The English Assassin   ::   Silva Daniel

His assumptions were confirmed twenty minutes later when, back in his hotel room, he synchronized the two tapes in an audio playback deck and slipped on a pair of headphones. After a few minutes, he reached out suddenly, pushed the STOP button, then REWIND, then PLAY.

“Where?”

“In Paris.”

“And the subject?”

“An art dealer named Werner Müller.”

STOP. REWIND. PLAY.

“An art dealer named Werner Müller.”

STOP.

He dialed a number in Zurich and relayed the contents of the conversation to the man at the other end of the line. When he had finished, he treated himself to a cigarette and a split of champagne from the minibar, the reward for a job well done. In the bathroom, he burned the pages of his notebook in the sink and washed the ashes down the drain.



15

PARIS



THE MÜLLER GALLERY stood at the bend of a small street between the rue Faubourg St. Honoré and the Avenue l’Opéra. On one side was a dealer of mobile telephones, on the other a boutique selling fine menswear that no man would wear. On the door was a sign, handwritten in neat blue script:BY APPOINTMENT ONLY. Behind the thick security glass of the window were two small decorative eighteenth-century works by minor French flower painters. Gabriel did not like the French flower painters. Three times he had agreed to restore a painting from the period. Each had been an exercise in exquisite tedium.

For his observation post Gabriel chose the Hôtel Laurens, a small hotel fifty yards north of the gallery on the opposite side of the street. He checked in under the name of Heinrich Kiever and was given a small garret that smelled of spilt cognac and stale cigarette smoke. He told the front-desk clerk that he was a German screenwriter. That he had come to Paris to rework a script for a film set in France during the war. That he would be working long hours in his room and wished not to be disturbed. He drank in the hotel bar and made boorish advances toward the waitress. He shouted at the chambermaids when they tried to clean his room. He screamed at the room service boys when they didn’t bring his coffee quickly enough. Soon, the entire staff and most of the guests at the Hôtel Laurens knew about the crazy Boche writer in the attic.

On the way to Paris he had stopped at the airport in Nice, dropped off the rented Mercedes, and collected a Renault. The rental agent was a man called Henri, a Provençal Jew whose family had survived the French Holocaust.