The English Assassin

hunched like a cyclist, his fists pressed to his temples. Occasionally he would lift his eyes and contemplate the piece mounted on his easel—or look up to watch the rain running in rivulets over the skylight. Then he would lower his gaze and resume his reading.

    He read Martin Davies and Lorne Campbell. He read Panofsky, and Winkler, and Hulin, and Dijkstra. And of course he read the second volume of Friedländer’s monstrous work on early Netherlandish painting. How could he restore a work even remotely linked to Rogier without first consulting the learned Friedländer?
    As he worked, the newspaper clippings rattled off his fax machine—one a day at least, sometimes two or three. At first it became known as “the Rolfe affair,” then, inevitably, Rolfegate. The first piece appeared in the Neue Züricher Zeitung , then the Bern and Lucerne papers got in on the act, and then Geneva. Before long, the story spread to France and Germany. The first English-language account appeared in London, followed two days later by another in a prominent American weekly. The facts were tenuous, the stories speculative; good reading but not exactly good journalism. There were suggestions that Rolfe had kept a secret art collection, suggestions that he had been murdered for it. There were tentative links made to the secretive Swiss financier Otto Gessler, though Gessler’s spokesman dismissed it all as malicious lies and gossip. When his lawyers began issuing not-so-subtle warnings about pending lawsuits, the stories quickly died.
    The Swiss left demanded a parliamentary inquiry and a full-fledged government investigation. For a time it appeared as though Bern might be forced to dig deeper than the topsoil. Names would be named! Reputations would be ruined! But soon the scandal blew itself out. Whitewash! screamed the Swiss left. Shame on Switzerland! cried the Jewish organizations. Another scandal swept into the sewers of the Bahnhofstrasse. The Alps had absorbed the brunt of the storm. Bern and Zurich were spared.
    A short time later, there was an odd postscript to the story. The body of Gerhardt Peterson, a high-ranking federal security officer, was found in a crevasse in the Bernese Oberland, the victim of an apparent hiking mishap. But Gabriel, alone in his Cornish studio, knew Peterson’s death was no accident. Gerhardt Peterson was just another deposit in the Bank of Gessler.
     
    ANNARolfe managed to remain aloof from the scandal swirling about her dead father. After her triumphant appearance in Venice, she embarked on an extensive European tour, consisting of solo recitals and appearances with major Continental orchestras. The critics declared that her playing matched the fire and brilliance of her work before the accident, though some of the journalists moaned about her refusal to sit down for interviews. At the new questions surrounding her father’s death, she released a paper statement referring all questions to a lawyer in Zurich. The lawyer in Zurich steadfastly refused to discuss the matter, citing privacy and continuing inquiries. And on it went, until interest in the story spun itself out.
     
    GABRIELlifted his head and peered through the skylight. He hadn’t noticed until now, but the rain had finally stopped. He listened to the weather forecast on Radio Cornwall while he straightened up the studio: no rain until evening, periods of sun, reasonable temperatures for the Cornish coast in February. His arm was only recently healed, but he decided a few hours on the water would do him good.
    He pulled on a yellow oilskin coat, and in the kitchen he made sandwiches and filled a thermos flask with coffee. A few moments later, he was untying the ketch and guiding it under power away from the quay and down the Port Navas Creek to the Helford River. A steady wind blew from the northwest, bright sunlight sparkled on the wavelets and the green hillsides rising above the Helford Passage. Gabriel locked down the wheel, pulled up the mainsail and the jib. Then he shut down the engine and allowed the boat to be taken by the wind.
    And soon it left him. He knew it was only temporary—it would last only until he closed his eyes or allowed his mind to lie fallow for too long—but for now he was able to concentrate on the boat rising and falling beneath him and not the beatings he had suffered or the things he had seen. Some nights, as he lay alone in his beastly single bed, he wondered how he would be able to live with