The damaged 16th-century Italian altarpiece that Gabriel is restoring is a powerful symbol of his own fractured psyche and his attempt to find healing. In his self-imposed exile in Cornwall, Gabriel’s obsessive work on the painting, The Adoration of the Shepherds, becomes a form of penance and a retreat from the violent world of espionage. The wounds on the canvas—the flaked-off paint and centuries of neglect—mirror the deep psychological scars he carries from his violent past and the attack on his family. By meticulously cleaning and retouching the painting, Gabriel attempts to impose order on chaos and restore beauty to something that has been broken, reflecting his own deep-seated need for personal restoration. This connection highlights the novel’s exploration of the theme of The Restorative Nature of Art as a force for healing in a destructive world.

The parallel between his old and new professions, however, reveals the inescapable nature of his past. The novel explicitly notes that Gabriel recognizes the similarities between his two crafts, stating that for both restoration and killing, “The methodology was precisely the same: study the target, become like him, do the job, slip away without a trace” (98). This comparison suggests that even in his sanctuary, Gabriel cannot fully escape the mindset of an assassin. The skills are transferable, and the cold, detached precision required for both roles emphasizes the theme of The Psychological Toll of State Violence. Ultimately, the painting symbolizes a fragile hope for recovery, but also the grim reality that some damage can only be covered up, not erased, a truth Jacqueline voices when she tells Gabriel that a restorer “just hides the wounds” (305).

Firearms recur throughout the novel as emblems of the violence that defines each character’s world and the identities they cannot shed. For Gabriel, the Beretta he carries is an extension of the assassin he once was, a tool that reasserts itself the moment he is pulled back into the Office’s orbit. The choice of a Beretta is itself significant: compact, Italian-made, and favored by Israeli operatives for its concealability and reliability, it is a weapon designed for close, personal work rather than distant combat. Like the tools Gabriel uses to restore old paintings, it is carefully chosen for a specific purpose. It suits an assassin who looks his targets in the face, and it links Gabriel to the intimate, quiet lethality that has always defined his craft. Even as he devotes his hands to the delicate work of restoration, those same hands remain trained for killing, and the pistol he keeps close during his Cornwall exile signals that his retirement is provisional at best. The weapon is a reminder that the violence of his past is never more than an arm’s length away.

Guns also mark the moral geography of the conflict. Tariq favors a Makarov, the standard Soviet-bloc sidearm long associated with Cold War proxies and Palestinian militant training. The pistol carries with it an entire lineage of ideological violence—a weapon shaped by the alliances and grievances that forged him in a personal and a geopolitical sense. Heavier weapons appear as well, including the Uzi submachine guns wielded by Shamron’s security teams, whose very name evokes the Israeli state and its founding imperative of armed self-defense. Tariq’s weapons are instruments of ideological vengeance, wielded in the service of a cause that has consumed his life and his health, while the firearms carried by Shamron’s agents are presented as instruments of state necessity, thereby functioning as emblems of how these characters view themselves. The novel resists any clean distinction between the two, however: The pistols look alike, the wounds they inflict look alike, and the men who carry them are shaped by the same cycles of retaliation. In this way, guns embody the theme of The Cyclical Nature of Violence, passing from hand to hand across generations and borders without ever resolving the grievances that put them there.