Moscow Rules

of the Italian art community to realize Signore Vianelli was no ordinary restorer. He was special, she thought. It was no wonder the men of the Vatican had entrusted him with their masterpiece.
     
     
    But why was he working here at an isolated farm in the hills of Umbria instead of the state-of-the-art conservation labs at the Vatican? She was pondering this question, on a brilliant afternoon in early June, when she saw the restorer’s car speeding down the tree-lined drive. He gave her a curt, soldierly wave as he went hurtling past the stables, then disappeared behind a cloud of pale gray dust. Isabella spent the remainder of the afternoon wrestling with a new question. Why, after remaining a prisoner of the villa for five weeks, was he suddenly leaving for the first time? Though she would never know it, the restorer had been summoned by other masters. As for the Poussin, he would never touch it again.
     

 
    3
     
     
    ASSISI, ITALY
     
     
    Few Italian cities handle the crush of summer tourists more gracefully than Assisi. The packaged pilgrims arrive in mid-morning and shuffle politely through the sacred streets until dusk, when they are herded once more onto air-conditioned coaches and whisked back to their discount hotels in Rome. Propped against the western ramparts of the city, the restorer watched a group of overfed German stragglers tramp wearily through the stone archway of the Porto Nuova. Then he walked over to a newspaper kiosk and bought a day-old copy of the International Herald Tribune . The purchase, like his visit to Assisi, was professional in nature. The Herald Tribune meant his tail was clean. Had he purchased La Repubblica , or any other Italian-language paper, it would have signified that he had been followed by agents of the Italian security service, and the meeting would have been called off.
     
     
    He tucked the newspaper beneath his arm, with the banner facing out, and walked along the Corso Mazzini to the Piazza del Commune. At the edge of a fountain sat a girl in faded blue jeans and a gauzy cotton top. She pushed her sunglasses onto her forehead and peered across the square toward the entrance of the Via Portica. The restorer dropped the paper into a rubbish bin and set off down the narrow street.
     
     
    The restaurant where he had been instructed to come was about a hundred yards from the Basilica di San Francesco. He told the hostess he was meeting a man called Monsieur Laffont and was immediately shown onto a narrow terrace with sweeping views of the Tiber River valley. At the end of the terrace, reached by a flight of narrow stone steps, was a small patio with a single private table. Potted geraniums stood along the edge of the balustrade and overhead stretched a canopy of flowering vines. Seated before an open bottle of white wine was a man with cropped strawberry blond hair and the heavy shoulders of a wrestler. Laffont was only a work name. His real name was Uzi Navot, and he held a senior post in the secret intelligence service of the State of Israel. He was also one of the few people in the world who knew that the Italian art restorer known as Alessio Vianelli was actually an Israeli from the Valley of Jezreel named Gabriel Allon.
     
     
    “Nice table,” said Gabriel as he took his seat.
     
     
    “It’s one of the fringe benefits of this life. We know all the best tables in all the best restaurants in Europe.”
     
     
    Gabriel poured himself a glass of wine and nodded slowly. They did know all the best restaurants, but they also knew all the dreary airport lounges, all the stinking rail platforms, and all the moth-eaten transit hotels. The supposedly glamorous life of an Israeli intelligence agent was actually one of near-constant travel and mind-numbing boredom broken by brief interludes of sheer terror. Gabriel Allon had endured more such interludes than most agents. By association, so had Uzi Navot.
     
     
    “I used to bring one of my sources here,” Navot said. “A Syrian who worked for the state-run pharmaceutical company. His job was to secure supplies of chemicals and equipment from European manufacturers. That was just a cover, of course. He was really working on behalf of Syria’s chemical and biological weapons program. We met here twice. I’d give him a suitcase filled with money and three bottles of this delicious Umbrian sauvignon blanc and he’d tell me the regime’s darkest secrets. Headquarters used to complain bitterly about the size