“You won’t tell your mother?”
“Of course not!”
The men pretended to rule Corsica, but the real power lay in the hands of the mothers. The Englishman handed the boy a half-empty packet.
He slipped the cigarettes into his satchel. “One more thing.”
“What’s that?”
“Don Orsati wishes to speak with you.”
“When did you see him?”
“This morning.”
“Where?”
“At the café in the village.”
“Where is he now?”
“At the café in the village.”
Orsati lives a stressful life, thought the Englishman.
“Invite the don to my villa for lunch. But tell him that if he expects to eat, he should bring along some food.”
The boy smiled and scampered off, the leather satchel flailing behind him like a banner. The Englishman slipped the jeep into gear and continued up the road. About a half mile from his villa, he slammed on his brakes, and the jeep skidded to a stop amid a cloud of red dust.
Standing in the center of the narrow track was a large male goat. He had the markings of a palomino and a red beard. Like the Englishman, he was scarred from old battles. The goat detested the Englishman and blocked the road to his villa whenever it pleased him. The Englishman had dreamed many times of ending the conflict once and for all with the Glock pistol he kept in his glove box. But the beast belonged to Don Casabianca, and if he were ever harmed there would be a feud.
The Englishman honked his horn. Don Casabianca’s goat threw back his head and glared at him defiantly. The Englishman had two choices, both unpleasant. He could wait out the goat, or he could try to move him.
He took a long look over his shoulder to make sure no one was watching. Then he threw open his door and charged the goat, waving his hands and screaming like a lunatic, until the beast gave ground and darted into the shelter of the macchia. A fitting place for him, thought the Englishman—the macchia, the place where all thieves and bandits eventually reside.
He got back into his jeep and headed up the road to his villa, thinking about the terrible shame of it. A highly accomplished assassin, yet he couldn’t get to his own home without first suffering a humiliation at the hands of Don Casabianca’s wretched goat.
IT had never taken much to spark a feud on Corsica. An insult. An accusation of cheating in the marketplace. Dissolution of an engagement. The pregnancy of an unmarried woman. Once, in the Englishman’s village, there had been a forty-year feud over the keys to the church. After the initial spark, unrest quickly followed. An ox would be killed. The owner of the ox would retaliate by killing a mule or a flock of sheep. A prized olive tree would be chopped down. A fence toppled. A house would burn. Then the murders would start. And on it would go, sometimes for a generation or more, until the aggrieved parties had settled their differences or given up the fight in exhaustion.
On Corsica most men were all too willing to do their killing themselves. But there were always some who needed others to do the blood work for them: notables who were too squeamish to get their hands dirty or unwilling to risk arrest or exile; women who could not kill for themselves or had no male kin to do the deed on their behalf. People like these relied on professionals: the taddunaghiu. Usually they turned to the Orsati clan.
The Orsatis had fine land with many olive trees, and their oil was regarded as the sweetest in all of Corsica. But they did more than produce fine olive oil. No one knew how many Corsicans had died at the hands of Orsati assassins over the ages—least of all the Orsatis themselves—but local lore placed the number in the thousands. It might have been significantly higher if not for the clan’s rigorous vetting process. In the old days, the Orsatis operated by a strict code. They refused to carry out a killing unless satisfied that the party before them had indeed been wronged and blood vengeance was required.
Anton Orsati had taken over the helm of the family business in troubled times. The French authorities had managed to eradicate feuding and the vendetta in all but the most isolated pockets of the island. Few Corsicans required the services of the taddunaghiu any longer. But Anton Orsati was a shrewd businessman. He knew he could either fold his tent and become a mere producer of excellent olive oil or expand his base of operations and look for opportunities elsewhere. He decided on the second course and took his business across the water. Now, his band of assassins was regarded as the most reliable and professional in Europe. They roamed the continent, killing on behalf of wealthy men, criminals, insurance cheats, and sometimes even governments. Most of the men they killed deserved to die, but competition and the exigencies of the modern age had required Anton Orsati to forsake the old code of his ancestors. Every job offer that crossed his desk was accepted, no matter how distasteful, as long as it did not place the life of one of his assassins in unreasonable danger.
