The Black Widow (Gabriel Allon #16) - Daniel Silva Page 0,19

his flat slightly ajar. He opened it slowly, silently, and in the half-light saw Chiara seated at one end of the white couch, a child to her breast. The child was wrapped in a blanket. Only when Gabriel crept closer could he see it was Raphael. The boy had inherited his father’s face and the face of a half-brother he would never know. Gabriel toyed with the downy dark hair and then leaned down to kiss Chiara’s warm lips.

“If you wake him,” she whispered, “I’ll kill you.”

Smiling, Gabriel slipped off his suede loafers and in stocking feet padded down the corridor to the nursery. Two cribs stood end to end against a wall covered by clouds. They had been painted by Chiara and then hastily repainted by Gabriel upon his return to Israel, after what was supposed to be his last operation. He stood at the railing of one of the cribs and gazed down at the child sleeping below. He didn’t dare touch her. Raphael was already sleeping through the night, but Irene was a nocturnal creature who had learned how to blackmail her way into her parents’ bed. She was smaller and trimmer than her corpulent sibling, but far more stubborn and determined. Gabriel thought she had the makings of a perfect spy, though he would never permit it. A doctor, a poet, a painter—anything but a spy. He would have no successor, there would be no dynasty. The House of Allon would fade with his passing.

Gabriel peered upward toward the spot where he had painted Daniel’s face among the clouds, but the darkness rendered the image invisible. He left the nursery, closing the door soundlessly behind him, and went into the kitchen. The savor of meat braising in red wine and aromatics hung decadently in the air. He peered through the oven window and saw a covered orange casserole centered on the rack. Next to the stove, arranged as if for a recipe book, were the makings of Chiara’s famous risotto: Arborio rice, grated cheese, butter, white wine, and a large measuring cup filled with homemade chicken stock. There was also a bottle of Galilean Syrah, unopened. Gabriel eased the cork from the neck, poured a glass, and returned to the sitting room.

Quietly, he settled into the armchair opposite Chiara. And he thought, not for the first time, that the little apartment in the old neighborhood of Nachlaot was too small for a family of four, and too far from King Saul Boulevard. It would be better to have a house in the secular belt of suburbs along the Coastal Plain, or a large apartment in one of the smart new towers that seemed to sprout overnight along the sea in Tel Aviv. But long ago, Jerusalem, God’s fractured city upon a hill, had cast a spell over him. He loved the limestone buildings and the smell of the pine and the cold wind and rains in the winter. He loved the churches and the pilgrims and the Haredim who shouted at him because he drove a motorcar on the Sabbath. He even loved the Arabs in the Old City who eyed him warily as he passed their stalls in the souk, as if somehow they knew that he was the one who had eliminated so many of their patron saints of terror. And while not religious by practice, he loved to slip into the Jewish Quarter and stand before the weighty ashlars of the Western Wall. Gabriel was willing to accept territorial compromises in order to secure a lasting and viable peace with the Palestinians and the broader Arab world, but privately he regarded the Western Wall as nonnegotiable. There would never again be a border through the heart of Jerusalem, and Jews would never again have to request permission to visit their holiest site. The Wall was part of Israel now, and it would remain so until the day the country ceased to exist. In this volatile corner of the Mediterranean, kingdoms and empires came and went like the winter rains. One day the modern reincarnation of Israel would disappear, too. But not while Gabriel was alive, and certainly not while he was chief of the Office.

He drank some of the earthy, peppery Syrah and contemplated Chiara and Raphael as though they were figures in his own private nativity. The child had released his hold on his mother’s breast and was lying drunken and sated in her arms. Chiara was staring down at him, her