The English Assassin   ::   Silva Daniel

It took Gabriel the better part of the next day totrack him down.

He left two messages on Jacobi’s answering machine at home and two more with his thoroughly unhelpful secretary at the university. At one-thirty in the afternoon, Jacobi called Gabriel on his cellular phone and agreed to a meeting. “Come by my flat at six this evening. We’ll talk then.” Then he rattled off the address and abruptly rang off. That left Gabriel several hours to kill. In a bookstore near the university he found a French-language copy of The Myth and spent the rest of the afternoon reading among the students in a café off the Place des Terreaux.

At six o’clock the professor was waiting in the foyer of his apartment building on the rue Lanterne. He wore a frayed tweed jacket, and his rimless spectacles were pushed up into a bird’s nest of unruly gray hair. There were clips on the legs of his trousers to keep the cuffs from becoming entangled in the chain of his bicycle. “Welcome to exile,” he said, leading Gabriel wearily up the staircase to his flat on the fourth floor. “We Swiss revere the right to free speech, but only if that speech refrains from criticism of Switzerland. I committed the mortal sin of a good Swiss, and so I find myself here, in the gilded cage of Lyons.”

On the landing outside his door, the professor spent a long moment digging in his saddlebag through loose papers and battered notebooks, searching for the keys to his flat. When finally he found them, they were admitted into a small, sparsely furnished apartment. Every flat surface was piled with books, documents, and newspapers. Gabriel smiled. He had come to the right place.

Jacobi closed the door and hung his saddlebag over the latch. “So you wish to discuss the murder of Augustus Rolfe? As it turns out, I’ve been following that case quite carefully.”

“I thought you might. I was wondering if we could compare notes.”

“Are you a historian as well, Mr. Allon?”

“Actually, I’m an art restorer, but in this matter I’m working for the government of Israel.”

“Well, this promises to be an interesting evening. Clear the things off that chair and sit down. I’ll see to the coffee.”

PROFESSOR Jacobi spent several minutes digging through his towering stacks of paper for the file on Augustus Rolfe. It was very slender.

“Herr Rolfe was a private banker in the truest sense of the word, Mr. Allon. I’m afraid much of what I’m going to tell you is based on conjecture and rumor.”

“I’ve often found that one can learn a great deal about a man by the rumors that swirl around him.