Orsati always found it slightly amusing that his most skilled employee was not a Corsican but an Englishman from Highgate in North London. Only Orsati knew the truth about him. That he had served in the famed Special Air Service. That he had killed men in Northern Ireland and Iraq. That his former masters believed him to be dead. Once, the Englishman showed Orsati a clipping from a London newspaper. His obituary. A very useful thing in this line of work, thought Orsati. People don’t often look for a dead man.
He may have been born an Englishman, but Orsati always thought he had been given the restless soul of a Corsican. He spoke the dialect as well as Orsati, mistrusted outsiders, and despised all authority. At night he would sit in the village square with the old men, scowling at the boys on their skateboards and grumbling about how the young had no respect for the old ways. He was a man of honor—sometimes too much honor for Orsati’s taste. Still, he was a superb assassin, the finest Orsati had ever known. He had been trained by the most efficient killers on the planet, and Orsati had learned much from him. He was also perfectly suited to certain assignments on the continent, which is why Anton Orsati came calling on the Englishman’s villa that afternoon with an armful of groceries.
ORSATI was a descendant of a family of notables, but in dress and appetite he was not much different than the paesanu working his patch down the valley road. He wore a bleached white shirt, unbuttoned to the center of his barrel chest, and dusty leather sandals. The “lunch” that he brought with him consisted of a loaf of coarse bread, a flask of olive oil, a chunk of aromatic Corsican ham, and a lump of strong cheese. The Englishman provided the wine. The afternoon was warm, so they ate outside on the terrace overlooking the cul-de-sac valley, in the dappled shade of a pair of towering Corsican pines.
Orsati handed the Englishman a check bearing the imprint of Orsati Olive Oil. All of Orsati’s assassins were officially employees of the company. The Englishman was a vice president for marketing, whatever that meant. “Your share of the fee for the Spain assignment.” Orsati swirled a piece of the bread in oil and shoved it into his mouth. “Any problems?”
“The girl was working for the Spanish security service.”
“Which girl?”
“The girl Navarra was seeing.”
“Oh, shit. What did you do?”
“She saw my face.”
Orsati contemplated this news while he sawed off a slice of the ham and placed it on the Englishman’s plate. Neither man liked collateral casualties. They were usually bad for business.
“How are you feeling?”
“I’m tired.”
“Still not sleeping well?”
“Not while I’m in a foreign country killing a man.”
“And here?”
“Better.”
“You should try to get some rest tonight instead of sitting up all hours with the old ones in the village.”
“Why?”
“Because I have another job for you.”
“I just finished a job. Give it to one of the others.”
“It’s too sensitive.”
“You have a dossier?”
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Orsati finished his lunch and swam lazy laps in the pool while the Englishman read. When he finished, he looked up. “What has this man done to deserve to die?”
“Apparently, he stole something quite valuable.”
The Englishman closed the file. He had no compunction about killing someone who stole for a living. In the Englishman’s opinion, a thief was earth’s lowest life-form.
“So why does this job require me?”
“Because the contractors would like the target dead and his business destroyed. The men who trained you at Hereford taught you how to use explosives. My men are comfortable with more conventional weapons.”
“Where am I going to get a bomb?”
Orsati climbed out of the pool and vigorously toweled his thick silver hair. “Do you know Pascal Debré?”
Unfortunately, the Englishman did know Pascal Debré. He was an arsonist who did jobs for a Marseilles-based criminal enterprise. Debré would have to be handled carefully.
“Debré knows to expect you. He’ll give you whatever you need for the job.”
“When do I leave?”
