The Heist (2 page)

“That’s not what Simon Mendenhall said.”

“Simon earns his living by talking people out of their money. I, however, am a source of unvarnished truth, even when it hurts.” Dimbleby settled his gaze on Isherwood with a look of genuine concern.

“Oh, don’t look at me like that, Oliver.”

“Like what?”

“Like you’re trying to think of something kind to say before the doctor pulls the plug.”

“Have you had a peek in the mirror lately?”

“I try to avoid mirrors these days.”

“I can see why.” Dimbleby added another half inch of the wine to his glass.

“Is there anything else I can get for you, Oliver? Some caviar?”

“Don’t I always reciprocate?”

“No, Oliver, you don’t. In fact, if I were keeping track, which I am not, you would be several thousand pounds in arrears.”

Dimbleby ignored the remark. “What is it, Julian? What’s troubling you this time?”

“At the moment, Oliver, it’s you.”

“It’s that girl, isn’t it, Julie? That’s what’s got you down. What was her name again?”

“Cassandra,” Isherwood answered to the window.

“Broke your heart, did she?”

“They always do.”

Dimbleby smiled. “Your capacity for love astounds me. What I wouldn’t give to fall in love just once.”

“You’re the biggest womanizer I know, Oliver.”

“Being a womanizer has precious little to do with being in love. I love women,
all
women. And therein lies the problem.”

Isherwood stared into the street. It was starting to rain again, just in time for the evening rush.

“Sold any paintings lately?” asked Dimbleby.

“Several, actually.”

“None that I’ve heard about.”

“That’s because the sales were private.”

“Bollocks,” replied Oliver with a snort. “You haven’t sold anything in months. But that hasn’t stopped you from acquiring new stock, has it? How many paintings have you got stashed away in that storeroom of yours? Enough to fill a museum, with a few thousand paintings to spare. And they’re all burned to a crisp, deader than the proverbial doornail.”

Isherwood made no response other than to rub at his lower back. It had replaced a barking cough as his most persistent physical ailment. He supposed it was an improvement. A sore back didn’t disturb the neighbors.

“My offer still stands,” Dimbleby was saying.

“What offer is that?”

“Come on, Julie. Don’t make me say it aloud.”

Isherwood swiveled his head a few degrees and stared directly into Dimbleby’s fleshy, childlike face. “You’re not talking about buying my gallery again, are you?”

“I’m prepared to be more than generous. I’ll give you a fair price for the small portion of your collection that’s sellable and use the rest to heat the building.”

“That’s very charitable of you,” Isherwood responded sardonically, “but I have other plans for the gallery.”

“Realistic?”

Isherwood was silent.

“Very well,” said Dimbleby. “If you won’t allow me to take possession of that flaming wreck you refer to as a gallery, at least let me do something else to help lift you out of your current Blue Period.”

“I don’t want one of your girls, Oliver.”

“I’m not talking about a girl. I’m talking about a nice trip to help take your mind off your troubles.”

“Where?”

“Lake Como. All expenses paid. First-class airfare. Two nights in a luxury suite at the Villa d’Este.”

“And what do I have to do in return?”

“A small favor.”

“How small?”

Dimbleby helped himself to another glass of the wine and told Isherwood the rest of it.

It seemed Oliver Dimbleby had recently made the acquaintance of an expatriate Englishman who collected ravenously but without the aid of a trained art adviser to guide him. Furthermore, it seemed the Englishman’s finances were not what they once were, thus requiring the rapid sale of a portion of his holdings. Dimbleby had agreed to have a quiet look at the collection, but now that the trip was upon him, he couldn’t face the prospect of getting on yet another airplane. Or so he claimed. Isherwood suspected Dimbleby’s true motives for backing out of the trip resided elsewhere, for Oliver Dimbleby was ulterior motives made flesh.

Nevertheless, there was something about the idea of an unexpected journey that appealed to Isherwood, and against all better judgment he accepted the offer on the spot. That evening he packed lightly, and at nine the next morning was settling into his first-class seat on British Airways Flight 576, with nonstop service to Milan’s Malpensa Airport. He drank only a single glass of wine during the flight—for the sake of his heart, he told himself—and at half past twelve, as he was climbing into a rented Mercedes, he was fully in command of his faculties. He made the drive northward to Lake Como without the aid of a map or navigation device. A highly regarded art historian who specialized in the painters of Venice, Isherwood had made countless journeys to Italy to prowl its churches and museums. Even so, he always leapt at the chance to return, especially when someone else was footing the bill. Julian Isherwood was French by birth and English by upbringing, but within his sunken chest beat the romantic, undisciplined heart of an Italian.

