The Black Widow

He paused in the formal entrance hall and surveyed his surroundings, as if for the first time. The room was decorated precisely as it had been on the morning of Jeudi Noir: stately brocaded furniture, heavy velvet curtains, an ormolu clock, still ticking away five minutes slow on the mantel. Again, the door to Gabriel’s memory opened, and he glimpsed Hannah seated on the couch in a rather dowdy woolen skirt and thick sweater. She had just handed him a bottle of Sancerre and was watching intently as he removed the cork — watching his hands, he remembered, the hands of the avenger. “I’m very good at keeping secrets,” she was saying. “Tell me why you want my van Gogh, Monsieur Allon. Perhaps we can reach some accommodation.”

From the adjoining library there came the faint rustle of paper, like the turning of a page. Gabriel peered inside and saw a rumpled figure standing before a bookcase, a large leather-bound volume in his hand. “Dumas,” the figure said without looking up. “And quite valuable.”

He closed the book, returned it to the shelf, and studied Gabriel as if contemplating a rare coin or a cage bird. Gabriel returned the gaze without expression. He had expected another version of Bouchard, a slick, cocky bastard who took wine with his midday meal and left the office promptly at five so he could spend an hour with his mistress before rushing home to his wife. Therefore, Paul Rousseau was a pleasant surprise.

“It’s a pleasure to finally meet you,” he said. “I only wish the circumstances were different. Madame Weinberg was a friend, was she not?”

Gabriel was silent.

“Is something wrong?” asked Rousseau.

“I’ll let you know when I see the van Gogh.”

“Ah, yes, the van Gogh. It’s in the room at the end of the hall,” said Rousseau. “But I suppose you already knew that.”

She had kept a key, Gabriel recalled, in the top drawer of the desk. Obviously, Rousseau and his men had not discovered it, because the lock had been dismantled. Otherwise, the room was as Gabriel remembered it: the same bed with a lace canopy, the same toys and stuffed animals, the same provincial dresser, above which hung the same painting, Marguerite Gachet at Her Dressing Table, oil on canvas, by Vincent van Gogh. Gabriel had carried out the painting’s only restoration, in a rambling Victorian safe house outside London, shortly before its sale — private, of course — to Zizi al-Bakari. His work, he thought now, had held up well. The painting was perfect except for a thin horizontal line near the top of the image that Gabriel had made no attempt to repair. The line was Vincent’s fault; he had leaned another canvas against poor Marguerite before she was sufficiently dry. Zizi al-Bakari, a connoisseur of art as well as jihadist terror, had regarded the line as proof of the painting’s authenticity — and of the authenticity of the beautiful young American woman, a Harvard-educated art historian, who had sold it to him.

Of this, Paul Rousseau knew nothing. He was staring not at the painting but at Gabriel, his cage bird, his curio. “One wonders why she chose to hang it here rather than in her parlor,” he said after a moment. “And why, in death, she chose to leave it to you, of all people.”

Gabriel lifted his eyes from the painting and fixed them squarely on the face of Paul Rousseau. “Perhaps we should make one thing clear at the outset,” he said. “We’re not going to be closing out old accounts. Nor are we going to take any strolls down memory lane.”

“Oh, no,” Rousseau agreed hastily, “we haven’t time for that. Still, it would be an interesting exercise, if only for its entertainment value.”

“Be careful, Monsieur Rousseau. Memory lane is just around the next corner.”

“So it is.” Rousseau gave a capitulatory smile.

“We had a deal,” said Gabriel. “I come to Paris, you give me the picture.”

“No, Monsieur Allon. First you help me find the man who bombed the Weinberg Center, and then I give you the painting. I was very clear with your friend Uzi Navot.” Rousseau looked quizzically at Gabriel. “He is a friend of yours, is he not?”

“He used to be,” said Gabriel coolly.

They fell into a comfortable silence, each staring at the van Gogh, like strangers in a gallery.

“Vincent must have loved her very much to paint something so beautiful,” Rousseau said at last. “And soon it will belong to you. I’m tempted to say you’re a very lucky man, but I won’t. You see, Monsieur Allon,” he said, smiling sadly, “I’ve read your file.”

10 RUE PAVÉE, PARIS