8
COSTA DE PRATA, PORTUGAL
BY ALL APPEARANCES the woman who had settled in the refurbished old monastery on the steep hill overlooking the sea had taken a vow to live the sequestered existence of an ascetic. For a long time no one in the village knew even her name. Senhora Rosa, the scandalmonger checkout clerk at the market, decided she was a woman scorned, and she inflicted her dubious theory on anyone unfortunate enough to pass by her register. It was Rosa who christened the woman Our Lady of the Hillside. The moniker clung to her, even after her real name became known.
She came to the village each morning to do her marketing, sweeping down the hill on her bright-red motor scooter, her blond ponytail flying behind her like a banner. In wet weather she wore a hooded anorak the color of mushrooms. There was a great deal of speculation about her country of origin. Her limited Portuguese was heavily accented. Carlos, the man who cared for the villa’s grounds and small vineyard, thought she had the accent of a German and the dark soul of a Viennese Jew. María, the pious woman who cleaned her home, decided she was Dutch. José from the fish market thought Danish. But Manuel, the owner of the café on the village square and the town’s unofficial mayor, settled the question, as he usually did. “Our Lady is not German, or Austrian, or Dutch, or Danish.” Then he rubbed his first two fingers against his thumb, the international symbol for money. “Our Lady of the Hillside is Swiss.”
Her days had a predictable rhythm. After her morning visit to the village, she could be seen swimming laps in her dark-blue pool, her hair tucked beneath a black rubber cap. Then she would walk, usually among the jagged granite outcroppings on the ridge of the hill or up the dusty track to the Moorish ruins. Beginning in the late afternoon, she would play the violin—exceptionally well, according to those who had heard her—in a bare room on the second floor of the villa. Once, María stole a glance inside and found Our Lady in a feverish state, her body rocking and pitching about, her hair damp, her eyes tightly closed. “Our Lady plays like she’s possessed by demons,” María said to Carlos. “And no sheet music. She plays from memory.”
Only once, during the festival of Santo António, did she take part in the social life of the village. Shortly after dark, as the men set fire to the charcoal grills and uncorked the wine, she traipsed down the hill in a sleeveless white dress and sandals. For the first time she was not alone. There were fourteen in all: an Italian opera singer, a French fashion model, a British film actor, a German painter—along with wives, girlfriends, mistresses, and lovers. The opera singer and the film actor had a contest to see who could consume the most grilled sardines, the traditional fare of the festival. The opera singer easily dispatched the actor, who then tried to console himself by making a clumsy pass at the fashion model. The actor’s wife slapped him silly in the center of the square. The Portuguese villagers, who had never seen a woman slapping a man, applauded wildly, and the dancing resumed. Afterward, all agreed that the band of gypsies from the villa on the hillside had made the festival the most enjoyable in memory.
Only Our Lady seemed to take no joy from it. To Carlos, she seemed an island of melancholia in a sea of wild debauchery. She picked at her food; she drank her wine as though it was something that was expected of her. When the handsome German painter planted himself at her side and showered her with attention, Our Lady was polite but clearly indifferent. The painter finally gave up and went in search of other prey.
At midnight, just as the festival reached fever pitch, Our Lady slipped away from the party and headed up the track alone to her villa on the hillside. Twenty minutes later, Carlos saw a light flare briefly in the room on the second floor. It was the room where Our Lady played her violin.
WITH little else to do that summer, the villagers set out to finally learn the name and occupation of the mysterious woman from the hillside. Carlos and María, the two people closest to her, were carefully interrogated but could offer little help. Once a month they received a check, sent by certified mail, from a company in London called European Artistic Management. Because of the barriers of language and class, their communication with the woman was restricted to the simplest of greetings. They were able to supply one piece of critical information: Our Lady was prone to sudden unexplained absences. Rosa of the market read much into this. She decided Our Lady was a spy and that European Artistic Management was nothing but a front. What else would explain her secretive nature? Her sudden disappearances and even more sudden returns? But once again, it was Manuel who settled this question. One evening, while the debate raged in his café, he reached beneath the bar and produced a compact disc recording of several Brahms violin sonatas. On the cover was a photograph of Our Lady. “Her name is Anna Rolfe,” Manuel said in triumph. “Our Lady of the Hillside is a very famous woman.”
