daniel

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.

FORthe next week and a half he did nothing but read. His personal collection contained several excellent volumes on Rogier, and Julian had been good enough to send along two splendid books of his own, both of which happened to be in German. He spread them across his worktable and perched atop a tall hard stool, his back hunched like a cyclist, his fists pressed to his temples. Occasionally he would lift his eyes and contemplate the piece mounted on his easel-or look up to watch the rain running in rivulets over the skylight. Then he would lower his gaze and resume his reading.

He read Martin Davies and Lorne Campbell. He read Panofsky, and Winkler, and Hulin, and Dijkstra. And of course he read the second volume of Friedländer’s monstrous work on early Netherlandish painting. How could he restore a work even remotely linked to Rogier without first consulting the learned Friedländer?

As he worked, the newspaper clippings rattled off his fax machine-one a day at least, sometimes two or three. At first it became known as “the Rolfe affair,” then, inevitably, Rolfegate. The first piece appeared in the Neue Züricher Zeitung , then the Bern and Lucerne papers got in on the act, and then Geneva. Before long, the story spread to France and Germany. The first English-language account appeared in London, followed two days later by another in a prominent American weekly. The facts were tenuous, the stories speculative; good reading but not exactly good journalism.