House of Spies (Gabriel Allon #17)(16)

Keller changed into a pair of wrinkled chinos and a rough woolen sweater, and carried the wine and the volume of McEwan downstairs to the terrace. Stretched on the wrought-iron chaise, he resumed reading the novel where he had left off, in midsentence, as though his interruption had been a few minutes instead of many months. It was the story of a young woman, a student at Cambridge, drawn into British intelligence in the early 1970s. Keller found he had little in common with the character, but enjoyed the book nonetheless. A shadow soon encroached on the page. He dragged the chaise across the terrace and placed it against the balustrade and remained there until the darkness and cold drove him inside. That night an icy tramontana blew from the northeast, loosening several tiles from Keller’s roof. He wasn’t displeased. It would give him something to do while he waited for the don to find the man called the Scorpion.

He passed the next few days without plan or purpose. The repair of the roof consumed only a portion of one morning, including the two hours he spent at the hardware store in Porto discussing the recent spate of winds with several men from the surrounding villages. It seemed the tramontana, which came from the Po, had blown more often than usual, as had the maestrale, which is how the fiercely independent Corsicans referred to the wind that came down from the Rh?ne Valley. All agreed it had been a difficult winter, which, according to Corsican proverbs, promised a benign spring. Keller, whose future was uncertain, declined comment.

Afternoons he climbed the rugged peaks at the center of the island—Rotondo, d’Oro, Renoso—and hiked across sunlit valleys of macchia. Most evenings he took his dinner with Don Orsati at the estate. Afterward, over brandy in the don’s office, he would gently probe for details concerning the search for the Scorpion. The don spoke only in proverbs, and Keller, who was under the discipline of an intelligence service, answered with proverbs of his own. Mainly, they listened to the tramontana and the maestrale prowling in the eaves, which is how Corsican men preferred to pass the evening.

On the sixth morning of Keller’s stay there was an attack in Germany, a single suicide bomber in a Stuttgart train terminal, two killed, twenty wounded. The usual questions ensued. Was the attacker a lone wolf, or was he acting at the behest of ISIS central command in the caliphate? The one they called Saladin. Keller watched the television coverage until midafternoon, when he climbed into his battered Renault station wagon and drove into the village. The central square lay at the town’s highest point. On three sides were shops and cafés, on the fourth was an old church. Keller took a table at one of the cafés and watched a game of boules until the church bell tolled five o’clock. Its door opened a moment later and several parishioners, mostly elderly, came tremulously down the steps. One, an old woman dressed entirely in black, paused for a moment and glanced in Keller’s direction before entering the crooked little house adjoining the rectory. Keller finished the last of his wine as darkness settled over the village. Then he laid a few coins on the table and headed across the square.



She greeted him, as always, with a worried smile and a warm, weightless hand to his cheek. Her skin was the color of flour; a black scarf covered her tinder-dry white hair. It was strange, thought Keller, how the marks of ethnicity and national origin were erased by time. Were it not for her Corsican language and mystical Catholic ways, she might have been mistaken for his old Auntie Beatrice from Ipswich.

“You’ve been on the island a week,” she said at last, “and only now do you come to see me.” She gazed deeply into his eyes. “The evil has returned, my child.”

“Where did I contract it?”

“In the castle by the sea, in the land of Druids and sorcerers. There was a man there with the name of a bird. Beware of him in the future. He does not wish you well.”

The old woman’s hand was still pressed to Keller’s cheek. In the language of the island, she was known as a signadora. Her task was to care for those afflicted with the evil eye, though she had the power to see the past and future as well. When Keller was still working for Don Orsati, he never left the island without paying a visit to the old woman. And when he returned, the crooked little house at the edge of the square was always among his first stops.

She removed her hand from Keller’s cheek and fingered the heavy cross around her neck. “You’re looking for someone, are you not?”

“Do you know where he is?”

“First things first, my dearest.”

With a movement of her hand, she invited Keller to sit at the small wooden table in her parlor. Before him she placed a plate filled with water and a vessel of olive oil. Keller dipped his forefinger in the oil. Then he held it over the plate and allowed three drops to fall onto the water. The oil should have gathered into a single gobbet. Instead, it shattered into a thousand droplets, and soon there was no trace of it.

“As I suspected,” said the old woman with a frown. “And worse than usual. The world beyond the island is a troubled place, filled with evil. You should have stayed here with us.”

“It was time for me to leave.”

“Why?”

Keller had no answer.

“It was all the Israelite’s doing. The one with the name of an angel.”

“It was my choice, not his.”

“You still haven’t learned, have you? It’s no use lying to me.” She stared into the plate of water and oil. “You should know,” she said, “that your path will lead you back to him.”