She was also a woman prone to accidents. There was the afternoon she lost control of her motor scooter and Carlos found her by the roadside with a pair of broken ribs. A month later she slipped on the edge of the pool and cracked her head. Just two weeks after that, she lost her balance at the top of the stairs and tumbled down to the landing, coming to rest in María’s dustpan.
Carlos concluded that, for some reason, Our Lady simply lacked the ability to look after herself. She was not a reckless woman, just careless, and she seemed to learn nothing from her previous mistakes. “It will be very bad for the reputation of the village if something happened to so famous a woman,” Manuel concluded gravely. “She needs to be protected from herself.”
And so quietly, carefully, Carlos began to watch her. In the mornings, when she swam laps in her pool, he would find work to do close by so he could monitor her progress. He conducted regular clandestine inspections of her motor scooter to make certain it was in good working order. In the tiny hamlets along the top of the ridge, he created a network of watchers, so that whenever Our Lady went for her afternoon expeditions, she was under constant surveillance.
His diligence paid off. It was Carlos who discovered that Our Lady was hiking on the ridge the afternoon a powerful gale swept in from the sea. He found her amid the wreckage of a rock slide with her hand pinned beneath a hundred-pound boulder, and carried her unconscious down to the village. Had it not been for Carlos, the doctors in Lisbon said, Anna Rolfe would surely have lost her famous left hand.
HER rehabilitation was long and painful—for everyone. For several weeks, her left arm was immobilized by a heavy fiberglass cast. Since she was no longer able to ride her motor scooter, Carlos was pressed into service as her driver. Each morning they climbed into her white Land Rover and rattled down the hill into the village. Our Lady remained silent during these trips, staring out the window, her bandaged hand in her lap. Once, Carlos tried to brighten her mood with Mozart. She removed the disc and hurled it into the passing trees. Carlos never again made the mistake of trying to play music for her.
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sp; The bandages became progressively smaller, until finally she required none at all. The severe swelling receded, and the shape of her hand returned to normal. Only the scars remained. Our Lady did her best to conceal them. She wore long-sleeved blouses with lacy cuffs. As she moved round the village doing her marketing, she tucked her hand beneath her right arm.
Her mood darkened further when she tried to play the violin again. Each afternoon for five consecutive days, she walked up to her practice room on the second floor of the villa. Each day she would attempt something elementary—a minor scale over two octaves, an arpeggio—but even that would be too much for her ruined hand. Before long there would be a scream of anguish, followed by shouting in German. On the fifth day, Carlos watched from the vineyard as Our Lady lifted her priceless Guarneri violin over her head and prepared to hurl it to the floor. Instead, she lowered it to her breast and hugged it as she wept. That evening, in the café, Carlos told Manuel about the scene he had witnessed. Manuel reached for the telephone and asked the operator for the number of a company called European Artistic Management in London.
Forty-eight hours later, a small delegation arrived. There was an Englishwoman named Fiona, an American called Gregory, and a dour German called Herr Lang. Each morning, Gregory forced Our Lady to do several hours of punishing exercises to regain the strength and mobility in her hand. In the afternoon, Herr Lang stood over her in her practice room, teaching her how to play her instrument again. Slowly her skills returned, though even Carlos the vineyard keeper could tell that she was not the same musician she had been before the accident.
By October the delegation was gone, and Our Lady was alone again. Her days assumed the predictable rhythm they’d had before the accident, though she took more care when riding her red motor scooter and never set out for the ridge without first checking the weather forecast.
Then, on All Souls Day, she vanished. Carlos took note of the fact that, as she climbed into her Range Rover and headed toward Lisbon, she carried only a black-leather garment bag and no violin. The next day he went to the café and told Manuel what he had seen. Manuel showed him a story in the International Herald-Tribune. The vineyard keeper could not read English, so Manuel handled the translation.