The expatriate Englishman of shrinking resources was expecting Isherwood at two. He lived grandly, according to Dimbleby’s hastily drafted e-mail, on the southwestern prong of the lake, near the town of Laglio. Isherwood arrived a few minutes early and found the imposing gate open to receive him. Beyond the gate stretched a newly paved drive, which bore him gracefully to a gravel forecourt. He parked next to the villa’s private quay and made his way past molded statuary to the front door. The bell, when pressed, went unanswered. Isherwood checked his watch and then rang the bell a second time. The result was the same.

At which point Isherwood would have been wise to climb into his rented car and leave Como as quickly as possible. Instead, he tried the latch and, regrettably, found it was unlocked. He opened the door a few inches, called a greeting into the darkened interior, and then stepped uncertainly into the grand entrance hall. Instantly, he saw the lake of blood on the marble floor, and the two bare feet suspended in space, and the swollen blue-black face staring down from above. Isherwood felt his knees buckle and saw the floor rising to receive him. He knelt there for a moment until the wave of nausea had passed. Then he rose unsteadily to his feet and, with his hand over his mouth, stumbled out of the villa toward his car. And though he did not realize it at the time, he was cursing tubby Oliver Dimbleby’s name every step of the way.

E
ARLY THE FOLLOWING MORNING
, V
ENICE
lost yet another skirmish in its ancient war with the sea. The floodwaters carried marine creatures of every sort into the lobby of the Hotel Cipriani and inundated Harry’s Bar. Danish tourists went for a morning swim in the Piazza San Marco; tables and chairs from Caffè Florian bobbed against the steps of the basilica like debris from a sunken luxury liner. For once, the pigeons were nowhere to be found. Most wisely fled the submerged city in search of dry land.

There were portions of Venice, however, where the
acqua alta
was more a nuisance than a calamity. In fact, the restorer managed to find an archipelago of reasonably dry land stretching from the door of his apartment in the
sestiere
of Cannaregio to Dorsoduro, at the southern end of the city. The restorer was not a Venetian by birth, but he knew its alleyways and squares better than most of the natives. He had studied his craft in Venice, loved and grieved in Venice, and once, when he was known by a name not his own, he had been chased from Venice by his enemies. Now, after a long absence, he had returned to his beloved city of water and paintings, the only city where he had ever experienced anything like contentment. Not peace, though; for the restorer, peace was only the period between the last war and the next. It was fleeting, a falsehood. Poets and widows dreamed of it, but men such as the restorer never allowed themselves to be seduced by the notion that peace might actually be possible.

He paused at a kiosk to see whether he was being followed and then continued on in the same direction. He was below average in height—five foot eight perhaps, but no more—and had the spare physique of a cyclist. The face was long and narrow at the chin, with wide cheekbones and a slender nose that looked as though it had been carved from wood. The eyes that peered from beneath the brim of his flat cap were unnaturally green; the hair at his temples was the color of ash. He wore an oilskin coat and Wellington boots but carried no umbrella against the steady rain. Out of habit, he never burdened himself in public with any object that might impede the swift movement of his hands.

He crossed into Dorsoduro, the highest point of the city, and made his way to the Church of San Sebastiano. The front entrance was tightly sealed, and there was an official-looking notice explaining that the building would be closed to the public until the following autumn. The restorer approached a smaller doorway on the right side of the church and opened it with a heavy skeleton key. A breath of cool air from the interior caressed his cheek. Candle smoke, incense, ancient mildew: something about the smell reminded the restorer of death. He locked the door behind him, sidestepped a font filled with holy water, and headed inside.

