The Other Woman

Werner Schwarz smiled. “How long did it take you and Allon to come up with that one?”

“You didn’t actually see the assassination, did you, Werner?”

“There were no cameras at that end of the street, which is why you chose it. The ballistics evidence proves conclusively the operative on the motorcycle was the one who pulled the trigger.” Werner Schwarz paused, then added, “My condolences, by the way.”

“None necessary. He wasn’t ours.”

“He’s sitting on a slab in the central morgue. Do you really intend to leave him there?”

“He’s of no concern to us. Do with him what you please.”

“Oh, we are.”

The proprietor appeared and took their order as the last of the three luncheon parties made their way noisily toward the door. Beyond the windows of the dining room the Vienna Woods were beginning to darken. It was the quiet time, the time Werner Schwarz liked best. Navot filled his wineglass. Then, with no warning or explanation, he spoke a name.

Werner Schwarz raised an eyebrow. “What about him?”

“Know him?”

“Only by reputation.”

“And what’s that?”

“A fine officer who serves his country’s interests here in Vienna professionally and in accordance with our wishes.”

“Which means he makes no attempt to target the Austrian government.”

“Or our citizenry. Therefore, we let him go about his work unmolested. For the most part,” Werner Schwarz added.

“You keep an eye on him?”

“When resources permit. We’re a small service.”

“And?”

“He’s very good at his job. But in my experience, they usually are. Deception seems to come naturally to them.”

“No crimes or misdemeanors? No personal vices?”

“The occasional affair,” said Werner Schwarz.

“Anyone in particular?”

“He got himself involved with the wife of an American consular officer a couple of years ago. It caused quite a row.”

“How was it handled?”

“The American consular officer was transferred to Copenhagen, and the wife went back to Virginia.”

“Anything else?”

“He’s been taking a lot of flights to Bern, which is interesting because Bern isn’t part of his territory.”

“You think he’s got a new girl there?”

“Or maybe something else. As you know, our authority stops at the Swiss border.” The first course arrived, a chicken liver terrine for Navot and for Werner Schwarz the smoked duck breast. “Am I allowed to ask why you’re so interested in this man?”

“It’s a housekeeping matter. Nothing more.”

“Is it connected to the Russian?”

“Why would you ask such a thing?”

“The timing, that’s all.”

“Two birds with one stone,” explained Navot airily.

“It’s not so easily done.” Werner Schwarz dabbed his lips with a starched napkin. “Which brings us back to the man lying in the central morgue. How long do you intend to carry on this pretense he isn’t yours?”

“Do you really think,” said Navot evenly, “that Gabriel Allon would allow you to bury a Jew in an unmarked grave in Vienna?”

“I’ll grant you that’s not Allon’s style. Not after what he’s been through in this city. But the man in the morgue isn’t Jewish. At least not ethnically Jewish.”

“How do you know?”

“When the Bundespolizei couldn’t identify him, they ordered a test of his DNA.”

“And?”

“Not a trace of the Ashkenazi gene. Nor does he have the DNA markers of a Sephardic Jew. No Arabian, North African, or Spanish blood. Not a single drop.”

“So what is he?”

“He’s Russian. One hundred percent.”

“Imagine that,” said Navot.

11 (#ulink_b19cb110-2999-58e1-bdbd-1b85b0588bca)

ANDALUSIA, SPAIN (#ulink_b19cb110-2999-58e1-bdbd-1b85b0588bca)

The villa clung to the edge of a great crag in the hills of Andalusia. The precariousness of its perch appealed to the woman; it seemed it might lose its grip on the rock at any moment and fall away. There were nights, awake in bed, when she imagined herself tumbling into the abyss, with her keepsakes and her books and her cats swirling about her in a ragged tornado of memory. She wondered how long she might lie dead on the valley floor, entombed in the debris of her solitary existence, before anyone noticed. Would the authorities give her a decent burial? Would they notify her child? She had left a few carefully concealed clues concerning the child’s identity in her personal effects, and in the beginnings of a memoir. Thus far, she had managed only eleven pages, handwritten in pencil, each page marked by the brown ring of her coffee mug. She had a title, though, which she regarded as a notable achievement, as titles were always so difficult. She called it The Other Woman.

The scant eleven pages, the sum total of her labors, she regarded less charitably, for her days were nothing if not a vast empty quarter of time. What’s more, she was a journalist, at least she had masqueraded as one in her youth. Perhaps it was the topic that blocked her path forward. Writing about the lives of others— the dictator, the freedom fighter, the man who sells olives and spice in the souk—had for her been a relatively straightforward process. The subject spoke, his words were weighed against the available facts—yes, his words, because in those days women were of no consequence—and a few hundred words would spill onto the page, hopefully with enough flair and insight as to warrant a small payment from a faraway editor in London or Paris or New York. But writing about oneself, well, that was an altogether different matter. It was like attempting to recall the details of an auto accident on a darkened road. She’d had one once, with him, in the mountains near Beirut. He’d been drunk, as usual, and abusive, which was not like him. She supposed he had a right to be angry; she had finally worked up the nerve to tell him about the baby. Even now, she wondered whether he had been trying to kill her. He’d killed a good many others. Hundreds, in fact. She knew that now. But not then.

She worked, or pretended to work, in the mornings, in the shadowed alcove beneath the stairs. She had been sleeping less and rising earlier. She supposed it was yet another unwelcome consequence of growing old. On that morning she was more prolific than usual, an entire page of polished prose with scarcely a correction or revision. Still, she had yet to complete the first chapter. Or would she call it a prologue? She’d always been dubious about prologues; she regarded them as cheap devices wielded by lesser writers. In her case, however, a prologue was justified, for she was starting her story not at the beginning but in the middle, a stifling afternoon in August 1974 when a certain Comrade Lavrov—it was a pseudonym—brought her a letter from Moscow. It bore neither the name of the sender nor the date it was composed. Even so, she knew it was from him, the English journalist she had known in Beirut. The prose betrayed him.

It was half past eleven in the morning when she set down her pencil. She knew this because the tinny alarm on her Seiko wristwatch reminded her to take her next pill. It was her heart that ailed her. She swallowed the bitter little tablet with the cold dregs of her coffee and locked the manuscript—it was a pretentious word, admittedly, but she could think of no other—in the antique Victorian strongbox beneath her writing table. The next item on her busy daily schedule, her ritual bath, consumed all of forty minutes, followed by another half hour of careful grooming and dressing, after which she left the villa and set out through the fierce early-afternoon glare toward the center of the village.