The nave was in darkness and empty of pews. The restorer trod silently over the smooth timeworn stones and slipped through the open gate of the altar rail. The ornate Eucharistic table had been removed for cleaning; in its place rose thirty feet of aluminum scaffolding. The restorer scaled it with the agility of a house cat and slipped through a tarpaulin shroud onto his work platform. His supplies were precisely as he had left them the previous evening: flasks of chemicals, a wad of cotton wool, a bundle of wooden dowels, a magnifying visor, two powerful halogen lamps, a paint-smudged portable stereo. The altarpiece—
Virgin and Child in Glory with Saints
by Paolo Veronese—was as he had left it, too. It was just one of several remarkable paintings Veronese had produced for the church between 1556 and 1565. His tomb, with his glowering marble bust, was on the left side of the presbytery. At moments like these, when the church was empty and dark, the restorer could almost feel Veronese’s ghost watching him as he worked.

The restorer switched on the lamps and stood motionless for a long moment before the altarpiece. At the apex were Mary and the Christ Child, seated upon clouds of glory and surrounded by musician angels. Beneath them, gazing upward in rapture, was a group of saints, including the patron saint of the church, Sebastian, whom Veronese depicted in martyrdom. For the past three weeks, the restorer had been painstakingly removing the cracked and yellowed varnish with a carefully calibrated mixture of acetone, methyl proxitol, and mineral spirits. Removing varnish from a Baroque painting, he liked to explain, was not like stripping a piece of furniture; it was more akin to scrubbing the deck of an aircraft carrier with a toothbrush. He first had to fashion a swab with cotton wool and a wooden dowel. After moistening the swab with solvent, he would apply it to the surface of the canvas and twirl, gently, so as not to cause any additional flaking of the paint. Each swab could clean about a square inch of the painting before it became too soiled to use. At night, when he was not dreaming of blood and fire, he was removing yellowed varnish from a canvas the size of the Piazza San Marco.

Another week, he thought, and then he would be ready to move on to the second phase of the restoration, retouching those portions of the canvas where Veronese’s original paint had flaked away. The figures of Mary and the Christ Child were largely free of damage, but the restorer had uncovered extensive losses along the top and bottom portion of the canvas. If everything went according to plan, he would finish the restoration as his wife was entering the final weeks of her pregnancy. If everything went according to plan, he thought again.

He inserted a CD of
La Bohème
into the stereo, and a moment later the sanctuary was filled with the opening notes of “Non sono in vena.” As Rodolfo and Mimi were falling in love in a tiny garret studio in Paris, the restorer stood alone before the Veronese, meticulously removing the surface grime and yellowed varnish. He worked steadily and with an easy rhythm—
dip, twirl, discard . . . dip, twirl, discard
—until the platform was littered with acrid balls of soiled cotton wool. Veronese had perfected formulae for paints that did not fade with age; and as the restorer removed each tiny patch of tobacco-brown varnish, the colors beneath glowed intensely. It was almost as if the master had applied the paint to the canvas only yesterday instead of four and a half centuries ago.

The restorer had the church to himself for another two hours. Then, at ten o’clock, he heard the clatter of boots across the stone floor of the nave. The boots belonged to Adrianna Zinetti, cleaner of altars, seducer of men. After that it was Lorenzo Vasari, a gifted restorer of frescoes who had almost single-handedly brought Leonardo’s
Last Supper
back from the dead. Then came the conspiratorial shuffle of Antonio Politi, who, much to his annoyance, had been assigned the ceiling panels instead of the main altarpiece. As a result, he spent his days sprawled on his back like a modern-day Michelangelo, glaring resentfully at the restorer’s shrouded platform high above the chancel.

It was not the first time the restorer and the other members of the team had worked together. Several years earlier, they had carried out major restorations of the Church of San Giovanni Crisostomo in Cannaregio and, before that, at the Church of San Zaccaria in Castello. At the time, they had known the restorer as the brilliant but intensely private Mario Delvecchio. Later, they would learn, along with the rest of the world, that he was a legendary Israeli intelligence officer and assassin named Gabriel Allon. Adrianna Zinetti and Lorenzo Vasari had found it in their hearts to forgive Gabriel’s deception, but not Antonio Politi. In his youth, he had once accused Mario Delvecchio of being a terrorist, and he regarded Gabriel Allon as a terrorist, too. Secretly, he suspected it was because of Gabriel that he spent his days in the upper reaches of the nave, supine and contorted, isolated from human contact, with solvent and paint dripping onto his face. The panels depicted the story of Queen Esther. Surely, Politi told anyone who would listen, it was no coincidence.